Posts Tagged ‘Death’

The Quiet Death Of Desktop Messaging

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RIP, away messages and buddy lists.

According to new data from comScore, desktop instant messaging is down almost uniformly among the services, with one-time titans like Yahoo Messenger and AIM down 43% and 29%, respectively from 2012. Even Skype, which actually grew 8% between 2011 and 2012, saw a substantial 12% loss in 2012.

The decline, which seems to start in earnest around 2008 when Yahoo Messenger dethroned AIM as the top instant messaging service, is pretty easily traced to the rise of social networks, like Facebook, which launched its chat functionality in April 2008, and mobile chat apps. As of June 2012, Gchat, which is use primarily in the browser, had 425 million active users.

For those that remember AIM’s heydey, though, the numbers are remarkable proof of a swift and sudden change in how we talk to one another online. In a pre-Facebook and MySpace world, services like AIM were, effectively, the dominant social networks of their time. A good IM client, such as Adium or Trillian or Miranda, was one of the most important programs on your computer.

Today, these services are becoming ghost towns, left struggling to reinvent themselves in the face of yet another round of competition from over-the-top internet-based messagers such as WhatsApp. Mac's iChat client, which was in its prime mostly an AIM client, has been rebranded as Messages, and synced with Apple's mobile iMessage service.

AOL still isn't shuttering AIM outright, but the company did, however, lay off nearly all its development team in 2012. The sun has definitively set on desktop messaging: social networks injured it severely, and mobile apps may finish the job.

Home Console Gaming May Suffer Death By A Thousand Cuts, Rather Than A Major Revolution

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Author: Stefanie Jenkins

The Ouya is making its way out to backers even now (though my shipping notification still hasn’t arrived. Grrr.) and judging by early impressions, it’s no silver bullet to take down behemoths like Sony and Microsoft. The $ 99, Android powered console still isn’t fully formed exactly, but it’s doubtful that between now and June 25 it’ll take on giant-killer proportions. Likewise the recently-announced BlueStacks Android gaming console, which features a subscription-based pricing model, probably won’t alone topple the giants.

But combined, these and a slew of other devices including the GameStick, smart TVs from manufacturers, Steam Boxes, and even Google and Apple hardware are eating away at what was once a fairly exclusive field. It seems a lot of people are waiting for a watershed moment to signal a significant shift away from traditional console gaming to a new paradigm, but increasingly, it looks likely that what we’ll see instead is an erosion that more closely resembles glacial shift, but on a less geological time scale.

There’s evidence to suggest that console gaming is already losing significant ground, like quarterly results from Nintendo that show a dramatic decline in consumer interest in the recently-launched Wii U console. And while Sony saw its first full-year profit in half a decade, most of the good news was on the smartphone side, and PlayStation sales fell for the year. Microsoft is still doing fairly well with the Xbox 360, but growth of key accessories like the Kinect have slowed with time.

Slower Kinect sales are a good bellwether for the industry’s overall health, if only because it and devices like it are where console makers are turning to try to inject some fresh life into a market that had recently started to look fairly stale. To some extent, Kinect, Move and other gimmicks like the screen of the 3DS are an answer to incursions by mobile gaming and other alternatives. Just like point-and-shoot cameras needed differentiating features like long zooms to prove themselves relative to smartphone cameras, video games needed something new to reel in new buyers.

The new crop of challengers to the console gaming market, including Ouya and the new BlueStacks GamePop console, risks getting discounted by critics as just another round of devices like the GP2X Wiz or the Gizmondo, which had limited appeal and then faded into the background of video games history as little more than a minor footnote. But that’s taking too short-term and dismissive a view on what’s currently happening in the video game space. It’s true that, as ardent console gamers continually remind me, there will always be a demand for that type of content.

Increasingly, however, there’s a growing contingent of players that are fine saying, “if I can get it on my phone, why do I need it anywhere else?” and that’s a market that’s ripe for a living room transition like the ones being attempted by Ouya and BlueStack. It’s easy to discount these ahead of their full consumer launch, and I don’t expect them to have an immediate impact on console sales, but they are signs of a sure shift, and one that won’t go away, even if doesn’t provide the sort of bomb shock disruption that we’re so fond of identifying and championing.

Give your tweets a death sentence with Efemr

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Author: Tiffany Shoman

Efemr0_large

Efemr is a new web app that posts time-limited messages to Twitter; tweets are automatically deleted after an amount of time chosen by you, the user. It’s basically an attempt to apply SnapChat’s hugely popular formula — publishing a message that will eventually “self destruct” — to Twitter, though here your messages are likely to be seen by a wider audience. After granting Efemr access to your account, you can designate the shelf life of each tweet by attaching a hashtag time limit. #5 gets you five minutes, for example, with #1h making the post visible for one hour and so on.

The web app is advertised as a means of making your Twitter activity more fleeting, but also as a tool to “protect your e-reputation.” That latter point is…

“Star Trek Into Darkness” Poster Confirms Ship Death

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Author: Tech Blogger

RIP Enterprise I. Your future namesakes will remember you well.

iTunes got the exclusive reveal of the Enterprise going down in flames.

Source: trailers.apple.com

Confirming what the trailer showed us in December.

The Enterprise will somehow take a massive hit above Earth's atmosphere.

Then crash headlong into a metropolitan area.

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When Crowdfunding Is A Matter Of Life And Death

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Author: Rod Sutherland

With the health care system in crisis, a growing number of people are turning to crowdfunding sites to pay their treatment bills.

When Matt Fahey, a cameraman for the Deadliest Catch, was diagnosed with colon cancer last November, he didn’t have health insurance. He nonetheless went through with surgery and got stuck with a $ 51,000 bill. Facing six months of followup treatments and a six-figure total cost, bankruptcy seemed almost inevitable.

Instead, his cousin, Chuck Horton, a former professional fundraiser turned software entrepreneur, stepped in and set up a Rally.org campaign called “Dumb Ass Cancer” to help pay for Fahey's treatment.

“We wanted something up and running quicker than a traditional fundraiser,” says Horton. “Matt has a lot of friends on Facebook. We have a large extended family. We knew it was a good way to reach a lot of people really quickly.”

They came up with the idea on Friday. A week later it was live. Within two days they had raised around $ 7,000. (The fund is currently approaching $ 40,000.)

“People jumped in so we can have him focus on recovering rather than worry about where the money will come from,” says Horton.

Fahey with his chemo pump

Via: dumbasscancer.org

Fahey is not alone. An increasing number of people are turning to crowdfunding sites to pay for their health care costs, to the point that it’s becoming the number one category on some crowdfunding websites. Many campaigns — perhaps a majority — are for cancer treatment, but they also include help with HIV, gunshot wounds, organ transplants, and even infertility treatments. One campaign raised $ 171,525.00 for Farrah Soudani, who was critically injured in the Aurora shooting. Another hopes to raise $ 5,000 for an Iraq war veteran with Gulf War Illness.

Rally, which hosted DumbAssCancer, is at the center of the trend. Originally intended as funding tool for political causes, it is now a platform for a wide range of fundraisers. People have used it to raise money for the March on Washington for Gun Control, for scientific research on Great White sharks, and to bring the Buzkashi Boys actors to the Oscars from Afghanistan.

But over the past six months, healthcare has emerged as the site's top category, accounting for one in ten of their campaigns. “When we first conceived of Rally.org, we were acutely aware of walkathons and joint fundraising drives for various diseases,” a Rally spokesperson told BuzzFeed. “However, we did not anticipate the pent-up demand for a fundraising platform for individuals from all walks of life to pay their medical bills.”

“Given the seriousness of medical issues and related expenses, it makes sense that these campaigns generate the most support,” says a spokeperson for GoFundMe, another platform that has watched healthcare become its most popular category.

“People are turning to crowdfunding because they are much more connected socially through the internet, and the ability to crowdfund is becoming less complex,” YouCaring, another crowdfunding site, told BuzzFeed. Sixty-five percent of its campaigns are for medical issues. “Medical costs and the costs associated with sickness are completely out of hand. Many times when someone is sick they also cannot work, which causes even greater financial issues — even though they may have insurance.”

There are even some sites devoted entirely to raising money for healthcare, such as GiveForward. RareGenomics' charter is even narrower: it helps raise money for patients with rare genetic diseases to get genome sequencing tests.

Numbers are rising across the industry. In 2012, there were approximately nine times the number of healthcare campaigns on Indiegogo as the year before, pushing it up to the fourth most popular category on the site.

The rise of treatment-through-crowdfunding corresponds with other worrying trends in healthcare. Healthcare expenditures are the number one source of bankruptcy, according to a 2007 Harvard study published in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those filing for bankruptcy — seventy eight percent — had medical insurance when they first got sick.

“The best thing of the whole ordeal is seeing how much people love me and have helped,” says Fahey. “Obviously the money is reflection of that but besides that, I have had a ton of support from friends and family.”

As grateful as Fahey is for the campaign, he admits that fundraising while ill can be exhausting. Fahey says he was lucky that his family took on the responsibility.

“I went to one of the first fundraising meetings and I got frustrated. I was like, 'I have to go. I'm stressing out too much,'” says Fahey. “Cancer is a full time job, especially with all the bills and paperwork I get.”

Publicly asking for help also takes an emotional toll. “Personally I don't like being a charity case or asking for help,” he says. Fahey says it took him a while to reach out to people on his Facebook page — he was worried about how it might look.

Recently, Fahey signed up for a Preexisting-Condition Insurance Plan — aka ObamaCare — but is still facing tens of thousands in bills. “My fear is one asshole will repeal it before I finish treatment and then it will start racking up even more [costs],” says Fahey.

So far Fahey's campaign has raised $ 38,000 out of the $ 65,000 goal. A separate, real-world fundraiser raised $ 7,000 — paling in comparison to the online contributions. But they still don't have enough to pay for his chemotherapy and radiation treatment, which he is about to begin.

“The journey is not over,” says Fahey. “At this point, the financial part is harder than the treatment.”

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When Crowdfunding Is A Matter Of Life And Death

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Author: Brian McKinnell

With the health care system in crisis, a growing number of people are turning to crowdfunding sites to pay their treatment bills.