Security lessons from the PlayStation Network breach

Security lessons from the PlayStation Network breach Posted: 22 Sep 2011 09:15 AM PDT This post is part of a series brought to you by GoToAssist. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. On April 19th, Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qriocity services were infiltrated, and hackers walked away with personally identifiable information from more than 77 million accounts. The attack was one of the largest security data breaches in history, and Sony’s response has been widely criticized by security experts, consumers and politicians alike. From waiting over a week to alert users that their personal details may have been stolen to storing those personal details in an unencrypted format, the PlayStation Network breach is an excellent case study for how other cloud app companies both big and small can avoid a similar fiasco, even if they do get hacked. The first thing to keep in mind is that while it may be easy to blame the hackers, the roots of Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) breach started in the board room. “Organizational complexity and a lack of good security support at board level is probably the biggest mistake Sony made that led to the PSN hacks,” says Stuart Thomas, a UK security expert who has worked as head of security at the London Stock Exchange and wrote the national cryptographic standards for the UK National Health Service. Thomas has special insight into the matter: he built the original PlayStation 2 network for Sony back in 2001. “If you don’t have a solid expert at board level championing good security management of people, technology and processes, everything else fails,” says Thomas. Even so, it can be rare to find such experts at board level. “The ongoing costs of hiring Ph.D.-level security analysts are almost always scoffed at,” says Thomas. “But if you are not watching your intrusion logs, you have no idea what is going on in your network.” In Sony’s case, that may have led to disaster. An experienced security analyst examining the PSN’s logs on a regular basis should have been able to detect the earliest warning signs of the upcoming breach. We don’t know exactly what measures Sony had in place before the breach, but it has clearly tried to bolster security measures since then. In September, Sony hired former the director of the National Cyber Security Center at the US Department of Homeland Security Philip Reitinger to be its new chief information security officer (CISO). Organizational complacency was also an issue that led to the PlayStation Network attacks. “Nothing is ever 100% secure. Don’t assume someone won’t come after your data because you’re ‘just a games company’ or something similar,” says Chris Boyd, a senior threat researcher for GFI Software and four-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award winner in Consumer Security. Even though you may think that you are a small fish in a big pond, the danger of being hacked is very real. “Everyone is a target, even if you can’t think of ways that your data could possibly be used for nefarious purpose,” says Boyd. “If you don’t have a CISO already, now is the time to be looking for one.” Once you’ve got a security expert in place, practice makes perfect. “A cloud app company or online service should prepare to be hacked just as if it were having a fire drill,” says Stuart Thomas. “You need to have an agreed incident management policy for having your systems breached. Practice it often, then go over the results and learn from your mistakes. Don’t wait until it’s too late, your user’s data has been compromised and your CFO is firing the shots because your company has been cut off from processing credit cards.” And not just the big hacks count. Make sure that all levels of your company are aware of good security procedures. “If customer support is involved with password resets, you should ensure that staff are familiar with the basics of social engineering,” says Boyd. “There are dedicated teams who spend hours each day phoning customer service representatives, attempting to hijack accounts.” So what do you do when you find out you have been hacked? Well, whatever you do, don’t follow Sony’s lead and sit on the information. Instead, alert users immediately. Doing otherwise could cripple your company’s credibility in the eyes of consumers. “In Sony’s case, they waited seven days to tell users what happened,” says Boyd. “Since there was a possibility of financial data having been stolen, customers should have been informed much earlier. If I were a customer, I’d rather Sony had assumed the worst and let me know that my payment info may have been exposed, even if it turned out later that it wasn’t actually the case.” Ultimately, security isn’t just about the software you use or how you encrypt your data. Security can’t be patched in. You need to build your product with security in mind from the ground up, and foster an obsession with security amongst all aspects of your company. “Speed to market for a cloud app can be important, but quality controls ensure the survival of your app and brand,” says Stuart Thomas. “Great security skills are important, but it is the ability to evangelize, communicate and motivate all levels of management and staff that keeps security issues fresh in people’s minds.” What is the takeaway for cloud app companies both big and small hoping to learn from Sony’s mistakes? It’s simple, says Thomas. “Make security real.” Image credit: Surian Soosay/Flickr Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

King of Code Finalist: Ricky Robinett’s 2011 one-app-per-month marathon Posted: 22 Sep 2011 09:00 AM PDT (The King of Code contest is sponsored by Windows Phone and is open to developers on any mobile platform.) Like many other King of Code finalists, iPhone developer Ricky Robinett got an early start. In middle school, he built a basic side-scroller application using Visual Basic. Now, over a decade later, he's still programming and thinking much bigger. The best athletes are the ones who train regularly. Robinett's experience suggests that the same can be said for coders. Even though he has a day job as a senior software engineer at Targetspot, the country's largest radio advertising network, he's found time for herculean side projects in his spare time. Collaborating with friends and striking out on his own, he's launched a few high-profile products, including World of Fourcraft, FakeGirlfriend.co and Discouraging Doug. But more on those later. What makes Robinett really stand out is a pact he made with himself at the start of 2011: to launch or co-launch one project a month, every month. Eight months and launches later, so far so good. "At the end of 2010, I had a pretty harsh realization," he wrote of the decision. "Even though I spent the year talking about, and working on many projects, I never actually launched anything." Initially, he assumed that time and money constraints could be blamed for the lack of launches. After some self reflection, however, he realized it was actually fear of criticism that was holding him back. People don't usually think of technology as an emotional business, but app creators who invest much of themselves in their products may have more in common with artists, Robinett suggests. Forging ahead with launches this year has helped him face his fears and gain much more. "By working with new technologies, I've really expanded my skill-set and developed some great friendships," says Robinett, adding that every project he's launched has involved some help from his wife Hannah Robinett. In many ways, the project-a-month marathon (which he's dubbed 1x1x2011) has been humbling for him. Yes, some of his launches have been highly acclaimed, getting exposure on sites like Mashable and Thrillist. But others, like drunk-dial prevention app TrashedTweet and Twudge Report, never really saw the light of day. At the same time, this has helped him beat fears of failure, and he recommends the experiment to any coders having trouble getting their apps off the ground. "1x1x2011 showed me that launching an app isn't as scary as I made it out to be, but it also showed me that to be successful you have to do so much more than just launch," he writes on his blog. "You need to iterate and make the idea better. You need to engage your users. You need to add value to their lives." In 2012, Robinett says he plans to settle on just one idea and "devote some serious effort to it." It might be a project he launched in 2011, but it's too early to say. In the meantime, he's definitely made a name for himself — with two of his apps especially. As part of the World of Fourcraft team, he took second place at the NYC Game Hack Day. And his other popular creation, Discouraging Doug — a portable discouraging message generator — was featured as a new and notable iPad Entertainment App Feature on the iTunes Store. World of Fourcraft, in particular, makes it clear that Robinett is on the road to greatness. It's become popular for college campuses to turn themselves into digital board games for student bonding activities, but this app takes the concept to the max. It transforms the map of New York City — including the boroughs — into a gigantic game of Risk using Foursquare and Google Maps APIs. As Mashable's review of the game describes, "Checking into a neighborhood on Foursquare is the online game's equivalent to placing a plastic man on a country in the board game. An algorithm decides who owns each neighborhood using the number of people who have checked into it on each team." This is pretty ambitious, especially given the compressed time-frame of all of Robinett's 2011 projects. Who knows what he'll be capable of when he actually sits down and focuses on just one of his creations. We're looking forward to it. Filed under: dev, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Sony shows offf redesign of PlayStation Home as a social gaming hub Posted: 22 Sep 2011 09:00 AM PDT Sony is showing off more of a major redesign of PlayStation Home, which launched in 2008 as a virtual world and is now becoming a hub for social gaming. The redesign is aimed at jumping on the big trend in online games toward social games with free-to-play business models, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. It is the kind of gamble that Sony needs to make in order to hang on to its 23 million registered users at a time when social networks and mobile phones are stealing consumers. Jack Buser (pictured), director of PlayStation Home, said in an interview the core of Home will be a Hub (pictured at top) where you can socialize with friends and immediately find game-related activities to do. Sony has a closed beta test for the new Home right now and hopes to widen it soon. “Right when you walk into the Hub, you’ll see a featured game and the activity board that lists everything you can do,” Buser said. Home is evolving to become more of a platform for playing social games. The 230 titles available on Home are aimed at Home’s mostly hardcore fans, but they are lighter and more casual experiences than users would find in disk-based PlayStation 3 games. That’s a far cry from Home’s original mission in 2008 as a virtual world for gamers. Sony showed us its plans for Home at the E3 video game trade show in June and it has been tweaking the experience ever since, announcing preliminary plans in August. But now the design is taking shape for a full launch later this year. The whole idea, Buser said, is to keep users engaged for a longer period of time, to measure what they like, and then to revise the offerings of Home so that they will be more amendable to the audience. “That’s what we’ve learned from the rise of social gaming,” Buser said. Indeed, Sony took feedback into account in creating different sections within Home. The central plaza of Home will now be replaced by a futuristic transit place called The Hub. That Hub includes “meta games” where you can fulfill various quests such as defending the Hub from attack. Home will still have offerings such as such as navigation, shopping, socializing and viewing movies. Besides quests, the Hub integrates games, community events and user-generated content. At The Hub, users can look at an activity board where they will see the various games in progress and missions that they can fulfill. They can also create their own events to share with friends. Visitors can earn points for game-like activities. “We are giving the keys to the castle to the users so they can make their own goods,” Buser said. From the Hub, players can navigate directly into free games, or move to different districts that emphasize different game genres. In the constantly-changing districts, users can find games that suit their own styles and moods. The goal is to rapidly connect players with games that they want to play. The territories include the Action District (pictured right), where users can associate in a gritty, urban place that looks like a first-person shooter level and provides direct access to action and horror games. Home will also have district dubbed Sportswalk (pictured left), a place that makes you feel like you are "outside the stadium" with access to major league sports scores, headlines, highlights, and sports games; the Adventure District, which drops you into a an island jungle with a lot of mystery, hidden treasure, and adventure games; and Pier Park, a waterfront boardwalk with access to carnival, outdoor, and arcade games. You can take a ride on the Pier Park Ferris wheel (pictured below) or visit the arcade. Buser said that Sony will rotate new content through the marquee physical spots within the Hub and the districts, so users will find it worthwhile to come back and discover new games that are on display. For instance, in one plaza a tank from the game Sodium is on display. If a user walks up to it with an avatar, the user can jump directly into the Sodium game. The world will also contain new games. One of the new games that Sony will debut on PlayStation Home is COGS, a social game being developed by indie game label Codename. A working demo of COGS is one of the first things you see when you walk into Home. I played a gangster shooting game called Bootleggers 29, where you try to steal a barrel in the middle of a warehouse while shooting other gangsters in a multiplayer match. Sony is updating the Playstation Network client to enable real-time peer-to-peer game play, as is possible in Bootleggers 29. “It’s a great place for people who are between major games,” Buser said. “They can enjoy a break with a free-to-play game.” But Buser noted that, in contrast to broad social networks, Home’s audience is full of passionate hardcore gamers who don’t mind paying money for games. So he anticipates that Sony and its many third-party developers will make considerable amounts of money through virtual goods transactions. “Our users are the core of the PlayStation Network, the most active users,” Buser said. “They spend more money, play more games, watch more movies and listen to more music than the average consumer.” Some 30 developers are creating games for Home. Typically, about 5 to 10 developers make a game over six months before it debuts in Home. Buser said the average time spent in the Home platform is 70 minutes per session. There are about 10,000 virtual items. Home has 65 virtual spaces, 35 partners, and it has held more than 600 community events. The game spaces have seen 66.7 million actions over the past year, up 83 percent from a year ago. In bars inside the Sportswalk, you can see dart boards that you can actually play. The same goes for the poker tables, which will let you join others in a game of multiplayer poker, which is a full-scale poker experience with 3D avatars. You can play pool or sports trivia games if you like. If the games don’t do that well, Sony can swap them out and put in new games easily. “In the poker game, you can watch or take actions that will drive animations, such as an avatar pulling in poker chips,” Buser said. “You can win points.” Filed under: games, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

HTC and Dropbox to give new Android phones 5GB free cloud storage Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:49 AM PDT Device manufacturer HTC has partnered with Dropbox to give 5GB of free cloud storage to new HTC Android phone owners using the new Sense 3.5 interface, according to Pocket-lint. With Apple soon launching its iCloud storage service and Microsoft pushing its Skydrive, the level at which mobile devices interact with the cloud appears to be intensifying. The HTC-Dropbox partnership will make it possible for users to access and store all kinds of files like music, video and documents in the cloud. Normally, Dropbox offers 2GB free, but Sense 3.5 users will get 3GB extra. The first device to offer 5GB free Dropbox storage will be the female-focused HTC Rhyme Android phone, which is pictured to left and launching in October. All future HTC phones running Sense 3.5 will also get the 5GB cloud storage. HTC said it is unsure it will bring Dropbox service to its Windows Phone 7 devices because Microsoft already has Skydrive service inside of that OS. Skydrive offers a much better 25GB of free storage. At this point, HTC has not said if older Sense users with Android phones will get the Dropbox storage, but we may see the company extend this offer to more customers in the near future to keep up with the competition. Filed under: cloud, mobile This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Hulu hits a million paying subscribers; will invest $375M in new content this year Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:19 AM PDT Despite an impending sale from its owners who no longer what it, Hulu continues to grow in popularity and revenues. The streaming video service has reaching a million paying customers, reports Reuters. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar previously announced that Hulu expected to reach the milestone number of a million Hulu Plus subscribers before the end of 2011 in the a company's second quarter progress report. Now it seems that Hulu will far exceed those numbers by 2012. Hulu offers a limited amount of free access to the videos on its website and a premium subscription service called Hulu Plus for $8 per month. Hulu Plus subscribers get access to a larger library of exclusive content as well as the ability to watch programming on several different devices, not just through a web browser. The company first launched its Hulu Plus subscription service in November with exclusive content from its joint owners News Corp, Walt Disney Co and Comcast Corp’s NBC Universal. Hulu has since added has since added new content from Viacom and movie studio Miramax, and launched a new version of the service in Japan. Kilar said the company plans to invest $375 million in content this year and reach revenue totals of about $500 million, according to the report. With its impressive subscriber growth and healthy revenue numbers, critics have questioned the logic behind Hulu’s owners plan to sell the service to companies like Google, Amazon or DirecTV. The sale, however, might not occur due to lower than anticipated bids for Hulu, which VentureBeat reported last week. Hulu’s owners could terminate the sale if the next round of bids don’t meet its expectations — which are around $2 billion, not including any special content licensing stipulations. Filed under: cloud, media, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Real Networks’ GameHouse makes its run at social gaming Posted: 22 Sep 2011 07:50 AM PDT It has taken a while to get the engines revving. But the GameHouse division of Real Networks is making its run at the social game market. The company has 3,000 casual games and 50 million unique users a month, but that business has been disrupted. Now it is poised to start cranking out Facebook games that could potentially be a lot more lucrative, according to an interview with GameHouse senior vice president Matt Hulett. Hulett (pictured) said that GameHouse is launching a series of new Facebook games, including Collapse+Blast this summer and a follow-up title Bayou Blast, which launches at the end of October and is considered the company’s most important social game to date. Each game by itself isn’t a huge deal, but over time GameHouse hopes to grab its fair share of the market and make a strategic shift into social and mobile games. Rather than fear change, Hulett says companies like his have to embrace it and run with it. Overall, more than half of GameHouse’s 80 or so developers are now focused on social games. The investment this year is more than $10 million in social and mobile games, and that amount will increase significantly in 2012. “We are trying to take the ten-year-old GameHouse business on the casual side and move it over to social,” he said. “We want to crack the top ten in six months.” Hulett’s background is in startups, where he has raised $100 million in funding. But he joined the gaming division to turn the operation around.He described that process at a recent talk at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle. Real Networks built the GameHouse division in a more prosperous time, during the heyday of casual games played on web sites. Facebook and Zynga have disrupted that business, so that companies can no longer charge $20 a game for casual titles. Now the social games on Facebook are free-to-play, where users play them for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Even so, GameHouse still has something like a $100 million business. Just a short time ago, most people believe that Zynga had the Facebook game market locked up. It still has more than 267 million monthly active users today. But other rivals have made a big dent in grabbing users. EA has 94 million monthly active users, thanks to the fast growth of The Sims Social. Germany’s Wooga has 41 million users, and King.com has 16.6 million users. “It’s like the 1912 patent office, where they said everything that can be invented has been invented,” Hulett said. “Because they are successful now, it doesn’t mean Zynga will own the market.” The success of the newcomers has given Hulett some heart and emboldened him to accelerate the company’s investments. He is recruiting more developers to build new games or adapt existing ones for social play. Of the thousands of games that GameHouse has, there are probably 100 or so that can be adapted as GameHouse-owned brands on Facebook. So far, the company has 15 games on Facebook, with a total of 4.6 million monthly active users. The Collapse+Blast game has more than 200,000 daily active users and it is is growing by several thousand a day. The Bayou Blast game is a gem-matching game, much like Bejeweled. But it has an interesting touch-related mechanic where you can draw a line through all of the gems of the same color on a screen and score points by doing so. The game is social, as you can email high scores to your friends and taunt them. “It’s designed for higher engagement,” Hulett said. Other titles in the works include a slot machine game and a social version of Let’s Make a Deal. Each of those games will try to drive traffic to the GameHouse web site, in addition to being playable on Facebook. While some of this sounds simple, it has meant a lot of change at GameHouse, The company cut back on staff and then hired more people for the social and mobile games. The good thing is that the market is still growing at a healthy rate, and it’s not too late to expand into the Facebook market. Most other new entrants are aiming at the mobile market, and GameHouse has more than 75 games on those platforms. But the addressable market for social games is much better, Hulett said. The company will dip its toes into the Google+ social games market as well, though Facebook will remain its main target. “The simulation genre might be getting saturated, but there are new genres that are attracting different audiences,” Hulett said. “We’ve early in this journey. I’m betting with half the team focused on social, and even more next year.” Will some of this disrupt and hurt the casual game business? Hulett doesn’t care. “We have had the crap kicked out of us so many times that I have no problems cannibalizing anything I am doing today,” he said. Filed under: games This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Verizon CEO defends AT&T/T-Mobile merger, says it’s “like gravity” Posted: 22 Sep 2011 07:45 AM PDT Of all the people to defend AT&T’s $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam comes as one of the biggest surprises. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investor conference on Wednesday, McAdam said the massive deal has to occur, unless the government can better focus on giving telecoms more wireless spectrum, according to the mobile site Boy Genius Report. "I have taken the position that the AT&T merger with T-Mobile was kind of like gravity," he told investors. "It had to occur, because you had a company with a T-Mobile that had the spectrum but didn't have the capital to build it out. AT&T needed the spectrum, they didn't have it in order to take care of their customers, and so that match had to occur." McAdam went on to say that he has told the FCC that blocking the merger will harm American consumers. (Verizon Wireless is co-owned by Verizon and Vodafone.) The U.S. government filed papers to block the T-Mobile deal on August 31, saying that it would “substantially” reduce competition.  Sprint followed up with its own lawsuit a few days later. AT&T reiterated Wednesday that it’s seeking a “prompt trial” for the DOJ’s suit, Bloomberg reports. "We're seeking a prompt trial because we're very interested in closing this transaction," AT&T attorney Mark Hansen said. "We need to have the cloud of uncertainty removed. We're already a month beyond where we want to be." It’s interesting that Verizon’s CEO would be so gung-ho about letting its biggest rival become even more powerful. It could be a hint that Verizon Wireless wants to keep the door open to acquire Sprint. McAdam can’t trash talk the T-Mobile merger now when the company may need to convince regulators in a few years that it needs to purchase Sprint. Photo by Stuart Isett/Fortune Brainstorm TECH Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

YouTube adds Magisto’s ‘magical’ editing, removes 15-minute limit for verified users Posted: 22 Sep 2011 07:37 AM PDT That was fast. Only a day after automated video editing service Magisto announced it had received $5.5 million in second-round funding, YouTube has integrated the service into its offerings. YouTube took the opportunity to announce that it has removed the 15-minute limit from verified user videos and added a 2D-to-3D beta tool. YouTube appears to be adding a lot of new free tools in hopes that it will improve the general quality of clips on the service. Just a week after adding the ability to do basic video editing inside YouTube itself, the service is pushing for more with partnerships with Vlix, for adding effects and text, and Magisto for automating the video editing process altogether. A YouTube-Magisto partnership makes good sense, as Magisto's free service automates the video editing process for newbies, making it possible to submit video clips and let Magisto do the work of cutting a short video in an interesting fashion. Magisto scans the clips for noteworthy action and packages it with tricks like transitions and split-screens. Then users give the video a title and pick a soundtrack, and the video is ready to go. The option to use Magisto appears on YouTube’s “Create” page as well as during the video uploading process. YouTube also upped the ante for what users can do with the service by letting verified users upload videos longer than 15 minutes and letting users convert 2D videos to 3D. To become a “verified user” you have to give your phone number to YouTube. To use the 3D beta feature, you have to do so at the end of the uploading process by selecting “Edit Info”, then “3D Video” on the clip you’ve uploaded. What do you think about the YouTube’s new features? Have you tried Magisto’s editing yet? Filed under: media This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Turntable.fm gets a new look, makes it easier to land a DJ spot Posted: 22 Sep 2011 06:36 AM PDT Hot social music startup Turntable.fm has updated its main page with a much-needed redesign that will make finding a spot to share your tunes easier than ever. The new homepage is much slicker than Turntable.fm’s previous entry, which was fairly bare bones. Now in addition to finding popular rooms, you can easily find rooms that need DJs and mark and access your favorite rooms. The redesigned homepage also lets you easily see if any of your friends are online on Turntable.fm. While the homepage appears to be the only part of the service to get a new coat of paint, it was by far the page that most needed an update. Now new users to the service will be less confused about where to go and where to find a DJ spot. I suspect its music rooms will be the company’s next major design upgrade. At this point, after releasing an iPhone app and securing funding, Turntable.fm needs to focus on perfecting its overall experience. The service lets you share music by DJing to groups of up to 200 listeners, or you can just sit back and enjoy the tunes as other users DJ. But the game mechanics of the service could use some work. DJs earn points every time someone rates their song as “Awesome,” and they can then use those points to buy new avatars, which end up serving as status symbols. But typically it’s very difficult to land a DJ spot in more popular rooms. And it’s very easy for power users to stay in a DJ spot all day, racking up points in the process, without actually paying attention to the room. At some point, Turntable.fm needs to make it easier for new users to become DJs and earn points, otherwise it will end up being ruled by a subsection of power users. Filed under: media, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Why lyrics are the consumer web’s next big thing, again Posted: 22 Sep 2011 06:30 AM PDT Pages: 1 2 The next big thing for the consumer web could actually come from one of its oldest content verticals: lyrics. Services like RapGenius and TuneWiki are spearheading a new way of publishing and making money from song lyrics. Lyrics are a massively underestimated market segment, says Tom Lehman, co-founder of RapGenius, one of the progenitors of this “lyrics 2.0″ movement. "People don't understand how popular lyrics are, and how much people like to read and understand them," he says. In fact, a staggering two percent of all Google search queries are for lyrics. The share of Bing's pie is even larger, at seven percent. After 'Facebook,' the term 'lyrics' is the most common search term on Google in the US. The existing lyrics services, spoiled by the high demand and dearth of disruptive thinking, have left the field wide open to those who see this shadow opportunity. Lehman referred to the shoddiness of existing lyric services as "so bad, it's a meme." Indeed, most of the incumbents, topped by MetroLyrics, AZlyrics and Sing365, hail from a bygone era of the web where banner ads, popups and poorly conceived user experiences were the norm. Lehman describes the system as fundamentally broken. "Rather than pummeling users with ringtone ads, which are scams anyway, why not take a longer-term approach?" he asks, referring to monetization strategies based on stirring peoples' passions about artists and their music. Yet these existing players still manage to command incredibly high traffic. The world's highest-trafficked lyrics site, MetroLyrics, sees over 31 million monthly unique visitors according to Quantcast and Alexa estimates. Such traffic, despite their relatively unchanged and low quality experiences, shows that anyone who's able to deliver value from innovative uses of lyrics has a chance to reap big rewards. A Blueprint for “Lyrics 2.0″ At the core of the new offerings is a basic re-imagining of how people interact with lyrics. According to Lehman, existing sites tend to view lyric queries as a "superficial reference" type of activity where users merely try to confirm what they hear (is that really a bathroom on the right?). In his experience, that view is overshadowed by a deeper desire to connect, engage and even obsess about lyrics through analysis and discussion. RapGenius’s product caters to that new context, seeking to build knowledge and community through user-populated, highly detailed in-line explanations of lyrics, especially rap and hip-hop lyrics, which often have insider references and other deep meanings that are seldom understood on the first listen. So far, more than 30,000 users have signed up to discover, interpret, explain, and debate lyrics with one another. More than 10,000 songs are fully explained by the community, some songs being viewed tens of thousands of times with contrasting interpretations and viewpoints on key lines. The site expects to reach over 5 million monthly unique visitors soon. The site design is minimal and modern, a clear departure from existing services, which took aesthetic cues from the big sites of their heyday, making RapGenius more Tumblr than Altavista. The well-conceived layout with its intuitive highlights and bubble overlays is perfect for the infusion of explanations, analyses, context and criticisms to song lyrics. The same approach is envisioned for their upcoming mobile experience, which already sees 17 percent of site traffic (redirecting to the desktop version at the moment). James Hritz, vice-president of monetization at TuneWiki, another social music company that's placing big bets on lyrics 2.0, corroborates the trend. "Lyrics are about self-expression, community and learning," he says, pointing to RapGenius as a service that "gets" this need. His own firm is radically re-envisioning its lyrics offerings to provide deeper, more meaningful experiences to music consumers in the vein of RapGenius. TuneWiki has already learned a lot about how powerful lyrics can be. With a user base that's 60 percent international, many flock to the service to use lyrics as a tool to learn English. Since TuneWiki’s software can directly translate its database of more than 4 million fully licensed lyrics to any of 45 different languages, people can hear their favorite tracks in English and read the lyrics in their native tongue. The site’s Lyric Legend iPhone Game that debuted last year was an early demonstration of how lyrics have disruptive powers companies like MetroLyrics simply haven't executed on. Pages: 1 2 Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Fleetly joins the fitness gamification parade with a mobile and web app Posted: 22 Sep 2011 06:00 AM PDT Fleetly is launching a new app today that analyzes your fitness goals and motivates you to hit them. The app is part of a larger trend of gamification, where developers use game-like tasks to get people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily want to do, like exercise. Rivals such as Basis and Striiv are coming up with their own devices that monitor your movements and gamify fitness in the process. But Fleetly is one of the companies that plans to leverage the smartphones that people already have, rather than get them to buy another gadget. Fleetly can benchmark you changing fitness level and challenge you to compete for bragging rights on leaderboards. Fleetly can tell you if you have hit a plateau, based on time exercised, weight lifted, or distance run — and then provide recommendations on how to do better. The app is available for free on the web and on the iPhone at Fleetly.com/ios. The app works for all exercises, from weight training to long-distance running, said Fleetly founder Geoff Pitfield, and it helps athletes at all levels. Pitfield is an amateur triathlete and he was inspired to create Fleetly during his initial training. He wanted to track his progress, but nothing supported his variety of activities. So he started making an app that fits in with the trends of a quantified self, feedback loops, and gamification. Fleetly tracks your exercises, provides an ongoing numerical rating of your current fiscal level, which you can compare with friends or other active people. It rewards you with peer-group recognition and motivates you with challenges, leaderboards and medals. The app comes with more than 200 high-definition instructional videos and 260 exercise instructions. It helps you find and create exercises and workout routines to help you hit goals. It accommodates participation in sports from aerobics to yoga. The app is compatible with Nike’s Nike+ fitness service and Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale. The company is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has an office in New York. The company was founded in 2010 and it has three employees and an intern. Fleetly  will be compatible in the future with apps such as Foursquare, RunKeeper, and Garmin. Over time, Fleetly hopes to collect aggregated information about exercise habits and provide analysis that will help people see where they stand in the grand fitness universe. Rivals include basic workout loggers such as GymBuddy. There are also apps for recording jogs such as Nike+, DailyMile, Runkeeper, and iMapmyRun. Fleetly hopes to set itself apart by covering the whole range of athletic endeavors. It also focuses on social integration and motivating people through gamification. Points are based on real-world measures such as calories burned, body type, and weight loss. If you slack off, so too does your fitness level. The app works both offline when you’re at a gym, where it syncs automatically in the background as soon as it has a data connections. It also works online. The company is funded by friends, family and angel investors. Keith Stephens, a Fleetly user, said, "My favorite feature of the app (is the) quick access to see how the competition is doing. That really keeps me on my toes, everyday. Believe it or not, I like to see other people win and achieve their fitness goals, even more than myself. I want you to beat me, but I ain’t gonna give it to you." On average, the early users are using the app 16 times a week. They log nearly 20 different exercises per week. The top participants on the leaderboards are logging over 1,000 points a month, which is like running 35 miles per week. I’m inclined to believe they’re making it up. Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Strange new retail creature Wayfair emerges from 200 domains Posted: 22 Sep 2011 05:12 AM PDT You may not have heard of it, but this year a company called Wayfair surpassed Crate & Barrel to become the No. 2 online retailer of home furnishings and housewares in the U.S., based on annual sales. Wayfair carries more than 4.5 million items from 5,000 brands, and it’s still growing. Wayfair is the friendly, e-commerce version of Leviathan, a movie monster that scared the $#!% out of me back in 1989. In the horror flick, the slimy sea creature with sharp teeth went around a submarine and consumed the crew. The crew then became a living part of the monster, their faces protruding from the beast, making it hard for survivors to want to kill Leviathan. Formerly CSN Stores, Wayfair is an e-commerce giant that has quietly taken 200 sites that it created or acquired — Cookware.com, Luggage.com, Strollers.com, BedroomFurniture.com, and more — and folded everything into one mega-site in an effort to create a more memorable brand. Only two of the companies it has created, AllModern.com and members-only retailer Joss & Main, will continue to operate outside of the Wayfair Leviathan. They are the survivors, while the rest of the domains direct shoppers to Wayfair.com. The only companies that could stand a chance of “killing” Wayfair are the ones it has partnered with: Amazon.com, Walmart, Sears and Best Buy. They all share revenue with Wayfair and, in turn, gain access to those recognized market places are that keeping Wayfair financially afloat while the mega site constructs a new brand. I wonder if a slimy, toothy version of Wayfair is keeping Amazon execs up at night. The partnership seems to be a situation in which keeping your enemies close pays off. Literally. Wayfair is expected to make $500 million in sales this year. I asked chairman and co-founder Steven Conine if Wayfair is the next Amazon.com. “That would be nice,” he laughed. “We have a partnership with them, so they’re pretty excited about our growth.” I’m excited about Wayfair’s shopping platform. The site is cleaner than Amazon.com and searching for products is easier. I purchased outdoor furniture off the Wayfair site, even though I originally came across the items during a search on Amazon.com. The Wayfair name didn’t ring a bell, but I was much happier with the user interface so I decided to give them a shot. Founded in 2002 as CSN, Wayfair raised its first round of institutional funding in June 2011. The $165 million came from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners and Spark Capital. It was the largest Q2 funding in the U.S., according to The MoneyTree Report. Conine will spend “tens of millions” on advertising this year. Pretty soon, you’ll know what Wayfair is. Don’t be scared though, unless you’re in the business of selling home goods. (Image courtesy Wayfair.com) Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Study shows social gamers spend less time and money on console games Posted: 22 Sep 2011 12:01 AM PDT Social game players are spending less time and money on traditional console games, according to a survey sponsored by social game firm Kabam and conducted by Information Solutions Group. The online survey of 1,412 gamers defy the conventional stereotype of social network gamers being middle-aged women. The survey showed that one of the rapidly growing segments on social platforms is the hardcore social gamer, who plays titles such as strategy, role-playing, or other hardcore games. The survey is very self-serving, but it points to little-known facts that show why Kabam, which focuses on hardcore gamers, has a real business on Facebook. The nationally representative research survey found that these hardcore social gamers are younger and mostly male, very much in line with traditional gamer demographics. By contrast, many of Zynga’s players on Facebook are casual female players with little playing experience. About 82 percent of the hardcore social gamers also play console games. These hardcore social gamers also play for a longer period of time than casual social gamers. As the games get better on Facebook, social games (such as Kabam’s Glory of Rome, pictured) are disrupting play on the traditional consoles. One figure shows how social gaming growth is resulting in less time and money spent on other game platforms. About 27 percent of social game players who played games on other platforms say that they are spending less time on those platforms. They are also spending about 50 percent less money on console gamers. Kabam’s own customers report a 55 percent decline in their game play on other platforms. Those Kabam players spend 65 percent less on console games. “Gamers are migrating their playing time and the dollars they spend to social games at the expense of console and other traditional gaming platforms,” said Chris Carvalho, chief operating officer of Kabam. About 41 percent of U.S. internet users have played social games. That amounts to 98 million people in the U.S. The data shows that 61 percent of casual social gamers are women and 62 percent are over 40 years old. But 55 percent of hardcore social gamers are male and 57 percent are under 40, with an average age of 37. Both Kabam and Kixeye are targeting hardcore gamers on Facebook. Hardcore social gamers play multiple games simultaneously, with 76 percent playing two or more at once. In fact, 47 percent of hardcore social gamers play three or more social games, while 28 percent play four or more games concurrently. Hardcore gamers also exhibit more engagement, or time spent per session. The research says 68 percent of hardcore gamers play three or more hours per day of a game. Only 43 percent of casual social gamers spend three or more hours a day on a game. Information Solutions Group ran the survey from April 13 to May 2. It canvassed a group of people who play games and were 18 years old or over. Filed under: games, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

What to expect at Facebook’s f8 event Posted: 21 Sep 2011 10:28 PM PDT Few tech events can rival the mammoth amount of hype generated by an official Apple event, but Facebook’s f8 developer conference Thursday certainly comes close. Facebook’s motto for the event is “Read. Watch. Listen,” which hints at new partnerships with media companies that the social network giant is expected to announce. The company is also planning to reveal massive changes to the Facebook platform that will affect how its users share content with each other. Since there’s a lot to keep up with, here’s a roundup of f8 rumors: Facebook Music Facebook’s plans for integrating music into its social network have arguably received the most chatter across the web. Rumors have circulated that the company will announce a “music dashboard” that will aggregate your activity across multiple streaming music services, like Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG and others. As we previously reported, the new Facebook music service could feature "scrobbling", meaning any song you listen to gets automatically tracked on your profile without having to lift a finger. The service will also have a “Listen with your friends” feature available in Facebook’s relaunched friend activity ticker feed, which was accidentally leaked by a Facebook employee earlier today. One feature that people aren’t expected to see in the new Facebook music service is its “remote control” functionality, which would allow users to control a music player from another service without leaving Facebook. As All Things D reports, the company apparently yanked the remote functionality for one reason or another. Publishing & News Publications Facebook wants to include more content from news publications about as badly as news publications want the attention of Facebook’s over 750 million active user base. As we’ve reported earlier in the week, news publications like the Wall Street Journal are willing to add access to its content within Facebook in exchange for advertising revenue. Facebook wins because users don’t leave its walled-garden. Announcements at f8 could expand upon this notion of giving access to exclusive content if its lucrative for the content producers. In July, Forbes reported that a dozen news organizations (including CNN and The Washington Post) are partnering with the social network to produce “Facebook Editions”, a Facebook-app version of each publication. Social Gaming & Facebook Credits It’s likely that Facebook will unveil some changes to its social gaming platform. Overall, we expect the company to encourage game publishers to take full advantage of new features for game discovery, explore new genres for social games and to use Facebook Credits in creative ways. In the past Facebook has pushed to duplicate the success that social game developers like Zynga have experienced using the platform. Speaker Line-up Although the f8 event is a developer conference at its core, Facebook has lined up a good mix of interesting speakers from across the media business world.  The company’s event speakers include: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Clear Channel executive (and MTV founder) Bob Pittman, Zynga executive Owen Van Natta and Turntable.fm co-founder/CEO Billy Chasen. It’s likely that the speakers will have announcements of their own at f8 in addition to the information about partnering with Facebook. For complete coverage of Facebook’s f8 event, make sure to check VentureBeat throughout the day Thursday. Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Vidyo raises $22.5M for high-quality video conferencing Posted: 21 Sep 2011 09:24 PM PDT Vidyo has raised $22.5 million in a fourth round of funding for its high-quality video conferencing. The company plans to use the money to expand its sales worldwide and develop better, more immersive and inexpensive “telepresence” technologies. The company is hopping on the trend for telecommuting and the need to reduce travel expenses at companies, without losing the personal touch of in-person communications. It allows people to have meetings with groups of people who can all be using different video connections, such as an immersive “telepresence room,” a desktop computer, an iPad, or an Android mobile phone. Vidyo has built an infrastructure that can handle all of those devices in the same video conference call, said Ofer Shapiro, chief executive of Vidyo. And it does so at prices that are a fraction of the cost of corporate video conferencing systems. The system could help disrupt existing telepresence rooms that make it seem like you're in the same room with the person you're talking to. Companies have bought those systems in order to save on the costs, hassles and risks that come with airline travel. Hackensack, N.J.-based Vidyo has now raised $97 million since its founding in 2005. Vidyo has 9 patents and 27 pending applications for its VidyoRouter platform. In June, Shapiro showed me how nine people could use the system at once with crystal clear voice and picture quality. The video runs at 60 frames per second in the 1080p HD video format. And users can log into a wide variety of platforms, including 1080p HD 60 frames per second multi-screen telepresence rooms, video conferencing rooms, desktops, iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets, (including the iPhone, iPad 2, Xoom, Galaxy, Nexus S and others). The goal is to get it to work with 20 or more screens in the future. Vidyo says it can lower costs because its solution uses less bandwidth than other systems, delivering HD video at 500 kilobits per second per screen. The company foresees customers using it for supply chain management, command centers for disaster recovery or military uses, patient monitoring, distance learning, financial services apps and others. The cost ranges from under $40,000 for four screens at 720p HD quality and 60 frames per second. And it goes up to $60,000 for nine screens at 1080p quality and 60 frames per second. The cost is around $6,000 per screen for nine screens and $4,500 per screen for 20 screens. Tim Krongard, a partner at QuestMark Partners, said that video conferencing will undergo exponential market growth in the next five years and new market leaders will emerge. He will join Vidyo’s board. The funding was led by QuestMark Partners and it included existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo has more than 150 employees. Vidyo's partners include Google, Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, and Ricoh. Rivals include Microsoft-Skype and Cisco. Filed under: deals This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook employee gives away Facebook music detail on Twitter Posted: 21 Sep 2011 06:37 PM PDT Ah, Twitter. Thank you for being a forum for slip-ups. A Facebook employee today accidentally tweeted about a new feature in Facebook’s hotly anticipated music service, expected to be announced tomorrow at Facebook’s f8 conference. The employee, Ji Lee (@PleaseEnjoy) wrote on his Twitter, “The ‘Listen with your friend’ feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening. LIVE.” Facebook’s Ticker is a feature in the newly updated news feed, which allows you to follow your friends’ actions in real-time. According to Lee’s tweet, you will be able to listen to music along with your friends as their song choices appear in the Ticker. The “Listen with your friend” option will sync you to their place in the song, as indicated by Lee’s “LIVE.” Soon after posting the tweet, Lee removed it from his Twitter account. A screenshot was taken before its removal by Mitchell Holder (@MitchellHolder). The tweet comes on the eve of Facebook’s F8 conference, where developers and press alike expect to hear news about Facebook’s latest innovations. The conference is highly anticipated and many rumblings about the social network’s music service have surfaced. It also comes after a day after Facebook revamped its news feed. [via to TechCrunch] Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Intuit’s payments team says mobile card readers will die Posted: 21 Sep 2011 06:30 PM PDT Payments and financial software provider Intuit has its own mobile card swipe reader, but that’s not stopping it from saying card readers’ days are numbered. For all the development the company has sunk into its reader — two years’ worth, since the company began working on it in February 2009 — Intuit’s payments product manager Christopher Battles told VentureBeat that the card readers will be extinct as soon as a new technology can replace it. Intuit began distributing those card readers for free along with a pre-paid card for all Intuit GoPayment users in 2009. Whenever a small business swipes a card makes a transaction, Intuit takes a 2.7 percent transaction fee and then delivers the funds to the pre-paid account. The transaction takes a little more than a day to process, Battles said. Intuit will tell you any day of the week its reader isn’t like Square’s, its main competitor, whose reader plugs into a headphone jack on mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad. Square has garnered lots of hype even though Intuit’s reader was on the market first. Intuit also benefits from its brand recognition as a financial services software company — it also develops popular software like TurboTax and QuickBooks. Intuit is also placing a bet on near-field communication (NFC), which uses short-wave radio waves to transmit data between devices. PayPal just recently launched an NFC service of its own which lets you you tap together two NFC-equipped Nexus S phones to make a transaction. “We’re competing with a 7-second transaction time, it’s hard to provide enough features to compete with that,” Battles said. “Near-field communication is interesting, it has a future, but we don’t think we’ve cracked the code on it yet.” Another product manager on the payments team said the card readers were a short-term game for handling mobile payments. “The reader is for today, it won’t be true eventually,” Intuit senior product manager Mary Lunnebord told VentureBeat. “And by the time we crack the code on NFC, there will probably be a third technology to replace it — no one can tell what’s going to win out right now.” Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

OnLive launches game streaming in the UK with 150 titles Posted: 21 Sep 2011 06:18 PM PDT OnLive launched its games-on-demand streaming service in the United Kingdom today, marking its first major overseas expansion since launching in North America in mid-2010. The service rolling out in the UK is much more advanced than the original game streaming service that OnLive launched in the U.S. Now it has more than 150 games and is available on web-connected TVs, PCs, Macs and tablets. With OnLive, you can watch others play games, play live demos without downloading, and log in from just about any computer. “It’s a much more complete service that we have now,” said Steve Perlman, chief executive of OnLive, in an interview. “We’ve got a mature service. Basically, OnLive is coming into its own as a major platform.” OnLive is launching the service at the Eurogamer Expo in London, where attendees can get a free Onlive Game System. As a special promotion, OnLive is offering the first game that someone purchases available for the price of one pound. Normally, users pay 40 pounds for a new game. OnLive computes games in the cloud, or web-connected data centers, and then streams the game imagery to the user’s computer. With this streaming system, users don’t need high-end computers, disks, or downloads. They can log into the system and play games as if they were using any other cloud-based service. OnLive is partnered with BT, the UK’s high-speed broadband provider with 11 million customers. BT is offering a promo deal for its customers, including three months of free access to 100-plus OnLive PlayPack games, which are available for a monthly subscription fee. OnLive also has a new partnership with Game Group, a big game retailer. Game Group will market OnLive to millions of its customers across the UK and Europe. It will also sell the OnLive Game System (which you need if you want to stream games to a TV instead of a PC), the OnLive universal wireless controller, and the online game service digital offerings. Game Group has 615 stores in the UK. That is an interesting alliance since GameStop, the major U.S. retail chain, is directly competing against OnLive, even to the point of pulling its coupons from the recent Deus Ex Human Revolution game boxes. OnLive has more than 50 publishers, who can reduce costs and keep more revenues in their own pockets by distributing games digitally through the service. Of the 150 games coming, four of them are from Electronic Arts, which previously did not supply games for OnLive. After the promos are done, users can buy games for as little as 1.99 pounds or sign up for a PlayPack subscription at 6.99 pounds a month. Filed under: cloud, games This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Develop on Twilio, get cash from super angels Dave McClure and Ron Conway Posted: 21 Sep 2011 05:15 PM PDT Twilio announced today 500 Startup‘s Dave McClure (pictured left) and SV Angel‘s Ron Conway (pictured below, right) started a second $250,000 seed fund for startups built on top of Twilio. “We’re giving access to some of the best angels in Silicon Valley,” Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat. “Getting a seed investment from Ron Conway and Dave McClure speaks a lot and gets entrepreneurs up and running.” Finding funding in Silicon Valley can be difficult given the number of startups on the same search in such a small radius. Twilio wanted to call out the developers who were smart and business savvy enough to run their own companies on top of its platform. This year’s round will be particularly enticing for startups, because any funding given by McClure will be matched equally by Conway. For example, if McClure invests $50,000, the company will receive a total of $100,000 with Conway’s involvement. The fund caps at $250,000 and will be distributed by the discretion of the investors. “I think the Twilio platform continues to grow bigger and bigger,” McClure told VentureBeat. “We see [Twilio] being one of the more interesting platforms for developers.” This is not the first Twilio Fund to be announced. Lawson explained the first fund came about last year when he saw a tweet from McClure saying he had invested in his fourth Twilio-based startup that day. Lawson approached McClure and suggested a dedicated fund. Thus far, the first fund has invested in 10 startups and is continuing the search as six more startups pitch for funding at the Twilio Conference this week. “We found some great companies the first time around and I’m hoping we find some more,” said McClure. McClure was inspired by three past Twilio fund investments to start the second fund: employment tool Proven, customer relationship manager Volta, and automated sales caller FastCall411.  McClure was also impressed with GroupMe, which wasn’t in the fund, but was recently purchased by Skype based on the strength of its group messaging capabilities. McClure explained not all chosen companies will enter his incubator 500 Startups, but he welcomes them. McClure also readily welcomes Ron Conway to the fund. “I’m really happy to have Ron and SV Angel on board. They’ve also been pretty aggressive and innovative in going after some early stage companies,” he said. “Ron has been around the industry for 15-20 years. I have tremendous respect for him.” According to Lawson, McClure has led the charge on the past Twilio fund and was very elemental in decision-making. Both McClure and Conway invested in Twilio, McClure in the company’s 2008 seed round and Conway in 2010. [Photos courtesy of Joi/Flickr] Filed under: deals, dev This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Dylan’s Desk: Facebook approaches a billion customers Posted: 21 Sep 2011 04:47 PM PDT EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to VentureBeat’s new newsletters. Each week, I’m writing a column on business and technology, while Dean Takahashi is writing a column on videogames called The DeanBeat. They will be available to newsletter subscribers a whole day before they appear here on the website. VentureBeat will have much more coverage of Facebook F8 2011 starting early Thursday morning, so stay tuned. With 750 million people using it, Facebook has become one of the most far-reaching computer platforms of all time. The company will have a billion users soon, most likely within the next few months. Zuckerberg has been promising to hit that milestone for awhile, and I see no reason that he’ll miss. Sure, the social network may be inflating its numbers — and competition from Google+ could slow it down, somewhat. Given Facebook’s momentum, though, eventually Zuck will hit his mark. It’s just a question of when. When he does, this will put Facebook in an extremely elite group that few other companies have matched. Offhand, I can only think of two or three companies that have a billion active customers: Microsoft, Nokia, and maybe Samsung. Walmart probably has over a billion retail customers. You’ll no doubt think of some companies I’ve overlooked, so please email me with your additions. But unlike most of these companies, Facebook has real names and contact info for every one of its customers. That’s why Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference, happening this coming Thursday, Sept. 22 in San Francisco, is particularly relevant. The company has barely begun to turn its massive reach into revenues, as Paul Graham noted recently, but with its subscriber base on the cusp of a billion, it’s about to turn on the money spigot. Keep in mind that the entire internet didn’t reach a billion people until 2005. Mobile broadband subscribers hit a billion customers in 2010. Meanwhile, there are over 5 billion cellphone users worldwide, with one billion smartphone users by 2016. (Those people aren’t all customers of a single company, of course.) It took Google until May, 2011 to reach one billion monthly unique visitors, but the number of registered users is probably far smaller. Windows hit a billion customers in mid-2008, if reports from the previous year were accurate. Of course, one of the oldest canards in business is the Chinese market fallacy: If we can sell our product to just one percent of China’s one billion people, we’ll be rich! Of course, most of those business plans fail to account for the difficulty of actually reaching all those people, let alone transforming them into paying customers. With Facebook, however, it’s different: Every one of those customers will be reachable, making them a truly addressable market. What can you do with a billion customers? Commerce, music and media, for starters. Many observers expect Facebook to launch a music platform this week at f8. It seems unlikely to me that the company will try to compete head-to-head with Spotify, Rdio, MOG and the like: The market is already crowded and working out licensing agreements with music companies is a tedious business. It would be easier for Facebook to form partnerships with existing streaming-music companies, letting them integrate with Facebook so that you can see what music your friends are listening to and subscribe to or purchase that music yourself. Indeed, Spotify already has Facebook integration that lets you invite your Facebook friends to the service and share your playlists with them. Facebook could take a percentage, the music streaming companies would get access to a massive market, and Facebook’s customers would easily be able to share music from whatever services they’re already using. In fact, that seems to be just what Facebook is planning. Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody and other services have all begun adding Facebook-related metadata to their tracks. A similar integration would work well for streaming-video services like Hulu or Netflix. Add these things together and Facebook starts to look like a media-distribution and monetization platform the likes of which no one has ever seen before. Apple’s iTunes is probably the closest competitor, and the Cupertino company has made a juggernaut out of its cross-platform reach, with hundreds of millions of customers for apps, music and movies. Facebook, with the right moves, could pose a serious threat to Apple on this front. But what about commerce? With such a big addressable market, Facebook looks like a natural platform for selling stuff to people. Some have already begun doing that. A company called Payvment enables merchants to set up Facebook-based stores by adding commerce features to their pages. Payvment chief executive Christian Taylor told me that his company helps provide storefronts for 120,000 merchants (half of which are active), and that this accounts for 80 percent of the shopping activity on Facebook now. In other words, the overall market for Facebook commerce is still pretty small. What would help kick this into a higher gear? A Facebook-based payment solution. Right now you can use Facebook Credits to pay for virtual goods, but not real-world goods. If the company expanded that to allow real-world purchases with Facebook Credits, or provided a shopping card and payment-processing solution that any merchant could use, it could really kick “F-commerce” into high gear. And with nearly a billion potential customers, that would make Facebook into a market lots of companies would want to be in. Photo credit: Adriano Gasparri Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

HomeRun acquired by Rearden, gets nice liquidity for daily deals Posted: 21 Sep 2011 04:05 PM PDT HomeRun hit one out of the park with its recent exit. The daily deals company was purchased by e-commerce provider Rearden Commerce today, which also announced a $133 million round of funding. Rearden Commerce purchased the company for at least $87 million in shares, according to documents filed with the SEC, but it is not yet known whether cash was involved. Rearden says it will use the rest of its funding for other acquisitions and debt repayment. In a world where daily deals have become a noisier nuisance than metal music in a retirement home, HomeRun and its primary investor Foundation Capital have found a nice and perhaps timely exit in Rearden. Various deals companies have been backing out of the fray, such as Facebook, which ended its deals program late last month, and Yelp, which pulled back on its deals initiatives at the same time. Groupon’s IPO has also been on shaky grounds. Thus, finding a home soon rather than later may have been a good choice for the deals company. The purchase may be more strategic, however. HomeRun can benefit from Rearden’s small business reach because of the latter company’s partnerships with American Express, Citi Bank, and JP Morgan Chase. The three banking heavyweights all invested in Rearden’s $133 million round. In turn, Rearden can use HomeRun’s OfferEngine. HomeRun’s goal is not to just create one-off deals, but rather to foster relationships and create return customers. It created the OfferEngine to this end, which connects the right inventory and deals with the right audience. According to HomeRun’s website, over 180 million potential customers see deals powered by OfferEngine each month. “I would describe Groupon as a sales and marketing machine and HomeRun as a product machine,” Charles Moldow, a partner at Foundation Capital, told VentureBeat. Foundation Capital is an investor in HomeRun. Rearden will use OfferEngine in conjunction with its Deem product, which “connects buyers and sellers through a one-to-one, personalized marketplace.” The acquirer will also keep the deals portion of HomeRun active as well as its Phoenix call center. These will probably be used for offers projects spearheaded by Rearden’s partners American Express, Citi Bank, and JP Morgan. The proof that Rearden will really benefit may be in HomeRun’s product pudding, however. Moldow described Foundation Capital as having a “super majority” in HomeRun. The firm invested in HomeRun in 2009, while Groupon was putting its gears in motion, and was so excited about the company that it invested heavily. According to him, Foundation Capital had a strong relationship with HomeRun and was “actively involved more than normal,” in lining up the buyer, Rearden, and negotiating. “We always try to make 10x on our investments,” said Moldow. “I would say to you in this investment we feel pretty good about where we ended up.” Filed under: deals This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

These teenagers are trying to take my job (video) Posted: 21 Sep 2011 03:46 PM PDT While attending the 2011 Fall Demo conference in Santa Clara, I was startled by the sight of a young man helping himself to coffee in between interviews with startup founders and venture capitalists in the conference Green Room. It’s my job to drink coffee and do interviews. What’s more, he was way better dressed than me. Feeling threatened, I went to tower over him in my four inch heels. That young man was 12 year-old Vincent of The Intek, a Seattle-based tech blog created by three teenagers. Their “den mother” was always close behind, taking pictures the way moms tend to do, as the young men toured the conference hall and dug up stories. They had a great sense of who to talk to, and looked people in the eye as they shook hands. Vincent, who swears he likes coffee but I don’t believe him, told me he learns way more attending tech conferences than he does in school. “I mean, who cares how a plant grows from a seed?” he said. I took him by the ear and told him biology is way more important than location-based apps. He shrugged, as teenagers do, and took another sip of coffee. Alexa Lee followed them around a bit and shot this video of The Intek in action. Photo credit: Alexa Lee for VentureBeat Filed under: VentureBeat, video This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Twitter acquires Julpan, makes former Googler director of engineering Posted: 21 Sep 2011 03:00 PM PDT Microblogging site Twitter has acquired social information analysis startup Julpan for an undisclosed sum, the startup announced Wednesday. The move is an acquihire of sorts, since Twitter has appointed Julpan founder and CEO Ori Allon as its new director of engineering. As part of the acquisition deal, Twitter will also get Julpan’s technology and its team of 12 employees, who will continue working from Julpan’s New York-based office. Allon is well-known for his work on search algorithm Orion, which Google purchased in 2006 after outbidding both Yahoo and Microsoft. Google hired Allon to integrate his work (originally the product of his PhD efforts at the University of New South Wales) into the company’s main search algorithm, which is where he remained until leaving to found Julpan in 2010. Not only is this a good fit for Twitter, but it will also help fill the talent-void left by departing chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, who announced his departure last week. “Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them,” wrote Allon on Julpan’s blog. “We look forward to joining forces with Twitter’s engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan’s innovations.” Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

How to turn women philanthropists into tech investors (video) Posted: 21 Sep 2011 02:33 PM PDT We all know that tech investment needs more women, and Natalia Oberti Noguera thinks that female philanthropists are ripe for the training. We recently had Noguera into the VentureBeat office to chat about overarching issues of women and technology. In this video, she discusses what her project, the Pipeline Fellowship, is doing to improve the gender split in the industry and visibility of women leaders and role models in technology. The Pipeline Fellowship trains women who already give money charitably to nonprofits and other organizations to start making angel investments. These women are introduced to early-stage startup financing through a program of education, mentorship and hands-on practice. Fellows in the program commit to investing in a woman-run, for-profit startup at the end of the training. Filed under: VentureBeat, video This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Your company is not the next TV Guide, says TV Guide Digital Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:33 PM PDT TV Guide Digital has a message for online entertainment guides calling themselves the next TV Guide: “There is only one TV Guide, and that’s TV Guide,” says Christy Tanner, the executive vice president and general manager of TV Guide Digital. Tanner reached out to VentureBeat after we published the story “Fav.Tv ain't your grandmother's TV Guide.” We received pitches from about a dozen other companies saying they’re the next TV guide, as well. Tanner says there’s been a rash of startups creating business models around features similar to those TV Guide has had in place for the past year. She isn’t saying those other companies are copying TV Guide’s features. Tanner adds the other companies are not thinking as broadly or iterating features as quickly TV Guide can. TV Guide’s big push to go digital It may come as a surprise, but TV Guide Digital has a team of more than 20 developers and engineers. Tanner says this team has produced the very innovations on which some startups base their entire business model. Since last October, TV Guide Digital has released at least one new product or feature every month. The group is constantly cranking out new ways for viewers to interact with and find the shows they love. On top of speed, they also benefit from have a huge built-in audience. “We have mass market reach and broad acceptance,” Tanner explains. “Our customers and advertisers have embraced every innovation we’ve put out there. People are hungry for innovation and our plan is to keep leveraging our experience. It’s hard for people living and breathing inside the tech community to consider the idea that TV Guide is doing fresh things with technology.” Take, for example, TV Guide’s Watchlist, an interactive program guide. People can create a list of the shows, sports teams, actors or themes they like to watch on television and Watchlist creates a list of recommended times, channels, websites and services that line up with the user’s tastes. The list is composed of live television events, content only available online and content available on demand. It even covers Hulu, Hulu+ and Netflix (Quickster and whatever movie rental platform Blockbuster releases this fall will be added as soon as they are available). Tanner gave VentureBeat some exclusive statistics on Watchlist to illustrate her point: Watchlist has had more than 375,000 list creations since its launch. On Monday, September 19, Watchlist had a record 40,000 check-ins. That’s a jump from the 20,000 average daily check-ins it received in May 2011. She added that Monday's Two and Half Men episode is officially the most checked-in single event, surpassing the Super Bowl. Innovation is one factor of TV Guide’s success, but monitization is another. TV Guide has sold 50 socially-integrated sponsorships on the Watchlist platform since October 2010. They provide custom ad packages around the concepts of check-ins and “watch and share.” The TV Guide Mobile app has had five million installations over the past year and 1.5 million monthly active users. Those numbers are food for thought for people who say their startup is “the next TV Guide.” “If we didn’t evolve, then shame on us. The opportunity here is huge,” says Tanner. “The entertainment industry is constantly changing.” Make room for the competition Consulting group Altman Vilandrie & Company found half of 18- to 34-year-olds say they would prefer an alternate program guide, such as a screen with apps or images of available content, to a traditional, static TV guide. There’s clearly a big pie here, and startups are trying to get a slice. Some smart companies are going about it very differently than TV Guide, including Dijit.com. The company’s free mobile iOS app creates a second screen experience for TV managing and viewing, combining a universal remote, interactive TV listings, social networking and Netflix streaming. Dijit has deconstructed the elements of how people multitask while watching TV (an estimated 70 percent of TV viewers watch while holding another device) to find out which features belong in their app and features that don’t belong at all. “TV Guide should be dominating this space, but they aren’t,” says Jeremy Toeman, chief product officer at Dijit. “Think of it this way: Sony should be dominating the TV market, not Apple, but Apple is doing exceedingly well in this space.” Toeman describes TV Guide’s lack of domination in the second screen category as “a classic innovators dilemma.” The print version of TV Guide was an innovation. It was available in every corner store for $.99. It wasn’t until the app market emerged and a constantly updated programming app for  $.99 became a better deal than a stale print copy. “I understand how they got into that situation,” says Toeman. “They are starting to make some inroads and I want to see what they’re doing. If they do a great job at something I hope we can do a great job at other things. We think TV is in the 1.5 stage and 2.0 is on the horizon.” Dijit is making its own, including turning smartphones into universal remotes. It’s also focusing on iPads with a new version of its remote, expected to ship next month. Toeman is really studying the tablet experience because he believes it will dominate the way people experience media at home in their living rooms. Toeman would never call Dijit the next TV Guide. That’s smart. Illustration courtesy TV Guide.com via the wonderfully talented Epiphio Studios. Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Sony’s PlayStation Networks suffers (another) outage Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:29 PM PDT Update: Sony said around 1:45 pm PST that the service was back up. The Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) suffered an outage today and the online gaming service, which had more than 77 million registered users earlier this year, still isn’t working. After Sony’s big PSN outage in April, it’s easy to assume the worst about a little downtime with the network. The six-week outage earlier this year came after hackers found a flaw in the network’s security. More than 10 million credit card numbers may have been stolen in that attack. Now is not a good time for the outage, since it’s the middle of the fall video game selling season and Sony’s Resistance 3 shooter game is generating a lot of demand for multiplaying gaming sessions. The service has been down for a number of hours. Sony recently distributed a v3.72 firmware update that went live on the 19th. Users have to download that to get online. But having downloaded that patch won’t help you get online during this outage. Sony has pledged to do better on security, saying it would spend more on the network to ensure its safety. Filed under: games This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Spotify is singing success: 2M paying subscribers Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:16 PM PDT Streaming music service Spotify now has more than 2 million paying subscribers in eight countries, according to a new report today. Spotify saw a huge boost in premium subscribers after its U.S. launch in July. The company’s premium service is a paid, advertisement-free version of its streaming music service that lets people share playlists. The startup has added about 400,000 new paying subscribers since the launch, according to comments made by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in an interview with CNBC. Ek is presenting at Facebook’s f8 developer conference Thursday, where he is expected to share additional information about Spotify’s stateside penetration into the music streaming market. The company announced that it reached a million paying subscribers in March 2011 — thus doubling its premium subscriber base in just six months. Spotify’s growth is definitely impressive. And while competitors like MOG and Rdio haven’t disclosed their own premium subscriber numbers, it’s difficult to imagine that they’re anywhere close to Spotify. MOG, Rdio and several other streaming music services are also presenting at the f8 event Thursday. Many have speculated that the music services will outline the details of their partnership with Facebook’s new music platform. [via Mashable] Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Your users have multiple online personas — can they all log in to your site? Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:10 PM PDT Patrick Salyer is CEO of Gigya, which makes sites social through plugins like Social Login, Comments, Activity Feeds, Social Analytics and Game Mechanics. You can follow him on Twitter @patricksalyer. Back in 1999, Microsoft took a first step towards creating a universal Web identity when it launched Microsoft Passport. While the product didn't catch on in its original iteration, Passport helped bring a critical concept to life that would eventually change the internet: that identity would one day rule the Web. The next major development in online identity came when the OpenID standard emerged, offering the groundwork for a universal "single sign-on" for authentication across the Web. The real explosion of online identity, however, didn't happen until Facebook launched the now ubiquitous Facebook Connect API. Facebook Connect brought social identity to the mainstream by cracking the adoption code. Facebook Connect added real value to both its massive base of users (allowing easy sign-in and interaction with friends) and publishers (increased participation, engagement and page views). Today, dozens of online identity providers, from social networks to email services, have opened their platforms and followed in Facebook's footsteps, and companies like mine are enabling social experiences by offering registration and login through these identity providers. Thanks to the proliferation of these identity providers, we have come to a point that when visitors login to websites, they're not just choosing to do so with an identity provider – they're choosing a persona. This is a dramatic shift on the Web when we consider that just a few years ago there were no scaled identity providers. Personas exist naturally because the Web mirrors real life. In real life, in any given week I may go out with coworkers, family, conference attendees, basketball friends, or old college buddies and I'm sharing different parts of my life with all of them. Those different personas exist online just as they do in my offline world. For example, when I log in with my LinkedIn identity on the Web, I'm showing that I want to share and interact with my professional persona. When I log in with Twitter, I'm trying to impress the people I want to know and want to be known by. Facebook (and soon, Google+) identity is perhaps the most intimate – when I use my Facebook identity on the Web, I'm choosing to let my real friends know about it. Website visitors literally have multiple online personalities – a concept with major implications for online businesses, particularly content publishers, looking to add social functionality to their sites. And as social login becomes standard on the Web, some publishers are clearly cognizant of their users' chameleon-like nature and some are surprisingly not. Take a look at The Huffington Post: Notice how HuffPo implemented seven different login options for their users – some overtly social, some not. The wide range of login options allows visitors not only a choice of persona but also a choice of what type of personal information they give the publisher. For example, someone logging in with Facebook grants the publisher access to more personal profile information like interests and activities, while someone choosing to login with their LinkedIn ID grants access to more professional information like job title. The Huffington Post's social login options make sense because the site offers content appealing to many different personas – business/tech news, sports, entertainment, etc. Yet across the web, you can find examples of major sites focusing only on Facebook or Twitter. Take Yahoo News, for example, pictured below. While it has integration with Facebook and Google, shouldn't the site at least offer login through Twitter? LinkedIn? In addition to that, the site brings you to an entirely new page offering nothing other than the login box and a gigantic display ad. Yahoo News covers a huge range of topics and for business users, so not offering LinkedIn and Twitter seems like a missed opportunity. The Future of Identity on the Web The beauty of mass-adoption technologies like Facebook Connect is that these tools have essentially brought identity to the rest of the Web. While Facebook will likely reign as the leading social network identity provider, I think we'll continue seeing the other players take a significant piece of the social identity pie as Web users look to engage with specific content with specific personas. Content providers that understand the intricacies of Web identity have much to gain – and those businesses that fail to recognize the many faces of identity have a user-base to lose. Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

HP CEO’s approval rating in a steep decline among employees Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:06 PM PDT With rumors circulating that Hewlett-Packard's board may fire chief executive Leo Apotheker, it is interesting to note that his approval rating is declining fast among employees. Apotheker has a 25 percent approval rating so far for the month of September, according to jobs and career community site Glassdoor. Overall, nearly 3,000 HP employees have left reviews and ratings on Glassdoor. For the overall length of his time at HP, Apotheker has an average 58 percent approval rating, with 42 percent disapproving. When former CEO Mark Hurd was fired, he held a 34 percent approval rating among HP employees, while interim CEO Cathy Lesjak held a 55 percent approval rating during her month in the position. The average approval rating for CEOs on Glassdoor is 62 percent. One marketing director at HP commented on the site, “Fire Leo. The man is flat out incompetent. We’ve gone from fiasco to the next under his reign." HP employees have given HP itself a rating of 2.5 out of 5. Carol Bartz, former Yahoo CEO, who was fired on Sept. 6, had an approval rating of 33 percent in the third quarter, which was actually above her 24 percent rating, an all time low, in the second quarter. Steve Jobs had a 97 percent approval rating among Apple employees. Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Need therapy? Get it cheap and online at PrettyPaddedRoom Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:03 PM PDT Everybody needs to vent sometimes. Most of us occasionally need feedback from trained professionals, too. If you need an inexpensive and insanely (pun intended) convenient option for therapy, look no further than PrettyPaddedRoom. PPR is an online space for you to safely and securely vent your stresses, frustration, anxiety and depression, either into an online journal, face-to-face with a therapist over video chat, or both. “There's still a stigma attached to therapy, and I think people see it as intimidating or expensive,” founder and therapist Bea Arthur told VentureBeat. “But the fact remains that most people would love the chance to be listened to genuinely and objectively. So I wanted to transform traditional therapy into a more approachable and affordable experience.” When you choose the online journaling method, a therapist will read your words and respond to you. These asynchronous “sessions” start at just $50 monthly for three sessions each month. For face-to-face, real-time therapy, PPR offers private online sessions conducted over video chat; the rate is a low $100 per month for four 30-minute sessions each month and one journal consult. You can schedule these virtual meetings for any time that’s convenient for you, and they’ll take place wherever you’re most comfortable and have a reasonable WiFi connection. There’s also a free option (journaling only with no therapist feedback) and a deluxe $150-per-month option that includes longer, 45-minute sessions and three monthly journal consultations. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of freakin’ therapy for the price. The site is slightly skewed toward the female demographic and currently has an all-female staff. Arthur told us, “When I was working in domestic violence, we had an all-female staff and predominantly female clients. Women are natural caregivers, and we can be amazing at taking care of each other … I wanted to promote that with this project.” During your sessions or in your journal, you can talk and get advice about relationships, family conflicts, your career, body issues, depression, trauma, self-esteem and a slew of other common concerns. Currently, PPR is running its service with just five therapists on the team. However, it seems like the kind of model that could easily scale, allowing practicing therapists to supplement their real-world practices with virtual sessions in a wide range of locations and languages. “I believe that every person at any given stage in their life needs help sorting through the millions of thoughts clogging their mind and zapping their energy,” Arthur concluded. “Think of how much more effective each of us could be if we were able to process our thoughts and reactions better. If we could understand why we do the things we do and break our bad habits forever. Forget change — we could take over the world!” Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610