Michael B. Farrell for the Boston Globe (via Gameindustry.biz):

Despite the recent setbacks, the video game industry in Massachusetts is growing fast. The sector directly ­employs at least 2,041 people at 112 companies, according to a September survey by Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI), a state-­sponsored game development center at Becker College in Worcester. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they are ­developing some kind of mobile games.

It’ll be interesting to see how many of these studios can build sustainable businesses in the mobile space without needing to be acquired by larger companies or diversify into the console space, where at least some of them are very, very reluctant to enter.

Mark Hattersley for Macworld UK:

Independent benchmark tests by Futuremark have revealed that Microsoft’s Surface tablet is surprisingly slow at web browsing. When run through the Peacekeeper: Universal Browser Test, the Microsoft Surface speed test came out at just 348, almost third of the result from the new Apple iPad 4’s score of 951. The Surface also scored slower than the Apple iPad mini (515), Nexus 7 (489) and even last year’s Apple iPhone 4S model (438). In fact, the Microsoft Surface only just beat the Eee Pad Transformer Prime (344).

Keep trying, Microsoft. I’m sure you’ll get it right someday.

Probably three years after the rest of the industry has moved on to something else.

Michael Noer for Forbes:

It’s a prototypical Silicon Valley ethos, with one exception: The Khan Academy, which features 3,400 short instructional videos along with interactive quizzes and tools for teachers to chart student progress, is a nonprofit, boasting a mission of “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” There is no employee equity; there will be no IPO; funding comes from philanthropists, not venture capitalists.

Much has been written and broadcast about Khan Academy in the past few months, but if you still aren’t familiar with it, check this out, then visit the site and find something to learn. What Salman Khan and his staff are doing is amazingly cool.

Jason Perlow for ZDNet:

Ever since I got my iPhone 5, and after receiving my new iPad 4th-generation this weekend, I’ve learned to love Apple’s new Lightning connector. At first, I was annoyed. I had already purchased a whole bunch of 30-pin charging cables for my iPad 3, along with matching square white Apple 10W to USB charging adapters. So now I had two types of connectors and two types of USB adapter cables to charge Apple products with.

Perlow goes on to explain why the Lightning connector found on Apple’s newer iOS devices impresses him so much – from the reversible design (unlike Micro USB, which is unidirectional) to the wattage specification (allowing more battery-hungry devices like the new iPad to charge).

He also talks about what a quagmire the Android market has become, thanks to a lack of standardization. Micro USB is popular but it’s hardly universal, and it’s unsuitable for many devices that are too power-hungry.

Admittedly, it’s a hard sell for some of us who have invested a lot of money in devices that work with Apple’s 30-pin dock connector, but as Perlow puts it, “I have to give the company credit for designing a better charging and syncing connector standard when I see it.”

Associated Press, via Washington Post:

Apple Inc. paid an income tax rate of only 1.9 percent on its earnings outside the U.S. in its latest fiscal year, a regulatory filing by the company shows.

We’ve heard a lot about income tax this year in the U.S. presidential race because of Mitt Romney’s tax returns (and lack thereof), and I guess this sensationalistic piece from the AP is trying to tap into some of that – Apple paid a scant 1.9 percent on earnings outside the United States. The article conveniently drops the fact that the domestic corporate tax rate is 35 percent to give readers some sense of outrage, painting Apple as corporate tax dodger by inference.

Look, the reason Apple and just about every other international corporation that does business in the US, Mitt Romney and other people with decent tax accountants on the payroll pay less than the rest of us is because they can, thanks to a hopelessly screwed up tax code that’s rife with loopholes.

Apple today announced it has sold three million iPads in just three days since the launch of its new iPad mini and fourth generation iPad—double the previous first weekend milestone of 1.5 million Wi-Fi only models sold for the third generation iPad in March.

So much for the people that said it wasn’t going to sell.

Wired:

Buckyballs are officially discontinued. If you don’t have any Buckyballs or Buckycubes and don’t get some soon, you never will.There are more than a billion of these magnets in consumers’ hands and only 24 reported incidents of children under 14 ingesting them. Skateboarding is statistically 890 times more dangerous than having Buckyballs.

As the story points out, you can still buy Buckyballs for a limited time and the company will continue to make other “Bucky-like” products.

Many thanks to LouderLogic for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Looking for the best listening experience for your iTunes Library? Look no further than LouderLogic – the Advanced Audio Player, featuring audio enhancement technology, crossfading, a 4-band parametric EQ, Spectrum Animation Mode, and dynamic Play Queues for interacting with your iTunes library on the fly.

LouderLogic brings the fullness you crave out of every song, using patent pending Audio Level eXtension (ALX) technology by McDSP. With the push of one button, LouderLogic minimizes volume fluctuations between songs while maximizing all the musical details the artist intended you to enjoy. Simply put, you’ll get more from your music!

The Verge:

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, Omni published dispatches from the world of science and some of the most iconic science fiction stories of the late twentieth century, including William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” (May 1981), Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon” (November 1990), and Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” (April 1991). The print magazine folded in 1995 — though an internet version lasted somewhat longer. Now, as of earlier this fall, the Internet Archive has a near-complete run of Omni, free for download or viewing online.

If you are “of a certain age”, you’ll remember Omni. It was kind of a precursor to Wired but much more out there.

io9:

If you didn’t catch Pixar’s latest feature Brave in the theaters, you may have missed out on La Luna, Enrico Casarosa’s stellar short about the moon’s custodians: a young boy, his father, and his grandfather. Hit play and let yourself be transported to a magical world where you can sweep up the stars and a child must learn to find his own way.

I like it.

Intial reports said that about 90,000 smartphones users were infected with a virus lurking in applications they downloaded, But later they found that developers stole more than 10 million pieces of personal information from users mobile.

Android is just so awesome, being all open and such.

Kudos to Josh on the review, especially for calling out the lack of LTE.

This is opening weekend for Wreck-It Ralph, the new animated feature film that takes you inside the world of video games as one character, tired of his repetitive life, goes out into the digital world in search of meaning.

I teamed up with Philip Michaels and Dan Moren on TechHive to list out some of our favorite (and most hated) movies either inspired by or featuring video games as a central plot point.

Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White is also at the Fifth Avenue store and has been monitoring availability of the various models. According to White, all three models of the white Wi-Fi iPad mini sold out in a little over an hour, with the black models following suit after about two hours. No additional shipments are expected at the store today.

Not bad at all.

Aaron Mahnke released a new e-book that he says will help take the friction out of doing your freelancing work. Sounds like something we could all use.

But shortly before 8 a.m., when the store usually opens for a new launch, I had a headcount of 550. According to the records Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has been keeping since 2008 (see below), that’s more customers than turned out for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S.And by 9:56 a.m. — four minutes before the doors finally opened — I counted 801 men, women and children. Only the iPhone 4 (1,300) and iPad 2 (1,190) drew bigger crowds.

Think about how this could eat away at Google’s business, especially considering newspapers in Brazil only saw a 5% drop in traffic.

I love how the iPad can instantly change the way we do things.

I figured the least I could do is to explain my decision in full – I like to think it might help protect you from nasty break-ups like this in the future.

This is the longest, most boring Apple break-up letter in history. Please Ed, just go.

In an order filed on Thursday, it was revealed that Samsung will be able to question Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller for up to three hours, with the deposition expected to cover matters associated with Apple’s request to ban products a jury found to be in violation of its patents.

Schiller can handle himself.

The Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor Plug-In expertly tempers dynamics and tames transients like no other device on the market. Created by UAD Direct Development partner Brainworx and Shadow Hills Industries founder Peter Reardon, this true-to-life emulation of Shadow Hills’ hallmark Mastering Compressor features a world-class signal path, controlling music dynamics in two stages — first with an Optical section, then with a Discrete (VCA) section. Both sections can be bypassed, providing a variety of compression sounds (Optical, Discrete, and combined) from a velvet touch to an iron fist.

I want this.

There is a blog for everything.

Hurricane or not, Comcast wants its Cable Box back.

DavidMahler:

One man’s quest to find the greatest headphones ever made!

Holy crap. This is without a doubt the single most exhaustive review of anything I’ve ever read in my life. Utterly insane the amount of time, money and effort this guy poured into this review. (hat tip to Dan Frakes for the link)

Read about the lengths these guys went to in order to keep all of the sites online. Remarkable.