Colossatron: Massive World Threat Revealed

Halfbrick Studios, the developer behind Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja, has announced Colossatron: Massive World Threat. Inspired by monster movies and anime of the 80s, Colossatron casts players as a massive, city-smashing robot snake, whose sole purpose is to cause destruction.

The strategy lies in color-coded Powernodes you attach to your Colossatron, each of which features different weapons and abilities, and can be combined for "explosive secrets" within different Powernode tiers.

"Success is measured by one key metric – dollars of damage caused," the developer explains. "The more powerful Colossatron is, the more destroyed and the higher the score. Players can compare and even combine their destructive powers, with additional competitive and cooperative social features revealed soon."

Check out the debut trailer below. Think it'll have the same addictive qualities as Fish out of Water and Jetpack Joyride? Let us know in the comments below.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s currently reading Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

Get Well? Fidel Castro Suffers Massive Stroke, Doctors Say He’s Close To Death And Give Him Weeks To Live!

Is this the end of an era?

Via TMZ reports:

Fidel Castro has reportedly suffered an embolic stroke … and his health is so bad, the 86-year-old former leader of Cuba can barely eat, speak or recognize people.

The news is being reported by El Nuevo Herald, which says it spoke with Jose Marquina — “a respected doctor” who assured the paper he has firsthand sources and information about Castro.

The doctor told the Herald, “[Castro] could last weeks like that, but what I can say is that we’ll never again see him in public.”

The last time Castro was seen out in public was back in March — when Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba.

Who knows what kind of power struggle Castro’s death will bring about, but for the sake of the people of Cuba we hope the transition is a peaceful one.