| Activision CEO: 'Call of Duty' is like Facebook and Google launches phones into space |
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The "Call of Duty" games effectively adapt to changing communication habits, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of game publisher Activision, told CNN on Tuesday.The latest entry in the console-game series, "Call of Duty: Black Ops," has netted more than $1 billion in sales worldwide since it came out on November 9, Activision announced on Tuesday. In that time, gamers have spent 600 million hours with the game, the company said."More people play 'Black Ops' every day than watch Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon, combined," Kotick boasted. "The audience of 'Call of Duty' is probably greater in terms of size ... than in any other interactive form of entertainment."Activision didn't invent war games or first-person shooters. Even today, the genre continues to attract new big-budget entrants. [Read the full article] Internet phone service Skype was working to get back to normal Thursday after an outage that started the day before."We've seen evidence of a significant increase in the number of people online," Skype said on its Twitter page on Thursday morning. A @Skype Twitter post at 8:54 a.m. said the increase was estimated to be 10 million people online."Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to predict on an individual level when you'll be able to sign in again, and we thank you for your patience in the meantime."The outage started Wednesday, Skype said on its website, and technical problems were keeping people from logging into the internet phone service."The ability of one Skype user to find another relies on what we call 'supernodes', and yesterday, a number of these failed due to a software issue, which we've now identified. Our engineers are working to resolve the problem," Skype said in an update on its website Thursday. [Read the full article] How many videos go viral per year? From Bed Intruder to Annoying Orange, there's an insane amount of memes we've run with in 2010.Called the Klick! Holiday Party, the seven-minute clip, from ad agency Klick!, is a mock festive event in its cubicle-laden offices.What we get are dozens of employees dressed up like their favorite memes, dancing to The Isley Brothers' classic "Shout."The video is an almost continuous shot, but more impressive is the sheer number of memes it hits. Klick! claims more than 50 are referenced, including:• Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" • Tron Guy • Double Rainbow • I Can Haz CheezburgerI caught about three dozen, but there were a few I didn't even recognize -- and I wrote a book on the history of memes.The video is both brilliant and overwhelming, and it will probably make you eager to hunt down the viral ideas you haven't caught yet. [Read the full article] 
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