11 October, 2011

Preview: Assassin’s Creed Revelations takes plenty of creative risks (video)



Preview: Assassin’s Creed Revelations takes plenty of creative risks (video)
Posted: 11 Oct 2011 09:00 AM PDT
Assassin’s Creed Revelations takes a lot of creative risks, considering it is the fourth installment in a video game series that has sold more than 30 million copies for French game publisher Ubisoft. I’ve had a good look at part of the single-player campaign and it plays better in parts than past games.
The game debuts Nov. 15 amid a ton of competition in the hardcore console market, so it’s going to need innovations in order to stand out from the crowded field of potential blockbusters. In the past, the game series has had no problems beating the competition, so this new game is just about as close as you can come to a guaranteed blockbuster. The question is only whether it will outsell the previous games.
The game is a huge investment for Ubisoft, which has come to depend on the revenues from this series every year. The company has more than 500 developers working on the series, making it as big an investment as Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty franchise. Multiple studios from around the world collaborated on the title, with a half-dozen studios from Montreal to Singapore working on the game.
“It’s the only way we can create a game of this quality in such a short time,” said Alex Amancio (pictured below), creative director of the game, in our video interview (see below).
With all of that development might, it would be tempting to create a no-risk title. But that’s not the way the creative team approached the game, which they wanted to be the biggest in the series to date. This title has a lot going for it, because there are some changes to the ongoing story, the scenery (with the game set in the beautiful Ottoman-era city of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, and even the game play. As near as I can tell, old fans will like it, and those new to the series might like it too. Like past games, the new title gives you the thrill of parkour movements, where you can run up walls and jump across building gaps with the grace of a ballet dancer, just before closing in for the kill for an assassination target. This game will end the stories of its previous protagonists, Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Altair Ibn LaAhad. It is also the final game to be set in the Renaissance era.
“More so than any other game, we’re telling a continuing story here that is the heart of the game experience,” Amancio said.
The game continues the pattern of having a deep and complex story, like in Dan Brown’s novels such as the Da Vinci Code. In the first game that came out in 2007, we find that scientists have created a machine called the Animus to allow the character Desmond Miles to go back in time by visiting the memories of his genetic ancestors. That game took us back to the Crusades, as seen through the eyes of the assassin Altair. That game set up the conflict between two secret societies, the Knights Templar and the Assassins. The game flashes back and forth between Desmond in modern times and Altair in the year 1191 during the Third Crusade. The second game, Assassin’s Creed II, came out in 2009 and focused on a new assassin, Ezio, during the Italian Renaissance. That was followed by last year’s Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, which featured Ezio and Desmond’s further adventures, with Ezio’s story set in Rome during the time of the corrupt Borgia family.
The new game is all about the completion of the trilogy of Ezio. He became an assassin in Assassin’s Creed II, became master of assassins in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, and now he is on a personal quest. He looks back on his life and realizes he has always been very reactive. He became an assassin because his father and brother were murdered. He started a brotherhood of assassins because his uncle got killed.
Now, in the year 1511, Ezio is older and wiser now and tries to find some answers about the Order of Assassins. He seeks the answers left behind in a library created by the great assassin from the first game, Altair. But he finds the place, Masyaf, teeming with Templars, the enemies of the assassins, and he has to find five keys to open the library and deny them to the Templars at the same time. So what started out as a pilgrimage to the beautifully rendered city of Constantinople becomes a race against time. Of course, Desmond, a character from the modern day, comes back into the game as he tries to access Ezio’s memories in a plot that continues in the modern era. Desmond has to pull together the threads of Ezio and Altair’s stories so that he can recover from a coma that has him locked in the Animus machine.
“It was a no brainer to choose that city” as the setting for the new game, Amancio said. “It was the New York City of the era, a cultural hub” that was a capital of multiple empires. It was also on the shore of two continents, which was a cool metaphor for Ezio meeting Altair, his predecessor.
The title is an open world game, where you can roam anywhere in the game world, even as you follow certain missions on particular paths. As always, you can spend a lot of time just roaming around the digital recreation of Constantinople. You can make money by pickpocketing passersby, but they will scream and finger you to the authorities if you get caught. You can find items like poison around the city, you can loot stuff from the bodies of those you kill, and spend all of this on better gear for your assassinations. The city has its own ambient life, like gypsy beggars who surround you and won’t let you escape. You can climb up to the top of a tower to see a spectacular view of the city. Half the fun is exploration.
The game includes many new things you can do, like crafting bombs after collecting the parts for them around the city. You can now use them to attack your enemies and also distract them so that you can reach your targets more easily.
“The limit is your own imagination” in how you use those bombs, Amancio said.
Ezio can also use a hook blade — a hook attached to a stealth kill blade hidden in a wristband — for all sorts of new things, like grabbing on to an opponent and then flipping over them before closing in for a kill. He can also use the hook blade to grab onto a wire and slide down it in zip line fashion. That’s one of the coolest parts of cruising around the rooftops of Constantinople. You can also drop down on top of an enemy while sliding on a zip line, killing the enemy instantly through an “air assassination.” That one little hook blade creates all sorts of new game play opportunities, and it’s an example of a tiny innovation that can make a game seem creatively fresh.
The graphics engine behind the game has seen a major upgrade. The characters move more fluidly. The game can now render smoke and skin. The game camera can no focus in on the skin and it really does look like skin. That’s been one of the weak points of the series in the past, since other games have been moving ahead on graphics at a faster pace. The motion capture has also been improved so that the movements of characters are also more realistic.
I’m not sure every creative risk will pay off. In one part of the game, you are called upon to command a group of assassins to defend your turf from the attacking Templars. So you take command of soldiers, place them on rooftops, and defend them from attacks. You essentially become a general in a defensive or offensive operation. It’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure it’s perfectly executed. But we’ll see how the fans like it when it comes out. This game series is getting better and better, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the game.
Here’s our video interview.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 08:52 AM PDT
ZenpriseBusiness mobile management service Zenprise has raised $30 million to help businesses better manage their mobile devices when it comes to security and functionality, the company announced today.
Zenprise is capitalizing on the substantial increase of smartphone use in the workplace in the past few years. The company offers its Zenprise MobileManager solution for on-premise deployments and Zencloud for cloud deployments.
The funding round was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from all of Zenprise's existing investors including Rembrandt Venture Partners, Ignition Partners and Shasta Ventures. Greylock has made some major moves in the past few weeks with a $30 million investment in Coupons.com and leading the round on Tumblr’s massive $85 million VC investment.
“This year has been one of tremendous growth for Zenprise, driven by companies seeking to balance Bring-Your-Own-Device policies with mobile device, application and data security," said Jayaram Bhat, CEO of Zenprise, in a statement. "This significant investment led by Greylock is a major validation of Zenprise's strategy and market position."
Previously, Zenprise raised $9 million in funding in June 2010 and a $10 million round in March 2009. With today’s funding and some prior investments, Zenprise’s total funding is now at about $64 million.

Filed under: deals, enterprise, mobile



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 08:11 AM PDT
Roku LTRoku will offer a new $50 model to its product line of streaming media set-top boxes, the company announced today.
Much like more expensive set-top box models, the Roku LT offers 720p quality video playback and will give users access to over 300 channels of programming, including Hulu Plus, Netflix, Epix, Amazon Prime Instant Video and many others. The LT model, however, doesn’t have an SD card reader or support for Bluetooth technology.
Also, unlike the other Roku box models available for purchase in brick and mortar retail stores, the cheaper LT box will only be available to consumers via Roku’s web store.
The move by Roku signals a new strategy by the company to focus on customers that already have a cable or satellite TV subscription. About 80 percent of Roku owners still have subscriptions to cable or satellite, according to Roku CEO Anthony Wood.
In keeping with that new strategy, the company also announced that all of its set-top boxes will soon have access to the HBO Go service, which provides premium movies and original TV content, like True Blood and Game of Thrones. HBO Go is only available to cable or satellite subscribers with a preexisting HBO channel package.
Both the Roku LT box and access to HBO Go are scheduled to launch later this month.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 08:03 AM PDT
AT&T‘s family of Android phones is getting crowded. The company has launch five new Android devices, including the sequel to a phone released just this year, the Motorola Atrix 2.
The new phones add some much-needed variety to AT&T’s smartphone lineup. But it’s hard not to notice that, aside from the Atrix 2, there’s very little to get excited about with these new releases, announced at the CTIA conference today in San Diego.
By all appearances, the Atrix 2 is a very minor upgrade over its predecessor, which was one of our favorite devices from the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. It features a slightly bigger screen at 4.3-inches (versus 4-inches), a higher-quality 8 megapixel camera, as well as the added ability to record 1080p high-definition video. But just like the original, the Atrix 2 also runs a 1-gigahertz dual core CPU (though it may be a newer-generation chip). You can also connect the Atrix 2 to Motorola’s LapDock, turning it into a netbook of sorts.
AT&T also announced the Samsung Glide, which sports a 4-inch screen and a slide-out hardware keyboard, as well as the Samsung DoubleTime, whose most notable feature is its dual touch screens. The DoubleTime is clearly aimed at mainstream users with its slower 600 MHz CPU and small 3.2-inch displays.
On the far-less-desirable end is the Pantech Pocket, which also features a 4-inch screen and a hardware keyboard, but sadly seems to have been cursed with an ugly design.
For its pre-paid lineup, AT&T is announcing the Avail, a low-end device built by ZTE. The Avail includes a 3.5-inch screen and 5-megapixel camera, which honestly isn’t too shabby for a pre-paid device.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:09 AM PDT
The iPhone 4S will be a reminder that CPU clock speed isn’t everything.
Even though Apple’s upcoming iPhone 4S runs the same dual-core A5 CPU as the iPad 2, Apple has apparently reduced the chip’s speed from 1 gigahertz to around 800MHz, reports Anandtech. But that doesn’t stop the iPhone 4S from blazing past all other phones — many of which have CPUs well over 1GHz — in benchmark tests.
In the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, the iPhone 4S is almost twice as fast as the iPhone 4, achieving a score of 2222ms vs 3921ms (lower is better). It’s only bested by the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9. The iPhone 4S trounces all others in the Rightware BrowserMark test, achieving a score of 89,567, while the Samsung Galaxy S II only hits 55,144. Compared to the iPhone 4, the Geekbench test found that the iPhone 4S is just about twice as fast.
Just like with the iPhone 4, which runs a slower A4 processor than the original iPad, Apple likely reduced the CPU’s speed to conserve battery life.
And as Anandtech writes, there are plenty of other benefits:
A lower clock not only means higher yields from the factory, but likely a lower operating voltage as well. Dropping a CPU’s core voltage, yields a greater-than-linear decrease in power consumption, making the marginal loss in clock speed a good choice. At a lower operating frequency than its Android competitors, Apple does have to exploit its strengths in software to avoid any tangible performance penalties. Apple has traditionally done this very well in the past, so I don’t expect the loss of frequency to be a huge deal to the few who do cross-shop iOS and Android.
When it comes to gaming, the iPhone 4S is no slouch either, achieving FPS speeds twice as fast as Samsung’s Galaxy S II.
Overall, while the iPhone 4S may appear to be just a slight upgrade over the iPhone 4, its new A5 chip makes it a different beast entirely.


Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:00 AM PDT
Striiv, the startup that is trying to make fitness fun,will begin selling its fitness gadget on the HSN TV show and its web sites starting Oct. 22.
The deal is a coup for the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that makes a gadget that hangs on your key chain and keeps track of every step you take. The more you walk or run, the more you are rewarded with points on the device’s small display. The gadget is an example of gamification, or taking an activity that isn’t that fun — exercise — and making it more fun with game mechanics such as an encouraging reward for walking 1,000 steps.
HSN will offer Striiv to its customers as an exclusive retail bundle with unique accessories, selling for $99.95. It will be featured on HSN during several sales events that will run throughout the holiday shopping season and focus on Striiv’s ability to get people moving. David Wang, chief executive of the company, said in an earlier story that Striiv lets you turn every day activities into fitness opportunities. The gadget measures your every step, even when you're walking up stairs, and gives you chances to hit personal goals, play games with friends, and make donations via walkathons.
Wang said that the HSN partnership will showcase Striiv, building awareness for the device during the important holiday selling season. The company seems to be betting that women in particular will find the device appealing, as they are the primary viewers of HSN. What’s more, HSN viewers are likely to be couch potatoes who need some extra motivation for exercising.
“Striiv is unlike anything in the marketplace today where through your own activity and movement, you can play games, track your progress, and give back to charity," said Sandy Conrad, senior vice president of merchandising for HSN. “The device is tailor-made for the HSN customer – busy women juggling family and careers but like all of us, wants to be more active.”
Striiv has built-in sensors that the company calls its TruMotion technology for detecting whether you are walking, running, or going up stairs. The Striiv device has enough battery life to last for four or five days of use. And it has a high-resolution screen powered by a dual-core ARM-based processor.
Striiv recently raised $6 million in funding to finance the launch of the new Striiv device and to further the company's mission of taking active gaming outside the living room.
With Striiv’s first game, which is embedded on the device, you can score more points by exercising. In the game, MyLand, your enchanted island fills with more exotic wildlife and plants the more you move. It's kind of like a fantasy version of FarmVille, with centaurs and crops. You can grow things by using energy, and you can get more energy by moving around. No setup is required and the device has its own tutorial. Striiv has partnered with Global Giving to make donations toward charities during your own “walkathons.”
Formed in 2010, Striiv's team includes social game and tech industry veterans. Wang's background is in location-based technology. Both Wang and design head Lexy Franklin were members of Booyah's team that made the location-based game MyTown, which is like Monopoly in the real world. Booyah's original app gave people rewards for all sorts of achievements, but Wang said Striiv wanted to be laser-focused on just one goal: better fitness.
Rival technologies include Basis, which makes a wrist band that measures your movement, heart rate and perspiration. Striiv has more than 20 employees.

Filed under: games, mobile



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:00 AM PDT
[Disclosure: Xyologic cofounder Matthaus Krzykowski was previously VentureBeat's advisor on mobile issues and remains an occasional contributor.]

It’s almost inevitable that the numbers of Android apps downloaded will outnumber Apple’s mobile downloads at some point. Xyologic, a startup that indexes and searches the App Store, predicts that the number of monthly Google Android apps downloaded will exceed the number of monthly Apple iOS (iPod, iPad and iPhone) apps downloaded by June 2012.
It makes sense, since Apple is just one company, whereas Google’s Android has many companies behind it. Android smartphones and tablets have also been selling very well worldwide. The number of monthly iOS app downloads is now about 1.45 billion, compared to 640 million for Android. By June 2012, both will be about 3.2 billion (see chart at top). After that, Android will leave Apple in the dust, Xyologic cofounder Matthaus Krzykowski told VentureBeat.
“Apple continues to grow at exponential rates, but Android is growing at hyper-exponential rates,” Krzykowski said. “In the coming months, we’ll see a number of countries where Android becomes No. 1.”
The chart below shows that Apple has had 18.2 billion app downloads to date, compared to 6.76 billion for Android. At that rate, Android will catch up with Apple in total downloads by mid-2013, according to Xyologic.
During August, Android overtook the iOS monthly app downloads for the first time in three tracked countries: Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal. One country where Apple has gained market share is South Korea, which in February accounted for 9 percent of all Android Market downloads. Now it makes up only 3.2 percent of Android downloads.
Other data shows that iPod Touch and iPhone consumers downloaded an average of 8.7 apps during August. Apple saw 1.212 billion app downloads during the month. Apple also has sold an estimated 200 million devices now (not counting iPads). Xyologic estimates that the number of iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold last year was 140 million. In the chart below, the data shows there are 465,729 Apple apps, compared to 289,305 Android apps. Android is projected to overtake Apple by August 2012, when both will have about 680,000 apps. That day of reckoning has been put off in part because Google has begun deleting inactive or low-quality apps. The deletion rate has grown from 20 percent in November 2010 to 48 percent in July. The Google team is deleting tens of thousands of apps a month. Apple deleted about 30 percent in 2011.
Berlin, Germany-based Xyologic will release 220 app download reports from across 29 countries, giving much more transparency to the who’s who of mobile apps. On a monthly basis, app makers will be able to keep score of who is doing the best in each different country. 

Filed under: dev, mobile



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:00 AM PDT

Kiwi Crate is announcing today it has raised $2 million in funding for a subscription service that delivers hands-on crafts and activities for pre-school and kindergarten age children.
The service is aimed at parents who don’t have the time or inclination to conceive of a craft, go to the store to get the materials, and prepare instructions for the child on how to put the project together. The products are aimed at inspiring creativity and curiosity in children, and they’re curated by a panel of experts with experience in education. The service for kids ages three to six squarely targets the demographic of busy parents who want their children to do hands-on activities rather than watch TV or play video games all day long.
The startup is the brainchild of Sandra Oh Lin and other entrepreneurs and financiers from the PayPal mafia, as well as talent from YouTube and BabyCenter.
“The idea came from the fact that I am a mom with kids who are 2.5 and 4.5,” Oh Lin said in an interview. “I always had a deep appreciation for hands-on projects but came up short on ideas and getting materials.”
She started sharing projects with others and held play dates and “projects parties.” Parents gave her good feedback and she decided to run with it. Oh Lin was former general manager of eBay Fashion and, prior to that, launched PayPal Mobile and led product marketing for PayPal’s merchant services business. Her co-founders include Yu Pan, a PayPal co-founder and early employee at YouTube, and Yael Pasternak Valek, an ex-Yahoo product manager who was on the founding team at Maya’s Mom, which was acquired by BabyCenter. Kiwi Crate started earlier this year. The name came from a trip Oh Lin’s family took to New Zealand, the land of Kiwi fruit.
The seed funding round was led by First Round Capital, with additional investment by the Mayfield Fund, Comcast Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Consigliere Brand Capital, UJ Ventures and 500 Startups. Individual angel investors include Raymond Tonsing and Seth Goldstein (co-founder of Turntable.fm).
"The team is awesome," said Dave McClure of 500 Startups. “I’ve worked with them previously at PayPal and they are fantastic. Also, the category has huge potential and is under-invested. I also have kids, four and six, and my partner Christine (Tsai) just had a baby. We are the target market.”
The U.S. crafts industry generates sales of about $29.2 billion a year, according to the Craft & Hobby association. About 20 percent to 25 percent is estimated to be materials and projects for kids.
"As an investor, I was attracted to the fact that Kiwi Crate is solving a real pain point for millions of busy but well-intentioned parents," said Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, who joined Kiwi Crate's board. "As a father myself, I immediately ‘got it’ when I first saw the concept. On top of that, we love the subscription-based business model and the possibilities for bridging the online/offline gap."
The crates will arrive on the doorstep each month with a surprise project. In the spring, the kits might include a gardening project, or something related to a major holiday such as Thanksgiving. Some will be more artistic. Some will be scientific. All will help kids learn fine motor skills.
“While they have fun doing these things, they will learn too,” Oh Lin said.
While the projects will be hands-on physical activities, Oh Lin said she isn’t against digital play. She said the whole idea is to inspire creativity for kids growing up in a digital age, where there is still a need for motor skills and real-world learning. You can learn to paint on an iPad, but it still isn’t quite the same as learning with a brush, Oh Lin said. She finds it sad that there is decreased emphasis on arts in schools due to budget cuts.
The subscription fee will be $19.95 a month or $220 for an annual subscription. That means that the materials won’t be too expensive, since Kiwi Crate has to make money on that amount, which includes covering shipping costs. Parents can create their own projects for less money now, and they can also shop at places like Michaels art stores, which sell ready-to-go art projects for children. There are also web sites with online videos for young kids, such as Cullen’s ABC’s.
Oh Lin says her service is a time saver and it will be curated by a team of experts in education and child development.
“We have a rigorous process and want to make sure it is universally appropriate for both boys and girls,” Oh Lin said. “The value is in providing the convenience. It’s a big pain to go out to the store with kids in tow. You may have a great idea, but you usually have to buy more than you need.”
Kiwi Crate will also create a web site with a bunch of ideas and forums for parents, who will be able to upload images of completed projects. The company has five employees. Oh Lin said she likes to think of the company as a “mission driven” startup, where doing good goes together with making money.
“We have a sense doing something fun,” she said. “This is part of a movement toward hands-on creativity,” like the Maker Faire, where the company tested its idea and won accolades.


Filed under: VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 06:00 AM PDT
Design flash sale site Fab.com has just launched a suite of mobile apps to bring its signature offerings — great designs at accessible prices — to iPhone, iPad and Android users.
With these apps, Fab.com shoppers can quickly browse the latest flash sales, drill down into item details and make purchases on the go. Users will get daily notifications when new sales go live as well as notifications when items in their shopping carts are expiring.
The app also comes with handy sharing mechanisms for Facebook and Twitter (natch) and a calendar of upcoming flash sales.
These native applications are available free of charge right now in the Android Market and iTunes App Store.
“Currently 18 percent of traffic to Fab.com comes from mobile devices, all through the mobile web,” a Fab.com spokesperson wrote to VentureBeat.
“In addition to improving the browsing experience for its mobile users, Fab expects the introduction of native apps for iPhone, iPad and Android to increase conversion from mobile sales.”
Sales from the website alone are robust enough that the company was profitable a few weeks into its launch. Of course, the New York-based startup is focusing on rapid growth over profitability right now, but these early numbers are encouraging.
The site is still a few weeks shy of its six-month birthday. Already, the company has passed the 700,000 member milestone, has processed more than 100,000 orders and has seen more than 200,000 items shipped.
“We never in our wildest dreams expected to grow this fast,” wrote CEO Jason Goldberg in a recent blog post. “This is fun.”
Fab.com is on quite the roll, having just last month launched its pop-up shops, online stores that focus on a special, specific theme and that last for 30 days in contrast to the site’s usual 3-day shelf life for flash sales.
The company’s growth and product launch schedule likely has much to do with an $8 million Series A the company received over the summer.
So what’s next for Fab.com? Goldberg says we can expect the young company to unveil “new innovations in the area of social commerce like never seen before on any website or service” fairly soon.
Check out screenshots of the new mobile and tablet apps below:

Filed under: mobile



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 05:00 AM PDT
Spark by Marketo
Marketing automation firm Marketo on Tuesday launched a new small-business-focused brand called Spark with new tools for small business owners looking to generate leads and easily manage marketing efforts.
Marketo and competing providers like Eloqua, Genius, Pardot and Silverpop are part the emerging space of marketing automation. These companies are making it possible for businesses to improve sales lead generation and use a content management system to better connect businesses to their potential customers.
Thing is, Marketo has had its eye mostly on enterprise-level customers since its launch in 2006. But with Spark, the company can better reach out to small and mid-size companies by delivering specific tools that are relevant to that audience.
Spark shares the same technology behind Marketo but gives small businesses more pricing options and services with rapid and sustainable customer growth in mind. Marketo said the biggest tools it will bring to small business owners will include e-mail marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and insights, social media and event marketing.
"Millions of small businesses don't have the time or technology needed to truly spark rapid growth,” said Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO and president, in a statement. “The things that really grow their business – like marketing efficiently and finding solid leads – never move off their to-do lists.”
A short video promo laying out the basics of Spark by Marketo can be viewed below:


Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 05:00 AM PDT
NComputing is launching a new version of its software that will turn enterprise computing on its head, allowing as many as 100 users using lightweight clients to share a single server in a corporation or school.
If this new vSpace Server 6.5 edition is successful, then it could dramatically cut the costs of enterprise desktop computing and rewrite the rules of virtual desktop interface (VDI) technology, where one system supports many users or operating systems. NComputing’s software returns low-end computing to the old days of time-sharing, where dumb terminals connected to mainframe computers kept computing costs lower.
NComputing's virtualization software allows several client machines — nothing more than monitors, keyboards and memory hubs — to share the computing power of a single PC. That way, one PC can deliver computing power to multiple users for lightweight purposes such as browsing the web or sending email. This set up works well in schools, emerging countries, big task-focused corporations and in retail. In the past, vSpace servers could handle no more than 30 users. Now the company will more than triple that number with the release of its new software. That could dramatically cut the cost of a traditional PC desktop.
Analyst firm IDC says that VDI-based desktop systems cost about $1,200 per user. NComputing can deliver the same functions for $300 to $400 in cost, said John Barco, senior director of product management at NComputing, in an interview.
“The economies of scale for NComputing are hard to ignore now,” Barco said.
The new software allows information technology and network managers to significantly reduce the number of hardware hosts, operating systems, and virtual machines needed in order to create a VDI platform with multiple users per server. That’s important because cost and complexity are the biggest barriers to the adoption of virtual desktops, said Raj Dhingra, chief executive of NComputing in Redwood City, Calif. The systems enable better security and are easier to manage. The lightweight clients include NComputing’s Numo system-on-a-chip that reduces a desktop to virtually a single chip.
The new features for the vSpace software include automated deployment, allowing thousands of virtual desktops to be configured and deployed in hours rather than days or weeks. Setting up 100 clients is now as easy as setting up just one. IT managers can now remotely view and control user sessions, allowing easier fixes on support calls. The machines support PC applications such as good audio quality, microphones, and multimedia applicaitons such as Skype.
NComputing has more than 3 million clients deployed in 140 countries. The new vSpace Server 6.5 software is available immediately. NComputing has more than $150 million.




Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat



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Posted: 11 Oct 2011 04:02 AM PDT
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory plans to create what could become the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, based on a Cray supercomputer with 18,000 microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices and an equal number of Nvidia graphics chips.
The supercomputer will pave the way for “exascale computing” and will be known as Titan. It will use Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia to deliver GPU computing, or parallel processing that uses the graphics chips for non-graphics processing tasks. The system will deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance, or more than two times faster and more than three times more energy efficient than today’s fastest supercomputer, the K computer in Japan.
Titan will let scientists use massive parallel computing power for research and discovery in a variety of fields, including material science, energy technology, medical research, geoscience, and others. It is worth noting that microprocessor makers IBM and Intel lost out on the deal.
"All areas of science can benefit from this substantial increase in computing power, opening the doors for new discoveries that so far have been out of reach," said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at the lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Titan will be used to research things such as more viable biofuels, cleaner burning engines, safer nuclear energy, and more efficient solar power. Steve Scott, chief technology officer of Tesla products at Nvidia, said that the Tesla GPUs will provide over 85 percent of the peak performance of Titan, showing that a supercomputer that runs on microprocessors alone is less efficient than one that runs on GPUs too.
Addison Snell, chief executive of Intersect360 Research, agreed that the new supercomputer is likely to be the world’s most powerful upon installation, according to the Top500 list of supercomputers. The system could lead a resurgence of U.S. facilities that have the fastest supercomputers. Four of the five top supercomputers are now owned by Asian entities. Snell said the combination of microprocessor and GPUs together will help break through barriers of performance that Intel-based supercomputers have hit in recent times, due to concerns about cooling and overheating.
In the first phase of the Titan deployment,  Oak Ridge will upgrade itsa existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs using Nvidia’s code-named Fermi designs. These GPUs will serve as companion processors to multi-core microprocessors in that Cray XK6 supercomputer. In the second phase, expected to begin in 2012, Oak Ridge plans to use up to 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation architecture code-named Kepler.
The Titan system will probably be the world’s most powerful supercomputer upon its installation, according to the semiannual TOP500 list (www.top500.org), which ranks computers based on their peak performance on a matrix-multiplication benchmark called Linpack. Any time there is a new #1 it is significant, but in particular there are a few things that stand out to me.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:54 PM PDT
Twitter is forcing all hyperlinks submitted within tweets and direct messages to use its URL service t.co, the company announced on its developers blog today.
The t.co service, which launched in June, was initially intended to shorten the character length of long URLs. Previously, any URL over 19 characters was assigned a new t.co URL, but as of today all links will get wrapped — regardless of character length.
Twitter has various reason for forcing all hyperlinks through t.co. It eliminates the security risk posed by third-party short link services (like Tinyurl and bit.ly) that don't allow the company to screen for malicious links. But more importantly, t.co URL wrapping is central to Twitter’s new web traffic analytics service unveiled in September.
The new analytics service lets users see how many page views generated from each tweet, retweet and reply as well as other statistics. As VentureBeat’s Matthew Lynley reported, the new analytics service is intended as a lightweight tool. And according to the company, it isn't designed to compete with more in-depth analytics provided by companies like Google, bit.ly and more.
Link shortening (or link wrapping) and analytics are just some of the services that Twitter has decided to bring in-house — leaving many to question where it stands in relation to its rich community of third-party developers.
“Twitter’s just trying to consolidate the activity on its site so everything is under its own umbrella — presumably with the eventual expectation that it can somehow make money,” said John Boitnott, Digital Media Consultant at Hasai, a social media and web marketing firm. “So, they are just doing what they have to. Otherwise they don’t get the privelege of existing.”
Boitnott, whose firm manages traffic reports for several well-known brands, said Twitter’s ability to push traffic to outside websites has diminished over the years.
“Twitter, over the years, has slowly brought less and less bang for your buck on every metric — whether it be per tweet or monthly totals… weekly totals, you name it,” he said, adding that having and interpreting a large network (and/or community) of people is necessary to optimize referral traffic.
[Disclosure: John Boitnott is a former VentureBeat writer and employee of Hasai, which does contracted marketing work for VentureBeat.]

Filed under: security, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:01 PM PDT
Plantronics is launching a Bluetooth headset today with one cool feature: it knows when it it is hanging on your ear.
When you place the Voyager Pro HD headset on your ear, the sensors on the device can tell whether you are wearing it or not. If you are wearing it, the headset automatically answers the call on the headset speakers and microphone. If you are not wearing it, the device allows you to answer the phone using the phone’s microphone and speakers. When you take it off your ear, it will pause an audio stream and it will lock the call button to avoid accidental redials.
This kind of smart device offers cool benefits to users and it justifies a higher hardware cost for the devices, separating it from the pack of other headsets on the market. In that respect, the approach is similar to the higher-priced Jawbone headsets on the market. It also shows that if you attach a sensor to just about any device, you can turn it into something with a higher value and new functions.
The device can handle streaming high-definition audio. The device also uses Plantronics’ Vocalyst voice-recognition service to let you manage email, check the weather, or update Facebook using voice commands. The Plantronics MyHeadset app gives you tips, tricks and tools for Android.
If you triple tap the Call button, the headset dials Vocalyst, the voice and text service, which can read your text messages to your while you drive. You can stream music, podcasts, navigation directions, and other audio to the headset. Voice alerts can tell you how much talk time is remaining. You can monitor your headset battery level on the iPhone or Android smarphone. The headset sells for $99. It weighs 17 grams and can run for six hours of talk time and five days of standby time.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:01 PM PDT
Sometimes, just “liking” a friend’s Facebook update isn’t enough. That’s when a good old-fashioned voice call is in order.
Today, T-Mobile is expanding its efforts to let you call your Facebook friends for free with the launch of its new Bobsled VoIP apps on iOS, Android, and the web.
The new apps greatly increase the presence of T-Mobile’s Bobsled service, which launched back in April on Facebook as a way to easily call your friends on the social network. And as an extra nicety, the Bobsled web app also allows you to call any phone number in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico for free from your desktop browser.
There are already plenty of mobile VoIP offerings available, including Rebtel and Viber, but Bobsled is the first to be solely devoted to letting you chat with your Facebook followers. That may ultimately help the Bobsled apps become more widely adopted, especially among teens and users who keep a close watch on their monthly cellular voice minutes.
Just as with the original Facebook Bobsled app, the new apps are also powered by Vivox’s VoiceEverywhere service. T-Mobile has previously said that it plans to integrate video chat into Bobsled as well.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 08:21 PM PDT
Apple chief executive Tim Cook said today the company will hold a celebration of Steve Jobs life at a special event on Oct. 19.

In a memo to employees, Cook said the event will take place at 10 am at Apple’s outdoor amphitheater at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Although the memo didn’t say so, the event is not likely to be open to the public. Silicon Valley hasn’t seen an occasion like this since the public memorial service for David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, who died in 1996 at the age of 83. That event was held at the Memorial Church at Stanford University.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Jobs died of respiratory failure at about 3 pm on Oct. 5. The death certificate said that the underlying cause was “metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor.” Jobs had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009.
Cook’s memo follows:
Team,
Like many of you, I have experienced the saddest days of my lifetime and shed many tears during the past week. But I've found some comfort in the extraordinary number of tributes and condolences from people all over the world who were touched by Steve and his genius. And I've found comfort in both telling and listening to stories about Steve.
Although many of our hearts are still heavy, we are planning a celebration of his life for Apple employees to take time to remember the incredible things Steve achieved in his life and the many ways he made our world a better place. The celebration will be held on Wednesday, October 19, at 10am in the outdoor amphitheater on the Infinite Loop campus. We'll have more details on AppleWeb closer to the date, including arrangements for employees outside of Cupertino.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Tim

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 06:10 PM PDT
kindle fireAmazon is under fire for its new Kindle Fire tablet, the new target of a patent lawsuit by Smartphone Technologies of Acacia Research Corporation, a patent aggregating and licensing
Acacia Research has hit up a number of other smartphone manufacturers including blackberry creator Research in Motion (RIM) and Apple, according to PaidContent. Patent wars such as this one have forced companies into multi-million dollar settlements. RIM paid out a $612 million settlement in a case against another patent licensing firm NTP. Litigation against Apple has not come to fruition for Acacia, however, as the two continue down duke it out.
The Kindle Fire is on trial for a number of different patent violations including one for having icons lead to an action on the screen, for instance opening an application. Others include patents from Palm for the ability to run more than one calendar at a time.
Amazon announced its new tablet in late September and plans to start shipping units on November 15th. Preorders are currently being taken. The tablet will cost $199 dollars. On the same day, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos also announced its original Kindle will sell for $79, and a $99 Kindle touch, which is also available in 3G for $149. The latter is also a target of Acacia’s patent lawsuit against Amazon.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 05:48 PM PDT
iPhone 4SNew estimates from Wall Street analysts suggest Apple registered more than 3 million pre-orders for its newest smartphone, the iPhone 4S, after selling the device for one weekend.
Apple announced this morning it registered pre-orders for more than 1 million iPhone 4S phones in 24 hours, well beyond its previous record of 600,000 phones. New estimates peg the initial weekend’s sales to be somewhere north of 3 million, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky. That means Apple could sell more than 25 million iPhones in its fourth operating quarter this year, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said.
The last time Apple launched an iPhone, it was only available on AT&T. Apple opened the iPhone 4 up to Verizon Wireless in February this year. This time around, Apple is launching the phone on the three largest wireless carriers in the United States simultaneously, with the addition of Sprint. The iPhone 4 sold out in around 17 hours when it launched on Verizon Wireless in January. It also sold out in less than 24 hours on AT&T when it launched in June last year.
The iPhone 4S sports significant hardware upgrades, though it looks identical to the iPhone 4. The phone runs Apple’s A5 dual-core processor and reportedly has more memory. It also has an 8-megapixel camera, compared to the iPhone 5′s 5-megapixel camera. Apple normally releases a new phone every year, but the company atypically released the iPhone 4S later this year, just after its most recent operating quarter ended September 25.
Pre-orders for the iPhone 4S began Friday last week. The company will start shipping the phone this Friday Oct. 14. It's available with a new 2-year contract for $199, $299 and $399 for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models of the phone respectively. The phone is available on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless.  The iPhone 4S will make its worldwide debut October 14 in United States, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, Germany and the U.K.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 05:38 PM PDT
Early today, Google started showing off Dart, a new language for structured web programming.
This language is, as a product of the 21st century, designed with modern web browsers and modern devices — from tablets to servers — in mind.
According to a reportedly leaked email from last year, the language “aims to maintain the dynamic nature of JavaScript but have a better performance profile and be amenable to tooling for large projects.”
Dart is said to be a replacement for JavaScript (or CoffeeScript, or ClojureScript). It’s class-based, and it was developed to bring more simplicity, efficiency and scalability to the table. Key minds behind the project include Google programmers Lars Bak, Gilad Bracha and Kasper Lund.
Bak writes on the Google Code blog that applications written in Dart can be executed on a native virtual machine, or can be translated to JavaScript and executed on a JavaScript engine.
In addition to the language itself, Google is also releasing basic tools for checking, compiling and running Dart code as well as libraries.
“Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent,” wries Bak. “To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means you can start coding without types and add them later as needed. We believe Dart will be great for writing large web applications.”
If you’ve done programming before (in any number of common programming languages), the syntax is simple enough to pick up and will look and feel at least somewhat familiar.
Google engineer Bob Nystrom, who worked on the project, took to Reddit to answer questions about the new language.
“Its syntax, while uninspiring, is familiar and easy to pick up for millions of programmers,” Nystrom wrote. “I wish it had a little more razzle dazzle but I can’t deny that literally on my first day of writing Dart code, I was productive in it.”
He noted that the language is based on the “workhorse features” classes and first-class functions. “I know it’s cool to hate on classes these days,” he noted, “but it’s worth remembering how much of the world’s successful code is written in a class-based language. And, of course, closures are delightful.”
The rest of Nystrom’s Reddit thread acts as a pretty informative FAQ for Dart.
Googler William Shields puts the language in perspective with some words about Google Web Tools (GWT) in a thread on Hacker News.
“What’s simple in JavaScript with anonymous objects and duck typing doesn’t quite gel with Java, so you’ve had to do things like use JSNI for edge cases. Google has some incredibly large and ocmplex JavaScript apps (e.g., GMail). While GMail isn’t written in GWT, GWT is aimed at that kind of application with deferred binding and the benefits of static type analysis.
“What if you took that expertise… to produce a language that could run on the server, run in the browser (for browsers that support that) and compile to Javascript (for browsers that don’t)?”
Shields concludes that the Java-reminiscent syntax is “no surprise” and that he expects to see a JVM implementation soon “that will then leverage all the existing Java libraries.”
One of the questions Nystrom remarked on was whether Google would be able to support a sustained committment to yet another programming language. After all, the company is still in a very formative and critical stage with Google+ and is supporting a good number open-source programming projects, including another programming language, Go.
Nystrom says questioning Google’s committment “is a valid concern. It was a concern of mine when I joined the team. I don’t know what will happen, but what I can say is Google’s already put more resources on it than I was expecting. Gilad [Bracha] doesn’t f-ck around, and he came to Google to work on Dart. I don’t think he’d be happy if it fizzled out.”

Filed under: VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 05:37 PM PDT
Steve Jobs’ first “One more thing” announcement took place on July 21, 1999 when he presented Wi-Fi to the world with the aid of a hula hoop. In total he would go on to make 18 of these big finish announcements at Apple events, including one introducing a live performance of the song “Waiting for the World to Change” by John Mayer.
In this infographic we look back at 11 of the most memorable final announcements from Jobs’ keynotes.

Sean McColgan created this infographic for PromotionalCodes.org.uk.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 05:09 PM PDT
acer-aspire-ultrabook-s3
Acer’s first major MacBook Air competitor, the Aspire S3-951 laptop, will go on sale this week, the company announced today.
The MacBook Air has run virtually uncontested in the ultra-thin laptop category with its blazing fast speeds, SSD hard drive and tiny form factor. But Intel’s Ultrabook line, starting with the Aspire S3, will provide a Windows-7-powered challenge to the Air.
The biggest difference between the S3 and the Air is the price. The first Aspire S3 Ultrabook will sell for $899 while the comparable 13-inch MacBook Air costs $1,299. And in this economy, that sort of price difference is significant, especially for two devices that offer similar power and designs.
In the specs department, the Aspire S3 offers up a 13.3-inch screen with 1366-by-768 resolution, a 20GB solid state drive running Windows 7, a 320GB hard drive for storing media and programs, a Core i5 processor, and 4GB of RAM. To top it off, the machine weighs just under three pounds.
Whether you’d pick between the S3 or a MacBook Air will come down to what you can afford and a Mac versus Windows preference. Honestly, I could go either way and make solid arguments on both sides. Acer will likely continue to release more models of Ultrabooks with different hardware configurations, and Toshiba’s got an Ultrabook in the pipline too, so this competition will continue to be fun to watch.
Would you pick up an Acer Ultrabook or are you willing to pay the premium for an Apple-made ultra-thin laptop?

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 03:30 PM PDT
friend.ly logoSocial network giant Facebook has acquired Q&A service Friend.ly, the startup revealed in a blog post today.
Friend.ly is a Facebook application that allows users to ask and answer questions. Because the service has access to a Facebook user’s account information, it has a slight advantage over competitors like Formspring.me. Although, those who use Friend.ly tend to ask less personal questions.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it seems Facebook was more interested in Friend.ly’s talent than the service itself.
As part of the acquisition deal, Friend.ly will continue to operate as a separate service, while its 10 employees (including CEO Ed Baker) will work on new projects at Facebook.
“We've admired the team's efforts for some time now, and we're looking forward to having Ed and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement about the acquisition.
Founded in 2010, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Friend.ly previously raised a total of $5 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and others.

Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 02:44 PM PDT
socialgrappleGoogle has acquired Twitter statistics startup SocialGrapple, a move suggesting the search titan is looking to boost its Google+ analytics tracking abilities.
Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Google launched Google+ a few months ago, and while the new social network has attracted a fair amount of headlines, it still has a long way to go to catch up to Facebook and Twitter in size. One way the company will help Google+ grow is by deepening its feature set and depth of third-party apps. Adding a premium analytics service that companies and brands can use to track and monitor accounts would certainly be a step in the right direction.
SocialGrapple was founded a year ago by Y-Combinator-bred Andrey Petrov with the goal of giving Twitter users interactive charts and better data representation of Twitter statistics. The service lets you compare different kinds of followers, see changes in your follower count, among other analytics.
Petrov writes on the SocialGrapple homepage about the acquisition:
SocialGrapple started a year ago, and launched only a couple of months later as a social graph analytics service. It was an amazing learning experience and I am incredibly grateful to all the users who supported this venture. Much of what was built over the months came directly from your needs and requests, so I feel like we were all on this journey together.
Since the first launch, we also explored keyword tracking and branched out to other social networks, but this was only scratching the surface. I'm looking forward to taking these ideas to the next level and revealing metrics on an incredibly larger scale.
Thank you again for being a part of my journey. I strive to continue building tools that make the world more transparent and empowered, and I can't imagine a better partner than Google.
Do you think SocialGrapple could help Google improve Google+ account tracking?

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 01:02 PM PDT
Today, at long last, Facebook has introduced its application for Apple’s iPad.
The app will give users “the full Facebook experience, right at your fingertips,” writes former Microsoft employee and current Facebook engineer Leon Dubinsky on the Facebook blog.
“Facebook on the iPad feels fun,” he summarized.
Facebook’s new iPad offering will let you access chat features, messages, photos and profiles. The app places particular emphasis on visuals, for obvious reasons. Dubinsky writes, “Photos really shine on the iPad. They're bigger and easy to flip through, like a real photo album. It's like having a slideshow with all your friends and memories, wherever you go.” Touch capabilities mean you can swipe a finger to slide through an album and pinch to zoom in on a picture. You can also go into full-screen mode, as seen in the screenshots below.
The app features a slick navigation bar on the left side for finding games and apps, as well as a drop-down box with notifications and new messages available on each page at the touch of a fingertip.
In addition to chatting, browsing and flipping through pictures, you can also play games in fullscreen mode, watch high-resolution videos in line and stream content to Airplay devices.
The long-awaited release has been one of the more anticipated — and hotly contested — application launches of the year.
Back in June, a Project Spartan rumor surfaced. Reportedly, the project was to build an HTML5-based web app for mobile Safari that would to circumvent Apple's App Store. The rumor originated on TechCrunch. While we’re sure that a couple Facebook engineers could have been working on such a project (the company’s intrapreneurial culture means that small teams are working independently on all kinds of projects all the time, but many of them never see the light of day), Spartan turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
In fact, the company’s iPad app had already been in development for nearly a year.
In addition to today’s iPad announcement, Facebook has also given its iPhone app a facelift. The new version of the app features faster search, simpler navigation and better access to games and Facebook apps.
You can get both apps free of charge in the iTunes App Store right now.
As far as an Android or other OS tablet app is concerned, a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat, “"We work closely with every mobile device maker and platform provider; however, we aren’t announcing anything beyond the iPad at this time.
“Tablets are obviously an exciting segment of the mobile market now and we are as excited as everyone is in seeing the new device experiences that may be coming down the line. People today can visit m.facebook.com on their Android tablets and have access to most of the features and functionality of the iPad app, including the ability to access app and play games.”

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:45 PM PDT
Moving into enterprise video communications, on-demand disk publisher Rimage has agreed to acquire Qumu for $52 million in cash and stock.
The deal gives publicly traded Rimage a foothold in the fast-growing video communications market for enterprises. In the deal, Rimage will pick up more than 100 companies as clients in the ranks of the Global 1,000. The deal is expected to close in the next day.
Rimage distributes on-demand media on Blu-ray disks, CDs and DVDs. With Qumu, it can also distribute that on-demand content to any mobile or desktop device. For example, Rimage takes video taken by surveillance cameras and publishes it to discs. With this new acquisition, it can publish that video to smartphones or the web as needed.
Sherman Black, chief executive of Rimage in Minneapolis, said in an interview the Qumu acquisition is a “cornerstone” deal for his company as video communicaitons and social applications become more popular in businesses.
“We started an organic effort in this space but found a way to accelerate that with Qumu,” Black said. “We now have a publishing platform that is bigger than any others out there.”
Qumu helps corporations create, manage, and securely distribute video and related content. Its customers are in the banking, technology, telecommunications, university, and government markets. It sells its products direct to companies as well as through partners Sony and AT&T.
Qumu’s revenue has increased more than 45 percent a year for the past three years. In 2010, it generated $10.3 million in revenue and it is on track to hit $15 million in 2011. The company is targeting $21 million in revenue in 2012. Rimage hopes to take Qumu into new markets faster than Qumu could do on its own. Ray Hood, chief executive of Qumu in San Bruno, Calif., will remain the leader of the Qumu team and become a senior vice president at Rimage. In an interview, Hood said the company operates a federated content delivery network and competes with Cisco, Polycom, Vbrick, Sonic Foundry and others.
“We’re like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube for the enterprise,” Hood said. “We make the video secure and targetable to the right employees.”
Rimage said it will increase its cash dividend in the fourth quarter to 17 cents a share, which is up 70 percent. Rimage expects to increase revenues by double digits in 2012. For 2011, Rimage expects revenues of $86 million to $88 million and earnings per share of 42 cents to 45 cents.
Black said the company is launching its own “push-based delivery platform” in the future. That is equivalent to iTunes for enterprises. Rimage was founded in 1978 and went public years ago. It has 180 employees. Qumu was originally started as eScene Networks. It was acquired by Inktomi, which was then bought by Yahoo. Qumu’s current founders bought the company back from Yahoo and it now has 55 employees.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:41 PM PDT
Today, Facebook extended Facebook Platform on mobile to give its huge network of third-party developers better tools and more access to on-the-go users.
This news comes directly on the heels of Facebook’s iPad app launch, a long-anticipated event itself.
Noting that around 350 million people use Facebook every month on a mobile device, Facebook engineer Luke Shepard writes on the company’s developer blog that third-party app developers will now be able to access their users on iOS devices and via the social network’s mobile website.
“We are at the beginning of bringing Facebook Platform apps to mobile,” Shepard cautions. “The features we are launching today are still under development. They will evolve as we learn more about building richer social experiences on mobile devices. In addition, we will extend our native support for more mobile platforms such as Android in the near future.”
In the past, Facebook’s bookmarks, requests and news feed social channels were not available to mobile apps on the network’s platform. Starting today, if a user engages with a third-party app on a mobile device, he or she will get a bookmark to the mobile versions of the app. If a native version of that app is installed, it will launch anytime a user taps that app’s bookmark in Facebook on an iOS device. If the device is not installed, the user will be directed to the app’s iTunes App Store page.
Facebook’s new requests dialog allows users to receive requests anywhere the app is supported. “For example, if a user plays a move in a game on Facebook.com, their friend can respond from her iPhone,” writes Shepard. “As with bookmarks, users will tap the notification and land directly on the mobile version of your app, whether it is a native iOS app or a mobile website.”
The whole tap-to-go-to-native-app feature will also apply to news feed stories.
In addition to these updates, Facebook is also launching a new feature, authenticated referrals. This feature means that a third-party app’s users who come to the app via Facebook stay connected to Facebook.
Perhaps most importantly from a business perspective, Facebook is bringing support for Credits, its virtual currency,
to mobile web apps. All mobile web games on Facebook Platform are required to use Facebook Credits exclusively for payments. Native iOS apps are not required to do this.
Shepard cites Flixster, Gilt Groupe, Huffington Post, EA and Zynga as companies that are already using the new features. “Most of these apps are built using HTML5, providing an experience that seamlessly works across iOS, Android, and other mobile devices,” he notes.
On October 8, Facebook will be holding a mobile hacker event in Silicon Valley; Facebookers will be on hand to answer questions and train mobile developers on these new tools.
Image courtesy of johnkarakatsanis.
DevBeatCheck out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT

Leisure Suit Larry was a tacky video game series that debuted in 1987, chronicling the failed attempts of Larry Laffer, the world’s least successful lover, to get women into bed. But it did sell more than 10 million units, with regular sequels debuting as recently as 2009. It showed that sex, or the lack of it in Larry’s case, sells. Now Larry is about to get some Viagra.
Replay Games has announced that it has secured worldwide rights to the Leisure Suit Larry franchise for all game platforms. Over time, the series has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and Replay hopes to turn Larry into a case study in rebooting a franchise with retro appeal.
The company will work with Larry’s original creator, Al Lowe, to bring back all of the Leisure Suit Larry games, re-imagined and redesigned for the future, Replay chief executive Paul Trowe told VentureBeat. The company will also work on entirely new Larry games if the initial games are successful. The key will be to make those games fun for modern gamers.
“We originally hooked players with the concept of a naughty game that was unusual and not found anywhere else,” Lowe said in an interview. “They stayed and liked the games because they were funny. My goal is to make it funny, and there is a sore lack of humor today in video games.”
Austin, Texas,-based Replay is hoping to cash in on the nostalgia factor. It will target all of the aging male gamers who grew up with Larry. Players who grew up with video games are still playing them, and other games that targeted ’80s and ’90s player nostalgia — such as LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island — have generated considerable sales.
Lowe and Replay will first revisit Larry’s original adventure, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The game, in its new high-definition glory, will debut in the fourth quarter of 2012, or perhaps sooner. The original title debuted in 1987 and Lowe stayed with it through six adventure games and several auxiliary titles until about 1998.
Trowe said he had been working to acquire the original Sierra properties for more than 10 years and he was finally ready to breathe new life into the franchise after releasing Larry from the “clutches of corporate America.”
Trowe got the money to start his own game company after he sold his previous startup, Pulse Interactive, to SK Telecom in 2006. After a two-year no-compete expired, he started Replay Games in 2008.
“Nobody would do a deal with me,” Trowe said.”But this is a coup as far as I’m concerned. I wouldn’t make this game without Al.”
The Larry franchise was recently owned by Vivendi Universal, which acquired Sierra (via acquisitions of parent firms) years ago and then sold it to Codemasters, which published a title called Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, in 2009. That game was done without consultation with Lowe and didn’t sell well. Critics hated it, with GameTrailers.com giving it a 2.3 out of 10 rating.
“I watched the franchise dissipate and get watered down,” Lowe said. “It was not fun to watch. One of them thought it was all about creating basketball breasts. That wasn’t it at all. Paul said he would get the rights and I wanted to redeem my creation.”
Last year, Codemasters decided to license the property to Replay Games. Replay has rights to publish on the PC, Mac, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, iOS, Android, Steam, On-Live, Gaikai, and all major affiliate portals. The strategy is to focus on digital game distribution, not retail games.
The new series has just as much chance to succeed as any. After all, games exploit violence for the sake of entertainment all of the time. There might as well be a comic game that exploits sex.
“My belief is it is easier to do violence,” Lowe said. “Comedy is harder. I don’t have a good answer for why. But I am not interested in turning Larry into a shooter game.”
Lowe said he will oversee production of the games so that they meet the highest standards. The actual developer will be Adventure Mob, a game studio that will use the Unity Technologies game engine for cross-platform game creation. Oded Sharon, chief executive of Adventure Mob, created the studio in June along with Oran Bar-tal. The company is a spin-off of Corbomite Games, which was making adventure games.
Trowe, who has been working on games since he was 12, when he was a beta tester for Sierra On-Line, founded Replay Games in 2008. The company  has five employees. Rivals include Aspyr Media, 505 Games, Conspiracy Entertainment, and Mastiff. Trowe said that Replay has begun raising a $5 million round so that it can publish classic games in high-definition on new game platforms.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:57 AM PDT
Facebook isn’t the only platform where social games are booming. Revenue from non-Facebook social games is expected to grow from the current amount of $3.2 billion to $5.6 billion by 2014, according to estimates released today by social app platform Viximo and SuperData Research.
The study could be biased because it was released by Viximo, which has a vested interest in making social games grow outside of Facebook. However, the study is backed up by some hard data and was conducted by SuperData, which came up with the estimate by surveying 774,158 unique transactions by 152,159 individuals in social games for the six months ending June 1, 2011.
The study found that while Asia is the largest social games market, non-Facebook platforms in Western markets will be responsible for nearly one quarter of worldwide social gaming within the next three years. Despite Facebook’s apparent dominance, it only represents about a third of worldwide traffic for social networks. While Facebook leads in the U.S., the majority of social gaming revenue is made on other platforms, particularly overseas.
Key social game markets Brazil, Germany, Russia and Turkey are seeing huge growth in non-Facebook social gaming traffic. Developers who target those markets can see good distribution, strong monetization, and lower costs for acquiring new customers.
"The social web beyond Facebook is often overlooked when it comes to games and applications.  As it turns out, social networks beyond Facebook represent a non-trivial — in fact, significant — and fertile ground for games and apps," said Dale Strang, chief executive of Viximo.  "What we uncovered with this study was just how quickly non-Facebook social gaming is exploding around the world, giving game-makers a terrific opportunity to reach new audiences and generate new revenue."
The total social game market, including Facebook, is expected to reach $8.6 billion by the end of 2014 (not counting ad revenue). Asia will account for about $2 billion total revenue for 2011, but South America and Western and Eastern Europe are growing at very fast rates. Russia has 35 million users of social games and Brazil has 32.6 million. Germany is generating the most social gaming revenue in Europe with more than $173 million in expected revenue this year. That is expected to reach $250 million by 2014.
Among the large regional networks are Hyves in the Netherlands, Tuenti in Spain, StudiVZ in German, and Badoo in the United Kingdom. Google+ is also expected to provide a solid platform for social games outside of Facebook. Viximo’s platform for games and apps reaches more than 150 million users across a variety of social networks.

Filed under: games, social



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:28 AM PDT
Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang is apparently interested in buying out the company and taking it private, reports Reuters.
Yahoo has experienced some notable setbacks of late that have put its future in question. The company fired CEO Carol Bartz in September because of her inability to grow the business. Following her departure, Yahoo and its advisers reportedly began working on a strategic review that could include a sale. However, interim CEO Tim Morse hasn’t been clear about the possibility of selling the company.
If Yahoo is up for sale, a deal from Yang would involve selling off his 3.63 percent stake in the company. Fellow Yahoo co-founder David Filo would also likely sell his nearly six percent stake. The report from Reuters indicates that a handful of private equity firms were potentially interested in the deal, including Bain Capital, Silver Lake Partners, and Hellman and Friedman.
Yang’s strategy for taking the company private might have something to do with Yahoo’s poor stock price, which limits its ability to make acquisitions that could help boost its market share in advertising and search. A sale would also allow Yang and associates to more easily sell off its international business in Japan to pay off some of the company’s debt.
Previously, VentureBeat reported that both Microsoft and Alibaba had expressed interest in purchasing Yahoo.

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat



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Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:24 AM PDT
Today, Motorola unveiled the ET1, a 7-inch, rugged tablet created with the enterprise in mind.
The tablet was constructed to offer more security and sturdiness than a consumer tablet would need. It also features multi-user login options and enterprise applications for workforce and inventory management.
The 1.4-pound ET1 features a 7-inch touchscreen and front and rear cameras. It will will run the Android 2.3 operating system, Gingerbread, which has been optimized specifically for enterprise use. The tablet’s specs also include a 1GHz dual-core processor and 8GB of onboard storage capability, which can be expanded to 32GB with an microSD card.
The device’s Corning Gorilla Glass touchscreen is around 30 percent thicker than most consumer displays, and it is recessed to provide extra shock protection. ET1s are also supposed to be able to handle liquid spills and temperature changes better than consumer tablets would.
Price-wise, the ET1 weighs in at just under $1000 per unit for bulk orders. Because the rather rugged-looking tablets are built to withstand daily workplace and warehouse use, units are expected to last between three to five years.
The ET1 is expected to be rolled out first to employees in warehouses and retail outlets. For stores, Motorola has equipped the tablets to help employees with product comparisons for customers and with locating inventory in a network of retail locations. The tablet will also allow employees to accept credit card payments anytime, anywhere, making it a sort of mobile cash register.
Here’s a demo video showing the ET1 in action:

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat



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