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Appy Monday – Candy Crush Saga King of Freemium games.

Candy Crush Saga

A freemium game is an app that can be downloaded for free on the Google Play store for android or iTunes for iOS products but users can spend money while playing the game to unlock premium services or enhancements if required. Freemium is a combination of the words “free” and “premium”. The app being free attracts a lot of users to download and engage with the game until they are willing to spend money to enjoy premium features such as playing with no advertisements, unlocking extra levels or simple extra powers to help overcome existing levels.

One of the most played freemium Apps out there at the moment is Candy Crush Saga. We at b*different, like everyone else are addicted to it. Candy Crush Saga is a fun puzzle game that is available for free on Android and iOS. Produced by King.com Limited, The app can be integrated to your Facebook account where you can send and receive extra lives from your friends, see their scores, real time progress and compete to not only beat the tricky puzzles but to beat your friends scores too.

The aim of Candy Crush Saga is to work your way through hundreds of levels completing different tasks, some levels require you to reach a certain score, others to clear jellies, more to bring fruits down to the bottom of the screen but all levels have one thing in common, a limited amount of moves. You complete tasks by matching three or more jellies in a row. Run out of moves and you lose a life, having to wait thirty minutes or rely on friends to give you a life if you want to retry as five lives are the maximum you can have at any one time.

So this is where the Freemium elements come into play, and they are not cheap. Examples include:
 • Jelly Fish (€1.79): Adds jelly fish to candy, then clears three pieces of jelly when matched.
• Extra Moves (€0.89): Adds five extra moves to a puzzle.
• Lollipop Hammer (€1.79): Smash candy to remove it.
• Charm of Life (€14.99): Increases your lives from five to eight.
• Charm of Stripes (€35.99): Allows you to change a candy to a special piece once per game.
• Charm of Frozen Time (€21.99): Allows time to stand still when you are planning your moves in time trial games.

Top Ten in App Downloads according to itunes are:
 1. Extra Lives0,89 €
2. Extra Moves0,89 €
3. Lollipop Hammer1,79 €
4. Color Bomb0,89 €
5. Unlock Next Episode0,89 €
6. Unlock Lollipop Forest0,89 €
7. Striped & Wrapped1,79 €
8. Unlock Next Episode0,89 €
9. Unlock Next Episode0,89 €
10. Jelly Fish1,79 €

King.com say it is possible to clear all 335 Candy Crush Saga levels without purchasing any additional charms. After over a week stuck on level 29, we can easily see how tempting it could be to get out the credit card, buy the Charm of Life have three extra lives at a time and complete the levels catch up with our friends and feel like we are making progress at a game that is impossible to put down.

To download on Android: click here To download on iOS: click here

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Password Security

Password Security

 

Almost half a million Irish customers of collective buying website Living Social have been urged by the Data Protection Commissioner’s office to change the passwords associated with their account after hackers gained unauthorised access to databases containing customer details such as names, email addresses, date of birth and passwords. Living Social has stressed that the database containing credit card details had not been compromised.

Tips for Online Password Security

  • Create a strong password, use letters, numbers and a symbol if possible. Never use spouses, children or pets names.
  • Use different passwords for different accounts. If one account is subsequently hacked, your other accounts will not be at risk.
  • Use the Security Question option sparingly, if there is an option to verify with phone or email always select it. Many people close to you will know most security questions.

 

Most Popular Passwords of 2012

  1. password
  2. 123456
  3. 12345678
  4. abc123
  5. qwerty

If you have one of these I also recommend changing it ASAP

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Trustev playing with the big boys!

Trustev a startup that offers ‘social fingerprinting’ technology to help tackle ecommerce fraud, has been named as one of the 30 finalists competing for the coveted Disrupt Cup at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York. 

The Cork based company uses social data from services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to provide a layer of verification that a customer is who they say they are. Online retailers can add the service to their sites with a few lines of code. A ‘Trustev score’ is then generated for the customer, with retailers able to set a threshold for what scores can be approved, blocked or flagged for manual checking. 

TechCrunch Disrupt

Half of the event is a startup launch battlefield where 22 new companies and products will show their stuff to the world for the first time on stage. Startups are eliminated over three rounds until we have a “final four” for best of show. Eventually an overall winner will be chosen.The winner receives a cash prize of $50,000, although that has paled in importance to the massive press and user awareness that the companies will get from their time at Disrupt.Thirty cutting-edge companies, chosen from applicants all across the globe, will launch their products on the Startup Battlefield stage, in front of an all-star panel consisting of investors, VCs and influencers in the global tech community, all before a live and online audience of several hundred thousand viewers. 

TechCrunch’s editors, working with the VCs, seasoned entrepreneurs, and product experts, will select five companies for a final round on the third and final day of Disrupt. Only one Battlefield contender takes home US$50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. Previous winners like Dropbox, Yammer and Mint have gone on to become global household names. 

Trustev are big supporters of us here at B*Different and we wish them all the luck in the world. 

 

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Examie: Access Past Exam Papers on the GO!

Dylan Varian is an 18 year old leaving cert student from Cork. Recently he released an app for Leaving Cert and Junior Cert students for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The app, “examie“, allows the user access to all the past exam papers and marking schemes for Leaving and Junior Cert.

Dylan’s main aim for the app is make it cheaper and easier for students to get access to papers and marking schemes. Currently publishers are charing around €5 for each paper. Considering every Leaving Cert student is doing seven to eight subjects that price quickly escalates to €40. However Dylan has priced his app, examie, at just €3.59. Even less than 1 paper from a publisher.

We are big supporters of Dylan and think his app is very innovative and we wish him the very best of luck in his upcoming exams. 

 

To download the app CLICK HERE

To follow Dylan on Twitter CLICK HERE

To vist his website CLICK HERE  

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Adfaces – taking the outdoor advertising market by storm

New startup Adfaces is launching today in Dublin.  The company, which is headquartered in Barrow Street offers a ‘one click’ self service for small to medium enterprises to get outdoor advertising space in an affordable way.   

“Until now, buying outdoor advertising has been a timely and complex process” according to the CEO of Adfaces, Nick Dimer.  

The company will offer advertising beginning at €3.60 per day which will enabled advertisers to display their products and advertising on over 1,600 outdoor advertising panels.

Adfaces as a company is already established in Germany and currently holds 30% of the outdoor inventory in the country.  

If you would like to attend the launch of Adfaces tonight at their offices on Baggot Street, please register here.  The event runs from 6pm onwards. 

Story credit: DigitalTimes.ie

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Fancy being driven to work not in, but by your car?

Well, Google is one step closer to making this a reality – by introducing it’s new self-driven cars on the roads of America – developed by Stanford Professor and Vice President of Google – Sebastian Thrun.  The vehicles have been licensed to legally drive on the highways of Nevada – the first of which is a Toyota Prius.  

The cars themselves rely on a number of elements to ensure that they are safe – from radar sensors to a series of lasers, video cameras and also on a large database collected by real world drivers.   So far, self driven cars have travelled on, amongst others, the Pacific Coast Highway and the Golden Gate Bridge.  

With the prevalence, and the incredible detail being poured into Google Maps, self-driven cars were really only a matter of time.  It will be quite interesting, from a safety point of view in the future to see how successful these cars are – especially in terms of the reaction time of a computer versus a human.  

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JNLR figures released

The latest Ipsos MRBI JNLR (Joint National Listenership Research) figures were released yesterday – for the period covering April 2011 to March 2012 (12 months).

Just under 16,000 people were interviewed as part of the survey and the results show that 85% of the public (adults) listen to radio for up to 4 hours during the 7am to 7pm timeframe Monday to Friday.  Every weekday, an average of 59% people listen to their local or regional station while 47% tune into national stations.   

15-34 year olds are more likely to listen to local/regional stations rather than their national counterparts – with the figures at 62.9% versus 37.1% (although this demographic has seen a 0.5% increase in listening to national stations in recent months).  

Those in the 35+ age bracket prefer to listen to national radio – with the figure being at 51.3%.  This is broken down as 68.1% in Dublin, 67.7% in the Dublin Commuter region and 59.1% in the Multi-city area.  

In terms of local radio, this is still making significant progress in individual areas throughout the country – with the likes of Mayo, North Donegal as well as some south western counties seeing more than 50% of the adult population listening in daily.  

For full details, you can view the JNLR Press Release here.  

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Google Drive

There is no doubt about it that cloud storage is the way forward, for the past 1.5 years we’ve been using Dropbox for sharing and it’s defiantly the way to go for sharing files with colleagues and family etc. We also use Google Docs for group collaboration and it works very well.  Learning of Google’s new cloud storage facility ‘Google Drive’ yesterday excited us but are Google a little too late to the party? We think there is plenty room for more competition. 

*Google Drive is not available in Ireland at the moment. 

 

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Facebook – now with 901 million users

On Monday, Facebook announced that it is creeping even closer to a staggering 1 billion members. 

The company now has 901 monthly active users, with 526 million being described as daily active users in the month of March.  

488 million also used Facebook mobile services in March. 

Interestingly enough, Twitter is beginning (slowly but surely) to catch up on Facebook with a reported 500 million users in February of this year.  However, of this 500, only roughly 140 million accounts are active.  

So who’s got the champagne for the 1 billionth user?  

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QR Con 2012

So we attended the launch of the Dublin Web Summit recently and met with several  tech folks.  One of the elements that came up in conversation was that of QR Codes.  What is their uptake like? Are they absolutely amazing or just something which is cool, but will never probably take off.  

Given the variety of opinions we said that we should hold a meeting with some digital marketing folks as well as web developers and designers.  

We’re happy to announce this event will be taking place next Monday at 6pm in the Digital Hub.  It’s just an informal chat where you can put across your thoughts about QR Codes – if you or your business have used them, what you thought the ROI was like and so forth.  

So if you’d like to attend, just click on the Eventbrite invitation below.  The meetup is free and we’d love to see as many people from Twitter there as well.  Let’s turn virtual reality into reality again!  

If you’ve got any questions, just tweet @eimearmccormack, @davidod or @john_geoffrey. 

Looking forward to an interesting discussion.  

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CloudFlare – another $1 billion valuation?

With the recent purchase of Instagram by Facebook for a cool $1 billion dollars, the tech world has once again proven that despite any recessions, there is still money in the tech/smart economy.  

‘CloudFlare’ – which is a San Francisco based startup is also reported to be in talks to raise funding which would increase their valuation to a cool $1 billion dollars.  This is being reported by multiple sources close to the discussions.  

Cloudflare itself provides protection for websites from threats to their security along with increasing how quickly their websites loads.  

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