Booyah was one of the early leaders in the location gaming market with MyTown, a check-in game that raced out ahead of Foursquare and Gowalla, but differentiated itself with its Monopoly for the real world approach. After 4.5 million downloads of MyTown, Booyah is back with MyTown 2, a new take on gaming that incorporates more of a CityVille approach while still using the real world as a game board.

MyTown 2, a universal iOS app which hits the App Store Thursday, works the city building angle but allows you to apply it to the real world. The original game also allowed you to buy real locations but the sequel now comes with an overhead view of the world that looks more like CityVille and We Rule. It also changes some of the mechanics. Now the price of a location is based on its real-world popularity with other players, who can also own the same property, and that also determines how much money the location produces. Gamers look to expand their town’s population, which allows players to build more business and improve their economy. Check-ins are no longer necessary to buy locations, but can be used to get bonuses, boosts and special rewards.

Booyah CEO Jason Willig, who replaced founder Keith Lee a month ago, said the sequel tries to find game experiences from the first game that spoke to people and expand upon them.

It’s an interesting move for Booyah, which has moved away from location-based gaming with titles like Night Club City and Early Bird. It’s now showing it still wants to innovate on this idea of location-based gaming. Booyah was never really in competition with Foursquare and Gowalla, which provide more of a utility for check-ins. And now those companies are moving even further away from their gaming mechanics while MyTown is trying to be even more like a real game.

I think it’s interesting that MyTown has also de-emphasized the check-in, which Willig said is not central to the game anymore but can serve more like a slot machine providing extras. It reminds of what Ville Vesterinen, founder of location-based game Shadow Cities noted, that much of location games are played from home or work so games need to allow people to play without necessarily always venturing out into the real world. Will MyTown 2 find an audience? Its predecessor raced out to 3 million downloads in its first year though growth slowed after that. MyTown 2 has got an interesting take on city-building in the real world and I’m hoping it can help explore more of the location-gaming genre, which is still just getting going.

Booyah could use some more momentum to justify the almost million it’s raised from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel and DAG Ventures .

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While Angry Birds grabbed headlines last year, it wasn’t the only breakout mobile app success story. Slovenian start-up Outfit7 last year managed to quietly rack up more than 60 million downloads of its Talking Friends apps, led by its breakout hit Talking Tom Cat. The company, which is now up to about 72 million downloads, has built a fast-growing empire by side-stepping the mobile gaming market and constructing a modern toy with communication at its heart.

The Talking Friends apps — there are nine of them now with the addition of Talking Gina the Giraffe over the weekend — allow users to speak and have a cartoon character say the same words. It sounds simple– and indeed there were others before Outfit7 arrived on the scene a year ago. But the company exploited the idea fully, nailed the execution and along the way vaulted to the top 10 free apps of 2010 in the Apple App Store. The company, which runs a management and research office in Palo Alto Calif., is now up to a rate of 15 million downloads a month after launching its first app in July.

I talked with CEO Andrej Nabergoj recently about how his start-up, made up of largely search engineers and social app makers, managed to create the tamagotchi of apps. He said the key was creating a well-made novelty app that held a surprising amount of engagement. And then it came down to endowing it with tools that allowed it to become a powerful communications tool.

“We thought of this not as a game but a toy; we’re competing in the toy space and we’re taking time away from toys,” said Nabergoj. “Kids consider touch screens as toys not phones and we understand that.”

Nabegoj said it’s not just kids that enjoy the idea of a mobile toy. Adults also appreciate the idea of open-ended play with a character, something that takes them back to their childhood. The move helped Talking Tom Cat and Outfit7′s other apps appeal to a different audience than mobile gamers. But the key was making Talking Tom more than just a disposable app. Outfit7 equipped Talking Tom Cat with a variety of expressions and reactions, so users can pet him, punch him, serve him milk or get him to purr. The character becomes something of a digital doll or action figure. Though other talking character apps existed, it was this interactivity along with a focus on getting the voice syncing right that helped Talking Tom Cat rack up 40 million downloads by itself.

Another key decision was allowing users to share their creations in 45 second video clips on YouTube, Facebook or by e-mail, helping it spread virally. What the company found was the Talking Friends apps were more than just toys, they were evolving into communications tools. Nabegoj said users started broadcasting messages to friends via Talking Tom Cat. Parents were sending notes to their kids with the apps. One child suffering from multiple sclerosis used the app to talk to her parents in place of her normal voice, which was normally hard to hear.

“We’ve seen these uses cases but, it’s something we never intended,” Nabegoj said. “That’s when we started to understand why people use our apps so frequently: because they’re communication tools.”

He said 20 percent of users use the apps on a weekly basis, which is a good number considering they’re more or less novelty programs. Nabergoj said there are still a lot of opportunities to use voice to broadcast messages to others. That’s something Outfit7 will continue to explore this year as it releases at least 15 new apps, covering different niches and target audiences. Upcoming apps, like the recently released Talking Gina the Giraffe, will flesh out the personas of characters with a new mood engine, include virtual goods and will offer mini-games, broadening the appeal of the apps. The formula appears to be holding up: Talking Gina recorded 1 million downloads over its first four days.

Nabegoj said Talking Tom Cat will also play an even larger role this year, becoming a character that makes appearances in other non-Outfit7 apps. Though it’s not as ambitious as Rovio’s plans for Angry Birds merchandise and movies, Nabegoj said there’s an opportunity to leverage the popularity of Talking Tom Cat and his friends.

“We will hit 100 million downloads this year,” Nabergoj said. “We already have 40 million people that are very loyal to the Talking Tom Cat brand and we want to expand that connection.”

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Facebook has disrupted or helped to re-engineer many businesses and markets, including the photo-sharing market and the social-gaming market. But one thing it hasn’t really focused on so far is the news business. Plenty of media companies use Facebook as a news-delivery platform, and many users (including Gawker founder Nick Denton, according to a recent interview) rely on it as a news source. But Facebook itself hasn’t done much to capitalize on that. That could change, however, judging by some comments from chief technology officer Bret Taylor — and it could pit the social network against Twitter in the race to become a social news platform.

While Taylor — the former co-founder of the social network FriendFeed — didn’t provide much in the way of details during his interview, he did say that he sees disruption coming to a number of industries as a result of social platforms like Facebook, much like it has to gaming, and that one of those disrupted industries is likely to be media:

If we had to guess, it’s probably going to be orientated around media or news, because they are so social. When you watch a television show with your friend, it’s such an engaging social activity. We think that there’s a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we’re really excited about that.

Taylor’s comments seem to suggest that Facebook isn’t looking to do anything news-related itself, but is hoping that developers will come up with social-news applications that can run on top of the Facebook platform, the same way that Zynga’s games like Farmville or Cityville do. One example might be an app like Flipboard, which takes a person’s Facebook stream and makes it part of a social-news service. Another interesting experiment is a similar app called PostPost. Facebook is also clearly continuing to push the open-graph plugin strategy that has helped sites like The Huffington Post drive massive amounts of traffic and comments to the site, and offering improved commenting as a plugin for media outlets appears to be a focus as well.

At one point not that long ago, it looked like Facebook might be trying to become a news platform in a different way, by aggregating news itself, as a way of becoming a sort of personalized newspaper for users. There were some initial moves in that direction that didn’t really go anywhere, and then more recently the network launched something it called “community pages,” which aggregate posts based on topic keywords and looked as though they could become a news aggregation service. But many of those pages are effectively useless, and amount to little more than SEO spam traps: one early example pulled in every post that mentioned the word “depends” and displayed it on a page about the adult undergarments of the same name.

The interesting thing about Taylor’s comments as they apply to television — and how social it is becoming, as people talk about shows with their friends in real-time — is that this is exactly what Twitter is also focusing on. Robin Sloan of the Twitter media team has talked about this phenomenon (including during a presentation at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live conference in November) and how it can drive viewership for events such as the MTV Movie Awards, etc. In a more recent example, the number of tweets sent during the Super Bowl set a new record, with about 4,000 being sent every second at the peak.

With its new real-time commenting features, which are being rolled out to all users now, it seems obvious that Facebook is also interested in becoming the discussion forum for such events — and possibly for breaking news like the uprising in Egypt, where Facebook has played a key role in getting information out about the protests and in helping dissidents coordinate their activities (despite the issues with the social network’s real-name policy, which I wrote about recently). But Twitter is a powerful player in that regard as well, with people like NPR’s Andy Carvin becoming one-man newswire services and curating the information coming from Egypt in real time.

Although Facebook may be focusing more on itself as a platform for apps and media outlets, it clearly has ambitions when it comes to the ongoing “socialization of news,” and at some point that means it is going to run headlong into Twitter.

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Intel cut loose some benchmarking samples of their new, top of the line CPU, the i7-980X Extreme Edition. This is not a CPU intended for the causal use, but rather aim directly at the gaming market. MSRP for the CPU all by itself is a jaw-dropping $999, and rumors are already circulating that the OEMs are already looking at coming out with systems that utilize the new processors.

The reviews are looking good too. There’s just one little problem. There’s no software out there that can really take advantage of the new processor threading yet. See, the i7-980X supports up to 6 cores, which means it’s a multi-threading monster, but if the software doesn’t support it, you end up spending a grand on future proofing. Not a terrible idea, I mean it’s not like it’s worthless, but don’t expect the your brand new smoking CPU to be all it can be until the software can take advantage of it.

Don’t take my word for it, I haven’t actually seen one of these bad boys yet, but all the reviews out there are pretty much saying the same thing.

By Chris Scott Barr

When Microsoft entered the console gaming market, it was a great day for gamers here in the US. Now I don’t have anything against Nintendo or Sony, I love their consoles. What I don’t love is all of the exclusive hardware that Japan gets from these companies, since they are located in the region. Well since Microsoft is located here in the US of A, the tables are turned. Take this new 250GB hard drive that has been announced for the 360. Guess where it’s being launched first. Wait, Japan?

What’s even more strange is that despite a confirmed March 11 launch in Japan, there is no plan for a US release. Does Microsoft not think that we download enough? Or maybe they know that we’re in a recession, and aren’t going to pay $170 for a 250GB hard drive. I’ve ranted about this before and it still infuriating, you can buy a 2.5-inch hard drive (which is what’s used for the 360) for 1/3 of the price they are selling it. That’s one heck of a markup. They should take a cue from Sony and let us use our own drives to upgrade.

[ Microsoft ] VIA [ PCWorld ]

Super Mario Bros. Wii doesn’t come out here in North America for another five days, but, for whatever reason, it comes out in Australia in two days! That explains why you can find the world’s first review (nearest I can tell) on IGN Australia. The Web site gave the game a 9.2 (I swear, these decimal point reviews are 100 percent absurd), but I think it’s safe to conclude that the game is, indeed, fun, which is really all you can ask for.

As is customary from my “oh here’s a review!” posts, I’ll merely highlight the nut graph, which is the wrong phrase to use here but whatever, but I’ll also encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s only two pages (you’ll recall that IGN’s GTA IV review was seven pages long) so get to it.

Whether or not this is the best Mario game to date is purely a matter of personal tastes; it’s certainly the most humble on outward appearances. The red game case – a bold and loud statement of fun – is the first indicator that there’s something special under the hood in this one. Still sorting the men from the boys after 20 years, Mario and Luigi’s new adventure is not important because it’s the continuation of a franchise we know and love – rather, it’s because New Super Mario Bros. Wii demonstrates one more time why Nintendo are masters of the all-ages gaming market; relevant and refreshing but at all times reverent and above all, incredible fun.

I can only add that I played the game for, oh, 15 minutes about a month ago, and it struck like Smash Bros does: it’s fun on its own merits, yes, but the more people you play with, the better.

Or, simply, if you own a Wii, you’ll probably want this under your Christmas tree (or whatever) this year.