Carmakers look to video games for new routes to market

(Reuters) - The spoiler popped up automatically when the speedometer of the new Audi RS7 Sportback moved past 130 kilometers an hour on Charles Bridge in central Prague, creating just enough downforce to ensure the tires gripped the road around the next turn.

Racing through the city's scenic old quarter in the "Forza Motorsport 5" videogame is unnervingly realistic - not least thanks to the force-feedback steering wheel that makes the speeding driver struggle to keep control.

The upcoming Microsoft Xbox One game is also just one example of an increasingly symbiotic relationship between software developers and the auto industry. Together they get games fans behind the wheel and carmakers in pole position to woo today's younger consumers as tomorrow's car buyers.

Even if many of the players may not be able to afford to buy a car now, Volkswagen's Audi sponsors the game since it can start winning brand loyalty for the future. It is also well aware that driving games are not just enjoyed by the young.

"It's not just about reaching the youth - an Audi in a video game also reaches our core target group. Unlike in a movie where there is a straight narrative, a video game is interactive and the storyline is not defined in advance," said Kai Mensing, head of International Product Placement at the company.

Meanwhile Nissan competes on screens as a partner in Sony's rival PlayStation game "Gran Turismo", giving gamers the chance to enter a competition which starts with driving a Leaf electric car in their living rooms and could lead to actually racing a real 370Z sports car on Britain's Silverstone circuit.

"We take you all the way through to being a racing driver," said Gareth Dunsmore, general manager for marketing in Europe, adding that its "GT Academy" finalist Lucas Ordonez went on to a real world podium finish at the Le Mans 24 hour race in 2011.

Nissan's digital advertising spend has trebled in the last five years and is expected to top $500 million this year, roughly 25 percent of Nissan's overall advertising outlay.

"GT Academy is a great way for us to attract the gaming community to the brand. A million people have experienced this year driving an electric vehicle in a game," Dunsmore said.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

Consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates in-game advertising will be a $2.8 billion industry worldwide this year. Carmakers say it is cheaper than product placement in films and they can even collect licensing fees for handing over their vehicle specifications to game developers.

Games industry analyst Brian Blau of Gartner, who once worked on licensing deals with carmakers, said auto companies are willing to pay as much as a million dollars if one of their cars is deeply integrated into the storyline of a video game, all the way down to appearing on the cover of the box.

"Advertisers are very keen on these kinds of immersive technologies," he said.

And carmakers need to stimulate demand amongst younger drivers.

In Germany, Europe's largest auto market and home to major car companies like VW, sales of vehicles to younger people have been in decline, with official data showing the share of new cars sold to people aged between 21 and 39 dropping each year since 2009 from 19.8 percent to 16.2 percent currently.

Whereas car sales have stagnated at around 3 million vehicles for years, video game sales in Germany rose for a third straight year in 2012 to a record 73.7 million. More importantly, over a quarter of the 26 million Germans that regularly played video games last year earn above-average incomes, taking home over 3,000 euros after tax every month.

For carmakers this means an audience expanding in size, increasing in affluence and diversifying in its base, and experts agree that product placement in video games can be an extremely effective tool to promote a brand.

"Gaming is a very engaging and captive environment that requires your full concentration. When people watch the Super Bowl on TV, however, they're multitasking - tweeting and commenting on their Facebook page throughout the game," said Dave Madden, senior vice-president of global media sales at games developer Electronic Arts.

German psychotherapist Bert te Wildt knows first-hand just how powerful, and even addictive, video games can be compared to other mediums having researched gaming dependency.

"The feeling of being behind the wheel of a fast car is far more intense when you drive it yourself in a digital world than when you watch it in a film, for instance," said te Wildt, a physician at Ruhr University's LWL Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy in Bochum.

"And now that these cyberspace vehicles are nearly photo-realistic, product placement in video games has become that much more attractive for carmakers," he added.

CROSS-MARKETING

And product placement is also attractive to videogames publishers.

Microsoft's "Forza Motorsport 5" and Sony's "Gran Turismo 6" have been nominated for the best titles for the Xbox and PlayStation consoles at this week's Gamescom convention in Cologne and Daimler had its gull-winged Mercedes-Benz SLS parked in front of Sony's press hall this week to promote the upcoming PlayStation 4 title "DriveClub".

But the automaker's interest goes well beyond racing games.

Caroline Pilz, head of product placement at Mercedes, said a campaign last year with SimCity Social, a form of Electronic Arts citybuilding game that was played on Facebook until recently, far exceeded its expectations in boosting the awareness and image of its A-Class car ahead of a crucial relaunch.

"Social gaming is a fantastic platform to go beyond the normal male audience that play racing games and instead reach females between 25-45 that don't read car magazines, who are in the perfect age to purchase compact cars like the A-Class," the head of product placement at Mercedes told Reuters.

Apart from allowing gamers to share achievements with friends and other players, online connectivity offers carmakers the added ability to tout their latest models in software updates that include exclusive downloadable content.

Just don't expect carmakers to have their vehicles driven around in September's hotly-anticipated "Grand Theft Auto V" game, since running over people with a BMW or Mercedes is not what the carmakers want to see.

One developer who asked not to be named said his car game did not feature any pedestrians or bystanders at all.

Even portraying vehicle crashes of the kind portrayed in Electronic Arts' "Need for Speed" is controversial, because it could spark safety concerns.

"We have very specific understandings of how we would show damage to a car," he said.

Google search goes 'desi' with Hindi tool

Now, you can handwrite on screen instead of typing Hindi letters from an English keyboard

Bangalore Global Internet search engine Google has unveiled a software tool enabling Indian netizens to search its encyclopaedic website by writing in Hindi (Devanagari) script.

"Instead of typing Hindi letters from an English keyboard, netizens can handwrite on screen what they want to search on our engine using our new Hindi tool, as the Internet can be used as easily as reading and writing in the vernacular," Google India said in a statement here.

In its quest to get about 300 million more Indian users online, the company's geeks found that less than 10 per cent of Internet usage was in Indian languages, while in the real world the remaining 90 percent of newspaper readers or television viewers were using the media in their respective mother tongue.

"Our innovative tool makes accessing Internet in Hindi simpler. Hindi-knowing netizens should be able to use their language in the digital world to read and write as easily as they do offline," an official said in the statement.

The software also enables Google users to search by scribbling Hindi words with a finger or stylus on any digital device screen.

The tool can also be accessed on a mobile browser at www.google.co.in. Once the feature is enabled, a user can activate the handwrite icon on the screen to write letters in Devanagari for words or content to be searched on the engine.

"The Hindi handwrite features have been a collaboration between our teams across Zurich, Mountain View and Bangalore. Our engineers are excited with the potential these methods of inputs have in India," the statement added.

Acer Liquid S2 pops up on GFX Bench, runs on Snapdragon 800

Acer Liquid S2 seems to be the company's next flagship device that will supposedly hit the shelves very soon.

According to a leaked roadmap Acer Liquid S2 will run on a quad-core 2.3GHz processor and pack a 5.98" 1080p IPS display. The rest of the mentioned specs include 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage and NFC. The Android version is dubbed K OS, although we are not sure if that is shortened from Key Lime Pie or some proprietary launcher. Acer Liquid S2 is supposed to be released this month in Russia for about €585.

The most recent leak comes from the GFXBenchmark database. The Acer Liquid S2 has already run through the GFX tests and the results are in. What's most important though is along with those results we get to see new information on its internals.

The Liquid S2 in the GFX database was running on a quad-core 2.1GHz processor with Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB RAM, which can mean only one chipset - the mighty Snapdragon 800. The device was using Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Since the next major Android version won’t be out until October, the Liquid S2 will probably run on what's available on time of release. August is almost over, so we can cross out the release date as well.

Whenever Acer announces the Liquid S2 phablet we expect to see it followed by a dual-SIM model shortly after.

Mexican town sets up its own, much cheaper cellphone service

VILLA TALEA DE CASTRO — Left out by telecom firms like the one owned by billionaire Carlos Slim, a remote Mexican mountain village now runs its own cellphone network to communicate with the outside world.

Tucked away in a lush forest in the southern state of Oaxaca, the indigenous village of Villa Talea de Castro, population 2,500, was not seen as a profitable market for companies such as Mr Slim’s América Móvil.

So the village, under an initiative launched by indigenous groups, civil organisations and universities, put up a perch-like antenna on a rooftop, installed radio and computer equipment, and created its own micro provider called Red Celular de Talea (RCT).

Now, restaurant manager Ramiro Perez can call his children and receive food orders on his cellphone at a cheap price in this village dotted by small homes painted in pink and yellow.

The local service, started in 2013, costs 15 pesos ($1.20) a month — 13 times cheaper than a big company’s basic plan in Mexico City — while calls to the US, where many of the indigenous Zapoteco resident have migrated, cost a few pennies per minute.

"I have two children who live outside the village and I communicate with them at least two or three times a week," says Mr Perez.

Before, he had to use telephone booths where he paid up to 10 pesos a minute.

The coffee-producing village installed the network with the help of Rhizomatica, a nonprofit organisation with US, European and Mexican experts that aims to increase access to mobile telecommunications in communities that lack affordable service.

Rhizomatica, a civil group named Redes and a town official say they hope a telecoms reform, pushed through Congress by President Enrique Peña Nieto to open the market, will "break the obstacles" that prevent the development of such community-based projects.

"Many indigenous communities have shown interest in participating in this project and we hope that many more can join this scheme," the groups say.

The equipment used in Talea, which was provided by California-based Range Networks, includes a 900MHz radio network and computer software that routes calls, registers numbers and handles billing. Calls to the US are channelled via a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) provider.

The village received a two-year permit from the Federal Communications Commission to have the right to test the equipment.

When a cellphone user arrives in the village, an SMS automatically appears saying: "Welcome to the Talea Cellular Network (RTC) — to register, go to the radio with this message."

There is one catch: phone calls must be limited to a maximum of five minutes to avoid a saturation of lines.

Israel Hernandez, a village resident and one of the volunteers who helped set up the system, says the network uses the radio-electric spectrum that "telephone (service) providers refuse to use because it is financially unviable".

Mr Slim’s Telcel is part of his América Móvil empire, which controls 70% of Mexico’s mobile phone market and has 262-million subscribers across Latin America but never made it to Talea.

Alejandro Lopez, a senior town-hall official, says the village has approached big telecoms firms but they required 10,000 potential users as well as the construction of a path where an antenna would be erected and a lengthy power line.

"Despite some technical problems, because we are in a test period, the project has been a success", Mr Lopez says, with 600 villagers signing up in the first three months.

Buoyed by the system’s success, the village has decided to buy its own equipment that will allow RCT to run 35 lines simultaneously and plans to install it in the coming weeks.

The next step, RCT volunteer Mr Hernandez says, is to form co-operatives with other villages to request concessions from the Mexican government in order to resolve "this lack of free frequencies for cellphone communications in the country’s rural communities".

Malware Posing as Facebook Video, Hijacking User Accounts

Here's another proof of how unsafe is the current WWW.

According to Italian researchers, a piece of malicious software thatlooks like a Facebook video is making the rounds on the site. When users click on the “video,” the bug hijacks their account and even their web browser.

According to the researchers, the video appears as a link in an email or Facebook message telling a user that they’ve been tagged. Once they click on it, users are prompted to download a browser extension or plug-in. If users complete that step, the real trouble truly begins. Once the download is complete, the hackers can access everything stored in the users’ web browser, including saved passwords and financial information. One of the researchers, Carlo De Michel, told The New York Times that the bug has been spreading at the rate of 40,000 attacks every hour, and has thus far afflicted almost 800,000 users of Google Chrome alone. For its part, Facebook said that it was aware of the attack and working to clear it from the site.

“In the meantime, we have been blocking people from clicking through the links and have reported the bad browser extensions to the appropriate parties,” said Facebook spokesperson Michael Kirkland in a statement. “We believe only a small percentage of our users were affected by this issue, and we are currently working with them to ensure that they’ve removed the bad browser extension.”