Infinity Blade: Dungeons gameplay finally revealed, two months after teaser at Apple’s iPad launch

Revealed at Apple’s iPad 3 launch event, Epic Games’ new Infinity Blade: Dungeonstitle has been forever ‘Coming Soon.’ Today, we can finally bring you some footage (via Joystiq) as to how the game will look, highlighting a shift from the previous titles in the franchise.
Whereas previously you fought one-on-one with your enemies, Infinity Blade: Dungeons features a top-down view and (dare I say it) has more of a Diablo III vibe about it. Add in some touchscreen gestures and you appear to have the makings of a pretty impressive iPad game.
The E3 trailer, in it’s entirety:
Infinity Blade: Dungeons looks really slick, utilising HDR graphics and tone mapping and incorporating new lighting that the iPad’s quad-core graphics processor can handle.
Epic Games CEO Mike Capps said during Apple’s iPad launch that the Unreal Engine takes advantage of the tablet’s impressive graphics capabilities, which Capps says bests the Xbox 360 or the PS3 as far as memory is concerned — as to how, he wouldn’t elaborate.
At the time, we figured we would see the app in a couple of weeks, that’s now been extended to a couple of months. If we were to guess, it will be made available at least by Apple’s WWDC conference, but Epic has given no indication as to its release.

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Apple no longer censoring the word ‘jailbreak’ in U.S. iTunes Store

Yesterday a bit of a hullabaloo was started when it was discovered that Apple was censoring the word ‘jailbreak’ in the U.S. App Store. Now, that censoring has been corrected, and the word is visible across all categories, including podcasts, songs, iTunes U, iBooks and more.
This censoring was likely the result of an error in the ratings for the U.S. App Store, as the word appeared just fine worldwide. As I conjectured yesterday, we have seen Apple fix the problem quietly, and the error has been rectified.

In closing, I’ll just quote what I said then:

If Apple was simply enacting an ‘iTunes-wide’ ban on the word jailbreak, why would it only do so in the U.S.? Much of the world’s jailbreak community is located internationally, because one of the first major reasons to jailbreak iOS devices was to unlock it from its exclusivity to AT&T as a carrier. Why wouldn’t Apple censor it in the most popular regions for the term?
If I had to conjecture, I would say that this problem will likely quietly fix itself now that it has gained some attention. Don’t be surprised to see the word jailbreak suddenly re-appear like normal in iTunes.

It looks like this is exactly what has taken place. Rest easy jailbreakers, Apple isn’t out to get you.

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Facebook spikes 13.16% to $43 per share on NASDAQ debut; $117.7b market cap

In its public trading debut on NASDAQ, Facebook’s share price immediately jumped 13.16% to $43, instantly giving the social networking giant a market capitalization of $117.7 billion. That’s $13.7 billion more than yesterday’s $104 billion valuation.
Yesterday, the company priced its IPO at $38 per share. Facebook’s trading debut spike is in line with debut patterns of other companies, and is especially unsurprising given the hype around the company’s flotation.
Facebook also raised the price of its shares, and added more total shares to its IPO in the week that preceded it. Pricing was finally set yesterday, after a day of meetings. It was unsure, at least publicly, if Facebook would be priced at $38, or $39. The company eventually settled on $38. Facebook’s IPO is the largest ever for a technology or Internet firm, and the second largest in US history. Visa’s offering was slightly higher.
TNW will be watching Facebook throughout the day. It will be quite interesting to see where the stock ends its first day of trading. As it is Friday, the company will have less than one day of trading before the weekend moratorium hits, although after-hours trading may be very active for the newly public company.
According to Bloomberg, some 82,000,000 shares of Facebook traded in the first 30 seconds. In the first 5 minutes, 100 million shares traded hands, Reuters reports.
Facebook has eased since its first pop, and is trending down towards the $40 mark. Check Google Finance for real time updates.

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See all the photos Facebook employees are posting to Instagram on IPO day

It’s been a long time coming but it’s finally happened, Facebook has gone public on NASDAQ and is offering 421,233,615 shares to investors. Updated.
As you can imagine, there’s quite a party going down at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, with thousands of employees sharing their experiences directly on the social network, but also via one of its newest acquisitions — Instagram.
Thanks to Instagram’s API and Spots.io, we can see every photo that the guys and girls at Facebook are posting to the image sharing service, in almost real-time.
Take a look for yourself.

If you’re so inclined, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for the location, so you can be notified of the latest Instagram photos shared from Facebook’s California campus.
Instagram might not officially be a Facebook property (it’s facing a longer than expected wait thanks to an FTC probe), but its employees are already big fans of the app.
If you want a good look at what they are sharing without having to subscribe to individual updates, this has to be the easiest way.
Update: If you’re looking for an alternative, as Spots.io seems to have overloaded, check out this gallery at Instabam.

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Facebook drops, kissing IPO price before rebounding

In a nail-biting bit of trading, Facebook landed at the $38 mark, and sat there, almost falling below its IPO price. The company had spiked as high as $43.20 this morning, according to Google Finance, but settled quickly.
Zynga’s plunge and halt could not have helped. Here’s the chart, as things stand:

I’ll bet a whole host of investors are more than glad that Facebook didn’t break the psychological boundary that its IPO price represents. Whatever jitters investors seem to have had, they appear to be leaving.
Of course, the entire financial world is staring at the company, given the size and importance of its initial public offering. For more on Facebook’s IPO, check TNW’sprevious coverage.

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India tipped to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest Facebook market by 2015

It has just seen Brazil overtake it to become Facebook’s largest overseas market, but India is being tipped to overtake the US and the Latin American country to become the planet’s largest collection of Facebook users by 2015.
India currently has 57 million registered Facebook members, putting it some distance behind the US (157 million) and narrowly below Brazil (59 million) — according toSocialbakers — but India has barely scratched the service of its online potential, and could bring hundreds of millions of its population online in the coming years.
Speaking to CNBC, Gartner analyst Shalini Verma predicted that a change of order will take place before the end of 2015, driven by a continued growth in mobile-based Web access:

India could overtake the United States in the next three years. Last year, Facebook users in India doubled. Growth will be driven by mobile Internet users in second- and third-tier cities.

Mobile is the key factor for the development of Internet access in India, which, in turn, would power Facebook and other services’ growth. Currently, fixed-line penetration is below 10 percent — the country passed 100 million users in November — with mobile already accounting for half of all Internet use, according to Statcounter data, and phone-based access is set to only increase.
Smartphones and Web-enabled feature phones are the driving force behind India’s online revolution. Smartphone shipments to the country passed 10 million for the first time last year, taking just ten months to set the new record, according to CyberMedia Research, but there is still much more to come.
Smartphones accounted for just 6 percent of the 160 million plus mobile devices that shipped to India in 2011. Shipments are very much in response and anticipation to sales and, with country-wide monthly smartphones purchases topping one million for the first time in November, retailers are set to order and sell devices in greater quantities than ever before this year.
The increasing affordability of low-end smartphones and Web-enabled feature phones is a key factor seen as having the potential to bring lower-income India’s online with a more app centric mobile experience.
Nokia is making a particular push for the first time Internet phone buyer market with a series of affordable feature phones, including its Asha series – which begins at $60 — while two sub-$50 phones were announced last week.
Facebook itself is also pushing its low end offering, having added seven new Indian languages to its ‘Facebook For Every Phone’ app, which caters for feature phones in the country.
There are also encouraging signs on the infrastructure side of things. India was a relative late adopter of 3G networks but it already has its first commercial 4G deployment, after AirTel launched its LTE service last month.
Initially available in just two cities and via dongles only, the service will expand to cover more parts of the country in time and, once LTE-compatible device ownership swells, smartphones and tablets will be included too.
Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor heralded the significance of the 4G service as “driving fundamental changes in society at large” and wider adoption of mobile Web and Internet-enabled devices is likely to see Facebook, Twitter and other online services seriously grow their presence among India’s 1.2 billion population.
Facebook itself has previously admitted that India will become its biggest market at some point, but it remains to be seen if Facebook user numbers there can accelerate at such a rate that it overtakes the US by 2015.
Based on recent growth (1.96 percent in the last three months) — which doesn’t account for saturation — the US will pass 200 million members by the end of 2015. That would require Facebook to grow by more than three and half times its current user base in India – a big ask.
Currently, half of India’s Internet users are registered members of Facebook, which suggests that the demand to support such growth is there. Assuming that the site held its popularity among Indians, it could break 200 million users if the country is able to bring a further 300 million new Internet users online by 2015.
However way you look at it, the requirement is challenging but Facebook will be concerned with growing its user base (and revenues) in India, and that is certain to happen regardless of whether India tops the US market, or not.
Note: For anyone sceptical that India’s impoverished hold any interest in owning a smartphone, it’s worth remembering that there are more mobile phones in the country than toilets, as CNN reported. Equally, the Internet (and Facebook) can provide genuine benefits for everyday life – as these Indian farmers can testify.

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Iran plans to sue Google over leaving the Persian Gulf nameless on its Maps service

It seems that Google’s woes over its decision to leave the Persian Gulf nameless on Google Maps are far from over, with Iran saying it will sue the tech company as a result, AP reports.
After the move stirred up quite a bit of controversy among Iranian Internet users, the Iranian government was quick to call out Google for its decision, accusing the company of fabricating lies, adding that the move would not do much to engender trust among its users and “diminish the corporation’s credibility.”
Speaking to the BBC, Google’s stance was to stay out of the matter, claiming that it’s not the only unnamed item on the maps.
Clearly not convinced with the justification, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast stated that Google was liable to “serious damages”, and speaking to Iranian news agency Mehr, he added that Iran has made it clear that they are more than willing to take the matter to court.
The topic has proved to be a highly controversial and politicized one, with Gulf and Arab states choosing to refer to the body of water as the Arabian Gulf, while Iranians insist on standing by the historical Persian Gulf.
Google may have chosen to bury its head on the sand on this one, as a way of simply staying out of the argument, but the stance may have brought the tech company more trouble than it bargained for.
Google is no stranger to controversy in Iran, having its products periodically blocked, and most recently Gmail is among the many foreign email services which have beenblacklisted for correspondence with Iranian 

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