The News 225: Saturday, January 11, 2014

The news for Saturday, January 11, 2014 Links for this episode:Nintendo: 3DS game sales up 45 percent in 2013 | Polygon More than 16 million 3DS games were sold through retailers and Nintendo's eShop in 2013, an increase of more than 45 percent compared to 2012's sales numbers, according to a Nintendo press release.The company also announced today that lifetime sales of the 3DS, 3DS XL and 2DS topped 11.5 million in the United States. Double Fine will give backers part one of its $3.3m Kickstarter game Broken Age on January 14 - The Next Web Double Fine will release the first part of Broken Age, the adventure game it funded with a $3.3 million Kickstarter campaign, on January 14.The release date was hinted at by studio founder Tim Schafer and later confirmed to Joystiq. “Haven’t shipped a game of my own in 4.5 years, an adventure game in 16, a point-n-click in almost 20,” he said on Twitter earlier today. “Next Tuesday is going to be exciting!” Uber’s driver-for-hire service arrives in Dublin to challenge Hailo - The Next Web More than a year-and-a-half after Hailo took its cab service to Dublin, Uber is finally arriving in the Emerald Isle’s capital city too.Uber’s driver-for-hire service lets you beckon a classy car with a few clicks of your smartphone and has been expanding wildly in recent times – it’s now available in dozens of cities across 26 countries, with its other recent launches including Tokyo and Moscow. The final season of 'Mad Men' will premiere in April | The Verge Fans of AMC's acclaimed period drama Mad Men can start counting the days to Don Draper's return: the first half of the show's final season will start airing on April 13 of this year, according to an announcement from the network covered by the Hollywood Reporter.AMC had earlier announced that Mad Men's seventh and last season would be split into two halves, each one consisting of seven episodes and airing around a year apart. That decision mimics the network's approach to its other acclaimed series, Breaking Bad, which bowed out with a record high of 10.3 million viewers last September. "This approach has worked well [...] for us with Breaking Bad, which attracted nearly double the number of viewers to its second-half premiere than had watched any previous episode," AMC President Charlie Collier said last year. "We are determined to bring Mad Men a similar showcase." Path picks up another $25 million in funding, just months after layoffs | The Verge Three months ago social networking service Path laid off 20 percent of its staff "to support continued innovation," followed shortly thereafter by departure its head of business, all sparking curiosity into just how well its was doing as a company. That apparently did not spook investors, who have just put another $25 million into the venture as part of a series C round, reports ReCode. Dropbox website goes down, hackers claim responsibility (update) | The Verge Dropbox's website appeared offline late Friday night, with the company releasing a statement saying the issue occurred during "routine internal maintenance." Just moments before the outage, though, the hacker group The 1775 Sec took to Twitter to state that they were responsible for downing the Dropbox website, and that they did so in in honor of late programmer and activist Aaron Swartz on the eve of the one-year anniversary of his death. The news followed reports that a Massachusetts Institute of Technology subdomain had also been taken down by hackers in honor of the late programmer. Beats Music arrives January 21st, family plan exclusive to AT&T customers | The Verge On January 21st, Beats Music will arrive on iOS, Android, Windows, and the web for a $9.99 monthly subscription. The service, originally known as Daisy, uses a combination of algorithms and human curation to suggest songs, claiming to have a staff of music experts "hand-selecting your playlists while you stream." The company's betting that curation will set Beats Music apart from the music streaming competition, like Spotify and Rdio, and it's not alone in that bet — AT