bubble

Marble Blast is a unique bubble-based puzzler

Similar to probably a hundred other games in the Android Market, Marble Blast requires you to shoot monochromatic bubbles at other monochromatic bubbles. Create a cluster of three or more, and all of them pop and disappear. The object, of course, is to clear your screen of all of them.

What makes Marble Blast unique, however, is that the bubbles, or marbles, actually travel around your screen in a single-file line. They aren't stationary targets anchored to the top of your screen as they are in other bubble-based games like Bubble Blast 2. Your job in Marble Blast is … Read more

Hard Candy bet on iPhone 5 goes south

There you go; there's no iPhone 5, at least not yet. For most of us, this is a typical case of much ado about nothing, a huge hype followed by a letdown. For Tim Hickman, the CEO of Hard Candy Cases, it's also a business gamble that didn't work out. The company sent out an embargoed press release to the press a couple of days ago about its new cases for the iPhone 5, information that was leaked earlier today by the Cult of Mac.

It turned out Hard Candy wasn't sure that there would be an iPhone 5, nor did it know the actual design of the product. Just a few minutes ago, like the rest of us, Hickman was watching the live event from his home, but with much greater trepidation...… Read more

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