VentureBeat |
- HTML5 cross-platform game company Moblyng shuts down (exclusive)
- Marvell processor fuels the latest One Laptop per Child XO 3.0 tablet
- Digital entertainment is changing the living room for good (infographic)
- Putting Leonard Nimoy and Woz on stage together is every bit as awesome as you’d think (video)
- Steam game service doubles sales, reaches 5M concurrent users
- Instagram now flooding Facebook with 6 photos per second
- Symantec says some source code stolen, no customer information exposed
- Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy speaks at DEMO (video)
- Netflix UK competitor LoveFilm signs streaming agreement with iTV & BBC Worldwide
- U.S. Army releases gamer gear for Xbox & PlayStation
- Chartbeat takes $1M from current investors, raising more later this year
- Quad-core iPads (& perhaps iPhones) coming soon
- New Internet business in four days: Wharton School workshop for MBAs
- Public interest group urges FTC to investigate Facebook for Timeline privacy violations
- Nikkei: Sony to name Kazuo Hirai president, but Stringer remains CEO
- Survey: Gamers playing more on mobile than consoles, PCs
| HTML5 cross-platform game company Moblyng shuts down (exclusive) Posted: 07 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST
Just a year ago, the company said it an filing it had raised about $7.5 million of a $10.9 million round, but it was simply a follow-on funding to its previous round. Stewart Putney (pictured right), believed that HTML5 games were going to become predominant on mobile devices in the future. The benefit was that developers could create games once and have them run on a wide variety of devices as well as on social networks and the web. For users, such games meant that they could play a game on one device and challenge another player playing the same game on another platform. But Putney confirmed in an email that the company has shut down and the staff of 20 employees has been laid off. “We did not monetize enough to stay in business,” said Putney. Redwood City, Calif.-based Moblyng was founded as FlipTrack in 2007, porting Flash slide shows to mobile operating systems. But it changedits plan to help developers quickly port their mobile games to other operating systems. Then it focused on making HTML5 games on social networking sites and mobile devices. HTML5 is viewed as the lingua franca of the web, a protocol for creating software that can run on web sites, mobile phones, and social networks. It has become more popular lately because games in the Flash format often run poorly or not at all in mobile browsers. HTML5 has been used instead for mobile apps, but in games, HTML5 has had mixed results, since many games in HTML5 run slow. HTML5 is seen as a large competitor for Flash, which most casual games are built on. Most websites that host videos also use Flash to play them. But Flash is lacking on some mobile devices — most notably the iPhone and iPad — while HTML5 is available in most mobile browsers. Moblyng had alliances with Playdom and Lolapps, but it had more success creating its own games that could run in a cross-platform manner, where a player could log into a game on Facebook and play against someone on a mobile phone or the web. The company’s site says it has more than 10 million downloads. Putney said the games have gotten traction, but too late. The company launched its HTML5 games on the Facebook HTML5 mobile platform in mid-October, but the audience started growing in December, but time and cash ran out. “I am very proud of the work we did, the HTML5 games are still live and we have a growing base of active users,” Putney said. “I remain very confident HTML5 will be a great platform for social games and media, it is simply a question of when. We just unleashed a group of kick-ass HTML5-focused professionals into the market, so my hope is they will help the HTML5 ecosystem develop that much faster.” Moblyng’s investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital. The company also received another $500,000 from unnamed angels. There are a variety of other HTML5 game makers out there, such as Game Closure, and Sibblingz has also created tools for building cross-platform HTML5 games. Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Marvell processor fuels the latest One Laptop per Child XO 3.0 tablet Posted: 06 Jan 2012 08:00 PM PST
Unveiled today at the Consumer Electronics Show‘s opening press reception, the OLPC XO 3.0 tablet is the latest attempt to get computing power in the hands of every child in the world. Marvell’s Armada family of low-power processors — which are in tens of millions of cell phones and mobile devices — are the brains of the new tablet, which is razor-thin yet packs a lot of computing power and is rugged for use in classroom environments. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell also said that the first Marvell-powered XO 1.75 laptop from OLPC will begin shipping in March to school children in Uruguay and Nicaragua. OLPC’s current laptops have been distributed to 2.4 million children in 42 countries and 25 languages, said Edward McNierney, chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child. "The XO 3.0 builds on many of the technology breakthroughs we made with the XO 1.75, including the use of the Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, resulting in a significant decrease in power consumption—a critical issue for students in the developing world,” McNierney said. Weili Dai, co-founder of Marvell, said that the company is proud to use its technology for the benefit of children in education applications. The countries of Uruguay and Nicaragua have ordered 75,000 units of the OLPC XO 1.75 laptop for delivery in March.Those also use Marvell’s ARM-based Armada PXA618 SOC processor, which delivers the same performance as its predecessor at half the power consumption. That laptop has a price of $185. The XO 3.0 tablet will also feature the Marvell ARMADA PXA618 SOC processor and Avastar Wi-Fi SOC. Other features include the ability to be charged by solar panels, hand cranks, and other alternative power sources. It has a sunlight readable display and can run either Android or Linux. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Digital entertainment is changing the living room for good (infographic) Posted: 06 Jan 2012 06:42 PM PST
Nowadays, people miss shows on purpose so they can watch them on their time, on the device of their choice. There’s none of this gather the family around the tube for a little late night Lawrence Welk. Now even my grandma is surfing YouTube for variety show reruns on her iPad. The infographic below shows she is far from alone. In fact, 1.2 billion unique viewers watch videos online in October 2011. Indeed, watching video online is better for money makers as well. After introducing video to its customer service offerings, Dell reported a 5 percent decrease in service call volume. Considering how time consuming these calls can be, employee time can be reallocated into something more financially efficient, changing the bottom line. There has been a push amongst major media companies for a new type of entertainment delivery: TV Everywhere. TV Everywhere is the idea that people should be able to bring the living room with them, watching shows and movies on their time and their dime. This new push has inspired big industry deals. Disney and Comcast recently reached an agreement to bring Disney’s properties to any Comcast Xfinity subscriber’s device of choice. Other companies such as Netflix are moving their products toward streaming, and putting less emphasis on physical DVD rentals. Physical deliveries put limitations on where you can engage with content, which is the opposite path media companies want to take. Interestingly, however, it seems how your media provider started out dictates what type of video entertainment people will watch on your service. For instance, Netflix began as a DVD rental unit — a faster, easier, to-your-door alternative to Blockbuster. Perhaps because of its early ties to the DVD industry, more than half of Netflix subscribers watch movies. On the other hand, Hulu was born out of the YouTube category, where people flocked for quick snippets of video. Now a whopping 73 percent of Hulu-goers use the service specifically for watching television shows. These services are changing what the living room looks like. It’s no longer a couch, recliner and remote, but can also be a doctor’s waiting room, subway train or park. Check out what else is happening as entertainment moves from silver screen to big screen to portable screen in the infographic below:
Filed under: media, mobile        
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| Putting Leonard Nimoy and Woz on stage together is every bit as awesome as you’d think (video) Posted: 06 Jan 2012 05:31 PM PST
VentureBeat Founder and Editor-In-Chief Matt Marshall had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and legendary actor Leonard Nimoy on stage at the VentureBeat/DEMO Enterprise Disruption event last night. Having the co-creator of arguably the most important tech company in the world on stage at the same time as the man famous for captivating entire generations of hopeful space travelers as Star Trek’s Spock is every bit as awesome as you’d expect. This was the first meeting between the two men since their first encounter in 1988 when they casually walked passed each other on Moscow’s Red Square without saying a word. Fortunately, Nimoy and Wozniak were much more talkative this time, as you can see in the video of the interview embedded below. After Woz admitted to stealing an usher’s name tag at a local theater to sneak into the midnight premiere showing of the first Star Trek movie, Nimoy followed up by asking him about the practicalities of some of the fictional technology used in Star Trek. “Is it possible to create a universal translator?,” Nimoy asked, which prompted Woz to explain some of the current technologies available — namely, using Google Translator through a mobile device. Other highlights include the plausibility of artificial intelligence, references to the race of cyborg drones called the Borg and more. Anyone who wasn’t able to watch the live stream of our Enterprise Disruption event yesterday should check out our video coverage, including Nimoy’s discussion from earlier in the night. Filed under: DEMO, media, offBeat, VentureBeat        
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| Steam game service doubles sales, reaches 5M concurrent users Posted: 06 Jan 2012 05:29 PM PST Today Valve disclosed their Steam sales data from last year, and once again their units sales have increased by more than 100 percent for the seventh year running. Steam now houses over 1,800 games for its consistently growing user base of 40 million accounts. The infamous, wallet-emptying Steam Holiday Sale was responsible for the most concurrent users in Steam’s history, reaching over 5 million users at once. The amount of data transferred by the digital distribution service doubled over last year’s, serving over 780 petabytes, or 780,000 terabytes. Steamworks was also a major success in 2011. 14.5 million copies of the 400 currently available Steamworks games were registered last year, an increase of 67 percent from 2010. In-game item trading, a service that started in Team Fortress 2, generated over 19 million traded items. Steam’s support of free-to-play games began in June of 2011, launching with only 5 titles, but increasing that number to 18 by the year’s end, with a promise of many more to come. Gabe Newell, the president of Valve, is looking forward to some of the further advancements Steam will see in the coming year, including “the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house.” We might not see Half-Life 2: Episode 3 any time soon, but Steam’s continuing evolution and growth throughout 2012 is nearly inevitable. Filed under: games        
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| Instagram now flooding Facebook with 6 photos per second Posted: 06 Jan 2012 05:05 PM PST A fun little iPhone application for sharing stylized mobile captures ballooned into a social network of significance in 2011. Today, the app’s insta-photo-sharing effects are felt with increasing force on Facebook and the rest of the web. Instagram, the still iPhone-only application, is penetrating the world’s largest social network at a rate of roughly six photos per second, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared exclusively with VentureBeat. The figure means that the filter-ific application is now contributing more than half a million photos to the Facebook experience each day. That’s a hell of a lot of Sepia-tinted photos of bangs, food truck meals and sunsets. For some perspective, Instagram was averaging a total of three photo uploads per second to its service at the end of 2010. It now sends twice that many photos to Facebook alone each second. Instagram, launched on the App Store in Oct. 2010, was an insta-success with iPhone owners. The service has more than 15 million users who upload photos at a rate of more than 60 photos per second (based on 2011 year-in-review numbers). A large percentage of those folks — as much as 10 percent, based on Systrom’s revelation — love their filtered machinations so much that they push them out to Facebook for their extended networks to enjoy. Users are also sharing their photos to Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and other third-party destinations so much so that Instagram, which does not operate a full-fledged web experience, is now seeing 10 million page views each day and 300 million page views per month, Systrom told GigaOm Friday. In a wise move, the startup just enabled full-sized photo-sharing for members who select to post their photos to Facebook. A photo shared with Facebook from Instagram is now added to an “Instagram Photos” album, showcased on the user’s Timeline and is large enough so that it looks to be a native part of the experience. “It feels right to share because you’re giving your Facebook friends a great experience,” Systrom explained of the big-photo update. “The reaction has been really positive from everyone in the community and we’re glad that people see this as making Instagram even more essential in their every day flow.” Just how important is Facebook-sharing to Instagram’s continued success? I’d speculate that there’s a strong correlation between the photos shared and the number of new users Instagram signs up each month. Systrom himself provided some anecdotal evidence to support the theory. “We've always been growing fast, but I think network effects help — we've got millions of people who love Instagram and they spread the word for us,” he told VentureBeat in a previous interview. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Symantec says some source code stolen, no customer information exposed Posted: 06 Jan 2012 04:11 PM PST A group of Anonymous members based in India has stolen the source code for Symantec’s anti-virus software. The security company confirmed the attack today after viewing the small amount of code released by the group, Lords of Dharmaraja, this morning. Symantec, which creates anti-virus software for businesses and consumers, discovered the potential hack on Wednesday when the group posted about its newest trophy on an Internet forum. At the time, Symantec believed only some documentation on source code for software built in 1999 was compromised. According to Symantec spokesperson Cris Paden, who spoke with VentureBeat over email, the cyber criminals posted a segment of code on the same forum, which led Symantec researchers to confirm the code’s theft. It turns out the source code is of two outdated enterprise-grade anti-virus products built just five or six years ago. No consumer products have been compromised. “Presently, we have no indication that the code disclosure impacts the functionality or security of Symantec's solutions,” said Paden. “Furthermore, there are no indications that customer information has been impacted or exposed at this time.” This is the second attack focused on Internet security companies performed by the hacker collective, Anonymous. The group recently infiltrated the servers of security analyst firm Stratfor stealing over 9,000 credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information. At the time Anonymous threatened to use the credit cards to make donations to charities as part of its vigilante appearance. In general, Anonymous doesn’t have a unified agenda, but it seems embarrassing security companies by infiltrating them and stealing credit cards and code is the flavor of the week. The two products in this attack, SAV 10.2 and SEP 11, have either died out or now run on new code. SAV 10.2 is still serviced by Symantec, but is retired software, no longer in production. SEP 11 has since been recoded to become SEP 12 and SEP 12.1. The company says its servers were not hit directly. Instead, the code was stolen from a third party source, which Paden says Symantec is still looking into and cannot give out further details. “Symantec is working to develop remediation process to ensure long-term protection for our customers' information,” said Paden. “We will communicate that process once the steps have been finalized.” Anonymous image via Shutterstock Filed under: security        
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| Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy speaks at DEMO (video) Posted: 06 Jan 2012 02:04 PM PST We were honored to have Leonard Nimoy, best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, as one of our speakers last night. VentureBeat and DEMO produced the event, which was hosted by Fusion-io, a leader in efficient server technology. As we gathered to discuss large-scale innovations and future-focused technologies, we were joined by Mr. Nimoy, who shared some of his thoughts on how science fiction of the past is becoming the scientific and technological reality in the present. Nimoy is in a unique position. Having been a fundamental part of the most influential science fiction series (arguably) ever, he’s associated with science and technology. But the man is an artist — he’s an actor by profession and also an excellent photographer But he realizes that curiosity and creativity drive both of these disparate pursuits, and he shares the importance of those two virtues with us, both through his words and his character. If there’s one thing I learned from listening to Mr. Nimoy both on- and offstage last night, it’s that he is completely devoid of arrogance or complacency; and his wide-eyed, unpretentious approach to people and ideas is part of what makes him so inspiring. He is endlessly inquisitive, and he showed us that he is willing to learn, whether from great minds like that of Steve Wozniak or from mere passers-by whose only commendations are the new bits of information they possess. His attitude was (to me, at least) a stark and refreshing contrast to the know-it-all aura we technologists sometimes acquire. When we involve ourselves with the day-to-day creation of the tools the future world will use, we tend to become a bit blasé, to acquire a certain road-weariness or ennui. We are distrustful of others’ ideas when we ought to be open-minded, and we are critical when we ought to be encouraging, for innovation’s sake. Nimoy ended his prepared remarks with a quotation from famous science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” I hope that we, like Nimoy, continue to explore our own strange, new worlds with enthusiasm and fresh eyes, and to innovate without regard for the realm of the impossible. Filed under: VentureBeat, video        
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| Netflix UK competitor LoveFilm signs streaming agreement with iTV & BBC Worldwide Posted: 06 Jan 2012 01:57 PM PST Video rental service LoveFilm subscribers in the UK will soon have streaming access to content from British television networks BBC Worldwide and iTV, LoveFilm’s parent company Amazon announced today. BBC Worldwide’s content library includes television shows like Doctor Who, Life On Mars, Torchwood Planet Earth and more. iTV’s library contains TV shows like Marchlands, Above Suspicion, Cold Feet and Secret Diary of a Call Girl. While people in the UK can already watch BBC and iTV content online via the iPlayer or OnDemand services, going through LoveFilm has its advantages, such as being able to watch all that content through a number of devices (iPad, Xbox, Playstation). LoveFilm’s motivation to beef up its index of streaming television show content is likely a direct response to new competition from Netflix, which plans to launch its streaming service in the UK and Irish markets soon. Netflix also recently inked a deal with BBC Worldwide to add content to its streaming library. Filed under: deals, media, VentureBeat        
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| U.S. Army releases gamer gear for Xbox & PlayStation Posted: 06 Jan 2012 12:58 PM PST
The U.S. Army is cashing in on civilians’ enthusiasm for first-person shooters with a new line of Army-branded gaming peripherals for, ahem, “modern gaming warfare,” as the accompanying copy reads. That’s as close as the marketers come to stating the obvious: This gear is for Modern Warfare franchise addicts. The lineup includes a three headsets, three rifle controllers and a backpack with a specially cushioned console-carrying area. The peripherals are set to come to all major retailers soon in 2012. The gear comes from CTA Digital, a shop specializing in gaming, mobile and camera peripherals. In the past, the company has come up with such innovative products as a blowing ball controller for bowling games and inflatable race cars for racing games such as Mario Kart. This is the first licensing agreement the shop has done to date. “We’re proud and honored that the Army chose to work with us.” said CTA CEO Sol Markowitz in a release. “We’re looking forward to a long and mutually beneficial partnership.” The company says the leftie- and rightie-friendly rifle controllers will be fully mapped for Dualshock features, including linking the trigger to the R1 button. One of the rifles was designed specifically with the PlayStation Move in mind. This device will allow players to match the real-world hardware with the in-game weapons by removing the scope, rear stock or muzzle as desired. One of the Army-branded headsets features 3D sound effects as well as RCA piggyback cables, an adjustable mike boom, a 14-foot cable, mute and game/chat volume controls. CTA is also releasing two ear-budded, throat-miked headsets for cancelling redundant mic noises. Here’s a sneak peak at the gear: Filed under: games        
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| Chartbeat takes $1M from current investors, raising more later this year Posted: 06 Jan 2012 12:31 PM PST
That might be a quote from cult classic The Big Lebowski, or it might be what Chartbeat recently told their current investors. Who’s to say? While we don’t know the play-by-play of the conversations, we do know that hot-as-molten-gold analytics startup Chartbeat has taken an additional $1 million from existing investors only. This type of deal is called an inside round, and Chartbeat needed the extra cash to keep the lights on and sustain its growth between its $3 million seed round last year and the much larger round it plans to raise in 2012. "We didn't want to slow down, but we also didn't want to take money from the wrong people,” Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat. “So we got an inside note to keep things pumping while we go out and find backers for a much bigger round later this year." Chartbeat was incubated and accelerated at Betaworks, the same organization that got Bit.ly on its feet. Chartbeat provides real-time analytics to all kinds of websites and online publishers (disclosure: VentureBeat staffers are Chartbeat addicts; we use the service all the time to brag about how well our posts are doing). Chartbeat’s visually friendly dashboard shows visitors, load times and referring sites on a minute-by-minute basis. The service also provides alerts for site crashes or unreasonable slowness. Chartbeat’s investors include a long list of top-shelf names in the early-stage and angel funding universe, including Index Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Josh Felser’s Freestyle Capital, SoftTech VC, Jason Calacanis and a few others. Filed under: deals        
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| Quad-core iPads (& perhaps iPhones) coming soon Posted: 06 Jan 2012 12:07 PM PST
The A5 chip in the latest iPhone and iPad models supports dual-core processing only. Quad-core A6 chips are rumored to be in the works and may land in consumers’ hands as soon as this year. By looking at the most recent iOS beta’s code, as 9to5mac already has, we see the operating system supports up to four cores, numbered core.0 to core.3 (developers always start counting with the number 0; don’t ask us why, that’s just how it is). Quad-core mobile devices aren’t unheard of in these parts. Back in May, Nvidia started singing the praises of its new Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor. Code-named Project Kal-El (Superboy’s given name, for all you non-nerds), the chip was designed to give mobile phones and tablets performance capabilities on par with those of laptops and other personal computers. Just last fall, we saw Nvidia demonstrate a quad-core Windows 8 tablet, but the Tegra 3 chip came to market first on Asus’ legally beleaguered Transformer Prime Android tablet, a quad-core beast. In order to keep the iPad competitive, Apple has to start thinking about quad-core processing power. And quad-core processing would be an awfully nice advantage for gaming and other heavy-duty software. We’ll see if Apple launches new iPad (and perhaps iPhone) versions featuring quad-core processing in the next few months, but we’d be shocked if the company lets Android manufacturers sneak ahead of it in innovation for very long. Filed under: mobile        
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| New Internet business in four days: Wharton School workshop for MBAs Posted: 06 Jan 2012 11:45 AM PST Create an Internet business in four days; that's the goal of the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania’s workshop that finished yesterday. Students spent four days turning ideas into business prototypes and competing against each other in the course’s Innovation Tournament. In four days, Jan 2 – 5, MBA students learned how to pitch, create and launch a new web-based business. Each student entered the class with an idea and through a process of elimination, seven business ideas and teams emerged. Students learned the basics of creating an online business; from identifying target audiences and pitching an idea, to search engine optimization and online traffic reporting. At the end of the workshop, the organizers announced the winners of the Innovation Tournament. Each team won on a specific metric, such as most pageviews for the business website or best real world application. While the “everyone wins” spirit is helpful in a classroom setting, in the real business world there are often clear winners and losers — something the workshop didn’t dive into. In addition, due to the short time span, the workshop didn’t discuss how to identify and deal with competitive businesses. New businesses launch all the time and many companies are competing for the same customers. Being able to set your business apart from all of the others, can mean the difference between success and failure. The team that won based on pageviews and marketing created Chow4You, a service that helps you find meals based on nutritional value and dietary needs. Rohan Mirchandani, the acting CEO of Chow4You, said, “The workshop was focused on learning the steps to take to make a business viable, especially focusing on user experience, which I found to be the most important topic”. The program is just a prototype now, but based on his experience in the course, Mirchandani said he felt confident that he could launch Chow4You as a real business. The Innovation Tournament is in its fourth year and has launched about one successful business from each workshop. Karl Ulrich, the Vice Dean of Innovation at Wharton, teaches the four day workshop at the beginning of January at Wharton West, the San Francisco campus for the Wharton School. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Public interest group urges FTC to investigate Facebook for Timeline privacy violations Posted: 06 Jan 2012 11:38 AM PST
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Facebook for its implementation of Timeline, the social networking company’s radical new profile feature. The group believes that Timelne exposes user information to the public without explicit consent from the user, and as such violates the conditions set forth in a recent, highly-publicized settlement between Facebook and the FTC. In a late December open letter to the FTC, revealed by ZDNet, EPIC alleges that, “Facebook is changing the privacy settings of its users in a way that gives the company far greater ability to disclose their personal information than in the past. With Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user's data from the user and has now made information that was essentially archived and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user.” At the heart of the matter is Facebook’s role in surfacing stories and status updates from the past. During the initial implementation process, Facebook members are given a seven-day window to tweak the information and privacy settings around the content that appears in their Timelines. But, according to EPIC, this window doesn’t equate to “affirmative express consent,” a condition of Facebook’s settlement with the FTC. “As we explained when we announced timeline in September, and we reiterated last month when it became available worldwide, Timeline doesn’t change the privacy of any content,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Everything is accessible to the same people who could or likely had seen it already in their News Feed sometime in the past. In addition, Timeline offers a number of new, simpler, and more effective ways for people to control their information, including activity log, the most comprehensive control tool we’ve ever developed. We think these innovations are things privacy advocates should be applauding.” In the November settlement, a disciplinary response to Facebook changing the privacy settings of its users without permission in 2009 (a matter brought to the FTC’s attention by EPIC), the FTC found that Facebook’s prior privacy claims were unfair, deceptive and in violation of federal law. “The proposed settlement bars Facebook from making any further deceptive privacy claims, requires that the company get consumers’ approval before it changes the way it shares their data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years,” the Commission said. In response, Facebook agreed to create a comprehensive privacy program, hired Erin Egan and Michael Richter as co-chief privacy officers and revised its corporate structure. But the changes have done little to appease EPIC. The post was updated with a statement from Facebook. [Image via Andrew Feinberg/Flickr] Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Nikkei: Sony to name Kazuo Hirai president, but Stringer remains CEO Posted: 06 Jan 2012 11:38 AM PST
Current president, chairman and CEO Howard Stringer will lose his president title but will remain CEO and chairman. The move almost certainly sets up 51-year-old Hirai to take the reins from 69-year-old Stringer some time in the future. Sony did not immediately respond with an official comment. Hirai (pictured) was head of Sony’s games unit from 2006 to mid-2011 and essentially built Sony’s successful PlayStation business in the U.S. from the ground up. In June 2011, European games head Andrew House took over the gaming unit, and Hirai became the company’s consumer business chief. When the notorious Sony PlayStation Network hack occurred in the middle of 2011, Hirai made the announcement that the network was back online in the U.S. Hirai obviously did not get blamed internally for the debacle, which shut down the PSN for a month and led to lawsuits when players had sensitive data stolen. We will update this post when we hear more. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Survey: Gamers playing more on mobile than consoles, PCs Posted: 06 Jan 2012 10:22 AM PST
The survey, conducted on over 15,000 people last month, found that more are drawn to the mobile platform than in previous years. Forty-six percent of those surveyed said they played on their mobile more in 2011 than in the previous year, while 26 percent said they’d played more on their consoles, and 23 percent said they’d played more on their PCs. The study says women over 30 consistently showed more interest in mobile gaming than others. Twenty-seven percent of women over 30 said they spend more than three hours playing games on their mobile phones every day, which is double the percentage of men on average, as well as that of women ages 12-29. The survey also found that mobile gamers are as devoted to game play as console gamers. Twenty-one percent say they spend at least an hour playing every day on their mobile phone, compared to the 24 percent who say they spend at least an hour a day on their console, on average. MocoSpace says the high engagement levels on mobile indicate the device carries as much allure as consoles. Despite the portability of a smart phone, 47 percent of mobile gaming is actually done at home, according to data from the NPD Group. MocoSpace CEO Justin Siegel says the fact that people are gaming on their smart phones while sitting a few feet away from their controller shows that mobile is capable of grabbing and holding their interest. “This data makes it clear that mobile is a viable alternative to console and PC gaming,” he said. Filed under: games        
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Ever wonder what it would be like to put two of the biggest icons among geeks into the same room? Well wonder no longer avid VentureBeat reader.
A prominent public interest group is once again targeting Facebook for questionable privacy practices.
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