scoring

ScoreTable 1.2.1 Review

Board games and card games are a lot of fun, but tracking the score is sometimes harder than it should be. One poor player is tasked with jotting down every scoring play, adding up the scores, and making sure it remains accurate. ScoreTable attempts to simplify and streamline the scoring process with an attractive, easy-to-use iPad app. For the most part, it works as advertised, with only a handful of small issues.

The concept is very simple and the clean interface reflects that with only two choices to select a score table to start (one button for the game "… Read more

ComScore: Google claims top spot for desktop and mobile hits

Google hasn't budged from the No. 1 spot when it comes to its desktop and mobile audience, according to ComScore's latest rankings, but the companies with the most mobile growth are ones that have been struggling to keep investors happy.

Groupon, Zynga, and Pandora's mobile users grew more than twice as much as their numbers for desktop users, according to ComScore's February measurement for the top 50 digital media companies. Of course, the three companies -- which have seen their share of management shakeups and disappointing earnings this past year -- had much smaller numbers to … Read more

Use IFTTT to get breaking news, score updates from ESPN

If you're looking to combine a bunch of unrelated Web services with each other and come up with a concoction of triggers and alerts to intertwine your online life, look no further than If This Then That (IFTTT).

The site, as we've previously told you, allows you to set triggers based off of various services such as Facebook, local weather, Instagram, package tracking, and many others -- 60 channels in total. Those triggers will then carry out an action on another channel, ranging from calling your phone to adding a line to a Google Drive spreadsheet. When you … Read more

Project Gamma brings intelligent audio to digital comics

AUSTIN, Texas--From the band Love and Rockets lifting its name from the famous cult favorite Hernandez brothers' comic, to a suspiciously-coincidental Jack Kirby and Frank Zappa meeting, comic books and music have a long history of influencing each other.

The fusion of music and comics as directed by the comics' creators has been limited to a list of recommended tunes in the letters pages of the book -- until now. Today, Marvel Comics raised the curtain on a plan to turn that history on its ear with a digital comics-and-music fusion code-named Project Gamma.

Project Gamma is, in the words … Read more

Yearly online travel spending tops $100B for first time

U.S. consumers spent more than $100 billion on online travel bookings last year, making 2012 the first year ever that the $100 billion figure was surpassed, according to a report from ComScore.

The company, which tracks Web site visitors and other information, said U.S. travel e-commerce sales reached $103 billion in 2012, up 9 percent from the previous year. Air travel bookings, up 10 percent from the previous year, accounted for nearly two-thirds of all travel spending.

The data is the latest signal of just how many consumer tasks are moving online. ComScore noted that travel was a … Read more

Bing falls to 5th global search engine, surpassed by Yandex

Yandex is probably the biggest search engine few people have ever heard of.

The Russian search engine has surpassed Microsoft's Bing in the world's top search engine rankings, according to Search Engine Watch, which got its data from ComScore.

Coming in first place is Google with 114.7 billion search queries and 65.2 percent of the market share. China's Baidu ranked second with 14.5 billion queries and 8.2 percent share. Third was Yahoo with 8.6 billion queries and 4.9 percent share. And, fourth was Yandex with 4.8 billion queries and 2.… Read more

Apple reigns as chief U.S. smartphone maker

As Apple appears to be winning the U.S. smartphone race, Google still has a strong hold as the top mobile platform.

New data by ComScore shows that Apple got the rank of "top smartphone manufacturer" by raking in 36.3 percent of the market share, while Google Android was the No. 1 platform with 53.4 percent share. ComScore tallied this data by surveying more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers between September and December 2012.

To date, 125.9 million people in the U.S. now own a smartphone, which is 54 percent of the … Read more

Make free voice calls on Facebook's app

Thursday's CNET Update does exist:

Stories from today's tech news roundup:

- Facebook updated its Messenger app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing people in the U.S. to make voice calls through a Wi-Fi or data connection.

- iPhone users can finally buy music from Amazon from their device. Amazon launched its mp3 store for iPhone and iPod Touch users, but the catch is that purchases must be made through the Web browser, at amazon.com/mp3. And the songs can be played on the Amazon Cloud Player app.

- The cloud storage service MediaFire is now available for Android … Read more

'Fiscal cliff' fears blamed for flat online holiday spending growth

Growing fears of an impending economic crisis in the new year apparently led to weaker-than-expected U.S. online holiday sales results.

Consumers spent $42.3 billion online during the November-December holiday shopping season, a 14 percent increase over 2011, according to data released today by ComScore. While online shopping set some spending records, overall growth was largely flat, the market analyst concluded.

"This year's growth rate is essentially on a par with last year's," ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement. "But despite many positives for the online sector, this year's season did … Read more