Cisco on Tuesday will show just how serious it is about mobile data with the introduction of its first product derived from its Starent acquisition, the ASR 5000.

Trials HD developer RedLynx sold 1.5 million copies of its games during 2009, the Helsinki-based studio's best year ever. RedLynx's release slate last year -- which also included PC title Monster Trucks Nitro and iPhone games Monster Truck Nitro and DrawRace -- together sold 1.5 million copies. CEO Tero Virtala says that developing and publishing in the digital space is the primary driver of its success. "In 2008, we published one game, Trials 2 SE ...

Gamasutra is debuting a new partnership with UK-headquartered information aggregator GamesPress, with a new 'press releases' section listing the latest unfiltered industry announcements. The agreement brings together the industry's leading online trade publication and its leading online trade material repository. Gamasutra will mirror all press releases submitted to GamesPress in their original form in a dedicated section of the Gamasutra website. UK-headquartered GamesPress, the definitive one-stop public relations resource for the video game industry, hosts ...

Something photographers have been waiting for; Aperture 3 finally brings all the features we know and love in iPhoto ‘09, and meshes them with a new and improved Aperture software set. We’re talking about great organizatioin features using Faces and Places, brand new Brushes that let you paint effects on images, full 64-bit support for Snow Leopard, and even Facebook and Flickr uploading — all part of more than 200 new features. Apple has a free 30-day trial on their website or you can buy Aperture 3 for $199. Still, some new MacBook Pros would have been appreciated, guys…

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Wall Street Journal:
Bush Was Right, Says Obama  —  'We're not handling any of these cases any different from the Bush administration.'  —  This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor's practices.

This is not a rainbow. It's a moonbow, an extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon caused by the near-full moon that it's extremely hard to catch. So hard, in fact, that you can only see its colors thanks to long-exposure photography.

It was captured by Wally Pacholka last January 20, at the Haleakala Crater on the Island of Maui, Hawaii. The moonbow—or lunar rainbow—is caused when the near-full moon at less than 42 degrees in a dark sky. The colors are so faint that the human eye color receptors can't be excited enough for the brain to identify them. Therefore, they appear as white arcs to the naked eye. Only by using long-exposure photography you can reveal the diffraction of the moonlight through the microscopic water droplets suspended in the air.

By the way, that red thing shining on the sky? It's Mars rising. Check out the rest of Wally's amazing images at [Astropics]

Ksplice Tuesday officially launched its no-reboot patching service for Linux servers.

The Cambridge, Mass., startup has about 35 customers and several thousand servers using its paid Uptrack service, in which security and maintenance patches are automatically applied to Linux servers with minimal delay and no downtime, according to Chief Operating Officer Waseem Daher.

The overseers of Cartoon Network TV division Adult Swim's web games (Amateur Surgeon, 5 Minutes To Kill (Yourself)) have told Gamasutra why original IP reigns supreme for its games, despite the plethora of TV shows it could pick from. In fact, the late-night home of shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and The Venture Bros -- aimed at 18-34-year-olds -- has chosen to create original video games while practically banning anything that smacks of convergence. ...

More games developers are working on content for mobile phones - and a big majority are targeting the iPhone. There are twice as many developers working on iPhone games as there are creators of titles for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS....

BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins has shipped more than 3.2 million units worldwide since its Fall 2009 release, publisher Electronic Arts announced today. "This is a tremendous start for the Dragon Age franchise and we are extremely pleased with the great reception the game has already received from critics and fans worldwide," says BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka -- who also now holds the title of group general manager of Electronic Arts' RPG/MMO Group. The studio's still ...

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Nvidia reckons it has finally cracked the problem of smoothly swapping between graphics chips in notebooks that have more than one GPU. Today, it launched its solution, which it has branded Optimus....

Tony Romm / The Hill:
Nelson to oppose Becker for NLRB spot  —  Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (D) on Monday announced he would oppose Craig Becker's nomination to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a move that could ultimately scuttle Becker's confirmation indefinitely.  —  Senate Democratic leaders needed …

Image courtesy Jonathan Fiamor Photography.

When I was at UT Austin, a school which is famously car-unfriendly, it was rumored that one of the elder patriarchs of the College of Natural Sciences--a man who had multiple doctoral degrees and had been given countless awards for his work both as a scientific researcher and an educational administrator--had once quipped that the honor that was most valuable to him, on a daily basis, was the "O" parking permit that let him leave his car literally in the shadow of UT's iconic tower.

Well, in terms of available parking, UC Berkeley makes UT Austin look like an airport remote lot in Iowa on a Wednesday in the dead of winter. And according to this official page there are presently seven living Nobel laureates on the faculty there, so I'm guessing there must be at least seven of the prestigious NL parking spaces. Supposedly, regular mortals have to shell out $50 for presumptuous malparkage among the elite.

These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

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ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

Chrome/Firefox/Safari: Want proof that HTML5 is the way of the future? Try Sketchpad, a surprisingly robust online painting app that doesn't require Flash, Shockwave, or any other plug-in—just a modern browser and a mouse.

Run by a team that dubs themselves Colorjack, this "Sketchpad" demo shows off the capabilities of modern JavaScript and HTML5 support. You can paint any color in any shade or opacity, take on patterns and "Spirographs," and use all the tools you're likely familiar with from Microsoft's older versions of that old Paint standby.

Sketchpad also offers a handful of control windows you can move around and keep open. If the app supported drag-and-drop file imports, as Firefox 3.6 does, this would be a truly robust, and almost desktop-replacing, webapp.

When you're done with your efforts, hit the save icon and your image pops up in a new tab, ready to be saved. Sketchpad is free to use, and works on any browser that supports HTML5—including, it's been suggested, in some mobile devices, though we had very little luck actually painting with an iPod touch and Android device.

We've seen more than a few Core i5 notebooks recently, all of which have been hamstrung by Intel's weak integrated graphics. Now, Nvidia's Optimus enables their discrete GPUs to work in current-generation Intel PCs, whether Intel likes it or not.

Optimus is a new technology that allows Intel's integrated GPU to coexist with a discrete Nvidia GPU, seamlessly alternating between the two depending on the task at hand. It works with GeForce 200M series, GeForce 300M series, next-gen GeForce M, and next-gen Ion GPUs as well as Intel's Core2Duo, Core i3/i5/i7, and Atom N450 processors.

At the most basic level, Optimus is similar to the switchable graphics that Nvidia pioneered a few years ago. But switchable graphics as currently conceived are a pain in the neck: you have to switch manually, there's generally a 5-10 second delay, your screen flickers, you have to shut down certain applications. Optimus still includes a manual option, but otherwise automatically decides what can run on integrated graphics (regular web browsing) and what needs an extra boost (games, Flash video, etc), making the switch for you behind the scenes. It makes the change so quickly by letting the Nvidia GPU handle the processing duties while still employing Intel's IGP as a display controller, as in the diagram above.

One drawback is that Optimus relys on the software profile to tell it which graphics to employ. That'll be done through an Nvidia verification process and accessed through automatic online updates, but there may be instances where your PC doesn't recognize a software and won't know whether to use the IGP or the Nvidia GPU. You can still switch manually in those cases, but it's an unfortunate extra step.

Performance hasn't been confirmed yet by a third party, but Nvidia posits that Optimus is up to an 8x improvement across apps and games than Intel's integrated solution. And because it only kicks in when needed, there's purportedly not much of a battery drain, depending on how often you use intensive graphics.

Nvidia says there will be more than 50 notebooks packing Optimus by this summer, although today it's launching only on a few Asus notebooks like the UL50Vf, an ultraportable which houses both a Core2Duo SU7300 and a GeForce G210M.

What we don't know—but what we strongly suspect—is if Optimus is the solution Apple has been waiting for before refreshing its Macbook line. The hiccup: currently, Nvidia says that Optimus is only compatible with Windows 7. But with the Macworld just around the corner, We may be seeing Optimus Macbook Pros sooner than later. [Nvidia]