New financing in tow, Playsino placed his bet on social casino games

Titan gaming, makers of a gaming platform, the content sites and game tournaments based social networks to cash and prize is now known that it is embarking on a complete makeover, its rebranding as Playsino, along with a new focus, CEO and contains some new financing.

Under his new moniker, Playsino looks to take advantage of its traction in tournaments and space and emerging on another vertical double down virtual rewards: social casino games. Ambitious, Playsino building "the world's largest social gaming Casino platform" is presented, and is naming a new Chief Executive to help to lead the way. Brock Pierce, who will be CEO of the start, the Managing Director of Clearstone is gaming Global Fund and founded a serial entrepreneur, with eight companies and acquired 30 more in various capacities.

You Pierce an early role in the development of virtual goods, Foundation, Internet gaming entertainment (IGE) in the year 2001 and Zam in 2003. In addition to the new leadership, Playsino is also today announced that it has raised $1.5 million in venture capital as part of a current round. It was from IDM venture capital, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, Pacific Capital Group, Siemer ventures and several angel investors, including Jordan Simons GCP and Wicks Walker W4 ventures led. Existing investor tomorrow ventures participated in the round.

With the new capital in tow, Playsino puts on a mission to build the largest social free-to-play-casino on the Internet. Pierce takes the view that social gaming at a turning point, and that social casino games are the catalyst for this movement. Half of the people on the Web, about 510 million, he says, play or some kind of social game - a gaming audience, which has grown since 2010, at 71 percent. With H2 gaming appreciate that online gambling could be as much as $30 billion globally by 2013, and the U.S. accounting for $4.5 billion, as a whole, online betting represents a great opportunity.

Social casino games have the ability of looking for generating effect of the games combine, the Zynga have made such big player in social gaming, such as Farmville with the monetisation strategies of the more hardcore games Pierce believes is a dangerous combination. The CEO says that he is focused on using the launch of the new capital of internal development, but the company aims, which publish corresponding third-party content and will be careful, independent players also purchase. So probably we will see Playsino develop their own casino games in connection with the construction of a platform that so well can sell their games developers and established players taking a cue from Zynga.com.

While the space opportunity represents the large casinos and gambling companies are moving online in the process and competition is certain to increase. There was also much attention from the Justice Department, and as the space forward, is moving there probably are allowed to play a number of provisions for the protection of consumers, but the players also constrain the amount. According to BusinessWeek, at least five States have already introduced legislation, the people playing Web Poker against other States would allow.

It is a space that is very much in transition States consider online gambling legislation, and their development can be shaped by regulatory restrictions, but there are certainly a lot of money to be made social casino games and Playsino wants to be a part of it. Although it is still too early, the established game companies have a simple way in the social casino games, if they are regulated as the space, see so the start with some addictive, high-quality games to be ready, when it is smothered by the Zyngas and EAs who wants to avoid the world.

Windows 8 Finally corrects high-resolution interface problems for Metro only

Almost certainly in response to the recent release of the Retina display iPad 3 armed, Microsoft has published the details of how Windows 8 will cope with a wide range of screen resolutions and sizes, from 1366 × 768 laptop (112 PPI) cheaper to 2560 × 1440 (291 PPI) tablets and everything else. Windows will now gracefully with density of 96 PPI pixels above. Unfortunately, and quite disappointed users Windows dedicated veterans, these much-needed fixes will be valid only for the Metro and desktop interface.

Historically, Windows was absolutely atrocious to handle any display with greater than 96 PPI — but, until recently, this has not posed much of a problem because display with a pixel density of 96 PPI as well (Windows default from the years ' 80) were few and far between. With the emergence of mobile computers that displays 1920 × 1080 crams in pixels in 14 inches (157-PPI), and demonstrating that tablets will soon have a PPI in 2048 × 1536 200s iPad, Microsoft was forced to make some changes.

Without scaling, the physical size of UI elements decrease increases PPI. On the desktop with a mouse and keyboard (and assuming good eyesight), this doesn't matter too much. The story is very different with touchpad (75% of all consumers Windows PCs are laptops) and touchscreen. To work around this, the operating system must enlarge the interface — an icon that the 32 pixels wide on a 96 PPI display must be scaled up to 64 pixels (for example) on high density screens. In the picture below you can see the effects of an increase in the PPI without resizing; increased screen resolution, as does the difficulty of hitting a button with your finger.

In Windows 8, the Metro interface (new apps start up screen and underground) will have three different levels "zoom": 100%, which is a 11.6-inch 1366 × 768 (112 PPI) display; display of 140%, representing a 1920 × 1080 (190 PPI) 11.6-inch full HD; and 180%, which is a 11.6-inch display 2560 × 1440 (253 PPI) WQHD. Almost every desktop monitor falls into the category 100% (2560 × 1440 display 27 inches is only 109 PPI), while many laptops and tablets to use zoom 140 and 180%. Blog Post: Windows 8 building does not mention the Desktop side of things at all, so it seems that it will be stuck with the current zoom controls, poor.

Windows 8, with zoom scale

As far as developers are concerned, creating a scalable app is simple: If you provide vector graphics, Windows 8 will take care of everything for you; otherwise, just need to provide bitmap images for each of the three levels of zoom. Windows will automatically manage the resizing of interface elements. Of course it helps that Metro is composed almost entirely of rectangles and typography, both of which are easily resized.

Resize icon in WIndows 8

In fact, Windows 8 will do exactly what iOS has to do when scaling up original iPhone and iPad apps for the iPhone 4 or iPad 3 with a Retina display. There is a rather substantial difference, though: Apple devices, because of fixed proportions and dimensions of the screen, the image simply needs to be doubled in size (scaled 200%). This is easy to do and has no risk of causing any graphical anomalies. Windows 8 is not so easy: If you resize an icon of 32 × 32 pixels of 140%, ends with 44.8 × 44.8 — which then must be rounded upwards or downwards for 44 and 45. It's the same story for 180%.

Windows Task Manager 8: a little fiddly to PPI touch high?It might not be very obvious with the icons, but with a more intricate layout and especially websites defined with CSS, a difference of 1 or 2 pixels can make a big difference: no lines in the right place, navigation bars and text wraps incorrectly, and so on. Also one of the simplest (and most common), line 1 pixels, would have been forced into an existential crisis: does remain, get 1 pixels scaled up to 2, or straddle the fence and become blurry and anti-aliased?

As for where this leaves the side Windows Desktop 8, we're not sure. What Office or Photoshop will be like on a 2560 × 1440 laptop, without correct interface resizing? Microsoft has made a lot of noise on the Ribbon UI to takeover Explorer 8, Windows, but that will be usable at 300 PPI? The new version of Task Manager (pictured above) — can you imagine trying to click on those panels on a small