No More Games for the Wii U, Says EA

May 18th, 2013Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News No Comments

Here at Money4Machines we help you sell console boxes like the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. We’ll take a look at anything, though, including the Nintedo Wii U.

Released in November 2012 (a mere six months ago!), the Wii U was designed as a development of the Wii console. Supporting HD graphics, running 2GB of RAM and capable of video output of 1080p, the Wii was expected to be as successful as its predecessor. The touchscreen controller definitely had the “oooooo!” factor (that has to be read in the voices of the aliens from Toy Story!), but the dream just didn’t play out for Nintendo.

EA is one of the most significant players in the gaming industry, and a recent press release confirmed the company’s departure as a games developer for the Wii U. Will other’s follow suit? It’s never a great sign when the heavy-hitters walk away from your device, but since falling from the top spot in terms of market leadership, EA have become exceptionally cautious, opting to place safe bets and invest in money-spinners like the next Xbox and PS4.

Gaming blog, GamesIndustry, described the likely demise of the Wii U as “death by apathy” as the console experienced it’s “Dreamcast moment” The site also reported that although official figures cannot be reported by the press, the Wii U and it’s games are a dead duck, with developers only need to shift around a thousand units to hit the no.1 rank.

 

Horror as a Toddler Sees It in New Kickstarter Computer Game

April 23rd, 2013Curious Stuff No Comments

Sort of, anyway. Among the Sleep is a Kickstarter first-person computer game currently vying for funds on the crowdsourcing website.

The story is a simple and clever take on the more common first-person format. You wake in the night – a toddler of about two clad in a babygro – with the simple mission of navigating the environments of the house to find comfort.

But nothing’s every that simple, is it? The house – calm and lovely by day – takes on a sinister tone at night. Long shadows, those proverbial bumps in the night and the torture of an overactive imagination combine to create and exceptionally diverse landscape of trials and tribulations. What’s real and what’s all in your little toddler head?

There’s no combat in the game. Instead, you survive by hiding from the monsters, solving puzzles and pulling up your big baby pants to get on with exploring. You don’t keep going, you don’t find the safety at the end.

Here at Money4Machines we’re pretty into the whole puzzle and adventure thing. Monkey Island is an office favourite, and when we’re not helping you sell your mobile or get cash for your old Xbox 360, we just might be testing incoming consoles using the Monkey Island Special Edition. Want to sell console devices like the Xbox 360 or Playstation? Head over to our quotes page before you rediscover all those old games and can’t let the little critter go!

Among the Sleep could be released for Mac, Windows and Linux as early as the end of this year – we’ll keep you posted!

Pinterest Has Stopped Being Really, Really Picky

August 12th, 2012Curious Stuff, Tech News No Comments

When we signed up to Pinterest, it was a couple of months before the overlords accepted our request to join. We sent fruit baskets and let them whip our children, and still they made us wait wordlessly for ages!

But it seems our cries (and perhaps those of all the children) have finally been heard. Pinterest has agreed to open its pretty little hipster floodgates and let anyone begin to pin. Of course, they realise this may invite uncool people to the party, but when you’ve gone from nothing to being the no.3 social networking site in the world in less than two years, you can afford to let your guard down a little!

Our Money4Machines Pinterest account is a great way for us to share cool tech images, weird stuff and interesting visuals that are very much of the ‘misc’ tag.  But we’re looking forward to seeing a suspected influx of new users too. One of the main problems faced by Pinterest is quite simply how to make money without alienating their users. They’re still a bit hazy on the financial plan (as in, there isn’t one)

If you want to sell consoles and iPods and old Kindles and tablets and stuff, head over to our quotes page now. If you want to read geek humour and learn a bit about what it’s like to be in the Money4Machines office, go here!

Why Doorways Are Ruining Your Memory (and it’s nothing to do with walking into them when drunk!)

July 13th, 2012Curious Stuff No Comments

It's a trap!

That god-awful moment when you walk into a room and forget why you’re there. Sometimes you’re even carrying a clue like an old iPad, inflatable hippo or maybe a wet dog that’s not your wet dog. Anyway, memory serves you a big cold plate of nothing in place of the feast of recalled information it so expertly carried down the stairs and almost into the room you presently occupy.

Early onset Alzheimer’s? Adult ADD? General stupidity? Unlikely. The most likely explanation is that your brain is following it’s own sensible memory directories system perfectly whilst simultaneously screwing you into an I-knew-what-was-going-on-three-seconds-ago-so-what’s-changed state of frustration!

It’s all about how our brains remember things. Sure, we spend our days calculating sell for cash UK rates and helping folks like you to sell consoles and old Kindles, but we’re also, not surprisingly, on the nerdy side when it comes to things like sport statistics, classical mythology and a bunch of other random topics (two different people in this office can sing all the colours in Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat!) We know the value of a good memory, but can still suffer the same spotty lapses of cognition as a TOWIE regular when we walk from one room to the next. So what’s up with that?!

Doors.

Seriously. When you decide you want to sell consoles or whatever and wander from your living room into whatever room of the house (or evil lair – we don’t like to penalise the differently-good!) you keep your laptop in, you probably have to walk through a doorframe. And that’s your mistake!

Our memories are very much location-based. Those delightful little flesh-sponges we call brains love to categorise memories by environment, which is why we can do things like go camping and instantly remember the relationship between pooping outdoors, nettles and doc leaves! The information pops into your head because your brain knows you might need it in that situation.

And it’s pretty much doorframes that are mostly responsible for telling our brain to reorganise its information and make new, more relevant information available. So suddenly “I’m going upstairs to get my other Boba Fett helmet” becomes “Why am I up here feeling like I should put a bucket on my head?”

Or think of it like this: You’re looking at your messy desk and can easily spot the notes you need because you can see them. Leave the room and try to remember the desk’s contents, and it’s a totally different story!

According to researchers at the University of Notre Dame, the best way to thwart the effect is to repeat things to yourself out loud as you go from one environment into the other. We’re choosing to see that as a magic spell. Awesome. And by the way, it was those Notre Dame boffins who worked out the whole doorway thing, so we’re inclined to believe them about the spell too!

Festival Tech – What to Love and What to Leave

June 12th, 2012Device Reviews, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

You may just be here to sell iPads and stuff for some lovely, lovely cash, but we reckon some of you folks visit for our blog’s puckish sense of humour, gritty advice and ever-growing list of Things That Annoy Us.

But happy summer days are ahead (including great new rates on our sell for cash U.K gadgets!), so lets stray from the usual sell for cash path and have a look at a few of the best bits of tech you should be taking to Secret Garden, Leeds/Reading and the rest of the guys in the band this summer!

FindMyFriends (app.)

So there’s no Glastonbury this year (so no need to sell console for the ticket!). Our office manager is sulking (he’s the daddy of meal planning and comfort grabbing in the festival setting!) But when the grand old duke of festivals is on, apps like FindMyFriends and GlastoNav save us all from the troublesome irk of trying to spot your mate in a throng of ten thousand people by saying things like “About eighty people left of the third big scaffolding from the big tree!”

Solar Charging Backpack (power!)

Another team fave, our project manager still uses his as a regular backpack when he cycles to work. Voltaic Systems’ backpack provides about three hours of talk time for an hour of sunlight and is actually really well-made as a holder of things too.

Windup Torch

A decent windup torch negates the need for batteries. We love the Cyba-Lite Eco Wind Up Super Bright Collapsible Lantern, not because of the atrocious spelling or overly long name, but because it does what it says and does it very, very well.

Camcorder

Don’t want risk wrecking your iPhone 4S? Take a camcorder, strap it to your hand a make a decent recording of things like your mates, your adventures and all those brilliant little moments that make up a classic festival experience. Top tip – seventeen hours of really far away wobbly footage of your favourite band will note make good viewing! Something like a Panasonic SDR-SW20 is a pretty good benchmark – waterproof and shock proof!

Things We Don’t Need

Speakers/Mp3 players – Don’t be that kid playing Brimful of Asha at 4AM. You risk being bitten to death by angry hippies. Festivals aren’t about showing off your awesome playlists!

Tablets – Seriously, you can’t live without your telly fix for three days? The unwritten rule of festivals is to never take anything you can’t afford to lose, so leave the new iPad at home!

Samsung Pips Apple to the Post with the Galaxy S3

June 1st, 2012Uncategorized No Comments

It’s only just out of the pre-order stages, but Samsung’s flagship little demon, the Galaxy S3, has already surpassed Apple’s iPhone 4S in the U.K! We buy U.K smartphones from pretty much every developer (even those weird conceptual Nokias like the 7280!) and Samsung’s popularity is something we see every time a new device bursts onto the market in a parade of glory! The battle between the Galaxy S2 and Apple’s iPhone4 was pretty epic, with each model pipping the other repeatedly and making market share graphs look like the heart monitor of an excited chiwawa!
Our friends, Carphone Warehouse, revealed last week that the Galaxy S3 is officially their fastest selling pre-order of the year. Samsung aren’t treating us to any official figures yet, but when the phone went out to pre-order customers a couple of days ago, it’s estimated at least NINE MILLION people had pre-ordered the handset. Apple aren’t forthcoming with their figures on pre-orders for the 4S, but they did tell us around a million pre-orders were made in the first 24 hours of availability (if they’d beaten Samsung, you know they wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet!)
Want to sell consoles, computers and tablets to join the S3 revolution? We buy them all!

A Brief Blog Entry of Time

May 4th, 2012Curious Stuff No Comments

 

Let’s say you’re one of our marketing team and you’ve got the day off. You quite fancy doing a little work from home with the cat on your lap – making notes on how to help our customers sell consoles, old iPads and stuff at the best rates – but at some point the phone rings and your mother decrees you will be giving her a lift to her WI meeting because she’s got a broken foot and she bore you so you can just quit your moaning and do this one thing for her etc, etc.

Fast-forward an hour and you’re making notes on sell for cash campaigns at the back of a village hall on your old iPad (playing games via 3G on the New iPad would be too tempting!) while your mother and her WI buddies are preparing to hear their guest speaker, a rather odd-sounding man who’s come to give a lecture on sundials. Yes, those less-precise-than-actual-clocks-and-no-good-in-the-dark timepieces are more than just garden ornaments and places to pop leftover toast for the birds.

We buy laptops, help you sell consoles and deal with all kinds of gadget-y dealings. We’re also of the Internet generation so it’s pretty tough to keep our attention for more than ten minutes unless you’re using infographics, spitting out memes or are on fire. But damn this man could make sundials sound like the most riveting topic since “Did you know Apple, yeah the computer company, are going to bring out a mobile phone? Wonder what that’ll be like?”

In honour of said sensational sundial guy, we’ve gathered a bunch of random facts about time, telling the time, old things, very old things and future things.

So there you have it, a bunch of facts about time and railways under the guise of a blog about how to sell consoles, smartphones, tablets and accurate-to-within-13-inches GPS devices!

Do You Have the Willpower to Use Your Smartphone Properly?

April 12th, 2012Curious Stuff No Comments

Apps are great. We love scouring the net for the latest, weirdest and most definitively greatest new releases. But do we use them properly? Do we heck! If you could sell for cash all the unused apps we find on your old tablets and smartphones, we’d be living on the moon in a secret moon base filled with lolcats, fajitas, bean bags and copies of HowItWorks magazine! (Maybe we already are…)

The problem with lots of apps is that they require 100% commitment to get the best use out of them. Some of the top unused apps we find when you guys are doing the whole sell my iPad thing are to do with things like diet and exercise. The MyFitnessPal app is one of our favourite free fitness and healthy living apps, but few folks have filled in more than perhaps a ten day stint in total.

Lists

Some folks are list-mad, and there are plenty of list apps available for your smartphones and tablets. You want to sell iPads and old iPhones to us for some nice cash, so we reckon you’ve probably got a tidy little list of ways to make extra cash. The great thing about list apps is that, in theory, they help you keep track of stuff more efficiently. But in a little office poll we found only 20% of our main office team actually regularly update or check their To-Do app lists. The most popular list format turned out to be the good old biro on the back of the hand!

Finances

We buy consoles, smartphones and all that jazz at superb rates (which our long-suffering worker bees have toiled away on for the past few days improving, boosting and generally bettering!) You can sell consoles, smartphones and even old Kindles to boost your nest egg, but can an app really stop us lying to ourselves about those little splurges on PS3 games, shoes and lolcats?

Yes! We love finance apps like the Accounts app for iPad! You have to be strict with yourself, but the proof is in the figures when you REALLY get a hold on your spending and saving. For finance apps, a hefty chunk of willpower really, REALLY brings home the bacon.

Scheduling and Calendars

This was a tricky one. There are some strict Blackberry devotees in this office who log every teeny bit of their lives on their business Blackberry… but others who prefer to wing it with a thousand Post-its! Calendar apps work most efficiently when every dental appointment, meeting, free day and family lunch is entered, so commitment is certainly a big factor. Miss one thing and you’re hopelessly disorganised. We reckon calendars and schedulers require heaps of willpower to get the most out of them, and without the will there’s no way you’re going to stay 100% on the ball.

But enough about apps and the troublesome sides of e-organising your life for today. If you want to sell iPads, old Kindles, smartphone or consoles, forget apps and head straight to our quote area!

2012 British Science Festival Heads to Aberdeen

April 2nd, 2012Curious Stuff, Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News No Comments

 

There are plenty of things in our tech-filled lives that bring a smiley emoticon to our faces – new iPhones, your old Kindles, helping our customers sell consoles, computers and gadgets for cash, office cat’s snoring and – the classic – a really, REALLY well-brewed cup of tea! Oh, and the British Science Festival!

One of Europe’s largest science festivals, the event has taken place in some form for the past 150 years! Run by the British Science Association, the 2012 event will cover around 250 events between 4th and 9th September in Aberdeen, including debates, hands-on fun stuff, live experiments and exhibitions.

This year’s theme is “Energising Minds” which means there’s likely to be some pretty cool blow-your-socks-off-and-melt-your-shoes style scientific and engineering gems on hand. Famous faces, plays and lectures will be on offer for toddlers right to serious academic types in bow ties with leather elbow patches, pipe and a strong sense of stereotyping.

If your interests are as piqued as ours, we reckon it’s time to sell iPads, old Kindles and whatever other unwanted gadgets you can get your hands on to fund a trip to the great and glorious North! We buy laptops, smartphones, GPS, cameras, tablets and probably a few bizarre devices too (use the online enquiry form to check!)

For more information on the British Science Festival visit www.britishsciencefestival.org, and don’t forget your lab coat and goggles!