bubble

Bodacious Bubble Breaker

We have to admit that when we first laid eyes on Bubble Breaker, we weren't impressed. It was nothing but a small rectangle full of colored circles arranged in a grid, and clicking on them in groups of two or more of the same color made them disappear. This didn't seem particularly fun or exciting at first, but once we played a few rounds and figured out exactly how the game worked, we couldn't tear ourselves away.

The object of the game is to attain a high score by popping bubbles, but this isn't obvious in … Read more

Enable Bubble Buttons in Google Maps for Android

Google Maps recently updated and brought with it a new Labs feature called Bubble Buttons. The above video walks you through how to enable the new feature, as well as what exactly Bubble Buttons means for you.

If you aren't the video-watching kind, follow the steps below to enable Bubble Buttons for yourself. Before you do, though, make sure to check the Market to make sure you are running the latest version Google Maps.

Launch Google MapsPress the Menu buttonSelect MoreSelect LabsScroll down to Bubble Buttons, tap to enable 

Now when you tap on a venue's pin … Read more

Pop bubble wrap bubbles...on your iPhone!

Bubble TapTap Free is one of numerous free, ad-supported apps in which you pop virtual bubble wrap, in a game that tries to simulate the visceral thrill of mashing that time-honored packing material.

The interface is simple: 40 bubbles, arrayed realistically in staggered rows, which you tap to audibly pop. The bubbles regenerate after a few seconds, letting you go back and pop as many as you can while a one-minute timer ticks off the seconds. The game also gives you a bonus for popping bubbles in quick succession, briefly showing you the number of bubbles chained together as you … Read more

Bubble blast

We've seem numerous iterations of games like Bubble Shooter 4, a puzzle game that involves shooting colored bubbles at other bubbles of the same color to clear them from the board. Bubble Shooter 4 is neither the best nor worst that we've encountered in this genre, but there is one thing we can say for it: we ended up playing it for way longer than we had intended.

The game has an underwater theme, and gameplay is overseen by a cranky-looking mermaid. The game board is filled with bubbles of various colors, and a pointer at the bottom … Read more

Wag.com summons ghost of Pets.com

Is it a sign of a bad bubble that we're re-hashing ideas from the first dot-com boom? Or are some ideas right, just too early? The team at Quidsi, which runs Diapers.com and Soap.com and which was bought by Amazon for $540 million this year, believes the latter, and they're launching Wag.com today to prove it.

Wag.com is a bubble 2.0 stab at Pets.com. For those of you too young to remember, Pets.com was a high-flying Internet retailer in 1999 and 2000. It sold pet food and other pet supplies online. Even in the frothy 1999 tech bubble, though, it was a puzzler that a company could make money selling dog food cheaply online and then paying for shipping on top of it.

In fact, Pets.com lost money selling and shipping low-margin pet consumables. So much that the company burned through its funding and folded less than two years after it launched.

Lesson learned, right? Apparently not. Quidsi believes that if they "start with the customer, and work our way back," as Quidsi's Marketing Director Earl Gordon says, they can make an online dog food business work. Because, clearly, nobody else has thought of this before.

The real secret is simply better logistics. There are three Wag.com warehouses, each with the entire inventory selection in them, to reduce shipping distances. Quidsi also uses proven Kiva robots to move items throughout its warehouses and help shop floor workers pack and pick shipments. "We've been doing this for a while," Gordon says. "We can efficiently deliver a a 40-pound bag of dog food."

The other trick to Wag.com, in addition to its ability to leverage Amazon's own marketing muscle, is that, "It's not all about dog food and cat litter." Josh Himwich, who runs commerce solution for Quidsi, says that the company would barely squeak by if it focused on selling commodities, as the Diapers.com brand already appears to do with its eponymous products. "Diapers are loss leaders at every single [retail] store. Not quite for us, but approaching it. If all you do is sell dogfood, you won't stay in business." … Read more

Smiley Pops is a new take on match three

Smiley Pops offers yet another take on the match three like-colored bubbles game concept. Open it up, and it may feel familiar, but take a closer look, and you'll notice that the bubbles are oriented in a unique way. Smiley Pops' bubbles are not stacked in perfect columns and rows the way they are in many other games. They're staggered, with one wedged between the two below it.

To play, swipe around three bubbles to rotate them. If the new arrangement results in at least three matching colors in a row, on the same line, they'll all … Read more

This Day in Tech: Obama appoints Twitter CEO, plus Google foes

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Friday, May 27.

Obama appointing Twitter CEO to advisory group Twitter chief Dick Costolo will join the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. Microsoft's Scott Charney and McAfee's David DeWalt will be appointed too. More

Microsoft to showcase new tablet OS next week? Software giant reportedly plans to take the wraps off a new operating system next week, perhaps running on hardware using Nvidia's ARM-based Tegra processor. More

Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting New features may initially give … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: The bubble episode

Are we in another tech bubble? Is money in technology flying around the same way it was back in 1999, making people rich beyond their dreams--and beyond what they deserve? The LinkedIn IPO underlined the question. The company, founded in 2003, finally went public last week, raising $352 million at its offering. The stock quickly shot up, igniting talk that we are, indeed, in a tech bubble. We're also expecting a very frothy IPO for Zynga, and eventually for Facebook.

Bubbles are about more than the public stock market, though. Tech companies start with private money from investors previously made rich when their companies were acquired or went public, and from venture funds investing money from pensions, college endowments, and the like. And now there are also private exchanges for start-up shares, the very existence of which is, to some, another indication of froth in the market. And a bubble.

So that's what we're discussing today: Are we in a technology bubble? If so, is it good or bad? And what have we learned from the last tech bubble, which was only about 10 years ago, that we can use to be smarter this time around?

I have two great guests to discuss this topic, both of whom are survivors from Bubble 1.0, as am I. In the studio with us, visiting from our Boston bureau, is CNET News Executive Editor Jim Kerstetter. And joining us via Skype is Eric Hellweg, the editor of the Harvard Business Review's Web site, HBR.org.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you (Q&A)

We all like having things tailored to our specific needs and interests. But Eli Pariser thinks we should beware of the substantial risks inherent in the increasing personalization of the Internet.

Better known (so far) as the executive director of the progressive political action committee MoveOn.org, Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You." His new book, which was released yesterday, argues that the latest tools being implemented by the likes of Google and Facebook for making our Internet experiences as individual as possible … Read more