Call of Duty Elite subscription service launches with Modern Warfare 3

Facebook with guns

The Call of Duty franchise looks set to get a Facebook style boost this November when the highly anticipated Modern Warfare 3 launches. Shipping with the game will be Call of Duty Elite, which aims to bolster the experience with online stat tracking, downloadable content and player interaction.

Call of Duty Elite will be part paid for service, part free to use. The Facebook style interactions will be available to all without charge, those who want to access things like game performance analysis and DLC will need to pay.

Things are going to be run on a monthly subscription basis, the exact cost of which is yet to be announced.

A video detailing the exact functions of the service has emerged calling it "an online service that lets you form groups, share films of your games and study maps and weapons". Call of Duty Elite will also work across the games franchise and not be limited to Modern Warfare 3. Live feeds and stats help you to build knowledge of weapons "trends" so you can learn what sort of arsenal is proving successful in different maps.?The theater allows you to share videos with Elite itself, but also YouTube and even Facebook.?

Given the current buzz about this years other first person blockbuster; Battlefield 3, it looks like Activision and Infinity Ward are going to have to pull out all the stops in order to retain their crown.?

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Related links:

• News - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 screenshots let loose
• News - Video - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 first full trailer
• News - PlayStation Network services restored by end of week

Tags: Call of Duty Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 games Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 Gaming

Call of Duty Elite subscription service launches with Modern Warfare 3 originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 31 May 2011 11:33:00 +0100

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Call of Duty Elite is a for-pay social, content service for MW3

While many people claimed that $15 was too much for a map pack, the DLC was purchased by the millions. Activision knows how to profit from the secondary and even tertiary content that gamers are keen to access, and the just-announced Call of Duty Elite is the newest weapon in the war for higher stock value. The concept is interesting: Elite is an interactive strategy guide that's constantly updated with your stats and playing habits, along with a full suite of social networking functions.

Activision has been adamant that the company will never charge for multiplayer play, but it has found a way to charge for multiplayer data.

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Must See Gaming Panel Tomorrow

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WHO declares cellphones "possibly carcinogenic"

Those who are worried about the possible health risks of cellphones just received some backing from a significant source: the World Health Organization. A group within the organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, has announced it is listing the electromagnetic radiation produced by cell phones as "possibly carcinogenic." The IARC's use of the term "possibly" is key to the decision, as its expert panel determined that the information available is too limited to say anything with a greater degree of certainty, but is sufficient to warrant careful monitoring.

The designation is the result of a meeting held last week that brought 31 health researchers together to evaluate the conclusions that can be drawn from current research, including unpublished information from the Interphone study. The conclusions will eventually appear in The Lancet Oncology, but the IARC has issued a press release ahead of publication.

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Smartphone makers bow to demands for more openness

For many Android enthusiasts, "openness" is almost an 11th commandment. So when manufacturers began restricting full access to Android smartphones a couple years ago, many saw it as a cardinal sin. Good news for you smartphone modders: some manufacturers are beginning to see the light.

"Today, I'm confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices," wrote HTC CEO Peter Chou in a Facebook post on Thursday evening. "There has been overwhelmingly [sic] customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones."

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Disney Universe hands-on

Character mash-up fun

Disney Universe is a first. It is the first time that Disney has allowed complete cross-pollination?of some of its licenses in a game, in that you can play the character from one of its movies and TV shows in the world of another. For example, you can take control of Alice from Time Burton's Alice in Wonderland in the madcap world of Monsters Inc. Well, sort of...

Actually, you don't really get to play Alice at all. Instead, the game gives you control over small kid-like avatars who "suit up" in iconic character costumes, including wigs, masks and hats. This clever work-around gives the developer more free reign - allowing characters to get harmed without damaging the reputation of any sacred properties - and is an obvious necessity really; after all, a full sized Tron appearing alongside a Pixar-rendered Mike from Monsters Inc. would be both tricky to pull off and aesthetically clumsy.

It also allows the game to offer a massive gamut of characters to choose from, as there's 40 Disney properties to dress up as, including the aforementioned Mike, Alice and Tron, and Stich from Lilo and Stich.

And it is these that Pocket-lint and a couple of other gamers used in two unfinished levels of the game during a behind-closed-doors hands-on with the Xbox 360 version - complete with floppy blonde?toupee.

Disney Universe itself is described by the developer as an action-adventure, but there's far more to it than that. You can have up to four characters on screen at the same time, and while the publisher is promoting the game as a family-oriented experience, our first impression is that its cunning blend of puzzle, platforming and meanie-bashing gameplay can equally suit the post-pub crowd.

That is because it, like games such as Gauntlet and the excellent Alien Swarm (available on Steam), adopts a third-person co-op model that flows and ebbs like a flash flood. It's fast paced and requires each player to collect, fight, solve and leap in equal measure - sometimes simultaneously. And as you can always hinder your fellow players by hitting them, grabbing them, and even throwing them off platforms, there's always an avenue for mischief.

In fact, some levels even require you to compete against your fellow players full stop, feeling like Power Stone, one of Capcom's finest moments on the Dreamcast, in the process. And it is this fine balance between both camaraderie and conflict that, even from the play of a couple of the levels, leaves us in no doubt that Disney Universe will stretch over a wider age range than Disney's usual fare.

During our hands-on play, the producer of the game, Iain Richie, told us that the finished game will have six differently-themed worlds in total and each world will be split into three levels. Then, each level is then split into three areas, and as the two?areas from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Monsters Inc. that we saw were pretty expansive, that's a lot of gameplay right there.

He also explained that, depending on the theme, the type of gameplay can change: "Each level is a very different experience," he said. "And the game scales itself depending on how many players are playing."

It also levels the playing field as you progress, therefore making it easier if it assesses that you need help (for a child, for example). And as the scoring system is made up from all manner of different factors, not simply how many enemies you dispatch or how much gold you collect, there are rewards for all manner of different styles of player.

Richie also revealed that there will be plenty of downloadable content coming after release: "New worlds, new costumes," he said. "The DLC will be coming for the next gen platforms."

And from our initial play, we already get the feeling that extra content, like the game itself, will be eagerly snapped up by young and old.

Disney Universe will be out around Autumn time in the UK, and available from Disney Interactive for the Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Mac.

Tags: Gaming Disney Interactive Disney Universe Xbox 360 PS3 PC gaming Tron Pixar Mac gaming

         

Disney Universe hands-on originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 26 May 2011 10:40:00 +0100

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PlayStation Network services restored by end of week

Except in Japan, Hong Kong & Korea

All services on the PlayStation Network are finally going to be restored by the end of the week (Friday 3 June)... Unless you live in Japan, Hong Kong or South Korea that is.

European and PAL regions, the Americas and the rest of Asia will be able to access the PlayStation Store for the first time since the hacking scandal began (20 April) and?Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity will also be available to subscribers.

However, other Qriocity features will still be disabled for the time being. Sony promises that a full restoration, and Japanese, Hong Kong and South Korean services, is coming, but there is no time scale at present.

For the rest of us, the other services we can get our hands on by the end of the week include in-game commerce, the ability to redeem vouchers and codes, and full functionality on Media Go.

According to the PlayStation Blog, the company has "implemented considerable security enhancements to the network infrastructure," and is now clearly happy that its new infrastructure is better protected against further attacks.

Kazuo Hirai, executive deputy president of the Sony Corporation, is hoping that this will signal the end of a bad 6 weeks for the company:?“We appreciate the patience and support shown during this time,” he said.

The restoration of service will be followed by roll-out of the Welcome Back compensation package for PSN and Qriocity subscribers. It includes free games and PlayStation Plus membership, but there is currently no confirmed time frame for it implementation.

Tags: Gaming Sony SCEI SCEE PSN PS3 PlayStation 3 Playstation Network Hacking

PlayStation Network services restored by end of week originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 31 May 2011 10:23:00 +0100

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Find Link and Leverage Opportunities

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Twitter: We'll hand over super-injuction tweeters' details if asked

And says you're on your own

Did you crack a funny joke at a certain footballer's expense on Twitter, linking him with the super-injunction case before his cover was blown by an attention-hungry MP?

Well, bad news kids - because Twitter's new European boss Tony Wang has stated that the micro-blogging giant will hand over your information to the authorities if the site is "legally required" to.

Speaking at the e-G8 forum in Paris, Wang also sent a clear message to tweeters that they would be on their own should such legal action taking place, saying that people who did "bad things" would have to defend themselves.

"Platforms have a responsibility, not to defend that user but to protect that user's right to defend him or herself," he said.

"Let them exercise their own legal rights under their own jurisdiction, whether that is a motion to quash the order or to oppose it or do a number of other things to defend themselves."

Now, how any court would be able to determine which tweets broke the rules of the super-injunction, and which ones were simple micky-takes is beyond us. After all, the footballer in question is extremely high profile and would have undoubtedly been subject of numerous mocking tweets daily, from opposing fans, even before this whole media storm kicked off.

It will be interesting to see how this one develops.

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Tags: Security Lawsuits Online Internet Twitter

Twitter: We'll hand over super-injuction tweeters' details if asked originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 25 May 2011 17:16:02 +0100

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Guest Blogger Tanya Gordon Talks Windows Live Writer

After working professionally at McGraw-Hill as well as prior work in the telecommunications industry, Tanya Gordon relocated to southwest Iowa in conjunction with her husband?s job. She launched Mommy Goggles over 5 years ago, rising to prominence as a national Mom Blogger. In addition, Tanya happily parents two wondrous children who despite best efforts still have been known to engage in ongoing sibling squabbles: Tucker, 5, and Kambry, 3. She can be reached at tanya@mommygoggles.com.

I am a mother, blogger, active photographer and travel for media events. I use all four when it comes to bringing in a personal feel to my blog posts whether that be a review or posting pictures from our daily events. I cannot even begin to fathom how many hours I have spent using a high priced photo editing program to create an image, copyright in layers, adjust the opacity, crop images, tweak the brightness and flatten the image to use for my blog or daily 365 photo program. Once, after a travel event, I spent a good 3 solid days doing this. In April, I went to Mom 2.0 Summit where I was able to meet with Windows and learn all about Windows Live Writer. Needless to say, I was excited to get my hands on the program and try it out.

Writing posts, offline and online

The main thing I want to tell you about Windows Live Writer is that you do not have to be connected to the internet to use it. You can use Live Writer right from your computer, and upload once you are in an internet area. Being a blogger, this makes it so nice for when I am traveling; I can write posts en-route and publish once I get connected online.

Images: Individually or Slideshow
You can add images to show up individually, or you can add them as a group to make a a slideshow. This is especially good when you have multiple images so you won?t bog your post down with solid images.

Image Cropping

Within Windows Live Writer, I am able to upload an image, add my website copyright name & date info, as well as crop, right from Windows Live Writer. I simply pick out the image I am going to use for the post, click on the crop button to the top left and crop.

This was a review where I had my image picked out, but I needed it to be cropped thinner.

How long did this take me? Oh, about 2 minutes, if that.

Post Title & Post Link

One thing that I do with my blog posts is to create a title that may be lengthy, but I don?t want the link to be that long. Personally, I like shorter links with specific key words included. You can do this!

� Create your post title

� Write your post

� Click on ?View All?

Once that box opens, scroll down to ?Slug? and you can enter what you want your link to read.

� For this specific post, my post title was: ?How to have a successful yard sale (Garage Sale Tips)?

� The Slug is: ?garage sale tips? once published is: http://www.mommygoggles.com/garage-sale-tips/

Image Copyright

One thing that I love about Windows Live Writer is that you have the ability to copyright your images. This comes in handy especially when I want to watermark images of my kids, or even for my daily projects like the 365 Photo Project. For something like a 365 Project, what I will do is create a new post within Windows Live Writer, make the post title something with ?Delete? in the title?, add my image, resize or crop as needed, add my copyright to the image, then post to a draft within my blog.

Once I go online to my drafts, I will see the post that I just added to my drafts.

 

From my drafts, I will click on preview (to open in a new window), right-click & save my image back to my computer, then I can go to my 365 Project and add that copyrighted image to my gallery.

Once I get my image saved back for my 365 project, I know to go back to my drafts and delete it. All in a matter of a minute, I have my image copyrighted to use for my daily photo project.

Overall: I love Windows Live Writer! I tried this program over a year ago, but wasn?t too fond of it at the time. This was before a lot of these features were added. Now that I have been using it for several weeks, I am in love with it! When we go on long family road trips, I will take my laptop, open Windows Live Writer, write on the road and once I get to internet, my posts are ready to publish. Windows Live Writer has saved me so much time!

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Opera provides Safari alternative for iPad and iPhone users

Opera Mini 6 hits iOS

Back in March Opera release Opera Mini 6 for J2ME, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian and now its iOS' turn to get in on the fun - with the iPad and iPhone version of Opera Mini 6 landing.

“I would compare it to walking onto the stage and hearing the roar of the crowd,” said Opera’s, CEO Lars Boilesen, when describing the feeling of letting the Opera Mini 6 browser out on stage in the App Store.

“We have put in a lot of rehearsal and clever thought behind the new experience. The Opera Mini browser has always kicked up the tempo when downloading pages; now the browsing flows along to a smooth, easy beat.”

Indeed.

So what exactly are fanboys getting if they download the app? Well, auto adapting for your iDevice's display for a start with optimised pages for iPhone 4s and iPads.

You'll also get faster smoother panning and zooming, share buttons for My Opera, Facebook or Twitter and "jazzed-up" skin and revamped Opera menus.

And if your confused, the difference between Opera Mini and Opera Mobile is that Mini reduces pages down to around a tenth of their size, saving you on data and making surfing quicker, and Opera Mobile is the whole shebang, complete with HTML 5 bells and whistles.

Opera Mini 6 for iOS is free, and is in the App Store now.

Tags: Browsers Opera Mini Apps iPad apps iPhone apps Software Opera

Opera provides Safari alternative for iPad and iPhone users originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 24 May 2011 14:26:00 +0100

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Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation

According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources. That's a big increase from the company's last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he's an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date. No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people's homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan.

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Announcing Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, release in June

Service Pack 1 is on track for release at the end of June.

SP1 releases for both Office client suites and SharePoint server products will be made available. All language versions of SP1 will release simultaneously. Initially, Service Pack 1 will be offered as a manual download from the Download Center and from Microsoft Update, and no sooner than 90 days after release, will be made available as an Automatic Update.

SP1 will include many interesting changes. Across the client suites and server products, SP1 offers a sprinkling of improvements to make a strong 2010 release wave even stronger. During TechEd and beyond, teams on http://blogs.office.com will update their blogs with more specific details of 2010 Service Pack 1 contents.

There are far too many changes in SP1 to list here, but the list below is a sample of SP1 highlights to get things started. This is a list of things that you can do now that you couldn?t before, or things that are just better than they were with the original release:

• Outlook fixes an issue where ?Snooze Time? would not reset between appointments.
• The default behavior for PowerPoint "Use Presenter View" option changed to display the slide show on the secondary monitor.
• Integrated community content in the Access Application Part Gallery.
• Better alignment between Project Server and SharePoint Server browser support.
• Improved backup / restore functionality for SharePoint Server
• The Word Web Application extends printing support to ?Edit Mode.?
• Project Professional now synchronizes scheduled tasks with SharePoint task lists.
• Internet Explorer 9 ?Native? support for Office Web Applications and SharePoint
• Office Web Applications Support for Chrome
• Inserting Charts into Excel Workbooks using Excel Web Application
• Support for searching PPSX files in Search Server
• Visio Fixes scaling issues and arrowhead rendering errors with SVG export
• Proofing Tools improve spelling suggestions in Canadian English, French, Swedish and European Portuguese.
• Outlook Web Application Attachment Preview (with Exchange Online only)
• Office client suites using ?Add Remove Programs? Control Panel, building on our work from Office 2007 SP2

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