Local industry

Cupid in dating brands lease deal with Brightsolid

From BBC

"Online dating firm Cupid is to take on several brands under a leasing deal with Dundee-based Friends Reunited owner Brightsolid. Under the 10-year deal, Cupid will operate Friends Reunited Dating, Friends Over Fifty and Swoon. Brightsolid will retain ownership of their domain names, trade marks and intellectual property rights (IPR). Brightsolid said this would allow it to concentrate on its core activities in online publishing and technology. In October, Edinburgh-based Cupid was named as Scotland's fastest-growing technology business in a survey by accountants Deloitte."

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Quarrel… in the running for a BAFTA

From Pocket Gamer

"Turning 2011's handheld-centric nominations on their head, smartphone titles are the dominant force in this year's mobile and handheld category at the BAFTA Video Games Awards. Leading the line are iOS hit Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint from Zee-3, Quarrel from Dundee-based studio Denki, PopCap's ever-popular Peggle, the iOS version of Dead Space from EA and The Nightjar by Somethin' Else."

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Dundee rising

From Develop

"The last couple of years have been a little tempestuous for Dundee, with some terrible lows – goodbye Realtime Worlds – countered by a few notable highs – hello Outplay. However, the development sector in Dundee, far from disappearing, has evolved, adapted and grown in a variety of new ways. This flux and uncertainty has mirrored that found in much of the global games industry, where the focus has shifted from the triple-A console titles, onto the smaller multi-platform casual, social and mobile games. Yet the overriding feeling around the city’s development studios is one of optimism, confidence and excitement."

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Deals Website Being Launched by Dundee Publisher

From All Media Scotland

"The Dundee-based newspaper, magazine and comics publisher, DC Thomson, is making its first foray into the online deals industry. From tomorrow, www.beezerdeals.com will be offering discounts on a range of products and services, including restaurants and hotels, beauty treatments, car MOT’s, local entertainment and theatre… Adds the publisher: "This exciting digital development demonstrates DC Thomson’s continued investment across multi-media platforms. It comes after the redesign of the company’s Dundee and Aberdeen-based newspapers, and follows the launch of several magazine titles in digital format on the Apple Newsstand.."

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App-y days... smart way to hail a cab!

From Evening Times

"A new smartphone app is helping taxi passengers stay safe and travel across Glasgow faster. The app allows customers to skip Glasgow Taxi’s telephone queue and book a cab on screen, cutting waiting times. Customers can also find the closest cabs with a Find a Rank function. The app allows passengers to find out how far away the taxi is with a live tracking feature with access to a number of automatic ‘on app- roach’ notifications."

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Scrabble-esque Facebook game Word Trick now available on iPhone for free

From Pocket Gamer

"Social and mobile developer Outplay Entertainment's Facebook game Word Trick is now available to download from Apple's App Store for free. The Scrabble-esque puzzler tasks you with creating words from a selection of random letters and strategically placing them on a board that contains familiar double-letter and triple-word tiles."

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General industry

TIGA proposes new tax breaks for revitalizing UK games industry

From Gamasutra

"As the UK government prepares its 2012 budget, trade group TIGA (The Independent Games Developers Association) has submitted a report outlining new measures meant to support the growth of local developers and publishers. The report proposes measures that could create 4,661 jobs and contribute £188 million ($285 million) in investments over the next five years for the UK video games industry, which has suffered a decline recently as other countries have offered more competitive tax incentives."

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Barclays says new mobile app is credit card-style watershed

From The Telegraph

"By linking customers' mobile numbers to their current accounts, the service, Pingit, will enable people to send and receive payments between UK accounts, simply by texting another mobile from their smartphone…It has significant potential for small payments between friends, for example sharing restaurant bills, or fees for school trips…"We think we're at a transformational moment for banking," Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclays Retail and Business Banking, told The Daily Telegraph. "It is difficult to predict the pace of adoption but it has the potential to be as big a change as the credit card."

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Are books and the internet about to merge?

From The Guardian

"Every web page, however sophisticated it may seem, is basically a digital book that we read on our computer through our web browser. So when Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks and LibriVox, stated today that the book and the internet will merge, he was in one sense simply reiterating what is already the case. But from the perspective of people without the technical knowledge to see how closely entwined the book and the internet already are, it has the whiff of yet another doom-monger proclaiming the death of the book as we know it."

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As digital music sales leap, paid-for print circulations tumble

From The Guardian

"As music companies finally get to grips with the challenges of the internet, paid-for magazines and papers are struggling… stats from the BPI… revealed that digital music revenue in the UK grew 24.7% in 2011 to £281.6m, offsetting two-thirds of the decline in income from physical sales… ABC consumer magazine circulation figures for the last six months of 2011… did not make easy reading for the traditional, paid-for music press. NME saw its circulation fall to just 27,650, while Q's average monthly sale dropped 3.6% in the period."

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Reports

Forrester: 1B smartphone and tablet users by 2016, with Apple, Google and Microsoft powering 90%

From Next Web

"You would have to be blind not to see at this point that the future of our computing lives will be mobile. Recent statistics gathered by research group Forrester only back that up. According to the report, there will be 1 billion smartphone customers by 2016, with 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets in the US alone. Of those worldwide billion mobile devices, Apple, Google and Microsoft will control some 90% of the market with their respective platforms. Business users will factor heavily into these numbers, with some 350M employees using smartphones."

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Mobile technology will decide who wins battle on the high street, says global KPMG survey

From Talking Retail

"Retailers and consumer goods companies say mobile technology will be the key driver to maximise sales over the next two years ahead of more traditional ways to generate business such as business intelligence or supply chain management, according to a global survey of CFOs in the sector. The research suggests that the importance placed on mobile technology varies by country. According to the KPMG Consumer Markets CFO Survey, 36% of UK respondents view mobile technology as key to maximize sales, compared to 46% in Germany, 44% in the US and 50% in India."

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The Number Of Mobile Devices Will Exceed World’s Population By 2012 (& Other Shocking Figures)

From Tech Crunch

"Despite its long and boring name, Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update” is one of the more fascinating data-filled reports you’ll read this year. The report examines the dramatic growth we’re seeing in the mobile Internet space, including the massive demands for mobile data, the growth of mobile video, and the rise of the smartphone as new gateway to the web itself. Globally, mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold over 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row."

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An average of 701 apps launched every day last year

From The Telegraph

"In total 255,922 apps were launched last year in the British version of Apple’s incredibly popular App Store and on average 21,326 apps were launched per month, says a breakdown of the digital store’s figures. According to a new report jointly-authored by AppZapp, an app bargain-guide and madvertise, a European mobile advertising network, the most apps were launched last December – in the run-up to Christmas. A total of 28,992 went live in the App Store in the final four weeks of last year - the most for any month during the whole of 2011."

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Events

Engage Invest Exploit '12

From Informatics Ventures

"We are pleased to announce that Sir Jackie Stewart OBE will deliver the keynote address. Apart from his career as a highly successful racing driver, Sir Jackie has always been a great promoter of innovation and was a major figure in revolutionising the industry's safety standards. Now in its fifth year, EIE has established a "must attend" reputation in the European calendar with a simple value proposition for investors and serial technology entrepreneurs: see a large volume of high-potential, high-quality prospects in a short space of time, in one place, and with an engaging agenda." The event takes place on May 10th at the Informatics Forum, Edinburgh.

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... and finally

Videogames improve sight in adults born with a rare eye disorder

From The Guardian

"Doctors have treated people born with a rare eye disorder by prescribing a course of gun-toting videogames. Adults who played first-person shooter games for 40 hours a month improved enough to read one or two lines further down a standard chart used in eye tests, the researchers found…The surprise results challenge the view that computer games are bad for the eyes and suggest that the adult brain can be trained to overcome certain conditions."

 

Compiled by David Hartley