Hasta La Gadget!

Hot on the heels of the mysterious and sudden layoffs of 150 employees at Zynga‘s multiple studios comes the company’s Q3 2012 earnings report, and while it doesn’t look too good for the once-booming social game studio, it’s not as bad expected. The company earned a revenue of $317 million, but the net income dipped into the negatives, losing $52 million during the third quarter.

It’s not all bad, though. Revenue was actually expected to be around $250 million, so the amount of money Zynga brought in was actually more than what analysts thought. However, the company is looking for ways to cut down on costs and save a little bit of cash. They implemented a “cost reduction plan” that will hopefully total a pre-tax savings in the fourth quarter of up to $20 million.

The plan already included the downsizing of certain studios and the closure of others. In total, Zynga cut 5% of its workforce and shut down its Boston branch. The company also expects to shut down its Japan and UK studios, but no timeline has been given for that. Zynga also is expecting to shut down 13 of their games, but a lot of their popular games will still remain available.

However, Zynga is reporting slightly higher user numbers this time around. Daily active users were 60 million during the third quarter, which is up 10% from 54 million a year ago, but down from 72 million in the second quarter of this year. Monthly active users were 311 million in the third quarter, up 37% from 227 million a year ago, and also up from 306 million during Q2.

Zynga reports Q3 2012 earnings is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The folks at Mac Mini Vault have benchmarked and torn down the new Mac Minis. The Mac Mini’s $600, 2.5GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge configuration racked up a Geekbench score of 7433 straight out of the box. That’s impressive considering last year’s Sandy Bridge i5 Mac Mini refresh has a standing average of 6323 on the Geekbench. More »

Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo are researchers from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa and they are leading us down the primrose path towards human extinction. More precisely, they’re using a method called specially-targetted communication. The flying robot “selects” ground robots and communicates with them by changing LED colors. Once the airborne robot sends the right signals to the ground robots, they can work together to move over and around obstacles that the ground robots cannot see.

Most important is that fact that no real “wireless” communication is necessary here, unless you count the LEDs as a form of electromagnetic signaling. Instead, the flying robots can tell the ground robots to do what they do best – self-assemble – and then guide them where they need to go.

You really have to see the video to understand it, but it’s some seriously wild robot interaction. The method requires no GPS, no maps, and no outside control. The flying robots just need to know what the environment looks like and the ground robots just have to follow orders. It’s amazing stuff.

via ieee

We’ve been tracking third-party Lightning cables pretty closely, because millions of people are receiving new iDevices and want a second charger.  We’ve seen the “authentication” chip cracked, and we saw a third-party cable that lights up, but none of them have beaten’s Apple’s $20 asking price for a Lightning cable. Until now. iPhone5Mod, the same people behind that light-up dock we covered earlier, have released more boring, straightforward Lightning cables–plus they’re significantly less expensive than Apple’s version. The bad news? They’re still $10.

Many cables using the cracked Chinese chips are not officially licensed Apple cables, and therefore they’re in a legal grey area. If you only want officially licensed-Apple goods plugging into your phone, iLuv has produced an entire line of Lightning-compatible accessories and cables. The bad news there is that they won’t be available until 2013, meaning they miss the all-important Christmas shopping season. Sometimes being bad does pay off.

Photo courtesy of iPhone5Mod.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Don’t buy an iPad 3 today unless you like the old 30-pin connector, Cheap third-party Lighting cables are coming soon,

Many of us dread the moment when we might scratch our smartphone screens. That’s why a lot of people protect them with cases or maybe even just a simple screen protector. However, the advancement of glass technology has improved over the years, and Corning is just one manufacturer that’s making an impact. The company’s tough-as-nails Gorilla Glass has been installed on over 1 billion devices so far.

Corning released their Q3 2012 earnings today, and along with the earnings, they touted that over 1 billion (with a “B”) devices are equipped with Corning’s toughened Gorilla Glass. Furthermore, 33 major brands are using Gorilla Glass on at least one of its products, and 500 individual models of devices are equipped with the glass technology.

The trend of toughened glass isn’t only spreading on smartphones, but tablets, laptops, and even televisions are equipped with Gorilla Glass. These are fairly impressive numbers, and they should continue to rise as the popularity of scratch-resistant and toughened glass rises. It may even become the standard one day.

As far as sales figures, Corning earned a revenue of $2.04 billion during Q3, which is up 7% from last quarter, but down 2% from last year. The company ended up with a net income of $521 million, up from $462 million last quarter. However, it’s 36% down from last year, which saw a net income of $811 million.

Corning announces 1 billion Gorilla Glass devices is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.