Cloud games mean sweet streams for Sony
Sony's latest acquisition could change PlayStation's future, Facebook may add a new word to express your feelings on a post, and get ready to sign up for a new social media site focused on news.
- Bridget has spent over 18 years as a consumer tech reporter, hosting daily tech news shows and writing syndicated newspaper columns. She's often a guest on national radio and television stations, including ABC, CBS, CNBC and NBC.
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The future PlayStation experience could involve streaming your video games. Sony is buying the cloud-based game provider Gaikai for $380 million in shares. Gaikai lets you stream games like Mass Effect 3 with just an Internet connection. No downloading. No discs. Gaikai began working with Samsung and LG to bring video games to Smart TVs. This acquistion could cause a few ripple effects in the gaming industry, not to mention we could be seeing streaming as an option for a future Playstation device. It could even expand the Playstation footprint outside of the traditional console, since any connected device like a smartphone or tablet could play these games.
Facebook may add a new emotion to express your thoughts on a post: Want. A developer found code for a Want button in Facebook's software development kit. It doesn't work yet, but if activated, it would put more of a shopping spin on the network (to help it make more money from advertising, of course). And we'll all start sounding like Veruca Salt. But I want a Want button NOW, daddy!
We have our eyes on Twitter, which just cut off LinkedIn from automatically posting tweets on a profile. And Twitter may start to mess with other sites, since it will have stricter API rules. Analysts see this as Twitter trying to gain more control so it can better monetize tweets.
Firefox is coming out with it's own smartphone operating system, called simply Firefox OS. It used to be referred to as Mozilla's Boot to Gecko. It's a browser-based operating system and will be for low-cost phones. The first models will arrive in Brazil in 2013.
The headphone maker Beats electronics has acquired the music streaming service Mog. This means the 15 million songs that mog owns for streaming could be integrated into beats products. Mog struggled to survive in the crowded streaming space alongside Spotify, Rdio and Pandora.
Apple's old paid sync-and-storage service MobileMe has closed. Apple warned everyone this day was coming for some time now. But if you used the service, you still have a limited time to get back your data and move it to Apple's iCloud service.
Here's a network to keep your eye on: Waywire. It's a new social site for news that is aimed at getting millennials involved in public affairs. Users of Waywire post video responses to news stories. If you participate enough, you get to help decide which stories get highlighted on the site. It also will produce three short newscasts a day. Waywire was co-founded by Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker and received funding from big names in tech, including Google's Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, and even Oprah.
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