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MIDNIGHT CLUB: LOS ANGELES – SOUTH CENTRAL DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT COMING MARCH 12TH
02.25.09

The Midnight Club: Los Angeles – South Central downloadable content will be available on March 12th for both the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and for PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.

South Central offers more streets to race in with the free South Central Map Expansion which expands Midnight Club: Los Angeles by one third, adding four new neighborhoods to make up the iconic district of South Central. The South Central Premium Upgrade is the total South Central experience for Midnight Club: Los Angeles delivering 9 new vehicles, 26 new races, 12 new battle maps, 10 new delivery missions, over 100 new red light races, new vinyl packs, new parts, new music and more all for the cost of $9.99.

The free South Central Map Expansion will ensure that every racer with either Xbox 360® or PLAYSTATION®3 copies of the game can race online against players that have the South Central Premium Upgrade.

The South Central Map Expansion features:

• Map expansion by one third
• Four new neighborhoods
• Price: FREE for both Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3

The South Central Premium Upgrade features:

• Nine new vehicles:
  Luxury: 2008 Mercedes-Benz CLK63 AMG “Black” SUV: 2008 Range Rover Supercharged, 2008 Range Rover Sport Super Charged Lowrider: 1955 Chevy Bel Air, 1963 Buick Riviera, 1964 Chevy Impala, 1965 Chevy Malibu Muscle: 1970 Chevy Chevelle, 1966 Pontiac GTO
• 26 new races
• 12 new battle maps
• 10 new delivery missions
• 100+ new red light races
• New rims
• New body kits for each new car
• New vinyl pre-sets
• Hydraulics/Airbags unlocked on all new cars
• New music
• Price: $9.99 for PLAYSTATION 3 and 800 MS points for Xbox 360

More car packs are also set to come soon, stay tuned to the official site for more details, including the debut trailer.

The Kindle 2 is now official and listed on the Amazon.com site for pre-order. According to the official page, the Kindle 2 is set to ship on February 24 for $359. The device is a bit more than 1/3 of an inch thick, weighs 10.2 ounces, and has integrated 3G wireless connectivity with no monthly fees.

Amazon says that the battery life is 25% longer and pages turn 20% faster than on the original. The new device offers text-to-speech and can read stories to you. The display is a 6-inch diagonal E-Ink unit with a resolution of 600 x 800 pixels at 167 ppi in 16-level gray scale.

One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pacman while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.

What if you could also access literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain’s hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

There’s an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you’ll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone’s small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:

=> “Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson- which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. …

The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text. The example below shows the page image from the original manuscript for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In this extreme case, the extracted text is riddled with errors:

=> “lV~e.il!” .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve …

Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Our computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.

The technical challenges are daunting, but we’ll continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies. With this launch, we believe that we’ve taken an important step toward more universal access to books.

To try it out, point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m and begin reading. Oh, and if you do bump into some rough patches where the text seems, well, weird, you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.

Happy mobile reading!

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