Heroes of Newerth is now Free to Play

It's still summer and that means tech savvy teenagers are staying indoors doing computer gaming, killing newbies and mic spamming on TF2 since it went F2P. Now another company is going on the same road. 

Heroes of Newerth (well known as HoN) is now a free-to-play science fantasy, action real-time strategy game developed by S2 Games and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Released back on May 2010, HoN is heavily inspired by the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne custom map, Defense of the Ancients.

Similar to TF2's F2P method, new players will have a Free Account. After a player has surpassed a certain threshold of game time, or purchased Goblin Coins, their account is upgraded to a Verified account.

Existing paying players will have Legacy accounts which can't be purchased anymore. Legacy accounts players will receive a lifetime of free access to all HoN heroes and are able to play in Verified Only games.


You also don't need a kick ass gaming notebook or computer as the game will run smoothly on any modern systems.

System requirements

2.2GHz processor

1GB RAM

GeForce 5, ATI 9x00, OpenGL 2.0 compatible (Linux and Mac) video card

Linux/Windows XP/Vista/7/Mac

Network Connection Required

Aggregator	Score
GameRankings	78.14%
Metacritic	76%
Review scores
Publication	Score
Game Informer
Game Revolution	B+
GameZone
PC Gamer US	71%
Awards Entity Award Independent Games Festival                   Audience Award (2010)

New MacBook Air now available

Apple Inc, the company famous for the iPhone, iPod, iPad and iTunes today have released their new MacBook Air starting at $999 for the United States market and at £849 for the United Kingdom.

Featuring OS X Lion, Apple went with the tagline, Everyone should have a notebook this advanced. And now everyone can for this updated version.

Aimed more towards the university students, U.K. students can get the new MacAir for £730 through the education store, and U.S. students will find the costs to be knocked down to $949 if they're eligible. 

Included in the updated specifications:

• Mac OS X Lion pre-installed
• 11″ and 13″ models available
• 0.11″ thick at its thinnest point — 0.68″ at its thickest
• 128GB/256GB solid-state hard drive
• 4GB RAM
• 5 hours battery life
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• Intel Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors
• Thunderbolt I/O technology
• LED backlit display
• Glass multi-touch trackpad
• Backlit keyboard
• Ultra-fast wireless-n networking

The MacBook Air is slim, stylish and incredibly light, along with 5 hours of battery life and powerful technology should be a good pick for a lot of college students who doesn't like to carry around bulky laptops to classes.

Weird, Microsoft registers Microsoft-Sony.com and Sony-Microsoft.com

That's right, the creator of various Windows OS and the powerful gaming console Xbox 360 have shockingly registered both Microsoft-Sony.com and Sony-Microsoft.com yesterday for a year.

Whois record for microsoft-sony.com

Tuesday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Andy Lees said that Redmond would eventually have just a “single ecosystem” for PCs, phones, tablets, and even the TV.

Source

Speculations arise that partnership for a single system from both companies is imminent and could be successful just like when Sony and Ericsson became Sony-Ericsson when their cellphone divisions merged.

PS 360 perhaps?

Google unveils Photovine

 

After acquiring the trademark and domain name Photovine.com last month, Google Inc have finally revealed what their latest project is all about.

According to their support page:


What is Photovine?
Photovine is a community that’s about creating fun and unique collections of photos that we call Vines.

How does Photovine work?
In Photovine, vines connect you with people through the ideas and themes expressed in your photos.

A vine is like a constantly growing family of photos connected through a common caption created by you, your friends, and people all over the world.

Some examples of vines could be: “What Weekends Are Made Of”, “Secret Stuffed Animal”, “Party People”, or, “Love of My Life”.

As people add photos to vines, they tell their own stories about the moments, images, and ideas that define our lives in a way that’s social, creative, and fun.

Start a vine by taking a photo and creating a new caption, or add to an existing vine. Other people will see your vine and join in by adding their own photo, showing their own take on the caption.

What kind of photos can I post?
If you find yourself with a photo that you’re not sure is a good idea to post, it’s probably not. As a rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t want your family to see it, you probably shouldn’t post it.

What about privacy?
We take your privacy seriously. Please read our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we treat the information collected from you while using our app.

Although the app is not currently being released yet, it's still exciting how it will turn out as you can find new friends relating to the same vine as yours.

Google Disables Realtime Search

After a 2 year long partnership with Twitter and other companies, Google has temporarily pulled the plug on the social network-infused Google Realtime Search which displayed the latest tweets and Facebook postings.

Google confirmed the news tweeting, "We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring howto incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned" from its @googlerealtime Twitter account.

 

The results were quietly removed from Google on July 2 as Google's deal with Twitter came to an end. 

 

Posted via Twitter

While Twitter provided the majority of content found on Google Realtime Search, Google also included sites like Facebook, Google News, MySpace, FriendFeed, Quora, and Gowalla

Google added, "While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."

 

The alternative for users are now mainly focused on Microsoft Bing's Social Search that continues to incorporate real-time results Tweets.

MySpace sold for $35M, a $545M Loss

News Corp. an integrated media company founded by Rupert Murdoch, with properties in film, television, cable, magazines, newspapers, publishing, has unloaded the former social networking powerhouse website, MySpace for $35 million.

Just four years ago, the social-networking site had a valuation of $12 billion.

News Corp. had reportedly been expecting a sale ranging into $100 million, which itself would have represented a huge drop from the staggering $580 million the company paid for MySpace back in 2005.

Specific Media's homepage

MySpace's new owner is the ad network Specific Media, and News Corp. will get a minority equity stake in that company. Specific Media is an innovative global interactive media company that enables advertisers to connect with consumers in meaningful, impactful and relevant ways.


Specific Media now has a platform to sell advertising to what is still a very sizable community, and it said it will unveil its plans for MySpace later this summer. Based on monthly unique visitors, MySpace had about 35 million visitors in May, while Facebook had nearly 160 million. The site also includes MySpace Music, with 38 million songs that are delivered to users via streaming music which Facebook lacks.
 

Users now can even connect to Myspace using Facebook 

Michael Gartenberg, research director at the Gartner Group, said the price drop for MySpace is a "testament to how things can change so quickly in the social space." He added that, while the "days of MySpace as a dominant social space are over, the brand still has a core set of followers, primarily based around music," and it's conceivable that some sort of sustainable business model could evolve.

MySpace is not the only social-networking site to soar, be acquired, and then crash. Back in 2008, AOL spent $850 million for Bebo, only to sell it later for under $10 million.