Games and entertainment

There's no slowing YouTube down.

Speaking to Reuters in an interview published today, YouTube announced that people around the globe now watch 4 billion videos on the site each day. In May, YouTube announced 3 billion daily video views. In 2006, that figure stood at 100 million daily videos.

But the eye-popping statistics go beyond daily video views. According to Reuters, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, jumping from the 48 hours of video uploaded in May. And although most of the site's videos don't generate a dime for Google, YouTube revealed to … Read more

My 85-year-old grandmother wouldn't do well on a bike on the open road. Her vision, hearing, and cognition have all declined enough to make such an expedition something of a death sentence. But those indoor stationary bikes are just so...boring.

Which is why researchers launched the Cybercycle Study in 2008 in an effort to explore what kinds of benefits older adults might reap from riding stationary bikes with interactive video game features.

What they found is that the cybercyclists demonstrated greater cognitive benefits than those who rode traditional stationary bikes without the virtual enhancement, according to their article … Read more

Anyone who has allowed a little porkiness to creep around their waist knows that removing it can be troublesome.

One tries to eat less. One votes for a new gym regime.

But getting up at 7 in the morning to jiggle with the bright-eyed and bushy-bottomed can verge toward the impossible.

So along comes GymPact, an iPhone app that will tear money from your pocket, should you fail to go to the gym when you promised.

At first glance, this seems to resemble, well, theft. Who are these GymPact people to take your money just because the duvet was slightly … Read more

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says his company achieved its goals after going public last year, even though some investors didn't get what they had hoped for out of the stock.

"Our goals were we want to raise a billion dollars," Pincus told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published today. "Through going public, we wanted to add some more great long-term investors to the company. All of that was successful."

But what about the individual investor? Zynga went public late last year at $10 a share. In its first day of trading, its stock was down 50 cents to $9.50 a share. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--We've heard of headphones delivering new highs before, but never quite like this.

At the Polk Audio booth here at the Consumer Electronics Show, the manufacturer has set up one of the more brazen gimmicks at a show filled with brazen gimmicks: a trampoline gymnast who zooms toward the high convention-center ceiling with every jump. Of course, she's wearing Polk's new Ultrafit sports headphones, which--big surprise--stayed put despite her vigorous bounces.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--There are pedometers all over this year's CES (a few of them being tested simultaneously on my own hip), and while there's nothing particularly special about the $25 GeoPalz pedometer for kids in terms of the pedometer itself, its reward system has a few tricks up its, er, shoe clip.

The family-owned business, out of Boulder, Colo., has been working on the motivate-kids-to-move gag since 2008, and features a step counter that converts into online points for prizes such as books, CDs, and sports equipment.

This week, GeoPalz is taking the motivation game a step further by … Read more

Microsoft's Xbox 360 was one of the few bright spots in a year marked by a downturn in retail gaming sales, according to data out yesterday from NPD Group.

The Xbox 360 scored almost 40 percent of physical retail sales across all product categories in 2011. Microsoft's gaming console was the top-selling platform of the year, said NPD, though Sony's PlayStation 3 also saw a jump in unit sales over 2010.

Revenue from software, accessories, and other items for the Xbox 360 and PS3 rose 5 percent for the year.

But the gaming industry as a whole … Read more

Amazon's Lovefilm has inked two important deals as it prepares to wage a streaming-video war with Netflix in the U.K.

BBC Worldwide will bring its programming, including "Doctor Who" and "Life On Mars," to Lovefilm's streaming service. In addition, Lovefilm, which operates solely in Europe, announced today that it has signed a deal with the U.K.'s largest commercial broadcaster, iTV, to stream its shows, including "Marchlands" and "Above Suspicion" among many others.

Lovefilm's BBC deal is especially important. Just last month, Netflix announced that it signed a deal with the BBC … Read more

Netflix ended an exceedingly difficult 2011 by announcing a big number.

The company said earlier today that during the fourth quarter of 2011, more than 2 billion hours of television shows and movies were streamed by users across 45 countries.

Unknown, however, is how that compares to prior quarters. "We haven't made that comparison but suffice it to say 2 billion hours is a big number and a high mark," a company spokesman said.

In October, Sandvine reported that Netflix accounted for nearly one-third of peak downstream traffic in the U.S., making it a bigger bandwidth … Read more