A social network game (sometimes simply referred to as a social media game, social gaming, or online social game) is a type of online game that is played through social networks or social media. They typically feature gamification systems with multiplayer gameplay mechanics. Social network games were originally implemented as browser games. As mobile gaming took off, the games moved to mobile as well. While they share many aspects of traditional video games, social network games often employ additional ones that make them distinct. Traditionally they are oriented to be social games and casual games. The first cross-platform "Facebook-to-Mobile" social network game was developed in 2011 by a Finnish company Star Arcade. Social network games are amongst the most popular games played in the world, with several products with tens of millions of players. (Lil) Green Patch, Happy Farm, and Mob Wars were some of the first successful games of this genre. FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Kantai Collection, and The Sims Social are more recent examples of popular social network game. Major companies that made or published social network games include Zynga, Wooga and Bigpoint Games. == Demographics == As of 2010, it was reported that 55 percent of the social network gaming demographic in the United States consisted of women while in the United Kingdom, women made up nearly 60 percent of the demographic. In addition, most social gamers were around the 30 to 59 age range, with the average social gamer being 43 years old. Social gaming may appeal more to the older demographic because it is free, easier to advance through in a short period, does not involve as much violence as traditional video games, and is easier to grasp. Other games target certain demographics that use social media, such as Pot Farm creating a community by involving elements of cannabis subculture in its gameplay. == Technology and platforms == A social network video game is a client-server application. The client in the web era was implemented with a mix of web technologies like Flash, HTML5, PHP and JavaScript. When mobile games moved to mobile, social game front ends were developed using mobile platform technologies like Java, Objective-C, Swift and C++. The back end was a mix of programming languages and systems, including PHP, Ruby, C++ and go. Where social network video games diverged from traditional game development was the combination of real-time analytics to continuously optimize game mechanics to drive growth, revenue, and engagement. == Distinct features == The following table outlines common characteristics of social games, mentioned by Björk at the 2010 GCO Games Convention Online: A social network game may employ any of the following features: asynchronous gameplay, which allows rules to be resolved without needing players to play at the same time. gamification, which video game mechanics such as achievements and points are applied to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. community, as one of the most distinct features of social video games is in leveraging the player's social network. Quests or game goals may only be possible if a player "shares" with friends connected by the social network hosting the game or gets them to play, as well as "neighbors" or "allies". a lack of victory conditions: there are generally no victory conditions since most developers count on users playing their games often. The game never ends and no one is ever declared winner. Instead, many casual games have "quests" or "missions" for players to complete. This is not true for board game-like social games, such as Scrabble. a virtual currency which players usually must purchase with real-world money. With the in-game currency, players can buy upgrades that would otherwise take much longer to earn through in-game achievements. In many cases, some upgrades are only available with the virtual currency. == Engagement strategies == Since social network games are often less challenging than console games and they have relatively shorter game play, they use different techniques to stretch game play and tools to retain users. Continuous goals: The games assign specific goals for users to achieve. As they advance in the game, the goals become more challenging and time-consuming. They also provide frequent feedback with their performance. Every action will translate towards a certain goal that will be used to attain higher gaming capitals. Gaming capitals: Players are encouraged to earn different badges, trophies, and accolades that indicate their progress and accomplishments. Some achievements are unlocked just by advancing in the game while others may significantly alter the rationale behind the game and require extensive investment from players. The ways of gaining gaming capital are not limited to playing games but the games-related productive activities that are appreciated in the player's social circle too. By accumulating gaming capitals, they provide an intrinsic benefit to gamers as there is an avenue to boost their accomplishment and showcase their expertise of the game. The achievements are visible to their network of friends. Gaming capitals are a way for developers to increase replay value provides extended play time, and players get more value from the game. Motivation for collecting gaming capitals: 1. Legitimization: refers to society's willingness to approve or condone certain behavior. Collecting is about channeling one's materialistic desires into more meaningful pursuits. Game achievements serve a similar purpose, allowing players to justify the hours spent playing the game. 2. Self-extension: Gathering and controlling meaningful objects or experiences can work to gain one an improved sense of self. The collector's goal to complete a collection is symbolically about completing the self too. Events timed to real world: Popular games such as Dragon City and Wild Ones require users to wait a certain time period before their "energy bars" replenish. Without energy, they are unable to conduct any form of action. Gamers are forced to wait and return after their energy replenishes to continue playing. == Monetization == Social network games frequently monetize based on virtual good transactions, but other games are emerging that utilize newer economic models. === Virtual goods === Gamers will be able to purchase in game items like power-ups, avatar accessories, or decorative items users purchase within the game itself. This is realized by monetize products that do not technically exist. Virtual goods account for over 90% of all revenue generated by the world's top social game developers. Designers optimize user experience through additional gameplay, missions, and quests, without having to worry about overhead or unused stock. == Advertising == The following are common ways of advertising in social network games: === Banner advertisements === As banner ads within social networks tend to be where ad response is low, they tend to be priced at bottom-of-the-barrel CPMs of around $2. However, because social games generate so many page views, they are the biggest part of advertising revenue for the social gaming industry. === Video ads === Videos are the ad format with the most revenue per view. They tend to be higher-priced, either by CPMs ($35+ CPM in social games) or cost-per-completed-view. According to studies, video ads result in highest brand recall thus a good return on investment for advertisers. Video ads are shown either in in-game interstitials (e.g. when the game is loading a new screen) or through incentive-based advertising, i.e. you will get either an in-game reward or Facebook credits for watching an advertisement. === Product placement === A brand or product will be injected in a game in some way. Due to the variety of ways in which product placement can be accomplished in any media, and because the category is nascent, this category is not standardized at all, but some examples include branded in-game goods or even in-game quests. For example, in a game where you run a restaurant, you might be asked to collect ingredients to make a Starbucks Frappuccino, and receive in-game rewards for doing so. As these product placement deals are non-standard, they are largely charged with a production fee, which can be $350,000 to $750,000 depending on the type of placement and the popularity of the game. === Lead generation offers === Another form of advertising that is prevalent in many social games are lead generation offers. In this form of advertising, companies, usually from different industries, aim to convince players to sign up for their goods or services and in exchange, players will receive virtual gifts or advance in the game as a reward. === Sponsorship === ==== White label games ==== Applications that are built once, then individualized and licensed again and again. Developer can create a quality app focused on fun while leaving the edge
Realization (linguistics)
In linguistics, realization is the process by which some kind of surface representation is derived from its underlying representation; that is, the way in which some abstract object of linguistic analysis comes to be produced in actual language. Phonemes are often said to be realized by speech sounds. The different sounds that can realize a particular phoneme are called its allophones. Realization is also a subtask of natural language generation, which involves creating an actual text in a human language (English, French, etc.) from a syntactic representation. There are a number of software packages available for realization, most of which have been developed by academic research groups in NLG. The remainder of this article concerns realization of this kind. == Example == For example, the following Java code causes the simplenlg system [2] to print out the text The women do not smoke.: In this example, the computer program has specified the linguistic constituents of the sentence (verb, subject), and also linguistic features (plural subject, negated), and from this information the realiser has constructed the actual sentence. == Processing == Realisation involves three kinds of processing: Syntactic realisation: Using grammatical knowledge to choose inflections, add function words and also to decide the order of components. For example, in English the subject usually precedes the verb, and the negated form of smoke is do not smoke. Morphological realisation: Computing inflected forms, for example the plural form of woman is women (not womans). Orthographic realisation: Dealing with casing, punctuation, and formatting. For example, capitalising The because it is the first word of the sentence. The above examples are very basic, most realisers are capable of considerably more complex processing. == Systems == A number of realisers have been developed over the past 20 years. These systems differ in terms of complexity and sophistication of their processing, robustness in dealing with unusual cases, and whether they are accessed programmatically via an API or whether they take a textual representation of a syntactic structure as their input. There are also major differences in pragmatic factors such as documentation, support, licensing terms, speed and memory usage, etc. It is not possible to describe all realisers here, but a few of the emerging areas are: Simplenlg [3]: a document realizing engine with an api which intended to be simple to learn and use, focused on limiting scope to only finding the surface area of a document. KPML [4]: this is the oldest realiser, which has been under development under different guises since the 1980s. It comes with grammars for ten different languages. FUF/SURGE [5]: a realiser which was widely used in the 1990s, and is still used in some projects today OpenCCG [6]: an open-source realiser which has a number of nice features, such as the ability to use statistical language models to make realisation decisions.
Differentiable imaging
Differentiable imaging is a method within computational imaging that incorporates differentiable programming to design imaging systems. It treats the entire imaging process - from light passing through optical components to the numerical reconstruction—as a differentiable programming problem. This approach links optical hardware with numerical reconstruction, enabling joint optimization of both parts through differentiable programming. Differentiable imaging additionally extends the scope of computational imaging beyond image reconstruction, such as by aiding in characterization of optical components. == Background == Computational imaging combines optical hardware and computational algorithms to capture and reconstruct information that conventional imaging system cannot. This is achieved from a combination of the imaging system and the software used in the image reconstruction. Since the captured information may not directly show the image of the target, these systems often rely on numerical models that describe how light encodes the target. In practice, such models may deviate from the physical systems due to uncertainties such as noise, misalignments, manufacturing imperfections, environmental variations, etc. These uncertainties can cause a mismatch between the physical system and its numerical model, which may degrade reconstruction quality and limit the effectiveness of the hardware–software co-design. Uncertainty quantification is also studied in other hybrid physical–numerical systems, such as digital twin. While numerical modeling imaging systems date back to the several decades, such as the multislice method in electron microscopy or X-Ray nanotomography, differentiable imaging emphasizes jointly modeling uncertainties and solving inverse problems with image reconstruction simultaneously. Differentiable imaging transforms the traditional encoding model y = f ( x ) {\textstyle y=f(x)} into a more comprehensive formulation y = f ( x , θ ) {\textstyle y=f(x,\theta )} , where θ {\displaystyle \theta } represents a parameter set of mismatches between physical systems and numerical models. The forward model captures the entire imaging pipeline through a series of interconnected component functions: y = f ( x , θ ) , f = f n o i s e ∘ f c ∘ f o c ∘ f x ∘ f o i ∘ f i , {\displaystyle y=f(x,\theta ),\qquad f=f_{noise}\circ f_{c}\circ f_{oc}\circ f_{x}\circ f_{oi}\circ f_{i},} where the function composition operator ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } connects each system component, and θ = { θ c , θ o c , … } {\displaystyle \theta =\{\theta _{c},\theta _{oc},\ldots \}} encompasses uncertainty system parameters. Each component corresponds to specific physical processes within the imaging system, from illumination through object interactions to sensor behavior and noises. This forward model enables the formulation of an inverse problem that simultaneously optimizes system parameters while reconstructing images: x ∗ , θ ∗ = argmin x , θ L ( f ( x , θ ) , y ) + ∑ n = 1 N β n R n ( x ) {\displaystyle x^{},\theta ^{}={\text{argmin}}_{x,\theta }{\mathcal {L}}(f(x,\theta ),y)+\sum _{n=1}^{N}\beta _{n}{\mathcal {R}}_{n}(x)} s . t . x ∈ Ω x , θ ∈ Ω θ {\displaystyle s.t.\quad x\in \Omega _{x},\theta \in \Omega _{\theta }} Here, L ( f ( x , θ ) , y ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}(f(x,\theta ),y)} represents the fidelity term that quantifies the discrepancy between the model predictions and measured data. The whole process of the y = f ( x , θ ) {\displaystyle y=f(x,\theta )} is constructed as a computer graph based on differentiable programming, and the inverse problem is solved with gradient based algorithm, while the gradient is calculated with automatic differentiation. == Applications == One application of differentiable imaging is uncertainty management, which seeks to quantify and mitigate the impact of factors induce reality-numerical mismatch. Explicitly accounting for uncertainties can improve reconstruction accuracy and system robustness. Examples include: Model-related uncertainties: unknown or unmeasurable variables—for instance, optical system quantities that differ from the design specifications Data and system uncertainties: artifacts introduced during image acquisition, such as low-quality data, noise, or hardware imperfections Manufacturing uncertainties: variability in the production of imaging hardware—such as slight deviations in lens curvature or sensor alignment—that alters the physical system's behavior
Iubenda
iubenda (stylized in lowercase; Italian pronunciation: [juˈbɛnda]) is an Italian software company that develops tools intended to support website and application compliance with data protection and privacy regulations, including consent management platforms. The company was founded in 2011 in Milan by Andrea Giannangelo. In February 2022, the company was acquired by team.blue. == History == iubenda was founded in 2011 in Milan, Italy, initially focusing on automated privacy policy generation. In 2015, the company expanded its services to include cookie compliance tools following the implementation of ePrivacy regulations in Italy. In 2018, following the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, iubenda expanded its products to include consent management and compliance documentation services. In February 2022, iubenda was acquired by team.blue, which obtained a majority stake in the company. Italian media described the acquisition as one of the largest Italian technology startup exits in recent years. In October 2022, iubenda acquired consentmanager, a Sweden-based consent management provider. In 2025, the company acquired CookieFirst, a Netherlands-based consent management platform. In 2025, iubenda partnered with AccessiWay, a digital accessibility company owned by team.blue. == Activities == iubenda develops software tools intended to support compliance with data protection and privacy regulations. Its products include generators for privacy policies, cookie banners, terms and conditions documents, and consent management platforms. The company’s consent management platform integrates with frameworks used for online advertising and privacy compliance, including Google's Consent Mode. The platform is designed to support compliance with regulatory frameworks including the GDPR in the European Union, the UK GDPR, Brazil’s LGPD, Switzerland’s FADP and privacy laws in the United States. Its tools can be integrated with content management systems, web applications, and other digital platforms, including WordPress. The company operates internationally, with a customer base of more than 150,000 organisations, primarily in Europe and the Americas.
Fabric computing
Fabric computing or unified computing involves constructing a computing fabric consisting of interconnected nodes that look like a weave or a fabric when seen collectively from a distance. Usually the phrase refers to a consolidated high-performance computing system consisting of loosely coupled storage, networking and parallel processing functions linked by high bandwidth interconnects (such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand) but the term has also been used to describe platforms such as the Azure Services Platform and grid computing in general (where the common theme is interconnected nodes that appear as a single logical unit). The fundamental components of fabrics are "nodes" (processor(s), memory, and/or peripherals) and "links" (functional connections between nodes). While the term "fabric" has also been used in association with storage area networks and with switched fabric networking, the introduction of compute resources provides a complete "unified" computing system. Other terms used to describe such fabrics include "unified fabric", "data center fabric" and "unified data center fabric". Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at the Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago suggested in 2007 that grid computing "fabrics" were "poised to become the underpinning for next-generation enterprise IT architectures and be used by a much greater part of many organizations". == History == While the term has been in use since the mid to late 1990s the growth of cloud computing and Cisco's evangelism of unified data center fabrics followed by unified computing (an evolutionary data center architecture whereby blade servers are integrated or unified with supporting network and storage infrastructure) starting March 2009 has renewed interest in the technology. There have been mixed reactions to Cisco's architecture, particularly from rivals who claim that these proprietary systems will lock out other vendors. Analysts claim that this "ambitious new direction" is "a big risk" as companies such as IBM and HP who have previously partnered with Cisco on data center projects (accounting for $2–3bn of Cisco's annual revenue) are now competing with them. In 2007, Wombat Financial Software launched the "Wombat Data Fabric," the first commercial off-the-shelf software platform providing high performance / low-latency RDMA-based messaging across an Infiniband switch. == Key characteristics == The main advantages of fabrics are that massive concurrent processing combined with a huge, tightly coupled address space makes it possible to solve huge computing problems (such as those presented by delivery of cloud computing services); and that they are both scalable and able to be dynamically reconfigured. Challenges include a non-linearly degrading performance curve, whereby adding resources does not linearly increase performance which is a common problem with parallel computing and maintaining security. == Companies == As of 2015 companies offering unified or fabric computing systems include Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Egenera, HPE, IBM, Liquid Computing Corporation, TIBCO, Unisys, and Xsigo Systems.
Common Image Generator Interface
The Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI) (pronounced sig-ee), is an on-the-wire data protocol that allows communication between an Image Generator and its host simulation. The interface is designed to promote a standard way for a host device to communicate with an image generator (IG) within the industry. CIGI enables plug-and-play by standard-compliant image generator vendors and reduces integration costs when upgrading visual systems. == Background == Most high-end simulators do not have everything running on a single machine the way popular home software flight simulators are currently implemented. The airplane model is run on one machine, normally referred to as the host, and the out the window visuals or scene graph program is run on another, usually referred to as an Image Generator (IG). Frequently there are multiple IGs required to display the surrounding environment created by a host. CIGI is the interface between the 'host' and the IGs. The main goal of CIGI is to capitalize on previous investments through the use of a common interface. CIGI is designed to assist suppliers and integrators of IG systems with ease of integration, code reuse, and overall cost reduction. In the past most image generators provided their own proprietary interface; every host had to implement that interface making changing image generators a costly ordeal. CIGI was created to standardize the interface between the host and the image generator so that little modification would be needed to switch image generators. The CIGI initiative was largely spearheaded by The Boeing Company during the early 21st century. The latest version of CIGI (CIGI 4.0) was developed by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) in the form of SISO-STD-013-2014, Standard for Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI), Version 4.0, dated 22 August 2014. SISO-STD-013-2014 is freely available from SISO. == Definitions == Image generator – In this context an image generator consists of one or more rendering channels that produce an image that can be used to visualize an “Out-The-Window” scene, or images produced by various sensor simulations such as Infra-red, Day TV, electro-optical, and night vision. Host simulation – In this context a “Host” is the computational system that provides information about the device being simulated so that the image generator can portray the correct scenery to the user. This information is passed via CIGI to the image generator. == Maturation == CIGI 4 is the latest version of the standard as was approved by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization on August 22, 2014. CIGI became an international SISO standard known as SISO-STD-013-2014; which contains the CIGI version 4.0 Interface Control Document (ICD). CIGI 4.0 is the official standard, published by SISO. Previous versions of CIGI were spearheaded by Boeing include CIGI v3.3, in November 2008, v3.2 April 2006, v3.1 June 2004, v3 November 2003, v2 in March 2002, and the original (v1) in March 2001 == Protocol dependencies == Typically, CIGI uses UDP as its transport protocol, but CIGI does not require a specific transport mechanism, only packet definition conformance. CIGI traffic does not have a well known port; however, the use of ports 8004-8005 has been widely adopted by commercial image generator vendors implementations. == Development tools == === Host Emulator === The Host Emulator can be used as a surrogate to manipulate the interface when a simulation Host is not available. It is a Windows-based image generator Host application used to develop, integrate and test image generators that use the CIGI protocol. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the creation, modification and deletion of entities; manipulation of views; control of environmental attributes and phenomena; and other host functions. The Host Emulator has several features that are useful for integration and testing. A free-flight mode allows for fixed-wing and rotorcraft flight, movement along entity axes and free rotation using a joystick or a joystick-like widget. Scripting and record/playback features support regression testing, demonstrations and other tasks needing exact reproduction of certain sequences of events. A packet-level snoop feature allows the user to examine the contents of CIGI messages, image generator response times and latencies. A Heartbeat Monitor Window shows a graphical timing history of the Image Generator's data frame rate. Other features include explicit packet creation, animation control, missile flyouts and a situation display window (Host Emulator 3.x only). === Multi-Purpose Viewer === The Multi-Purpose Viewer (MPV) provides the basic functionality expected of an Image Generator, such as loading and displaying a terrain database, displaying entities and so forth. The Multi-Purpose Viewer can be used as a surrogate to manipulate the interface when a real Image Generator is not available. The MPV is capable of operating with both the Windows and Linux operating systems. === CIGI Class Library === The CCL is an object-oriented software interface that automatically handles message composition and decomposition (i.e. packing, unpacking and byte swapping to the ICD specification) on both the Host and Image Generator sides of the interface. The CCL interprets Host or Image Generator messages based on compile time parameters. It also performs error handling and translation between different versions of CIGI. Each packet type has its own class. The individual packet members are accessed through packet class accessors. Outgoing messages are constructed by placing each packet into the outgoing buffer using a streaming operator. Incoming messages are parsed using callback or event-based mechanisms that supply the using program with fully populated packet objects. === Current tool suite === A set of CIGI development tools are managed and maintained by the SISO CIGI Product Support Group. The latest packages are available on SourceForge. Comments/Suggestions to the package can be directed to the SISO discussion board at: https://discussions.sisostds.org/index.htm?A0=SAC-PSG-CIGI Archived 2017-09-13 at the Wayback Machine === Wireshark === Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Wireshark provides a dissector for CIGI packets. As of October 2016, “The CIGI dissector is fully functional for CIGI version 2 and 3. Version 1 is not yet implemented.” === Older versions of CIGI === A CIGI Interface Control Document (ICD) and development suite is available in open source format. The tools, ICD, and accompanying user documentation can be found and downloaded from the CIGI sourceforge web site. The SourceForge version of the MPV is limited in its support of CIGI data packets and is intended to grow as needs arise. The MPV uses CIGI 3 as its interface, but the MPV is backward-compatible with earlier CIGI versions through the use of the CCL. The MPV uses the Open Scene Graph library to render a scene. The scene graph is manipulated according to the CIGI commands received from the Host via the CCL. The MPV itself is an application layer that consists of a small kernel leveraging heavily on a plug-in architecture for ease of maintainability and flexibility. An implementer can implement the interface from scratch, however a full suite of integration tools is available. These tools consist of three elements. The Host Emulator (HE), the Multi-Purpose Viewer (MPV), and the CIGI Class Library (CCL).
Scripped
Scripped was an online screenplay services company offering three services: script writing, script registration, and script coverage. Scripped did not facilitate collaboration among screenwriters. It combined with Zhura in 2010. According to Techcrunch, Scripped had more than 60,000 writers as of March 2010. Scripped was administered by Sunil Rajaraman, Ryan Buckley and Zak Freer. Actor, writer, and director Edward Burns and screenwriter Steven E. de Souza joined Scripped's Board of Advisers in May 2008. In 2008, the company formed a partnership with Write Brothers, makers of Movie Magic Screenwriter software. On March 29, 2010, Scripped announced that it closed $250,000 in private investment and merged with competitor Zhura. Scripped's CEO, Sunil Rajaraman, remains the merged company's Chief Executive Officer. On April 1, 2015, citing a serious technical failure, Scripped shuttered its service. As part of the announcement, it was disclosed that their backup servers had failed as well, losing all of its users' stored scripts. The website URL currently redirects to WriterDuet's website, another online scriptwriting service; Scripped had advertised WriterDuet in Scripped's shutdown open letter. == Features == The Scripped Writer provided a built-in screenplay template which formatted the document to a standard for scripts as recommended by the AMPAS. The screenplay document was composed of seven elements: scene, action, character, dialog, parenthetical, transition and general. Each element had a specific style to which the Scripped Writer conformed as text was entered. Like other client-side screenplay software, Scripped offered Tab-Enter toggling between screenplay elements, making the writing process much faster. Text files could be imported into the Scripped Writer and automatically conformed to the screenplay template. Completed scripts could be exported as PDF files. In May 2011 the administrators of Scripped launched Scripted.com - a sister site focused on freelance writing jobs. Subsequent to the service's launch, the company was renamed to Scripted, Inc.