Hasta La Gadget!

Isn’t it curious how you always crack open a beer before settling in for some GTA? Or how you tend to put an anxious hand over your wallet when logging onto PSN? No soldier, it is not curious. Not at all. But this is: Researchers at North Carolina State University claim they’ve found a way to predict your in-game behavior with “up to 80 percent accuracy.” After analyzing the decision-making of 14,000 World of Warcraft players, they noticed that different players prefer different types of achievements. These preferred achievements clump together into statistically significant groups, known as “cliques”, even if they have nothing obvious in common. So a WoW player who likes to improve their unarmed combat skills also, for some psychological reason, tends to want points for world travel. What’s more, the researchers believe that clique-spotting can be exploited outside the rather specific world of WoW, in which case their method could prove lucrative to game designers, online retailers and pretty much anyone with an interest in predicting your next move. Want to know more? Then we predict you’ll click the PR after the break.

Continue reading Shocker! Gamer behavior is actually quite predictable

Shocker! Gamer behavior is actually quite predictable originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Researchers at the University of Georgia analyzed six years’ worth of Usenet posts, and you know what they discovered? Life ain’t fair. The most popular two percent of posters who started discussion threads hogged 50 percent of all replies, while everyone else struggled for attention. What made some thread-starters more attractive than others? Thankfully it wasn’t rampant flaming. The distinguishing trait was actually how factual they were: only 12 percent of posts by popular posters contained personal opinions or comments. However, posting a bit of news isn’t all it takes to win followers. In a related experiment, 200 volunteers were unleashed onto “simulated” discussion forums and their behavior revealed an even more important factor. The slightly flummoxed researchers called it a “preferential attachment”, which pulled readers towards posters who already had an excess of followers. In other words, life still ain’t fair. For a delightfully factual breakdown of the full results, check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Shocker! The internet is not egalitarian, popular forum posters have it easy

Shocker! The internet is not egalitarian, popular forum posters have it easy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TV viewers are a famously fickle bunch, which tends to drive TV advertisers crazy. The prevalent theory remains that skipping past ads using a pesky DVR is the biggest enemy of marketers, but new research has once again contradicted that received wisdom. The IPG Media Lab in Los Angeles pulled together a representative group of 48 TV and online video viewers and asked them to sit through some programming while equipped with the usual “devices or distractions” that accompany their viewing habits. Central to the study was the measurement of time each person spent facing the screen and how engaged they were with the content. The first thing noted was that 94 percent of TV viewers and 73 percent of online video consumers used some other form of media to augment their visual entertainment. Smartphones were the most common, with 60 percent of test subjects resorting to their handset while gawking at the TV. That’s resulted in a mediocre 52 percent attention level during actual programs and 37 percent during ads. In other words, two thirds of the time, commercials are being ignored and smartphones are helping people with that heinous behavior. Ironically, fast-forwarding adverts using a DVR garnered attention levels that were 12 percent higher, mostly because people were trying to make sure they didn’t skip too far ahead. Damn, why does reality have to be all complex and stuff?

Smartphones, not DVRs, are the biggest threat to TV adverts originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 08:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Direct sales figures for Windows Phone 7 handsets have been remarkably difficult to come by since Microsoft’s OS reboot at the end of last year, but here come the stat gurus at Gartner to provide us with their best estimate. 3.6 million of the world’s smartphone sales in the past quarter were counted under the Microsoft mobile OS umbrella, of which 1.6 million featured the very latest WP7 software. That means Redmond partners sold more Windows Mobile devices in the first three months of 2011 than ones bearing the sparkling new operating system. Guess now we know what LG meant when it said the Windows Phone launch didn’t meet expectations. Gartner sees these numbers as evidencing a failure “to grow in consumer preference” by WP7’s launch devices, though it predicts better things ahead, with Nokia’s participation helping to accelerate the platform’s momentum. For more (much more!) stats relating to the global cellphone market in Q1 2011, click on the source link for Gartner’s full disclosure.

Gartner: 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 devices sold in Q1, consumer interest remains tepid originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 May 2011 06:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA may be kicking all kinds of tail on the mobile front with its ubiquitous Tegra 2 chipset, but back on its home turf of laptop and desktop graphics, things aren’t looking so hot. The latest figures from Jon Peddie Research show that the GPU giant has lost 2.5 percentage points of its market share and now accounts for exactly a fifth of graphics chips sold on x86 devices. That’s a hefty drop from last year’s 28.4 percent slice, and looks to have been driven primarily by sales of cheaper integrated GPUs, such as those found inside Intel’s Clarkdale, Arrandale, and most recently, Sandy Bridge processors. AMD’s introduction of Fusion APUs that combine general and graphics processing into one has also boosted its fortunes, resulting in 13.3 percent growth in sales relative to the previous quarter and a 15.4 percent increase year-on-year. Of course, the real profits are to be made in the discrete graphics card market, where NVIDIA remains highly competitive, but looking at figures like these shows quite clearly why NVIDIA is working on an ARM CPU for the desktop — its long-term survival depends on it.

NVIDIA losing ground to AMD and Intel in GPU market share originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 08:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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