VentureBeat |
- Worldwide Android game development contest enters final stage
- Rockstar sets date for Max Payne 3; Take-Two lowers guidance
- Forget Facebook, the IPO market is dying, says SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert
- Our test for the best cell phone service provider at CES 2012
- Bionic Panda Games raises seed funding for Android mobile games
- Creepy Steve Jobs action figure canceled after Apple lawyers step in
- Wikipedia founder defends SOPA blackout; Twitter has other protest plans in the works
- Disgruntled Netflix investors file class-action lawsuit
- Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, hands-on with the first smartphone with enough battery life for a full day’s business use
- CSR shows how your phone can navigate inside large buildings
- Intel marketing guy: Netbooks aren’t dead yet
- The 10 most promising products of the coming year, as revealed at CES
- Apple to revolutionize textbooks with “GarageBand for e-books,” says report
- SendGrid raises $21M from Bessemer, Foundry, others to make automated e-mails painless
- CCP Games hires David Reid as chief marketing officer as Dust 514 nears launch
- Japan’s DeNA teams up with NetDragon to launch mobile social games in China
- ZPM Espresso is making an open source home espresso machine
- THQ in trouble? Publisher denies multiple-game cancellation rumor
- Mojang reveals 20M registered users for Minecraft
- SOPA supporters, stop leaving money on the table and blaming piracy for your woes
- The downside of cloud computing: 4 reasons to think twice
- Wikipedia goes nuclear against SOPA: founder confirms site blackout
| Worldwide Android game development contest enters final stage Posted: 17 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST
Full details about the "Get Discovered" contest are available here. "With hundreds of thousands of apps currently in the Android Marketplace, it can be difficult for game developers to break through the clutter and have their games seen by the public," said Prita Uppal, CEO of Hooked Media Group. "The 'Get Discovered' contest provides a tremendous opportunity for developers to raise exposure through Best Buy's App Discovery Center and have their games played by new audiences." Get Discovered! Contest Details Judging the final competition will be Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product, Google+; Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures; Dean Takahashi, lead GamesBeat writer at VentureBeat; and Margita Labhard, Director of Digital Business Models at Best Buy. Every game entered into the contest will use Hooked Media Groups' SDK and be integrated into the recently launched Hooked App, which is available for free in the Android Marketplace. The app is a game recommendation and discovery platform that uses a proprietary algorithm to learn a users' gaming preferences, game play statistics and social mapping to provide them with personalized game recommendations and advanced search features. The more games a user ranks, the more customized the recommendations will become, thus providing the users with introductions to games that they may have never been exposed to, including those from smaller developers whose games may have not received significant exposure. Consumers can find the Hooked app in the Android Marketplace or by going here. Contest finalists will receive distribution from Best Buy, increased game downloads and plays, as well as recognition among top leaders in the game industry. Developers can submit their games until January 24th, 2012. The Finals Event Filed under: dev, games, VentureBeat        
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| Rockstar sets date for Max Payne 3; Take-Two lowers guidance Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:56 AM PST
The game is the next big potential blockbuster from the publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, which last published Max Payne 2 in 2003. The game will debut on May 18 internationally and on May 29 on the PC in North America and internationally on the PC on June 1. It’s a big title coming from one of the world’s most innovative game labels. The new title will rely on “powerful storytelling” in the action-shooter genre and deliver a cinematic and intense experience, according to founder of Rockstar Sam Houser. In this new game, the former New York detective Max Payne travels to the streets of São Paulo, Grazil, while working for a wealthy client. A street gang kidnaps Rodrigo’s wife and Max is pulled into the rescue and a conspiracy among the warring factions in the country. Clearly, Rockstar has scaled up the investment in the Max Payne franchise and we’ll see if it pays off in a title that has broader appeal among the masses. The original Max Payne from 2001 introduced “bullet time,” or the shift to slow motion game play when players are surrounded by bad guys and need extra help dispatching them. Each year, Rockstar has been releasing major titles in the late spring. A year ago, it launched L.A. Noire in May and the year before that it released Red Dead Redemption in May 2010. That’s usually a sign for other game publishers to avoid releasing games in May. Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive lowered its guidance for the fiscal year 2012 ended March 31, thanks to its decision to shift the game from the fourth fiscal quarter of FY 2012 to the first fiscal quarter of FY 2013. Take-Two will provide more information on the impact of the change when it reports earnings for the third fiscal quarter of FY 2012 on Feb. 2. Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at SterneAgree, cut his estimates for FY 2012 for Take-Two and raised them for FY 2013. Filed under: games        
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| Forget Facebook, the IPO market is dying, says SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:40 AM PST  SecondMarket's Mr. SilbertBankers and brokers nibbled on spinach omlettes, looking out over a sumptuous view of midtown Manhattan, at a private breakfast thrown by Bloomberg Markets on the 29th floor of their Lexington Avenue building. Barry Silbert, the baby faced founder and CEO of SecondMarket, which facilitates trades in private tech companies, was taking questions from the crowd. “Facebook is the elephant in the room, no doubt about that,” Mr. Silbert said. The social network is expected to IPO as early as May. “It represents a significant portion of our revenue, so we will have a big hole to fill.” Right now SecondMarket is holding weekly auctions on Facebook stock to meet the extreme demand for shares, says Mr. Silbert. The company’s public offering is seen by many as a test of the eye popping $100 billion valuation the social network has reportedly reached on the private markets. But Mr. Silbert didn’t see a long term future for SecondMarket as a stepping stone to an IPO. “The IPO market is dying,” he declared. “You see companies achieving robust valuations on the private market but being treated poorly when they go public. Often there are factors like the credit crisis or the situation in Europe affecting the markets. It’s the reasons entrepreneurs like myself never want to go public.” The longer companies stay private, of course, the better for Mr Silbert’s business. If an IPO isn’t the ultimate goal for a venture backed startup, then what is, Venturebeat asked. Aside from being bought out by a bigger company how can you provide an exit that satisfies venture capitalists hoping for big returns? “We want to create a market where anyone who is a twenty percent holder of a company with a valuation of $150 million or more can get liquidity on their investment within two years,” replied Mr. Silbert His vision is a re-invention of the small cap IPO that might be music to the ears of venture capital funds backing tech comapnies. It now takes an average of ten years to get a company to IPO and there are fewer and fewer going public below the $1 billion mark. SecondMarket would aim to be a third route venture backed startups could pursue for an exit if IPO and M&A don’t make sense. “We have the world’s best Rolodex, a network of 85,000 investors, we can match with opportunities,” Mr Silbert said. “We started at the very top with these outliers like Facebook and Twitter, but the aim is to work our way down to much less high profile companies.” New legislation currently being considered in Washington D.C. would expand the number of shareholders a private company can have and lift the ban on general solicitation, allowing SecondMarket to more aggressively promote the companies trading on its platform. “We are looking to make a market that fits each company. No high frequency trading or flash crashes, none of that crap.” said Mr. Silbert” “We want to connect companies with patient, long term capital that makes the most sense as they grow their business.” Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat        
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| Our test for the best cell phone service provider at CES 2012 Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, everybody wanted to talk. And when they talked on their mobile phones, they put a great deal of stress on the mobile phone carriers. We tried to figure out who handled the load the best. CES is the biggest technology convention in the US. This year it once again broke attendance records with 153,000 analysts, exhibitors, and journalists. Regardless of your place in the industry, having mobile service in Sin City during the week-long extravaganza is the single-most important thing everyone must have. To do the testing, I brought along four phones (plus my personal phone), one on each carrier. Here are the phones I used for testing:
All four tested devices work on 4G networks, and both the Galaxy Nexus and Vivid have access to LTE networks. Because I, along with Venturebeat staffers, also covered the show, testing on which cell provider worked best during CES was not purely scientific. It was all real-world testing using data and telephony when there was a need to use the phones. Of course, at CES, that was constantly. The best overall coverage came from, in a word, Verizon. Nearly every carrier provided similar call coverage and quality, but data speed and coverage varied wildly. Verizon was the only provider that consistently had solid performance, both over LTE and 3G. All three other cell carriers were in a constant state of flux, but for one specific reason: there was no upstream bandwidth. Sprint had waves of data coverage, where data speeds would fluctuate between 0-300kbps. AT&T and T-Mobile almost consistently had little to no upstream bandwidth. Testing data speeds with Ookla’s Speedtest.net app, both on and off the show floor, AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks struggled to find any bandwidth. Download speeds ranged from 100-12,000kbps, but it almost never mattered because there was no upstream bandwidth. Suffice it to say, both GSM carriers’ tubes were clogged. Verizon was the only carrier who almost never dropped a data signal and always had enough bandwidth to download new emails, upload photos and documents, and do so consistently. Sprint regularly received emails and push data faster than Verizon. For hotspot use Verizon had the most stable network, though transfer speeds even over LTE were fairly slow because of the high volume of users. It was enough for mobile and even minimal laptop use. On the strip, my findings were the same. AT&T, which recently began providing LTE in Las Vegas, was mostly unusable because of so little upstream bandwidth. In tall hotels data speeds were significantly slower, and LTE and even 3G networks were completely dropped the higher up I went. This is an unfortunate problem, especially since most hotels do not have free Wi-Fi. Further off the strip data speeds increased, but not during the main show days. While Sprint proved to be second best for data, because data fluctuated so much using GPS navigation was surprisingly difficult. Strangely AT&T and T-Mobile didn’t have this problem, and the tested Epic 4G Touch has no problems with the GPS in Los Angeles. Verizon proved to be the best for navigation. Call quality, as mentioned earlier, was similar across all networks, likely because most communication was done over data during the show. I made calls across all carriers and dropped or could not connect only in poor connection areas, such as hotel parking lots or underground. In short, here is how each cell provider fared:
Because most of us enjoy, or attempt to take advantage of the best local cell provider, my recommendation for future attendees or at other conventions is to use a company Mi-Fi card from Verizon. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Bionic Panda Games raises seed funding for Android mobile games Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST Bionic Panda Games is announcing it has raised seed financing to develop mobile games for Google’s Android operating system. Not surprisingly, Google Ventures is one of the backers.
That strong performance allowed it to raise the round (which was raised last year and is being announced for the first time today) from Google Ventures, SoftTech VC (where Hudson is a partner), Norwest Venture Partners, 500 Startups, and angels Craig Sherman and Kal Vepuri. That’s a pretty strong group of investors, but Bionic Panda’s founders have a good pedigree. Hudson, who ran a number of well-known industry conferences such as the Social Gaming Summit, and Jimenez previously worked together at Serious Business, maker of Friends for Sale. Zynga acquired that company for an undisclosed price in February 2010. And Hudson sold his events business to Mediabistro. Hudson, a venture partner at SoftTech VC, is the CEO. He also previously worked at Google, Gaia Online, IronPort Systems and In-Q-Tel. Jimenez is the chief technology officer and previously worked at Cybersource and BitTorrent. “There’s a huge opportunity here,” said Hudson in an interview. “We are seeing a ton of enthusiasm on the investing side for most things mobile. We are seeing a seismic shift where the apps, the networks, and devices are all good enough for real entertainment. It has taken off much faster than many predicted.” Hudson said the company has a couple of projects in the works. Aqua Pets is a free-to-play Android game, which users can download for free. They can then pay real money for virtual items such as fish food. "There are tremendous opportunities to build mobile game franchises on the Android platform," said Joe Kraus, partner, Google Ventures. "Bionic Panda is an early leader on the Android platform and we are excited to work with their team as they pursue their passion for developing the next generation of casual mobile social games." Bionic Panda has about 12 employees, but it plans to get bigger. ” A lot of companies will build a big business on the back of mobile gaming,” Hudson said. Filed under: games, mobile        
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| Creepy Steve Jobs action figure canceled after Apple lawyers step in Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:46 AM PST
The somewhat creepy 1-foot-tall Jobs doll was unveiled by Chinese toy company In Icons a few weeks back and immediately attracted headlines. The doll was supposed to include Jobs, a black turtleneck, blue jeans, sneakers, two pairs of glasses, black leather belt, black socks, two apples and a “One More Thing” backdrop. But the company has backpedaled due to “immense pressure.” “Though we still believe we have not overstepped any legal boundaries, we have decided to completely stop the offer, production and sale of the Steve Jobs figurine out of our heartfelt sensitivity to the feelings of the Jobs family,” the company wrote in a statement on its homepage. The decision to cancel the doll makes a lot of sense because Apple is serious about protecting its image and the legacy of its former CEO. A few days after it was announced, Apple’s lawyers reportedly told the company that depicting the Apple logo, Jobs' name, his appearance or his likeness is a criminal offence. In Icons said it will provide a full refund for anyone who pre-ordered the action figure. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Wikipedia founder defends SOPA blackout; Twitter has other protest plans in the works Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:37 AM PST
Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (pictured) caught flack last night when he seemingly criticized Wikipedia’s blackout decision, only to clarify his position later. Twitter won’t be blacking out its service, but Costolo says he has something else planned to protest SOPA and its sister bill PIPA. "The general sentiment seemed to be that US law, as it impacts the internet, can affect everyone,” Wales told the Telegraph in an interview this morning. "As for me, what I am hoping is that people outside the US who have friends or family who are voters in the US, will ask them to make a call to their senator or representative, and I hope we send a broad global message that the internet as a whole will not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement." Wikipedia will be joining major sites like Reddit and Boing Boing with its SOPA blackout, but Twitter — which has already publicly denounced the anti-piracy measures — won’t be following suit. Alex Howard, a technology journalist who focuses on open government, asked openly on Twitter if Costolo, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg “have the cojones” to follow through with blackouts of their own. But in response, Costolo tweeted: “That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.” That single tweet led many to believe that Costolo didn’t agree with Wikipedia’s blackout, but he later explained his reasoning: “Not shutting down a service doesn’t equal not taking the proper stance on an issue. We’ve been very clear about our stance.” Costolo followed that up by saying, “We have been very active and will continue to be very active. Watch this space.” Clearly he has something in mind to protest SOPA, and we expect his plans to be announced soon. Costolo also responded directly to Wales about the non-controversy on Twitter, explaining he was “only referring to Twitter in response to explicit tweet suggesting we lacked courage for not shutting down.” Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Disgruntled Netflix investors file class-action lawsuit Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:36 AM PST
Netflix’s stock price suffered from two very large decreases in both the summer and fall of 2011, in part due to massive price increases to subscription plans and a failed attempt to spinoff the Netflix’s DVD-by-mail rental business into a separate company. And while the company was clear on those future plan, it wasn’t entirely clear on some of the content deal renewals necessary to keep Netflix’s streaming library up to par with competitors. The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System (PDF), claims that senior management didn't reveal to investors that many of its streaming content contracts would soon need to be renegotiated at a much higher cost. The suit also claims that members of Netflix senior management sold their stock when it was artificially high during the summer — prior to letting investors know the company’s true costs associated with renewing contracts. The official statement from Robbins, Geller, Rudman & Dowd LLP (the firm hired for the class action suit), reads:
Although the suit was filed by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System as well as "all plaintiffs similarly situated”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all investors will participate. We’ve reached out to Netflix for further comment and will update this story with any new information. [Via PaidContent.org]
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| Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST It’s an unfortunate truth: if you want a phone that will last all day, get a dumbphone. Smartphones aren’t designed to last all day, and as the features and uses increase incrementally, the battery life has stayed a consistent not long enough. Business and power users know this all too well – it’s one of two reasons why too many of us carry around two phones at all times. Motorola may have just solved that problem. The award-winning Droid Razr (and one of Venturebeat’s most interesting phones of 2011), the thinnest Android smartphone available today, will now come in two models, standard and Maxx. The Maxx variant is much thicker than the 7.1mm at 9mm (for comparison, the iPhone 4/4S is 9.3mm thick), and the giant 3300mAh battery fills that extra 1.9mm of space. The largest competing smartphone battery found at CES was in the Samsung Galaxy Note, a 5.3″ phone tablet, with a 2500mAh battery.  The Droid Razr atop the Droid Razr MaxxThe repercussions of such a device are far reaching. Motorola claims exceptional battery life, with 21.5 hours of continuous talk time, 15 hours of native video playback, 10 hours of GPS navigation, and 6 hours of HD streaming over Verizon’s LTE network. That is nearly double what competing high-end smartphones can achieve. With the 3pm charging session now in question, there’s no doubt that the Droid Razr Maxx may be the most important handset for business and power users this year. It may set them free to carry one phone around, perhaps for good. If the Razr Maxx sells well – and I expect it will because everyone has a black hatred for constantly charging their phones – it may provide the kick for companies like Samsung and Apple to stress battery life on phones for true full-day use. Everyday consumers may not require extended batteries, and some handset makers like Apple have whole businesses which revolve around accessorizing their phones with battery cases, additional chargers and batteries, etc. The Razr Maxx will give Motorola a competitive edge in this way, eliminating a number of hidden costs for consumers while simultaneously providing today’s top of the line phone hardware. At CES I had some time to play with the Razr Maxx, and in the hand it feels bulky and thick, but still comfortable. The kevlar back is only slightly different from the Droid Razr, and thickness is the only real difference. Instead of the phone thin everywhere but the camera, it has uniform thickness. And because the Razr Maxx is identical in every other way to the Droid Razr, it is practically the same phone. Other upcoming phones, like the Nokia Lumia 900 and Sony Xperia S, can only boast 7 and 8.5 hours of talk time, respectively. Compared to 21.5 from the Razr Maxx. For any phone competing on battery life, the Razr Maxx wins, no contest. The Razr Maxx does look and feel bloated and lacks the sleek design of the Droid Razr, but I’ll take battery life over look and feel any day of the week. Do keep in mind that even at 9mm of thickness the Razr Maxx is still very, very thin. There is only one major setback, and that is the Maxx shipping sans Android 4.0. No date has currently been given for the update, and the Maxx will ship with Android 2.3.5. The announcement of the Droid Razr Maxx also comes with a lower price for the Droid Razr, which will ship for $199 instead of the current $299 with contract. The Droid Razr Maxx will release in the next few weeks, pending Verizon’s release schedule, for $299 plus 2-year service contract. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| CSR shows how your phone can navigate inside large buildings Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST CSR, the leading maker of navigation chips, showed how you can use its upcoming platform to find your way inside large buildings such as the giant Las Vegas Convention Center. Now a combination of several new technologies makes it possible to navigate with map-based directions inside large buildings, giving you even fewer reasons to get lost or be late for an appointment.
J. Blake Bullock, senior product line manager at CSR, said in an interview that SiRFstarV fuses different radio signals, sensor inputs, and other location data to provide reliable and accurate positioning for inside buildings. Using a cloud-based back-end service dubbed SiRFusion, the technology pulls together the different inputs to figure out where you are and where you are moving. “We’ve been working on this problem for the last couple of years,” Bullock said. “The result is good positioning indoors.” The smart thing about this is that none of the signals by themselves is perfect. GPS uses satellites that need a line-of-site to the handheld device. WiFi radios are also useful for triangulation. Your phone can detect a variety of WiFi networks, and it can calculate which hot spot you are nearest. So that can also help fix your position. But WiFi networks aren’t ubiquitous and sometimes you’re out of range. The system also relies on gyroscopes, compasses, and accelerometers — which detect motion — to determine the speed and direction that you are moving. That method is called “MEMS positioning dead reckoning,” and it determines your step patterns. Separately, each system has flaws. But together, they can fix your position with reasonable accuracy. Bullock showed me that he could use an application with a Micello map that could show him the walking route from the CSR booth to the Nokia booth. The device came up with a reasonably accurate turn-by-turn path through the network of booths to show me where I was supposed to walk. It tells you, for instance, to walk to the BlackBerry booth and then turn right.
Now what has to happen is that companies need to create indoor maps. Google said in November that it will add indoor information to Google Maps, using a crowdsourced model. Navteq has indoor navigation and routing, but Google doesn’t have that yet. Once those things are in place, CSR’s technology could be great for airports, train stations, shopping malls, convention centers, and casinos. The map and application companies are working on creating accurate indoor maps, based on building blueprints. The SiRFstarV family of chips will go into production later this year and devices using it coudl debut sometime in 2012. CSR is a big chip maker that has grown bigger with the mergers of Sirf and Zoran. Bullock showed me how he could use an app to search for a booth at CES in the South Hall of the convention center — a cavernous place. The map showed all of the major booths inside the hall and it showed in green arrows (see picture) which way to walk. You could judge your progress by looking at major booths along the way on the map trail. Now there is no escape, and no excuse for getting lost. Unless you lose your phone. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Intel marketing guy: Netbooks aren’t dead yet Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST
Netbooks are the stripped-down laptop-like computers that cost around $200 to $300 and were created only for surfing the web. They were a hot commodity a couple of years ago, but now they’re in the dustbin where consumer computers go to die. Instead, Intel is preparing to launch a huge marketing campaign around higher-priced Ultrabooks, which have high performance, good security, instant responsiveness, and razor-thin cases. Intel was also touting chips that power both smartphones and tablets. Netbooks debuted with some fanfare in 2007, when Asus launched the Eee PC and sold hundreds of thousands in a few months. Every computer maker followed suit, some of them grudgingly. Miller acknowledges that the glamour has left the netbook category, but he refuses to say it if More than 100 million netbooks have been sold to date. They have taken a hit in sales because of the popularity of the Apple iPad and other tablets. But the decline of sales in 2011 was in the single-digit percentages, Miller said. In the second quarter of 2011, tablet sales overtook netbook sales, according to ABI Research. In markets such as Western Europe, netbook sales collapsed 40 percent. But like the Maytag repairman, Miller still holds out hope. “They are affordable, on-the-go, mobile computing,” Miller said. “For what netbooks do, they do very well. I think netbooks will still be a sustainable business for us in 2012. Our new (code-named) Cedar Trail chip is going to help that. We don’t see it going away.” There are big declines in netbooks in mature markets in the U.S. and Western Europe, but netbooks are selling in other territories. Some of the Windows 7 netbooks are selling $179 to $199. Those are attractive prices, Miller said. Still, Intel usually wins no matter what people buy, since it has chips that range from the low end to the high end, covering all the bases. Asked if tablets had taken market share from netbooks, Miller said, “I don’t know if I entirely agree or disagree.” There were declines in low-end computers in general, he acknowledged, as tablet sales soared in 2011. At CES, there were well over 50 tablets on display among various vendors. But Intel itself could only count around six to eight models of netbooks. Toshiba, for instance, showed off a brand new 10-inch tablet at CES, but it had no netbooks on display because of the decline in demand for them. The same was true for Dell, which had no netbooks but plans to enter the tablet market at some point. Ultrabooks, by contrast, are coming in at higher prices at around $1,000, plus or minus a few hundred dollars. Leslie Sobon, vice president of worldwide product marketing at rival Advanced Micro Devices, says she doesn’t think Ultrabooks are priced right and are adding a few hundred dollars to the cost of a laptop. AMD is shooting to provide chips for lower-priced laptops. Over time, the netbook category could get squished as prices for tablets and Ultrabooks come down. “If I could get an Ultrabook for $199, I would get an Ultrabook,” Miller said. “But that’s going to be a while.” Filed under: mobile        
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| The 10 most promising products of the coming year, as revealed at CES Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:47 AM PST We spent hours combing the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to sleuth out the most compelling tech trends and the most exciting new products of the coming year. Now that we’ve returned from Vegas, pounded enough Emergen-C cocktails to get us back into a semblance of health, and compared notes, we’ve settled on this list of the show’s top products. Read on to see the most promising hardware that will be hitting store shelves in the coming months. 10. Samsung Galaxy Note Samsung Galaxy NoteLess a technological breakthrough than a form-factor experiment, the Galaxy Note is notable primarily because, well, it actually works. Up to now, phone and tablet manufacturers have been careful to separate their lines: Phones have 4-inch screens or smaller, while tablets have 7-inch screens or larger. The embarrassing failure of Dell’s 5-inch Streak confirmed the wisdom of that approach. But in truth, there’s little difference between a tablet and a smartphone, other than size, and for those of us who habitually use 3×5 cards or similar-sized pocket notebooks, a 5-inch diagonal screen is actually just about perfect for holding in one hand while jotting notes with the other. By adding a stylus and some note-taking and handwriting recognition software to the Android OS, that’s exactly the use that Samsung has in mind for the Galaxy Note. And yes, it’s too big for a pants pocket. It might be more attractive to female customers, who can stash it in a purse, or to more stylishly dressed men, who could put it in a jacket pocket. We spent some time with the Note on the CES show floor and came away favorably impressed. One downside: It’s running a sadly outdated version of Android (2.3, aka Gingerbread). It will be coming to AT&T Wireless later this year, and should be a strong contender of AT&T and Samsung give it a decent price and find the right audience for their marketing message, which is basically that writing and drawing are still fun. –Dylan Tweney 9. Gear4 Sleep Clock Gear4 Sleep ClockIf you sometimes wake up feeling drained, the Gear4 Sleep Clock may help you. The clock uses an iPhone app, a dock and Doppler radar to sense your sleep pattern and wake you up at the lightest point in your sleep cycle. The radar senses your movements and determines exactly when you fall asleep. It also senses if you wake up during the night and detects your breathing so that it can figure out if you are in a deep sleep or not. When you wake up the next day, you can see the results on your iPhone app. It will tell you exactly how many hours and minutes you slept. And it will say how long it took to fall asleep and how many times you woke up. After you use it for a while, it will come up with averages and recommendations so you can get better sleep. You don’t have to wear anything on your wrist, as you do with rival solutions from Basis Science or Jawbone. The Gear4 device will go on sale soon for $199. –Dean Takahashi 8. HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook HP Envy 14The distinctive feature of this Ultrabook is its cover. It is made out of black Gorilla Glass, a damage-resistant glass from Corning that is normally used for screens. It certainly makes this laptop design stand out amid a sea of Ultrabooks at CES. The machine carries the Envy brand established by Voodoo PC, which HP acquired. It has a high-definition HP Radiance display (1600 x 900) with 300 Nits of brightness. It has nine hours of battery life and a row of connection slots. It also has an HD webcam and HP's Beats Audio technology. The Spectre also has an analogy roller control for changing the sound volume and it has a mute button on the side for when you have to stop the music fast. It comes with 128 gigabytes of flash memory and Intel's Rapid Start technology. The height is 20 millimeters and it weighs 3.79 pounds. It will cost $1,399 and will start selling on Feb. 8. –Dean Takahashi 7. OLPC XO 3.0 tablet OLPC XO 3.0This tablet has been in the works for a long time and its true cost remains to be seen. But One Laptop per Child has done a good job of researching what children in developing countries need and then tailoring it for them. It's not just an iPad with a different label slapped on it. It has a dust and waterproof cover. It has its own Linux operating system (and it can also run Android) and its Sugar user interface has been adapted for touchscreen use. You can charge it with a wall outlet, a solar panel, or a hand crank. And the screws for the cover line up as power pins when you are getting power from the solar panel. And it has an eight-inch display that works inside or outside in bright sunlight. That's a lot of innovation in a small tablet whose target cost is around the $100 mark. Overall, the OLPC XO 3.0 has an appealing design that promises to reach a wider market than previous OLPC XO laptops. –Dean Takahashi Click here to see products 6 through 4. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Apple to revolutionize textbooks with “GarageBand for e-books,” says report Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:36 AM PST
That’s according to Ars Technica, which points to sources that describe Apple’s plans for a “GarageBand for e-books” — in other words, software that for interactive e-books that would be as easy to use as the company’s renowned music software. Apple was very up-front that the event, which will be held at the Guggenheim Museum, will be centered on education. But up until now, all we’ve had to go on is a brief mention of Steve Jobs’ interest in the textbook market in Walter Isaacson’s biography. And with the proliferation of iPads in schools and classrooms, Apple has the perfect vehicle to deliver next-gen textbooks. Students could easily justify the cost of an iPad (which will last them for years) and digital textbooks, compared to spending several hundred dollars every semester on paper textbooks. As VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar explains, the education book publishing industry is mammoth, bringing in annual revenue upwards of $5.5 billion for sales of lower education (Kindergarten to 12th grade) and $3.7 billion for sales of scholarly/higher education in 2010, according to statistics from the Association of American Publishers. So it makes perfect sense that Apple would want to enter into an $8 billion industry. (It also helps that textbooks are very expensive, mostly because of unnecessary bureaucracy or a lack of regulation at the university level.) Despite the many advancements in technology over the past decade, the textbook industry is still fairly traditional. College students still pay through the nose for huge books that they may never finish reading, and bookstores tend to mark up the already expensive books to capitalize on college students. There’s certainly room for some company to break the mold for textbooks — and what better company than Apple, which revolutionized the way we bought music? Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| SendGrid raises $21M from Bessemer, Foundry, others to make automated e-mails painless Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST
SendGrid helps more than 37,000 clients with sending all kinds of e-mails to their customers, including shipping notifications, confirmations and even notes to let you know you’ve been ousted as the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare. On top of doing the heavy lifting when it comes to sending e-mails to large numbers of customers, the company provides real-time analytics about how effective those e-mail campaigns are. “E-mail is not a fun thing to deal with,” SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin told VentureBeat. “We alleviate the pain of dealing with e-mail.” The new funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures also participating. Franklin highlighted that every prior investor invested in this round as well, indicating that the company was on solid financial footing and would continue to grow quickly. SendGrid already works with Heroku and Rackspace’s platforms, but now it will also support Microsoft’s Windows Azure development platform. Moving to partner with Azure will help the company get more exposure, especially with enterprises. SendGrid’s traction has mostly been with smaller companies and tech startups like Spotify, Foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb and Twilio. But with Azure support, the company hopes more large companies will jump on board. “Almost every venture-backed tech company you can think of is working with us … but Azure is not big with the emerging tech crowd,” Franklin said. “But with Microsoft at its center, Azure could attract several big companies to the fold.” Boulder, Colo.-based SendGrid graduated from the TechStars program in 2009 and has received about $27 million in total funding, including this new round. SendGrid sends more than 2.6 billion e-mails per month for customers in more than 150 countries. Depending on the plan, the company will handle the sending of between 5,000 and 25,000 e-mails a month for free. Once your company moves past that point or grows to need more e-mails, the company starts charging. $79 a month, for example, will get you approximately 100,000 e-mails sent a month. You can see a cool infographic on SendGrid’s funding history and products below: Filed under: cloud, deals, VentureBeat        
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| CCP Games hires David Reid as chief marketing officer as Dust 514 nears launch Posted: 17 Jan 2012 03:00 AM PST
Reid joins the Reykjavik, Iceland-based company as it prepares to launch its biggest game in years, the first-person shooter sci-fi title Dust 514. The hire gives CCP Games some veteran marketing firepower, as Reid previous served as marketing chief for Trion Worlds, GameTap and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 business.
Reid (pictured) said in an interview that he is excited about CCP’s opportunity to greatly expand its universe of players with Dust 514, which is a first-person shooter game on the PlayStation 3 that takes place on a planet within the Eve Online universe. What makes it interesting is that Eve Online players can battle above the planet with their starships and make a difference in the battle on the ground. Likewise, the players on the ground in the first-person shooter game can influence what happens up in space with Eve Online. As such, it’s a unique opportunity for groundbreaking cross-platform game play and marketing, Reid said. Not only is Dust 514 an interesting marketing challenge, it’s also a big technological challenge, Pétursson said. The company has had to more than double its computing power to accommodate a single game environment and backend that is shared by both games. On top of that, CCP Games has to synchronize game play across the PlayStation 3 and PC game platforms. Reid will also drive the marketing strategy for World of Darkness, an upcoming MMO with a vampire and werewolf theme. That game is in pre-production now. CCP just recently launched Crucible, the latest free expansion for Eve Online, and it also has a private alpha test going for Dust 514. Reid will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and report to Pétursson. Reid will run marketing activities such as branding, corporate communications, PR, advertising, social media and customer acquisition. Most recently, Reid helped launch Rift, the fantasy MMO from Trion Worlds. He managed a team of 50 people and helped get Rift to more than 1 million paid activations in just a few months. He orchestrated the Rift ad campaign, which used the tagline “We’re not in Azeroth Anymore,” a reference to the chief rival World of Warcraft. Before joining Trion as senior vice president of marketing, Reid was president of publishing at NCsoft West. He was also vice president of marketing for game portal GameTap and director of the Xbox global platform marketing for Microsoft. Pétursson said, “We’re very happy to have David joining us. We are innovating in this space and have been looking for the right people to help us expand. David is a great evangelist.” Reid acknowledged that Trion Worlds was an interesting company to work at, but he said he felt that the job at CCP was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “We had a great launch with Rift and I have nothing bad to say about it,” Reid said. “But I have kept my eye on CCP for a very long time.” “The success of CCP has been astonishing year after year,” Reid said. “The company has staggering potential, with Dust 514 coming and World of Darkness aiming for a broader audience. CCP is doing something that is very unique among the MMOs. “ "As we enter one of the most important years in CCP's history, we'll rely heavily on David to help us bring our revolutionary gaming experiences to even more players, on more platforms, around the world," said Petursson. Reid said he would ramp up efforts to get Dust 514 in the hands of the press and will start publicizing the game through a variety of means. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Japan’s DeNA teams up with NetDragon to launch mobile social games in China Posted: 16 Jan 2012 10:23 PM PST
Tokyo-based DeNA has more than 35 million users and generated $1.5 billion in sales in 2011. But that’s mostly from its core audience for mobile social network games in Japan. To expand in China, it is setting up a joint venture with NetDragon. The new joint venture will have $6 million in capital and a staff of 30 people. The joint venture will take non-Chinese games and localize them for the Chinese market. The new company will also operate the localized games on Mobage China, a social mobile gaming platform operated by DeNA in China. Under Chinese law, foreign game companies entering the market have to team up with local game companies or network operators. DeNA will leverage NetDragon’s ability to develop and operate Chinese games through its highly popular mobile app store. DeNA owns San Francisco-based Ngmoco, which will also provide games to NetDragon, which has more than 40 million users for its smartphone marketplace. In the long term, the joint venture will also do original in-ouse titles, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games for DeNA’s Mobage users. Filed under: games, mobile        
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| ZPM Espresso is making an open source home espresso machine Posted: 16 Jan 2012 04:19 PM PST Making good home espresso is possible, but the machines tend to cost a small fortune. ZPM Espresso, a startup in Atlanta, is hoping to change that with its open-source espresso machine. If the company succeeds, it could have a nice market for itself, as the espresso and specialty coffee market have been growing quickly around the world. (Can you tell based on how many Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee places there are?). The founders like drinking espresso and they took apart a bunch of old machines to see how it’s done. They figured out how to make a machine for less money, but including important features such as PID controls, custom temperature, pressure profiles, and open source hardware and software using Arduino, a kind of microcontroller. The microcontroller governs the behavior of the thermoblock and the pump, rather than relying upon mechanical controls. That allows the data to be analyzed, saved, and shared. To make good espresso, it helps to have the ability to control temperature and pressure precisely. Typical machines that can do that can cost more than $700, but ZPM is aiming at a target price of $300 to $400. One of the secrets is a custom-designed thermoblock that ZPM is creating itself. The funds will be used to set up a shop with a foundry to cast the thermoblock and other pieces. The machine uses as many off-the-shelf parts as possible, to lower costs. The company is raising a round of money on Kickstarter, the crowdsourced funding site. Based on the progress so far, it looks like the company will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hope is that a community of users will share their temperature and pressure profiles online so that more people can figure out how to make a good cup of espresso. The open-source machine will be user serviceable. Here’s a link to a video of what ZPM is trying to do. The company hopes to ship devices starting in the spring or summer. Preliminary tests show that the shots produced by ZPM can match those of professional baristas. ZPM has four employees and competes with rivals such as Crossland Coffee and Rancilio. The founders are Igor Zamlinsky (left) and Gleb Polyakov (right), both Russian immigrants who grew up in Atlanta. Igor is a mechanical engineering student at Virginia Tech and Gleb is a student at George Tech. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| THQ in trouble? Publisher denies multiple-game cancellation rumor Posted: 16 Jan 2012 02:07 PM PST
Speculation on the company’s future spread like wildfire this weekend after a series of tweets from gaming industry veteran Kevin Dent suggested the publisher was cancelling its Game Workshops massively multiplayer online game, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, and its entire 2014 lineup, in order to preserve cash. Dent later went on to say he thought THQ shutting its doors was a longshot and that he couldn’t see “institutional investors allowing THQ to go down the toilet,” but by then the rumor had gone viral and was reported on by various gaming publications. Now, THQ is in full damage control mode and has issued a statement debunking the rumor.
Despite its assurances, THQ is clearly struggling. Shares in its stock were down 6.90 percent on Friday. Since the stock market is closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there’s no way of knowing if this weekend’s rumor will cause a further drop. For the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, THQ said it expects to report weaker-than-expected results because of poor sales of its uDraw Game Tablet for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Sales for the third quarter are expected to be 25 percent below its previous guidance of $510 million to $550 million. Results will be released for the third fiscal quarter in early February. In the second fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, THQ reported a loss of $92.4 million on revenues of $146 million, compared to a year earlier loss of $47 million on revenue of $77.1 million a year earlier. On a non-GAAP basis, the loss for the second fiscal quarter was $46.9 million on revenues of $119.6 million, compared with a non-GAAP loss of $40.6 million on revenue of $70.4 million a year ago. The launch of the uDraw GameTablet was a big misstep for the company in 2011. Weak sales of the device led to 30 layoffs for developer Play THQ in an effort to reduce costs and re-focus attention on other brands such as Saints Row and WWE. Despite its lousy year, however, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter thinks it’s too soon to write THQ off. “They are low on cash, and will likely run out by June or earlier unless they do something,” he told VentureBeat through email. ”‘Something’ includes reducing their overhead, canceling projects, selling assets or raising capital. There are a lot of options before they cancel their 2014 slate, put themselves up for sale, or declare bankruptcy, so I think the rumors of their imminent demise are exaggerated.” THQ’s upcoming projects include the recently announced South Park role-playing game, Darksiders II, film director Guillermo del Toro’s inSane, Metro: Last Light, and a sequel to Homefront. Filed under: games        
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| Mojang reveals 20M registered users for Minecraft Posted: 16 Jan 2012 01:49 PM PST
“Minecraft now has 20 million registered users. At 70 kg each, that’s 25% of the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza.” At the current price of a registration (about $27 US), that’s a lot of money as well as weight. Even at the old pre-release cost of $20 per person, the total possible amount of $400 million is nothing to sneeze at. Of course, not every player who registers goes on to pay for the game, but the potential for the indie hit is quite staggering. Purchasing a registration is simple; users register as a user at the Minecraft store page, choose to purchase either a license for themselves or as a gift, and fill out a secure credit card form. Minecraft is a Java-based game that can be played on Mac, PC, iOS and soon to be released Xbox 360. Players can craft items from raw materials gathered and mined from the procedurally generated world. It tickles similar synapses as when playing with Lego, or exploring a sandbox video game world. The graphics are intentionally blocky, giving the whole thing a retro, toy-like feel. Minecraft released as an official 1.0 version this past November, after a long beta period. Currently at version 1.1, Minecraft could possibly be this author’s favorite game of all time. Apparently, another 20 million users feel the same way. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| SOPA supporters, stop leaving money on the table and blaming piracy for your woes Posted: 16 Jan 2012 12:36 PM PST
“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios.” I would like to see some evidence for the claim that piracy costs a significant number of jobs. Based on the economics of digital goods, the intransigence of Hollywood executives presents a greater threat to American jobs than piracy. To be clear, I am not advocating for piracy. I believe that content creators should be paid for their work. My entire career has been about creating intellectual property. I’m in the process of writing a screenplay and I’d like to be paid for it. But I also believe that we shouldn’t take claims like “piracy costs jobs” at face value when the economics suggest that it might not be true. A quick primer on the economics of digital content: movies and TV shows are, for all practical purposes, non-rival goods. One person having a movie doesn’t diminish the satisfaction of another person having it. There is no meaningful incremental cost of production and distribution. There is also high price elasticity — as the price goes to zero, demand increases substantially. For simplicity, we’ll assume that lost revenue equals lost jobs. A simplistic approach to calculating the economic harm from piracy would be to multiply the retail price of content by the volume of content downloaded. This is the kind of idiocy that Hollywood uses when calculating economic harm. But it results in a grossly inflated number because not all piracy is the same. Let’s take a look at some of the types of piracy:
Of these four types of piracy, only the first one causes economic harm to the distributors and producers of content. That is the scenario where they lose money that they otherwise would have received. Hollywood could mitigate the losses on this type of piracy by making content more easily accessible online. We’ve seen that if Hollywood provides easier access to content, a lot of people will choose that alternative. Hulu is perhaps the best example of this. Instead of having to wait in the mail for a DVD of Psych, I can watch it online, legally. Piracy has costs. Besides being illegal, the user interface is terrible and you make your computer susceptible to viruses and spyware. Hulu made watching content legally easier than pirating it. The company created a great interface, has quality content and has become the leading destination for premium video content in the United States. Even their subscription service has become a reasonable success, with more than 1.5 million subscribers. Hulu’s business grew 60% last year to almost $420 million in revenue, according to a blog post by CEO Jason Kilar. In the other three cases, piracy itself isn’t costing Hollywood any money — that’s money executives are leaving on the table because they refuse to adapt to 21st century markets and distribution methods. Much of the piracy that exists in developing countries is by people who can’t afford to pay the rates that distributors have set. When I lived in Malaysia, one of the music labels I talked to had set the price of MP3 downloads at roughly the same as the U.S. price — $1 per song. This is in a country where an iPhone is one month’s salary. In the SOPA debate, they argue that sites are making money off ads that point people to pirated content. But if the studios and record labels stepped in and provided a legitimate alternative, they would make even more money. The music label could offer a legal model that worked for Malays and the label: an ad-supported music service, where consumption was encouraged instead of discouraged. Because they didn’t offer that, people resorted to piracy. Take a show like Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. It’s a great show and I would love to watch it. But as it’s currently sold, I have to sign up for cable or satellite (at a cost of $30-$60 a month) and then HBO (another $15-$20 a month). I’m not willing to do that. I would be happy to pay $2 to $3 an episode. But they won’t sell it to me that way. That’s $8 to $12 a month in lost revenue. Because the incremental cost of distribution is almost zero, this would be nearly all profit. There are plenty of substitute goods. Instead of watching Real Time, I’ll read a book or watch something else. This is also an interesting case because Real Time is a time-sensitive show. There’s practically no economic value the week after it airs. (Unlike, say, an episode of the Sopranos.) The fourth bucket is another type I ran into in Malaysia. I wanted my dose of American TV (Malaysian TV is awful), but I couldn’t access Hulu. I was willing to pay $200 a year for access, but Hollywood didn’t want to take my money. I could have used a third-party proxy server (and paid them) to make it look like I was accessing Hulu from the United States. Or I could have resorted to BitTorrent. This was another lost opportunity for Hollywood to increase their revenue. In every scenario I can think of, Hollywood executives are leaving money on the table and then blaming piracy for its woes. Instead of innovating to meet the needs of the market, it is choosing to legislate to try to protect decades-old business models that won’t survive changing consumer behavior.
[Top image credit: joshhhab/Shutterstock] Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| The downside of cloud computing: 4 reasons to think twice Posted: 16 Jan 2012 12:07 PM PST
However, both as a customer twice over and as a consultant helping others move to the cloud, I have seen the other side of the rainbow; I've seen where the rain falls and where the reality doesn't quite live up to the hype, and where you as a customer might be surprised or disappointed. So for those of you getting ready to make the jump to the cloud, here’s a look at the downside. This is the list of things that don’t make it into the cloud marketer’s PowerPoint deck but that you need to know about if you’re going to buy into the cloud with your eyes wide open: 1. You are no longer in control 2. You are not the most important part of anything 3. You can have any colour you want, as long as it's black 4. You still need on-premise hardware, and an in-house IT staff When you’re considering a cloud service, make sure you read all the fine print, and walk through specific scenarios with the provider before you sign. Ask about service limits and what features you won't get when compared to doing it yourself. I bet 99 times out of 100 you’ll find any limitations to be acceptable, but you’ll also need to socialize those throughout the business to avoid any surprises down the road. Casper Manes blogs for IT Channel Insight, a site for MSPs and Channel partners where you can find other related articles to cloud services. [Image credit: EmiliaU/Shutterstock] Filed under: cloud, enterprise        
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| Wikipedia goes nuclear against SOPA: founder confirms site blackout Posted: 16 Jan 2012 11:32 AM PST
Channeling the energy of an excited teenager, Wales (pictured) tweeted this morning, “This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!” The announcement comes on the heels of Congress’ decision today to shelve the SOPA vote, as well as the White House’s weekend smackdown of SOPA and any other similar anti-piracy measure, like its sister PIPA bill in the Senate. A Wikipedia blackout seemed inevitable, especially since 87 percent of the site’s polled members said that they opposed SOPA. If passed, SOPA and PIPA would give the government and copyright holders the ability to block websites with content they deem to be infringing or pirated. During the blackout, which will begin at midnight Eastern Standard Time, the Wikipedia English home page will display a message asking users to reach out to their Congressional representatives. Wales said that the blackout was a “community decision.” The German version of the site will run a banner about SOPA, while other languages “will make their own decisions,” Wales said. Wikipedia will join the ranks of companies like Reddit who have chosen protest SOPA and PIPA on January 18. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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