VentureBeat |
- 2012 mobile predictions: Microsoft purchases Spotify, Google spins off Motorola, and more
- The best indie games of 2011
- Eight great gadgets from startups that build hardware
- Star Wars: The Old Republic reaches 1M registered users in less than a week
- Where in the world is the next booming smartphone and tablet market?
- Out of Asia: Yahoo may let go of its Alibaba & SoftBank shares
- Why women have a hard time raising money for startups, part 1 (video)
- VentureBeat Holiday Contest: Win a Galaxy Nexus and Beats Studio headphones!
- 2011 holidays: Shopping-by-tablet was popular, but retailers weren’t ready
- The most popular StumbleUpon links of 2011 (infographic)
- How to make a millionaire (video)
- Go Daddy gives into pressure, comes out against SOPA
- You better watch out: Google is tracking (and calling) Santa
| 2012 mobile predictions: Microsoft purchases Spotify, Google spins off Motorola, and more Posted: 24 Dec 2011 09:00 AM PST
Over the course of 2011, the mobile industry has been a year of mixed emotions. It has witnessed dynamic changes and suffered tragic losses, such as the launch of the iPhone 4S and death of Steve Jobs. We've also seen the emergence of video calling, and the rapid mainstream adoption of not only iPads, but tablets in general . At the same time, there's been unprecedented growth in the sector. According to IDC, early year estimates predicted that the smartphone market would grow nearly 50% globally in 2011, jumping from approximately 300 million shipments in 2010, to 450 million by 2011. This, coupled with the rise of mobile commerce as a main market driver, and it's really no wonder why many feel that this past year has been the year of mobile. Looking ahead to 2012, there's guaranteed to be some big surprises lurking in the shadows. Here's what I believe will be some of the top headlines you'll see in the coming year: Microsoft buys Spotify, goes head to head with iTunesAll the speculation and rumors you heard will end up coming to fruition. In 2012, we will see Spotify Also, not to be neglected, is the common lineage between the two. The Swedish music streaming giant already has a pre-existing (and successful) partnership with Microsoft-affiliated social networking giant Facebook. In 2007, Microsoft partook in one of Facebook's fund raising rounds and took a $240 million equity stake in the company at a valuation of $15 billion. As a complement to its other properties, Spotify will continue to flourish within the Microsoft domain and it's likely we'll see it integrated into the Xbox Live platform alongside Skype and in a new version of Microsoft's product suite. Microsoft will benefit enormously from a brand aspect and have a new asset to monetize its existing customer base with. Mobile VoIP growth makes dramatic impact on operatorsNext year will see the tipping point for true mVoIP (mobile Voice over IP). With 4G finally rolled out across the U.S. and technology improvements from companies like Rebtel and Viber, dropped calls will become a thing of the past. mVoIP will therefore go from being a fad, to something that is embraced beyond the digerati, and finally catching on with the mainstream. Juniper reports that mobile VoIP clients downloaded to the smartphone will account for four fifths of 640 million mVoIP users by the end of 2016, while alliances between carriers and mVoIP specialists will remain relatively few in number. In the short term, operators will respond with their own services, partnerships with over-the-top (OTT) service providers and following on more rumors of consolidation, eventually buying them. Google to spin-off MotorolaAfter purchasing Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in August, Google will spin-off the company in an attempt to save face with other handset manufacture partners like HTC and Samsung and remedy the risk of them leaving the Android eco-system in favor for Windows Mobile 7. In what will basically amount to a patent acquisition deal, Google will share patents with their OEM partners to allow for more direct competition with Apple. (Maybe not such a surprising move after all, considering research firm Canalys recently shared that Android captures nearly 50% of the global smartphone market?) Also, look for Google TV to jump back in the spotlight with Motorola poised to offer Google TV-enabled set-top boxes and cable providers jumping on board to compete with streaming providers such as Netflix. Carriers forced to transition to tiered data plansSome research firms have already predicted that the role of voice within the broader communications market will change substantially over the next few years, especially as it appears to be headed into integration with other applications. To save customer churn, carriers will begin to offer tiered data plans to cope with the ever-increasing network strain and alleviate their reliance on voice revenue. In the transition process to tiered data, a portion of consumers are likely to initially be averse to the shift. We might even see this lead to a brief period of less data consumption on mobile devices due to a fear of being charged high per MB if they go over the their limit. Over time however, tiered pricing will be for the better, as it will facilitate a better and sustainable user experience by way of a model that makes sense from an economical perspective for the operators. More carriers offering alternative pricing models and packages to stay competitive should turn out to be a big win for the consumer over the next 12 months. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Posted: 24 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST Indie games are officially in style. Amidst all the bundles that have been offered for so very little money all year, it can sometimes be hard to take a step back and gather one’s thoughts about which of the indie games released in 2011 really stood out among the crowd. We have taken the time to rifle through dozens of these games to find the very best, and the following list, presented in no particular order of quality, are the ten we have chosen. Feel free to suggest your own favorites in the comments below, or yell at your monitor for any startling omissions from the list.
1. Bastion The Xbox Live Arcade game Bastion has consistently been the talk of the indie game world all year. Supergiant Games‘ first release turned heads at E3, receiving praise from every outlet under the sun, hyping up its release just over a month later. This isometric action game revolves around the Kid, the player character who must restore his world after the terrible Calamity that befell it. The Kid has a whole host of items at his disposal with which to tear apart foes and complete challenging obstacle courses that hone the player’s use of each weapon. One feature that cannot go without a mention is the stirring performance of Logan Cunningham, the voice of the dynamic narrator who follows the Kid throughout his entire journey, both berating and extolling the protagonist without end. It topped charts, broke hearts, and proved just how successful a well made, original indie game could be on XBLA. In fact, the game has become popular enough to not only be ported to the PC via Steam, but Bastion is also one of the first games of its scope and size to make its way to Google’s Chrome browser.
2. Terraria It’s hard to imagine any indie game-related list any more without including the ultimate sandbox game, Minecraft. Luckily, the fine folks at Re-Logic have given us a 2D world much like Minecraft to stick on this 2011 list. The similarities are impossible to avoid: players are set loose on a randomly generated world with nothing but a few tools at their disposal, and then must collect materials in order to create shelter, clothing, weapons, and hundreds of other doodads in order to survive in the hostile environment. As players progress, the “Minecraft-clone” mentality begins to wear off rather quickly. The sheer amount of craftable items, terrifying enemies (including enormous bosses), random events that can change the entire game, and useful NPCs(!) should be enough to prove that Terraria has its own slew of features worth investing hours of gameplay into. Plus, the recent 1.1 patch seems to have almost doubled the amount of content in the game.
3. The Binding of Isaac Edmund McMillan‘s The Binding of Isaac might be one of the strangest and most polarizing indie games to ever gain this much popularity. Isaac, the titular child, is threatened to be sacrificed by his crazy mother on one terrible day, forcing him to hide out in the basement, where he goes on disgusting adventures using his tears as bullets to fend off monsters. It’s even more disturbing than it sounds. The gameplay is similar to the original Legend of Zelda. Each level is made up of several rooms full of baddies and bonuses and keys, the latter of which are necessary to progress. As Isaac goes deeper into the basement, he can upgrade his weaponry and defenses by finding the items scattered around. The story is told through flashbacks to past events in Isaac’s childhood, all equally terrifying. It’s not just worth sticking with this dungeon crawler for the fun of it, it’s worth discovering a few of the multiple endings to see just what ends up happening to this sad little boy.
4. Serious Sam Double D Double D is one third of the Serious Sam Indie Series, a triplet of indie games from three different developers released in the weeks and months before Serious Sam 3: BFE. It was hard to pick just one, as each are markedly different experiences, and certainly worth your time if you haven’t picked them up yet. Double D is a side-scrolling shooter with hordes of enemies ranging from the typical headless mobs to giant robots, and even dinosaurs (if you survive for that long). Of course, the main draw of Double D is its unique Gunstacking feature, in which up to four different weapons can be stacked on top of one another in order to create an unholy amalgamation of mechanical warfare. There is always a place for thought-provoking and well-written titles like Bastion and Binding of Isaac, but the pure dumb fun of Serious Sam translated this perfectly to a 2D side-scroller deserves a mention as one of the most fun indie games of 2011. And remember, both Kamikaze Attack! and The Random Encounter (the other games in the Indie Series) deserve your attention as well…once you’re done stacking four chainsaws and charging through Tyrannosaurus rexes.
5. Frozen Synapse Every step of every unit counts in Frozen Synapse, the most fist-clenchingly intense online turn-based tactical shooter of 2011. Both in its thorough and entertaining campaign and asynchronous online multiplayer, Frozen Synapse gives you control of the most minute decisions to best take out the opposing force. The matches are played from a top-down view, and each turn is only a few seconds of deciding on the best positioning of each unit in preparation of an attack. Offense and defense must be balanced carefully, because holding out in a building too long could lead to an ambush, whereas rushing in to the field of battle could leave your units completely unprotected from a more cautious foe. The pressure of having to keep up with each of your own troops and the movement of the opponent’s fleet can be overwhelming, but it makes the victory all the more sweet. Sneaking up behind a sniper has never been more satisfying than in Frozen Synapse. Filed under: games        
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| Eight great gadgets from startups that build hardware Posted: 24 Dec 2011 05:00 AM PST When you think Silicon Valley startups, you think applications, locational data, cloud storage and social gaming. We dug around to find some companies that still innovating on the physical plane and making actual, tangible products.
DropcamThis is a gizmo for those days when you’re at work and all you want to do is see your puppy who’s stuck back at home. Or the weekends away from your startup office when you’re worried about burglars. Dropcam is a Wi-Fi enabled camera that plugs into the wall for 24/7 streaming footage. You can access the video online, or through your mobile phone. The camera is meant to be a surveillance device, and is set-up to mark changes in motion and sound on the footage. It can even send you mobile push notifications if you want to keep an eye on your house. You do have to buy a service plan in order to record to your DVR, which isn’t too steep, but does make this a gift that keeps on charging. However, there are many cool uses for its free “Basic” plan, which doesn’t record video, but still streams it. Price: Audio enabled camera is $279, no audio is $199 Service Price: Plus Plan is $8.50 a month for 7 days of recording, Pro Plan is $24.95 a month for 30 days of recording |
| Star Wars: The Old Republic reaches 1M registered users in less than a week Posted: 23 Dec 2011 05:06 PM PST
“We likely had the largest one-day subscription account registration process in MMO history — over one million people are now registered players of the game, and the number is growing rapidly,” say BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk on the game’s official blog. “As you might imagine, this presented a huge strain on our infrastructure and systems,” they add, ”but the good news is that we seem to be through the worst of it now thanks to folks working hard all day to serve our community.” The developers say they are also working to resolve the issue of server queues, claiming it’s another side effect of the huge demand for The Old Republic. ”We were definitely anticipating a very high load but if anything the demand for the game has only exceeded our expectations.” To date, BioWare says players have logged 28 million hours in the game – roughly the equivalent to watching all six Star Wars movies two million times. They have also created more than 3.8 million characters, including 510,000 Jedi Knights and 550,000 Sith Warriors. BioWare says players have averaged well over five hours a day online and have killed more than two billion non-player characters in the eight days since early game access began. "Everyone at BioWare, EA and LucasArts is honored — and humbled — by the stellar response from our fans,” says Dr. Muzyka. ”We’re going to work together closely with our community in the weeks, months and years ahead, continually serving our audience with regular delivery of compelling new features and content." BioWare has already given a sneak peek at the new upcoming content for the online role-playing game, which includes a new Flashpoint and an expanded Operation. The new Flashpoint will take place on a brand new world, the developer says, while the new Operation will take the existing Karagga’s palace scenario and more than triple it in size. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Where in the world is the next booming smartphone and tablet market? Posted: 23 Dec 2011 03:39 PM PST The U.S. and China currently have the world’s largest potential smartphone and tablet markets, but many other countries are ripe for wider smart-device adoption in 2012. Flurry, a mobile analytics company, has crunched numbers from the past month to paint a picture of what the global smart-device market looks like now, and where it’s headed next. It identified what smart-device markets have the most potential for future revenue, making them fertile ground for everyone from equipment manufactures to app developers.
First, Flurry looked at which countries have the most active iOS and Android devices, using data from its own 140,000 apps running around the globe. It estimates there are 264 million active smartphones and tablets currently running these mobile operating systems. (The overall device count differs from the official numbers from Google and Apple because Flurry doesn’t include deactivated devices.)
That shows who has already bought a device, but what about the next wave of smart-device consumers? To calculate where the market is heading, Flurry set up some parameters since comparing based on total population would lead to skewed results. Instead, it accounted for the age of various populations (“recognizing that children do not purchase devices”) and their disposable income. It used data from the IMF and a study of the world’s middle classes by Pepperdine University to calculate who can afford smart-devices. Worldwide, 1.8 billion people are estimated to be middle-class. China has the biggest pool of potential smart-device owners, with 122 million people who can afford a smartphone or tablet, but don’t yet own one. The U.S. isn’t tapped out yet, there are still 91 million people who can afford a smart-device. India has 75 million possible smart-device users, followed by 65 million in Japan, and 34 million in Brazil and in Germany.
Sweden leads with way, with an impressive 66 percent of its total addressable audience already owning an Android or iOS device. For comparison, only 51 percent of the U.S.’s 200 million potential smart device owners currently have an Android or iOS device. In France, 28 percent of the TAM owns a smart-device. Finally, Flurry charted the world’s largest addressable markets regardless of penetration (below). It’s difficult to guess exactly how quickly each country’s smart-device adoption will occur. For example, while India is close in size to China, it has a much smaller middle- and upper-class population, and adoption among people who can afford a smart-device has been slower than in other countries. Japan, on the other hand, has a relatively well-off and tech-savvy population that has only a small amount of iOS and Android adoption, making it a potentially lucrative smart-device market in the future.
Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Out of Asia: Yahoo may let go of its Alibaba & SoftBank shares Posted: 23 Dec 2011 01:57 PM PST
According to reports various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board has decided to sell back the majority of its assets in the China- and Japan-based Internet companies and to focus on its struggling operations in the United States instead. Currently, Yahoo holds a massive 40 percent stake in Alibaba, a stronghold in Chinese e-commerce, as well as a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan and 40 percent in SoftBank. After the negotiations are complete, Yahoo will control 15 percent of Alibaba Group’s shares and none of SoftBank’s. For all its Asian assets, Yahoo can expect to collect $17 billion to $18 billion, according to the Journal’s anonymous sources. The deal comes at a somewhat tense time in Yahoo’s history, especially with regard to Alibaba. In October, Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma publicly stated that he wanted to buy Yahoo, lock, stock and barrel. The unsolicited, informal bid hasn’t turned into an acquisition yet, but Ma & Co. did start rounding-up funds to buy back the Alibaba stock held by Yahoo. But in light of the company’s falling revenues (which were down 24 percent year-over-year due to a search deal with Microsoft) and its trouble finding a replacement for former CEO Carol Bartz, it’s probably wise for Yahoo’s board to narrow its scope down to the essentials at home in the States. Filed under: deals, VentureBeat        
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| Why women have a hard time raising money for startups, part 1 (video) Posted: 23 Dec 2011 01:39 PM PST Every now and then, we hear from a female startup-founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money. She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s a woman pitching an idea to a roomful of male investors. Women 2.0 CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania came into VentureBeat’s studio to chat about a few issues experienced by a lot of female founders, not the least of which is experiencing subtle sexism during fundraising. Charania also names a few names — VCs who enjoy working with women and make a point of including female-founded companies in their investment portfolios. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, video        
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| VentureBeat Holiday Contest: Win a Galaxy Nexus and Beats Studio headphones! Posted: 23 Dec 2011 12:56 PM PST
VentureBeat is giving away a Galaxy Nexus, as well as a pair of Beats Studio headphones, as part of our holiday contest (sponsored by the app store Appitalism). What better way to forget the holiday doldrums and ring in a New Year? To refresh, the Galaxy Nexus is Google’s new 4.65-inch behemoth that packs in just about every feature you’d want in an Android smartphone. And the Beats Studio headphones are no slouch either — they’re highest-end model in Dr. Dre’s lineup (a $300 value). Entering is easy, just follow the instructions below:
Entries are due Thursday, December 29, by noon PST. One winner will be randomly selected next week. Here are the rules:
Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| 2011 holidays: Shopping-by-tablet was popular, but retailers weren’t ready Posted: 23 Dec 2011 11:48 AM PST This was a groundbreaking holiday season for e-commerce. Cyber Monday lived up to its hype – the biggest ever – and online sales held strong throughout the season. While sales figures took the majority of the headlines, this season gave birth to a new trend: "couch commerce" — people using tablets as their preferred device for shopping. My team at Compuware measured 2011 holiday site performance, and we found that the volume of consumer traffic generated by iPads dwarfed that of iPhones for major retailer websites in the weeks leading up to the big Cyber Monday push. This confirms earlier Forrester data from analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, which noted that retailers surveyed say 21 percent of their mobile traffic now comes from tablets, with several companies anecdotally reporting figures above 50 percent.
The tablet is ergonomically a great device with which to casually shop while seated. Our data revealed that people started using their iPads to shop within hours after Thanksgiving dinner. The tablet is clearly adding to the growth in online retailing, but there's a catch. While consumers enjoy shopping with their tablets, retailers now have another device requiring optimization. Why is device optimization (a website version built for a device's specific characteristics) so important? The short answer: non-optimized sites can diminish or even ruin the user experience, which equates to less traffic and fewer sales. So were retailers fully prepared for couch commerce in 2011? Not really. We analyzed 30 U.S. retailer sites and found that none of the sites were optimized for the iPad, and only 14 had a dedicated iPad app. While some may argue device-specific optimization isn't critical, sites that are slow and don't meet end-users' performance expectations result in lost customers and revenue. The lack of Flash capability in iPads has been well publicized, but many retailers still have Flash-based content. Tablets also have less CPU power and RAM than their desktop or laptop counterparts. Combine these with the inconsistencies of mobile carrier connections, and you have an entirely different environment for optimizing your website. The navigation differences between a mouse and your finger are also significant. Unless a site is touch-enabled, some links requiring a mouse click may not work. Many times this won't be a problem but can be frustrating for users when it does occur, especially when shopping cart links don't execute properly. When a site is tablet-optimized, the quality of the user experience amplifies the device's glide-across-the-screen elegance. If not optimized, it can be cumbersome and make the user want for a "real browser." For example, tapping a single, small text link on a web page designed for a large monitor can get tedious. The graphics below show how eBay's full site appears on an iPad compared to its new tablet-optimized site.]  eBay full website eBay tablet-optimized websiteThere can also be page load time slowdowns if a page's composition isn't attuned to the device. Shoppers will abandon slow-loading or buggy sites within seconds. As Robert Hamilton from the Google Mobile team said about the link between increased usage and a fast user experience: "(This) reinforces something we at Google have known for a long time: fast is better than slow." Just five years ago retailers only needed to deliver a stable, fast-performing website for a single user experience (Internet Explorer on the PC). Today, tablets must now be added to the growing list of mobile devices mandating optimization. This includes multiple smartphone OSs and dedicated apps for a variety of platforms. That's a lot of complexity, but the investment will be worth it. According to Forrester Research, tablets already account for 20 percent of e-commerce sales, despite the fact that only 9 percent of shoppers own tablets. Given the holiday 2011 growth in couch commerce, expect IT departments to expand their tablet-specific budgets beyond their current levels and in 2012 begin to mirror what happened after the smartphone took off: more sites optimized for the device and more dedicated apps created to directly match stores to a device, resulting in happier shoppers, and most importantly, more revenue. Steve Tack is the Chief Technology Officer of APM Solutions for Compuware Corp. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| The most popular StumbleUpon links of 2011 (infographic) Posted: 23 Dec 2011 11:46 AM PST
What do Japan’s earthquakes and tsunami, the royal wedding, and the passing of Steve Jobs have in common? They were all hugely popular topics on StumbleUpon in 2011. The link discovery website had quite a year — in October it reached 20 million users, December brought a complete site redesign, and it now averages 1.2 billion “stumbles” per month. In the above infographic, you can see how much the popular events of 2011 influenced StumbleUpon’s activity. During the Super Bowl, there were 41 mobile stumbles per second. And after Steve Jobs passed away in October, StumbleUpon recorded a 199,500 percent increase for searches of “Steve Jobs.” StumbleUpon rounded up the most popular, inspiring and adorable links from the approximately 14 billion stumbles the site saw this year. The resulting Best of StumbleUpon 2011 post is a three-page list that includes the top stumbles for men, women and mobile users. Below is sampling of the stumbles that made the list. Most inspiringIn the category of most inspiring, A dog’s seeing-eye dog is the winner with one million views. It’s a post about a blind Great Dane, and another Great Dane companion that has been acting as her seeing-eye dog for the past five years. Inspiring and adorable. Most popular on tabletsExpectations vs. Reality is a round up of 16 pictures that show how things really don’t always go as planned. The single-column all-images post was a natural for tablets. It had more than two million views on StumbleUpon — a rare case when reality probably topped expectations. Most stumbled videoOut of all the videos shared this year, Super Sprayer scored the most stumbles. At first the video doesn’t look like much; just an artist spray painting a sheet of paper. But as he sprays and smudges the paint, a stunning space scene with a planet and stars emerge. It may not be as viral as Rebecca Black’s Friday Video, but the painting definitely required more talent. Most deliciousChocolate cupcakes with flaming strawberries — need I say more? This unique recipe of chocolate cupcakes topped with flaming, alcohol-filled strawberries became the most delicious stumble of 2011 with one million views. And lastly, most sharedDraw a Stickman is a simple game; you draw a stickman and watch what happens to it, adding input here and there. How did it get so many shares? Likely because it’s a fun way to kill a few minutes and has a nice message at the end. Filed under: media        
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| How to make a millionaire (video) Posted: 23 Dec 2011 11:14 AM PST Recently, VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima sat down with Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late, to talk about what it really takes to be successful. Most of us were told by our parents that if we worked hard, went to college, got good grades and treated people fairly, we’d succeed in life. However, many of us have not found this to be the case and are struggling to keep our heads above water despite following that American Dream recipe to the last pinch of determination. On the other hand, we watch as dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg become the newest members of the Forbes lists and become the most powerful people in the world. In this interview, Ellsberg explains a bit about the real-world rules of success — the things you don’t learn in college but that are crucial for entrepreneurs and hustlers of all stripes. The Education of Millionaires is available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle editions. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, video        
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| Go Daddy gives into pressure, comes out against SOPA Posted: 23 Dec 2011 11:12 AM PST
The statement (pasted below) comes after the intense backlash Go Daddy received yesterday from customers and Internet critics after it appeared on an official list of companies supporting SOPA. Not only did Go Daddy issue a statement on its new stance, but it’s also compulsively responding to any comments on Twitter referencing a Go Daddy boycott (screenshot here). It’s the same message, tweeted over a hundred times at this point. For anyone who’s still in the dark about the proposed legislation, SOPA gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. The implication of having the act pass is that it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content (such as a song, picture or video clip), the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business with companies like PayPal. As one of the largest domain registrars, Go Daddy’s support of SOPA was extremely alarming to many people and companies with a strong presence on the Internet because it could make de-indexing domain names much easier. Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest. Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors. It also started a Scumbag Go Daddy meme, which will probably never go away despite the company’s new stance on SOPA. It’ll be interesting to see if people still decide to take their business away from Go Daddy. Check out the full statement from Go Daddy pasted below:
Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| You better watch out: Google is tracking (and calling) Santa Posted: 23 Dec 2011 09:51 AM PST
Beginning tomorrow, you can start stalking the jolly old elf on your computer or even on your phone. And if you need to get Santa on the horn, you can leave messages or schedule a call from him to a loved one or friend using Google tools. Googlers teamed up with NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which has been “tracking Santa” since 1955. Each year on Christmas Eve, the “NORAD Tracks Santa” program follows Papa Noël as he departs from the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world. NORAD’s site now incorporates data from Google Maps and Google Earth so we can “see Santa’s sleigh flying over the Amazon Rain Forest, the Great Wall of China, the skyscrapers of New York, the Golden Gate Bridge,” as a spokesperson wrote in an email to VentureBeat. The tracking begins on Christmas Eve at 2 a.m. Eastern Time, about 13 hours after this publication, and the site offers some kids’ games (along with some truly horrifying MIDI tracks) between now and then. In addition to the NORAD site, you can now also see Santa’s path on Google Maps for mobile devices. If you’d also like to send a personalized phone message to wish someone a happy holiday, check out Send a Call From Santa. You can customize the message with favorite gifts, names, places and more. While it will cause anyone under the age of eight to loose their daggone minds, it’s a hilariously corny call to set up for your older friends, too. And of course, Santa uses Google Voice. If you’d like to leave him a message, just call 1-855-34-SANTA. Go set yourself a reminder to show the Santa Tracker to the young ones on Christmas Eve, schedule a “call from Santa” to strike some shock and awe into the hearts of those leaning toward the “naughty” list, then get offline and go spend some time with your family, you Internet-obsessed nerds. Filed under: offBeat        
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Fueled by disruption on several fronts, 2012 will see some major mobile industry consolidation, as well as mobile VoIP services’ lasting impact on carriers and more options on data pricing plans for consumers.
With 109 million users, the U.S. makes up 41 percent of the current global iOS and Android install base, followed by China with 13 percent (35 million), the U.K with 6.5 percent (17 million), and South Korea with 6 percent (16 million).
Oh, how the mighty have fallen: Yahoo is selling back most of its shares in Asian powerhouses Alibaba and SoftBank. It’s even losing Yahoo Japan.
Google has once again set up its Santa-centric goodies for the young and the young at heart.
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