Posts tagged numbers
Numbers Shift but Online News is a Steady Trend
Feb 9th
Have you seen the numbers lately? Brands and marketers like to leverage numbers to create a (desired) reception based on reader perception. Obviously, bigger numbers reflect more popularity and added reason for investors to celebrate. The New York Times issued a recent article on Facebook, calling attention to a subjective view of numbers. For instance, [...]
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The Numberlys Invent the Alphabet In a World Run By Numbers
Jan 11th
Moonbot Studios has released The Numberlys, its second story app for iOS. It’s an interactive tale with a massive visual scope appropriate for people of all sizes. Its stark, soaring black-and-white aesthetic draws on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to tell the story of five characters’ quest to create the alphabet in a world run by numbers.
The story plays out as a hybrid of a film, a book and an interactive game. Kids can just watch it unfold the first time, skip around with the page arrows, or crank a mighty gear to jump to their favorite parts. Moonbot co-founders Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enoch described the process by which they, along with co-founder William Joyce, create their stories, and its as charming a story as The Numberlys itself.
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Stirring the Pot of Stories
Moonbot works off a slate of stories, choosing a medium to start with and then expanding the story to different platforms. The first story app, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, was a short film first, which Moonbot then extended to be an iPad app, and a printed book is coming this fall. For The Numberlys, the iPad version came first, and the film version is now in production. “We approach all of these stories this way,” Enochs says. “The Numberlys will also be a book at some point.” Moonbot’s process revolves around the stories themselves, bringing them to the media that make the most sense for the audience and the particular story.
“We take all the things we love, stir it up into a pot, and hopefully it takes,” Oldenburg says. “With Morris Lessmore, it was Singing In the Rain meets Buster Keaton with a little bit of The Wizard of Oz.” This formula helps Moonbot’s stories appeal to all ages. “For an older user, there’s a nostalgic quality,” Oldenburg says. “For a younger user, it’s just pointing them towards this wonderful reference and inspiration that they might not experience nowadays.”
Creating The Numberlys
The follow-up project began with the concept for an alphabet book staring these five characters, the Numberlys. The creators asked themselves whimsical questions like, “Who came up with the letter G?” The story would invent answers to such questions. As a side effect, Moonbot would get the chance to make an alphabet book.
“Alphabet books are a right of passage for a lot of children’s book illustrators,” Oldenburg says. “One of the things on our checklist is always to do an alphabet book.” For Moonbot, entertaining, engaging stories are the priority, but educational themes manage to sneak into them.
“We didn’t really jive well with school,” Oldenburg says. “The teachers we got along with were the art teachers.” As Oldenburg spoke, the lyrics of part 2 of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” jumped to my mind. The opening sequences of The Numberlys, with its strange automatons marching in lockstep, evoke scenes from the 1982 film based on the album, The Wall.
With the Numberlys idea already cooking, there was a screening of Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis in Moonbot’s home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. The look and scope of the film became the inspiration for the soaring, black-and-white urban dystopia in which The Numberlys is set. Throw in some Marx Brothers and sprinkle some Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and that’s The Numberlys’ gritty, charming universe.
Oldenburg says the iPad was an ideal place to start with this story. The Moonbot team draws on a mixture of experience from computer-generated animation, television and film. The iPad’s approachable nature adds the potential of interactivity, allowing The Numberlys to draw in its users with 18 little games interspersed within the story.
Oldenburg and Joyce also decided to frame the story in the iPad’s vertical orientation, a more book-shaped than screen-shaped window into the world. “It’s a fun aspect ratio to work in,” says Oldenburg. “It really helps make it look grand and tall. It helps accentuate the scale.”
“It was very fun but also very challenging,” Oldenburg says. “Now, taking it out as a short film, what we’re going to have to do is vertical letterboxing. We’re calling it ‘the world’s tallest short.’”
Blurring The Line
After Morris Lessmore, people tried to define Moonbot’s genre. Moonbot has to choose a category in iTunes, and the best fit is the “Books” category. But as Oldenburg says, this is a bit of a hack. “There are two book categories in iTunes. There are the ones that cost a lot of money, which are basically PDFs, and there are the ones that don’t cost a lot – which are really hard to make – which are the interactive ones.”
The Moonbot team’s set of skills does not fit in these constraints. The creators have settled on “story app” as the best way to describe the versions of their stories that run on Apple’s iOS. But as a result of Moonbot’s process, these stories stretch outside the confines of one medium. As Oldenburg told me, “It feels like we’re doing something right when we start to blur lines.”
The Numberlys is available for $5.99 in the iTunes App Store.
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December Search Numbers: Google Regains Share From Bing
Jan 10th
The financial analysts are starting to trickle out comScore US search market share data for December 2011 ahead of the official public release of the figures tomorrow. According to what I saw there wasn’t a great deal of movement vs. November. The “big news” is that Google…
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Saudi Hacker Threatens to Release 1 Million Israeli Credit Card Numbers
Jan 6th
After releasing 15,000 credit card numbers hacked from an Israeli website on Tuesday, the Saudi hacker known as 0xOmar has released 11,000 more today. He has threatened to release a further one million.
The hacker broke into a popular Israeli sports site, making off with hundreds of thousands of accounts’ worth of personal information, including some credit card numbers.
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Of the numbers released, credit companies claim only a few hundred dollars was illegally spent before the cards were closed down, according to the Washington Post.
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On Tuesday, in a statement on the sports site, the hacker claimed to have stolen 400,000 identities. The message left on the sport site, according to CNN, included an introduction.
“Hi, it’s 0xOmarfrom group-xp, largest Wahhabi hacker group of Saudi Arabia. We are anonymous Saudi Arabian hackers. We decided to release first part of our data about Israel.”
Hacker News reported that his group claimed to be a part of the Anonymous hacking collective.
Yoram Hacohen, who heads up the Law, Information and Technology Authority at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, told CNN that “Israeli authorities have begun a criminal investigation, including a computer forensic probe to search for electronic evidence to try to locate the group.” He is more worried about identity theft than credit card fraud.
This week, Israeli security companies have taken this opportunity to speak to computer security overall in the country. According to Oren Levy, CEO of ZooZ:
“The core of the problem lies in the fact that payment information, such as credit cards, ID and phone numbers, and other information, is being processed and stored by tens of thousands of different merchants who aren’t equipped to handle the information. There is a real need to separate merchants from this critical private data.”
Is he or isn’t he?
Haaretz reported that a blogger named Amir Fedida claimed to have unmasked the blogger as Omar Habib, a student from the United Arab Emirates “works in a café, and studies computer science in at the ‘Hidalguense Cenhies’ in Mexico.”
In another report from the Jerusalem Post, the hacker denies he is anything other than what he claims, and says he’s too well hidden to be unmasked.
Cyber-attacks, both by governmental, and amateur, hacking teams, have become more and more part of the landscape of international relations in the last few years.
Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of cyber-attacks.
Shekel photo by Michael Plump, Dome of the Rock photo by Allistair | additional information from Jonah Balfour
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Forget PIN Numbers, Apple Wants to Let You Unlock Your iPhone With Your Face
Dec 29th
Compared to how things used to be done with desktop computers, accessing your smartphone seems almost as instantaneous as it gets. You just pick up the device, tap a button, slide a finger to the right, enter (or Swype) your passcode and you’re in. The whole process takes about two seconds and requires virtually no physical energy on your part. Piece of cake.
As quick and painless as this seems, Apple wants to simplify things even further for owners of its iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices. How? Imagine walking up to your phone or tablet in its dock and seeing the screen light up with a greeting. You pick it up and pull it a few inches closer to your face, and – wa la! – the screen is unlocked and the digital universe is instantly at your finger tips.
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This reality is not too far off, according to a patent filed recently by Apple. The company wants to build presence and facial recognition into its device so that users can simply approach and peer into a device in order to activate it. No more PIN numbers or button-pressing.
This is a feature already available on jailbroken iPhones, but one that is works very slowly and can easily be hacked using a photograph. Generally, the technology required to get this type of feature to work effectively is pretty sophisticated and, as Patently Apple describes it, “computationally expensive.” The trade-off for using an alternative method is weaker security, which defeats the purpose.
In a somewhat jargon-loaded post, the Apple patent-watching blog describes how Apple plans to overcome the challenges typically associated with implementing such technology. Their method would use a two-dimensional analysis of the placement of facial features as well as skin tone and check those details against “target images” previously captured by the device. This patent comes about a month after news of Apple’s acquisition of a patent for advanced 3D object recognition, which could be used in a similar fashion.
Exactly how they would thwart creative attempts to hack the system wasn’t detailed, but presumably they would have all of that sorted out before this feature sees the light of day.
Plans like this point to the future of how we’ll interact with computers and data in the future. Motion-based gestural control is already here thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect and the iPhone 4S has brought the most capable voice-controlled artificial intelligence application yet to the mass market. Siri is rumored to be coming to other iOS devices, including the iPad 3 and Apple’s much-rumored HD television set, due to launch next year. Thanks to the curious tinkering of developers, we’ve begun to see what tools like the Kinect and Siri are capable of, and their potential goes way beyond desktop computers and mobile devices.
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How to Visualize the Ridiculously Big Numbers Representing Global Online Video Usage
Dec 15th
According to comScore Media Metrix, nearly 1.2 billion people age 15 and older watched 201.4 billion videos online globally during October 2011. And Google Sites, driven by YouTube.com, ranked as the world’s top video destination with over 7…
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Social Sharing Trend Numbers of 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC]
Dec 14th
*clearspring released an infographic called Sharing in 2011: AddThis Trends. My favorite stat is Twitter makes up 52% of sharing in Japan. Check out the statistics on social sharing and the timeline of the most shared stories in 2011. At first I was so happy that the shared stories were really “news”, but the last [...]
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Android May Dominate the Numbers, But iPhone Most Desired
Nov 22nd
Advertising and data analysis firm Millennial Media issued its monthly mobile trends report this morning for October. It showed that the iPhone was the most used single device for the month with nearly 13% of all use across its network. While Android might dominate the ecosystem, the iPhone as a singular device is the most used smartphone on the market.
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Apple also dominated the shares for original equipment manufacturers, taking 23.5% of impressions across the network. Apple beat out HTC (18.1%) and Samsung (17.24%). Android claimed 14 of the top 20 devices in impression share with the Motorola Droid X coming in the No. 2 spot behind the iPhone. It goes to show what we have known for a while: Android wins by the numbers but Apple’s smartphone is the most desired.
In terms of overall impressions by mobile platform, Android wins by a landslide with 56% of the pie in Millennial’s network. iOS comes in second with 28%, half of what Android does. Cut that in half again and you get Research In Motion’s BlackBerry. This validates another trend we have known for a bit: Android has completely stolen RIM’s market, now outperforming it in the ad department by a factor of four to one.
With the prevalence of Apple and Android smartphones gobbling up impression share, it is no wonder that the top input method was touch, with 69%. QWERTY plus touch, QWERTY by itself and just the a standard keyboard input rounded out the rankings with 11% and 10% rankings.
The most used apps were music and entertainment related with games, communications and social networking the next three. News has broken the top five types of apps by impressions, rising from the No. 9 spot in October 2010. Productivity tools, like Evernote, calculators or document apps rose to No. 6 in the new rankings coming back from an unranked position a year ago.
According to Millennial’s numbers, the top goals for developers in 2012 is to continue developing new applications (40%) with maximizing revenue (21%) the next highest goal. See the chart below.
It is important to understand where Millennial is coming from with these monthly reports. The company is fundamentally an advertising network that acquires a lot of data on how people interact with apps in its network. These numbers are not entirely indicative of the true balance of power in the mobile ecosystem but are a good glimpse into content consumption based on freemium apps and mobile Web pages. The iPhone has done well in this category from the beginning either through quality apps or by the fact that advertisers push towards the iPhone because of its perceived superiority of the iPhone user to pay attention and interact with media and ads.
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‘Not Provided’ Search Numbers Rising, Where Will They Stop?
Nov 9th
When Google rolled out their encrypted search, loss of query data including the search terms was a major complaint from online marketers. Google told them the percentage would only be single digits as it was only applied to people signed into a Go…
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Infographic: Social, Local & Mobile, SoLoMo By The Numbers
Nov 7th
Three hot areas of marketing are social, local and mobile. There’s even a name for the collision of all three: SoLoMo. Nielsen and NM Incite have created infographics with interesting figures in each area. Parents turn out to be big on social media. Nearly half of visitors to local deals…
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