Last night I was browsing the “Featured” tab on the App Store on my iPhone and came across an interesting new app called “Viggle,” which promised to reward me with fabulous prizes for watching TV. Now, I watch my fair share of TV, so naturally this proposition intrigued me.

Basically, the service asks you to “check in” when you are watching a TV show, similar to GetGlue or IntoNow. The difference is that with Viggle, you get 2 points every minute that you’re “watching” TV. When you’ve collected enough rewards points, you can redeem them for things like Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora gift cards or a month of Hulu Plus service.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Yes and no. The “prices” of the rewards are high enough that you can’t really quit your day job and watch TV all day. A $5 gift card to Starbucks or Best Buy costs 7,500 points, which equates to 62.5 hours of TV watching. There are other ways to gain points, the most significant of which is by checking into “Featured” shows. Being checked into Glee nets you an extra 325 points, for example. You can also get scattered bonus points here and there for setting reminders to watch shows, answering trivia questions, or watching video advertisements. Many people have already reported redemption of the rewards, so at least Viggle is coming through on their end of the bargain as of now.

The biggest problem I had with the service is that the audio detection simply doesn’t work. I tried sticking my phone next to both my TV speakers for an episode of Family guy and next to my iPad streaming an episode of 30 Rock and neither would register on Viggle in four attempts. After two failed attempts, Viggle will give you the option of manually checking into a show. The catch is that you can only manually check into programming that is currently on “live” TV. (Viggle asks you for your cable provider in order to offer you options) I managed to “check in” to Jimmy Fallon’s show even though I wasn’t watching.

This got my gaming mind thinking. Since there’s a cap of 120 points per hour (you don’t get extra points for channel flipping), your best bet at points generation is to make sure you are always checked into a show. You can do this even if you aren’t near a TV by failing the app into letting you check into something manually. It’s a pretty silly busywork task to have to open an app on your phone and do some taps every hour or so to generate points, but it’s really no different than checking in to harvest your plants in FarmVille or opening a new floor in your Tiny Tower. To take the freemium game analogy further, earning bonus points by “watching” a video advertisement is basically the same thing as watching a progress bar as your Sim goes poop. There’s even rewards for opening Viggle at the right time (bonus points for checking into a featured show).

Granted, having a random list of checked in shows may not be as appealing an end result as a flourishing TinyZoo with Panda Bears, but I’d wager that getting gift cards to real stores is probably a good piece of compensation for that. I think that if I’m ever feeling bored enough to want to do some tapping on my phone, getting some more Viggle points may be in my future.

Since Viggle’s website has nothing but a link to their iTunes page, if you want more details on the service, checking out their Twitter feed is probably your best bet. The service says they are working on both Android and iPad versions of their app for release “soon.”

Download Viggle on iOS

Forget her, she’s boring.

Wouldn’t you rather have GLaDOS from Portal as the voice of your electronic assistant instead?

That’s what I thought.

via dcoreythomas.com

What makes it interesting, though, is that Google is also launching a basic content publishing platform for small publishers (like yours truly) to easily create a touch-screen optimized content portal.

Alongside Google Currents, we’re also launching a self-service platform that gives publishers the flexibility to design, brand and customize their web content. For example, if you’re a small regional news outlet, a non-profit organization without access to a mobile development team, or a national TV network with web content, you can effortlessly create hands-on digital publications for Google Currents.

It’s pretty basic, and you’ll still need to tackle the problem of growing your subscriber base, but it’s an interesting angle of attack nonetheless.

via Official Google Mobile Blog.

We’ve been waiting for years for someone to seamlessly wed editorial content like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork’s lists and reviews to a deep music backend, and this is a great step in that direction. These beta apps, though, are merely a first step, and don’t fully reflect the deep archives, sorting features, and knowledge of these sites yet, and we’re hoping to see that in future versions.

If I’m in a pinch for time to get some new music, oftentimes I’ll just troll Pitchfork’s best new music section for stuff to listen to on Spotify. With the Pitchfork App, I can listen to the album right there on the same page of the review. It’s awesome and time-saving. Houston is right in that many of the apps are bare-bones as of now, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction and we’re truly seeing a killer music app that combines content curation with instant gratification start to take shape.

From a business standpoint, it was brilliant for Spotify to bring the app makers to the Spotify client, rather than the other way around. It ensures that people will be Spotify users first and foremost.

You can try out Spotify apps out for yourself by downloading a preview client here. (Shame on Spotify for not linking to this on their Apps product page!)

via The Verge.

Currently, it’s got the basic functionality of things you’d want to do away from your Xbox, like check/send messages, achievements, and friend activity. You can even check out some streaming video content from the Xbox LIVE team. You can’t, however, browse the Xbox LIVE Marketplace and make downloads or purchases. This would be the logical next feature add and I’d be surprised if Microsoft didn’t implement this sooner rather than later. After all, allowing players to impulse purchase content on the go can only do good things for Microsoft’s bottom line.

Here’s a list of features from Major Nelson:

Some of the features include:

Read and send messages to friends
Manage your friends list, invite new friends
Read and Edit your full LIVE profile (name, bio, motto)
Change your avatar features/items with the avatar closet
View and compare your achievement progress with friends

Download the iOS app here for free

via Xbox Live’s Major Nelson

Apple obviously doesn’t use Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs so enabling LTE on the iPhone isn’t possible using Qualcomm baseband unless you make the phone’s PCB larger (which Apple obviously wasn’t going to do). Note that no one else seems to deliver a single chip LTE + 1x/WCDMA voice solution either, so this isn’t just a Qualcomm limitation.

Basically because as magical as Apple makes engineering seem, it just wasn’t physically possible and won’t be until at least 2012 sometime. And even then, will LTE even be rolled out in enough markets?

via AnandTech – Why No LTE iPhone 5 in 2011? Blame 28nm Maturity, Check Back In Q2/Q3 2012.

Deadmau5′s got some of the best light show/visuals in the business with his “normal” set equipment. But projecting those visuals onto a London skyscraper? Hot damn.

The stunt was ostensibly for the release of Nokia’s new Lumia 800 phone, though calling it “4D” is a bit hokey. What, did that light travel across time? Nevertheless, that Lumia is still a mighty sexy phone and associating it with pretty colors and a popular DJ can’t do it any harm.

From the very beginning our main competitors on the market were pirates. The question was really not if company x or y had better marketing or better releases, but more like “How can we convince gamers to go and buy the legit version and not to go to a local street vendor and buy a pirated one?” We of course experimented with all available DRM/copy protection, but frankly nothing worked. Whatever we used was cracked within a day or two, massively copied and immediately available on the streets for a fraction of our price.

We did not give up, but came up with new strategy: we started offering high value with the product – like enhancing the game with additional collectors’ items like soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. This, together with a long process of educating local gamers about why it makes sense to actually buy games legally, worked. And today, we have a reasonably healthy games market.

In any case, I am not saying that we have eliminated piracy or there is not piracy in the case of TW2. There is, and TW2 was [illegally] downloaded by tens of thousands of people during the first two weeks after release. Still, DRM does not work and however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time. Plus, the DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers – this group of honest people, who decided that your game was worth the 50 USD or Euro and went and bought it. Why would you want to make their lives more difficult?

Again, the lesson here is to treat your would-be customers with respect and add enough value to your legitimate product to make pirating unattractive.

via PC Gamer

Maybe bigger isn’t always better.

via 3.5 Inches – Dustin Curtis.

ORMEntertainment has been trying to recreate the Titanic for awhile, and their latest attempt apparently incorporates CryENGINE3, the same tech that powers Crysis 2. The framerate is a bit lacking, but hot damn does this look photo-realistic!

I hope Taiwan’s NMA news gets ahold of this technology soon. How awesome would some Mandarin narrated CGI tabloid news be?