Forecasters at the Harrison Group found that 13% of all American consumers showed “interest” in buying a tablet device between now and next September, with potential sales of up to 15 million units. In fact, some reports suggest that the iPad’s popularity could affect PC and laptop sales figures as consumers opt for the touchscreen tablet over a new netbook or upgrading an old PC.

via Is the iPad Really the Savior of the Newspaper Industry?.

                          

Technology in the classroom [infographic] – Holy Kaw!.

                          

White spaces refers to the unused television spectrum that traditionally existed between channels as buffers or empty spectrum left over or vacated by TV stations through the transition from analog to digital TV. The FCC voted two years ago to approve the unlicensed use of whites spaces. Here’s what you need to know about white spaces:

via All You Need to Know About White Spaces Broadband: Tech News «.

                          

When Technology Makes Headlines | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

                          

The social-gaming juggernaut, responsible for some of the most popular social games on Facebook like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is responsible for handling a deluge of traffic from the roughly 10 percent of the world’s Internet population who play its games. Zynga can add up to 1,000 new servers each week and has begun expanding into both public and private cloud storage and infrastructure to cope with the massive amount of traffic, Lee said.

via Zynga CTO: We turn on 1,000 new servers a week for FarmVille and other games | VentureBeat.

                          

14 fun facts about text messaging [infographic] – Holy Kaw!.

                          

Games Dominate America’s Growing Appetite for Mobile Apps | Nielsen Wire.

                          

Back Issues: From Pong to Red Dead Redemption : The New Yorker.

it is an added value post to accompany this recent piece by nicholson baker where he, as an established and mature writer, discusses his impressions and observations of entering the world of video games for the first time.  here’s a pull quote from the article abstract:

The writer, who had never held a video-game controller until last fall, describes his experience playing a series of video games, sometimes alone and sometimes with his sixteen-year-old son. The first thing he learned is that video games—especially the vivid, violent ones—are ridiculously hard to play. They’re humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over. To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, climb, crawl, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet. The second thing the writer learned about video games is that they are long. Playing one game is not like watching one ninety-minute movie; it’s like watching one whole season of a TV show—and like watching it in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration. If you’re good, it might take you fifteen hours to play a typical game.

                          

via The Savior of Condé Nast: Scott Dadich Is The New It Boy of the Mag World | The New York Observer.

                          

Nintendo Hardware | Cracked.com.