Title: On-time Use of Routine Vaccine Keeps Kids Out of Hospital
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Created: 2/25/2014 4:35:00 PM
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Report: Games revenue grew fourfold on Google Play and doubled on iOS in 4Q 2013
Feb27
on February 27, 2014
at 5:49 am
Posted In: Around the Web, games, Google, Google Play, Insider, iTunes App Store, Mobile, Mobile Gaming
A new report issued today by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and App Annie sheds some light on how portable — and in particular mobile — gaming is rising in terms of spending worldwide.
The report shows that gamers spent more than four times as much money on Google Play smartphone and tablet games in the fourth quarter of 2013 as they did a year earlier, while the revenue brought in by games on iOS App Store more than doubled over the same period. In terms of absolute value though, iOS game revenue continues to lead that on Google Play “by a wide margin,” the report notes.
“While consumers have traditionally spent more on games versus other types of apps, more than 75 percent of combined iOS & Google Play consumer app spending in 4Q 2013 came from games,” says App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt. He notes that it is a “significant increase” compared to the fourth quarter of 2012, proving the popularity of mobile gaming.
According to the report, Candy Crush and Puzzle & Dragons were the big winners across both dominant smartphone platforms for the full year of 2013. These were the top three grossing games, listed by platform:
- iOS App Store: Clash of Clans, Puzzle & Dragons, Candy Crush Saga
- Google Play: Puzzle & Dragons, Candy Crush Saga, Monster Taming for Kakao
Meanwhile, spending on gaming-optimized handheld platforms, typified by Nintendo’s 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Vita, rose about nine percent between 4Q12 and 4Q13.
In particular, spending on games in Asia-Pacific increased across the board, with the region’s total portable game spending outpacing that of any other major global region last year.
Lewis Ward, the research director of gaming at IDC, says: “The Google Play ecosystem in particular benefitted from a big regional upswing in the installed base of smartphones and tablets in 2013, but rising living standards in Asia-Pacific countries generally also buoyed game spending.”
Headline image via Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Google today launched a new online education tool called Oppia, currently an open source project with the goal of making it easy for anyone to create online interactive activities that others can learn from. Called explorations, these activities can be built and contributed to by multiple people from around the world through a Web interface, without any programming required.
Here is how Google describes its latest venture:
Oppia does this by modeling a mentor who poses questions for the learner to answer. Based on the learner’s responses, the mentor decides what question to ask next, what feedback to give, whether to delve deeper, or whether to proceed to something new. You can think of this as a smart feedback system that tries to “teach a person to fish,” instead of simply revealing the correct answer or marking the submitted answer as wrong.
And in typical Google style, here’s the YouTube video:
Google says Oppia does more than just present content: it gathers data on how learners interact with it and offers it to exploration authors so they can fix shortcomings in an exploration. For example, if many learners are giving an answer to which an exploration is not responding adequately (for example, the difficulty changes abruptly, or the next question appears to be unrelated), an author could create a new learning path for it. In this way, the exploration continues to get better.
Here’s Oppia’s current feature list:
- Learners receive personalized, customizable feedback after submitting answers
- Explorations are embeddable in any webpage
- An online analytics dashboard that allows explorations to be improved easily over time
- A full online editor GUI
- A comprehensive extension framework allowing straightforward integration of new interactions and classification rules
- Parameters can be associated with a learner in order to create a richer interactive experience
- Collaborative creation and editing of explorations with version control
- (in progress) Responsive UI for mobile devices
Unfortunately, there’s no indication of the amount of resources Google plans to dedicate to Oppia. The disclaimer “Oppia is not a Google product” seems to suggest the company is hoping a community forms and takes over.
Google’s reasoning for why Oppia exists is simple: the company believes online education can be delivered via more than just video, audio, and text. In learning, feedback is key, and as the company says: “one does not learn to play the piano by watching videos of many virtuoso performances.”
Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images