Zynga-Zyng-ah - Game publishing company Zynga has made the radical move of releasing some new games. Taking the company in a whole new direction, it's come up with Farmville 2. And Words with Friends did quite well so it's pushing the social gaming envelope with Matching with Friends. On the plus side, analysts seem to think that these kind of games are totally over and no one's going to play them. [Reuters]
Forget network - No longer must you weep as your phone repeatedly auto-connects to BT Fon or BT Openzone even though you've literally never asked it to: both are dead and gone. Don't celebrate too long though because, after hours of brainstorming, BT's Wi-Fi service has a new name: BT Wi-fi. [PR]
Twist and shout - Photonics researchers have found that twisted light waves could carry up to 2.5TB of data per second, meaning that we could see almost infinite load-bearing Wi-Fi and fibre networks in the not-too-distant future. Sadly just a proof of concept that could be easily disrupted by air turbulence though, so don't hold your laser-loving breath. [BBC]
Rock, paper, LION - Robots cheat. Sorry to break it to you. [TNW]
Feeling lucky - StumbleUpon has launched its 'content discovery engine' here in the UK. It's a bit like flicking through the internet and letting it fall open on a random page – fun for five minutes but probably not something we're going to do all day every day. [PR]
Is the cat alive? - Google created a network of 16,000 computer processors which, it inadvertently discovered, can think for itself. Having never been told what a cat is, the processors managed to recognise pictures of cats in a vast database of thumbnail images taken from over 10 billion random YouTube videos. We knew it would be Google that brought about the end of the human race. We just knew it. [NYT]
Cast aside - Apple has quietly released a new Podcasts app that makes it so much easier to stream, manage and listen to podcasts than using the music app/iTunes combo. And praise be, it also allows you to skip back just 10 seconds instead of the traditional 30. The app is free but requires iOS 5.1 and has a sweet hidden reel-to-reel graphic and extra controls if you swipe up on the now playing screen. [Ars]
Quinto Disturcid - What do Quincy Jones, Tiesto, Rancid and Disturbed? No, we're not bringing you news of a headache-inducing collaboration; these four disparate musical types are the first artists to release Spotify Artist apps. These are essentially curated playlists that include audio extras from the artists themselves – nice news for Quincy Jones, Tiesto, Rancid and Disturbed superfans, kind of meh for the rest of us. More artist apps coming soon though – fingers crossed for an R Kelly megamix. [PR]
Steve Dots - If you click here, you can see some photos of Ashton Kutcher pretending to be Steve Jobs on acid in a field. Enjoy. [Premiere]
Story time - Once upon a time there was a technology industry made of lots of different companies all trying to jive along together, making money and inventing gadgets to make life easier for the common man and only occasionally copying each other.
The entire industry was out for a walk, no, a picnic one day. The picnic site was on the other side of a river from the private jet hangar and no one wanted to miss out on a spot on the rug so everyone was jostling each other as they tried to get on the bridge and, we're sorry to say, a couple of companies got trampled.
Amid the hubbub, a giant troll jumped out. Sixty-seven thousand feet high, he consisted of choice parts of hundreds of smaller trolls that own and license patents but don't actually make any products of their own, and bits of lawyers too. It was a being as fearsome as Frankenstein's monster, but really a lot worse because it knew how to litigate.
"It will cost you $29 billion to cross this bridge," roared the troll. Because it was a global troll, it added, "If you prefer to work in sterling, I will accept £18.5 billion."
Luckily Boston University was on hand to record the events. Skip to the end: the industry paid up and the troll upgraded to a mansion, had some plastic surgery and lived happily ever after. [BBC]
