Blizzard Donates $800,000 From Virtual Pet Sales To Make-A-Wish
When Blizzard introduced its Moonkin Hatchling to the MMORPG, the publisher promised to send 50 percent of the proceeds from the $10 pet during November and December 2010 to Make-A-Wish. Presumably, it sold 160,000 of the pets during that period.
Blizzard also worked with the charity last month to grant the wishes of two boys facing life-threatening medical conditions. The kids visited the company's headquarters in Irvine and were treated to an inside look at World of Warcraft with the MMORPG's development team.
This news comes a few days after Blizzard added another in-game pet, the Cenarion Hatchling, to World of Warcraft. The company will donate 100 percent of the $10 pet's sales between now and July 31 to the American Red Cross's Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami relief efforts.
The publisher began its World of Warcraft charity efforts in November 2009 when it created its first premium pet, the Pandaren Monk, for the online game. Blizzard raised $1.1 million during a two-month campaign, which it donated to Make-A-Wish.
"We've had a long relationship with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and are proud to help contribute to the great work they do for children," says Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime.
"We're also proud of the spirit and generosity of our players – their enthusiasm for World of Warcraft and for supporting a good cause made this donation possible."
Deus Ex 3
Call of Duty: Black Ops Escalation
REVIEW: Turning up the heat.
Call of Duty has never wanted for memorable moments. Your first taste of Nuketown - pure, face-clawing masochism in model village form. The first time you had your guts torn out by an attack dog in World at War. Watching zombies chow on "Tricky Dick" Nixon. "No Russian".
Varenie Hry
Update On Identity Protection Scheme
As you will have read in the letter from Sir Howard Stringer, that we posted a few hours ago, in the US we are offering all PSN users one year’s free access to an identity protection scheme. I can assure you that here in the SCEE region, we are working incredibly hard to offer you something very similar. As is often the case here, with so many countries in our region, this is a very complicated thing to achieve, but we are close.
Please keep an eye on the blog as we hope to be able to announce something about this very soon.
Lady Gaga Judas Music Video
We loaded up the new Facebook app for the BlackBerry PlayBook that was just announced and released at BlackBerry World this week and gave it a quick rundown and video review.
No tech business battle has been so fun to follow than the one involving Microsoft and Apple. The Mac vs PC ads have been around for quite some time, and iTok takes on this issue to show who’s really winning this battle. With a humorous, but nevertheless valid, approach, Hunch goes deeper on the differences between users, and, to close our Daily Viz, three pieces a bit more serious. First, Win Rumours shows some numbers behind Microsoft, Apple’s “Ad Machine” is analyzed by the folks at Buy Sell Ads, and a very interesting overview to Silicon Valey’s Money Network, presented by Deal Book.
Amazon, CableLabs (PDF) 
Early in the week, one of the newest e-readers became the newest Android tablets in a sense. The Barnes & Noble Nook Color is great for reading e-books and is built upon Google Android’s mobile operating system, although you’d never know it due to the excellent interface that hides Android. The Nook Color gained more tablet features with a software update that adds a third-party app store, a useful email client, and support for Adobe AIR and Flash within the existing web browser application.
Reading books and video chatting is nice, but some Android owners want to get work done too. That becomes a little easier now that there’s a dedicated and free Google Docs application available. The software allows for document editing and printing through Google’s Cloud Print service on supported printers.
