Daily Tech and Gadget

Real Networks ‘ game division hired two new executives as part of a push into social games. Seattle-based RealGames said today it appointed Wilf Russell as chief technology officer and Jeffrey Revoy as vice president of social games. The moves are part of the company’s attempt to adapt its business, which has struggled to keep pace with the changes ..Read More

Commercial accounts for businesses on Twitter may finally make their debut next month at the company’s inaugural developer conference Chirp. Anamitra Banerji is leading a session on commercial accounts in the afternoon at the conference. Last summer, co-founder Biz Stone told us that the company was planning to launch a commercial layer over its ecosystem by year-end . They’re ..Read More

San Franciscans complain that Burning Man used to be better. New Yorkers claim that everything used to be better. While it’s no surprise that some attendees of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas, deemed SXSW to be “over” compared to previous years, what’s interesting is the why. The complainers cited three major ..Read More

Plastic Jungle , a site where you can sell unwanted gift cards or buy those cards at a discount, has raised $7.4 million in a second round of funding. I actually wrote about new site with a similar idea called CardPool just a few hours ago. Both CardPool and Plastic Jungle are part of a larger category of gift ..Read More

Steve Chen, co-founder of the wildly successful video sharing site YouTube, sold the site to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. No doubt he’s since internalized Google’s “Don’t be evil” ideology, at least as a talking point. But in January of that year, Chen’s thinking was exactly the opposite. In the text of an instant message to a ..Read More

French company Stonetrip has announced today that it has created tools that will enable developers to create cool 3-D games and apps on Google Android phones. The ShiVa 3D engine for Android will be released in a couple of weeks. The engine is a software platform that lets 3-D games run on Android phones. It will compete with the ..Read More

The mobile app market is heating up, both for paid and free apps. And we’re seeing numerous app developers and content publishers jumping into the market every day looking to make money on this opportunity. If you can get consumers to pay for your app, great. But with all the free apps already available for smartphones and tablet devices ..Read More

It looks like competition among translation startups is heating up, with a number of companies popping up making substantial announcements in the last few months.  Smartling , a startup that helps businesses to better use their websites by speaking to customers in their native language in real time, announced today it has secured a first round of funding for $4 million. Smartling is one ..Read More

At a certain point in BioShock 2 , I figured out what I needed to do to win the video game. I had to hypnotize the enemies so that they would shoot each other and not me. It’s a fun trick to play, but it wound up ruining the game in a lot of ways. It made finishing the ..Read More

GameStop , the worlds biggest video game retailer, managed to grow in its fourth fiscal quarter thanks to sales of used games and new store openings. Even in the age of digital distribution from rivals such as OnLive, GameStop plans on opening 400 stores in the coming year. The Grapevine, Texas-based company reported that sales for the fourth fiscal ..Read More