Mobile gaming outfit GREE has acquired US-based social game developer Funzio for a cool $210 million in a bid to increase their appeal in Western countries, and to produce more of their own titles. The Japanese firm who provides both a mobile social gaming platform and developers titles itself, is looking at the North American market and other new growth opportunities as they've already established themselves quite well in their homeland.

The deal is expected to be done by the end of May, with founder Yoshikazu Tanaka saying that it "means a lot to enhancing our global expansion". The mobile gaming scene is heating up, with just weeks ago Zynga purchasing OMGPOP, the guys and gals behind Draw Something. GREE may be a smaller player, but competition is always a good thing.

GREE isn't new to big acquisitions, where back in 2010 they acquired Openfeint for $109 million. That deal boosted their platform, and the new Funzio deal with strengthen its capability to produce titles, and, appeal more to Western gamers. This isn't the end of the good news for FREE, where they're set to unveil their new global gaming platform, which will integrate Openfeint, all within the next few months.

It's been everywhere, and I was even sitting down this morning playing with my gorgeous 13-month-old daughter this morning when I saw people standing behind the Sunrise crew on Channel 7 here in Australia, with black cardboard signs in their hand stating "WAKE UP".

We've heard it was Samsung behind this, as a campaign for their GALAXY S III possibly... but it's not. Research in Motion (RIM) have admitted that they're the company behind the controversial anti-Apple 'Wake Up' campaign. RIM issued a statement this morning through its PR firm, where they've said:

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist has posted a video discussing the collapse of Moore's Law in around 10 or so years. It has been predicted before, with physicists predicting the end of Moore's Law for quite a while now, but Kaku's reasoning and the slowing down of processing power that we are seeing today definitely lends credibility to his claims.

If you're unaware of Moore's Law, it pertains to computer hardware, stating that the number of transistors that can be placed onto a integrated circuit board can be doubled roughly every two years. There's always been an 18-month time frame for this, where we see a leap of the previous-generation of technology. This modified cycle can be credited to Intel executive, David House, not Moore.

Kaku has predicted that in around 10 years, silicon power will be exhausted. Intel has already admitted Moore's Law is slowing down using silicon, one of the reasons behind us seeing Tri-Gate transistors used in Ivy Bridge CPUs, an effort to try and extend the effective life of silicon. Kaku attributes the problem as two-fold: heat and leakage. Intel processors of today have a layer that is almost down to 20 atoms across. Quite small.

Researcher Newzoo has gathered some very specific figures in a new study that included the top 200 grossing mobile games and survey results from 17,000 respondents. The study found that the US mobile gaming market has grown considerably, from 75 million to 101 million mobile gamers. Of these 101 million, 69-percent of them play games on smartphones, with 21-percent gaming on a tablet.

While there are many more players, and increasing amount of them are willing to pay for in-game content. The number of paying players has grown 35-percent to 37 million Americans, or 36-percent of all mobile gamers. Splitting these numbers up, we have 19 million American gamers on an iPhone, 18 million on an iPod touch, and 12.7 million on an iPad, keeping in mind that many people use multiple iOS-based devices.

As of last month, Apple's mobile devices combined were generating 84-percent of the revenue by the top 200 grossing games, which left Android with 16-percent of the US pie. The best bit of this, is that a majority of this money is generated from in-game microtransactions, and not titles bought outright. Newzoo CEO Peter Warman does have something to say about this, as there is one big difference between iOS and Android, that could explain the revenue discrepancy: Apple requires users to link credit card information to their accounts, with Warman adding:

Diablo III is nearly here, we've already hit May 1 which means there's only two weeks left to go until we can raid dungeons, and start using the new Auction House to sell our loot. Today, Blizzard released a full list of the region servers that will be available for Diablo III.

What this has also unleashed, is that we can play on any region's server in Diablo III, which is great. Game servers will come in three regions: The Americas, Europe, and Asia. Players can choose any server they want, but with caution: you won't be able to transfer characters, or items from server to server. But you can switch between servers as many times as you want. The list of servers is:

Another note is that Auction houses, stashes, and friends lists, as well as most other individual information is region-specific, and won't transfer when you switch regions. StarCraft II was worse, where it had quite a strict region-lock on most servers. If you wanted to play on multiple region's, you needed to have multiple copies of the game itself.

Microsoft have unleashed upon the world, the DirectX 11.1 specifications. There's a massive list of things that are being included, so don your thinking cap and get directly into it! We shouldn't expect too much to change until consoles are updated with next-gen GPUs, which should hopefully happen next year.

Until then, it's a nice list and we should expect some small changes to the way games are made, look and react. Nonetheless, the specifications are neat, and as a tech junkie, this is just another fix for me, and hopefully you. Check out the latest DirectX 11.1 specifications below:

Shader Tracing and Compiler Enhancements

NVIDIA are on a roll, nothing can stop them right now it seems and now we have the first pictures of MSI's GEFORCE GTX 670. The GTX 670 will be NVIDIA's third SKU based on the GK104 GPU, and is set to compete directly with Team Red's Radeon HD 7950 GPU.

The card looks to be pure reference design, and only sports two 6-pin PCI-e connectors. I know you want to get into the specifications of the card itself, so lets do that, shall we? The GTX 670 sports 1344 CUDA cores, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface with 2GB of RAM and clock speeds on the Core of 900MHz, 1250MHz or 5GHz effective on the memory.

Non-reference cards that come through in the next few months should sport much shorter PCBs thanks to slim VRM requirements, and just 8 memory chips. DIsplay outputs include two dual-link DVIs, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. The box does state "OC Edition", which means it should come out of the box with overclocked speeds. Also, I'm interested to see what this new technology "DispalyPort" can do, you'll know what I mean when you see it.

Samsung have just unveiled their Series 7 Gamer notebook, and whilst you might think "Samsung... Gaming notebook... really?", you might want to think twice! It is definitely specced very nicely, and it looks awesome, too.

Let's talk some specs, the Series 7 Gamer notebook sports a 17.3-inch next-generation Full HD LCD with Samsung's SuperBright technology which gives a 400-nit screen, which is up to 50-percent brighter than traditional PCs. An Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPU fills out the CPU duties, it supports up to 16GB of RAM, up to a 1.5TB HDD, and comes with an NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 675M GPU for your gaming needs.

Filling out the specs, we have Dolby Home Theater v4 speakers, Windows 7 Home Premium, a 2.0-megapixel webcam, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, and it weighs in at 13.34lb, as well as a battery life of around 3.7 hours. Price? Just $1899.99.

Not everyone is exactly ecstatic about Blizzard offering real money auctions in the upcoming Diablo III game. I, too, see some issues with it, but that is for another article. Claims that Blizzard is trying to cash in on the game's second hand digital market have run rampant since its announcement of the plan last summer.

Blizzard will charge a flat $1 fee (or a rough local equivalent) for unique equipment like armor, weapons, or accessories. For common "stackable" commodities, Blizzard will charge 15%. This 15% charge even applies for strictly in-game gold transactions. The hope behind that is that it will stem inflation in the in-game economy.

Players will also get hit with another 15% fee when they try to transfer their funds from their Battle.net account to a third party service such as PayPal. The only way to avoid this is to spend the money on other Blizzard items such as a WoW subscription. The move of Blizzard allowing real money trading and taking a part in it will help stem the grey market of other companies doing the exact same thing. It should improve customer service and reduce scams. More information is available at today's announcement.

After weeks of teasing us about the upcoming DLC for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda has finally released more details about the coming DLC. First off, the name of the DLC is going to be 'Dawnguard.' I've never actually played Skyrim, so I can't say if that is some sort of reference to something in the game.

The marketing teaser image shows the usual hero. However, he has an unusual yellow glow in his eyes which could signal that the hero could be gaining some sort of new powers in the DLC. As we reported previously, gamers have dug around in a patch and found references to things that most likely will be showing up in the DLC.

Bethesda says that Dawnguard will debut on Xbox360 sometime this summer. In case you hadn't heard, the first two DLCs for Skyrim will be timed exclusives for Xbox 360. PS3 and PC gamers will have to wait at least an additional 30 days beyond the release. Technically, summer starts at the end of May, but it's doubtful that it will be that early. Bethesda says they are waiting for E3 in early June to release more details. I'll be attending E3, so I'll make sure to get the low down!