If you spent any time in high school thinking about ley lines and bio-implants, you were probably a Shadowrun player. The game, which petered out after a disastrous run as a PC/Xbox game in 2007, brought the high-tech of William Gibson to the magical realms of Mr. Gygax. It was, in short, pretty cool.

A Kickstarter project aims to bring back all that fun in video game form, adding lots of what you missed about Shadowrun back to the PC. This new version will be a RPG involving the Shadowrun world complete with various character types – elves, samurai, humans – and, although this is discouraged, deals with dragons. $15 gets you a copy of the game while $60 gets you a t-shirt and some in-game perks.

Pledge $10,000 and the real magic happens:

You can read about the game here or fund it over at Kickstarter. The game has already gained pledges of $2 million on a $400,000 goal, so there’s a good chance it will get made.

On countless occasions, you've likely said to yourself "I wish I knew how to do ______." Then, of course, life got in the way and you put it off until you could find the time. Maybe you wanted to become fluent in a language, learn a new instrument, start performing your house repairs, or a master a myriad of other skills. With the vast amount of knowledge online, you're now your only excuse. Here are the top ten most highly desired skills that you can teach yourself—and should. More »

This is an excerpt from Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks, a blueprint for getting healthy in a connected world. In this section, he outlines the typical day for someone who wants to get healthy without gym memberships, expensive diet plans, and odd tactics.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Try this: you wake up without an alarm sometime soon after sunrise, with plenty of time to spare to make it to work.

It was a good sleep; you went to bed just after nine o’clock after having a snack consisting of coconut milk blended with blueberries and a little whey powder. You’re already savvy about getting enough REM sleep, but now you aim to bump up your deep sleep, or restorative NREM. You might even check out the wave chart your Zeo produced.

The first thing you do is pour a cup of black tea or coffee and go outside to this pool of sunlight you’ve noticed out your window.

You bask and reflect in it for a minute, perhaps followed by a few Tai Chi moves, push-ups on the lawn, or pull-ups on the jungle gym across the street from your apartment. You sip a bit more coffee and return to your living space to get ready for the commute.

Technically speaking, as you gazed up into the sky and basked in that sun, the light rays touched your retinas and were transduced by the hypothalamus and pineal gland in your brain, which has now helped set your circadian rhythms for the day.

Mindfulness

The sun you got wasn’t much, not like spending the morning on the beach in the British Virgin Islands (gotta do that someday…), but it had the effect of lightening your mood, clearing your head, and kick-starting the day. You’ve sent the message to your body and your brain, “It’s morning and I’m well rested and ready to go.”

Every other day you stop at an intervening fitness facility to lift a few weights or do a 300-yard swim interspersed with a handful of 25-yard sprints—nothing too much, but today you’re biking to the train station, where they’ve thoughtfully included a place to lock your rig.

The train ride into the center of the city (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal; Zurich, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, Sydney, Wellington, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto…) takes 35 minutes, and you stand for most of it, just because it feels better.

Geek Gear

You kind of want to rack up more activity points on this web-connected, motion-sensitive, stair-counting altitude calculator you’ve clipped onto your belt (yeah, it’s called a Fitbit), although gear isn’t strictly necessary this morning. It’s just fun, in a geeky kind of obsessive way. You like quantifying and logging your exercise. This act itself seems motivating. The web charts your gear generates later are actually quite impressive. They can show your oscillating movement throughout the day, and pinpoint the days when you need more.

Gathering data is not useless when you act upon it.

The tool for adding up your daily motion mileage works with an odd “tail wagging the dog” effect; you seem to move more when you’re wearing it. Further, you never really knew that ordinary movement could equate to that much mileage during the day. More than six miles sometimes, even though your walks were broken up into several smallish ones. Plodding along on a treadmill just isn’t necessary anymore. You love looking at the stats at the end of the day. Just keep moving, you say to yourself. Seek the sun.

Hard-Boiled Eggs to Go

Breakfast today was two hard-boiled eggs (eggs bought the previous weekend at a farmer’s market), a piece of Swiss cheese, a bite of salmon left over from last night, and two plums plus an avocado (also purchased at the market). Yesterday, you fasted through breakfast, and that felt fine. Actually, the bit of coffee plus “intermittent fast” kept you pretty perky throughout the morning.

You’ve got a little plastic bag in your backpack containing the rest of the salmon, a mixture of almonds and walnuts, an apple, and a square of 85% high-cacao chocolate. In a pinch, there’s a good salad place near work. It only took a couple of weeks not to miss that bagel anymore, and especially all that crappy margarine (you go for really yellow butter now)—the sluggishness and lack of satiety it seemed to leave you with, and the way it seemed to take half the morning to digest it and the donut and scone you piled on top of it.

Hopping off the train, you walk about 30 minutes the rest of the way to work, on the sunny side of the street, even though you could have dipped into the subway or hopped on a bus.

Dude, Take the Stairs

Work is on the third floor of a tall building, but you take the stairs, walking briskly past a line of people waiting at the elevator. Their auras are uniformly glum, as if someone else is pulling their strings. You have never taken the elevator, including that time your supervisors were standing in front of it with expectant looks, suggesting they had an axe to grind.

You take the stairs two at a time, simply because the heft in your upper leg feels good. Your heart rate gets going, but not that much; you’ve noticed that improvement over the months.

OCD About Health

The morning goes on and you switch between sitting and standing in your cubicle—standing most of the time. You have a pretty good stand-up workstation setup. Besides, the standing for hours bumps up those motion and- mileage numbers, which no one else could possibly care about, except other users fidgeting with their tracking devices and apps and going online afterward with the data. You don’t mind having an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving healthy habits. You also don’t mind going without your gear for a day or two. No big deal.

About every hour or 90 minutes during the day, you head down those stairs again and back outside into the sun. When you get blocked on a sticky piece of code or logical problem, this brisk walk helps almost every time. Often, you experience casual moments outside that you always will remember and never would have experienced if you’d stayed in your cubicle all day, like that majestic hawk that hovered in the blue sky before it alighted on the ledge of a distant building. You tried to estimate its wingspan as it hung frozen in the cerulean blue.

Hey, He Likes Me!

That handsome dude or attractive woman with the healthy glow who spoke to you out of the blue that time when you were both sitting on a bench, chilling— that hadn’t happened to you in a long while; it’s usually just awkward silences and departures, ships passing at night. You’re going to see him/her again sometime; you’re going to swap phone numbers.

You take longer walks sometimes in the city, until you find yourself drifting around with a relaxed aimlessness, kind of like Owen Wilson in the movie Midnight in Paris.

You have the usual “meetings” (the quotation marks question their purposefulness) in the mid-morning and afternoon. You stand during both, and it seems to have a contagious effect. Two other people stood up during the second meeting, and you could have sworn both confabs went a little faster. You’re beginning to get a rep as “that healthy guy” around the office.

Knock Off Some Bench Presses

By the end of the day you’ve climbed about 12 floors and maybe walked a couple of miles or more (the number of miles you cover in a day, counting everything, always surprises you). A formal workout in the middle of the day is not necessary. But sometimes you duck into the company fitness facility on a rainy day and knock off some bench presses, pull-ups, and inverted push-ups. Sometimes it’s just a dash on a treadmill, or some karate kicks followed by Tai Chi. It takes no more than about 30 minutes.

Your workouts almost never exceed that length of time. When they do, horsing around would be a better way to describe them than workouts or training sessions: playing catch using a winged Nerf football with your son or a friend, or gliding along a country road on a mountain bike.

It All Adds Up to Something Good

Are you getting the point here? You’re able to shoulder a pretty hard job and commute, while staying healthy, mindful, and reasonably content. The days seem to flow more, instead of banging together like an extended train wreck, with you occupying the middle passenger car. Who could argue with that? You even get the monthly $50 bonus they pay at work to the employees with the fewest sick days!

The intent of the last assemblage of paragraphs wasn’t to get all vainglorious and virtuous about healthy lifestyles—although it was fun to write—as much as to paint a narrative about surviving the Digital Age and emerging from your days mostly unscathed (maybe an occasional bruised ego, but it comes with the territory, right?). This chapter has introduced some basic fitness concepts that the rest of the book will cover in sometimes extensive detail:

• Living in the Digital Age, where culture, data, and networks never sleep, but still incorporating the sun, lots of walking, and outdoor experiences— living closer to the imperatives of our preloaded software (our very deep past).

• The benefits of whole, non-processed, real food—and even a bit of “intermittent” fasting every week.

• The advantages of incorporating ordinary exercise regimes like stair climbing, lengthy, aimless walking (no matter how cold it is!), sprints, jumps, and hill-climbing extemporaneously, when you can.

• Using useful tracking tools and personal metrics to augment your fitness, share your progress with friends, help others work through some physical glitches or sleep issues, or for just plain time-wasting fun (when you have that time, that is).

• The importance of sleep and de-stressing; they could save your life.

• The advantages of other lifestyle tactics like freezing swims, saunas, and fasting, not to mention moderate exercise and a good drink now and then. These are examples of “hormesis,” or good stress (see Chapter 11). Unlike many faddish weight-loss and fitness schemes, the changes just described do not involve any expensive program or club fees, or drastic dietary changes (like “zero carb or fat”), except for the optional purchase of a few fun and useful gadgets or tools when you have a little extra change.

Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.

Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.

Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.

“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.

The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.

“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.

The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”

The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.

Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.

Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.

So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!

Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)

“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”

Sony’s Android-powered Xperia Play debuted to mixed reviews last year, but according to a newly published patent, Sony was apparently toying with the idea of making something much more interesting before settling on the design they ran with.

Not content with a single physical keypad meant strictly for gaming, the images associated with the patent depict a Sony smartphone with two of them — one with the game controls we’ve become familiar with, and another with a full QWERTY keyboard that would slide down over the game pad.

The company first filed for the patent back in October 2010 (back when they were still Sony Ericsson), just days before Engadget first published their spy shots of what we now know as the Xperia Play. There’s no way of knowing how close a device like this got to actual production, but I’d wager it didn’t last too long before Sony Ericsson’s design and production team passed it over because of the problems it could potentially raise.

On a basic level, more moving parts means more things that could potentially break, but there’s an even more pressing issue than that. Practically speaking, this thing would’ve been a chubby little beast — the Xperia Play isn’t a particularly thin device as it is, so who knows how hefty a device with two slide-out keyboards would have been had it ever seen the light of day.

Still, I can’t help but love the concept — though developers are crafting amazing experiences that are well-suited for touchscreens, some games just work better when a physical control scheme is part of the mix (anyone who’s tried playing the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on their iPhone would probably agree with me). The chances of Sony Mobile bringing a device like this to market aren’t nil though — after all, they already seem set on delivering phones with some wacky features.

The Titan II is yet another success for the hardware team over at HTC. It feels excellent in the hand, even if it’s huge, has a nice balanced weight to it, and the little chin at the bottom gives it some extra pizazz when lined up against other designs on store shelves. It calls to me.

But there are a few issues, as is the case with most any phone. The first, and most important one, is the screen size vs. resolution. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Microsoft, please push out Apollo so that your hardware partners aren’t stuck slapping a 480×800 WP build onto a massive display.

The Titan II has a 4.7-inch screen. It’s too big for my taste, but somehow the hardware and the design — namely the barely-there bezel around the screen — leaves the phone feeling comfortable in the hand. This is a first for me in terms of feeling comfortable with a phone sporting a display larger than 4.3-inches.

Unfortunately, Windows Phone 7.5 requires a 480×800 resolution, leaving the Titan II with just a 199ppi. This simply isn’t good enough. Anyone who’s used a phone released within the last year will instantly notice the pixelation, especially considering that the white-on-black text of Windows Phone only makes the low resolution more obvious.

On the other hand, the Titan II is ushering us into the world of double-digit MP camera phones, with a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera. I’m already a fan of the Windows Phone camera app, and adding a “better” sensor to the mix only helps. Of course, megapixels don’t mean much at a certain point, but in terms of basic use I think this thing takes rather beautiful images, and that’s all you can ask for anyways.

Again, I love the hardware. The back panel has a nice soft-touch finish that doesn’t soak up prints like most phones, and the front of the phone is all screen, just like it should be.

I’d like to see some expandable memory here as well as the option to remove the battery, but unfortunately HTC left that optionality out. I’ve only had a day or so with the phone but Windows Phone is just as snappy as usual on this guy, and of course connectivity to AT&T’s 4G LTE network only scoots that along.

I’ll hit you guys with a head-to-head soon, followed shortly thereafter with a full review.

This just might be the best stylus ever made. I’m completely serious. The problem with most styli is that there is never one around when needed. Besides that, the pen form factor is often not conducive for use on a small screen. But the MicroStylus, well, it’s so tiny yet functional that it’s perfect for the task. Plus it’s only $9.99 and stores neatly in a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The company sent me a pair to test but there’s not much to say. It works well. You simply grasp the stick like you would a pen. A soft touch capacitive silicon tip screws into the a milled aluminum body. It’s not as accurate as a pencil on paper but your Draw Something doodles will look fantastic.

The MicroStylus isn’t going to completely disrupt the stylus space. This little guy is the perfect casual use stylus for a mobile person. Sit at a desk all day? Get yourself an Adonit Jot stylus. They start at $20 and are fantastically precise. But if you find yourself needing a stylus on the go for note taking or gaming, the MicroStylus is perfect for the task.

The MicroStylus is available in black or silver and $9.99 buys you one while two can be had for $15 at MicroStylus.com.

So Google X founder Sebastian Thrun was on Charlie Rose last night showing off his latest creation, Project Glass. Which, if you haven’t seen by now, is quite possibly one of the most ambitious consumer products to come out of the Googleplex in recent memory. But until Thrun’s appearance on Rose, we didn’t actually know how the glasses would work other than the sizzle reel that was put together earlier this month.

A couple of things struck me as odd, though. Thrun never actually gave any voice commands during his demo of the glasses, while in the video everything was driven by voice. But that’s not what has me worried about Project Glass. During the interview, Thrun snapped a photo of Rose and uploaded it to his Google+ account. So far, it appears to work as advertised but take a look at the image quality and tell me whether or not it’s acceptable in this day and age. It’s not, it’s terrible.

But this is a much larger issue for Google and it’s one they don’t seem to be taking very seriously. At one point in Google’s history, the company we’re so beholden to actually made some really great products. Not that they were ever perfect, mind you. Google has grown complacent and comfortable with launching half baked products that they or others would eventually fix. Just look at Android, for instance. It’s still a work in progress, which is the fundamental issue with nearly every new Google product launched in the last few years.

Back to my original point – the optics on those Google glasses stink. Look at what Apple has been able to accomplish with the iPhone camera, especially the 4S. If there’s one takeaway that every product manufacturer needs to learn from Steve Jobs it’s that the marriage between hardware and software will always reign supreme. Sony is unable to replicate the iPhone 4S’s image quality in any of their smartphones with the same optics. The same could be said for Nokia’s Lumia 900 and its Carl Zeiss 8-megapixel camera, which, by the way, is advertised in commercials. Even HTC is making an effort to improve the optics on their devices with software tweaks and they seem to be working. The Titan II, for instance, has a pretty killer camera. But I digress.

Early on in the interview, Thrun admits that he likes taking photos and proved that Glass works. But at what point do you stop trying and innovating just because it works?

Glass has serious potential, whether it’s in the medical field for the handicapped or supplanting the Bluetooth headset wearing fashionistas but Thrun and his team have a long road ahead of them if this first public demo is any indication.

Be excellent again, Google. That’s all we ask.

We have always built and destroyed monopolies. Companies often start out good but slowly turn, for lack of a better word, evil. The twin dark stars of profit and market share bring even the kindest companies into a collision course with failure. I’d say Apple is headed down that road.

The company announced its 2012 Q2 earnings earlier this week and as MG pointed out, they’re nearly as impressive as the previous blockbuster quarter. A dive at wireless carrier’s financials shows that the iPhone accounted for a whopping 59% of smartphone sales in the U.S. last quarter. The iPhone 4S downright crushed a league of new Android flagship handsets. Android is faltering at the hands of the iPhone. Apple is on pace per some analysts to be the first trillion dollar company in history and will do so on the back of a trivial amount of products and services.

Apple’s success is made possible by keeping things simple. This started with the iMac’s one-size fits all mentality. Steve Jobs and Co. correctly identified that the average consumer doesn’t care about specs but rather capabilities. The spec has been dead at Apple for more than a decade. Where Dell, HP and the others target the average computer shopper, Apple looks to sell to their parents.

The same philosophy is driving the iPhone’s massive growth. There isn’t a better universal smartphone on the market. This isn’t open for discussion and the numbers prove it. Smartphones are now outselling less expensive feature phones with the iPhone as the number one seller. That states above all else that consumers overwhelmingly prefer Apple’s take on mobile phones. And for good reason.

I’m downright fed up with Android. Others must be with me. I’m ready to jump ship to the iPhone after being an Android user since the original Droid. Updates aren’t regular or useful and the vast fragmentation in hardware causes apps to be very inconsistent in quality. The only thing holding me back is Android’s workflow allowed by homescreen widgets. But the average consumer doesn’t care about workflow nonsense. They want a phone that works and they’re choosing the iPhone. And the iPad.

As dominating as the iPhone is to the mobile phone market, the iPad is even more so to the tablet market. The iPad is experiencing a crazy amount of growth due to the lack of true alternatives. Only the Amazon Kindle Fire offers any sort of competitive advantage but that’s only due to the $200 price tag. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the main iPad alternative and according to a study released today, it only holds 15% of the Android tablet market. The Fire accounts for 50% of Android tablets and it doesn’t even show its Android skin.

This domination in two of the most important consumer electronic spaces — coupled by Apple’s astounding cash reserves and market valuation — is more frightening than Microsoft’s monopoly in the ’90s. There was a time when Microsoft was in a similar position. In fact there are several important parallels between Apple of today and Microsoft of yesteryear.

At the core of the U.S. Government’s case against Microsoft was that Windows users only had access to Internet Explorer. This came during the height of the browser wars when Netscape and Opera were trying to gain traction. Microsoft asserted that IE was a Windows 95 feature rather than a standalone product much like Apple states the App Store is part of iOS. The Department of Justice successfully argued against Microsoft in stating that it was too hard for consumers to choose a different browser due to the download speeds at the time. It is also nearly impossible for the average iPhone owner to find a different source of applications for their device.

However, these anecdotal points only paint half the picture. Consumers are willingly choosing the iPhone and iPad over a large assortment of similar competitors. Windows was the only option 15 years ago. Macs were, if you will, the BlackBerry of the day.

The computing world has changed drastically since the U.S. Government deemed Microsoft a monopoly and broke the company in two. The term personal computer is much less meaningful. It doesn’t just define a beige box sitting on a desk. Most agree that the iPad is a personal computer and it could be argued that smartphones are an even more personal device. But for the sake of analyst’s market share pies, tablets and smartphones are segregated from their x86 counterparts. But much like the honey badger, Apple is the most fearless company in consumer electronics. It just takes what it wants.

Never mind what Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in this week’s earning call. Apple is all about convergence and making products (and its internal workings) as simple as possible. OS X looks and acts very much like iOS. For better or worse, this is driving consumerism toward a simplified operating system void of traditional computing elements. If a true competitors do not step up now, Apple will soon be able to commandeer any market it wants.

Apple already owns the smartphone and tablet market. The PC market doesn’t matter anymore. The company has moved past caring about low-margin computing products. Talk of an Apple HDTV has been around for years and the market is ripe for the taking. The next big step for Apple is enterprise and education with medical not far off.

Even without directly targeting the corporate space, the iPad and iPhone are already a major force in corner offices. Apple simply needs to implement stronger email and security settings and grant IT departments a bit more control of devices to effectively kill RIM. On that same note, a legitimate alternative to MS Exchange would better position Apple against Microsoft.

Apple used to be synonymous with education, and with the launch of iBooks textbooks last year, the company took strides to regain that distinction. However, there is still just a limited number of these interactive textbooks available, and they’re rather costly to implement given the massive upfront cost and liability of buying iPads for students. But this is how Apple works. It often launches services such as iTunes and the App Store before there are devices to fully utilize the capabilities. Look for Apple to slowly gain a huge following thanks to just these educational tools.

Android is the only hope to stand tall against Apple and it’s currently in a sad state. Google is giving OEMs too much leeway. The old adage of choice is good is working against Android. Four years after Android launched, consumers overwhelming choosing the competitor within the last three months. Google needs to rein its armies back in and refocus with a unified message. As an owner of both an Android and iPhone, I sincerely believe Android is a better OS but the iPhone is a better device.

Samsung has the right idea with the Galaxy line. As their adverts assert, they’re anti-iPhones thanks to their larger screens and wide range of models. Motorola took a step in a similar direction with RAZR MAXX. The larger battery offers something different than iPhone clones. But even with the launch of these major flagships, the iPhone 4S trampled on their highly advertised launch parades.

It’s hard to imagine a future without Apple. Per a study released today, 33% of American households already own an Apple product. The iOS behemoth will not be stopped. Android’s needless fragmentation and constant infighting will ensure that. The iPad will slowly morph into the de facto personal computing device. There will still be alternatives. Android and Windows will not completely go away, but Apple’s massive cash reserves will allow it to sway markets and assert unquestionable power. Apple could, if it really wanted, cut the price of the iPad in half and absorb the losses. iTunes and the App Store have shown they’re a major source of revenue alone. It would also make the device much more tempting for educators and IT departments.

But Apple isn’t in the position for global dominance just yet. First, the company needs to make even bigger inroads into China. It was announced in this week’s earning call that revenue from the Chinese market increased threefold over last year’s second quarter to $12.4 billion. In fact that falls just short of Apple’s previous complete year revenue from the prior year. And this is without the country’s largest carrier, China Mobile, offering the iPhone to its 600 million subscribers.

After China falls into Apple’s pocket, the world will be its oyster which the iPhone will open. And that’s a bit scary.

Citing poor sales of the Nintendo 3DS and “the stronger yen against the euro was also another reason,” Nintendo posted its first-ever loss – $534.6 million on revenue of $8 billion. This is down from $12.6 billion in revenue last year with $960 million in profit.

But, as they say, it’s dangerous to invest alone. Here, take this: the company is predicting a profit of $429 million next year.

Nintendo bet big on the 3DS and the forthcoming Wii U, a superior console designed for clever multi-player gaming. Although the Wii is the best-selling console in the world, it’s clear that demand has slowed with the launch of Kinect from Microsoft and the PlayStation Move.

We’re expecting to hear much more about the Wii U launch this summer at E3 and, provided they can get a product out the door by the holiday, expect these numbers to rise skyward. It’s a little sad to see Mario stumble like this, but here’s hoping he regroups.