statistics

Ranking the top game-design colleges

In the early 1980s, each arcade video game kept a list of that game's top players. Three decades later, thanks to a prestigious college-prep service, we now have a list of the top academic players in video game design.

The Princeton Review recently surveyed 50 game design programs at U.S. colleges in order to handpick the eight top schools to attend if you're interested in game development. It based its selections on a variety of criteria including: curriculum quality, school staff and infrastructure, scholarships and financial aid, and career opportunities.

The top eight undergraduate game design programs: … Read more

Social gaming's big, but who's spending money?

We all know by now that games built on top of social networks' platforms are a big deal, but the results of a study commissioned by games manufacturer PopCap give some idea of just what the numbers are like.

The survey estimates that there are about 100 million people in the U.S. and U.K. who play social games regularly, based on the 24 percent of survey respondents who identified themselves as such. More women than men--55 percent to 45 percent--identify themselves as social gamers, and the average age of a social gamer is 43. That's consistent with … Read more

Goldman Sachs: Shift toward cloud unstoppable

The latest technology software report from investment bank Goldman Sachs confirms what IT industry analysts have been seeing as an unstoppable shift toward on-demand IT services and what we now consider to be cloud applications, especially among small businesses.

According the report, e-mailed to subscribers this week, the macroeconomic downturn has likely accelerated software-as-a-service, or cloud, adoption, as customers are forced to look for lower-cost solutions to mission-critical business problems. Forty percent of survey respondents indicated that they would be more likely to use SaaS solutions in a weaker economy, due to perceived cost benefits, while only 4 percent said … Read more

Monitor your Mac

CheckUp is an easy-to-use multipurpose maintenance utility that can help you monitor and improve your Mac's performance. Its very visual interface uses colorful and dynamic icons, graphs, and dials to display performance and data over eight different categories: Profile (including uptime and a bandwidth tally), System (especially great for seeing which OS your Mac can handle), Processors (twin dials for dual processors, plus a temperature monitor), Memory (configuration, usage, and testing), Disks (all partitions, with an option for repairing permissions), Network (showing input and output in a customizable graph), Processes (a prettier, more flexible version of OS X's … Read more

Which tech VCs get name-dropped the most?

Most people working in Silicon Valley can rattle off a list of influential venture capital firms and individual venture investors. But if you're wondering which of them are being the most actively discussed in the media, you'll find some interesting data available in a new report from ITMemos. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to ITDatabase, the parent company behind ITMemos.)

That Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Benchmark and Accel top the list of most quoted VC firms is not terribly surprising. However, Fred Wilson of New York's Union Square Ventures, a significantly smaller firm, tops the list as most … Read more

Pingdom: Facebook is killing it on page views

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late … Read more

Snowstorm blankets Web with high shopping traffic

A blizzard that pelted much of the Eastern Seaboard with over a foot of snow also led to a spike in last-minute online holiday shopping last weekend, traffic firm ComScore said Tuesday.

Online shopping continues to eat up a bigger chunk of holiday retail each year, but this season, with roads snowbound and temperatures well below freezing in some of the most populous areas of the country at the tail end of the holiday season, it was even more than usual. (Several cities in the mid-Atlantic, like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., pulled in more snow in a single snowfall … Read more

Hitwise: 'Facebook' the year's top search term

Mark Zuckerberg should be proud: The top search term of 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, was not "porn," "poker," or "Britney Spears." It was, for the first time, "Facebook."

In 2008, Facebook had been the tenth most searched term on the Web, according to the traffic company's annual survey of search queries.

The rest of the list for 2009 is also made up of "navigational" searches, which Hitwise reps say actually always dominate top search queries despite the common wisdom that top searches tend to be for online gambling … Read more

Survey: IT spending to recover in 2010

Goldman Sachs' latest IT spending survey is out and it looks a tech-spending recovery is on the way for 2010. To a large extent, the data suggests not so much that spending is dramatically higher, but that it has normalized at pre-recessionary growth rates, rather than contracting as it has over the past several months.

Goldman is cautiously optimistic about 2010 spending, noting that much of it depends on the macro-economic environment driving more business spending. And while most areas will see growth counter to 2009's downward spiral, some areas such as off-shore development will feel significant retraction.

Regardless, the sentiments are positive and dramatically different than Goldman's report from November 2008 where IT spending was in a total death spiral. What a difference a year makes.

A few key points from the report:

With recessionary buying cycle clearly through the trough, the remaining question centers on the pace of recovery for 2010. Infrastructure, application development, and systems integration remain top spending areas, especially as CIOs start to consider newer technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. There is pent-up demand in hardware most notable, positive for storage and server/PC refresh. The appetite for offshore services appears to be below trend at current levels. HP, NetApp, CommVault, Red Hat, Riverbed, and Salesforce.com are notable names showing positive upward momentum in our latest survey.

In software, Red Hat and Salesforce.com showed strengthened results with VMware and Citrix remaining top of mind, which Goldman believes to be a good indication of internal and external cloud deployments gaining momentum.

Nintendo launches paid video content for Wii

The Nintendo Wii remains a force to be reckoned with in the video game world and new survey statistics along with new revenue streams suggest that Nintendo has still has something up it's sleeve.

New survey data from Lottay, an online wish-list and gift giving site, shows that the Wii and its associated accessories will regain momentum during this year's holiday season.

The Wii and Wii-related gear were wished for twice as much as the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360 combined though 38 percent of people wanted something other than products--namely cash, and in one case, Satan (I … Read more