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Today’s Nintendo Direct may have been all about the “Year of Luigi,” but a few non-Luigi games did slip through into the presentation. In particular, details on the release of the new Animal Crossing title were revealed.

Fans of the laid-back, whimsical fantasy life simulator have been waiting years for a new title, but won’t have to wait much longer. Animal Crossing: New Leaf was announced for a June 9 release in the U.S. The 3DS game will feature a myriad of customizable features, including clothes, furniture, and town fixtures. Players will also be able to swim and will become the mayor of their small town.

The new trailer for the game shows off most of these features, but the highlight for Animal Crossing fans is likely to be the game’s new visuals.

Robert Kennedy Jr. was among the dozens of protestors who were arrested yesterday after chaining themselves to a White House gate to make their voices heard regarding the Keystone Pipeline.

The project, which would put in 1,700 miles of conduit to export crude oil from Canada to New Mexico, was delayed by the Obama administration last year with the reasoning that more research needed to be done. But it was only pushed back until after the election, and some are now projecting that a final decision could come about as early as spring. Kennedy and the other protestors–a group which included actress Daryl Hannah–say they think Obama is better than the idea, which, in their opinion, would have lethal complications.

“I don’t think President Obama is going to permit this pipeline to happen,” Kennedy said. “I think President Obama has a strong moral core, he is not going to do something that is immoral, that is reckless and that is going to impose the costs of our joyride for these wealthy oil companies…on future generations of Americans and citizens all across the planet. I do not believe he will do that and I do not believe that [Secretary of State] John Kerry will do it.”

Hannah, who has been arrested for a similar protest before, says their hope is to change the administration’s mind on the matter before the imminent decision.

“We’re out here saying, ‘President Obama, you must reject the Keystone Pipeline,” Hannah said. “This is a lethal project that is the largest fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.”

Of the arrest, Kennedy said, “It’s unfortunate that civil disobedience is the only recourse against a catastrophic and criminal enterprise that will enrich a few while impoverishing the rest of humanity and threatening the future of civilization.”

Image: CBS6

The Nintendo eShop for 3DS has been a bastion of creativity and innovation since it first launched in 2011. Nintendo’s own studios have created a number of unique titles for the service that don’t conform to the conventions set by their big budget releases. That focus on innovative titles will continue with the next wave of eShop titles hitting the service.

During its Nintendo Direct this morning, the company announced that HarmoKnight, Kersploosh!, and Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move would be coming to the Nintendo 3DS eShop this spring.

The first is HarmoKnight, a rhythm platformer from Game Freak. The developer has taken time off of working on the Pokemon franchise to make this unique platformer that bears a striking resemblance to Bit.Trip Runner. It’s just as, if not more, charming than Gaijin Game’s effort, and features some stellar tunes if the trailer is any indication. With this being GameFreak, the game will also feature some Pokemon music crossovers that’s sure to delight fans of the franchise.

HarmoKnight will be available on the eShop on March 28.

The second is a far more “interesting” title called Kersploosh! In this game, the player controls a rock that’s been thrown down a well. The player will have to maneuver the rock on its way down to avoid obstacles as it makes its way to the water at the bottom. It’s certainly unique, and could very well be a really fun title.

Finally, Nintendo showed off the latest game in its Mario and Donkey Kong series called Minis on the Move. Much like the previous titles, the game is focused on solving puzzles as Mario leads miniature versions of himself to the exit while avoiding hazards.

Go here for more news from this morning’s Nintendo Direct.

When I first became Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I made a list of my priorities for the Agency. Working for environmental justice was at the top of that list. Ensuring equal environmental protections for all Americans is the unfinished business of the environmental movement.

It’s a simple idea – that all Americans are entitled to clean air to breathe, safe water to drink and a healthy community to raise their families – but often, it is America’s low-income and minority communities that bear the brunt of our country’s pollution.

As a result, these communities are also hit harder by the many illnesses pollution is linked to – conditions like asthma, heart disease, cancer and strokes. Studies show that minority groups face a greater risk of having asthma, and once they have it, they are at a greater risk of needing emergency treatment. African-American children are hospitalized for asthma at twice the rate of white children, and asthma-related deaths among African-American children take place at a rate of four times that of non-Hispanic white children. Hispanic children — especially of Puerto Rican descent — also face higher rates of asthma.

Dirty air, polluted water and contaminated lands not only put families at higher risks of serious and potentially costly diseases – they also discourage new developments and new jobs. Poison in the ground often means poison in the economy. Limiting the economic possibilities of low-income and minority communities only makes it harder to break the cycle of poverty.

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Do entrepreneurs with prior entrepreneurial experience outperform those who never before launched new enterprises? Conventional wisdom and a raft of research findings say yes, and investors know that it’s often wiser to bet on someone who’s started something before.

But this may not be true for social entrepreneurs. In fact, several of my current research projects are not producing evidence that individuals with prior entrepreneurial experience have superior social performance, more commercial success, or larger online followings. And these results are consistent across three different datasets.

First, I examined the social media networks of a sample of social entrepreneurs who applied to participate in the 2010 or 2011 summer accelerator programs run by the Unreasonable Institute. The majority of these entrepreneurs reported having some prior entrepreneurial experience when they filled out their applications. By the summer of 2012, these ventures had accumulated fewer Facebook likes (an average of roughly 980 compared to more than 1,600 for the inexperienced entrepreneurs) and fewer Twitter followers (an average of roughly 900 compared to more than 1,000).

Next, I looked at early revenue and investment results in a small sample of entrepreneurs that applied to one of thirteen Village Capital accelerator programs run in 2010 and 2011. More than half of these ventures had founders who had previously started other businesses. On average, the ventures with experienced entrepreneurs earned lower revenues (roughly $102,000 versus $168,000 in the previous twelve months) and raised less capital (roughly $89,000 compared to $181,000) than those launched by inexperienced entrepreneurs.

Digging a little deeper, it doesn’t seem to matter whether these experienced founders had started nonprofit organizations or for-profit companies. In fact, those ventures that had both kinds of entrepreneurial experience on their team produce lower commercial performance.

Finally, I am working with Emory doctoral student Li-Wei Chen to analyze the social performance of a sample of B Corporations founded between 1987 and 2011. The B Impact Assessments quantify the overall company impact on workers, communities and the environment in a score that ranges from zero to 200 based on more than 200 carefully-designed metrics. According to the LinkedIn pages of named company founders, more than 15% of the companies in this sample were established with some prior entrepreneurial experience on the founding team. The average B Rating of these ventures — roughly 109 — was virtually identical to the 108-point average for B Corps established by inexperienced entrepreneurial teams.

If these early tabulations are any indication, there is no systematic evidence that prior founding experience is translating into superior performance for social entrepreneurs. Their ventures don’t have larger on-line followings, superior early-stage commercial performance, or greater social impact.

Instead, we are seeing just as many good things from inexperienced social entrepreneurs. Take the example of Co2 Bambu, an innovative venture that supports post-disaster reconstruction efforts and addresses housing deficits in Latin America and Haiti. Its stellar social performance is reflected in a current B Rating of 161. Although the founding team was clearly experienced in a number of domains that might contribute to success — including management, design and government relations — none of the three entrepreneurs had previously founded an organization.

These observations raise a serious question for impact investors and others who are trying to identify and support the most promising young social ventures: Why doesn’t accumulated entrepreneurial experience improve the performance of social entrepreneurs?

Part of the answer might lie in the fact that social entrepreneurs are launching what some call hybrid organizations. Hybrids follow neither straight-up for-profit nor nonprofit models. Instead, they use for-profit techniques in order to meet the concrete social and/or environmental aspirations of traditional nonprofits. Entrepreneurial experience from either domain may not help founders navigate the many tradeoffs that this novel model requires.

It may also be that entrepreneurs who are not imprinted by traditional founding experiences aren’t bound to traditional ways of working and are thus better able to think outside the box. Thinking in this way seems quite valuable in the current period of mass experimentation within the social enterprise sector.

But there may be something deeper at play here: No one yet knows how to systematically produce social value by using markets and business acumen. Decades of business research and teaching has given us a common understanding of what goes into the production of commercial value (e.g., valuable resources and capabilities, reliable organizational routines, and powerful market signals). However, we don’t yet have a similar understanding of what business resources or market mindsets produce greater social impact. This makes it difficult to draw any lines from prior startup experiences to current attempts to create social value.

To make headway here, we must continue to push the business research community (both inside and outside of business schools) to produce more robust and nuanced insights into why certain social ventures, such as Co2 Bambu, are able to perform at a high level.

I did find one potential clue to success in these datasets. Female social entrepreneurs in two of the three samples seem to be doing better than men. They tend to attract significantly more Facebook likes and Twitter followers, and B Corporations with at least one female entrepreneur generating significantly better social performance. However, I did not find a similar gender effect in the revenue and capital data, which suggest that investors and customers might be overlooking gender as a potential signal of the ability to deliver superior social venture performance.

In the meantime, the lingering truth is that we don’t currently know what an ideal resume should look like for a promising social entrepreneur. This presents a problem for impact investors who are currently trying to find and back social entrepreneurs. Without help from the traditional cues, they are forced to do their work in partial darkness. This further slows the flow of funds into social impact organizations that desperately need them.

Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and register to stay informed and give us feedback.

The new generation of iPad-enabled knowledge workers has little patience for the archaic user experiences (UX) offered by entrenched enterprise IT providers, whether on their PCs at work or on their smartphones on the road (or at their kid’s soccer game). And many in enterprise IT, from software engineers to IT managers, are moaning the loss of control as elegant, easy-to-use consumer technologies like the iPad and Dropbox reshape expectations in the corporate landscape. For the big tech companies that used to dominate enterprise IT with their task-oriented utilitarian offerings, such as HP and RIM, the enterprise is no longer a safe haven for their product portfolios in the 2010s.

Behind the current wave of the “consumerization,” there are actually signs of a reverse trend in which the world’s most effective enterprise user experiences may reshape the future of all UX. This budding wave could benefit the enterprise IT industry tremendously — if they get it right.

The next wave of innovation will be driven by business-grade solutions that combine real-time analytics and improved UX to support better decision-making in a host of new areas. These innovations will range from how we manage large-scale infrastructure such as urban traffic, to how we manage our heating bills at home; from how we manage collaboration on a trading desk to how we prioritize our personal email inboxes.

And here’s the twist: as the boundaries between work and personal lives blur, it often feels like our lives are getting more and more “disconnected.” Information is funneled into more and more specialized applications to help us stay perpetually connected to our friends, colleagues, clients, and family (of course not always in that order). Apps have seeped into every crack and crevice of our personal and professional lives. So the mental involvement for managing these apps can get out of control. Even simple decisions, like where to meet for dinner, can involve multiple data streams and complex cross-channel and cross-app collaboration, from Yelp to OpenTable.

In our daily lives, we’re facing logistical and decision-making challenges that were once confined to IT managers in large corporations. How can we bring all of these streams of information together in a more useful manner?

Many IT companies, from Facebook to GE, are exploring innovative ways to extract value from Big Data, or ever-growing collections of complex information, which we’re all constantly supplying via our social networking streams and online purchases. The greatest opportunity is emerging from the ability to combine structured and unstructured data to improve decision-making and enhance our predictive abilities i.e. make smarter decisions. “More than the amount of data itself, the unstructured data from the Web and sensors (in our environment) is a much more salient feature of what is being called Big Data,” according to Thomas Davenport, visiting professor of Data Analytics at Harvard and author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.

For example, the goal may be to correlate brand discussions on Facebook and Twitter (unstructured data) with product sales for (structured data) to make the right recommendation to a consumer when they enter a store or look up a movie. Startups have already begun to emerge from the enterprise, like Rocketfuel, that harness industrial grade algorithms to better target product recommendations. Thanks to the profusion of cheap sensors in our cars and fridges, these data streams are moving out of our social networks and into our environments.

But we will only get so far when the ultimate source of value is individual consumer preference. Enterprise IT companies — IBM, GE, HP, versus dynamic startups beginning from scratch, may actually have the edge when it comes to extracting value from a host of different data streams. Why? Because they have simply built up the types of analytical experience and tools to do so.

Take, for instance, the comparative data collected from a popular app used on Facebook versus the data collected via a major Wall Street trading firm. Even with the increased amount of data being captured via consumer clicks each day, the conversion rate across many categories of online marketing remains in the single digits. In contrast, even a few percent point increase in productivity of a single Wall Street trader, can lead to millions in additional revenue per year. But the “user experience” layer will be critical in unlocking the value of data for consumers and businesses alike, as we have seen in our practices at General Electric and frog. And enterprises are starting to wake up to the value of UX in even the most specialized, industrial environments like wind farm management. Here are two real-world examples of challenges that draw from our recent experience working with large-scale enterprises that have broader potential to impact the consumer market:

1.Visualizing Communication Patterns: The financial services industry is saturated with structured market data. For many on Wall Street, the opportunities for competitive advantage have been reduced to betting on high volume, high speed infinitesimal market movements, such as small changes in the relative value of currencies. In this context there is new-found interest in the role that sentiment and opinion can play in influencing market behavior. Unstructured data from sources like Twitter are beginning to be taken seriously by the likes of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. What would happen if you combined this sort of broad sentiment analysis with CRM and portfolio data from your most valuable customers? What sort of social graph could you build? How could this new layer of information improve the performance of buyers and sellers, as they react to market events and communicate with one and other across institutional boundaries?

Wall Street is rapidly developing an overlay of data on communications and sentiment that is equal to the level of precision in their market tracking tools. Financial service IT companies, like frog client IPC, are in a unique position to develop next-generation, intelligent communication tools for traders around the world.

How could these same visual patterns, used to map the flow of information and influence in financial markets, apply to making sense of the personal data that people share via Foursquare or Yelp? Imagine if you could search through the contents of your priority communications, whether voice, text, email or tweets and correlate to a social media influence scoring service such as Klout or other measures of interest. Imagine if all of your various inboxes/call histories were tagged using a common visual scheme to denote key topics of interest with a social graph of “interest” generated in real-time. Google has already taken a step in this direction when they introduced the “important messages” filter in our Gmail inboxes, filed according to our response history. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Today a buyer on Wall Street can correlate market moves across a broad array of software tools, all of which represent market data using a consistent language of color and behavior. But some day soon your personal call history will look more like a stock portfolio than a to-do list and we will wonder how we ever managed the daily avalanche of communications without this additional layer of intelligence.

2. Conversing with the Internet of Things: “Smart” devices like the Nest thermostat are slowly seeping into the consumer market, opening us up to new streams of data from sensors embedded in our physical environment. Some day soon this stream of information and updates will be seamlessly integrated into our overall communications, opening the door to much more rich and intelligent ways to interact with our homes or our cars. When you think about the role of these systems on a different scale, say at the urban level, these sorts of inputs can promise huge improvements in daily life by helping to optimizing vast flows of human activity related to commuting, health, and public safety.

To realize the promise of this sort of intelligent infrastructure, huge amounts of data need to be collected and analyzed on a real-time basis. Cities and resorts are starting to make some headway, thanks to support from IBM and others. But, once again, the enterprise is way ahead. Infrastructure companies like GE have been gathering real-time data on power plants, locomotives, and aircraft for years, thanks to a wide variety of sensors. Now these companies are looking for fresh ways to unlock this data and make it useful in the moment. GE calls this the “Industrial Internet” and believes that unlocking this information will bring dramatic productivity gains and entire new businesses to life.

A case in point is MyEngines, a GE mobile app that allows fleet managers to track the status of aircraft engines in the air and on the ground to better manage their fleets and plan and predict maintenance issues before they come up. Imagine 100s of multi-million dollar engines becoming your next circle of “friends” on Facebook. How would you use that data to look for historical patterns, identify abnormalities, predict issues, and make decisions in real time? What GE learns about these opportunities may set the model for how we monitor an elderly parent across the country or our HVAC while we are on vacation. In particular, we may see the emergence of a host of new OnStar like services that monitor these feeds, correlates them with a variety of relevant data sources and predictive analytics to help us to respond in an effective and timely manner.

These are not futuristic scenarios. Both are real world examples of enterprise technologies we have explored within our organizations, and with our clients and partners. These ideas represent a new frontier of innovation where the enterprise can re-capture the lead in successful UX strategy while creating a new wave of technologies with immense potential for social value. Such advances are enabled by the key drivers of the “big data” revolution — ubiquitous internet, on-demand cloud computing, and cheap, connected sensors — not to mention numerous machines (and robotics), from engines to healthcare equipment to wind turbines.

This is the next and best opportunity for Enterprise IT software makers. They better not screw it up. But to lead this revolution they must also adopt the latest advances in user experience design that have emerged from the consumer “app” marketplace. The key is not just better algorithms but more intelligent ways of surfacing the data in meaningful ways, through fresh visual and interaction paradigms. As user-experience practitioners, we see enormous opportunities in a coming wave of data organization tools, which will blend the best interface elements of personal devices and apps and “smarts” of enterprise software and hardware.

Kickstarter has picked Valentine’s Day to debut their first-ever mobile app. The app, launching today on iOS, features tools for project browsers, backers, and creators alike.

Browsing projects feels simple and streamlined with the new app. You can look by category, popularity, and a host of other filters. Each project page lets you watch inline videos, as well as fund the project right there in the app.

The new app also lets you browse projects by location, so you can look at local projects near you.

Once you fund a project, you can use the Activity tab to see updates from its creators. If you connect the app to social networks, you’ll receive notifications when your Facebook friends back certain projects of create projects of their own.

“The app is a whole new way to experience Kickstarter. We took things we’ve learned from the past three years of building the site, and applied them to a total redesign for the iPhone. We redesigned the project page, browse pages, and others. And we focused on making three things really useful and fun: finding new projects, keeping up to date with projects you’ve backed, and offering great tools for creators,” says Kickstarter.

For project creators, the Kickstarter app provides some basic analytics as well as notifications for each and every pledge. Project creators can benefit from in-app photos and videos that they can upload as updates to their backers.

You can grab the new Kickstarter app for iPhone and iPod touch for free starting today.

Google is celebrating Valentine’s Day with a Google Doodle honoring George Ferris, the creator of the original Ferris Wheel (and the source of its name). As previously reported, the doodle hit the other side of the world as it became February 14th over there, and has been rolling out to the rest of the world with the date change. Now we’re getting it here in the U.S.

This particular doodle is pretty smart in that it works on a couple of different levels. Not only is the Ferris Wheel often associated with dating (which fits in with the Valentine’s Day theme), but it is also George Ferris’ 154th birthday.

Google doodler Brian Kaas shares some background on the doodle here. “Romance and amusement parks often go hand in hand,” he says. “In many places a carnival, fair or circus is a popular destination for a thrilling and action-packed date. Coincidentally, George W.G. Ferris Jr., the creator of the Ferris Wheel was born on Valentine’s Day in 1859. This year seemed like a golden opportunity to combine our celebration of love with the birthday of the engineer whose mechanical invention has filled so many hearts with wonder.”

“Early in the process we decided on depicting a scene with two, side-by-side Ferris Wheels among a landscape of other amusement park rides,” he adds. “Then when two Ferris Wheel carts happened to stop across from each other we thought that was the perfect moment for two characters to have a love at first sight moment. We thought this would be the best way to highlight the Ferris Wheel in its natural habitat and provide a clever way to introduce some valentines to each other. Plus, we thought it would be fun to push a big button to generate a whole series of combinations.”

You should check out the the full explanation of the doodle if you get a chance. It provides some good insight into the doodle-making process.

Ferris himself was born in Galesburg in 1859, attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and died in Pittsburgh in 1896. He was only 37 years old. His original Ferris Wheel was created for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

Today’s doodle is one of Google’s many interactive ones, and clicking the heart button will bring up different animal matches, followed by quick little picture stories showing these animals going out on various dates.

Here’s a video showing the doodle’s animation and the animal dating match-ups, courtesy of Simon Rüger:

Here’s a look at the full cast of animal characters from the doodle:

When you click the search icon on the doodle, it takes you to results for “George Ferris,” and highlights Google’s Knowledge Graph panel, showing information about him. According to the Knowledge Graph, people who search for George Ferris also search for Washington Roebling, H.H. Holmes, LaMarcus Adna Thompson, and Daniel Burnham. If you’re not looking for this particular George Ferris, the Knowledge Graph also gives you the option of seeing results for George Ferris the Cricketer (one of the most helpful features of the Knowledge Graph, which Google launched last year).

Yesterday, Google ran a doodle in Russia celebrating the life of Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin.

Check out some more of Google’s recent home page doodles here. If you’re not monitoring Google’s many international homepages, you might have missed some.

Hugh Jackman has faced rumors for years that he’s gay, and now he’s speaking out about it, saying it’s upsetting his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness.

“Just recently, it bugs her,” he said. “She goes: ‘It’s big. It’s everywhere!”

The rumors may affect Deborra a bit more than they do him, he says, because she frequents the internet more than he does. But he maintains that he is deeply devoted to her and to his family, and says he tries to shrug off the comments. “X-Men” producer Lauren Shuler Donner feels the same way.

“I have seen him with Deborra since the beginning of their trip to Hollywood, and I’ve been on five movie sets with him and have never seen him stray, have never seen him eye anyone. I met him when he did Oklahoma! [at London’s Royal National Theatre in 1999]. He was genuine, hugely talented. He was in love with his wife that day and still is,” she said.

The rumors may have began because Jackman is handsome and unafraid to bust out a show tune now and then, but many believe him when he says he’s a dedicated husband. He and Furness have been married 17 years.

Today’s Nintendo Direct was almost entirely 3DS-related, and the “Year of Luigi” theme carried through most of the presentation. There was, however, an interlude in which non-Luigi games were featured and a longer look at LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins was seen.

The Chase Begins is the 3DS version of the upcoming Wii U exclusive title LEGO City Undercover. Rather than port an inferior version of the Wii U game, however, TT Games has created an entirely new game for Nintendo‘s handheld console. The Chase Begins will follow the protagonist of LEGO City Undercover, Chase McCain, as he begins journey toward undercover work as a rookie cop.

If the new trailer is any indication, the 3DS prequel had the same writing team as LEGO City Undercover did. Players can look forward to silly humor, cops-and-robbers movie cliches, and fetching donuts for the deputy.

The game is currently scheduled for an April 21 release, around one month after the Wii U LEGO title is released.

This morning, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata sported a rather fetching Luigi hat and announced 2013 as the year of Luigi. He said it’s about time the character got his due after being a supporting character for so long. Of course, seeing is believing, and now you too can watch Iwata celebrate the life of Luigi with his sweet hat.

Besides Luigi, this morning’s Nintendo Direct also included new details on Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Fire Emblem: Awakening DLC, new eShop titles, and LEGO City Undercover. The video also featured the first look at Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, a 3DS remake of 2010′s Donkey Kong Country Returns on the Wii.

For some extra fun, try to count all the times Luigi shows up in the background during this Nintendo Direct.

In what’s likely the least surprising bit of news you’ll read today, Apple is appealing a recent ruling by Brazil’s intellectual property authority that it is not the exclusive owner of the iPhone trademark.

Reuters reported Thursday that Apple has asked for a review of the decision by the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). That decision, announced Wednesday, was that since local Brazilian company Gradiente Electronica had filed the iPhone trademark in 2000 — seven years before Apple introduced the iPhone — and released a product with the name in December 2012, Apple did not have exclusive rights to use iPhone.

As part of the review, Gradiente will have to establish a few things, according to Reuters:

Now, in order to keep its trademark rights, Gradiente will need to prove to the regulator in the next 60 days that it made use of the trademark between January 2008 and January 2013, Inpi said late on Wednesday. Brands in Brazil must be developed within 5 years of gaining approval.

With the “iPhone” smartphone Gradiente began selling in December, it appears to have met those guidelines. But that’s most certainly not going to be the end of this story, since Apple can take the case to court.

This is beginning to look as though it could play out the same way an iPad trademark case did in China last year. Like Brazil, China has a “first-to-file” policy that tends to favor the first person to file a trademark, not necessarily the first user. A Chinese company, Proview, had registered the trademark for iPad before Apple made the device. Apple said it bought the rights to the iPad trademark from Proview in 2009, before the iPad was introduced, for $55,000. Facing bankruptcy in 2012, Proview’s parent company disputed the sale and tried to get the iPad excluded from sale in China. After months of legal battles, Apple ended up paying a sort of ransom of $60 million as a settlement.

Settlement with Apple might be the ultimate goal here for Gradiente too. Its CEO has said from the moment this became international news that he’s willing to talk and is “open to dialogue about anything” with Apple.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Nintendo just announced that Google Maps with Street View is now available for Wii U systems in North America. So you now have the ability to wander around Martha’s Vineyard if you don’t have access to your tablet, computer, or phone — or pretty much any other Internet-connected device.

The Wii U’s implementation is rather clever. As Darrell explained previously, the Wii U’s GamePad lets users pan around various locations while the satellite imagery is shown on the television. While it’s most certainly a novelty, it can provide an escape from a lowly apartment in Scranton.

The app launched in Japan last week and Nintendo announced its U.S. availability today on the ever-entertaining Nintendo Direct videocast. No word on the special Panorama View app that Nintendo originally revealed at E3. This novel app that will use 360-degree videos rather than static imagery was originally slated for a Spring 2013 release.

Find the free app on the eShop right now.

Facebook is doing one of those top-of-the-news-feed topical promotions today – for Valentine’s Day of course. This time, Facebook is suggesting that you remember to surprise your Valentine with a cool gift.

And as you may have guessed, they’re using the real estate to promote Facebook Gifts, the ecommerce initiative first announced in September 2012 and rolled out to all U.S. users in December.

“Surprise Your Valentine,” says the prompt, alongside the profile picture of your significant other. My specific prompts suggests that I “add Honey Jelly Beans to your list of Valentine’s Day surprises for *insert name of my wife.*”

You can click on one button to buy the suggested gift via Facebook Gifts, or another to browse more gifts. It’s a simple and clever way for Facebook to push their Gifts initiative on a day where plenty of people are scrambling to find last-minute presents for their loved ones.

Facebook also has a “Valentines for All” section in the Gifts app, featuring items $30 and below.

I assume that Facebook is displaying similar prompts to other users that are in some sort of a relationship. Although I’m not sure whether or not the prompt changes depending on the type of relationship (married vs. it’s complicated, for instance). I’ve reached out to Facebook for more info on the Valentine’s Day Gifts box and will update this article accordingly.

Amazon introduced GameCircle in July of last year as a way to help developers easily add features like achievements, leaderboards and more into their Kindle Fire games. In a recent study, Amazon has found that GameCircle integration has proven to be most advantageous to developers.

Amazon conducted a study into GameCircle’s engagement and monetization rates from November 2012 to January 2013. The three month period showed games that integrated GameCircle produced 38 percent higher conversion rates and 33 percent more in-app orders than games that didn’t integrate GameCircle. When those stats are combined, Amazon says that GameCircle enabled games drive 83 percent more average revenue per user.

So, where’s all this money coming from? Unsurprisingly, GameCircle has been kind to the free-to-play model where players can enjoy the game for free, but are offered in-app purchases. GameCircle’s leaderboards encourage players to compete with friends in FTP games like Temple Run 2. Those players will also be encouraged to buy in-game items to better compete with friends. That’s where part of the increased revenue comes from.

GameCircle also offers a robust discovery mechanisms which help drive engagement. These discovery mechanisms are visible from the user’s game library, and include information on how many friends are playing each game, the number of achievements unlocked and leaderboard activity. This information encourages players to jump into games and compete with others.

As such, a separate study conducted in January found that 32 percent more players will open a game when it has this GameCircle enabled information on the games screen than those that do not. It once again into ties into the idea that FTP gamers are more likely to play your game, and spend money, when they’re encouraged to compete with others.

For those thinking about building a Kindle Fire game, you might want to check out GameCircle. It has helped other developers be successful on the Kindle Fire, and it might just help you as well. Check out the documentation here to get started.

Alyson Hannigan, who rose to fame on the immensely popular Joss Whedon show “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and now stars on “How I Met Your Mother”, recently obtained a restraining order after a fan began posting death threats against her and her husband, Alexis Denisof, on Facebook. Some of the posts allegedly threaten rape, as well.

“I am in severe fear for my safety and the safety of my family,” she wrote in her petition.

The mother of two claims that the man behind the threats, John Hobbs, is “mentally unstable” and was recently discharged from a mental hospital. As of now, he is not permitted to be within 100 yards of the actress or her family. Hobbs’ Facebook posts were included in the petition.

“With that said, in 2013 I still can marry you tomorrow. I can kill you tomorrow too. Cause I simply like and love you as you live life. Aly…It doesn’t end. Even after death,” read a post from early January.

Later that month he wrote, “Aly, many years ago I said we were ‘Soulmates’ Well, the only way you are going to see that now is by talking in person” and “Going to the casinos and a trip to Ca this year, so Alexis, I guess this means you better watch your wife, a little bit more than normal.”

Earlier this week, developer Gas Powered Games cancelled its Wildman Kickstarter project. Though the developer is well-known for its Dungeon Siege games, the Wildman Kickstarter was only around half-funded with a few days left to go. The $1.1 million goal did not appear to match consumer demand.

It now appears that Gas Powered Games had been banking its business on the success of the Kickstarter project.

Wargaming.net, a developer known for its free-to-play World of Tanks MMO, today announced that it has acquired Gas Powered Games.

“Wargaming growth in recent years has been tremendous, and we’re looking forward to joining one of the fastest growing gaming companies in the world,” said Chris Taylor, CEO of Gas Powered Games. “I’m sure our experience and expertise will help us contribute even more to Wargaming’s global success.”

In a statement, the Belarusian studio praised Gas Powered Games’ previous titles, and stated that Gas Powered Games “will further bolster Wargaming’s push into multiplatform expansion.” No other details of the sale were released.

“Gas Powered Games’ heritage and development pedigree shows us just how valuable an addition Chris and his company will make to the Wargaming family,” said Victor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming.net. “Gas Powered Games has a long track record of providing incredibly engaging AAA gaming experiences and we can’t wait to start working with them.”

Working on the theory that you either really hate Valentine’s Day or you really love Valentine’s Day (there is no middle here), YouTube has put together a bunch of Valentine’s Day playlists featuring videos that will make you feel gushy and romantic or will help you wallow in misery – whichever is your thing this year.

According to YouTube, the lists were hand-picked with the help of Trends Manager Kevin Allocca.

YouTube has six new Valentine’s Day playlists this year: most-viewed marriage proposals, cheesiest love songs of all time, science of love, marriage proposal fails, broken-hearted-yet-defiant-love-songs, and bad pickup lines.

In all, there are 69 videos spread out across the playlists (good one, YouTube).

You’ll see painful rejections like this:

And insane proposals like this:

And even find some solace in old breakup classics like:

You can check out all the playlists here.

I feel good about V-Day this year. I think I’ll go listen to some cheesy love songs.

Few people know more about online dating that Christian Rudder, co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid. Privy to the vast mountains of data created as millions of people answer questions about what they’re looking for in love, search through profiles of people in their area and flirtatiously message each other, Rudder has learned a lot from the numbers. This week, Rudder gave us insight into OKCupid’s dating algorithm in a TED-Ed lesson and came to our New York office to speak as part of our miniature TED about love, sex and family. To help you get in the Valentine’s Day spirit, here are some surprising facts we learned from Rudder about online dating behavior.

1. Women are more likely to get responses than guys. For a guy who writes a woman on OKCupid without any previous flirtation, he has a 25% chance of getting a reply from her. But for women who are cold-writing a guy — there’s a 40% chance she will get a reply.
2. Women’s perception of men’s attractiveness may be more warped than men’s perception of women’s appearance. With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”
3. Still, men tend to email the most attractive women. While guys can clearly appreciate women in the center of the attractiveness spectrum,  that doesn’t mean they don’t aim for the top. Men of all levels of attractiveness tend to send the most emails to the few women rated across the board as a 5.
4. Message length doesn’t appear to matter. Rudder was sure that longer messages would up a person’s chances of getting a response from the object of their affection. But it’s not true. Whether a message is the length of a tweet or the length of a novella doesn’t seem to matter in terms of chances for a reply. The numbers listed in item #1 hold tight — men have a 25% chance of getting a response and women have a 40% chance.
5. If you don’t hear back quickly, you probably won’t. Rudder took a look at the length of time elapsed before a person replies to a message and how it corresponds to the likelihood that they will respond. In a fascinating twist, half of all replies are sent by the seven-hour mark. There’s a big drop-off from there in the chances of a reply. “Seven hours is the half-life of your hopes and dreams,” joked Rudder.
6. Not all replies turn into dates. Getting a reply on OKCupid is half the battle — but it isn’t everything. There’s only about a 30% chance that a reply will turn into an actual conversation — a correspondence that lasts for three exchanges or longer.
7. Despite the startling statistics, people do fall in love through the site. Every day, about 500 people disable their OKCupid profiles for a very specific reason: they met someone through the site that they’re embarking on a relationship with.

What have your online dating experiences been like? Which of these facts surprises you the most?

A Massachusetts family has been awarded $63 million by a jury for a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction their daughter suffered when she was just seven years old. The cause? Children’s Motrin.

The family filed a lawsuit after 7-year old Samantha Reckis was given the over-the-counter medication in 2003 and suffered an allergic reaction so bad, it took off 90% of her skin, left her blind, and damaged her lungs. Her family says it also affected her memory. The Reckis’ attorney claimed that Johnson & Johnson, the makers of the drug, never put a warning on the medication that it might cause an allergic reaction. Samantha came close to death and had to be placed in an induced coma while her body fought off multiple infections.

The case has been drawn out for several years, so if the judge approves the settlement, the family will end up getting over $100 million after interest. The Reckis family says Samantha, who is now 16, is doing much better but still suffers from the after-effects of the reaction and has to work twice as hard in school due to her memory loss. Johnson & Johnson allegedly disagree with the verdict and issued a statement regarding their product, saying it is “safe and effective” when used as directed.

“A number of medicines, including ibuprofen, have been associated with allergic reactions and as noted on the label, consumers should stop using medications and immediately contact a healthcare professional if they have an allergic reaction.”

A warning on their website reads as follows:

Allergy alert:
Ibuprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction, especially in people allergic to aspirin. Symptoms may include:
hives
facial swelling
asthma (wheezing)
shock
skin reddening
rash
blisters
If an allergic reaction occurs, stop use and seek medical help right away.

Image: Motrin.com