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One of the most important new feature of Lich King, according to J. Allen Brack, the production director for WoW, is that it introduces death knights, which are a hero class of character and the first new class to be brought into the game since the original version.

But devoted WoW players and Blizzard executives should be pleased that the earliest reports from those who have played the beta version are largely positive, with almost no major concerns.

“They took it up a notch, with the complexity of the scenes and the intricacy,” said Glerum. “They have some areas which are now misty, which is a really interesting effect, walking through a mist. Previously, they had sort of grayed out the scene and called it mist, but now it’s hard to peer through.”

(Credit:
Blizzard Entertainment)

Another area that Glerum sees as an improvement is in the way that the very highest levels of the game are now accessible to more people.

But Glerum said that she’s impressed with the new system the game’s developers have created for dealing with the bugs.

“The beta bug tracking system is phenomenal,” said Glerum, who explained that Blizzard has built a system that allows players to simply click on just about any item or non-player character that has a bug associated with it in order to enter a bug report about it.

The effect of this was that a very small percentage of WoW players could get their hands on the best loot, since the only way to get it was to be part of such raiding groups.

One new feature that will be available to all WoW players, regardless of whether they’ve bought either or both expansions, is an Xbox Live-like achievements system.

All Lich King players will have to upgrade from Burning Crusade, in particular because the new expansion extends the top level players can reach to 80 from 70 in Burning Crusade, and 60 in the original game.

Schramm said another element of Wrath he’s excited about is the new achievements system Blizzard is implementing in the expansion.

Right now, the Lich King beta has only recently opened up to those lucky enough to get invitations–or those they have passed their access codes onto. Indeed, the codes are selling on eBay for $150 or more, a testament to the passion or many hardcore WoW players, especially given that the game is still months away from its public launch and riddled with the kinds of bugs common to early beta releases.

To Glerum, there are several areas of the game that Blizzard has made major strides with. Some are practical, while others are directly related to the visceral feeling of being in the WoW universe.

One new feature admired by some players is real-looking mist.

(Credit:
Blizzard Entertainment)

The reason why has to do with a tweaking of the rules about how many players it takes to put together a high-end raid, the kind of action where the best loot in the game is found.

And given that Blizzard seems to have the magic touch with the WoW franchise, this should surprise no one.

“There will be a lot of pressure to buy it, and anyone who has a character at the highest level will pretty much consider it a necessity,” said Schramm. “You’ll be walking through the Barrens (an area in WoW), and you’ll see a steam tank drive past you with five people sitting in it, or you’ll see a death knight clad in frozen armor with five ghouls walking behind him. This stuff is Wrath only. After seeing that, who wouldn’t want the expansion?”

(Credit:
Blizzard Entetainment)

And now, with the second major WoW expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King, in beta testing, Blizzard is getting ready to prove yet again that when it comes to American MMOs, it is the undisputed gold standard.

For now, participation in the beta is only available to players with active Burning Crusade accounts, and even then, as mentioned above, getting access is difficult. That is certain to change over time, and within a few months–it’s not certain yet when–the expansion will launch and be available to the general public.

In the previous beta, she said, it was necessary to manually spell out what the situation was where a bug was found. Now, the bug tracking window automatically is attached to the problem.

Reminiscent of the achievements system in Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, specific tasks with visceral rewards that can be showed off which provide ample additional incentive to players to continue playing even after they’ve completed a game.

Blizzard Entertainment has recently opened up the beta for its forthcoming expansion to ‘World of Warcraft,’ ‘The Wrath of the Lich King.’ According to people familiar with the beta, the expansion offers some big improvements and appears likely to sell millions of copies.

A face off in ‘Wrath of the Lich King’

In the original WoW, it took 40 players to comprise such a raid, and that, explained Glerum, was difficult for many guilds–organized groups in the game–to accomplish, given the complexities of getting so many people together.

“It’s just a huge improvement,” said Glerum. “I know that on their side, they’re going to have tons of results coming back that will be useful, and which will undoubtedly speed up their development process.”

Much of the early adoption of the expansion will almost certainly come from the most accomplished Burning Crusade players who want to continue to take the game as far as is possible.

Then, prior to the January 2007 release of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, no one had ever heard of the kind of nationwide midnight madness lines associated with
iPhone and
Xbox launches for a game expansion. Sure enough, however, people lined up at game stores everywhere for hours for the right to be among the very first to buy Burning Crusade, and the update went on to sell millions of copies.

Schramm, too, applauded the decision to reduce the high-end raiding threshold to ten players.

(Credit:
Blizzard Entertainment)

“They’ve again taken the end game and made it more accessible to more people,” Glerum said, “without costing the high-end players, without giving up the challenge that keeps the high-end players motivated.”

“Achievements really extend game play,” Schramm said, “and reward people for doing things they won’t normally bother doing.”

“Hopefully we’re better and smarter,” Brack said, “and came up with cooler mechanics this time around.”

In fact, in Wrath, 10-member parties will be able to take part in high-end raids, though 25-member parties will still be rewarded with access to more complex environments and slightly better loot. But at least those who can pull together high-level players will be able to take part in the action.

In Wrath of the Lich King, the threshold for high-end raids has dropped to 10 players, and that should open up at least some of the very best loot to a vastly larger number of people.

Being that Wrath of the Lich King is still in beta, there’s plenty of bugs for players to discover and Blizzard to fix.

“If you’re familiar with the mechanics of the 10-person version,” Brack said, “then you should be familiar with the 25-person version, at least in the philosophical sense.”

Brack said a good analogy for the two different raiding party limits is that there are dungeons and heroic versions of those dungeons.

Since its launch in the fall of 2004, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft has shattered expectations at every turn.

In Burning Crusade, the number was dropped to 25, meaning that many more guilds could manage to put together high-end raiding parties. Still, she said, getting 25 people together was often a challenge for many guilds.

Prior to its release, no American massively multiplayer online game (MMO) had ever reached what was then seen as the magical million subscribers level–even major hits like EverQuest and Ultima Online. Yet almost before anyone could blink, WoW, as it’s known, had surpassed 4 million paying users and now has more than 10 million worldwide, and at $15 a month for most users, it may well be bringing in more than $1 billion a year.

“I think Blizzard has learned a lot from the last expansion release,” Schramm said. “Even a group of ten people will be able to conquer the very highest end-game content, while 25-man versions will let people who want to be more hardcore do that as well.”

“I think it’ll be just as big, if not bigger” than the Burning Crusade expansion,” said Mike Schramm, the editor of WoW Insider. “BC was the biggest-selling PC game sequel ever, I think. Wrath might be a little lower than that, but there’ll certainly be lines for it.”

And Brack added that the achievements system will also be made available to players of both the original version of WoW and Burning Crusade. Buying the new expansion won’t be necessary.

“It’s just beautiful,” said longtime WoW player and Lich King beta player Katrina Glerum. “The game really feels epic in a way that The Burning Crusade didn’t….Burning Crusade felt like an extension of the (original) game. This really feels epic, and that you’re part of something grand.”

There’s no way to be sure, of course, that the new expansion–for which an official launch date has not been announced–will be a success, but there does seem to be a lot of enthusiasm being expressed for it, both among players like Glerum and on various WoW blogs and forums.

Birmingham City University, a college in the U.K., will start offering a degree in social media, the Telegraph is reporting. According to the report, the course will delve into “what people can do on Facebook and Twitter.” The course will also help students learn more about blogs, podcasts, and other social activities. Upon successful completion of the course, students will earn a master’s degree in social media.

Ecomii.com, a site that offers visitors green lifestyle information, launched a redesigned site Monday that provides users with more information about “living a healthier, greener life.” The site features an enhanced navigation system to find information sooner. Its new gardening center helps visitors with landscape design and growing organic vegetables. The site also boasts a hybrid and electric
car section, as well as a news center so visitors can be kept abreast of environmental news. The new site design is live now.

Venture capitalist firm Charles River Ventures announced Monday that its partners have raised $320 million for its 14th fund, Charles River Partnership XIV. The company will use that funding to continue to invest in start-ups. Right now, it has investments in Twitter and Yammer, to name a few.

Truphone, a provider of VoIP solutions, unveiled a new calling plan Monday that will charge customers a flat monthly fee to call mobile phones or landlines. Dubbed TruUnlimited, the calling plan allows users to call anyone anywhere in the world for the same fee at any time in the day. Truphone is making the calling plans available now. It will cost about $14 per month to call landlines and $35 per month to call mobile phones.

Social network Kickapps announced Monday that it will now support Facebook Connect and OpenID. Kickapps-powered sites don’t necessarily need to include access to OpenID or Facebook Connect, but the option is being made available to all Kickapps clients. According to the company, information from a user’s MySpace or Facebook accounts will be imported into their KickApps profile automatically. Sites that deploy OpenID and Facebook Connect will no longer require a unique Kickapps login.

In simple terms, Titanium is an open-source platform that allows you to build desktop and mobile applications using standard Web technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In the future we are going to announce some cloud-based, software-as-a-service style services to add on top of the infrastructure that will extend the functionality. We will be announcing these in Q1 of next year, so stay tuned.

Titanium means you can easily work with your existing Web development skills, you can build native desktop applications with all the traditional functionality of a desktop app and you are completely free to innovate and push the boundaries since the platform is entirely open. You don’t even need to use the Appcelerator SDK at all.

(Credit: Appcelerator) Titanium is primed to be the open-source Adobe AIR killer so I sat down with Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator’s CEO, to drill him on the preview release.

We first came out with the Appcelerator SDK that allows you to rapidly build a rich Web app with fully integrated front-end and back-end plug-ins. The back-end supports a ton of programming languages and frameworks and on the front-end we have a tool kit to support building the apps–so it makes it super easy. We wanted to take it one step further though and so came out with Titanium today.

It is the open source model that will make it possible for Titanium to build up such a strong user base. We are lowering the cost and timing it takes to develop applications and there is no need to hire other vendors because you can use your existing web development skills.

Any apps developed using Titanium so far?

Haynie: When we announced Titanium today we also released a couple demo apps as user cases for people to check out. In the true spirit of open source, you can download the full versions of the apps and the full source code. You can check out Tweetanium, our Twitter client, and Playtanium, a YouTube video player, and a Contact Manager here: http://titaniumapp.com/demos. We’re very excited to see what people build on top of these applications though.

Appcelerator, an open-source company that makes it easier to build and manage rich Web applications with aim to bring them to the desktop, today announced Titanium, its new platform to do just this.

Q: What is Titanium and why should we care?

Haynie: We started Appcelerator with the dream of developing an open platform to make it faster, cheaper and easier to build rich Web applications and deploy them in various environments such as the desktop and mobile device.

I also believe this current economic situation is an incredible time for open-source companies. It’s a really good time to be doing what we’re doing. We are seeing a worldwide hiring freeze, but still the expectations of growth, so everyone is looking for ways to get more out of what they already have.

Jeff Haynie, CEO Appcelerator

So in addition to launching Titanium you are also announcing a Series A financing round of $4.1 million. How did you raise it?

Haynie: Appcelerator was bootstrapped for the first two years, but with the SDK we were able to bring in revenue through additional services and training sessions. To continue to make the serious investments in the products and support our customers, we needed to raise our Series A round and were fortunate enough to hook up with Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures and Larry Augustin, who are both true believers in the need for Web apps to move to the desktop and the belief that open source is the only way this will truly be made a reality.

The bane of many open source companies existence is monetization. Any details on how you plan to monetize Titanium and actually make some money?
Haynie: We are a pure open source company, so we will never do the bait and switch open-source model and start charging for Titanium or offer a crippled version or an enterprise version. Titanium will always be free and open for anyone to use–everything you see is what you get.

Microsoft's internal open-source education

The further up the stack from the operating system Red Hat goes, the more it’s going to have to work with non-open source components, just as its Linux server business has always depended upon supporting the industry’s leading proprietary applications and databases.

It wasn’t always thus. Ironically, Microsoft and Red Hat have shared a common problem, though they have appeared diametrically opposed at a superficial level. The proprietary/open-source divide has sharply split the two companies, but even as Microsoft’s cold war against open source is thawing so, too, has pragmatism crept in at Red Hat.

And yet, something has brought the two companies together in a manner which suggests to me that both are converging in the way they view technology:

The
iPhone.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

It’s software, not religion. It matters, but not that much.

Bringing PHP into the Microsoft fold

(Credit:
Matt Asay)
which introduced the complexity of supporting its products on Windows (at least 50 percent of JBoss’ downloads were on Windows) as well as business model difficulties: Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s CTO, once told me that he wasn’t sure Red Hat’s revenue model would work above the operating system.

If you were to try to think of the two most diametrically opposed software companies in the industry, Red Hat and Microsoft come to mind. One is the open-source leader, while the other has tenaciously held to its proprietary software background.

Microsoft has the reverse problem. While it has occasionally forgotten that it’s a platform company, Microsoft is a platform company and should welcome all sorts of software on that platform. That means both open and proprietary, as well as mixes of the two. The more Microsoft remembers the need to strengthen its platform, the more it will necessarily embrace open source.

Red Hat believes that real customer choice comes from an open ecosystem of software. Microsoft believes something similar, but prefers customers buy into its own software ecosystem (Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.) and stay there.

Walk Red Hat’s Raleigh, N.C., campus and you’ll see Apple’s iPhone in the hands of an increasing number of Red Hat employees. Cross the country to Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus and you’ll see the same thing. I’ve been to both campuses in the past few months and was surprised by the number of iPhones being used.

Ubuntu @ Microsoft

This isn’t to suggest that either Microsoft or Red Hat is going to drop their differences overnight and become indistinguishable in their strategies. But both are growing out of their binary perspectives on the world, and that’s a very good thing for their customers and partners. In fact, I suspect that customers will ultimately drive out the bile and bitterness that has unnecessarily separated software that customers want to run together.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

There is, of course, a very good reason for this, and it should send a ray of hope to those who believe that open source and proprietary software are destined to live out binary, partisan lives:

Both Red Hat and Microsoft employees ultimately are consumers and care more about what works than dogmatically clinging to The One True Way to use or sell software.

This convergence is perhaps most easily viewed by the iPhone usage on both campuses, which suggests a pragmatism and affinity for “what works” that will increasingly see both companies abandon old dogmas and embrace customer realities.

Microsoft grapples with Linux.

For Red Hat, the big shift came with its JBoss acquisition,

commentary

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

See the pictures in this posting? They were taken while at Microsoft, not Red Hat. Microsoft knows it needs to figure out how to embrace open source.

CBS News has a video courtesy of the National Geographic Channel.

Yves Rossy leapt from a plane and crossed the English Channel on a homemade jet-propelled wing set on Friday.

Rossy, who is also known as FusionMan, averaged 125 mph as he zoomed across 22 miles. The flight lasted 10 minutes to 13 minutes–depending on whether one is counting the channel crossing or the entire flight. He even did a figure eight as he came over England.

Personally, I would settle for a jetpack.

(Credit:
Jet-Man.com)

Yves Rossy flew over the Swiss Alps earlier this year. For more photos from that flight, click on the image.

NetNewsWire for iPhone is a feeds repository, but a good one. You won’t be able to add feeds at this early stage, but the application will syncs with any of your existing NewsGator accounts for NetNewsWire for Macintosh, FeedDemon, Inbox, and NewsGator Online. The application lets new users to sign up from the iPhone. You’ll also be able to save posts in a clippings folder for later perusal, and read the full article on
Safari.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Like many other applications, NetNewsWire is the iPhone version of an already-brawny Web service operated by NewsGator, and one whose desktop versions CNET Download.com editors have already acclaimed for its usability on Macs and on PCs, where it’s known as FeedDemon.

Of the several news readers offered in Apple’s iTunes App Store to date, NetNewsWire stands out as the most appealing. Unlike Mobile News from the Associated Press, NetNewsWire pulls in stories from multiple sources, and unlike Google Reader, it does so nearly instantly in a true native application (Google Readers whisks you to an
iPhone-optimized Web application after you select it from a list of more options on Google Mobile.)

So, please, Twitter, we need to know about all the victims. This is the tech equivalent of rubbernecking. Which, in a way, is what Twitter is all about.

Possible Hacked Tyler Perry sample: “I am sitting on my sofa. Hey, could I turn this into a movie?”

Now a devious, perhaps ludicrously insane, hacker has taken it further. He (must be a ‘he.’ Women can spell and are never rude) found his way into the twitterdom of celebrities and tinkered with their tweets.

And is it possible he paraphrased musician Dave Matthews?

Real Shaquille O’Neal sample: “Even the aliens no me, da ones real far, i speak to em like ibadablaa, Jigamagla, bockeraaa.”

Real Dave Matthews sample: “Snow in Seattle. Snow still snowing. A day late and better better better. Snow snow. Snow. Doughnuts and coffee.” Possible Hacked Dave Matthews sample: “Dull, dull music. Music still musing. Dull, dull. Dull. Ten beers and massive bag of taco chips. Just to get through it.”

I can find only meager evidence of what these other 29 might have been. The Huffington Post was one. But there could have been more celebrities in this twitternapping. So I am concerned that the spoilsports at Twitter found these celebrity tweenage alterations before the unwashed followers were brainwashed and removed them.

(Credit: CC Gianmaria TM)

This is celebrity astrophysicist, Margherita Hack. I wonder what she thinks of Twitter.

Could it be that the hacker managed to improve on the deep tweeting of Tyler Perry (the chap who brought you, oh, every movie with ‘Tyler Perry’ in front of it)?

Could it be that he hacked into the everyday movements of NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal?

Even the President-elect’s updates were allegedly downgraded to the level of a sad shock jock. On the other hand, Bill O’Reilly’s falsified twittering, while misspelled, was, to some, rather touching.

For example, he attempted to suggest to twitterers of Britney Spears foul words that would surely never have emerged from her imagination. He implied to followers of Rick Sanchez that the CNN anchor partakes of scientifically concocted substances, surely a (free)baseless lie.

Possible Hacked Shaquille O’Neal sample: “Sippin’ some Earl Grey tea, Placido Domingo lappin’ at my ears.”

Thanks to Google, they know where you live. Thanks to Twitter, they know when you floss your teeth.

Real Tyler Perry sample: “Our goal is to truly maximize the presence of the Tyler Perry brand via Twitter–Make it a point to tell your networks to follow in.”

But may I be the first to ask the important question: What about the other 29?
Twitter declared that 33 accounts were blessed with messages whose genesis may well, indeed, have been a bottle.

(Note that a bug in the form moves the 1 vs. 16 and 3 vs. 14 games of the South region’s first round to the finals and regional sections, respectively. I couldn’t figure out why those two games kept jumping to the end of the queue, so I left them there for now. I’ll try to get them back in line prior to Thursday’s tip-off.)

(Credit:
Google Docs and Spreadsheets)

The online files I created are just for fun, as you’ll probably discern after you get a load of my off-the-wall selections. The form that accompanies the brackets uses simple two-item drop-down menus for recording your winners in the first round and text boxes for entering your selections in subsequent rounds.

For last year’s March Madness, I created a version of the tournament brackets on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and invited readers to download it to make and share their picks. This year’s version of the brackets spreadsheet includes a form you can use to make your picks and post them to the public version of the spreadsheets.

Use the "Choose from a list" option to create simple drop-down menus for making your NCAA basketball picks.

And who do I think is going to win it all this year? None other than Oklahoma over Connecticut in the final. You heard it here first.

It’s that time of year again: days are getting longer, the weather’s warming up (a bit), and 65 college basketball teams are hoping to be the last ones standing when the buzzer sounds, ending the last of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament’s 64 games.

You may notice that in my picks, I stuck with the chalk most of the time. Last year, I was picking upsets left and right, only to have the four No. 1 seeds make it to the the Final Four. I don’t see all the top seeds making it to Detroit this year, though I did pick two No. 1s and two No. 2s.

You won’t win a major prize, if your selections are the most accurate; I’m just a poor blogger, after all, not a multimillion-dollar sports network. If it’s fame and fortune you’re after, you’ll find no shortage of sites that let you compete with thousands or millions of other b-ball prognosticators.