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<title>Haaze.com / starnowyar / All</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:10:20 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Internet Explorer gains, Firefox wanes in February]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=internet-explorer-gains-firefox-wanes-in-february</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=internet-explorer-gains-firefox-wanes-in-february</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:10:20 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>starnowyar</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=internet-explorer-gains-firefox-wanes-in-february</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Microsoft's Internet Explorer saw a boost in market share during February, while Mozilla'sFirefox dropped, according to new numbers released by the Central Intelligence Agency and analytics firm Netmarketshare.The shift can be attributed to a re-balancing of Internet users by location, which gave China a healthy boost, while taking away market share percentage from countries that had originally weighed in heavier, such as the United States and part of Western Europe.&quot;In February, the C.I.A. released new data on how many internet users per country there are. It shows a large increase in the global percentage of Chinese users and a decrease in the global percentage of users from the U.S., U.K, Germany, France and other developed countries,&quot; the report said. &quot;These geographic shifts in internet usage have an significant impact on the global usage share numbers starting in February.&quot;For IE, that impact amounts to 63.26 percent on Windows machines, up from 62.40 percent the previous month. Meanwhile,IE8 jumped up 1.03 percent, with IE9 gaining a modest .10 percent, and the IE9 beta topping 2.09 percent ofWindows 7 machines. As for Firefox, the browser dropped by a little more than 1 percent to fall at 21.74 percent of total Internet use.Alongside the numbers, Microsoft announced that the release candidate of IE9 had been downloaded 11 million times since its release in early February. A Microsoft representative told CNET that number includes upgrades from the beta and Web downloads. Combined with previous download numbers of the IE9 beta, the total tally is 36 million, which Microsoft says tops combined downloads of the IE8 beta, and its release candidate.Net Marketshare said that country-level reporting has been unaffected by the change, and that the adjustment will correct inaccuracies with its reports. The company also reported that the new CIA numbers had impacted Mac and iOS Internet use reporting, causing slight dips despite neither platform losing users. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[preGame 40: Killzone 3' Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (podcast)]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-40-killzone-3-marvel-vs--capcom-3-podcast</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-40-killzone-3-marvel-vs--capcom-3-podcast</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:10:29 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>starnowyar</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-40-killzone-3-marvel-vs--capcom-3-podcast</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[In browser fight, Microsoft's silver lining grows]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-browser-fight-microsofts-silver-lining-grows</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-browser-fight-microsofts-silver-lining-grows</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>starnowyar</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-browser-fight-microsofts-silver-lining-grows</guid>
<description><![CDATA[IE continues to lose share of the browser market to Chrome and Safari, but the losses come from older versions.(Credit:Data from Net Applications' chart by Stephen Shankland/CNET)When Microsoft starts pointing to statistics that don't make it look so great, you can expect the company has a strong turnaround plan in place. Today's example: its share of browser usage.Microsoft, while still the top browser maker, saw Internet Explorer slide as a fraction of worldwide usage from 57.1 percent in December 2010 to 56 percent in January, according to statistics from analytics firm Net Applications released today. That decline continues a years-long trend for the company, which first lost share to Mozilla'sFirefox but now is losing it primarily to Google's Chrome and Apple'sSafari.Specifically, from December to January, Mozilla stayed flat at 22.8 percent, Chrome rose from 10 percent to 10.7, Safari rose from 5.9 percent to 6.3 percent, and Opera rose from 2.2 percent to 2.3 percent.But there's an important detail hidden in the statistics--namely, the makeup of the different versions of IE. Microsoft is actively trying to discourage use of decade-old IE6, which is the bane of Web developers who want to use modern programming features, and to encourage adoption ofIE8 and forthcoming IE9.With that view, Microsoft has got more to show for itself. Here's how Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer product marketing, put it in a blog post today:Internet Explorer 6...continued its decline, with a 1.77 [percentage point] drop reaching 12.03 percent in January worldwide. IE6 has dropped 3.9 [percentage points] over the last three months (an average of 1.3 [percentage point] drop per month) and 9.31 percent from a year ago. During that same time, IE8 has grown 9.15 [percentage points] since January 2010. This trend is even more accelerated in the commercial segment. I blogged last year that [among commercial users] IE6 usage share was already at 10.3 percent, and IE8 at 34.1 percent last November.So Microsoft has some trends in its favor--thus, the earlier point about Microsoft's willingness to spotlight statistics that don't look great at first glance.Here's an earlier example. With IE9, which embraces a host of new Web standards and emphasizes hardware-accelerated performance, Microsoft is eager to have a cutting-edge browser. In IE9's infancy, Microsoft was willing to point out how poorly it fared on the Acid3 test of various browser features, but the browser's score has steadily improved with each new version. By the way, IE9 accounted for 0.5 percent of browser usage in January, up only a smidgen from December. Expect that to change, though. It's still in beta testing, but expect a release candidate soon--likely February 10, judging by an invitation to a Microsoft IE event.Of course, Chrome and Safari are growing, too, but without much of the prior-version cannibalization. Another qualifier: even usage statistics that remain flat in percentage terms represent significant growth in absolute terms, since the overall number of browser users are increasing.Modern browsers are critical to a widespread trend on the Net: the development of increasingly sophisticated Web applications. People are spending ever more time on sites such as Google Docs or Facebook, so the higher performance and elaborate user interfaces enabled by modern browsers play a starring role in people's satisfaction with the Web. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Game guru Jane McGonigal says &''gamification&'' should make tasks hard, not easy]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=game-guru-jane-mcgonigal-says-8220gamification8221-should-make-tasks-hard-not-easy</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=game-guru-jane-mcgonigal-says-8220gamification8221-should-make-tasks-hard-not-easy</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>starnowyar</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=game-guru-jane-mcgonigal-says-8220gamification8221-should-make-tasks-hard-not-easy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Gamification, or making a non-game application more engaging by making it game-like, should not make tasks easy for the people undertaking them. It should make them harder, says Jane McGonigal, game research director of the Institute for Future and author of a new book on gamification, &amp;''Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world&amp;''.McGonigal says Web site owners  &amp;8212' including those of major corporations &amp;8212' should make tasks challenging, so that the sense of achievement upon completing them is greater.The assertion is related to McGonigal&amp;'s definition of a game, which she talked about at the Gamification Summit today in San Francisco. She said that &amp;''games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.&amp;'' When people play games, they are trying to achieve a feeling of &amp;''eustress,&amp;'' a kind of positive stress that motivates us to perform our best, she said.McGonigal, who has spawned some of the most creative games in the history of the industry (such as World Without Oil, a game aimed at getting people to reduce their use of oil), believes wholeheartedly in gamification&amp;'s ability to make big changes in the behavior of people who in turn can create big changes in the real world. But she worries that gamification efforts fall short when they adopt the mechanics of a game, such as giving rewards for certain behavior, without adopting the spirit of a game.The good feeling you get when you play an engaging game is what she calls &amp;''gamefulness.&amp;''&amp;''Lots of things have the bells and whistles, but not the heart of a game,&amp;'' she said.McGonigal actually created a game to go with her speech, to make it more fun. She had people in the audience send text messages to a phone number and do what it suggested. Ultimately, the game encouraged audience members to yell &amp;''amen&amp;'' at various points during her speech.She said that a lot of games have blurred the line between work and play. FarmVille, for instance, requires you to collect a lot of things in order to progress, much as you do for work. The common notion is that some jobs are hard work, and some of the best games are hard to play. The ultimate goal is to get gamers to conquer the game and get to a kind of euphoric feeling at the end of it.Golf fits the definition of McGonigal&amp;'s idea of a game, since it creates unnecessary obstacles to putting a ball in a hole. It makes sense. If a game is too easy, it becomes boring.&amp;''In real life, we would just drop a ball in a hole,&amp;'' she said. &amp;''Why does it become a game when we make it harder&amp;''It has to do with creating that feeling of eustress, which drives our motivation and performance and keeps us from getting bored or uninspired. She notes that users have invested more than 5.93 million years of time into playing World of WarCraft, the popular online role-playing game. Getting to the highest level in WoW takes 600 hours.While McGonigal was writing her book, she suffered a bad head injury. She was getting depressed because she couldn&amp;'t do things like read a book or write. Doctors were telling her that the head injury itself was making her biochemically prone to feelings of depression and she needed to pull out of it with positive feelings in order to heal.So she created a game. Called Super Better, the game was aimed at helping patients recover from an illness. She credits it with saving her own life. McGonigal has created a company, Social Chocolate, to commercialize that game and to launch others that lead to real world benefits. She describes the effort at www.gameful.org.Games that are done well create a feeling of urgent optimism, which is also the opposite of depression. It makes us feel like we are part of a social fabric, that we&amp;'re blissfully productive, and that we have achieved something bigger than ourselves with epic meaning, she said.Next Story: Top 10 reasons why you should launch at DEMO Previous Story: Box.net looks to keep it simple with new version of cloud storage softwarePrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: Gamification Summit, Reality is BrokenCompanies: Social ChocolatePeople: Jane Mcgonigal          Tags: Gamification Summit, Reality is BrokenCompanies: Social ChocolatePeople: Jane McgonigalDean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat. Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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