Spicy Horse’s Oz game combines the undead with “an Oz not of our remembering” – it’s called OZombie, and it stars Dorothy, Toto, the Lion and the Tin Woodsman. The Scarecrow, who always wanted brains, is cast as the villain in this iteration, and instead of carrying around a basket, Dorothy gets a repeater.

Spicy Horse is unsure which game it will make next, OZombie or Alice: Otherlands, and it all depends on whether the studio can regain the Alice rights from EA. If Spicy Horse and EA work out a good deal, then Alice it is. If not, OZombie gets the green light and probably a Kickstarter.

“Actually, the more I think about it – and the more I see/hear feedback from you guys – the more I’m personally leaning towards Oz,” Spicy Horse founder American McGee writes on the OZombie Facebook page. “There’s so much fun stuff to explore, so many interesting characters and locations to discover. Wonderland will also be there, if not today, if not the next project, then perhaps the one after that?”

Keep in mind (and mind your brains) that OZombie is entirely separate from American McGee’s Oz, the game Atari canceled in 2004.

Spicy Horse’s Oz game is OZombie: ‘If I only had some brainsss’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 19 May 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the latest Bedtime with BTIG note, strategist Dan Greenhaus passes along this chart of various markets and how they’ve performed year to date.

One thing that really stands out is how bad the performance has been from the BRICs. The two worst on here are Brazil and Russia.  China and India are barely in positive territory. Overall emerging markets are down.

The winners are the real old timers: UK, Japan, and of course the US, with Europe closely behind.

A big part of the story this year has been the weakness in commodity prices, which is toxic for countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia. China of course has its own issues, and has had a sick stock market for awhile.

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After you have a few interviews under your belt, you typically know how to go into one feeling confident. You already know what to wear, what time to show up, what to bring, and what to research in advance to be prepared.

But it’s harder to leave the interview feeling really good. No matter how well you answer tough questions or connect with the hiring manager, most of us can’t help but feel a little nervous or shaken after an interview.

The good news: You’re not doomed to feel this way every time. Here are a few smart ways to improve not just how you interview — but how you’ll feel about it after the fact. Read more…

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BrandYourself is expanding its efforts to take on the big names in the online reputation market (particularly Reputation.com) with the launch of a new version of its service.

The company started out as a fairly simple self-service tool for trying to improve your presence online, for example by creating a website and other content to push down undesirable results when someone Googles your name. (It has become increasingly focused on Google results over time.) The basic service is free, but BrandYourself charges $10 a month for additional features and usage.

With BrandYourself’s freemium, self-service product, it seemed to be serving a difference audience than Reputation.com, but now the newer startup is challenging its more-established competitor in a direct way. With a recently-launched concierge service, users aren’t just presented with a list of to-do items for improving their Google results — they can also pay BrandYourself team members to work with them on a strategy and actually do the work for them. So if, say, you don’t have the time create and maintain your own personal website, BrandYourself create and maintain one for you. And co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron said that where Reputation.com can cost thousands of dollars per month, BrandYourself’s concierge services can cost as little as $200 or $300.

Why the dramatic price difference? Ambron insisted that it’s not because BrandYourself delivers lower-quality, cheaper work — he showed me one of the websites created for a BrandYourself customer and it did look like a real personal page. In contrast, he showed me content that he said had been created through his account with Reputation.com, and it was basically just an empty template. (I emailed Reputation.com to discuss how the company saw itself stacking up against BrandYourself, but I did not receive a response.)

The big difference, Ambron said, is that existing online reputation services are built around a model of high acquisition costs and low retention rates — they pay for a lot of advertising to attract customers, and those customers don’t stick around for very long, so the companies have to charge high rates. BrandYourself, on the other hand, can treat its free tools as the marketing funnel for its paid version and concierge service. Plus, Ambron said that with lower prices, customers can use BrandYourself on an ongoing basis.

“We’re really trying to fix the online reputation space, ” he said. “Until it was only meant for rich people and it was notoriously ineffective.”

In addition to the concierge service, BrandYourself is launching a new interface that makes it easier, among other things, to submit links that you want to promote in your Google results. And there’s a new report card showing users BrandYourself’s score of their current search results, the progress that they’ve made with the service, and details about who is actually visiting your BrandYourself website.

The company says it has been used by more than 200,000 people. It has also raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is now based in New York City.

There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It’s not a brand new platform. It’s what Google has used for years. It is Google’s foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it’s open for the first time to developers and businesses.

Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.

Google Cloud Platform officially launched at last year’s Google I/O. So it still has a lot of hype that comes with a new Google service, especially at an event like Google I/O. It does not have the full set of features that comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A customer can get a much deeper service level agreement (SLA) from Windows Azure. Customers can use a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Openshift and leverage the Red Hat infrastructure. OpenStack is an option for companies that want to build out their own open cloud environment. Go that route and a customer has a host of vendors to choose from. Red Hat, IBM and HP are just a few to choose from for any number of software and services.

The Power Is In The Network

But there is one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart. And that’s the network that connects the company’s data centers so questions can be answered in milliseconds. It’s what makes it possible for Google to offer 3D maps, translation APIs and Google Glass.

“It is blazing fast,” said Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab about the network in a panel at Google I/O about distributed databases. “The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers.You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”

The network speed makes a difference in a few ways. The compute and storage in Google Compute Engine are separated but for the user it appears as if it is all together because it is so fast. It’s like having one giant, programmable super computer that in reality is distributed across thousands of servers.

The network speed also helps make a difference in cost. With the speed, comes the ability to process more data in less time.

Google factors its network into its pricing, much like cloud provider ProfitBricks does. ProfitBricks uses InfniBand, which offers more bandwidth capably than Google’s 10 gigabyte network. Regardless, Google’s fiber network and data center optimization provides the opportunity to offer sub-hour pricing, down to the minute.

On the Google platform,  a customer can double the cores and do a data job in 30 minutes at the cost that it would normally take an hour to do.

Google views data centers as living things. They are not islands but exist in a connected world, connected to devices, other services and other data centers.

It’s this view that shows why Google has to be so considerate of its own network. The world is becoming a vast data fabric. But networking is expensive. Compute and storage costs continue to decrease but networking has not gone down at the same pace as CPU and storage, said Google Product Maanger Amit Argawal in a presentation at the Open Network Summit last June.

What it costs to connect a 10 gigabyte pipe between two regions in the United States is different from connecting different countries in Asia, where the markets are emerging fastest, In the video, Argawal says in the video. Devices are ubiquitous and disposable. Someone can lose a smartphone, buy a new one and be back up in a half-hour. The data is in the cloud not on the device. The services in turn are populating across the network. Put together it’s a virtuous circle. The network needs to be fast and interactive. If not, user engagement will slow. High availability needs to be built into all layers of the stack.

Why Developers Play A Crucial Role

To allay networking and other costs, Google has to continually keep its operations running optimally. The Internet business model means services have to be free or for a small fee. That means Google has to make sure developers are building apps on services that will help Google extend its advertising products and low-cost cost subscription services such as Google Apps.

And that’s why Google Cloud Platform plays an important role in attracting more developers, who in turn help extend Google’s properties.

For example, Google talked at Google I/O about how it offers tools to help developers integrate into the Google back-end. Google Maps, Chrome. Android and BigQuery all have these integrations. Google Glass will get integrated but for now it is not the number one focus.

AWS has a rich developer ecosystem and has a deep selection of services to offer. But Amazon is not an identity and services provider like Google is. Google has more data to offer developers so that will also be a strong selling point going forward for the company with developers.

For Cloudant, a distributed database company, it’s the fact that there is now another community outside AWS that it can tap. “There are a large and growing number of developers on Google,” said Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Mike Miller, who also sat on the distributed database panel.

Google App Engine symbolizes some of the differences that may attract developers. Google announced at Google I/O that PHP would be offered on Google AppEngine. This will make Google available to the scores of web developers who have built their web sites with the programming language. In March Google acquired Taleria, showing its continued emphasis on building out support for dynamic programming languages and need for systems that scale out efficiently.  From Frederic Lardinois post about the acquisition:

The company claimed that its technology allowed developers to “handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code.” Talaria also claimed its ” server lets you keep your favorite high-productivity languages, but with the scalability and performance you’d expect from a compiled language.”

And then there is the ease of use that Google is trying to offer with Google App Engine. These include back-end as a service tools and more management features that allow developers to focus more on the code then the back-end.

That’s important for companies such as OrangeScape, a “visual PaaS,” for non-developers to build apps. CEO Suresh Sambandam said that means the company can keep its IT team relatively tight.

Google has a network that makes it arguably one of the largest carriers in the world.  But it’s the cost of these data centers that will be its biggest challenge going forward. It’s almost as if Google had to open its infrastructure to extend its distributed network as efficiently as possible while continually attracting developers to scale its business model.

Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it’s easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don’t escape without notice, we’ve gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Arc System Works announced Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN at its 25th anniversary festival in Yokohama, Japan today. While there are no details yet on what platforms the arcade fighter will appear on, the developer uploaded an introductory trailer to its YouTube channel.

The trailer features a battle between series mainstays Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske. Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN will, once again, be directed by Daisuke Ishiwatari, who also composed the song heard in the trailer. The video shows that the game will run on the Unreal engine and won’t use sprites, a first for the developer. Additionally, while the character shown at the end seems to be Milla Rage, the character briefly reflected in her eyes appears to be Eddie/Zato-1.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN announced at Arc System Works festival originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 19 May 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The historian Michael Beschloss just tweeted this excellent picture of the New York City skyline. He says it’s from 1947.

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SAN MATEO, Calif. — Biolite founders Alec Drummond and Jonathan Cedar were working at a design firm in New York when they had the idea to combine a thermoelectric generator with a wood-burning stove.

The result: The CampStove, a portable, $130 stove that can boil a liter of water in about 4.5 minutes while recharging your iPhone — just by burning a handful of twigs. What’s more, its internal fan produces a very efficient reaction, so the fire is very hot and nearly smokeless.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

BioLite Campstoves turning sticks into electricity at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013. Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

“We started to do the CampStove because it was a really good exercise in understanding how the technology worked,” said Drummond. It also encouraged them to build the device as compactly as possible.

But the company has bigger aims in mind than helping well-heeled backpackers go green. Its big project is the HomeStove, a larger stove meant for use in the developing world, and it is using sales of the CampStove to fuel (ha!) development and testing of the HomeStove.

“The company follows a model that we call ‘parallel innovation,’ where we have one technology that has near-term application in an accessible market recreation and emergency preparedness, and take the revenue to incubate longer-term markets in emerging companies,” said Jonathan Cedar, the company’s CEO.

It’s a model that, Cedar says, gives them the large-scale infrastructure and resources needed to bring their technology into the developing world effectively — something that nonprofits often lack.

Open fires: More lethal than malaria

According to BioLite, about half the human population — 3 billion people — cook their food over open fires, creating 1 billion metric tons of CO2 each year and killing 2 million people annually from smoke inhalation (twice as many as malaria). Of those 3 billion, about 1.3 billion lack access to electricity.

The HomeStove gives these people a way to cook more cleanly and efficiently: It consumes about half as much fuel as an open fire and produces only 5 percent as much smoke. Plus, by producing electricity, it can recharge a cellphone and small LED lights, helping these people get access to the Internet, communicate with others, or help their children stay up a few more hours at night so they can study for school.

Cedar says the company is currently market-testing the HomeStove in India and Ghana to find out what kind of prices and marketing are most effective. The goal is to make the HomeStove cost about the same as a feature phone in the local markets, or about $50; the fact that it can recharge those phones helps win the acceptance of men, even though it is a tool that will mostly be used by women for cooking. NIH and USAID projects are helping with the testing of the HomeStove.

BioLite is venture funded: It took a $1.8 million Series A investment led by Clay Christenson’s Disruptive Innovation Fund in Boston in 2011, with additional investments from angels and from Toniic, a network of “impact investors” in the Bay Area. It is based in Brooklyn, NY, and currently employs about 21 people.

Makers to world-changers

BioLite’s founders have deep roots in the maker community, which is one reason the company was exhibiting at the Maker Faire here.

“I think makers are really kind of our roots. Some of the first prototypes I built in TechShop here in Menlo Park,” Cedar said. He’d moved here temporarily from New York to learn about stove technology, for which U.C. Berkeley is apparently a real hotbed of innovation, and found that TechShop was a good place to work on his own stoves.

“We like to see science and technology applied to real-world problems, and I think that’s a lot of what makers are all about,” said Cedar. “Also, from a customer standpoint, the intersection of technology and outdoor exists pretty well here at Maker Faire.”

Both Drummond and Cedar were industrial designers, creating things for HP, Oxo, and Flip, before striking out on their own.

Cedar was always a tinkerer: “I was the kid who broke everything in my parents’ house,” he told me.

The initial idea for the stove came to them in 2006; by 2009 they were working fulltime on the project, and funding followed in 2011.

The company launched in June 2012 and has been profitable and cash-flow positive since then. Its CampStoves sell in REI and other mainstream outlets for $130 each, and the company has sold “tens of thousands” to date, Cedar said, predicting that they will have sold 100,000 units by the end of 2013.

Top photo: Alec Drummond (left) holds a cutaway model of BioLite’s HomeStove, while Jonathan Cedar holds a flaming CampStove, which is recharging the iPhone in his other hand. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

Filed under: Entrepreneur, Gadgets

Once again, Friday ended with the stock market climbing to new all-time highs.

Even with last week’s massive dump of lackluster economic data, volatility remained almost startlingly low.

It’s worth noting that it’s been a while since anyone has said anything about a debt crisis.  Europe is cooling off and the U.S. is watching it’s budget deficits improve.

This coming week will be relatively light for data. Perhaps, this will give experts some time to ponder the current risks to the markets and the economy.

Two big concerns of late are the rising risk of deflation and the stagnating earnings growth expectations. We will discuss each a bit more.

Top Stories

• Bernanke Heads To Washington:  On Wednesday morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will testify before the Joint Economic Committee to update us on his view of the state of the economy. Economists and investors alike will be looking for any clues that the Fed might begin to “taper” its aggressive monetary policy, which includes purchasing $85 billion worth of bonds every month to keep interest rates low.  Later that afternoon at 2 p.m. EDT, the Fed will release the minutes of its last Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
• No Inflation: “The big story this year is not the U.S. spending sequester, the China slowdown or the ongoing European recession,” said Bank of America Merrill Lynch‘s Ethan Harris. “The big story is inflation, or more precisely, the lack thereof.” Just this past week, the consumer price index came in below expectations. With concerns increasing of a Q2 economic soft patch, the real risk we may need to worry about is deflation.

Economic Calendar

• Existing Home Sales (Wednesday): Economists estimate existing homes sales climbed to 5.00 million in April from 4.92 million in March. “With the pending home sales index gaining modestly in March and mortgage purchase applications lifting, we anticipate a pick-up of 1.4%,” said Morgan Stanley‘s Vincent Reinhart.
• New Home Sales (Thursday): Economists estimate new home sales climbed to 425,000 in April from 417,000 in March. “New home sales are a notoriously volatile series on a month-to-month basis. The trend is likely upward, however, judging by most other housing-related indicators,” said UBS‘s Kevin Cummins. “We forecast a decent rise in the upcoming April report, consistent with the rising confidence about sales that homebuilders have reported and the rise in the mortgage purchase applications index.”
• Jobless Claims (Thursday): Economists are expecting claims to fall to 345,000 from 360,000 last week. “The trend is probably in between last week’s 360k and the sub-300k readings in the prior two weeks,” said High Frequency Economics’ Jim O’Sullivan. “At 339k, the four week average is up just 1k from the recover-to-date low.”
• Durable Goods Orders (Friday): Durable goods orders are estimated to have risen 1.1% month-over-month in April. Excluding transportation, economists estimate orders climbed by 0.4%. “We expect durable goods to rebound in April, but as reflected in the ISM manufacturing and regional reports, growth will likely remain modest due to economic weakness overseas,” said Wells Fargo‘s John Silvia. “Moreover, aircraft orders should also pick up as Boeing marginally increased orders in April.”

Market Update

Analysts are quick to note that despite record high stock prices, earnings are also at record highs, which makes valuations much more reasonable than they were during the highs of 2000 and 2007.

However, earnings growth expectations have stagnated.

“I am troubled to see that forward earnings has been stuck around its record high of $115 for the past nine weeks,” wrote market guru Ed Yardeni earlier this week. “This is the measure of earnings that I believe drives the market.”

Hedge fund manager Felix Zulauf shares Yardeni’s concern.

“The problem with currently rising equity markets is not rising prices but the lack of fundamental improvement,” wrote Zulauf for Itau BBA.  “Once equity markets discover the emperor has no clothes, they could face a quick and painful adjustment to bring markets in line again with fundamentals.”

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