By WSJ Staff

On Saturday night, Sandra Bullock made history by becoming only the second woman to accept her Golden Raspberry award — bestowed by the Razzie Awards for worst performance of the year — in person. Only Halle Berry, who won her Razzie in 2005 for “Catwoman,” has also had the humility (and sense of humor) to accept her award in person.

Granted, Berry and Bullock have the leeway to poke to fun at both their own careers and when films go awry — Berry is a Best Actress Oscar winner for 2001’s “Monster’s Ball” and Bullock is considered the front runner for the same award at this year’s Oscars ceremony, for her role as tough football mom in “The Blind Side.”

When accepting her speech, Bullock wheeled a wagon-full of DVDs for “All About Steve” — the panned comedy she won her Razzie for — on stage with her, and told the crowd everyone would get a copy.

“This is the deal I’m going to make. I will show up next year if you promise to watch the movie, really watch it, and really consider if it really and truly was the worst performance,” she said. “If you’re willing to watch it, I will come back next year and I will give back the Razzie.”

“I brought the shooting script, the final shooting draft,” she added. “And I will go page by page by page of my dialogue. I’m going to read the line the way that I read it in the film and then I want anyone who wants to come give me a line reading back to come up. So we can do this ’til about four o’clock, or you guys can rethink your decision and have me back next year.”

The first International Women’s Day

In 1869 British MP John Stuart Mill was the first person in Parliament to call for women’s right to vote. On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the right to vote. Women in other countries did not enjoy this equality and campaigned for justice for many years.

In 1910 a second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named Clara Zetkin (Leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin’s suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women’s Day was the result.

The very first International Women’s Day was launched the following year by Clara Zetkin on 19 March (not 8 March). The date was chosen because on 19 March in the year of the 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognized for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promise he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.

Plans for the first International Women’s Day demonstration were spread by word of mouth and in the press. During the week before International Women’s Day two journals appeared: The Vote for Women in Germany and Women’s Day in Austria. Various articles were devoted to International Women’s Day: ‘Women and Parliament’, ‘The Working Women and Municipal Affairs’, ‘What Has the Housewife got to do with Politics?’, etc. The articles thoroughly analyzed the question of the equality of women in the government and in society. All articles emphasized the same point that it was absolutely necessary to make parliament more democratic by extending the franchise to women.

Success of the first International Women’s Day in 1911 exceeded all expectation.

Meetings were organized everywhere in small towns and even the villages halls were packed so full that male workers were asked to give up their places for women.

Men stayed at home with their children for a change, and their wives, the captive housewives, went to meetings.

During the largest street demonstration of 30,000 women, the police decided to remove the demonstrators’ banners so the women workers made a stand. In the scuffle that followed, bloodshed was averted only with the help of the socialist deputies in Parliament.

In 1913 International Women’s Day was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Wommen’s Day ever since.

During International Women’s Year in 1975, IWD was given official recognition by the United Nations and was taken up by many governments. International Women’s Day is marked by a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam

Imminent enhancements to Google’s Android mobile platform have been revealed this week, in the form of a development effort called “Cupcake.”

Credit: CNET Networks

T-Mobile’s G1, aka the HTC Dream, was the first phone to go on
sale with Google’s Android operating system.

Android is in the process of being turned by Google from its own development project into open source. This week, some of the changes made to the mobile operating system by a private group of developers came to light in Cupcake–the Android code the group shares with the outside world. Now, according to the Android road map, the Cupcake enhancements have started to be merged into the wider, open-source Android project.

The private development branch will continue to operate, and the current merging of the new features into the master Android branch will be completed in early January.

Some of the changes coming to Android are bug fixes, affecting elements such as e-mail, conversation-list scrolling, and the alarm clock. Several new features are, however, also being added–for example, the ability to save MMS attachments. The Linux kernel upon which Android runs has been upgraded to version 2.6.27, and “basic x86 support” has been added.

The WebKit browser core has been updated, and support for the new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine has been added. The browser will now support cutting and pasting, and will also include a find function.

Android’s camera functionality has received a major boost, with the addition of video capture. Download functionality has also been enhanced; applications can pause their downloads, and interrupted downloads can now be resumed instead of failing.

Virtual keyboards will also become possible, and third-party developers will be given the application programming interfaces to create their own input methods. A new API for speech recognition is also included, as is A2DP stereo Bluetooth support.

(CNN) — Early each morning, millions of farmers around the world rise to toil in their fields. By night, gangs of mobsters scheme and legions of poker players shuffle up and deal.

Sure, none of it’s real. But the overwhelming popularity of so-called social gaming — simple games that let people play with their friends on networking sites such as Facebook — is changing the face of video games, experts say.

And as the maker of popular titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, San Francisco, California-based Zynga has ridden the games’ skyrocketing popularity to the top of that emerging market.

For Zynga founder Mark Pincus, the formula for gaming success on Facebook, MySpace and other sites was as simple as it might seem counterintuitive: create simple games that people like but can easily set aside.

“We built the games so they could be played in a tab on your browser while you’re on a conference call,” said Pincus, a veteran Web entrepreneur who created Zynga in 2007.

Of course, they’ve been helped by the massive growth of Facebook, where the games are so popular they’ve spawned “fan” pages devoted to complaining about having to watch friends play them.

Facebook, with its 400 million users, is where the vast majority of people play FarmVille and Mafia Wars along with other Zynga titles like FishVille, Vampires, Café World, YoVille and Zynga Poker.

In all, more than 65 million people play Zynga games every day, according to media tracking company Developer Analytics.

More than 75 million people a month play FarmVille, Zynga’s most popular title.

Zynga’s top title, FarmVille, is played by an estimated 75 million people each month — roughly equal to the number who have played the classic arcade and desktop game Tetris during its entire existence.

The massive growth was satisfying but not altogether surprising to Pincus, whose previous startups had included Freeloader, a Web-based information-gathering service; tech-support company SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an early social networking site from 2003.

He said that starting the game company, which he named after his late English bulldog, was an effort to fill what he considered a surprising void in most people’s daily Internet use.

“I thought in 2007 that something had gone oddly wrong with the whole Internet experience,” Pincus said. “I would have thought games would have been one of the top two or three experiences people had on the Internet.”

What Pincus got right, according to gaming expert Scott Steinberg, was a sort of return to the “golden era” of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.

“Video games actually appealed to a huge cross-section. They appealed to everybody,” said Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com. “What happened is, as we went through the mid-’80s to the mid-2000s, you started to see gaming become more incestuous in terms of 18- to 34-year-old males making games for people just like them.”

Zynga games like Café World draw much higher rates of female players than most video games.

By contrast, three of Zynga’s top five games — FarmVille, Café World and FishVille — have mostly female players, with many players outside the traditional 18- to 34-year-old range.

Those games all operate on the same basic premise. Starting with a simple farm, fish tank or restaurant, the player works to make it bigger and fancier, sharing items with friends and helping each other along the way.

Some of Zynga’s early titles simply mirrored existing board and card games. It was Mafia Wars — in which players team up to whack other gangs – that first exhibited what would become the hallmarks of social gaming: simple, single-player action that’s enhanced by teamwork.

With FarmVille, that formula would become complete.

Players plant virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite online friends to become their neighbors and help each other by sending gifts or helping with the farming. There’s no way to “win,” but players take satisfaction in building big, fancy farms that they can showcase to their friends.

“A farm is something that is internationally understood and known. It’s cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-age,” Pincus said. “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”

Not that Zynga’s success has come without criticism.

Mafia Wars is popular but prompted claims that it was a knock-off.

With hundreds of smaller companies vying for a piece of the social gaming market, some rivals have accused Zynga of using its hefty venture capital to crowd out less-financed competitors.

Many of its most popular games, including FarmVille, are similar to pre-existing games from smaller companies, a fact Pincus dismisses by noting that video games have always fallen into genres with similar titles from competing companies.

Psycho Monkey LLC, the makers of Mob Wars, filed a lawsuit claiming that Mafia Wars ripped them off. Zynga settled that case in August, said a spokeswoman for the company.

Zynga also was hit with complaints and lawsuits over its original business model, which let players earn in-game rewards for things like signing up for a credit card or video-rental membership.

Critics said some of the offers amounted to scams, leading players to download unwanted software or unwittingly sign up for memberships that appeared stealthily on their phone bills.

Pincus has acknowledged not being vigilant enough with the automated ads that appeared on Zynga games during the company’s early days.

More than 13 million people play FishVille every week, according to Zynga.

“We were playing whack-a-mole,” Pincus said. “Every time we found one of these or got a complaint, we would take them down. Eventually … we realized we had to take a much more aggressive stance than a normal Web site.”

In November, Zynga removed all “lead-generating” ads, relying for revenue instead on the roughly 1 to 3 percent of the player base that pays for in-game items, such as a barn in FarmVille. It has since been putting the advertisements back in, with a new system that lets it more closely monitor what kind of ads show up, Pincus said.

“We’ll see where this goes for the entire industry,” Pincus said. “It was really important to us to maintain a trusted position with our users. We wanted to do the right thing, and I think we did.”

Pincus offers a ray of hope for another vocal group of critics: the social-media users who say they’re tired of seeing all of their friends’ updates about Zynga and other social games.

On Facebook, a group called “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” had more than 5.2 million members recently.

“Please. No more of this stuff,” wrote one member. “I’ve had all I can take. About to hang up FACEBOOK. Just want a nice cozy place to talk with my friends!”

Zynga Poker was one of the company’s first social games and remains among the most popular.

“We have to evolve,” Pincus said “I think it’s heading to a place that’s more narrow-casting. I think you’ll get to a place where Facebook will be better about showing feeds to people who have a registered interest in them.”

For example, he said, there might eventually be a way to send game notifications only to people who play social games themselves.

“It’s not just games. It’s going to be true for music, for pictures, for status updates,” Pincus said. “I think, over time, these networks are going to start to shape more to … your [registered interests].”

Meanwhile, Zynga will be among the developers continuing to change how people look at video gaming. It’s a change that Steinberg, the gaming guru, says will be for the better.

While heavyweights like Electronic Arts and the popular Civilization series are making inroads into social gaming, Steinberg said, the genre is also opening up opportunities for smaller developers.

“We’re seeing, in many ways, a second renaissance for games,” Steinberg said.

“There’s been an epiphany among the developer community saying, ‘Look at these millions of users that we’ve forgotten to speak to for years.’ This can only be a good thing for the gaming industry in the end.”