VentureBeat |
- Zynga’s hybrid zCloud lets it get rid of two out of every three servers
- SEC: Carriers must let shareholders vote on net neutrality, thanks to Beastie Boys’ Mike D
- Looking for Android differentiation, HTC may launch a streaming music service
- Engagio goes from the comment section to a $540K seed investment
- What are the next big trends in broadband?
- SOPA foe Fred Wilson says everyone is a pirate, but supports a blacklist for pirate sites
- Bleacher Report debuts four new original sports shows on YouTube
- Social curation site Lockerz pushes commerce, announces low-price guarantee (exclusive)
- The rise of real-time marketing: LocalResponse revenue in January equalled all of 2011
- The iPad is too big to ban in China, authorities tell Proview
- Dylan’s Desk: You are all to blame for Apple’s factories
- MXP4 and Mobile Roadie take social music games to mobile devices (exclusive)
- Welcome to VentureBeat’s bold new look
- Prince of Persia creator returns to games with remake of Karateka
- FileTrek grabs $10M from Anthem Venture Partners, Telesystem to help businesses track cloud-based files
- Streaming video consumption on mobile devices and smart TVs nearly doubles in Q4
- How Hulu plans to measure success of ‘Battleground’ without TV ratings
- Zynga teams up with Slingo to publish Bingo-slot-machine hybrid game on Facebook
- Listen up! Following relaunch, Exfm triples its user base, raises fresh $1.5M
- Everything I needed to know about startups, I learned from Chuck Norris
- No LTE for you! FCC plans to reject Lightsquared’s 4G network
- Ex-Sun CEO Jon Schwartz is back, and this time, he cares
- AMD pumps extreme performance into mid-range computers with 1-gigahertz Cape Verde graphics chips
- Yelp ads leave bad impressions for small businesses
- Bad news for Amazon: Total Prime members may be fewer than estimated
- Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data
- Here’s Google’s Konami code treat for Valentine’s Day
- Netflix developing second original series, this time from the creator of ‘Weeds’
- Apple’s plans for its $90B in cash: “We’re not going to have a toga party”
- Looking beyond Facebook, Zynga hits 15M daily mobile game users
| Zynga’s hybrid zCloud lets it get rid of two out of every three servers Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:30 AM PST
But it didn’t mention one of the prime benefits of that shift. For every three servers that it used to have on Amazon Web Services, it can now get away with just one on the zCloud. The zCloud can thus dramatically lower the company’s costs, Allan Leinwand, chief technology officer for infrastructure engineering at Zynga, told VentureBeat. That, in turn, gives Zynga some huge cost advantages over its rivals in the social game business, he said. Leinwand is sharing these details in a speech at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Calif. today. Zynga started out using its own servers. Then, in June 2009, it launched FarrmVille. The game was an enormous success and it forced Zynga to shift to Amazon Web Services, a public cloud-based infrastructure that allowed it to tap Amazon’s extra computing resources as necessary to handle the enormous demand for Zynga’s games. FarmVille grew from zero to 10 million daily active users in its first six weeks and hit 25 million DAUs in its first five months. AWS gave Zynga huge flexibility, and it formally adopted a hybrid cloud strategy that mixed public and private clouds. Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga’s server capacity grew two orders of magnitude.
“We launched with AWS and then began to understand the stresses of the traffic and how we could manage it,” Leinwand said. At the beginning of 2011, 20 percent of Zynga’s daily active users were hosted on the zCloud and 80 percent were on Amazon. Now that has been reversed. Over time, even more users will be hosted on the zCloud. Zynga was able to deploy the zCloud for its initial trial within six months. CityVille Hometown, a mobile game, was the first to be entirely hosted on zCloud. In November, CastleVille started on the zCloud, and the system was able to handle huge traffic growth when the game grew to five million users in six days. Zynga now has 240 million monthly active users. Of course, shifting most of its user base to a private cloud carries its risks. Zynga now has to invest in its own data centers. If its games suddenly become unpopular and the user count drops, Zynga could get stuck with too much infrastructure. But the bet has paid off so far with steady growth in users and lower costs per user. Zynga can now deploy up to 1,000 servers in 24 hours. Zynga’s infrastructure is one of the largest uses of public and private clouds in the world.
“We wanted to understand our availability and make sure that it was solid and always there,” he said. Now that the zCloud is up and running, the company is collecting data on just how well all of the parts of the data center are working and what can be done to cut costs and improve the user experience. While Amazon is an all-purpose four-door sedan, Zynga’s custom-built zCloud is a sports car tuned to one purpose. Filed under: cloud, games        
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| SEC: Carriers must let shareholders vote on net neutrality, thanks to Beastie Boys’ Mike D Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:24 AM PST
You read that right. The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission said today that AT&T and other wireless telecom companies will have to let shareholders vote on net neutrality, thanks in part to a proposal from a group that includes Mike D of the Beastie Boys. Net neutrality, the notion that online traffic must be treated equally by ISPs, is now a “significant policy” issue, the SEC said in a letter posted on its website. The agency is now recommending that AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon include a resolution in its annual shareholder votes declaring that they won’t treat data differently based on its "source, ownership or destination." The move comes in response to a proposal sent to the SEC by Trillium Asset Management, which represents Mike D and two other AT&T shareholders. Previously the SEC found that net neutrality wasn’t a large enough issue to include in shareholder votes. But thanks to the policy push by the likes of Trillium, as well as the FCC’s own support of net neutrality when it came to landline ISPs, it seems the tide is finally beginning to shift in favor of those who want fair wireless web access. Of course, the SEC’s recommendation doesn’t guarantee that carrier shareholders will vote in favor of net neutrality. But at least shareholders can now get their say, instead of just accepting the carrier’s position. Via Bloomberg; Mike D photo via Fabbio Venni/Flickr
Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Looking for Android differentiation, HTC may launch a streaming music service Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:14 AM PST
Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC is reportedly working on its own music streaming service, a move that would help the company differentiate its Android phones and tablets from its considerable competition. HTC used to be one of the leading makers of Android phones, but now the company has taken a veritable back seat compared to Samsung and Motorola. The company has been struggling financially as well, with a significant drop in profit reported in its last quarterly earnings. The company said Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Android phones especially were responsible for the diminished interest in its handsets. But perhaps a streaming service, alongside new powerful devices, could help rejuvenate some its lost mojo. The rumor that it is working on a streaming service, which was first reported by GigaOM, does line up with some of HTC’s other recent announcements. Back in September, the company made a $300 million investment into Beats Electronics, with the intent of improving sound technology on mobile devices. On top of that, HTC’s latest flagship smartphone is the Rezound, which has Beats Audio and an advertising campaign focused on listening to music on the phone. HTC's Sensation XL phone also features Beats integration, and I’m sure we will see further phones and tablets with a high level of sound quality. The streaming service, per GigaOM, would be the default music client on HTC’s phones and tablets. The company is still reportedly working on plans and pricing, but we would expect such a service to line up competitively with the likes of Spotify, MOG, Rdio, and Rhapsody. Do you think a streaming service would help give HTC an edge as it tries to win back customers from Samsung, Motorola, and Apple? HTC You screenshot: YouTube/HTC Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Engagio goes from the comment section to a $540K seed investment Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:03 AM PST  Engagio founder William Mougayar Engagio, a Toronto startup founded by William Mougayar that helps people keep track of the conversations they are having in comment threads across the web, has raised $540,000 in a seed round led by Rho Canada and New York investor Fred Wilson. The unique thing about Engagio is that it was conceived in the comment section of Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC. And a number of the long time participants from the comment section pitched in to help Engagio with everything from securing a domain name to crafting their interface design. Even Fake Grimlock, everyone’s favorite giant robot startup dinosaur, lent a hand! Wilson, through his investments with Union Square Ventures, has articulated a thesis about the power of highly networked online communities. But keeping up conversations across portfolio companies like Twitter, foursquare, and Tumblr meant that Wilson was missing a lot of what people were saying to him. The first time Mougayar pitched Wilson a startup, a content duration platform called Equentia, he was turned down. So he took a page out of Paul Graham’s play book and found a a problem that needed solving. It was Wilson’s problem of course, not his, but there was still a target market. Engagio is a clean, inbox modeled after Gmail that allows all that discussion to happen in one place. With one click it can connect to Facebook or Disqus accounts and important the interactions. You can respond from inside Engagio and it will be posted to the appropriate site. Mougayar told VentureBeat by phone that he is opening a satellite office in New York at General Assembly. The Internet has opened up new doors for ambitious networkers. In the slang of A VC, Wilson is the “bartender” and Mougayar is an “instigator”, meaning he gets the conversation going in the comments. It’s a habit that seems to have paid dividends. Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat        
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| What are the next big trends in broadband? Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST This post is sponsored by Comcast Business Class. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.
It all began with the sounds of a dial-up modem screeching as it connected to the Internet. Then these connections graduated to a vast cable infrastructure. But what’s the next big technology for connecting an increasingly data-hungry world to the Internet? While cable remains a solid, wired solution for connecting to the Internet in many places, its adaptation has stumbled outside of the U.S. where a shaky infrastructure produced poor wireline connections. DSL came along after cable, and quickly became known as high-speed DSL as customers used more data faster, ever pushing the capacity of their phone lines. In rural areas, satellite often remains the only player in the game. However, more and more, the only phrase on the lips of services, companies, and customers alike has been optical fiber. Optical fiber has long been in use providing the major long distance wiring that makes up the backbone of the Internet. Indeed, the competition today is among service companies trying to bring the wiring from that backbone to your house or business, to service that "last mile" — the one that isn’t already handled by fiber. Although it’s more expensive than the other connection technologies, the results are hard to argue with: optical fiber can reportedly achieve speeds up to six times faster than DSL or cable (cable can theoretically achieve speeds of 30 Mbps, but realistically averages 6 Mbps. Likewise, DSL achieves about 6 Mbps, while fiber can hit 35 Mbps). More importantly, it is currently the wireline solution best in place to handle the astounding increase in data usage — something wireless solutions like LTE and Wi-Max cannot do on their own. Mainly due to the tremendous increase in streaming video, particularly HD video, only the virtually unlimited bandwidth provided by optical fiber networks can handle current needs for wired and wireless connectivity. Parks Associates has estimated that the number of U.S. households subscribing to fiber optic Internet would increase to 18 million by the end of 2011. Perhaps more telling are the estimates from Cisco that anticipate a "quadrupling of Internet traffic by 2015," with " more than 5.6 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and more than 1.5 billion machine-to-machine connections… forecasted." It’s not just mobile, or video, or even mobile video driving all this data hunger. It’s also the increase in cloud computing, which is reliant on an Internet connection, IPTV, video on demand, file sharing, user-generated content, online gaming, social networking and applications taxing the tubes. Fiber seems up to that challenge, boosting data rates and extending reach over copper fiber. The current goal of providers is to offer what is referred to as a triple-play (voice, data and video over one network) but as fiber’s use and popularity increases, expect to see them branch out to building fixed access or wireline Internet with wireless access technologies in order to provide networks that will offer always-on broadband services on a constant basis. Wire image via ShutterStock Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| SOPA foe Fred Wilson says everyone is a pirate, but supports a blacklist for pirate sites Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:38 AM PST  Image from Flickr user Uncle Catherine Influential New York investor Fred Wilson was one of the earliest and loudest opponents of the anti-piracy bill SOPA. He worried that it would threaten sites he considered legitimate, like Reddit, or Tumblr, which is backed by his firm Union Square Ventures. But as CNET’s Greg Sandoval reports, Wilson said yesterday that he supports the idea of an independent body which would create a blacklist for known pirate sites. “If we created an independent body that essentially created a black and white list,” Wilson told a crowd of media executives at the Paley Center in New York. “The black list are those sites we all know are bad news. We all know who the good guys are who are truly licensed and are operating legitimately. And we know who the bad guys are.” CNET reports that Wilson named Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify and Rhapsody among the good guys. The tech industry and the entertainment industry have very different ideas of what a pirate site looks like. If they both had equal representation on this independent body, perhaps they could agree on the most obvious villains. Wilson suggested services like MegaUpload, Pirate Bay and the various BitTorrent sites as the kind of sites that would be on the blacklist. “Using technology, we train our youth to know that they’re doing something bad and how they could do something that’s good.” But piracy is never that black and white. Tumblr, which Union Square Ventures invested in, certainly doesn’t fall under the category of “good guys who are truly licensed. (emphasis mine)” Instead, it’s a free-wheeling community where users often post copyrighted music and images. While you can argue that it falls under the DMCA safe harbor passed by Congress, and isn’t a pirate site looking to profit by distributing tons of illegal content, it is a home to many blogs that distribute links to full downloads of new albums. As Wilson said at the conference:
Filed under: media        
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| Bleacher Report debuts four new original sports shows on YouTube Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:32 AM PST
Fan-generated sports commentary site Bleacher Report announced a deal with YouTube today to bring four new sports-themed shows to its branded YouTube channel. The Bleacher Report’s website’s content comes from over a 1,000 columnists and 6,000 contributors that write commentary from a fan perspective. While the new shows will definitely use this fan mentality, it’ll also feature high-profile names in the sports and entertainment world. The new Bleacher Report channel is part of YouTube's strategy to boost the amount of premium original videos available on the site, making it more than just a place to watch funny cat videos and viral content. In October, YouTube committed $100 million in channel partnerships to make sure that this strategy succeeds. Some of these channel partnerships include Madonna's DanceOn, World Wrestling Entertainment's Fan Nation, and exclusive bits from the Onion News Network. More recently, YouTube forged deals to bring a variety of news-related channels to the site from partners like Reuters, Young Hollywood and Penske Media-Ion TV as well as a new indie film fest channel in partnership with Ridley Scott. As for the shows themselves, here a brief description of each by Bleach Report’s news release: B/R 5 Bleacher Report’s daily dose of the five biggest, best or most buzzworthy sports stories of the day, featuring Desi Sanchez (E! News Now and MTV) as the host. Available Monday through Friday, the daily show covers the hottest games, athletes, personalities and stories across the sports landscape that is delivered through an irreverent and entertaining style that is unique to Bleacher Report. NFL Draft 365 Hosted by Alex Panos (HGTV’s “Run My Money” and SNY’s “Beer Money”), NFL Draft 365 will be the first show of its kind to provide year round coverage of the lightning rod for discussion and debate that is the NFL Draft. With speculation, storylines and insatiable appetites for information, NFL Draft 365 will fill that void all year-long. Each weekly episode will include a current or former NFL player as a guest analyst, starting with Pittsburgh Steeler QB and two-time Super Bowl champion Charlie Batch. Regular features will include a War Room segment with Bleacher Report NFL Draft Lead Writer Matt Miller, in-depth profiles on top draft prospects, and candid memories from current and former NFL stars on their draft experience. Why We Watch Produced by Jim Forman (Showtime Championship Boxing and ESPN Classic), Sarah Kreiger (The Olympic Games), Amir Ebrahimi (NACHO LIBRE) and Chris Peterson (Top Gear USA), Why We Watch features short form sports documentaries that tell unique stories that capture the emotion and passion inherent in why we watch sports. Each weekly episode of Why We Watch will focus on a narrative unique to the sports landscape, be it a small story with major significance or a fresh new angle on a well-known event. Initial subjects include female auto racing pioneer Janet Guthrie and Robin Ficker, the NBA’s most notorious heckler. Full Ride Beginning in March, Full Ride is a weekly show serving information, opinion and analysis about the college football recruiting scene. Produced by Marc Kohn (Heisman Trophy presentation and NFL Draft), Full Ride will focus on the big programs and five-star recruits that make the college football world turn while uncovering diamonds in the rough that might push the next national championship contender over the top. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Social curation site Lockerz pushes commerce, announces low-price guarantee (exclusive) Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:30 AM PST
Lockerz, a social commerce site that debuted its a self-expression platform earlier this month, said today that it will guarantee that no other online site will be able to match its prices. Lockerz is similar to popular online pinboard site Pinterest, which lets users organize and share content and information they love. But Lockerz has put a monetization spin on Pinterest’s business model by offering rewards to its users for sharing content and driving users to make purchases at the site. “We took our time — a little bit longer than Pinterest — to really come out with a full commerce solution,” Lockerz chief executive Kathy Savitt told VentureBeat. The company recently announced its new “Locker” look, which allows users to curate “decals,” or the equivalent of a Pinterest Pin, on its website. Those decals can be categorized into groups such as makeup, clothing, and gadgets to be shared around Lockerz and other social networks. The incentive to share these decals is to get points. These points are similar to an arcade ticket. The more you earn, the bigger the prize you can buy at the gift shop. In Lockerz’s case, the more points you earn, the bigger the discount you get off of a “high-end product”. You earn points for each “grab” you get — a grab is when someone shares content you’ve assembled into your Locker.
“I think there are a lot of social companies that try to add commerce, and a lot of commerce companies that have tried to add social. We’ve tried to take a different path,” said Savitt. Lockerz wants to be the big name in “social commerce,” where people buy products that they’ve seen their friends discuss online. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for years that people are more likely to buy products if their friends have recommended them, and Facebook recently added new features to take advantage of that trend, such as the ability to “want” or “buy” something as opposed to just “like” it. Seattle-based Lockerz launched in 2009 and currently has 20 million users. It has given out 3 billion points to be used in its store since its launch. Pinterest, on the other hand is rumored to have as many as 13 million users in the 10 months it has been open. If Pinterest finds a way to make money off its users and finally takes its website out of invite-only mode, it will pose a big threat to Lockerz, and potentially to its low-price guarantee.
Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| The rise of real-time marketing: LocalResponse revenue in January equalled all of 2011 Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:06 AM PST
To get a sense of how LocalResponse works, lets take an example of one of their customers, Walgreens. The company scans through public posts from Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. If someone writes, “Just stopped in Walgreen” on Twitter or actually checks into the location on Foursquare, LocalResponse will respond to them with what’s on sale or a special offer. “Our bookings in January exceeded our revenue for all of last year,” founder Nihal Mehta told VentureBeat at his office in Chelsea. “We’re looking to double our staff this year and stay cash flow positive. The goal is to reach profitablity by the end of 2012.” Analytics for social media marketing are an increasingly crowded field. Everyone from Radian6 to Buddy Media is promising to help brands get the best return on investment as they pour dollars into the relatively uncharted waters of social media marketing. LocalResponse is hoping to diversify its revenue stream by offering direct marketing, analytics and mobile ad re-targeting. Since its already tracking location and intent across 500 million pieces of content a day, Mehta says it made sense to help publishers serve up mobile ads. “If you check into a park and Tweet out that you’re hungry, we can make sure your phone shows you an ad for Taco Bell the next time you log onto the web.” Right now LocalResponse is working with around one hundred brands, including big names like Coca-Cola, GE, GM, and McDonalds. “The big brands are playing the field right now and using a lot of different companies to see what works best in the social media marketing space,” says Mehta. “That’s a challenge, but of course we feel confident that our product will stand out in the end.” Filed under: mobile        
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| The iPad is too big to ban in China, authorities tell Proview Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:07 AM PST
Proview Technology, a firm that used to be big in the monitor market, likely won’t get its wish to ban shipments of Apple’s iPad in China. The company made news over the last few months with its claims that the name “iPad” infringes on its patents. But Chinese customs authorities have now told the company that they won’t assist in the dispute, and that a ban on such a popular product would be difficult to implement, reports Reuters. “The customs have told us that it will be difficult to implement a ban because many Chinese consumers love Apple products. The sheer size of the market is very big,” Proview CEO Yang Long-san told Reuters. He added, “we have applied to some local customs for the ban and they’ll report to the headquarters in Beijing.” Proview sought to ban both imports and exports of the iPad in China, the latter of which would have caused major issues for Apple’s iPad supply worldwide since most of Apple’s devices are built in China. Yang now says the best resolution for both companies would be an out of court settlement. Apple already lost a case to Proview last year over the iPad trademark. Proview has hearings lined up for later this month for both the settlement talks and trademark dispute. A hefty settlement would be a boon to cash-strapped Proview, which has fallen on hard times after the 2008 financial crisis. As VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell explained previously, representatives of Proview stated that Proview Taiwan, an affiliate of the Shenzhen company that did not have the legal right to represent the company in an IP transaction, sold the iPad trademark to IP Application Development, a UK company. Later, IP Application Development sold the iPad trademark to Apple, apparently unaware that the previous sale had not been authorized by the parent company. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Dylan’s Desk: You are all to blame for Apple’s factories Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:05 AM PST
As everyone knows by now, iPhones and iPads are built in huge Chinese manufacturing plants where tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts for little money, have little privacy, and are exposed to toxic chemicals and unsafe conditions every day. We’ve been hearing similar stories across other industries for years, but this one’s on us — the tech community. That’s right — all of us. It’s not just Apple. Motorola (whose acquisition by Google got a green light this week) and Nokia are doing it. Toshiba, HP, Dell, and Sony all use factories the New York Times reports as “bleak.” It’s virtually guaranteed that behind every gadget stands an army of underpaid workers and polluting factories. Apple is hardly the only electronics company that makes use of cheap manufacturing provided by companies such as Foxconn, its major supplier, which hit the news a few years ago because of a rash of suicides among its workers. Almost every other electronics manufacturer uses the same manufacturing principles, many of them use the same manufacturing companies, and most of them scrutinize their suppliers far less rigorously than Apple. In fact, Apple chief executive Tim Cook has a point when he says that Apple really cares about conditions in its suppliers’ factories: The company has done a lot to audit those factories and to insist that its suppliers clean up their acts. Indeed, Apple is the first tech company to enlist the support of the Fair Labor Association, a trade group that until now has focused on working conditions in clothing factories. That’s not to say that Apple’s free of blame. It’s just that many other companies are culpable too. The Kindle Fire might have been designed in Seattle, but it was manufactured in China, most likely by Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company with 30,000 employees worldwide and major manufacturing facilities in China. Do you know how many Quanta factory workers committed suicide last year? (I don’t.) Foxconn, Huawei, ZTE, Quanta, Compal Electronics: These are the companies that actually make the gadgets we use. While they may tout high ideals (Quanta’s website includes documents with titles like “love the Earth” and “Truth Goodness Beauty”), their approach to business is matter-of-fact: Design and build electronic products with increasing speed and precision and decreasing costs. Was your new Motorola Droid Razr assembled by workers being paid a fair wage, without polluting local rivers and without strip-mining some country’s copper reserves? In a global economy, making electronic goods means building factories wherever you can find sufficiently talented labor at the lowest possible cost. It’s not just cost, either: The just-in-time inventory principles of modern companies press their suppliers to turn on a dime. Need 3,000 new factory workers overnight, or 8,700 engineers in two weeks? China can deliver, and America can’t, at any price. Given the hundreds of components that go into making something as complicated as a smartphone, the manufacturing process involves dozens of companies with scores of factories in as many different locations. All of them are getting squeezed by an economy that demands faster and faster turnarounds regardless of the human costs. I say this as a gadget lover, and one who has spent much of his career writing about electronics, scourging the worst and glorifying the best. The best are elegant tools for the mind that have helped humanity immensely and are reshaping society and the world in profound ways, often for the better. But making these gadgets requires a lot of steps. Along the way, some of those jobs are very good and some are abysmal. Turning sand into silicon or mining lithium is dirty, nasty work. Turning purified silicon into wafers with billions of microscopic transistors is the work of bunny-suited engineers with master’s degrees and good salaries. Assembling packaged chips onto circuit boards and gluing LCD screens onto the chassis of phones is rote labor performed by minimally skilled workers who can easily be trained and replaced whenever necessary. Most of this work happens outside the U.S., where different legal standards apply. And good luck finding out about the details of that process. I’ve been trying for years to get various companies to let me write the story of how they make their devices, but they’ve always shut me down, providing only generic information. There may be competitive reasons they don’t want to expose their whole supply chain, and it’s complicated enough that they may not even know where all their components come from. But it’s a fair bet that they don’t want a reporter scrutinizing that supply chain because they know it’s full of dirt. (If any manufacturer out there disagrees with me, I’m all ears. I’d welcome details on where your components are made and assembled, and if I get a full picture, I will write about it.) In other words, ditching your iPhone and picking up an Android phone because you’re concerned about conditions in Foxconn’s factories is just dumb. Instead, let’s get mad about the inability of the American economy to compete on the global arena with the speed and precision of Chinese factories. Let’s get mad about the poor labor conditions and lack of environmental controls throughout the electronics manufacturing process in other countries. But let’s not pick on the most prominent seller of gadgets just because it’s an easy target. Everyone who has ever bought a computer, cellphone, tablet, or television bears responsibility for this industry’s lack of transparency and accountability. If you subscribe to my newsletter you can read these columns a whole day before they appear on our website. And check out my other Dylan's Desk columns. Photo: A worker in Ningbo, China assembles a camera. Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan/Flickr. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| MXP4 and Mobile Roadie take social music games to mobile devices (exclusive) Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST
The net result should a lot of music listening and game playing on mobile devices. The companies hope that their partnership will help turn mobile phones into “total entertainment” devices. Paris-based MXP4 launched Bopler Games as a music hub on Facebook in April 2011. The hub allowed users to create an original social music gaming experience by picking the songs that play in their favorite arcade-like games on Facebook. The plan was to create a music game category on Facebook. That effort succeeded, and now Bopler Games is moving to mobile. Bopler Games for mobile will debut with an app that includes the popular Pump It! game embedded in music artist David Guetta’s official iPhone app. MXP4 essentially supplies the game for Mobile Roadie’s artist apps. So when you visit the artist’s app, you can play a music game that is integrated with six of Guetta’s songs. Mobile Roadie’s apps have a gamification layer, where users can increase their overall ranking within the David Guetta app by scoring points in the Bopler game. The players can earn achievement badges and be featured in leaderboards. More apps for additional artists will be released in the future. Jean Charles Carre, business manager for Guetta, says that Guetta is always looking for new platforms that can help fans engage and interact with his music. "Social networking and gaming are now two of the most popular activities on mobile devices, so developing a mobile version of Bopler Games was a high priority for MXP4," said CEO Albin Serviant. "Mobile Roadie is the top provider of highly-customized, immersive artists-branded mobile apps, and we're elated to be working with them to expand both of our offerings for music fans around the world." Michael Schneider, CEO of Los Angeles-based Mobile Roadie, said that adding social games to the app platform makes it more compelling for mobile users and helps artists make more money. Mobile Roadie powers more than 3,000 apps with 15 million users for musicians such as Katy Perry, Madonna, Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Linkin Park, Adele, Pink, Bon Jovi, and Avril Lavigne. Now, any of those artists can add Bopler Games to their apps in a self-serve manner. Mobile Roadie was founded in 2009 to democratize app creation and it has more than 30 employees. Rivals in the app platform space include Mobbase, Appmakr, Red Foundry. Mobile Roadie’s backers include angels such as Guy Oseary, Ashton Kutcher, Rodger Berman and Mike Jones, among others. MXP4 has raised more than $13 million to date. Backers include Orkos Capital, Sofinnova Partners and Ventech. MXP4 was founded in 2007. Rivals include Disney's Tapulous on mobile phones. Filed under: games        
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| Welcome to VentureBeat’s bold new look Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:00 AM PST
We needed a better way to point readers to our best stories. The quantity of posts we publish has grown, so it had become harder for readers to find the stories that they care about and that are most important. Second, we wanted to make it easier to find content related to whatever you’re currently reading. Finally, we wanted a look that reflected the sophistication and excellence of the content we produce. Our new design accomplishes all that. Here are some of the highlights of the new look: A more dynamic homepage. We’ve got a bigger, bolder section at the top of our home page to show off the top, featured stories of the day. This section now has a greater variety of layouts, and we’ll update it several times each day to reflect the most important, breaking stories of the moment. Check out the before and after screenshots below (the old site is on the left, the new site is on the right):
A better way to show off our best stories. Just below the featured stories section, we’ve got a section for “editor’s picks.” These are the stories that we’re proudest of, selected from the past several days of VentureBeat. This is where we step outside the breaking news cycle and bring you longer features, interviews, reviews, and other pieces that are worth reading. This is a rolling selection of stories that will always show the most recent 10 editors’ picks. More consistent VentureBeat branding throughout the site. You may notice that the old “VentureBeat” logo has been replaced with a black and red “VB” at the top of this page. That’s going to appear on every page in every section. In the previous version of the site, each section (SocialBeat, GreenBeat, MobileBeat) had its own logo, but now we’re going for a more consistent look. We’ve also eliminated the “Beat” suffix from these section names, with one exception: GamesBeat is still GamesBeat (more on that in a minute). A better way to discover related stories. When you’re reading a story on VentureBeat, like this one, there’s a “carousel” of related stories at the top of the page. This shows three stories at a time, selected from the same section as the current story. You can scroll left and right to see even more stories. Here’s a comparison of the old story page (left) and the new one (right):
A window into the most popular stories on our site. In the right-hand sidebar, there’s a box that shows the most popular stories from the past several days. A second tab in this box shows the stories that readers have been sharing the most. Easier navigation and sharing. When you scroll down to read a story, a navigation bar pops up at the top of the page to provide a few tools for sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like. If you like what you’re reading, we hope you’ll use these buttons to share our stories with your friends. This bar also has arrow buttons to let you read the previous story or the next story in the same section. Finally, there’s one section that has retained the “Beat” designation, and that’s GamesBeat. In the next couple of months, we’ll be building a better, stronger GamesBeat, turning it into a destination site in its own right as we incorporate the community members and content from Bitmob, our most recent acquisition. Stay tuned for more details on that. In the meantime, GamesBeat will remain a section within VentureBeat. It will have many games-related stories that don’t appear on the VentureBeat homepage, so if you’re interested in games, bookmark the GamesBeat homepage and subscribe to the GamesBeat RSS feed. VentureBeat’s new design is the brainchild of Henry W. Brown, with technical implementation by Oomph, led by our chief technical officer Christopher Peri. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Prince of Persia creator returns to games with remake of Karateka Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:00 AM PST
Mechner’s Prince of Persia game series has sold more than 17 million units, accounting for well over $500 million. In 2010, he joined with Jerry Bruckheimer to adapt his own work for a Disney film, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The film was the highest-grossing video-game-based movie to date with more than $335 million at the box office.
“It is amazing to me how many people still remember Karateka and talk about it after all these years,” Mechner said in an email. “Somehow, the 1980s seem to be in the air again. People ask me about Karateka on my website all the time, and I keep seeing videos and retrospectives of the original game posted online. I was astonished when I was in Moscow at a press conference for the Prince of Persia movie opening in 2010, and Russian journalists asked questions about Karateka.” But Mechner never revisited the property for a remake until now. “Strangely, I think that’s part of its appeal,” he said. “People’s childhood memories of it have remained pure. It’s like it’s been in a time capsule.” Broderbund published the title, which got its name from the Japanese word for a practitioner of karate. In the game, the evil warlord Akuma has kidnapped the lovely Princess Mariko, and the player must defeat Akuma and his karate-trained guards to rescue the princess. It’s not a brawling or fighting game like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. It’s more like a cinematic, story-driven game with a love story and a fighting gameplay mechanic. "Making the original Karateka was a labor of love,” said Mechner, who lives in Los Angeles. “To have so many people embrace it and share their stories of playing it has been really rewarding. I am always surprised to hear how much impact that game had. In remaking Karateka, I want to honor the original game with a compact, pick-up-and-play game that is fluid, atmospheric, and beautiful." The return to games comes after a long hiatus. Mechner also spent time in recent years writing graphic novels such as Solomon’s Thieves, and Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm. He also wrote and directed a documentary, Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles story. For the first time since Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Mechner will take an active day-to-day role in making a video game as creative director of Karateka. Asked why he’s going back into games, he said, “Whether I’m doing a game, movie, or graphic novel, my goal is to create a world in which a story and characters come alive. I love working in all those media, each has its own special strengths, and I’d hate to give any of them up. I’m working as hard as ever as a screenwriter, but when I thought about bringing back Karateka, I felt very strongly that it should be a game. And that now was the time.” Mechner said he is working with a small team and has a very hands-on role as creative director. He talked to publishers early on, but decided that it made sense to make the game independently as a modestly budgeted downloadable game. Karateka will debut for the PlayStation Network (The Sony Entertainment Network) and Xbox Live Arcade in 2012. Funding came via angel investment. Filed under: games, mobile        
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| Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:11 AM PST
Cloud file management startup FileTrek has exited stealth mode with good news: it has raised $10 million in second-round funding and is ready to show businesses that it’s the best option for securely sharing and tracking files in the cloud. FileTrek will compete heavily with Box and Egnyte, two other file sharing and hosting solutions strongly targeting business users. But FileTrek stresses that it adds something to the mix of cloud storage that no one else is: detailed file tracking so you always know where a file is located and who made modifications. (When the company demoed the service to me, I told them it looked like Microsoft Office track changes on steroids.) “We’re not saying we’re better than Box, but we do offer more,” FileTrek CEO Dale Quayle told VentureBeat. “There is nothing currently available from Box that we don’t provide and there’s a ton available from us that Box doesn’t provide.” On top of always letting you know where cloud-based files are, the company also offers solutions for project collaboration and a way for managers to track data with audit reporting. Thankfully, the solution is also easy to scale across desktops and mobile devices so every employee can take part. FileTrek’s new funding was led by Anthem Venture Partners, Telesystem, and Ontario Emerging Technologies Funds. "We believe FileTrek will define a new category by delivering an innovative solution that combines file sharing and tracking of critical data," said William Woodward, Managing Director of Anthem Venture Partners, in a statement. "FileTrek gives accessibility to the content that is currently scattered throughout an organization and elsewhere, bringing a new sense of security to companies both large and small." Ottawa, Canada-based FileTrek previously raised $5 million in funding, so its total raised is now at $15 million. The company also has a regional office in Los Angeles. The company will the new funding to hire new engineering talent and to beef up its sales and delivery capabilities, Quayle said. You can see more screenshots from FileTrek’s service below: Filed under: cloud        
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| Streaming video consumption on mobile devices and smart TVs nearly doubles in Q4 Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST
People nearly doubled the amount of streaming videos played on mobile devices and smart TVs in fall than it did in the summer, according to Ooyala’s fourth quarter 2011 video index report. Ooyala offers a video platform for content owners to upload their video, analyze audience engagement, and easily monetize video content. The company claims that nearly a third of all streaming video viewer in the U.S. is done using a Ooyala player. "While people are still watching much more traditional TV than streaming video, our data shows we're on a clear and irreversible course toward an IP-delivered future," said Ooyala Co-founder and President of Products Bismarck Lepe in the report. The report, which tracks viewing habits of over 100 million monthly users, indicates that the boost in streaming video consumption over connected devices was aided by the October launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S, continued growth from Google’s Android OS platform, and the December holiday season. Video viewing on Google TV was also up by 91 percent from the third quarter, although that’s not exactly saying much if Google TV app install data is any indication. People watching videos on tablets are also far more engaged than those watching on a desktop, according to the report. On average, tablet viewers were 45 percent more likely to complete 75 percent of video played on the device. Also interesting was data about social media engagement behavior related to streaming video. Despite Twitter’s attention to tracking real-time viewing habits through tweets, Ooyala’s report found that Facebook users on average share ten times more video than Twitter users. Check out a condensed sample of the full Q4 2011 video index report in Ooyala’s infographic embedded below.
Filed under: cloud, media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| How Hulu plans to measure success of ‘Battleground’ without TV ratings Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST
Hulu is staying silent about the initial viewership of its first scripted original series Battleground, which premiered its pilot episode on the streaming video service Monday. Battleground is a half-hour dramedy (drama/comedy minus the annoying laugh track) about a campaign staff that’s trying to win a Wisconsin senatorial election for an underdog candidate. The show has some top-notch talent behind it like creator/actor JD Walsh and producer/director Marc Webb, whose film credits include 500 Days of Summer and The Amazing Spider-Man movie. It’s also one of the first high-profile series that’s focused entirely on web viewership. Normally, the premiere episode of a show with this level of hype would be followed by Nielsen TV ratings along with a breakdown of the audience demographics. But because Battleground is distributed as streaming video instead of television sets, it doesn’t have a standard rating system. And while Hulu definitely collected plenty of data about the show, the company isn’t planning to reveal the details — as is its policy for all shows that stream on its service. Unlike traditional TV programs, Battleground’s success isn’t determine by evaluating the viewership during a predetermined time slot. When people watch a show isn’t nearly as important as the show simply getting watched, a Hulu spokesperson told VentureBeat. Hulu said it plans on measuring the success of its original programs by the level of activity surrounding it, which includes total viewing audience, comments and discussion, social media interactions, and more. This is good for a number of reasons… A more honest and accurate form of “rating”The current rating system for TV programming is inadequate because it’s based off of a sample of the population measured by a single company. And while ratings in most casts serve as a determination of quality, TV ratings are little more than an indication of programs that get the most number of eyeballs. Whether those people actually like the show isn’t as easily gauged. Hulu, however, only needs to look at the activity of a particular show over a much longer time frame. It’s pretty simple if you think about it. If people are watching and talking about a show, it’s likely to get more episodes. The audience can also see a more honest representation of what people actually want to watch because others are constantly buzzing about it. If a show doesn’t have any buzz (after a reasonable amount of time), then its likely that no one will care if it’s gone. New shows are less likely to get killed off prematurelyBased on traditional TV ratings, plenty of good shows were canceled by networks prematurely because they couldn’t draw a large enough audience to bring in advertising revenue during a designated time slot. Even in situations where the network wants to take more of a chance on a show that’s off to a weak start, it’s far more difficult to justify programs that don’t bring in enough ad revenue. For instance, Firefly was taken off the air by Fox for this reason, despite becoming a cult classic post-cancellation. With Hulu, original shows are likely to get at least a full season to prove itself because the company is far more strategic about their strategy. Hulu isn’t trying to find decent shows that will fill its prime time schedule alongside some really great shows. It’s also worth noting that Hulu’s streaming service allows it to take advantage of shows that are more valuable as an entire season. More creative and unique showsWhen I flip on the television, my cable service rarely provides me with anything new or interesting. Again, this is due to the current TV rating system, which rewards shows that appeal to the highest number of people across all demographics and time slots. The selection of content is mostly stuff everyone is OK with watching when choosing between lots of bad programming. This is why there’s an abundance of CSI Spinoffs and reality TV shows. When there is a decently entertaining/interesting prime time show on, network executives are behind the scenes imposing changes to boost ratings. I’m not saying these shows still aren’t able to produce quality content from talented people, but I am saying that the creativity is usually hindered on the basis of business. Since traditional ratings aren’t crucial to the survival of the program, Hulu executive producers are likely to interfere on the basis of quality rather than ratings. In a Hulu blog post published Tuesday, Battleground creator JD Walsh explained his own experiences of “getting ‘network notes’ or revisions or other things that usually doom or plague great shows,” saying that:
Final wordHulu is breaking new ground in the way of premium original programming, which it obviously realizes. Ultimately, the company’s success will be based on whether it’s able to produce quality content that’s on par with top TV Network programming. Since Hulu is owned by three of the largest broadcast TV networks (NBC, ABC and Fox), it’s even likely that this model could create a new standard for how shows are produced and monetized. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Zynga teams up with Slingo to publish Bingo-slot-machine hybrid game on Facebook Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST
Zynga has teamed up with cross-media gaming firm Slingo Inc. to create a new version of the casual game Slingo on Facebook. Slingo is a 15-year-old amazingly popular game on the web and it is even on slot machines in casinos. But it’s never been on Facebook until now.
It seems like a perfect marriage but an incomplete one so far. Zynga Slingo isn’t yet integrated into Zynga Casino, which creates a common friend system between friends who play both Zynga Poker and Zynga Bingo. And it seems like Slingo is a perfect way for Zynga to move into the online gambling market, since Slingo is already available in various forms as an online gambling game. But neither company is talking about that yet. Short of those two possibilities, Zynga Slingo seems like it still has a lot of opportunity. Consumers have spent more than $1 billion on it during its history. Players have downloaded more than 50 million Slingo games and played those games over 5 billion times. Slingo.com has more than 4 million registered users, 80 percent of whom are women. They spend an average of 34 minutes per visit. Those users view more than 14 million video ads per month. But Slingo is down from its peak of 15 million monthly unique players, and it has to do something to follow its users into the modern age. Rich Sawel, product manager for Zynga Slingo, said in an interview that the company isn’t commenting about the prospect of moving into online gambling. (Zynga has already said it is considering partnerships to move into the online gambling market).
Zynga and Slingo Inc. partnered a year ago and the game has been in the works for a while, said Slingo chief executive Rich Roberts. (Slingo was established in 1995 and is owned by Sal Falciglia.) About a year and a half ago, Roberts’ team did a reboot. They knew they needed to rebuild the brand with new partnerships. They got the slot machine version of the game in more than 400 casinos in partnership with IGT Casino. They also did deals that licensed Slingo to various state lotteries. “But we were missing what we had with AOL in the past to get the brand out there,” Roberts said. “We are on 10 platforms, and now we’ll be on Facebook.” Zynga Slingo requires some skill to play, particularly when you choose a strategy about how to use your extra power-ups. That may factor in how states eventually decide whether to allow games such as Zynga Slingo under online gambling laws. Games of chance face tougher hurdles, while games of skill, such as poker, face easier approvals. As for online gambling, John Schappert, chief operating officer of Zynga, said on the company’s analyst call yesterday, “It’s a very interesting opportunity because we are uniquely positioned. We have the world’s largest online poker game and have been running it for the last four years and it posted record results last quarter.” But he didn’t say more about how Zynga might dive into that market. “We have an audience that is very familiar with the brand and the kind of gameplay it offers,” Roberts said. “It lends itself to an environment where people chat and play for hours.” Zynga, meanwhile, has amassed more than 246 million monthly active users on Facebook. Most of those are casual gamers who are likely to play games like Slingo. In Zynga’s version, players can play Slingo games until they run out of energy. They can get that energy from friends or purchase it.
On the social side, players can track the scores of friends in real-time. You can collect medals and brag about them. And you’ll eventually be able to challenge friends and compete to see who can get the highest score in three rounds. The potential for Slingo to be used with online gambling is clear. In a survey of 25,000 Slingo users, Hackensack, N.J.-based Slingo Inc. found that 21 percent of those who discovered it online went to a land-based casino to play Slingo. Zynga Slingo will be available in 14 languages. Sawel said that the company will consider whether to add Zynga Slingo to the suite of Zynga Casino games and integrate the friends list with Zynga Bingo and Zynga Poker friend lists. “We will listen to the consumers,” he said. Filed under: games        
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| Listen up! Following relaunch, Exfm triples its user base, raises fresh $1.5M Posted: 15 Feb 2012 04:24 AM PST  Screengrab of trending chillwave on Exfm Back in October music discovery service Exfm attempted to transform itself from a browser extension to a full fledged web service. Apparently the kids like what they’re hearing, because the site has gone from around 75,000 active users to more than 300,000. On the strength of that growth they have raised $1.5 million from their existing investor Spark Capital, more than doubling their total funding to date. “We’re seeing a lot of opportunity as streaming music becomes more mainstream,” founder Charles Smith told VentureBeat by phone. “We’re able to pull songs from places like SoundCloud and Bandcamp using their APIs. Then we can feature the best stuff on our destination site and give our users a great chance to stumble on new music.” Exfm began life as Extension Entertainment, a Chrome extension that followed users across the web gathering up the tracks from sites they visited and making them easy to play and share with friends. Like any good pop artists, it has been busy reinventing itself. It took the moniker Exfm, then mobile with an iOS launch last summer. This began to introduce new channels for discovery, like a Tastemaker section. “It’s my favorite social music experience,” Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet told VentureBeat. “Just like news often breaks first on twitter, I’m finding new artists are emerging within the exfm community before it hits mainstream radio.” The funding will be used to prepare for synchronous development across the web, Android and iOS. Exfm recently hosted its first music event in partnership with bands at New York nightclub Pianos. “One of the things we’re hoping to do this year is to build out our relationships beyond the tech industry to work with the music industry as well. We realized that we have the power to drive an audience to live events and that is a powerful thing,” Smith said. Filed under: mobile        
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| Everything I needed to know about startups, I learned from Chuck Norris Posted: 14 Feb 2012 10:53 PM PST
Think about it: If you're racing against the clock to get traction in your business, who better than Chuck Norris to lead you to glory? With his arsenal of ball-breaking, arm-snapping, kung fu-kicking tricks and tips, surely Norris would be able turn your start up into a well-oiled, butt-kicking machine. After nine years of building businesses and occasionally falling flat on my face, I've learned a few things, and I'm now ready to share them with you. Based on my experience and relfection, here are the three most important butt-kicking approaches I think Chuck Norris would use to build badass businesses. Fatal mistake #1: Building products without understanding usersWhen you build a product and it fails, it's typically for one major reason: You started with the product in mind, then tried to find users. Instead, flip the script, and think about where your user is coming from. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your customer:
When you take time first to learn from your customers, you are then able to build products that fulfill their wants, needs, and problems. Solution #1: Learn from customers first, the build. Fatal mistake #2: Hiring the wrong peopleThis is how Chuck Norris would dodge a painful mis-hire: He would screen and hire only A-players. Mis-hires cost owners more than five times what those employees get paid. Quickly weeding out talent can mean the difference between success and failure in any startup. Sizing people up quickly is key to success. Hiring people on your "gut feeling" alone can be dangerous. Here's part of the Chuck Norris “dodging bullets and throwing knives” approach to hiring a dream team: The book Topgrading is your new Bible when it comes to any hiring venture. It's 500 pages, which no human has time to read. Skip to pages 438 and 439. Every question you'll ever need to hire true stars is there. Solution #2: Use powerful, proven hiring questions from experts in the field. Fatal mistake #3: “Spray and pray” spendingIn a word, shotgun approaches to marketing new products will always fail. It’s not an effective way for a startup to spend money. When you get a windfall of money (a large venture capital round, for example), it can be a rush and a heavy burden at the same time. These issues will come up in conversations about marketing:
To battle these questions, outline strict test budgets to prove ROI (return on investment). If you can't measure it, don't mess with it. Call it old-fashioned, but pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a powerful tool to measure results and build viral messages. This approach can grow revenue, increase traction, and position your product aggressively in a competitive vertical. In the same way that Chuck Norris takes down armies single-handedly while getting paid like a rock star, PPC advertising can transform your business overnight. It can scale your business to dominate a market, test whether your business model is profitable, and test marketing messages in real time. Solution #3: Set strict budgets, use measurable marketing, and test core messages. Evan Peelle is a Los Angeles-based marketer with experience in web-based startups and conducting online marketing campaigns, including PPC, mobile, and search marketing. He can be contacted directly at evanpeelle@gmail.com. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat        
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| No LTE for you! FCC plans to reject Lightsquared’s 4G network Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:10 PM PST
We’ve been hearing from government regulators since June that Lightsquared’s proposed LTE network could interfere with GPS devices. Today the NTIA, an agency that oversees spectrum use, issued a letter to the FCC that claims Lightsquared’s network will indeed impact GPS services, and that “there is no practical way to mitigate the interference at this time.” The FCC then issued a statement announcing that it planned to reject Lightsquared’s application to build an LTE network, the Wall Street Journal reports. The agency’s decision could still be appealed, but at this point there seems to be little that Lightsquared can do to convince the FCC otherwise. In a statement of its own, Lightsquared said that it disagrees with the judgement but will still work to find a resolution:
Lightsquared at one point blamed the GPS industry for creating devices that don't stay within their required spectrum ranges. The company also said a potential antenna fix could solve its GPS interference issues — though now that doesn’t seem very likely. Reston, Virginia-based LightSquared was founded by billionaire Philip Falcone with the goal of reselling its LTE mobile broadband network to others. Its network, if built, would cover up to 260 million people. At this point, it looks like that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Ex-Sun CEO Jon Schwartz is back, and this time, he cares Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:01 PM PST
On Twitter, in a haiku. Today, Schwartz, a serial entrepreneur of sorts, is unwrapping his newest venture, CareZone, which has nothing to do with IT and everything to do with normal, everyday people. The new startup addresses some basic insecurities many of us face: How to I care for my parents as they age, for my children when they’re young, and for my siblings or others in my family with special needs? “The number one emotion that people experience when you start talking about caregiving is anxiety,” said Schwartz in an interview today with VentureBeat. “What happens when I’m in charge? There’s no school for that; it’s just life. It’s totally scary.” Schwartz’s product lets you store important documents, keep detailed (or simple) notes, send updates to “helpers” (who might be family members or other caregivers such as nurses or babysitters), track prescriptions, and more, all from a site that’s as easy to use as Facebook. Best of all, Schwartz is charging users a low monthly subscription fee for the service. Wait, wait, why is charging users a good thing?, you ask with furrowed brow. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be free, man? The reason the fee is good news is that it means CareZone can provide its service with a high degree of privacy and security. Since you’re paying for the service (at a rate of $5 or $10 per month, give or take), Schwartz and his colleagues don’t have to sell your data to advertisers. For once, dear reader, you are the customer, not the product. And since the service revolves around sensitive stuff like information about your kids and healthcare for your aging relatives, the extra measure of privacy is well worth the $5 per month. In building the service, Schwartz and Walter Smith, Schwartz’s longtime friend, thought about the questions fundamental to most people in their age group: “Where are we spending a lot of our time? When family calls, you drop everything, and it becomes 150 percent of your life,” said Schwartz. “In a perfect world, it’s when you choose — you decide to have a child. But in most of the world, it doesn’t happen that gracefully.” So, when family calls, we each experience pretty similar needs. We need a safe place to store important facts and documents, whether that’s a desk drawer or a server in a far-off data center. Schwartz said we also need a simple way to get our hands on that information and modify it as needed. And finally, we need an easy way to connect with other family members who are also involved in caregiving. “Very rarely are people doing this in isolation,” Schwartz noted. CareZone accomplishes this by allowing account creators to pull in other family members and send the group email notifications when documents are uploaded, conversations updated, or notes entered into the profile. “The AARP is a big part of our demographic,” he continued, referring to the often-overlooked baby boomer age group, which often cares for parents, children, and grandchildren simultaneously. “When you’re taking care of a child, there’s no question who’s in charge. When you’re taking care of your parents… you have to negotiate who is making decisions. You have to work together.” No matter who we’re caring for, we inevitably end up using online tools, even if it’s just emailing the sitter or a sibling. But these web-based services leave something to be desired, Schwartz said. For example, in trying to communicate with a cross-country sibling about an aging parent’s power of attorney or bank passwords or social security number, he said, “I could do it through Gmail, but when I do, ads come up on the side that just piss me off… I know there’s a profile that Google is building about me.” And for those kinds of web services, “Privacy is toxic,” he said. He said CareZone will never collect user data and will never sell data of any kind to any company. Data can be downloaded by the user or deleted completely if the user doesn’t want to keep it around. Schwartz is careful to note this app isn’t about healthcare. While it will help you to manage medications and communicate with health professionals, it’s more about “the mundane things that take place between doctors’ visits. Health is what doctors help with. Care is what families help with. But we can connect into [hospitals' technology] systems as they’re built.” Over the next three months, the startup will add Spanish-language service as well as mobile apps. Currently, the service includes a mobile web app that Schwartz said looks great on smartphones and the iPad. As the service matures, he said, the service will continue to add features that maximize CareZone’s usefulness without detracting from its ease of use. From now until March 15, people can get accounts free for one year. On March 15, new accounts will cost $5 per month if you’re managing care for one person; $8 if you’re caring for two people; $10 for three people, etc. The startup’s development team is based in Seattle, and its business team is in San Francisco. To date, the seven-person company has been bootstrapped, but Schwartz expects to be raising institutional money sometime in the future. Whether or not that investment happens in 2012, he said he anticipates the company’s growth to triple by the end of the year. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat        
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| AMD pumps extreme performance into mid-range computers with 1-gigahertz Cape Verde graphics chips Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:01 PM PST
Advanced Micro Devices is rolling out new graphics chips today that will bring screaming performance to the mid-range of the gamer PC market. The new AMD Radeon HD 7700 series (code-named Cape Verde) has a lot of the same technology as AMD’s code-named Tahiti graphics chip, which debuted in December as the world’s fastest graphics chip. But the 1-gigahertz-capable 7700 chips will be built into graphics add-on cards that cost only $99 to $199. That means it won’t cost an insane amount of money to buy a gamer PC that can run a lot of the latest computer games. And that will give Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD a leg up on graphics chip rival Nvidia for a time. The new chips will replace the 5770 series chips from last year and will run most games about 20 percent to 30 percent better than the earlier chips. The new chips can also run Battlefield 3, one of the most demanding games available on the PC, almost 30 percent faster than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics chip, said Arturo Wong Chujoy, product marketing manager at AMD in an interview. The HD 5770 series chips were the most successful modern graphics chips (running Microsoft’s DirectX 11 graphics technology) to date, based on hardware surveys conducted by Valve’s Steam service, Wong Chujoy said. Each of the new 7700 series chips has 1.5 million transistors and is less than half the size of the more powerful Tahiti chips. The 7700 series chips normally run at 75 watts but can power down to less than 3 watts of power consumption when the computer isn’t being used. The chips are built with AMD’s new 28-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip has 640 stream processors that handle graphics tasks, compared to 2,048 stream processors in the AMD Radeon HD 7970 high-end model. But Wong Chujoy said that the new models have a lot of high-end features, such as the Eyefinity 2.0 technology that allows one chip to power six displays. The 7700 series Gigahertz edition has “reference engine clock” that runs at 1 gigahertz. That means that most of the chip operates at that speed, making the chip the first in the world to run at such a rate, Wong Chujoy said. He also said the chips can be “overclocked,” or run at a higher than recommended speed. An 800-megahertz version can be overclocked to 900 megahertz, and the 1 gigahertz version can be overclocked to 1.25 gigahertz. The 7770 model will sell at $159, and the 7750 will sell for at $109. The Cape Verde chips will be available today from a wide range of game-focused hardware companies, from MSi to Asus. Starting in March, another set of graphics chips code-named Pitcairn will arrive and replace AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series of chips in the price points ranging from $199 to $399. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Yelp ads leave bad impressions for small businesses Posted: 14 Feb 2012 06:21 PM PST
After researching some ads on Yelp, I question the claim that Yelp is delivering a highly targeted audience. Here are examples of ads I found running on Yelp. It didn’t take me much time to find them; it’s not as if I did 10,000 searches and focused on the few that were bad. In this first example, I searched for a car wash in Newark, Calif., and got an ad for a body shop in Mountain View (for folks unfamiliar with the area, those two cities are on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay).
Here, I searched for Indian restaurants in San Francisco. I did get a relevant ad, but it’s not very compelling for a consumer. Should I go to a 3-star restaurant just because they’re an advertiser, or go to the 4-star ones that aren’t advertisers? (Yelp does allow advertisers to remove their rating from the ad. If you see an ad without rating, you can assume it’s a low-rated business.)
Here, the advertiser is much farther from the origin of my search in San Jose. How many people are going to drive farther when there are businesses closer and higher-rated?
Here I did a search for siding and got a contractor. But based on their details page, it doesn’t seem that they do siding.
I searched for mesothelioma, which is Internet advertising gold. (It’s an asbestos-related disease.) I got an ad for a bankruptcy attorney. Those are very different problems.
A search for Costco returned an ad for a community art gallery.
And my favorite: a search for flowers returned an ad for mattresses.
These are all terrible ad impressions. For a local business, I wouldn’t even pay a 6 cent CPM for these impressions, much less the $600 CPM that Yelp charges in certain verticals. These ads just shouldn’t come up. Yelp did not respond to a request for comment on this story; the company is currently in the SEC-mandated quiet period before its initial public offering. To be sure, Yelp does deliver ads that make sense. Here, I did a search for stationery in San Francisco:
It’s a fine ad. (I wouldn’t pay $600 CPM for it, but it’s not a wasted impression.) But when I did a search for flowers, the exact same business came up. Flowers and stationery are related, but aren’t the same. I called Lola to see if they sell flowers. They don’t. This points to two problems: a poor algorithm on Yelp’s part and the fragmented nature of the local advertising market. There just aren’t that many people searching on Yelp for services in each market. And, Yelp has committed to a number of impressions each month, so they deliver them — even when they make no sense and drive no value for the advertiser.
Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Bad news for Amazon: Total Prime members may be fewer than estimated Posted: 14 Feb 2012 04:09 PM PST
Amazon may have far fewer customers signed up for its Amazon Prime membership than analysts previously estimated. The Prime membership costs $79 annually for Amazon customers, who in return get free two-day shipping on most items sold through the retail giant. The service is attractive to customers because shipping fees aren't factored into individual purchases. And while Prime memberships increase the shipping costs for Amazon, research shows that Prime customers are more loyal and make more purchases. (I’ve got a stack of graphic novels that more or less proves that this is true.) The total number of Prime memberships ranges from 3 million to 5 million since October 2011, according to a Bloomberg report that cites three anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter. If the information is true, that would mean that the company has less than half of the 10 million memberships estimated by some analysts. Amazon was unavailable for comment about the membership numbers. (However, if the company does respond we’ll be sure to update the post.) Amazon’s goal over the next 18 months is to increase Prime membership to the 7 – 10 million range, according to the report. One way the company plans to boost membership is though Prime’s commercial-free streaming video service. The company recently signed licensing deals with Fox, NBC, CBS, and Viacom to increase the variety of television shows available, which makes the Prime video service more competitive with Netflix and Hulu. But, Amazon clearly wants to use the streaming video service as a perk to boost Prime membership far more than it wants to compete with other video services — (making a standalone Amazon streaming video service even more unlikely). Even if Amazon is successful in boosting Prime memberships over the next year, it’s unlikely that it’ll lessen the fears of investors who are concerned about the company’s future revenue growth. Last month, Amazon reported revenue of $17.4 billion for Q4 2011, which was nearly $1 billion lower than Wall Street’s estimates. Not only that, but the company stayed irritatingly silent about its other big ploy to gain customer loyalty, the $199 Kindle Fire tablet. That could indicate that either sales of the device were lower than expected or purchases through the Kindle Fire didn’t reach estimates (or both). If you combine the slow Prime membership growth and Kindle Fire data silence with the recent rumors that Amazon is plotting to open up brick-and-mortar retail stores across the country, it’s no wonder investors are worried about the company’s future revenue. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data Posted: 14 Feb 2012 04:00 PM PST
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla are among a smattering of iOS applications that have been sending the actual names, email addresses and/or phone numbers from your device’s internal address book to their servers, VentureBeat has learned. Several do so without first asking permission, and Instagram and Foursquare only added permissions prompts after the Path flare-up. Some of these companies deny storing the personal data, as Path was doing, but the transmission alone makes the private data susceptible to would-be intercepters. Perhaps most concerning, however, is that these app makers could mask the real names, phone numbers, and email addresses during the transmission process, protecting your privacy in the process, but choose not to. VentureBeat, employing a traffic-monitoring utility called mitmproxy to observe the data flowing between apps and the internet, discovered that many iOS applications upload personally-identifiable information to their servers. Path steps on a privacy landmine
Last week, Path iPhone app users were surprised (and quite disgruntled) to learn that the innards of their address books — contacts’ email addresses and phone numbers — had been uploaded to and stored on Path’s servers. After a public outcry, Path immediately amended its practice to request user permission, and deleted its records. But the larger issue of how iOS application makers access, transmit, and store address book data from iOS devices is one that refuses to be swept under the rug. And rightfully so. This is your address book we’re talking about, arguably the most private of all entities. It’s the digital repository of the personal and professional relationships you’ve amassed in your lifetime, and a simple click of a button could expose those relationships to strangers with malicious intents. Also, as many have pointed out, much of the data in your address book belongs to other people (their cell phone numbers, for instance), and has been entrusted to you with the understanding that you will keep it private. These same relationships are the building blocks for any successful social application. For years, developers have understood that if they give you an easy way to find your friends already using their applications, then you won’t have such a lonely experience and you might continue to use their apps. So, many of the applications you know, love, and use on a daily basis have a “find friends” feature that scans your address book to find your contacts already using their services. That act in and of itself is a boon to your overall experience, but many developers are employing a shortcut that puts your private contact data at risk. In order to find connections, app makers are going into your address book, gathering up either phone numbers or email addresses (or both) and uploading that data in its original state. In the best cases, they use an encrypted HTTPS connection to upload the data to their servers, but that’s not a given. Their servers then use the address book data to determine contact matches. In many cases, the data is discarded immediately thereafter. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla all upload either your contacts’ phone numbers or email addresses to their servers for matching purposes. Some of these applications perform this action without first requesting permission or informing you how they long they plan to store this data. Foodspotting is the worst of the bunch, as it appears to transmit your data over an unencrypted HTTP connection (in plain text), making it even easier for mischievous parties to intercept. A Foodspotting spokesperson said the company does not store the data it collects. “With the many concerns we’ve read about in recent press blogs, we’ve added additional security measures that will be out with our next update,” the rep said.  Unencrypted address book data. Data blurred out at the bottom is a list of email addresses in plain text. Facebook does upload your address book and stores your contacts, but it is also forthcoming about its process. The company has always employed a permissions flow for the “Find Friends” feature that prompts the application user with this message: “Facebook will store imported contacts on your behalf and may use them to generate friend suggestions for you and others.” Twitter’s position is a bit more ambiguous. “We do not automatically upload contacts,” a Twitter representative explained to VentureBeat. But the “Find Friends” feature, located in the Discover tab of the iOS application, does not require explicit permission for access to the address book, even though it does upload address book data. On the web, Twitter informs its members that it stores contacts for up to 18 months, and may use contact information to make “Who To Follow” suggestions.
Foursquare has just followed suit with an update to its iOS app Tuesday (pictured right). Foursquare’s permissions dialog is uniquely up-front about what it’s actually doing. “We’ve always been doing things the secure way — we only access the user’s address book when the user taps on the ‘Find via address book.’ That is, we only access the address book with an explicit user action,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said. “The extra dialogue is simply good practice so users are 100 percent sure they understand what’s going on — it’s a step to ensure transparency that we imposed on ourselves.” Yelp also claims that it does not store the data and requests user permission when accessing the address book. “When a repeat user launches the Yelp application, we provide a prompt for them to give their explicit permission to Find Friends via their Contact list,” a Yelp rep said. However, when VentureBeat tested this feature, we didn’t get a prompt. When we pointed this out, the Yelp representative said that the prompt only appears the first time you launch the application. They then added, ”To provide redundant disclosure, our latest app update, which is pending approval by Apple, provides a persistent permission request each time you seek to utilize the Find Friends feature beyond just the first time it is introduced.” The representative also said, “No emails are sent to anyone in their address book without explicit authorization, we don’t expose this data to marketers, and we do not store your contacts. If the user denies permission, the feature is bypassed and their Contacts are not accessed.” Are app makers taking unnecessary risks?Without access to their servers, we can’t determine if some of these applications are storing contacts without disclosing the practice, as Path was doing. That would be the most egregious of offenses because it makes your contacts the property of an unapproved third-party. It’s also a security risk: Should the company’s database ever get hacked, that information would become the hackers’ property as well. Most companies claim not to do this. “We don’t store address book information and never have,” a Foursquare representative told VentureBeat. “When a person searches for friends on Foursquare, we transmit the address book information over a secure connection and do not store it beyond that point.” All the applications named, however, are choosing to take a shortcut that could put your data at risk. In an interview with VentureBeat, application maker Martin May, co-founder of food-focused startup Forkly and previously with location-based app Brightkite, explained that developers should avoid sending the private data at all costs. Sending encrypted data, he said, only protects the user’s data until it gets to the company’s server, where it is decrypted. At that point, May explained, we have to trust that each company is only using this sensitive data in honorable ways, but they could theoretically do with it as they please. More than three years ago, May and fellow co-founder Brady Becker faced the “Find Friends” issue but found a better way to make matches without transmitting actual address book data. “When we were discussing the implementation, the first iteration inevitably lead to the same strategy that Path is using: upload the user's address book information to our servers so we can do the matching. But it didn't feel right,” May wrote in a recent blog post. “It didn't take very long before we realized that we didn't actually need the actual phone numbers and email addresses of people to match them; we just needed their hashes.” The hash system, explained in May’s post, allowed the company to compare hashes, rather than the full text of phone numbers and email addresses. That way, it could make matches without needing to “see” the actual names, numbers, or email address of members’ contacts. “This enabled us to implement the same ‘Find Friends’ functionality that so many apps nowadays use without compromising the privacy of the address book,” May wrote. “It’s pretty easy to replicate,” May told Venturebeat of the system. “It’s not very complicated.” iOS developer Matt Gemmell sides with May on the topic of hashing. “Why are you uploading the actual address book data, rather than (say) generating hashes of the user’s email addresses locally, then uploading just those hashes?,” Gemmell asked Path founder Dave Morin in a comment posted to the original blog post that exposed the company’s prior bad acts. “You’d be able to do friend-finding that way, and similarly if you uploaded hashes of all email addresses in the user’s address book, you’d be able to do your notifications of when a friend joins. At no point would your servers ever need to see the actual email addresses or phone numbers from our contacts.” Gemmell followed up a few days later with his own post detailing the hashing method and explained that applications users should not have to sacrifice privacy for cool social features. Apple provides no protectionWhy aren’t more app makers employing the hash-matching approach or similar techniques? The answer, some say, is that Apple allows the practice of uploading full address books to continue. Apple does not require app makers to request permission before accessing a user’s address book, nor does the company regulate contact data transmission and storage. User interface designer Dustin Curtis puts the blame squarely on Apple’s shoulders. “I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers,” Curtis wrote last week in a widely circulated blog post entitled “Stealing Your Address Book.” “There is a huge section of the Settings app dedicated to giving people fine control over which apps have access to location information,” Curtis detailed. “That Apple provides no protections on the Address Book is, at best, perplexing.” Instapaper creator Marco Arment concurs. “I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty,” Arment wrote in a post detailing how Instapaper uses address book data. (Instapaper sends encrypted email addresses to its servers, with permission, but does not store them.) “Apple can, and should, assure users that no app can read their contact data without their knowledge and explicit permission.” Apple, Arment argued, should change its API to require permission. Apple did not respond to a request for a comment. For now though, the more pressing questions seem to be: How vulnerable is our private data and how concerned should we be? May believes that most of the applications that access your address book have good intentions. Still, there have been instances of bad egg applications, solely designed to steal your contacts, making it into the App Store, only to be removed after someone cries foul. Considering that the practice of uploading address book data is so widespread, the answers to those questions are unknown, and the uncertainty is enough to make even the most trusting of people paranoid. Photo credit: miguel77 Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat        
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| Here’s Google’s Konami code treat for Valentine’s Day Posted: 14 Feb 2012 03:40 PM PST
Google has rolled out a lovey-dovey Easter egg (don’t get confused; they’re just holidays) just for Blogger sites today. Visitors to any Blogger site will see two animations — either an explosion of hearts bursting with love or a broken heart falling to the bottom of the screen in dejection. The animations will appear on any Blogger site with Dynamic View templates enabled. The “broken heart” will only appear when you navigate backward, and the “heart-splosion” will happen anytime you navigate through or click on the page. You’ll see the animations when you stay on a page without navigating for 1 minute and 43 seconds. Or, if you’re pressed for time, just enter the Konami code: (cursors) up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, (letters) b, a, then click your mouse for all the hearts you can handle. Try it out at sites like SlowBizz or Mamanetbebe. The company also published a new Google Doodle for today, featuring artwork from Michael Lipman of Happy Tree Friends and a short (but, for some, controversial) clip showing a male couple in tuxedos. Not too surprising from the forward-thinking company that is home to the Gayglers and that famously provides robust benefits for same-sex partners of Google employees. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Netflix developing second original series, this time from the creator of ‘Weeds’ Posted: 14 Feb 2012 02:55 PM PST
Lately, streaming services like Netflix are getting their hands dirty with creating shows rather than just streaming them. The original content is necessary to compete with premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. Netflix dipped its toes into the original series fray last week with the debut of Lilyhammer, a Steven Van Zandt drama about a New York City mobster. Streaming competitor Hulu also recently debuted its first scripted series, called Battleground, about a fictional politician’s run for U.S. Senate. Orange is the New Black, the second series Netflix has decided to finance, is based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, about the year she spent in a minimum-security women’s prison for drug-related charges. With that in mind, it makes sense that the show is being developed by the creator of Weeds, another comedy TV show about drugs and wily characters. In the realm of original content, Netflix is also resurrecting the cult-hit comedy Arrested Development by financing new episodes as well as the original drama starring Kevin Spacey called “House of Cards”. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Apple’s plans for its $90B in cash: “We’re not going to have a toga party” Posted: 14 Feb 2012 02:55 PM PST
At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked why the company has not taken the usual moves of buying back stock or issuing a dividend to shareholders. Investors, while happy with the epic stock price, are eager for a payout. Cook acknowledged that deciding how to best spend that money is a major topic being discussed within Apple. “I only ask for a bit of patience so we can do this in a deliberate way and do it in a way that’s best for shareholders,” said Cook. “We’re judicious, we’re deliberate, we spend our money like its our last penny … We’re not going to go have a toga party or do something outlandish.” When a company is sitting on a huge pile of cash, as Apple is, it is expected to shell out a dividend to investors and to spend money on things that will make it even more money. Cook said that so far, the company has spent billions of dollars on its supply chain, intellectual property, acquisitions, retail, and the Apple infrastructure. He acknowledged that those big dollar items still aren’t making much of a dent. In 2011, Apple acquired Israel-based flash memory company Anobit for $390 million and 3D mapping company C3 Technologies for $267 million. Cook said that since becoming CEO, he has adhered to the traditional Apple approach of not simply spending for the sake of spending but added that he is not religious about holding onto the money. As that pile approaches $100 billion, however, investors may start to become more insistent that Apple do something with it. Apple stock closed at $509 a share on Tuesday. Image via Waegook-Travel Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Looking beyond Facebook, Zynga hits 15M daily mobile game users Posted: 14 Feb 2012 02:20 PM PST
He made the announcement during a conference call with analysts after the company’s first quarterly financial release as a public company. Driven by the strength of games like Words With Friends, the mobile game growth will help supplement Zynga’s player base of 240 million monthly active users on Facebook. Mobile is a big strategic opportunity for Zynga, as the market for games on mobile could be much bigger in the long run. “The world is embracing play,” Pincus said in the call. “Social gaming and, more broadly, play is becoming the new TV.” John Schappert, chief operating officer at San Francisco-based Zynga, said that Zynga’s core strengths are its tech infrastructure, its detailed analytics, and its huge user base. He said that 80 percent of the company’s daily active users were on Zynga’s own proprietary zCloud, or its Zynga-owned data centers, at the end of the year, compared to just 20 percent a year ago. More traffic will be transferred to the zCloud this year, which means Zynga will not use Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services data centers as much as it has in the past. The zCloud cuts costs and makes games run reliably and fast. Zynga’s strategy going forward is to launch new games, enhance existing games, expand into mobile, improve monetization, and expand internationally. Its Scramble With Friends game, released in January, became a top-five brand in the Apple App Store. Daily, monthly, and monthly unique user numbers all showed growth in the fourth quarter, Schappert said. CastleVille exceeded expectations when it launched in the fourth quarter, but Mafia Wars 2 was a disappointment. Early results from Hidden Chronicles, launched last week, are positive. “The team has gotten a lot better at driving new-player conversion with packages and offers,” Pincus said. Dave Wehner, chief financial officer, said that the number mobile of payers is growing as well. Reach, engagement, and monetization are the key measures of Zynga’s performance. The company’s monthly unique user numbers grew 38 percent to 153 million. Many of those users play multiple games, so the monthly active users is 240 million. FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Poker accounted for 78 percent of revenues. The number of paying users in 2011 was 12.2 million, or about 5 percent of all players. Player conversion in the fourth quarter was 1.9 percent, up from 1.7 percent in the third quarter. Zynga’s games are available as free-to-play titles. Users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. A small number of users actually pay, but they buy enough virtual goods to make the entire game profitable, and Zynga is increasingly monetizing the users who don’t pay via advertising. Most of Zynga’s revenue is from virtual goods purchases, but advertising revenue tripled in the quarter. Both mobile and Facebook ad revenue grew, Wehner said. International revenue grew faster in the quarter than domestic revenue. The company has games in 17 languages now, compared to five a year ago. Head count was 2,846 up about 92 percent from a year ago and 2 percent from the prior quarter. Zynga is still investing heavily in research and development. Capital expenses were down in the quarter, but the company still spent money as it built out its private cloud, zCloud. Zynga has a line of credit that allows it to borrow up to $1 billion. Despite the cheery nature of the talk on the call, Zynga’s stock price continued to fall in after-hours trading, with the stock at $13.42 a share, down 6.5 percent from the close. But Zynga’s stock price on Tuesday’s regular session rose 6.95 percent. Schappert said Zynga is still working on Project Z, which is in closed beta testing. The site is Zynga’s own social network where it will host its own games. It connects with friends on Facebook. Schappert said he hoped that Project Z could launch soon. Zynga spent $110 million on research and development in the quarter, up 139 percent. Most of that went into game development. “The results were in line, guidance was actually very good, but the comment about it being back-end loaded caused the stock to pull back a bit,” said Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities. “I am a little disappointed that they didn't guide to Q1, so there will probably be continued volatility for a while.” Wehner said on the call that the back-end-loaded 2012 is a consequence of the pipeline of games and the usual pattern of bookings during the first half of the year. Wehner said that Words With Friends is an ad-driven game with very little virtual goods purchases associated with it. Atul Bagga, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said the quarter seemed “pretty strong” with revenue and earnings per share coming in above expectations. User numbers and other metrics were also up in the quarter, so he continues to believe Zynga has a large opportunity just by growing monetization, mobile users, international revenue, and expanding to new platforms. Schappert said, “We have a bunch of games in the hopper right now, and we will release them when they are done and when they are great.” Filed under: games, mobile, social        
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Every time I'm faced with a big problem in my business, I've found a way to get past it by asking myself, “W.W.C.N.D.?” (That’s “What would Chuck Norris do?”)
After spending the better part of 2011 fighting regulators, the wholesale wireless company Lightsquared suffered a killer blow from the FCC today that could squash its 4G LTE network plans.
Two years ago (almost to the day), then-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his departure from the company.
Popular photo-sharing app 
What, you thought Microsoft was the only one 
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