VentureBeat |
- Alibaba’s CEO wants to buy Yahoo — all of it
- Gears of War 3 sells 3 million in first week, more exclusives likely coming
- Tango video chat heads to Windows PCs
- Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire costs $210 to build
- Whoopsie: Microsoft accidentally deletes Chrome from several thousand users’ PCs
- Pantheon launches Drupal-based cloud site management for enterprises
- Confirmed: Square raises $100M, Mary Meeker, Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers now on board
- Five lessons experienced entrepreneurs have learned
- Dunder Mifflin launches iPad killer, The Pyramid
- Can a single game reach a billion players?
- The DeanBeat: Skylanders is massive, innovative gamble for Activision Blizzard
- The next iPhone may come in 16GB, 32GB & 64GB capacities
- IBM tops Microsoft as the second-most valuable tech company in the world
- Announcing the CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown
- No joke: Google promotes Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile on its search page
- Why was the first Kindle so ugly? Because Jeff Bezos loved his BlackBerry
| Alibaba’s CEO wants to buy Yahoo — all of it Posted: 01 Oct 2011 09:45 AM PDT
According to All Things D, the executive also stated, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo, and Yahoo is important to us… All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.” Alibaba, founded in 1998, is a large, privately owned group of web-based businesses and is based in China. The group is perhaps best known for its online marketplaces for business-to-business international and domestic trade. The Alibaba group also includes retail and payment platforms, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. All told, the Alibaba Group employs more than 22,000 people in around 70 cities and regions. It has offices around the world, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, India, the UK and the United States. Currently, Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, one part of the group. Calling Alibaba “a crocodile in the Yangtze,” Ma said that he was interested in buying the whole of Yahoo — a complicated undertaking if ever there was one. Yahoo was said earlier this month to be in merger or acquisition talks with Aol. Both companies have been struggling in the public eye and market. Reportedly, Aol CEO Tim Armstrong was dealing with representatives of Allen & Co., one of the firms working with Yahoo. Yahoo’s position has been increasingly unstable since the dramatic firing of former CEO Carol Bartz, a decision that had the company’s leadership in limbo as it also searched for new advisers. Back in August 2005, Yahoo announced an agreement to form a long-term strategic partnership with Alibaba Group in China. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo gave its Yahoo China business to Alibaba.com, and the two companies worked together to grow the Yahoo brand in China. Their goal was to create China’s largest web property. Also, Yahoo invested $1 billion in cash to purchase Alibaba.com shares, giving Yahoo a 40 percent economic interest with 35 percent voting rights, making it the largest strategic investor in Alibaba.com. Filed under: deals        
      This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Gears of War 3 sells 3 million in first week, more exclusives likely coming Posted: 01 Oct 2011 08:52 AM PDT
Gears of War 3 is the conclusion to an epic series that has spawned three blockbuster games for the Xbox 360. The first Gears of War came out in 2006 and had a score of 94 out of 100 across 88 reviews and helped standardize many of the modern tropes seen in over-the-shoulder cover-based shooters like Uncharted 3. Gears of War 3 picked up a score of 91 out of 100 across 82 reviews. It’s one of Microsoft’s flagship exclusive titles for the Xbox 360, which helps differentiate it from other consoles like the and PlayStation 3. Most blockbuster games, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, are going to appear on multiple consoles and on the PC. If gamers want to play Gears of War 3, they have to buy an Xbox 360 specifically. “Gears of War 3 has set the bar as the top game launch of the year, kicking off the biggest holiday in Xbox history with a bang,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. “While we don’t share sales projections, we’re really happy with the results thus far and are kicking off what promises to be our biggest holiday yet in Xbox history.” That relationship has been so successful that Microsoft will likely continue its exclusive relationship with Epic Games, a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. That could bode well for Microsoft, which has made significant gains over competitors thanks to its console’s motion controller, the Kinect. “We've enjoyed a terrific partnership with Epic Games throughout the "Gears of War" trilogy, and the success of the franchise is a testament to the strength of that relationship and our work together,” a spokesperson said. “We look forward to working with Epic in the future.” Filed under: games        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Tango video chat heads to Windows PCs Posted: 30 Sep 2011 03:44 PM PDT
The original Tango mobile app allowed smartphone and tablet users to make free video calls to other Tango users over 3G and 4G networks. The same features will be available on the Windows PC version with the usual tech requirements, such as having a web camera. Tango is currently not available for Mac users. The company notes that current Tango users can simply download the app to their desktop and sync their account. When a video call comes in, both their mobile and desktop apps will ring. As a mobile application, Tango competed against a couple well-known video calling applications, including Apple’s FaceTime, which only works over Wi-Fi. Now on the desktop, the company can add a few more competitors to that list, including Skype and OoVo. So far, it appears the company is holding its own with more than 18 million members in 190 countries. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, has raised a total of $47 million in funding from investors, including Draper Fisher, Bill Hambrecht, Michael Birch, Bill Tai, and Daniel Scheinman. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire costs $210 to build Posted: 30 Sep 2011 03:27 PM PDT Amazon will lose around $10 for every $199 Kindle Fire tablet it sells, but the company will make back that amount as a small profit when consumers buy digital content, according to a report by market research company IHS iSuppli. The news isn’t too surprising, since it has been speculated for some time that Amazon’s tablet would serve more as a conduit to its digital media ecosystem, than a device to give Amazon a huge profit in sales alone. IHS’s analysis of the Kindle Fire shows Amazon is spending around $192 on hardware components alone. Factor in manufacturing costs, and it appears Amazon is spending $209.63 to build each Kindle Fire. IHS expects Amazon to generate a small profit of $10 on every tablet sold, taking into account expected digital content sales for every unit. That may seem like a low-ball estimate, considering users will likely be buying plenty of digital media with the Fire for years. The research firm argues the real appeal of the Fire will be its ties to Amazon’s retail products: “The Seattle-based online-retail giant generates its profits on sales of shoes, diapers, and every other kind of physical product imaginable. Similar to Walmart and other large brick-and-motor retailers, Amazon's content business is designed to lure in consumers to buy such everyday goods as well as other money-making items.” Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Whoopsie: Microsoft accidentally deletes Chrome from several thousand users’ PCs Posted: 30 Sep 2011 02:57 PM PDT
So far, Microsoft reports that around 3,000 users were affected. The company has acknowledged the mistake and issued a fix to the software that caused the issue. A Microsoft spokesperson stated, “We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers.” The security software in question, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), had accidentally flagged Chrome as malware. Specifically, MSE thought Chrome was PWS:Win32/Zbot, a trojan that would steal passwords. Users began reporting the issue at around 8 a.m. The first user to identify the issue wrote in the Google help forums, “This morning, after I started up the PC, a Windows Security box popped up and said I had a security problem that needed to be removed. I clicked the Details button and saw that it was “PWS:Win32/Zbot”. I clicked the Remove button and restarted my PC. Now I do not have Chrome. It has been removed or uninstalled.” Microsoft now tells us that MSE versions 1.113.672.0 and higher include an update that will prevent Chrome from being flagged. If you’re an MSE user and the software has already blocked or removed Chrome from your PC, you will need to manually update Microsoft Security Essentials then reinstall Chrome. The official Google blog has detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do that, and Microsoft has the latest MSE virus and spyware definition updates available online, as well. A Google spokesperson wrote in response to Windows and Chrome users’ complaints about the issue that, although the software’s hypersensitivity caused some rather significant issues for many users today, the same users should still “be cautious when allowing exceptions in antivirus or protection software; there are legitimate trojans that are included in the MS Security update, Zbot included.” Neither company gave any indication that the incident was either intentional or malicious. We’re waiting to hear back from Microsoft as to why Chrome was flagged in the first place. Filed under: dev, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Pantheon launches Drupal-based cloud site management for enterprises Posted: 30 Sep 2011 01:28 PM PDT
“Pantheon gives you enterprise-class tools with the ease of a consumer site like Twitter or Tumblr.” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat. “It runs fast, it’s always on and there’s no need to buy servers or hire IT for content management and hosting.” Pantheon offers a cloud-based and easy-to-use website content management service that targets sites using Drupal‘s open-source software. The company makes it possible for clients to develop, host and manage their sites all using Pantheon. Enterprises that need more powerful site management tools than WordPress, which runs on 15 percent of the web’s highest trafficked sites, will likely appreciate Pantheon. “WordPress is wonderful if you’re a blog or have a small business site with a limited number of pages, but it isn’t suited for big enterprise sites,” Rosen said. Pantheon runs on top of the Rackspace Cloud for its back end. Rosen said the company has 50 paying customers right now. Some prominent clients Pantheon has already signed up include NBC Universal, University of California-Berkeley and AAA. Two sites Rosen spotlighted as Pantheon customers right now are The Fix and the UN’s Global Pulse, a site that went from inception to launch using Pantheon’s management system in just four weeks. Pantheon package pricing starts at $100 per month, and that cost escalates as an organization’s site needs increase. Rosen said the company will “have a cheaper offering soon.” San Francisco-based Pantheon raised $1.3 million about a year ago from the likes of First Round Capital, Baseline, Floodgate and Founder Collective. Pantheon has eight employees but Rosen said the company is hiring now to expand its team. A video demo of Pantheon’s service can be viewed below: Filed under: cloud        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Confirmed: Square raises $100M, Mary Meeker, Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers now on board Posted: 30 Sep 2011 01:17 PM PDT
Chief operating officer Keith Rabois said the company is processing nearly $4 million in payments every day, and it expects to surpass $1 billion by year's end. The company is signing up between 30,000 and 50,000 new merchants each month. The new funding round reportedly values Square at more than $1 billion, well above the company’s previous valuation of $240 million from its last funding round. The company issues small card-reader dongles that plug into a smartphone’s headphone jack. Users then swipe a credit card through the reader, which transmits all that information to Square’s mobile application. The application is popular with small business owners who don’t want to deal with the larger transaction costs or equipment fees that other banks and business infrastructure providers sell. If you still need evidence of Square’s rock star status in the startup world, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and former Obama chief economy adviser Larry Summers are joining the company’s board. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey founded Square. Filed under: cloud        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Five lessons experienced entrepreneurs have learned Posted: 30 Sep 2011 12:11 PM PDT T Yet, in 2010, entrepreneurs aged 35 to 54 were responsible for over 50 percent of total new entrepreneurship activity in the U.S, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. Individuals aged 55 to 64 also made their mark, representing 22.9 percent of new entrepreneurs in 2010, compared to 14.5 percent in 1996. With their irreplaceable advantage of experience, perhaps those who are older and wiser have learned a few valuable lessons during the course of their careers. Having started my first venture at the age of 28, followed by two others in the last 20 years, my experience has taught me the following crucial lessons: Follow-through is essentialNearly 1,000 startups raised $7.5 billion from venture capitalists in the second quarter of 2011, up 19 percent from the first quarter this year and 61 percent from the same period in 2009, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But the success rate of first-time ventures is only 20.9%, according to research published by the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010. Knowing what it takes to turn a vision into a successful business reality is crucial, and often times, is acquired through experience. Prove your ability to execute in both the short and long term, conduct comprehensive market-research and don't give up when economic outlook appears grim. Build an enthusiastic and passionate teamExperience teaches you the importance of building the right team and inspiring that team to never give up. Often times, ventures are formed with a top-heavy team of executives overly skilled and inappropriately scaled to the size of a business. When times get tough, instead of having the hunger to stick with it, many will jump ship. Build and inspire a core team that fiercely believes in your vision and has the commitment to persevere through market crises and the ups and downs of a startup. Balance is criticalNew ventures often follow an extremely lean operating model – too lean in fact. To a certain extent, you need to pay for play to capture greater market share. Raise sufficient capital and allocate the appropriate resources to expand your business. Seek to achieve the right balance; don't be afraid to adjust your business plan depending on market conditions. It pays to think like an investorVenture capitalists alone evaluate hundreds of presentations a year. While you undoubtedly need a brilliant idea that addresses a market need to spark interest, investors also gauge their faith in the executive team. Experience helps you to build relationships with your target investor group, and identify the right type of capital to raise for your venture. This does not happen overnight, but over time, strong relationships help you expand your resources and understand how to raise capital and who to raise capital from. Listen and learnListening is a virtue for a reason. Entrepreneurs often focus on communicating, convincing and selling. But investors can be more than financial-backers; they can also act as advisors who speak from their personal experience, failures and successes. Find mentors and industry leaders who can walk with you through your entrepreneurial journey. In 2010, 565,000 new businesses were started per month by new and repeat entrepreneurs, according to the Kauffman Foundation. In this time of economic uncertainty, the need for innovative ideas and new business ventures is greater than ever. Entrepreneurs are a vital part of the economy, so hold fast to your vision, be flexible, and persevere through failure and fluctuating market conditions. It will pay off in the end.
[Image via Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock] Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Dunder Mifflin launches iPad killer, The Pyramid Posted: 30 Sep 2011 11:47 AM PDT  Are you ready to unleash the power of the Pyramid? Our good pals at micro-cap regional paper and office supply company Dunder Mifflin have just taken the wraps off their latest offering, the Sabre Pyramid, a tablet to end all tablets. Weighing in at a husky three pounds, this triangular titan comes with chic accessories, including a battery pack and memory booster (which should help to supplement the device’s “50L” of onboard memory). While some may scoff at the tablet’s potentially painful form factor and ludicrous specs that wouldn’t satisfy an infant, we’re sure it will perform about as well as any of the other non-iPad tablets on the market right now. Barring that, it will surely make for an effective and conversation-sparking doorstop. Filed under: offBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Can a single game reach a billion players? Posted: 30 Sep 2011 11:00 AM PDT
For skeptics who believe we’re in the midst of a gaming industry bubble, the idea is just more evidence of mass hysteria among game makers. But the believers say that they can see the stepping stones to the goal, and they’re all grounded in an achievable reality. New platform technologies such as HTML5 and mobile devices, the growing popularity of gaming, a receptive mass market, cloud gaming and changing demographics could all make it happen in the not-so-distant future, said Peter Relan (pictured right), chairman of YouWeb, which has incubated four high-profile game startups. Speaking at the jam-packed HTML5 Dev Conference (which drew 1,200 attendees to San Francisco this week), Relan said that HTML5 — the next lingua franca of the web — will enable cross-platform games, where you can write a game once and publish it across many different platforms. HTML5 games are slow and don’t take advantage of each new device’s unique capabilities yet, but the standard is being updated and supplemented with technologies such as Relan’s own startup, Spaceport, which has made an HTML5 rendering engine combined with Javascript. “We want to create the game that reaches a billion people,” Relan said. “We sense that web 3.0 is here. Mobile devices will get to six billion people. They will become pervasive. We will have the ability as app developers to build apps that, with a push of a button, could update the user experience of a billion people, just the way that Google does when it changes its search theme for Thanksgiving.” It might seem like a game that reaches a billion people would have to be really simple and unsophisticated. But Relan said, “We greatly overestimate what we can do with a technology in two years, and greatly underestimate what we can do in 10 years. We’ve reached an inflection point in technology. When the iPhone first came out, the most popular games were arcade games. Now they are free-to-play, social freemium games. HTML5 games will start out as arcade titles. Then they will evolve. The technology is here to be the great normalizer across the platforms.” He added, “The mobile web is combining the internet’s universal access with what the iPhone brought us, the simplicity of the app. That combination has never happened before.”
Back in July, Peter Vesterbacka (pictured left, on the right), the “Mighty Eagle” at Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, argued that his company’s huge mass market game would be the big one. “We want to be the first entertainment brand with a billion fans,” he said in a talk at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle. “That will take us two or three years to do.” Already, Angry Birds has reached more than 350 million downloads, and it has become a recognized brand faster than just about any other cultural phenomenon. The simple bird slingshot game is played for more than 300 million minutes each day, and that is enabling the company to raise a round of funding that could value Rovio at more than $1.2 billion. “To get to the one billion fans, we will expand to all screens. The biggest platform for us is currently the smartphone (iOS, Android etc.), but we expect big growth on the web and also on lower-end phones,” Vesterbacka said in an email. Rovio is also expanding into the living room via initiatives like Angry Birds on the Roku2 box, and it is taking a multi-pronged approach to expanding in China. “Facebook has 800 million users and they are not even in China, so reaching the billion should be pretty straightforward,” Vesterbacka said. It’s a matter of removing obstacles to the expansion of the game industry and knocking down barriers that prevent a game from being distributed to the widest possible audience.
These games will run as well on smartphones as they do on high-end computers. And they won’t be crappy. They will have some of the same high-end 3D graphics features and awesome storylines and characters as traditional console titles, Helgason said at the Unite 11 conference this week. It’s not just the goofy new game leaders who are talking about a billion gamers. Traditional game companies have the same goal. John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, said that the global video game community would soon top a billion players. “A few years ago, I think there were a couple of hundred million consumer participants in our industry. I think we are going to break a billion in a year or two,” Riccitiello said in an interview with Reuters at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles. Zynga, meanwhile, the new arch rival of EA, has a goal of connecting the world through games, said Owen Van Natta, chief business officer at Zynga. It will do so by taking its popular Facebook games and spreading them across mobile devices and other platforms. Venture capitalists are looking to fund game companies that have a very big vision for reaching the widest audiences. “My sights are set on the company that can create the billion-player game,” said Relan, an active game investor. “There are really game-changing things that will happen when you can play games across all of your screens,” said Josh Elman, a former Facebook and Twiter product manager who is a principal at venture firm Greylock Partners. “We are looking at companies that can take massive advantage of these platforms and build something that is unique and defensible.” In addition to HTML5 and Unity, other technologies such as Adobe’s upcoming Flash 11, the WebGL 3D gaming standard, Facebook’s Project Spartan for mobile phones, and other technologies will make it easier and easier to share high-quality experiences across more and more platforms at very low production and distribution costs.
The internet has provided the reach to billions of people. High-quality graphics will soon become available on everything from Facebook to mobile phones, thanks to technologies such as fast mobile chips, 3D game tools such as Unity, Adobe’s Flash 11 and Air 3 technologies, and HTML5 combined with Javascript. Touchscreens are far easier as input systems. Distribution is becoming both cross-platform and viral. And the free-to-play business model — where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in small transactions — is able to enlist more and more new gamers. “This is very exciting,” he said. “You have to ask, ‘what would Nintendo do with this?’” Filed under: games        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The DeanBeat: Skylanders is massive, innovative gamble for Activision Blizzard Posted: 30 Sep 2011 11:00 AM PDT
—— Bring your toys to life. That was the big idea that drove Activision Blizzard and its game studio Toys for Bob to place a huge bet on a new idea: A massively cross-platform videogame that’s tightly integrated with collectible real-world toys. That kind of risk-taking is especially unusual in a video game industry that is drowning with clones and sequels. And it represents a huge risk for Activision. Based in Novato, Calif., Toys For Bob spent 2.5 years toiling on a brand new cross-platform video game that married the world of collectible toys with video games through a unique wireless technology that beams data back and forth between the toy and the game. The result is Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, which will debut on Oct. 16 on the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, 3DS, the web, the iPad and the iPhone. This kind of multiplatform launch with a new technology is almost as big as launching a giant new game franchise or a new console. Paul Reiche, head of Toys For Bob, said in an interview that team knew what kinds of risks it was taking, but it decided to step up to the challenge anyway. The story of how they did so says a lot about how to innovate in an industry with so much prior art and risk aversion. Asked if Skylanders was as big a bet as a Call of Duty game, Rieche (pictured) replied, “Fair enough.” He added, “There were many points where we suggested something very radical. There is an unfair perception that (parent company) Activision Blizzard is risk averse. This shows that when there is a good opportunity, they go for it.”
The project took shape a few years ago as Activision Blizzard was pruning back on its investments. Reiche and Fred Ford started Toys For Bob in 1989 and they built a number of video games. Activision bought the company in 2005 and gave it responsibility for developing the Spyro game franchise. But then Activision Blizzard killed off a lot of game properties so that it could invest more heavily in the really big ideas. Of the top 20 games, only the top five were really selling well. That meant that there was no point in creating a game that might be ranked No. 20. “That was the way the whole industry was moving,” Reiche said. “They said they wanted us to reinvent Spyro and the game he appears in. They said they needed something entirely new to generate the return on investment that Activision needed to be competitive.” So Reiche’s team began toying with toys. They explored how to create toys that could be used directly in games. One of the team’s developers, Robert Leyland, experimented with wireless technology and found something that would work fast. So when you set a toy on an electronic “portal,” the data stored in the toy’s flash memory could be instantly transferred wirelessly into the console and then into the game world. That way, a toy character could be inserted into the game world simply by placing it onto the surface of a portal. The toy could glow upon contact. RO Design, a technology arm inside Activision, helped with the design of the hardware. They added touches such as the toys having the ability to automatically save their data when they were added to a platform. “They took it and turned it into something with low power consumption and a mass market design,” Reiche said. Meanwhile, a senior artist at the company, I-Wei Huang, began the work on the toys. Instead of creating them as 3D animations first, Huang sculpted the characters as physical objects. Once they had these elements together, they started building the game. They recruited Toy Story film writers Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow to craft an adventure story for the game. They decided to target the Wii at first. “We saw no competitors there,” Reiche said. “We thought of how to integrate toys directly into the game play. You play as your toy, and you have an avatar inside the world. You can take your toy to school, and it had a revenue model that worked. It was a blue ocean.”
About a year ago, the project stood at a critical decision point. Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick had to weigh the options for launching the game as it was originally scheduled or pushing it back. He decided to postpone the project by a year, adding a huge amount to the overall budget. Eric Hirshberg, president of Activision Publishing, a division of the parent company, reviewed every part of the project in fine detail. Reiche had to explain details like why every toy had a certain kind of pose. Hirshberg said the company would bend its marketing plan to support exactly what the creative team wanted to do. “We had a complete functional game and a set of toys,” Reiche said. “But we all felt we could make this a whole lot cooler. So we went back to polish it. We had to decide that we were going to treat it like other top-tier products like Call of Duty. We chose to put out something awesome.” Toys ‘R Us got behind the game in a big way, taking the stage with Toys For Bob in a major unveiling at the Toy Fair show in New York in February. The Skylanders toys have been named “top toys for the holidays” a number of times, alongside products from regulars such as Nerf, Hasbro, and Mattel. “We’ve never shipped a toy before, but we are already in the top tier,” Reiche said. The extra year gave Activision Blizzard plenty of time to come up with a big marketing plan with a big budget. The resulting design was for a fighting game where players could stick their toys on a portal, instantly adding them to a game world. They could then play through the adventure, fighting hordes of enemies. Then the players could swap out characters as they wished. When they took the characters home, the toys would retain the memory of what they had done in the game. When you put one of these toys on a portal again, the character will have the same kinds of capabilities that it had recently earned at your friend’s house. Not only that, but you could level-up a character on the PlayStation 3 and use that same character in a Wii game. You can have a similar experience if you play it on the web or an iPhone or the 3DS. The game has more than 30 characters. Each one has a “brain” for retaining data and can be used in the adventure story where the goal is to defeat the evil Portal Master, Kaos, and his many minions. The game world is full of monsters, treasures, quests, puzzles, and mythical lands and creatures. You can use the characters in your own game or take them to your friend’s Portal of Power. Players can play cooperatively, or fight each other in a multiplayer arena. In the meantime, rivals such as Smith & Tinker’s Nanovor hybrid toy-games have crashed and burned. Nukotoys is still aiming to do something similar in the toy-game hybrid market. And Disney Mobile has just launched toys that can be used with a Cars-themed iPad game. The whole idea of hybrid toys is gathering more steam. The toy stores are lining up racks of the merchandise for Skylanders and they’re promoting them in interactive kiosks. Commercials are starting to run on TV and on YouTube. Activision Blizzard has lined up a considerable inventory of the toys, which will sell for $7.99 a piece. It’s going to either be a big success or a big crater. But there is no question that the game is innovative and that Activision Blizzard and Toys For Bob are swinging for the fences. That kind of measured gamble is what we all want to see more of in the game industry. “People should be watching this,” Reiche said. “We are not going at it half-cocked at all.” Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The next iPhone may come in 16GB, 32GB & 64GB capacities Posted: 30 Sep 2011 10:58 AM PDT
A “Mr. X,” as well as other sources in the iPhone manufacturing chain, told 9to5mac that the newest version of the iPhone will likely come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. Each version will be available in black and also in white. The data about capacities could be related to the rumored iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5. In fact, there’s been some suggestion that the rumored 4S will be a less expensive, 8GB version of the iconic smartphone. Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore said over the summer that Apple was ripe for releasing a cheaper, unsubsidized iPhone that could work with prepaid mobile plans; however, while those comments were informed, they were still speculative. At any rate, the rumors will all come to a halt (at least for the next month or two) on October 4, next Tuesday. That’s when Apple has scheduled its announcement of whatever is coming next for the iPhone. Stay tuned; our correspondents will be on the ground at the company’s Cupertino headquarters to give you the scoop. Image courtesy of ivyfield. Filed under: mobile        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| IBM tops Microsoft as the second-most valuable tech company in the world Posted: 30 Sep 2011 10:16 AM PDT
International Business Machines, which has been around since 1911, saw its market value reach $214 billion yesterday, while Microsoft’s fell to $213.2 billion. Both companies still fall behind Apple, which had a market value of $362.1 billion as markets closed yesterday. Over the course of the year, IBM has grown in market value by a total of 22 percent. Microsoft has, for the same period of time, dropped 8.8 percent. So what’s been behind IBM’s more recent success? In 2005, IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo for $1.25 billion. IBM believed the move would make it more profitable in the long run and would allow it to focus on software, services and supercomputers. While the software and services parts of the business are highly lucrative for IBM, it has a rich and long history in cutting-edge machine research. Over the past year or two, IBM has made headlines with its fascinating new chips and supercomputers. In 2009, the company’s Blue Gene supercomputing program earned a presidential nod and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. And this year, the company’s Watson, which handily beat Jeopardy contestants in February, was put to work as a hospital diagnostician in May. Earlier this month, we got to learn a bit more about IBM’s “brain chips” and where and how they’re made. Finally, earlier this week, IBM announced that, together with Intel, it would be creating a $4.4 billion tech hub in New York to continue its focus on next-gen computer chip technology. Clearly, IBM’s focus on computers that “think” has been part of its success; sloughing off its personal computing business allowed it to make huge strides in this area and others. Microsoft, on the other hand, is still doing robust business with its operating system and Office suite sales as well as its gaming business, thanks to the Xbox and Kinect. But the company is still making heavy investments and struggling to see returns in areas such as online services and mobile.
Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Announcing the CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown Posted: 30 Sep 2011 10:10 AM PDT At our new CloudBeat 2011 conference (Nov 30-Dec1), we’ll be holding an “Innovation Showdown” to showcase the coolest, most disruptive products leveraging the cloud. We’re opening the nomination process today, and we’ll be selecting 10 finalists on Oct 31 to present their products/services to the event’s full audience. The event will be at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City. To be nominated, a company’s product or service will need to be leveraging the cloud in a disruptive way. The more revolutionary the idea, the more chance we’ll select them as a finalist.Nominations can include startups or established companies with brilliant new ideas. We're giving special consideration to products that are new, or that haven’t been widely publicized yet. We’re looking for products that will change how businesses serve customers, empower employees and deliver tangible value to investors. Here’s how it will work. Finalists will have four minutes to showcase their innovative cloud technologies live at CloudBeat 2011. Live at the event, our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists, and actual enterprise customers — will provide feedback on the products/services presented. Ultimately, our sages will recap the highlights of the competition and determine the winner. The Showdown winner will be announced onstage at CloudBeat 2011 and will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and/or relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes yet to be announced. Additionally, the audience will get to choose its favorite new product/service. The winner of the "People's Choice" award will also be announced live onstage. To submit your company/product for nomination, go here. Deadline for submission is Oct 31. Upon what criteria will the companies be judged?
What are the guidelines and other rules?
Apply for the Innovation Showdown here, and don’t forget to register for CloudBeat 2011 today and save 25%. We’ll see you at the event! Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| No joke: Google promotes Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile on its search page Posted: 30 Sep 2011 09:58 AM PDT
In July, Google launched a new strategy to get more celebrities to join Google+ in an effort to help publicize the social network. The strategy is one that greatly benefited microblogging social network Twitter’s early popularity. And it seems to be working. Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile is currently in 270,706 people’s social circles. The link on Google’s search page is promoting a Google+ Hangout — a group video chat that lets participants watch the same video concurrently — for Will.i.Am’s band, Black Eyed Peas. The promotional text invites people to hang out with the band on Google+ just before they go on stage later tonight (6 p.m. EST). This isn’t the first time the band has done a special Google+ Hangout session, but it is the first time Google has linked to it on its most coveted piece of web real estate — the search homepage. Will.i.Am is no stranger to the technology scene. Earlier this month, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi reported on the musician’s experience as director of creative innovation at Intel. Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Why was the first Kindle so ugly? Because Jeff Bezos loved his BlackBerry Posted: 30 Sep 2011 09:53 AM PDT
Now the reasoning behind that ugly design has become a bit clearer: Jeff Bezos pushed his designers to replicate elements of his beloved BlackBerry, the New York Times reports. "Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people," a former Amazon designer told the NYT. The BlackBerry’s design influence led directly to the original Kindle’s boxy design, keyboard, and scrolling wheel on the side. Thankfully, Amazon quickly grew out of that design. Over time, the Kindle became slimmer and less boxy. The most recent Kindles, including the Touch and the new $79 model, don’t even have physical keyboards. Now with the Kindle Fire tablet, it appears that Amazon, much like the rest of the tablet competition, is trying to imitate Apple’s iPad. “You can't get much more minimal than a black rectangle," Tumblr user interface designer Justin Ouellette told the NYT. While there’s probably not much more Amazon can do with its future tablet designs, I’m interested in seeing just how far the company can push its e-readers. Amazon’s latest e-readers look different from competitors like the Nook and Kobo, and there’s still plenty of room for Amazon to pursue even lighter and more innovative designs. I can’t wait for a flexible color E-Ink Kindle. Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
In a talk at Stanford University, Alibaba CEO and chairman Jack Ma said, “We are very, very interested” in buying Yahoo, lock, stock and barrel.
This morning, a Microsoft security software program started deleting Google’s Chrome browser from users’ computers.
An anonymous tipster has leaked some information about Apple’s soon-to-be announced iPhone 5, including tidbits about onboard storage and device colors.
Today, for the first time since 1996, IBM is worth more than Microsoft.
In an attempt to promote its new social network, Google has placed a link to musical artist 
The first-generation Kindle e-reader was a revolutionary device, but it was far from pretty.
| You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |