Strikefleet Omega on iOS: Flight Control with sharp real-time strategy

In a way, iPhone classic Flight Control is a real-time strategy game (RTS), albeit without the pew-pew of laser fire and buzz of incoming alien ships bent on your destruction. This is Strikefleet Omega, a free-to-play RTS developed by Harebrained Schemes and published by 6waves with the perfect blend of strategic play and respect for mobile gamers' time.

Unfortunately, the touch, drag and tap fest is missing some much-needed spice in the form of social features. But more on that later--let's focus on what Omega does right. For one, this strategy game looks great on the iPhone. From its surprisingly detailed space craft to its flash-filled explosions, Omega is certainly worth staring at. (Especially in later levels when the screen is filled with both friendly and enemy space ships.)

Strikefleet Omega puts players in command of their own star fleet, seeking refuge from a evil alien race bent on its destruction. If you're more interested in the story that's fine--just know that it's largely a set piece for the various combat scenes. As players begin their counter-assault on the alien menace, they'll have to learn how to take the fight to enemy ships. Simply put, all that boils down to is tapping a carrier ship and dragging a path toward incoming enemy ships.

The play loop sounds simple enough, but just wait until enemy bombers invade the scene that can only be trounced by artillery canon fire. While you're tapping on dangerous bomber ships before they decimate your forces, you're keeping track of where your squadrons of fighters are. By the way, each new ship costs a certain amount of minerals, which come from asteroids that players mine using carriers ore-shipping spacecraft that, yes, you'll need to protect in transit with fighters and canon blasts.

If this sounds stressful, that's because it is, but in the best way. Strikefleet Omega tests players reaction and planning skills all the while training them for how to best react when their fleet is in danger of destruction. And what better way to do that then slap a star-based ranking system on each level? Perhaps it's a superficial way of extending replay value, but hot dang does it work.

Strikefleet Omega is, like most successful iPhone games, a fine use of the platform's touch capabilities in a way that's simple yet addictive. Tapping and dragging things shouldn't be this fun, but when used as the means for orchestrating sprawling sci-fi battles, it certainly is.

However, how am I supposed to show off my mad space battling skills? Oh wait--I can't. And that's one, if the only area, in which Strikefleet Omega falls flat. In this day and age, players want to see how they stack up against their friends. Until Harebrained Schemes wises up and makes Game Center and Facebook support more prominent pummeling the enemy across numerous star systems for three stars should hold us over.

Click here to download Strikefleet Omega for Free on iPhone or iPad Now >

Are you interested in trying out Strikefleet Omega? What do you think of strategy games on iOS? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Facebook introduces ‘listen with friends’ for real-time music sharing

Facebook today announced the “Listen With” button, which will allow users to listen to the same song simultaneously. The feature will roll out over the next few weeks, starting with Spotify, then adding other Open Graph music services.

From the chat sidebar, users can see which friends are currently listening to music. Clicking “Listen With” will open the music player and begin the song at the same point the person’s friend is now at. It also launches a new chat window so friends can comment about the songs they share. Listening to music with friends in this way will publish a News Feed story about the activity, according to Techcrunch. Facebook has never shared chat activity with a users’ friends before, but this is similar to how Google+ shares stories when users video chat with each other.

One problem with Listen With is that users will have to use the same app. If someone is using Spotify, friends can’t click to listen to the song in Rdio. According to AppData, Spotify is by far the leading Open Graph music player with 4.6 million daily active users to MOG’s 10,000 DAU and  Rdio’s 7,000 DAU. The Listen With feature is likely to only increase this disparity and make Spotify the defacto music service of Facebook.

The new feature is similar to Turntable.fm and Google+ Hangouts, which facilitate synchronous listening or viewing experiences. Turntable.fm has users choose avatars and join virtual rooms where people take turns playing DJ. The service is more about discovering music through strangers with similar tastes than sharing with friends. Google+ lets users join video chats called “Hangouts” and share YouTube videos that friends can watch at the same time.

If Listen With takes off, Facebook could add a similar option for video streaming services. We could also imagine Listen With activity becoming an option for Sponsored Stories in the future. Promoting a shared listening experience could be quite meaningful for artists.

If Facebook ever made Chat available between users and subscribers, rather than just between friends, Listen With could be an interesting way for fans and artists to interact. Turntable.fm has seen activity spike when popular artists like Diplo, Sir Mix-a-Lot and Talib Kweli joined rooms. However, since opening Chat to users with asynchronous relationships might be tricky for Facebook, celebrity partnerships could end up being Turntable.fm’s way to survive after the launch of Listen With.

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Facebook Combines Most Recent and Top News Into a Single Feed, Adds a Real-Time News Ticker

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Facebook Tries Replacing “Most Recent” with a “Ticker” Real-Time Feed Atop the Chat Sidebar

For the past few months, Facebook has been testing several home page redesigns that add a second, real-time news feed to the right of the central Top News feed. In the latest tested design, Facebook has removed the Most Recent tab of the news feed and replaced it with a real-time activity feed that is displayed at the top of the Chat sidebar.

This design may feel more familiar to users since it leaves birthdays, upcoming events, and ads in their traditional place to the left. However, the design reduces above-the-fold real estate for the buddy list such that might have to do more scrolling to find friends to Chat with. It also makes ads less prominent and thus less valuable than a previous real-time feed design that kept ads visible no matter where on the home page a user scrolled.

Facebook has long been rumored to be searching for a design of the home page that would do away with the two tab news feed, as some users never click away from the default Top News feed to view the Most Recent real-time feed. By showing both feeds at the same time the site could make sure the home page always displays both highly compelling older stories as well as fresh content, drawing more time-on-site from both those just quickly checking Facebook and those who’ve already read all their Top News.

In June we spotted the first of the new two-feed designs called “Happening Now”, which replaced the right side of the home page’s upcoming events and birthdays with a feed of text-only real-time activity stories about the actions of friends, such as “Eric Eldon posted a link”. These entries could be clicked to reveal an overlay displaying the full, rich media news feed story. Some users complained about losing easy access to birthdays, upcoming events, and the rich media Most Recent feed that helped them find posts related to the social games they played.

Later that month, we saw another design that kept the left navigation sidebar and the right live-feed sidebar fixed but let users scroll their central news feed, which itself first showed Top News stories and then further down showed Most Recent stories. Similar the the previous design, this could help Pages get more impressions for their news feed posts, but would also give more exposure to ads and let users access the top and left navigation bars at any time. However, users might have been jarred by only being able to scroll the central feed.

Facebook has confirmed the tests multiple times over the last couple months, saying “We are currently testing a feature within News Feed that gives people the ability to see what their friends are commenting on and ‘liking,’ as these actions are being taken on Facebook. This test includes a small percentage of Facebook users, just a fraction of a percent. In the coming weeks, as we learn more from this test, we’ll keep making improvements and may expand it to more people.”

Now, Facebook has combined elements of the previous design with the Chat sidebar it launched last month, which dynamically morphs Chat from an unfoldable button to a ever-present sidebar to the right of birthdays, Events, and ads when a user’s screen has enough space. This “Ticker” feed design also mimics the new “Games Ticker” which appears while users are playing games and displays stories about game usage by friends.

A screenshot from user Robert Dickbert shows the real-time feed taking up the top half of the Chat sidebar, leaving less room for the online statuses of friends and in some cases forcing users to scroll down the sidebar to see their whole buddy list. In the tests, users didn’t have a Most Recent feed, only a “Highlights” or “Stories From The Last 5 Day” feed similar to Top News. This would make it difficult to quickly consume a large volume of rich media real-time updates.

I believe a version of the home page that offered the Ticker and Top News but also provided the Most Recent feed would be optimal — basically how it is now, plus the Ticker. It would preserve all the old functionality and make a real-time activity feed visible to all users as the currently tested design does, but also let power users read the Most Recent feed’s full, rich-media versions of news feed stories without having to expand each from the sidebar individually. This design wouldn’t reduce the clutter of the home page, but a two-tab central feed with a real-time second feed could give gamers, casual users, and power users what they want.

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Sequoia-Backed Taykey Mines Trends in Real-Time to Power Cost Per Action Ad Targeting

Cost-per-action social media and search advertising service Taykey has just closed a $9 million second round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.

The company tracks social media mention and search trends in real-time to take advantage of urgent advertising opportunities and interest-based targeting parameters to power Facebook, Twitter, and search campaigns. Here’s a closer look at what it provides to advertisers on and off Facebook.

Let’s take a look at an example of an advertising campaign powered by Taykey. A singing contest television show such as X-Factor could hire Taykey for a month-long campaign on what amounts to cost per Facebook Like model, where the client pays a price per Like and sets a goal of the total Likes they want. Taykey would then monitor social networks, news, blogs, and searches for trends in the behavior and interests of the show’s target age and location demographic. It could determine what other TV shows or musical artists the audience Likes, and then run a series Facebook ad campaigns for the X-Factor Page targeted at people with those Likes.

Taykey co-founder and CEO Amit Avner tells us that “if X-Factor judge Paula Abdul falls off the stage, we’ll know in five seconds and go buy ‘Paula Abdul’ Google search keyword ads” to preempt the oncoming rush of searches for that keyword. Taykey might also purchase Twitter trending topics, or ads on Bing, Myspace, Digg in an effort to drive its own cost per Facebook fan as low as possible to make the maximum margin on the deal with X-Factor. Otherwise, X-Factor might just target 18-35 year old women, whereas Taykey would target those with interests related to the show, such as those who Like competing show American Idol.

Taykey says its patent-pending algorithm mines data from across the web, deduces keywords and sentiment, and maps the data to demographic and psychographic profiles. It then specifically targets those with the right profile, relieving brands from having to constantly discover new targets. Without using cookies or tracking of individuals, it shifts spend from one trend to the next attain the optimal CPA.

Avner explains to us that brands advertising on Facebook often target an age, gender, and location demographic that is too wide and unfocused, leading to lower conversion and rapid burnout. Taykey pinpoints the interests of these audiences to run a series of campaigns that keep conversion rates higher over time than more general campaigns. For instance, instead of targeting 18-24 year old males in New York City that Like ‘hip hop’, Taykey would determine specific artists such as “Jay-Z”, or television shows such as ’106th & Park’ to target the fans of.

The 19-employee Tel Aviv-based company was founded by three former members of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s intelligence arm, and has now secured a total of $12 million in funding. Several Fortune 100 companies have already run campaigns targeted by Taykey’s algorithm, including Pepsi, for which it attained 46,000 Likes in two days at half the projected spend.

It will use use the new round of funding, joined by Softbank Capital and Crescent Point, to hire engineers in Tel Aviv, Israel and to build out a New York sales office.

The “Related Adverts” real-time advertising system Facebook is testing that displays ads related to the content of a user’s most recent status update or wall post could be very useful to Taykey’s business. “We’d love to get in on it as soon as possible” says Avner of the beta product that doesn’t allow advertisers to choose if or which traditional interest-targeted Facebook ads are displayed in real-time.

As more brands realize the concrete value of Facebook fans, CPA ad services such as Taykey will become crucial to attaining large volumes of fans at the lowest possible price. While more well established Ads API tools and services will likely continue to manage much of the Facebook spend of the world’s biggest brands, real-time focused advertising services can complement a marketing mix by exploiting fleeting low-cost pockets of conversions.

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It’s Real Time: CryEngine 3′s Real-Time Tools

Posted by John Walker on March 7th, 2011 at 9:53 am.

Here’s something excellent that we missed last week. Along with Epic showing off the new Unreal improvements, Crytek had a remarkable tech demo for the latest features in CryEngine 3. It’s mystifying. I’m currently contacting alien lifeforms to arrange the delivery of my next PC from the future to make sure I’ll be taking full advantage of it. Those trees!

I love the sure knowledge that in a few years time I’ll be looking at these graphics and wondering at how I can have thought they were any good. I remember the first time I saw Far Cry and thought, “But it’s like a photograph!” The brain is enormously generous. But for now, wow, those trees!

Gametrailers have an interview with Crytek’s Sean Tracy which explains lots of the mysterious words in the video.

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cryengine 3, Crytek, those trees, trailer.

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Kontagent Real-Time Social App Monitoring System Tracks Errors and User Reactions

Today, social games analytics tool provider Kontagent releases its Real-Time Social Application Monitoring System for tracking actions and metrics such as installs, invites sent, notification email clicks, and revenue. Animated graphs in the tool update as frequently as every ten seconds, allowing developers to immediately recognize a breakdown of code for a viral channel, an error in their servers, or the success of a new virtual good.

The real-time data will allow developers who use the tool to take more risks and deploy code faster without doing as much testing, since problems can be identified before their opportunity costs get too high.

Kontagent’s tools track over 100 million social and mobile application users a month, and are in some form employed by game developers including EA/Playfish, Sony, Ubisoft, Digital Chocolate, and Tencent. Funded by fbFund, Altos Ventures, and Maverick Capital, Kontagent released its last major update in October, offering developers user action tracking and funnel analysis through its Social Analytics Suite v2.0.

The Real-Time Social Applications Monitoring Systems, or Real-Time SAMS, tracks over 10,000 events per second, and developers can choose to see their stats update every ten seconds, one minute, or five minutes. They can quickly determine the impact of a new landing page, altered flow, new game mechanic, or virtual good price change on a variety of metrics. If they see a certain count drop to zero, they know something is broken and can attempt to fix the bug before more users are affected.

Developers can design their own dashboards, selecting from many standard metrics, or create their own custom formulas such as revenue per paying user in the last seven days. Without the tool, developers would have to rely on their potentially slower, internal server monitors to notice operation problems. They would also have to painstakingly test edge cases that are difficult to predict — unless they have built similar tools themselves, or found other third-party options — but with Kontagent they can push code live and respond to issues on the fly.

Larger developers spend millions and years to create these types of tools. By offering them as a service, Kontagent is trying to level the playing field, allowing smaller developers to gain the same deep, instant insights that the giants of the industry have. While we haven’t tested it first hand, the granularity of the data available through Real-Time SAMS should help application developers iterate more quickly.

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