Skillz brings real-money gaming to the U.S. - Inside Social Games

Real-money gaming is now reality in the U.S. with?Skillz, a?first-of-its-kind multiplayer tournament platform, whivh gives players the chance to compete for real money and virtual currency in mobile games of skill. The platform launched today in beta for Android.

?We?re bringing real-money gaming to the U.S. right now, and we?re the first people to do that,? Andrew Paradise, co-founder and CEO of Skillz, tells Inside Mobile Apps.

Skillz enables games of skill to be played in cash tournaments in 36 states ? such as California, New York, Texas and more ? as well as virtual currency tournaments in any game worldwide. All a mobile developer has to do to enable cash and free multiplayer tournaments is integrate Skillz?s SDK, which can be implemented in as short as an hour to three work days.

Skillz has come out of stealth with 10 developers with 10 games on board, including Gnarly Games with GnarBike Trials, Spooky House Studios with Bubble Explode, Rocketmind with Big Sport Fishing 3D Lite and more. The first batch of titles run the gamut genre-wise, with genres like endless runners, bubble shooters, mini golf and more.

The obvious question to ask is how did Skillz make real-money gaming legal in the U.S.? The easiest answer is that real-money gaming via a skills competition has been legal for years in most states. First, it?s important to define the difference between a skill versus a chance game. On one end of the spectrum is a skill game like chess and on the other end is a chance game like roulette. The legal definition of a skilled game is if a skilled player predominantly beats an unskilled player about 75 percent of the time. Examples of games of skill where a cash competition is legal include chess tournaments, running marathons, golf tournaments, fishing tournaments, esports tournaments for games like StarCraft 2 and Call of Duty, even the arcade game Golden Tee, and more.

?One of the things we created is a way to statistically verify the level of skill versus chance in a game, and so one of the things we do is plug in these virtual currency tournaments into a given game and then we?ll run virtual currency tournaments and gather data,? Paradise says. ?Basically, we can look at how often skilled players beat unskilled players and then determine if a game is skill versus chance.?

Real-money gaming, in the form of gambling, is still illegal in the U.S., and most experts believe it won?t be legal in any significant fashion for at least another 18 to 24 months. With that said, top mobile game publishers such as Zynga, Digital Chocolate, and more, have been trying its hand at real-money gaming with casino games in countries where real-money gaming is legal like the U.K.

One thing to make skill-based games remain fair, Skillz replaced any randomness to a game by holding a particular level that does have random elements by keeping the level constant across multiple users playing in the same game and corresponding tournament. For example, in Imangi Studios? Temple Run (note that it doesn?t have Skillz integration), obstacles and coin placements are randomly generated in levels.

?The thing that we?ve done that?s really different is we?re the first people to bring this both to mobile and to turn it into an SDK,? Paradise says.

It should be made clear that there?s no wagering in the tournaments. Users are staking money on themselves via an entry fee, relying on their skills to win a cash prize ? not by winning through chance.

First-time users create an account in a Skillz-integrated game, fund their account, and then they are now good to go. Users can tap an Add Cash button, which takes the user to a deposit screen where they can add funds to their account from either a Visa debit card or PayPal account. Right now, tournament entry fees range from $0.25 to $5, with prizes going as high as $20 in an unlimited entry tournament with a $1 entry fee. There?s two types of tournament formats ? asynchronous player-versus-player tournament or an asynchronous tournament with multiple people. Players can withdraw their funds at any time, which Skillz?s will then send a physical check through the mail to a user?s provided address.

?We?ve literally tripled revenue for our early partners, which is pretty exciting,? Paradise says.

Skillz and the developers monetize through a 50-50 revenue share, which comes from a portion of the entry fees. The revenue share deal is standard for all developers. All other streams of monetization ? such as from ads or in-app purchases ? still work for any game that integrates Skillz?s SDK.

Some of the early results seen by Skillz were positive, Paradise says. The first game that launched with Skillz integration increased seven-day retention from below 4 precent to more than 18 percent, a more than 300 percent increase. The second game increased engagement, which was measured by time spent in app, by 200 percent. The third game saw skilled users logging in three times more often than non-skilled users.

Right now, users can?t play against their friends, Skillz only allows for public competitions, but the company plans to add that functionality later. Paradise says users can?t play with their friends due to significant challenges around cheating and fraud. For example, users may try to pick who they want to compete against, in this case their friends, so there could be collusion between players that would create unfair advantages in a private tournament.

?We?re very sensitive to fraud and cheating with a system like this and we spent a lot of time building out technology to handle that, but we really want to be sure we?re ready for the specific issues that private play can create before we launch that,? Paradise says.

As for brining Skillz to iOS, Paradise says due to Apple?s terms of service, it?s not possible for its service to work on Apple?s mobile platform. He adds that Skillz is in talks with Apple to allow the service to work for iOS sometime down the road.

Skillz, which was founded in March 2012, was in stealth mode as Lookout Gaming until today. The company raised $1.3 million in first round funding from Atlas Venture, Nextview Ventures and angel investors in November 2012. The team that built Skillz is comprised of veterans of the mobile commerce and mobile payment spaces as well as the game development area. Developers can learn more about Skillz tournaments here.

Source: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2013/04/30/skillz-brings-real-money-gaming-to-the-u-s/

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HTC One seen holding its own against Galaxy S4 marketing barrage

Why can she never win?? Poor Jennifer Aniston, lonely lady of Los Angeles, scorned bride and future crone. All she wants to do is marry Justin Theroux as planned, but of course then her ex, Brad Pitt, had to go and make plans to marry Angelina Jolie this summer, thus ruining everything. So Aniston is pushing back her wedding plans, it's said, to an unknown time, in the fear that the two events will be associated. So tragic. Jennifer Aniston just cannot get a break. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/htc-one-seen-holding-own-against-galaxy-s4-231521761.html

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Dr. Azziz's new garage might not happen this fiscal year - WRDW ...

Posted: Mon 5:27 PM, Apr 29, 2013

Updated: Mon 6:20 PM, Apr 29, 2013

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Dr. Ricardo Azziz might have to wait on home improvements to his state-funded home. (WRDW-TV)

News 12 First at Five / Monday, April 29, 2013

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW) -- GRU school officials say the upgrades to the president's home might not happen this fiscal year. The project could end up costing the school nearly $100,000, and school officials want to keep it at the first price of $75,000.

Dr. Ricardo Azziz might have to wait on home improvements to his state-funded home. The construction plans show updates to the Twin Gables Garage Carport for storage and entertainment space, which the Azziz family requested.

The initial plans were supposed to cost around $75,000. The historic preservation's department requested changes which could come in at $20,000. Schools officials says this is going to put it over budget.

The school paid just more than $23,000 for architect designs. They detail exact measurements and what the changes will be. A second set had to be drawn and sent to Veracity Construction for approval.

The school is now waiting for those plans and a final price tag. The GRU finance and facilities department need to crunch the numbers.

The final approval has to come from the Board of Regents. School officials say the contract has not been fully awarded.

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Source: http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/Dr-Azzizs-new-garage-might-not-happen-this-fiscal-year-205298311.html

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NASA extends contract with Russians for ISS crew transportation, doesn't see domestic flights until 2017

NASA has been relying on the Russians to get astronauts to the International Space Station since the shuttle program was retired in 2011, and it looks like it will be doing so for at least a few years longer. The space agency confirmed today that it's been forced to extend its contract for crew transportation services with Rocosmos until June of 2017, a move that comes at a cost of some $424 million. In announcing the news, NASA also reiterated that it is "committed to launching U.S. astronauts aboard domestic spacecraft as soon as possible," and says that it should be able to do so by 2017 provided it receives all of the funding outlined in the Obama administration's 2014 budget. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden further adds that he's "pleased with the progress our commercial crew providers are making," and remains confident that (again, funding-provided) they will be helping it carry astronaute into space "in just a few short years."

[Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls]

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Source: NASA

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/PugrKYKoYFc/

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Alexander Graham Bell speaks, and 2013 hears his voice

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON | Mon Apr 29, 2013 3:36pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nine years after he placed the first telephone call, Alexander Graham Bell tried another experiment: he recorded his voice on a wax-covered cardboard disc on April 15, 1885, and gave it an audio signature: "Hear my voice - Alexander Graham Bell."

The flimsy disc was silent for 138 years as part of the Smithsonian Museum's collection of early recorded sound, until digital imaging, computer science, a hand-written transcript and a bit of archival detective work confirmed it as the only known recording of Bell's voice.

Carlene Stephens, curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American history, first saw this disc and nearly 400 other audio artifacts donated by Bell when she joined the museum in 1974, but she didn't dare play them then.

"Their experimental nature and fragile condition ... made them unsuitable for playback," Stephens said by email.

"We recognized these materials were significant to the early history of sound recording, but because they were considered unplayable, we stored them away safely and hoped for the day playback technology would catch up with our interest in hearing the content," she wrote.

That day came in 2008, when Stephens learned that scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California had retrieved 10 seconds of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" from a 1860 recording of sound waves made as squiggles on soot-covered paper. That was nearly two decades before Thomas Edison's oldest known playable recording, made in 1888.

If the Berkeley scientists could coax sound out of sooty paper, Stephens reckoned, perhaps they could decipher those silent records she had guarded for decades.

She contacted Carl Haber at Berkeley and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress. They chose six recordings from the collection, including the one that turned out to be the Bell audio, and made ultra-high-definition three-dimensional images of them.

The Berkeley lab's scanner captures gigapixels of information, and not just width and height but the depth of the grooves, with measurements down to 100 nanometers, or 250 times smaller than the width of a human hair, Haber said by telephone.

DEEP WIGGLES

Depth is important with these old recordings, Haber said, because a lot of the information about how it sounds is stored in the deep parts of the grooves.

"It's not necessarily a groove that wiggles from side to side, it wiggles up and down," he said. "If you just took a regular (two-dimensional) picture of it, you don't get the information you need."

Haber and Berkeley colleague Earl Cornell used an algorithm to turn that image into sound, without touching the delicate disc. The system is known as IRENE/3D, short for Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.

Most of the recording is Bell's Scottish-accented voice saying a series of numbers, and then dollar figures, such as "three dollars and a half," "seven dollars and 29 cents" and finally, "$3,785.56."

This suggests Bell was thinking about a machine for business recording, Stephens said.

"The recording on its own is historically interesting and important," Stephens wrote. "It answers questions about Bell personally - what kind of accent did he have? (he was a Scot who lived in England, Canada and the United States) ... How did he pronounce his middle name? ('Gray-hum' not 'Gram')."

The job of authenticating the disc began with a hand-written transcript of the recording signed by Bell (online here).

In 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University sound-media historian, inventoried notations on the discs and cylinders in the Smithsonian's collection. Many were scratched on wax and all but illegible, Stephens recalled.

"We then matched up one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April 15, 1885," Stephens wrote. "When we recovered sound from the recording ... the content matched the transcript word for word. It is a recording of Bell speaking."

Similar scanners are used in quality assurance for micromanufactured products such as microchips, optical components and to assure the flatness of touch screens. Dentists use them to take three-dimensional pictures of cavities to aid in making custom fillings.

The Berkeley lab has worked with the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress to learn more about the earliest audio records, some on tinfoil or even paper. And while Haber and his colleagues now know how to authenticate the recordings, they cannot do all the records that may exist.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts is working with the Berkeley lab on a digital reformatting service for early audio recordings. There could be as many as 46 million of these early recordings in the United States.

The Bell recording was made at a time of creative ferment, Haber said, as Bell, Edison and others invented devices to change the way Americans communicate.

"Those guys were creating the future," Haber said.

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Jackie Frank)

Source: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/scienceNews/~3/VY_Wd7CIe2Q/story01.htm

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ElBaradei: Egypt leader will need opposition help

CAIRO (AP) ? Egypt's leading opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday he believes the Islamist president will eventually be forced to reach out to the opposition because his group is losing support and isn't able to tackle the country's myriad problems alone.

ElBaradei, speaking to a small group of journalists including The Associated Press at his home on the outskirts of Cairo, said members of the dominant Muslim Brotherhood "live in a delusion" if they think they can manage the country on their own, describing them as a "minority."

He said that if the opposition were to enter elections now, it could win a large chunk of parliament, even a majority.

Egypt has been polarized for months between President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist supporters on one side and their opponents on the other. A rocky transition has been marred by protests which now regularly turn into deadly clashes, in addition to lawlessness and a mounting economic crisis.

ElBaradei and others in the opposition blame the turmoil on the determination of the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Morsi hails, to monopolize power and push through its agenda. Morsi's supporters have accused the opposition ? including the National Salvation Front in which ElBaradei is a leading figure ? of trying to cause instability to undermine the elected government and prevent Islamist rule.

ElBaradei dismissed comments by critics of the NSF, which groups liberals, leftists and some parties considered carryovers from the deposed regime of President Hosni Mubarak, as fearful of competing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists in elections. So far, in the string of elections since the ouster of Mubarak in 2011, Islamists have come out on top, but their margins of victory have narrowed over time.

The National Salvation Front had said it would boycott parliamentary elections that were supposed to start in April, accusing the Islamists of gerrymandering election districts to their advantage. But the election was put off indefinitely by a legal challenge over the law governing the vote.

"It is bogus to say that we don't want to (compete), that we are spoilers ... We do want to go into elections," he said. "My feeling that right now if we go into elections, there is a good chance that we will get, if not a majority, a good chunk of the parliament, simply, not because our ingenuity, but because the Brotherhood messed up so badly, that again people will say, in my view, 'anybody but the Brotherhood' because they haven't delivered."

ElBaradei said the opposition is still considering whether to compete in the elections. The opposition has said it will decide whether to participate after the law is redrawn, and it called on Morsi to choose an independent prime minister and government to oversee the voting, and allow for a new attorney general to be chosen by the judiciary to replace the current one, a presidential appointee. A court has nullified the attorney general's appointment, but he remains in his post.

ElBaradei said Morsi has failed to fulfill promises he made domestically and to the international community that he will work with his opponents. But ElBaradei said he recognized that the opposition parties didn't muster the backing to force Morsi to reach out to them.

"We don't have leverage, I can tell you that. I thought they (Brotherhood) have common sense. Our leverage is that we thought they have common sense, that they are a minority and they don't have the qualified people to govern," he said.

"They have been making all kinds of noises to everyone who visited and to us that they are ready and want to reach out to the opposition," he said. "What we have seen in the last couple of weeks is a complete about face."

Several months ago, Morsi invited the opposition to join a "national dialogue" initiative to discuss major issues, but the opposition shunned the talks, calling them window-dressing with no specific agenda or clear concessions, while the Islamists pushed ahead with their own decision-making. Since then, the dialogue initiative has faded.

Morsi and his supporters promote the parliamentary elections as a step toward bringing stability to the country. Under pressure of widespread calls, including by some Islamists, Morsi has promised a government reshuffle more than a week ago. It has not happened, and government officials have said it will be limited, with the prime minister keeping his post, despite opposition demands.

"They are drawing a line in the sand which is not very helpful," ElBaradei said. "If there is no national partnership, I don't see clearly at all in which direction we will go."

He said a deeply polarized Egypt needs political consensus to tackle a burning economic crisis and to deal with an angry population that has lost hope in its political elite.

"I am shocked they can't see the writing on the wall that this is not going to work. If you are in a hole, stop digging. In my view, they keep digging right now."

Egypt's economy has been hard hit by two years of turmoil following the ouster of Mubarak. The budget deficit is surpassing 10 percent of GDP, and foreign currency reserves have fallen to a critical level of just $13.4 billion, a third of the pre-uprising level. Also, foreign investment and tourism revenues are drying up as the country grapples with turmoil.

A crucial $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund has been delayed by months of negotiations over how Egypt will reduce its massive system of subsidies, and the lack of political and societal consensus on the reform program, which would bring in harsh austerity measures. Many economists and political observers believe the Brotherhood is wary of reaching a deal before elections, fearing that carrying out unpopular reforms would hurt it at the polls. Even so, presidential officials have repeatedly said a deal will be reached soon.

ElBaradei said while most agree on the necessity of austerity measures and the importance of the loan, "if the Brotherhood continues to follow a policy of exclusion, don't expect the opposition to put their stamp on the loan."

But he said he expects the Brotherhood to "have no other option but to turn around and come to reach out to a political consensus," possibly by the end of the summer, given the economic and security situation.

While recognizing that his new party, al-Dustor, and other newly formed parties are cash-strapped, he said there is already work on the ground by party members to reach out to people, including offering limited medical convoys to disadvantaged areas, similar to the popular social programs of the Muslim Brotherhood.

ElBaradei said the United States was first happy with the election of the Muslim Brotherhood because it was a chance for them to work with a democratically elected Islamist group, one of the most important in the region, on issues of national security, pertaining to Israel, Iran and the Gulf. This, he said, has made the Americans "almost shy" to speak out against what he called Islamist domination of the political process.

He said now he believes Washington was in a "process of rethinking."

"At the end of the day ... nobody wants to see Egypt fall apart," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/elbaradei-egypt-leader-opposition-help-200405397.html

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Adults lack stem cells for making new eggs

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Mammalian females ovulate periodically over their reproductive lifetimes, placing significant demands on their ovaries for egg production. Whether mammals generate new eggs in adulthood using stem cells has been a source of scientific controversy. If true, these "germ-line stem cells" might allow novel treatments for infertility and other diseases. However, new research from Carnegie's Lei Lei and Allan Spradling demonstrates that adult mice do not use stem cells to produce new eggs. Their work is published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 29.

Before birth, mouse and human ovaries contain an abundant supply of germ cells, some of which will develop into the eggs that will ultimately be released from follicles during ovulation. Around the time of birth these germ cells have formed a large reserve of primordial follicles?each containing a single immature egg. Evidence of new follicle production is absent after birth, so it has long been believed that the supply of follicles is fixed at birth and eventually runs out, leading to menopause.

During the last decade, some researchers have claimed that primordial follicles in adult mouse ovaries turn over and that females use adult germ-line stem cells to constantly resupply the follicle pool and sustain ovulation. These claims were based on subjective observations of ovarian tissue and on the behavior of extremely rare ovarian cells following extensive growth in tissue culture, a procedure that is capable of "reprogramming" cells.

Lei and Spradling used a technique that allows individual cells and their progeny within a living animal to be followed over time by marking the cells with a new gene. This general approach, known as lineage-tracing, has been a mainstay of classical developmental biology research and has greatly clarified knowledge of tissue stem cells during the last decade.

Their research showed that primordial follicles are highly stable, and that germ-line stem cell activity cannot be detected, even in response to the death of half the existing follicles. The research placed a stringent upper limit on the stem cell activity that could exist in the mouse ovary and escape detection--one stem cell division every two weeks, which is an insignificant level.

What about the rare stem-like cells generated in cultures of ovarian cells? According to Spradling, these cells "likely arise by dedifferentiation in culture," and "the same safety and reliability concerns would apply as to any laboratory-generated cell type that lacks a normal counterpart" in the body.

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Carnegie Institution: http://www.ciw.edu

Thanks to Carnegie Institution for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127983/Adults_lack_stem_cells_for_making_new_eggs

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