Eighteen new cars have been designed for this one, starting at small dune buggies and working up to ultra-fast supercars.  You can race them along 24 routes that are both paved and dirt (some both).

Arcade Mode is a cool way to play without commitment, taking one of 40 pre-defined challenges for a few minutes.  For the longer term, you can play in Career Mode to start small and earn money with your races to upgrade your vehicle until you finally get to the big leagues.  Finally, in Single Event Mode, you can race in a one-shot run (as a full race, a Hot Lap, or an Elimination event) against your friends on WiFi.

The coolest part are the car customizations you can make.  You can add parts to tune your car to your specific style of play, so if you’re hard on the corners or tend to stand on the pedal, you can adjust the car to respond the way you’d like.

This makes it possible to power slide through corners, romp the accelerator before hitting a bump, commit to hard cornering, and more.

The graphics are awesome, but they really pop if you have an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S, taking advantage of the superior graphics they offer to improve shading and add to the 3D effect of the game.

You can even play over the Internet and you have all of your race characters from the original plus more, making 17 in all.

Really awesome game that will have you pumped as you play!

While we can only speculate what the social network might bring in during future years, it has been estimated that it may bring in as much as $540 million by the year 2014.  These figures come from eMarketer and relate to the payments advertisers make to have ads on Twitter.

Another key factor to take from these figures is that the overall growth pattern will slow over the coming years as the revenues increase.  Twitter saw a huge 233% growth in revenues in 2011, but this is expected to fall as low as around 36% in 2014.  Of course, the figures from 2012 onwards are merely estimates of what could happen, but they look to be fairly reasonable.  We shall have to wait and see whether the social network lives up to these estimations or manages to rise above them.

In any event, it looks as if Twitter will be reaping the rewards of getting on top of its advertising options in the coming years.  It is said that most revenue at the present time comes from America.  However, this may not be the case in the future.  As Twitter becomes more established and accessible in other parts of the world, so ad revenues will be seen to come from other areas as well.

The quiver of excitement surrounding the news is understandable.  This is easily the largest price ever mentioned in conjunction with an IPO for a company like this.  Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg looks to become a billionaire – not a millionaire but a billionaire – as a result of the IPO.  Several other employees at the company are also thought to benefit hugely financially as a consequence of the move.

Initial suggestions were that the IPO could be worth as much as $10 billion.  However, even though the amount is much less than that, it is still far more than many people can imagine.  When talking in terms of the actual overall wealth and value of the company, that figure will pale into insignificance.

Although all eyes are on the figures, the real question is whether Facebook can make money from all the data it has collected.  This is where privacy concerns and the viability of the social network come in.  It remains to be seen how successful Facebook’s IPO is, and how successful future shares are after this.  There is no doubt all eyes are definitely on the social network at the moment.

Benefits for businesses

When a customer using a website cannot quickly and easily find an answer to questions about shipping costs, product details or almost anything else, they will often move on to a competitor’s website. By adding live chat functionality to your website, you will keep such customers on your site. This will obviously help to increase online sales and the overall average order value. Interacting with customers as they shop helps to improve overall customer satisfaction, a factor that will increase the likelihood of repeat sales.

Live chat allows a customer service representative to work one-on-one with a customer if they experience a problem, or have a question when using the site. Because problems are resolved much more quickly, the overall costs of customer service provision will actually decrease. Since both the representative and the customer can view the same web page or product contemporaneously, the customer’s questions are answered swiftly and in full, without the need for back and forth contact through email or multiple phone calls.

Businesses can even monitor the performance of their website through live chat software. They can monitor what customers like best and what they tend to avoid. This helps to improve an overall brand and website reputation.

Features of Live Chat Software

The most important feature of live chat software is this ability to chat with customers in real time. The most sophisticated software includes click-to-chat buttons and proactive invitation rules, such as the ability to invite a customer to chat when they click on the FAQs page. A variety of customization options, especially for reporting and invitations, are usually available in higher-level editions, and are extremely helpful in managing customer contact. It is also important to be able to brand the software so that it doesn’t look like a third party application. Some types of software actually include an automated agent and allow for skill based group creation, to ensure that customers reach the right representative for their needs.

Since software for live chat helps to improve your business in real time, you should also have real time support. A reliable application will provide you with a 24/7-support service, to help you fully utilize your chat client and keep your system up and running. You can also learn about your customers with a campaign viewer and Google Analytics, to fully optimize your site for your intended audience.

Staying up to date with technology

Customers trust an online company that stays up to date with the latest technology. Live chat software is essential for any online business wishing to illustrate that they are focused on the latest in customer service. Customers will appreciate the investment and see your business as a leader in the industry. This will make you the choice for shopping over the less innovative competition.

The new app, which unlike previous apps such as competitor Square, requires no external add-ons for the phone in order to work.  Rather than reading the card via the magnetic strip through an add-on dongle swipe reader, the app reads the card’s imprint to get the account number, cardholder’s name, expiration date, etc.

The app works by creating a window-like frame on the phone’s screen into which the card is “placed” by holding it in front of the phone’s camera.  The app then reads the card and lets the user know it’s got the data, which is displayed for confirmation.  Then all the merchant has to do is send the information through their processor, verify the charge, and the sale is complete.

In addition to the new software, Card.io is launching a software developer’s kit (SDK) for the app that allows developers to create customized or specific uses for the application, such as integration with popular website card processing apps or merchant gateways.  Potentially, developers could also utilize the app to recognize things other than cards, such as business cards or other items.

So far, more than 160 apps, including most of the popular processing gateways as well as top-level merchants like Newegg, have integrated with Card.io.

Very cool and enabling.

Although reports indicate that Google Plus is still growing at an extremely fast rate, how much of this is down to automatic joining?  You may not be aware of this, but if you sign up for a Gmail account today, you will be prompted to get a Google Plus profile as well.  It is up to you whether you fill it in or not, but it is an interesting way of encouraging people to get involved with Google Plus.

It also makes us wonder how many apparent Google Plus members do not actually use the social media site at all.  Perhaps some sign up for it quickly while they are going through the process of getting an email account, but they never go ahead and use it.

In the end, the statistics that tell us how many people are members of Google Plus are going to be very different from the statistics that tell us how many people actually use it.  This is something no one but Google really knows.  However, we suspect there may be a big gap between the two numbers.

Luckily, you can now consider using a service called Digioh.  This is a sales and distribution service that has no transaction fees.  You can sign up for free and sell a single file with no charges at all.  Alternatively, they offer a free trial and $9.99 a month for up to ten files.  The advanced package allows unlimited files to be downloaded and it costs just $14.99 a month.

Social media marketers will be particularly interested in this offering.  The service has many features that will prove useful, but a definite highlight is the fact that you can sell your digital items via Twitter and Facebook.  This could open up two additional streams of income if you have suitable digital products to sell in this way.

Another plus point of this service is that it does not require you to have any particular skills to be able to upload your items.  This can be done in seconds so it is a very fast way to start selling online.  With plenty of different file types supported by Digioh, it looks as though it is going to be a huge success.

Your job is to help the flightless horndogs across the chasms and safely to the spawning ground so they can get their groove on.

The game is a sort of 2D puzzle adventure mixed with some fun scenery and a great premise.  Unlike some games of its type, it’s not full of environmental messages and preaching.  It’s just lusty penguins trying to make a new generation of penguins.

The game is by veteran app game maker Polarbit (Reckless Getaway, Tank Riders, Wave Blazer) and is only a dollar in the App Store.  It’s compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad with iOS 3.0 or higher.

Penguin Palooza is a lot of fun as your penguins hurl themselves at various angles or towards helpful tools or on-screen bonuses.  You direct them what to do and then hope for the best.  The more penguins you get across each chasm, the higher your score.

Definitely addictive and fun, the game is well worth the download.  Try it!

More specifically, the network is accused of transforming its search feature so that results from Google Plus are highlighted and given preference to results from other sites.  You may have noticed that Google Search has changed in recent days – although the change appears to be spasmodic.  Some days it appears to be present and other days the original search facility is used instead.  Perhaps it is the attention of the FTC that has led to this change.

Results from the social networking site only appear if the user is logged into their own Google Plus account.  In this situation no other results from other social networks appear to be included.  If the user is not a member of Google Plus the results appear to include tweets from Twitter and results from Facebook as well.  This has led to complaints and it is these complaints that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into.

An antitrust probe has already been launched with reference to Google.  It is believed that this probe has now been extended to include investigations into these latest allegations.  Google is certainly going through a rough time at the moment, and this apparently is not going to end anytime soon.

Foursquare enables users to pinpoint their location when they post an update to their account. When the hacker got into Ashton Kutcher’s account they made their location public, and it would seem as if Ashton knows what that location is. He later posted a tweet on Twitter warning the hacker that he knew his address and that he was coming for him.  No one knows what ultimately happened but it may have given the hacker pause.

Kutcher is known to be an investor in Foursquare so it remains to be seen whether this hacking incident is going to affect the popularity of the site.  Obviously, it will be embarrassing in more ways than one.  At the time of writing, none of the original tweets regarding the incident were appearing on Twitter.  However, Ashton did tweet a message on 16^th January congratulating the security team on Foursquare.  This seemed to be a veiled reference to what had occurred to rectify the situation so he could regain control of his account there.

It is not the first time that someone has had their social media accounts hacked, but it may be the first time the hacker told everyone where they were.