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We all need a little bit of leisure time every now and again, but there’s no reason why you have to break the bank to get award-winning games to play during those times. That’s why VentureBeat is offering The Name Your Own Price Gamer Bundle for a limited time.

That’s right. We’ve partnered with 6 of the world’s finest Indie Gamer developers to bring you The Name Your Own Price Indie Gamer Bundle. You pay what you want for three different games that will keep you gaming for hours on end including: The Journey Down, Aztaka, and iBomber Defense. And if you pay higher than the average price, you’ll also receive Spades of Time, SpaceChem, and Cubemen.

After purchasing, you’ll get instant access to the full-version of games right from your account using Steam. Support some of the world’s best Indie developers and pay what you want for their finest work. Remember, they’ve worked hard to build these apps – pay a price you feel represents their efforts.

Here’s a little bit about the games included:

Blades of Time

• Solve different puzzles and fight armies of monsters
• Over 40 different combo attacks as well as spells of different magic schools
• Beautiful graphics: travel from snowy valleys and dense jungle to ancient cities and temples
• Eye-catching visual appeal

SpaceChem

• An addictive puzzle game
• Excellent design and user experience
• A fun, challenging and rewarding game that includes cosmic horror space monsters

Cubemen

• A fun, action-packed battle game
• Over 80 built-in maps and 8,000+ user-generated maps
• Built-in level editor
• Single player and multi-player gaming
• Fast-paced, easy to play but yet difficult enough to keep you battling for hours

iBomber Defense

• Twenty-two challenging and unique stages across a vast campaign
• Huge variety of weapons to repel the enemy: AA Guns, Artillery, Machine Gun Nests and more!
• Use Counter Attacks, Rewinds and the High Ground to your advantage
• Slick, gorgeous, graphics

Aztaka

• Gameplay in a gorgeous hand-painted world
• Discover 21 unique and detailed levels
• Enhance and customize your character by leveling-up and training skills and abilities
• Manipulate spiritual energy through an innovative hybrid control scheme to solve puzzles and vanquish foes

The Journey Down: Chapter 1

• A twisted and suspenseful adventure game
• An original jazzy reggae soundtrack
• Full of puzzles, mischief, and mystery

You can learn more about all of the games in the bundle by heading over to the VB Store.

But that’s not all that we’re offering with this offer. We’ve also chosen three charities that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of three charities of your choice: Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons. You get to help choose which charity raises the most!

This deal won’t lst for long – and that average price will climb each and every day. So don’t delay – pick up The Name Your Own Price Gamer Bundle today!

The collective outpouring of grief and anger at the circumstances surrounding the death of Internet visionary Aaron Swartz is only continuing to grow. In the past few days, we have seen his friends and co-workers share warm stories of his brilliance, compassion, and tireless dedication to the causes of an open and free exchange of ideas. Yet a dark cloud hangs over these discussions: the thought of what could have been if things went differently.

This case has exposed to the world an ugly, corrupt side of our justice system – one that prioritizes harassment over due process, which uses the threat of incarceration as a tool of psychological warfare.

In part, because of a misguided, ruthless prosecution and the revolting behavior of one of our nation’s most respected educational institutions, our generation has lost one of its brightest stars. When a system judges a victimless transgression against intellectual property as a worse offense than entire classes of violent crimes, society is in a dangerous place.

As Columbia Professor Tim Wu points out, “the great ones almost always operate at the edge;” Steve Jobs and an entire generation of technological geniuses found their roots in hacking telephones and early communication systems. We would have lost so much if we branded them as “destructive felons” before their careers even began.

Swartz was only a year older than me when he tragically took his life, yet he already had contributed so much to the world. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I benefit from his work regularly. RSS feeds have simplified my daily reading, Creative Commons licenses have made sharing content far easier, and I have spent countless hours learning incredible things deep in the pages of Reddit. More than that, my entire generation has benefitted enormously from a free and open Internet, which he fought so hard to preserve.

In many ways, the rapid exchange of information has come to define our generation – we were the pioneers of a more social Internet, and we’ve watched many times as entire industries have transformed into bits of data that can be seamlessly shared online. We are a generation built off the “remix,” understanding that originality can come from reinterpretation. And for better or worse, we have little respect for artificial barriers meant to keep knowledge and content restricted to only certain people.

The Internet has played a critical role in our development, exposing us to stories, information and perspective from people from all walks of life, globally. It has also been critical in helping to create what is one of the largest, most socially tolerant generations ever to exist.  We know the positive power of technology, but we understand that people connect with each other, we learn through the human experience.

Swartz not only reflected these values and beliefs, through his incredible body of work he actively moved these causes forward. In his many writings, he reveals himself to be an idealist, unsatisfied with what was around him. Yet he was one of the few with the actual passion to create the change that he wanted to see.

Moving forward, the authorities involved need to be held accountable for their actions – at the very least. We need to take a hard look at our legal systems, our priorities and how we can stop this from happening again. It seems that the government has inadvertently breathed new life into the causes that Swartz championed. The exciting #pdftribute campaign by researchers on Twitter is just one example of what can be done to improve the world in his name.

His actions were rare and powerful acts of civil disobedience that are not commonly seen in our generation. Though his time on the planet was short, Swartz made a monumental impact. The fact that his last days were spent in such darkness is truly heartbreaking.

Tarun Wadhwa is a research fellow with Singularity University and a researcher with the Hybrid Reality Institute. He is currently completing a book analyzing the impact of the global rise of digital identification systems. You can follow him on Twitter: @twadhwa.

This story originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Photo credit: ldandersen via photopin cc

A new nonprofit search engine dubbed “Gooru“ announced today an ambitious plan to bring personalized learning to K12 education.

Gooru, a Silicon Valley company, was founded by Yahoo India’s former CTO (think education-focused Google without the ads). It is teaming up with Silverback Learning, a Boise, Idaho-based tech startup founded by teachers, to identify students’ needs and offer them relevant online learning materials.

Silverback is the developer of Mileposts, a cloud-based management system that allows teachers and administrators to organize and access student data. It will integrate with Gooru’s search engine to pinpoint the educational areas where students are struggling, and suggest the most appropriate free learning materials.

“Teachers are focused on maximizing student education in the classroom, and therefore are commonly time-challenged to search for and select the best matched educational materials for each and every student based on their individually assessed needs,” said CEO Prasad Ram, who relocated to Palo Alto, Calif. to develop the company.

Prior to founding Gooru, Ram worked in senior-level research roles at Yahoo, Google, and Xerox Parc.

“Now more than ever, the educational industry is in need of knowledge and talent to innovate and create new technologies,” Silverback CEO Jim Lewis told VentureBeat.

What’s particularly interesting is that through Gooru, students and teachers can access resources that are aligned with Common Core State Standards, the initiative to bring diverse state-by-state curricula into alignment by 2014/15.

Gooru is still in beta and currently focuses on online resources for learning, such as teacher videos, digital textbooks, quizzes, and games. Its search engine taps into the growing proliferation of digital learning resources (primarily 5th-12th grade math, science, and social science topics). In the future, it will expand to K12 reading, language arts, and additional subjects.

Image via Shutterstock

The contest is Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, and it’s focused on photos of historic sites around the world. Last year’s contest saw 168,000 pictures uploaded by more than 5,000 photographers from 18 European nations. This year, volunteers in more than 30 countries, including the U.S., will join in as organizers attempt to surpass that total.

The Wikipedia Commons is already one of the world’s largest repositories of freely usable images, with  13.6 million media files. But there are substantial gaps in the database, according to Lodewijk Gelauff, one of the organizers of the first Wiki Loves Photos contest in 2010. No freely usable pictures exist of many world heritage sites, culturally significant monuments, and notable buildings around the world.

“Wiki Loves Monuments is an important way for volunteers around the world to showcase the cultural heritage in their countries and share these images with everyone through Wikipedia,” Gelauff said in a Wikimedia Foundation blog post.

All submitted photos will be added to the Commons, which means that anyone can use them for any purpose, as long as the photographer is credited. Ten finalists and one grand prize winner will be announced in December, and the winner will receive a trip to Hong Kong to shoot a photo tour in conjunction with Wikimania 2013.

“By uploading your photos, you are sharing our national heritage with everybody in America and in the rest of the world. The photos will be free to use, and free of cost, forever,” said Peter Ekman, the national coordinator for the U.S. contest.

A Wikimedia app is available on Google Play that contestants can use to both locate monuments of interest and enter photographs into the contest, directly from their Android smartphones.

Participating countries include India, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, the Phillipines, and Brazil, plus all of North America and almost all of Europe.

Americans can contribute here, and international contributors can submit photos at wikilovesmonuments.org.

Image credit: Sfmontyo/WikiMedia

In addition to being the biggest streaming video site in the world, YouTube is also the largest host of videos licensed under creative commons, the site revealed today in a blog post.

The Creative Commons licensing allows others to use a piece of media within their own content as long as they give attribution (to a certain degree). For example, a music video could splice in news clips from C-SPAN as long as C-SPAN was credited as providing the clips. And since there are various degrees of Creative Commons (free for non-commercial use, commercial use, free to use if unaltered, etc.), identifying the exact licensing type can be difficult.

YouTube first added enhanced abilities to mark uploaded videos under Creative Commons to its video editor a little over a year ago. It also forged partnerships with several major content partners, such as C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, and PublicResource.org to provide over 10,000 clips to users. Yahoo-owned Flickr also offers users its enhanced ability to mark photos under Creative Commons licensing.

Since then, the number of Creative Commons licensed (CC BY) videos on YouTube has increased to over 4 million, or 40 years’ worth of videos, according to the site.

“Thanks to CC BY, it’s easy to borrow footage from other people’s videos and insert it into your own, because the license grants you the specific permissions to do so as long as you give credit to the original creator,” wrote Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly in the YouTube blog post.

Top image via CreativeCommons/YouTube

Although YouTube has been around for six years and owned by Google for five, it’s admirable that the company continues to add features that empower the user. The addition of Creative Commons licenses to YouTube will make it easier for users to increase their exposure if other users want to use or remix that content. Adding Creative Commons tags will also help YouTube on the copyright front by clearly distinguishing what clips users can use freely and what they cannot.

YouTube said it is teaming up with C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, and PublicResource.org to provide more than 10,000 clips to users. Any videos that use Creative Commons videos will list the CC source videos underneath the video player.

Another big part of the announcement is that YouTube customers will be able to mark their own videos with a Creative Commons CC-BY license that lets other people edit and remix a copy of their work.

Users who want to check out the Creative Commons selection right now can go to www.youtube.com/editor and select the CC tab. From there, users will be able to search through all YouTube videos marked with a Creative Commons tag or Favorites that have been previously selected.