VentureBeat |
- Nimble uses seed funding to take on Salesforce with “social CRM” (exclusive)
- Grooveshark denies service to Germany due to “unreasonably high” licensing costs
- 6waves Lolapps acquires mobile game maker Escalation Studios
- iPhone 4S helps Apple catch up with Android among recent smartphone buyers
- Original Doom game now available on Xbox Live
- Dylan’s Desk: Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer
- Cloud enterprise app maker Tidemark grabs $24M from Redpoint, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz
- VBWeekly: We call Congress about SOPA (video)
- If CES was any indication, car tech is going high tech this year (pictures)
- How BioWare saw a chance to differentiate Mass Effect 3 with Kinect (interview)
- Use voice commands to play better in Mass Effect 3 (video)
- 3 million people and counting sign petitions against SOPA and PIPA
- Everspin triples growth for magnetic RAM chips in 2011
- Namely raises $1 million to help ad agencies battle tech startups for talent
- Presents for social gifting service Wrapp: $5M more funding, Reid Hoffman joins board
- Chegg debuts HTML5 digital textbook reader
- SOPA blackouts and protests go live (gallery of screenshots)
- Code 42 Software raises $52.5M to raise profile for online backup
- Which anti-SOPA game companies are fighting back, and how
- Why Groupon’s still not well in China despite group-buying uptick
- Alienware launches its $699 X51 gamer PC for the mass market
- Codecademy introduces summer semester inspired by Obama’s Summer Jobs+
- Could collaborative consumption work in China? Not yet.
- Israeli hackers attack Saudi & UAE stock exchange websites
- Six million LittleBigPlanet user levels created; here are some of the best
- SOPA controversy creates rival to game industry group ESA; LFG aims to be “the NRA for gamers”
- Mobile processor company Audience files for $75M IPO
- House debate over SOPA anti-piracy bill to resume in Feb.
- Apple attacks Samsung’s Android devices in Germany. Again.
- Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang resigns from board of directors and all other roles
| Nimble uses seed funding to take on Salesforce with “social CRM” (exclusive) Posted: 18 Jan 2012 09:58 AM PST  Jon Ferrara, CEO of NimbleCustomer relationship management “sucks,” according to Nimble chief executive Jon Ferrara. Investors are throwing money at the company, and Nimble is responding with new features that it hopes will turn “sucks” to “sales.” “Since we started two years ago we’ve been getting phone calls from a number of large venture capital firms and tech companies interested in investing in or acquiring Nimble,” Ferrara told VentureBeat. “I’ve said no to all of them.” Ferrara calls Nimble a social customer relationship management (CRM) company. “Life and business are social, and people buy from people they like,” he said. “In the old days we got to know people by going to their offices. Now we do it over the Internet in six different tabs.” The company recently took on a seed round of funding from Google Ventures as well as a number of well known techies such as Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban. Why such an eclectic group for a $1 million seed round? Ferrara says they’ve all been wanting a piece of Nimble for awhile, and they all support the new features Ferrara will be releasing by the end of this month. CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software — the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com — is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy. Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start.
Within the beginning of this year, Nimble will integrate with Hubspot, Mailchimp, WooFoo, Zendesk, Yammer, Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite to capture the wide range of “tabs” we keep open all day just to chat. With the topic of “big data” floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts. Perhaps the lead you once relied on is slipping away, or one of your coworkers has just made a connection to the same CEO you pitched last month. This type of information will soon be included in your daily e-mails, so you can have a better grasp on who you know and how well you know them. Nimble isn’t alone on this front. Companies such as Nutshell are also adding interactivity, such as showing when a lead is “getting hot” and allowing you to chat with other employees without leaving Nutshell’s portal. But even with these new functions, vendors like Nimble and Nutshell will have to watch out they don’t go the way of old, cumbersome enterprise software by adding so many features that users just ignore them. Nimble’s seed round may have stirred up a lot of product development, but Ferrara isn’t done looking for cash yet, which is completely out of his character. The Nimble CEO founded Goldmine, a predecessor to today’s CRM technology, 20 years ago and sold it for over $100 million without ever having taken venture money. At the time, Ferrara felt like he would be diluting the value of his company, but he has since been won over to the positive effects of a little capital injection.  Jason Calacanis“The mistake I made with Goldmine is that if I had taken money at the right time, I wouldn’t have sold it as a $100 million company,” said Ferrara, “It would have been a $1 billion company.” So Ferrara has trodden lightly into VC territory this time around, after having put in $2 million of his own dollars into Nimble. Seed investor Don Dodge, currently a developer advocate for Google, was introduced to Ferrara and after three hours of chatting in Dodge’s backyard, the two decided to move forward with an investment. Mark Cuban impressed Ferrara, in essence, because of his ability to tell you what to do based on what he thinks is right. Dharmesh Shah brought marketing software Hubspot to the table, which is being integrated into Nimble’s offerings. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis brought something different to the table: chutzpah. “Jason has a reputation and people feel strongly one way or the other about him based on that,” explained Ferrara. “I had formed an opinion and after I got to know the guy, I really came to like his chutzpah and his ability to say what he thinks regardless of what people feel about it.” Currently, Ferrara is on the hunt for his first round of institutional funding. He would like to find the right investors for a $6-10 million round. But it’s not all about the money this time around. “I’m not in this thing to make $100 million, I already did that,” Ferrara said frankly. “I want to disrupt the market … because I think CRMs today suck.” Photo of Jason Calacanis via Joi/Flickr Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat        
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| Grooveshark denies service to Germany due to “unreasonably high” licensing costs Posted: 18 Jan 2012 09:04 AM PST
Grooveshark lets its users legally upload music that can be enjoyed by the entire community. And much like YouTube, if a user uploads a file that he or she doesn't own and it gets a DMCA complaint, Grooveshark takes the file down. It’s estimated that Germany makes up less than 10 percent of the site’s total 30 million active users. Grooveshark has been in legal hot water with the major music labels because it doesn't have broad licensing agreements to play the majority of its music, unlike Spotify, MOG, Rdio and Rhapsody. In Germany, however, the issue might be tied directly to cost versus legality, according to TorrentFreak’s translation of the company’s official site notification:
GEMA is a German music rights collection agency that has 64,000 members and represents over 2 million artists. The “unreasonably high” music licensing fees could be related to a GEMA rate change for music-on-demand services. We’re reaching out to Grooveshark for more information about the situation and will update this post with any new statements. Gainesville, Fla.-based Grooveshark has over 30 million active monthly users who stream more than 15 billion songs per year, according to the company. In November, the company rolled out a new design of its online music player that includes a social layer. More recently, the company debuted a new HTML5 music player aimed at getting around restrictions against a Grooveshark application for Apple’s iOS platform. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| 6waves Lolapps acquires mobile game maker Escalation Studios Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:54 AM PST
San Francisco-based 6waves Lolapps is one of the biggest social game makers on Facebook, with more than 14.6 million monthly active users. But 6L, as the company will be known in the future, considers mobile to be its fastest-growing market opportunity, said Arjun Sethi, chief product officer, in an interview. It’s also a market that, unlike Facebook, isn’t dominated by Zynga or any other company. “This feels like the early days of Facebook,” Sethi said. “The good thing about mobile is that there is no clear winner. It’s going to be a huge playing field. “ The Escalation Studios team will stay at its location and continue to focus on delivering cutting-edge mobile games such as Doom Resurrection, pictured. The team was founded by Tom Mustaine and Marc Tardiff, both veterans of the game industry. They will become design directors. A third co-founder, Shawn Green, will become director of engineering for 6L. The company’s more recent games include the musical chain reaction game Splode and Yeti Town. Tardiff said the company started out with work-for-hire and later moved on to original titles. “Marc and his team are doing wonderfully,” Sethi said, adding that he was impressed that Escalation’s goals for its future aligned closely with 6L’s. 6L plans to double its business in 2012, and mobile is expected to play a big role in that growth. As the company expands, it will both hire and acquire new talent. Escalation Studios has 30 employees, while 6L has 200. So the combined company will have around 230 people. GCA Savvian Advisors was the financial advisor for Escalation. Filed under: games, social, VentureBeat        
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| iPhone 4S helps Apple catch up with Android among recent smartphone buyers Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:45 AM PST
Apple’s market share among recent smartphone buyers in the U.S. rose from 25.1 percent in October to 44.5 percent in December, while Android’s fell from 61.6 percent to 46.9 percent last month, according to the latest numbers from Nielsen. The numbers don’t exactly come as a surprise. Apple’s iPhone 4S launched on October 15 and sold like hotcakes. Meanwhile, only Google’s Galaxy Nexus Android phone had much of a chance of cutting through the Apple hype, and it didn’t reach the US until the middle of December. This same dance occurs pretty much every time a new iPhone is released. It’s also worth noting that iPhone sales dipped during the summer quarter this year, as many consumers were anticipating the release of an iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S’ performance over the holiday quarter helped Apple make up for much of those earlier lost sales. When looking at all U.S. smartphone consumers, Android still has a big lead at 46.3 percent, while iOS is sitting at 30 percent. Nielsen also notes that smartphone penetration is still growing rapidly, with 60 percent of recent mobile phone buyers choosing smartphones over less feature-rich phones. Smartphone owners now account for 46 percent of all mobile phone owners. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Original Doom game now available on Xbox Live Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:56 AM PST
The mature-rated game is a classic from 1993, the early days of PC gaming. While the graphics look quaint now, they were realistic for their time and advanced the era of 3D graphics that began with Castle Wolfenstein 3D and ended with titles such as id Software’s Rage. Doom was shocking in its day because it had a lot of blood and you could blow your enemies into little chunks with rockets or chop them into pieces with a chain saw. By today’s standards, that seems tame. But it marked a turning point in video games, which had a richer tradition as a children’s pastime. After Doom, games for adults grew as a market, and now first-person shooters are a multibillion-dollar market.
The original Doom was created by a small team including John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall. Those guys are now legends of the game industry, and John Carmack was inducted into the hall of fame for the industry’s peer group, the Academy of Interactive Sciences. Now high-end PC and console games are made by teams with 100 developers or more. Doom is now owned by Bethesda Softworks, which acquired id Software. The game is still difficult to master and scary. Monsters jump out at you from hiding places and growl at you in the dark as they lob flame balls at you. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Dylan’s Desk: Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:30 AM PST If you subscribe to my newsletter you can read these columns a whole day before they appear on our website. All the cool kids are doing it!  The print head of the MakerBot creates plastic objects, like this green thing, layer by layer.Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity? It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of. “We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video below. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.” The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year. If you can dream it, and if you can create a 3D representation of it in an STL file, a desktop 3D printer can create it in a few hours. Provided it’s small enough, that is: The Replicator can only create objects smaller than 300 cubic inches, or about the size of a loaf of bread. Not quite big enough to assemble a cotton gin or a replacement plough blade, but certainly large enough to make toys, chess pieces, gears, artwork, cups, bowls, and a lot of other things. “This is kind of magic, because there was nothing there, and now there’s something,” said Pettis. Also, unlike the Star Trek Enterprise’s replicator, MakerBot can only create things in inedible ABS plastic or biodegradable PLA, so it won’t be able to make you a cup of tea — Earl Grey, hot. Sorry. Still, 3D printers are making a whole new field of creativity accessible to computer geeks. In the same way that laser printers enabled people with computers to become publishing experts in two dimensions, these printers are opening the doors to creative, computational expression in three dimensions. I’ve been fascinated with the “do-it-yourself” movement since I went to my first Maker Faire. Subsequently I investigated the growing world of hackerspaces, where people gather to work on code, learn how to solder, teach crocheting classes, borrow a welder, slice things into strips with a bandsaw, use a drill press, or work on projects that involve all of the above skills. The MakerBot emerges from this world, as Pettis was one of the telegenic evangelists of the DIY ethic and is a cofounder of NYC Resistor, one of the earliest U.S. hackerspaces. I’m convinced that the people who have embraced the DIY movement have tapped into the core of what makes the United States great: Self-reliance, experimentation, innovation and a non-dogmatic reverence for facts. Over the decades, innovators tinkering in metaphorical (or literal) garages have played important roles in the development of electricity, radio, computers and, now, the internet economy. DIY, or at least a willingness to take initiative for doing things on one’s own, outside the usual structures, has also played a role in political life, with grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org and loosely organized movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street drawing much of their strength from people’s iconoclasm and sense of self-sufficiency. But one thing that hasn’t emerged from the DIY movement — until MakerBot — is a major venture-backed business. MakerBot Industries might change that, as the company has now raised more than $11 million in investment capital and employs 75 people in its Brooklyn headquarters. Not only that, Pettis told me the company has openings to hire another 30 people. He didn’t say whether the company is making money now, but he did point out that Makerbot did about $8 million in revenue on its seed round investment alone, which was only about $75,000, so the business has promising roots. What about competitors? One of the biggest players in the 3D printing space to date has been Shapeways, which VentureBeat has covered previously. Shapeways lets designers print objects not only in plastic, but in ceramic and metals as well, and it allows you to print larger objects than you can with the MakerBot printer. But you can’t buy a Shapeways printer; you upload your design to the company’s site, and it ships you the finished product. Shapeways, by the way, counters my assertion that DIY product-printing is an American phenomenon — the company was founded in the Netherlands. But its $5.1M funding came partly from New York’s Union Square Ventures (the rest came from Index Ventures in London), and the company has now moved its headquarters to New York. Another ship-to-your-door 3D printing company is Sculpteo, which I also ran into at CES. Sculpteo prints in ceramic. But when it comes to consumer 3D printers you can have at home, MakerBot’s main competitor seems to be 3D printing pioneer 3D Systems. I spent some time at CES ogling the company’s Cubify Cube printer. Cubify prints plastic objects in different colors, and has a more clean, iPod-like industrial aesthetic compared to MakerBot’s hacker-y, DIY aesthetic. The Cube is also cheaper, at just $1,300. (Check out our video of the Cubify below.) Pettis’s response to the competition was cheeky geek macho. “Our machine makes things that are twice as big as their machine,” Pettis said. And that’s another really American thing: Competition. Let’s hope it helps make 3D printers cheaper every year, until everyone has one of these strangely anti-consumerist consumer devices in their own kitchens, right next to the breadmakers. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Cloud enterprise app maker Tidemark grabs $24M from Redpoint, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:10 AM PST Enterprise performance management company Tidemark has raised $24 million in its third round of funding. The company makes cloud-based apps that help businesses interpret and act on real-time data. Tidemark made our list of 10 disruptive cloud companies we’re exited about because it helps enterprises with the important task of cloud-based data management and analysis. Its HTML5 apps help decipher critical enterprise data and extract information that can help managers, strategists and operations planners judge business performance and overall health. "The world's largest enterprises are demanding an analytics solution truly built for the cloud,” said Christian Gheorghe, founder and CEO of Tidemark, in a statement. “With this capital, Tidemark will continue to expand its core technology, products and go-to-market capability to deliver innovation and customer success in analytics." The funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, co-CEO of Workday, also participated in the round. Redpoint founding partner Geoff Yang will join Tidemark’s board of directors. "The next-generation of enterprise applications combine social, mobile, analytics and big data," Yang said, in a statement. "Tidemark is at the nexus of all of these trends and Redpoint is extremely pleased to make this investment. We look forward to a long-term successful relationship in helping to build the company." Redwood City, Calif.-based Tidemark came out of stealth mode in October 2011 when it announced an $11 million funding round. It now has $35 million in total funding and has “aggressive plans” to target more Fortune 1000 companies with its apps. You can watch a video outlining Tidemark’s enterprise data management applications below:
Filed under: cloud, deals        
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| VBWeekly: We call Congress about SOPA (video) Posted: 18 Jan 2012 06:30 AM PST For our weekly video show, we decided that not only were we going to talk about SOPA; we were going to do something about SOPA. Also, this was our CES wrap-up show, and Chris Peri, who was there to see it all, recaps some of the highlights of the consumer electronics freak-fest that was. You can check out all of VentureBeat’s CES 2012 coverage at your leisure. SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that attempts to conquer counterfeiting and piracy but would also entail widespread censorship on the web. We wouldn’t call the bill controversial so much as outright hated — at least among Internet companies. Even the Internet’s founders and inventors have become very vocal about their opposition to SOPA and its sister bill, PIPA. So instead of standing idly by and opining about SOPA, we picked up the phone and called Congress. Jolie O’Dell (that’s me, folks) called Rep. Jackie Speier of California to express opposition to SOPA (in other, unfilmed correspondence, O’Dell also contacted her two senators about her opposition to PIPA). We highly recommend that you do the same post haste. If you’re all fired up and ready to get in touch with your representatives in Congress, here’s a great guide explaining exactly how to do that. If you're not shy about getting on the phone, you can call your representatives in Congress directly. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121, and the House switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Filed under: VentureBeat, video        
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| If CES was any indication, car tech is going high tech this year (pictures) Posted: 18 Jan 2012 06:22 AM PST More than any other time in show history, car manufacturers showed up in full force to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week — a major sign that car tech is going high tech this year. While CES used to be filled with tech companies showing off car stereos, car manufacturers themselves are now taking up space on the floor to show all the cool things their vehicles can do. And vendors are going car heavy too — if your company used to show off an app for an upcoming smartphone, now your company is hyping your app for a car dashboard instead. If the dashboard itself doesn’t run apps directly, the console will find some sort of crazy way to interact with your apps using the driver’s voice. For example, Mercedes-Benz head Dieter Zetsche debuted the mbrace2 console, which connects the dashboard to the cloud for over-the-air software updates and gives the owner access to Facebook, Google, news highlights and more from the dashboard. The mbrace2 solution will also have 3G Internet access, but it's unclear if you’d need to purchase a data plan to use it. The connected system will also include "remote access capabilities" such as remote vehicle health diagnostics, a driving journal and speed alerts. Ford, which has keynoted CES the last few years, showed off the latest of its Sync technology. Sync now has more apps for AppLink, a program in the console that interacts directly with iPhone and Android apps when the phone is connected via Bluetooth or USB. AppLink already lets you voice control apps like Pandora, Slacker, iHeartRadio and Stitcher, and now it works with a new NPR app that lets you create on-demand listening of your favorite NPR programs. Sync is installed in 4 million cars in the U.S., and Ford expects 9 million cars worldwide will have Sync installed by the end of 2015. Chip-maker Nvidia had a tent just outside of the Las Vegas Convention center at CES to show its own car integration. The company had two cars on display in the tent: a beautiful white Lamborghini Aventador (pictured above), which features an infotainment system with real-time Google Maps data. The other car was a stunning blue Audi A7, with Google-Earth-based 3D maps and night-vision cameras to help you not hit pedestrians. Nvidia also helps power the awesome-looking Tesla Model S sedan, which has a 17-inch touch-screen that controls the media, sunroof, door locks and navigation. All three cars have Nvida Tegra chips inside boosting capabilities. Streaming media inside cars also took a nice leap with Harmon’s Aha console, which will now be available in select models from Subaru and Honda. Streaming services MOG and Rhapsody will work on Aha and provide on-demand music from their extensive catalogs so you’re never disconnected from your favorite songs. The streaming radio service Pandora also used CES to announce that it has partnered with a whopping 23 auto companies to make sure its music can play in their cars. VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal correctly points out that car and phone interegration has a lot of road for improvement, but we believe these car manufacturers are headed in the right direction. You can view a gallery of all the cool car tech we saw at CES below: Photos by Sean Ludwig, Dean Takahashi and Devindra Hardawar Filed under: mobile        
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| How BioWare saw a chance to differentiate Mass Effect 3 with Kinect (interview) Posted: 18 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST Aaryn Flynn has a lot riding on Mass Effect 3, the sci-fi shooter and role-playing game that debuts on March 6. Flynn, the general manager of game developer BioWare‘s studios in Edmonton, Canada, and Montreal. As such, his teams have been in charge of one of the biggest games of 2012.
Hey, no pressure. We had a chance to sit down with Flynn at the preview of the game at a press event near the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The sci-fi title wasn’t disappointing. It is the third game in a series where the Earth and all of humanity is threatened by a galaxy-wide invasion of beings known as the Reapers. The game has cinematic visuals, a deep story, and — in something that is new this time around — voice controls through Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensor for the Xbox 360 game console. Flynn, of course, says it is the best game in the series, as the entire galaxy is in a state of war. Here’s a transcript of our interview with Flynn. GamesBeat: Tell us about your role. Flynn: I’m the studio general manager for BioWare’s Edmonton and Montreal studios. Both of them paired up to create the game. Edmonton has always done the Mass Effect series and we added Montreal during the development of Mass Effect 2. It was a new place to draw on creative talent. That team has grown to more than 60 people and they are all part of the Mass Effect 3 team.
Flynn: The team is a little bigger now because we are being so much more ambitious with Mass Effect 3. We have to do an amazing single-player campaign. We have to do multiplayer. We have to do Kinect. GB: How far back did you start to think about integrating Kinect? Flynn: It’s been about nine months for Kinect. It launched during the middle of the development of Mass Effect 3. After it came out, I was playing Kinect with my kids. Microsoft reached out and asked what BioWare could do with Kinect. We started working with Microsoft and hit upon this idea of voice recognition as something that would be technically feasible to do. Kinect has a good applications programming interface for this. It really fit into what we were trying to do. It was authentic to the experience. Mass Effect has squad mates. It has a system for conversations. And speaking in voice seemed to be the right thing to do. It worked with the brand. It all worked out. GB: What about the gesture side of Kinect? Did you experiment with that?
GB: Couldn’t you have done something minimal like using your arm to throw a grenade? Flynn: The technology was a barrier there so we discounted it pretty early. GB: It seems like reaction time is very quick with the voice commands. Flynn: Yes it is. I don’t know what the actual timing is. The Kinect software is quite good and so it does pick up on what you are saying very quickly. Mass Effect 3 is a very responsive game and so it can respond quickly to that verbal command and turn it into a command that the game can execute. GB: You’ve played the game with and without Kinect. Can you actually play faster with Kinect? Flynn: I’m not sure you end up playing faster or slower. It’s more about what suits the player. There are those people who are very quick with their fingers and love to pause the game and go into the menus. They set up their commands. Then are those who are more focused as Shepard and want to be immersed in the action as they issue commands to their squads. It’s another way to play it.
Flynn: When a character has a specific action that is important to that character, we have to create a unique command for that character. The nice thing is that with Kinect, you can chain your commands together very nicely. So while one is doing something, you can have the other character do something else. You can build a tree of complex commands, and that is quite immersive. We have dozens and dozens of commands. We’ll publish a list at some point. GB: I think I recall that voice recognition works better with a fixed list of commands. Flynn: Technologically, there is a list of commands in the game for sure. But we are looking for fan feedback to see what the players like to do. GB: Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could change the names of the characters? Flynn: That might be interesting. I think what it would come down to is that we would have to work with Microsoft on that. But that’s the kind of feedback we like to hear. When the game gets out, we can respond.
Flynn: The team is very hard at work. When the series was imagined a decade ago, it was imagined as a trilogy. The first two games were the building blocks for this big game. To be on the cusp of closing it out is quite a feeling. It’s an amazing moment because we are thinking about whether people will like it and what kind of feedback we will get. The team is putting everything they’ve got into this game. GB: Is it as long as the other games? Flynn: Oh yes. It’s at least as big. I would hesitate to put a number of hours of game play, because you can play it any way you like. It’s probably bigger. There is more to do. There is multiplayer mode. We brought back the role-playing game elements. You can have a lot of fun customizing your armor, weapons and your character. You can enjoy how your character will be more and more unique. GB: The overall message is that the game is faster action and more shooter-like?
GB: It seems like Kinect enables you to play faster? Flynn: In that sense, that’s correct. A lot of players will find they can control Shepard and don’t have to pause the game. It’s more fluid and immersive. GB: So you can get rid of the command wheel entirely? Flynn: Certainly you can do that. I haven’t had to do it because I can use verbal commands all the way through. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Use voice commands to play better in Mass Effect 3 (video) Posted: 18 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST Mass Effect 3 is one of the hot new video games coming this spring from BioWare, whose previous two installments have sold millions of copies. For the third time around, there’s always a risk that it could be boring. But BioWare’s team found a way to innovate using the voice commands in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360.
As you’ll see in the demo below, you can use the voice commands to speed up the third-person shooter gameplay of the new game from BioWare. And if you’re a neophyte player, the commands may help you keep up when too many things are happening. While Kinect didn’t quite work well enough to play the game with motion sensors, the voice commands are a good use of the add-on system for the Xbox 360 and are a case of innovation in gaming that is sorely needed. Console game sales fell 8 percent last year in the U.S. and most games are sequels. While this new installment is the third and final part in a trilogy, it’s refreshing to see that BioWare delivering something cool.
Now, with Kinect, you can just say a command, such as “carnage,” and your partner will launch the attack (which explodes enemies) at the target that you’re looking at. You can also say a command to switch weapons such as “Shotgun” and then your own character, Commander Shepard in this case, will change weapons. You don’t even have to shout. You can use your voice to pick up things, bypass locks, and activate buttons. Each one of those tasks often requires you to press a button and possibly lose your concentration on the really important tasks, such as targeting enemies. As you can see below, Driscoll is a good shot. But when the action gets tough, it helps to be able to play the game faster. And since you don’t have to pause the game to issue commands via buttons, the game can be much more immersive.
The Kinect system offers you feedback. When the indicator light turns red on the small Kinect microphone icon in the top left hand corner of the screen, then the Kinect system doesn’t understand what you said. If it turns blue, it means it recognizes what you said and then will execute your command. You can order your teammates to move, provide cover for you, or follow you. They will move to wherever your aiming reticle is set. That helps you set up a flanking maneuver to get past tough enemies. The demo will be available on Xbox Live on Feb. 14. Check out our video of Driscoll below. For demo purposes, Driscoll played it on the casual level. You can imagine the action gets a lot more intense on the harder levels. Filed under: games        
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| 3 million people and counting sign petitions against SOPA and PIPA Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:55 AM PST Google blacked out the logo on its main page today to protest the controversial anti-piracy legislation, SOPA and PIPA, being debated in the House and Senate. They didn’t go full service blackout like Wikipedia and Reddit, but hey, they’ve got a business to run. Clicking on the blacked out logo takes you to a graphic with some interesting statistics on the battle against SOPA/PIPA to date. It starts with a single dissenting voice, Vint Cerf, a founding father of the internet and Chief Evangelist for the internet at Google. It expands to show the 3,000,000 people who have so far signed petitions opposing these bills. We’ll be covering the New York Tech Meetup’s emergency protest, aka Rally for The Future of the Internet, outside the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand this afternoon at 12:30. So far 1,300 people have signed up for the event, including a number of the biggest names in the Silicon Alley startup and venture communities. Be sure to check back then for live updates, photos and video.
Full PFD of Google’s Take Action Infographic Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Everspin triples growth for magnetic RAM chips in 2011 Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST
Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) chips perform the same functions of permanent flash memory chips, but also have the responsive speed of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The MRAM chips use the spin, or the directional facing of a magnet, to store data in digital form. Chandler, Ariz.-based Everspin is still the only company shipping production quantities of MRAM. And it is seeing customer adoption from big companies. Altogether, the company has more than 300 active customers with 100-plus MRAM products in three major markets. More than 100 applications are using MRAM today, and in 2011, the company secured more than 250 new design wins for those designing MRAM into their products. In 2011, Everspin shipped more than 2 million units. Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, said that MRAM has gained traction as a superior alternative to non-volaitle SRAM chips for RAID controllers, used in the enterprise storage market. Everspin’s products are being used in industrial, energy and automotive markets. But the big growth segment in 2011 was enterprise storage, server and networking equipment. Customers in that market include Dell and LSI. Using MRAM in enterprise data centers reduces system downtime and simplifies system design, lowering overall costs. MRAM also eliminates the need for external components such as resistors, capacitors, batteries and super-capacitors. That, in turn, improves reliability and cuts system costs. Everspin is a spin-off from Freescale Semiconductor.
Filed under: mobile        
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| Namely raises $1 million to help ad agencies battle tech startups for talent Posted: 18 Jan 2012 04:31 AM PST  Namely founder Matt StrazTurnover has always been a problem at top advertising agencies. But these days the designers and developers needed to create rich media campaigns are also being lured away from Madison Avenue by the booming New York tech scene. “Retaining top folks is always a problem for agencies,” says digital media agency veteran Matt Straz. “Battling for talent with tech startups and that has added a whole new dimension to the talent crunch.’ So Straz has founded a new company, Namely, which hopes to use cloud computing and data analysis to help advertising agencies retain their key employees. Venturebeat has learned that Namely just raised a $1 million seed round from some of the biggest names in New York’s ad-tech scene: folks like Mike Lazerow from Buddy Media, Michael Barrett from AdMeld, Michael Kassan and Wenda Harris Millard from MediaLink, Simulmedia's Dave Morgan and CIA founder Chris Ingram. “At some agencies there can be 30 percent annual turnover on the top accounts,” said Straz. “We’re building a really robust database in the cloud so that the decision makers at these companies can get an informed take on who they should pay to keep and when it’s ok to let a competitor poach.” Although he won’t name any names, Straz says that several of the largest advertising agencies have already signed on and imported their employee statistics, meaning Namely has a better chance to avoid the cold start problem of having a service making recommendations based on very little data. Straz, who sold his previous startup Pictela to AOL, says that he decided to avoid raising from traditional venture capitalists and took four months going door to door with people from his own industry. “It took a lot longer, but it was a lot more satisfying. There are kind of two worlds in New York, the flashy consumer tech and then the big world of ad-tech behind it.” He has also decided to headquarter Namely in Brooklyn. “That’s where the creative class tends to live,” Straz noted. He’ll be joining Charlie O’Donnell, who yesterday launched a new venture fund to focus on the rising tech scene in Brooklyn. “I just hired a developer and you know who I was competing with? Facebook. But this guy picked Namely because we’re based in Williamsburg, and that’s a neighbourhood he loves.” Filed under: deals, media        
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| Presents for social gifting service Wrapp: $5M more funding, Reid Hoffman joins board Posted: 18 Jan 2012 04:30 AM PST
Adding even more cred to the company is LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a partner at Greylock, who will be joining Wrapp’s board. He’ll be serving alongside Skype and Kazaa co-founder Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Atomico. The funding will help Wrapp to accelerate its expansion into the U.S. and U.K., after it found success in its home country of Sweden over the past few months. The company says that in Sweden it has sent over 250,000 gift cards in December, and it’s continuing to grow about 30 percent every week. As of the past three months, 2 percent of Sweden’s population of 9 million are active on the service. “Our biggest issue right now is that we grow so quickly, we’re running out of [retail] campaigns,” said Wrapp CEO and co-founder Hjalmar Winbladh in an interview with VentureBeat. He went on to say that the company needed to arrange additional retail campaigns quicker than it originally thought. Wrapp now has 30 major retailers in Sweden participating in its service, as well as hundreds of smaller retailers. Wrapp connects to your Facebook account to let you know when friends and family have upcoming birthdays. After gifting a card to a friend through the Wrapp mobile or web app, other friends can see the card on the recipient's Facebook account and chip in additional funds. The gift card remains "wrapped" on the recipient’s Facebook page until the day of their birthday, which adds a nice bit of mystery to a traditionally boring gift card transaction. Wrapp's cards can only be redeemed using its Android or iPhone app, which adds a nice viral element to the service since every recipient instantly becomes an active Wrapp user. Winbladh tells me that women between 22 and 35 are the most active users on the service. That’s a good thing, since they’re statistically the biggest shopping demographic worldwide. As for its U.S. strategy, Winbladh says that the company will target large nationwide chains and then focus on more regional retailers. Wrapp is particularly appealing for retailers since they don’t have to pay anything until someone redeems a gift card, and even then retailers using the service say that every redemption has been profitable. Since Wrapp relies on Facebook data, retailers can also use it to target specific consumers by age, gender and location. Stockholm, Sweden-based Wrapp also has offices in Silicon Valley. Thus far, it has raised a total of $10.5 million. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Chegg debuts HTML5 digital textbook reader Posted: 18 Jan 2012 04:30 AM PST Chegg’s digital textbook reader is the “nice guy:” comfortable, treats you right, but doesn’t come with many exciting twists. “[E-readers] are built for reading purposes, not studying purposes,” said Brent Tworetzky, product leader for Chegg, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We wanted to create an environment that works where students need it.” Digital textbooks are quickly replacing the tradition, heavy and cumbersome books of semesters past. This is especially the case as laptops replace notebooks and the sound of clicking becomes expected white noise against the teacher’s voice. Many companies have taken to converting textbooks to PDFs, but that’s it, they’re just PDFs. It’s the same clunky textbook, just now without the weight. Companies such as Kno and Inkling are trying to insert interaction and beauty to the textbook, but need to build a user base, and grow textbook offerings. Chegg, however, saw an opportunity to service its 4.5 million users by creating an HTML5 digital textbook reader, that can work on any device and utilizes both its suite of education tools and the students who use them. Chegg has spent the last year acquiring a number of companies and using them to create a comprehensive collection of education products. The company currently offers textbook rentals — its bread and butter — along with homework help, course reviews, and other products aimed at helping students through their years of higher education. Recently, Chegg acquired design firm 3D3R, whose talents have been used to create the new digital textbook reader. The reader is pretty standard, which may be to Chegg’s benefit. Pages in the textbook look like they would in a textbook, you can highlight text, add notes in the margins, and it will sort your highlights and notes into study guides for you to reference. It also connects you to Chegg’s homework help product, allowing you to ask a question about a certain piece of content, and receive an answer from the Chegg community. It also lets you see the most pertinent areas of text by pre-highlighting what areas of a page the Chegg community is interacting with the most. The reader is free, though the textbooks obviously are not. And because it is built in HTML5, you can access it from iPads, Androids, laptops, library computers, phones, wherever you are. The company calls it an e-reader, which is a bit misleading given that “e-reader” has become synonymous with hardware such as Kindles and Nooks. Really, it is just a cloud-based piece of software. But honestly, it is the lack of frills that may make this reader a success. For instance, Inkling is gorgeous. The company’s iPad app reinvents the textbook, taking it out of its original form and into interactive pages that are as beautiful as they are functional. But sometimes too much of a good thing is too much. Functional is good, but practical is better. Chegg’s reader is more accessible, with more available textbooks. “It’s what HTML5 can do,” explained Chegg’s chief executive officer Dan Rosensweig of the reader’s accessibility. “The key here is that a lot of these readers that you use, you choose one device, that’s it.” Rosensweig says we are “going to see other increasingly trying to follow” in the footsteps of HTML5 reading. Filed under: mobile        
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| SOPA blackouts and protests go live (gallery of screenshots) Posted: 17 Jan 2012 10:15 PM PST A handful of U.S. websites have decided to go dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act as well as its senate cousin the Protect IP Act — two piece of proposed legislation aimed at curbing piracy efforts abroad. Perhaps the most vocal protester of the bunch is search engine giant Google, which has decided to update its homepage with a large sideways black box over the company’s logo. Since the site prides itself on staying very minimal, the logo is basically the most dominant visual element on its search homepage at any given time — meaning it’ll be difficult for the majority of U.S. web users to avoid observing the protest if nothing else. The Google homepage also features a link to an anti-SOPA/PIPA infographic and a form that allows you to sign a formal petition against the bill. Google writes:
To summarize, both SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content, the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal. In addition to Google, several other staples of the web have also joined in the SOPA protest, including Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, BoingBoing.net, The Huffington Post and many more. Some organizations, such as Reddit and the Cheezburger Network of sites, have chosen to begin their protests or blackouts at 8 a.m. EST tomorrow. We’ve included a gallery of screenshots below displaying protest messages from several sites. Since it’s only 1 a.m. on the east coast, I’d expect we’ll end up updating this page with more screenshots throughout the day. Update 1/18/2012 9:05 a.m. EST: We’ve added screenshots from six other sites participating in the SOPA protests — Fark, xkcd, smbc, Cheezburger Network, WordPress and Reddit. Stay tuned for more! Update 10:46 a.m. EST: Added screenshots from RawStory, Grooveshark, Oreilly, MLG (Major League Gaming), Minecraft, Ragemaker, The Internet Archive, Imgur and TwitPic. Update 11:39 a.m. EST: Added a few more screenshots. It’s worth noting that the screenshot below from popular web comic The Oatmeal doesn’t properly portray the full extent of the blackout message. Artist Matthew Inman has created a hilarious narrative animated gif image that manages to include goats, Oprah, Jesus, Jet skis and (of course) SOPA. For more information about the proposed legislation, check out VentureBeat's ongoing SOPA coverage. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Code 42 Software raises $52.5M to raise profile for online backup Posted: 17 Jan 2012 09:01 PM PST
Online backup has become a crowded and important market, now that both consumers and enterprises are generating a mountain of data, much of it stored in an unsecure manner on laptops, mobile devices and other gadgets. Code 42′s ambition is to expand its sales and marketing so that it becomes the storage backup of choice when you want to protect your data. Matthew Dornquast, chief executive and founder at Minneapolis-based Code 42 Software, said in an interview that the company now has more than 100 petabytes of data backed up with its software and hardware. It has backed up more than 100 billion files and gets 250 million new unique files per day. The services includes Crash Plan, an automatic backup system for consumers; Crash Plan Pro for small businesses; and the Crash Plan Pro hardware and software backup service for enterprises. Code 42 has some interesting approaches to the business. It embraces a freemium model, allowing you to back up your data to friends’ sites for free and to back up your data from different locations for free. The backup to friends method helps with the viral spread of Code 42. It’s a good time to expand because the number of devices in the home and the enterprise that need backup — from phones to video recorders — is increasing every day. Much of that data is personal, so it is increasingly important to store it in a secure way. “There are all sorts of new devices that are generating data, and the question is how you can manage the data effectively,” Dornquast said. In 2008, the company expanded into enterprise backup and it now has 4,000 enterprise customers. Many of those, including Google, have taken the company up on its private data cloud service, where the customer takes control of the management of the data in the cloud. Ping Li, a partner at Accel, said in an interview, said, “Code 42 is a good example of the consumerization of IT. They span everything from the consumer, who likes the Apple-like user interface, but do so in a sophisticated way that gets them into the enterprise.” The investment is the first from Accel’s “Big Data” fund aimed at infrastructure and application companies associated with gathering huge amounts of data. Rivals include Carbonite and Mozy in the consumer market and Iron Mountain, now owned by HP, in the enterprise. Rivals such as Box and Dropbox have more sharing and collaboration focus. Carbonite in particular is better known because it advertises all over the place. “We come from a model of protection, while others focus on sharing,” Dornquast said. “A lot of our customers use us to build their own private clouds where they control it.” Code 42 sells its software as a service or through perpetual licenses. For enterprises, that amounts to $5 to $10 a month for each computer and $6 a month for consumers. The company has 86 employees and plans to double that this year. The company was founded in 2001 by Brian Bispala, Mitch Coopet and Dornquast and it never raised venture capital until this round with Accel. It has been profitable every year. In the last three years, revenue has grown 500 percent. Dornquast said his firm will use the money for a sales and marketing expansion as well as research and development. Dornquast said the company is interested in acquisitions and made an acquisition last year of a mobile development team. Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat        
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| Which anti-SOPA game companies are fighting back, and how Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:04 PM PST The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have definitely gotten the Internet’s attention, but not in the good Elmo orders Taco Bell sort of way. This is more like Rebecca Black announcing she’s obtained the license to the entire library of The Beatles music. The two bills have lovers of all things Internet immensely concerned, with many people claiming that if either one passes, the current everyday freedoms we enjoy, including unfettered access to Google, Wikipedia, and especially YouTube, would cease to exist as we know them. In reality, SOPA and PIPA target foreign websites that are pirating copyrighted content, but they do so in a broad way that most Internet experts agree would be damaging to the way the Internet functions. The video game industry would potentially be hit particularly hard, as a major element of the gaming culture is sharing screenshots, streaming gameplay videos, and celebrating over 20 years of video game art and music. This is not only done on a consumer level, by millions of gamers around the world, but is also the backbone of all professional gaming coverage from sites like GamesBeat and countless others. The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “Instead of complying with the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.” Many gaming companies have taken action to protest the bills. Below is a listing of all notable anti-SOPA gaming companies and how they’re fighting for what they believe in. And don’t miss our gallery of anti-SOPA protests today. “Don’t just send a tweet or shake your head in anger. Do something.” Mojang Minecraft creator Markus Persson announced via Twitter that he’d be taking down minecraft.net and mojang.com on January 18th to protest SOPA (the day the bill was originally set to be voted on, though that has now been indefinitely delayed). Persson acknowledged that a large part of Minecraft’s very viral success was due to players posting screenshots and videos of their in-game creations. Under SOPA, each and every one of them would potentially be at risk of having their sites closed down, something Persson, the legal copyright holder, obviously opposes. "No sane person can be for SOPA,” Persson stated, speaking on behalf of Mojang. “I don't know if we're sane, but we are strongly, uncompromisingly against SOPA, and any similar laws. Sacrificing freedom of speech for the benefit of corporate profit is abominable and disgusting." Major League Gaming (MLG) First MLG moved all 100+ of its domains off of GoDaddy, as did more than 30,000 other sites. It then announced it would be furthering its anti-SOPA stance by participating in the blackout on January 18, from 8am to 8pm ET. The entire MLG network will down during that period, and will be replaced by a short message with additional information about SOPA to “help educate our community members about the bill and what it could mean for them.” Destructoid Independent gaming blog Destructoid announced it will be joining in on the January 18 SOPA protest by blacking out its site, alongside MLG, Reddit, Wikipedia, and others. Destructoid founder Yanier Gonzalez wrote, “If you think this blog post is annoying and not about videogames, wait until you can’t reach our site at all because you won’t have the power to decide what websites you can and cannot reach.” Wikipedia Wikimedia is not a gaming-only site, obviously, but it does play a major role in the way gaming content is spread and digested across the Internet on a daily basis. You may best know Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales from those mopey banners begging for your donations, but he’s opted to take a decidedly more fearsome stance on SOPA. “All US Citizens: #WikipediaBlackout means nothing unless you call your Senators. Do it now! Give friends the number too!” Wales wrote on his Twitter. The English-language version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours on January 18. The move is not entirely unprecedented, however, as the Italian version of Wikipedia ran a similar blackout protest in October against new libel laws. Wales also defended the move on his personal Wikipedia page, and considered taking the blackout global as recently as yesterday. Unlike most other sites, where the decision to protest came down from on high, the Wikipedia blackout was proposed to and discussed by over 1,800 users in a 72 hour-period, with the “overwhelming majority” supporting community action against SOPA. If you absolutely can’t cope without Wikipedia for one day, you can always download the entire site. Epic Games Dana Cowley, senior PR manager for Gears of War studio Epic Games, wrote on the official Epic forums to clarify the company’s anti-SOPA stance. “Epic Games supports efforts that would stop overseas websites profiting from pirating our games, but we have to do that in a way that’s compatible with freedom of speech and due process of law. Thus, we do not support the current version of SOPA.” Cowley also noted that Epic Games is a member of the Entertainment Software Association, stating it was “working with legislators to refine the bill.” That may be sugar-coating it quite a bit, as the ESA is an organization that has come under heavy fire for its official support of SOPA. ESA members Electronic Arts, Sony and Nintendo all quietly removed their names from a list of official SOPA supporters. This may or may not have had something to do with a petition with over 130,000 signatures telling EA to oppose Internet censorship. Indie Gamers Polish indie game developer Sos Sosowski, with the help of 48-hour game-making competition Ludum Dare organizer Mike Kasprzak, has put together the Stop SOPA Jam. The jam will protest SOPA on January 18 in a very unique way: by making games. Anyone can join the Stop SOPA Game Jam by making an anti-SOPA game and uploading it tomorrow for public consumption. Minecraft’s Markus Persson has confirmed he will be participating. Sosowski initiated the movement with a single tweet: "Let's protest against #SOPA the best way we can! Make #antiSOPA games on January 18! Join the #sopajam! Let's do this!" “We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation.” Red 5 Studios Red 5 Studios, the developer of Firefall, an anticipated upcoming free-to-play massively multiplayer online game (MMO), has taken perhaps the most extreme anti-SOPA stance of them. Not only will Red 5 be protesting on January 18 by shutting down its official website, but also the ongoing beta for Firefall. “We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation,” said CEO Mark Kern. “We are also ashamed of the ESA for supporting a bill which is clearly not in the best interests of gamers or the game industry.” Firefall, which was the primary sponsor for last year’s PAX Prime event in Seattle (earning promotions and a massive booth front in center during the convention), has pulled all plans for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). E3 is (arguably) the world’s largest annual gaming expo, and is run by the ESA. Kern stated that Red 5 is not a member of the ESA, and never will be given its stance on SOPA. Instead, Red 5 has established the League for Gamers, a non-profit alternative to the ESA with the goal of “protecting gamers and developers from anti-industry legislation.” You can read more about the LFG in GamesBeat’s exclusive interview. Kern also noted that bills like SOPA would be especially detrimental to smaller companies “who will not have the legal resources or lobbying presence to protect themselves from unwarranted shutdown.” Story continues on the next page. Top image via Destructoid Filed under: dev, games, VentureBeat        
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| Why Groupon’s still not well in China despite group-buying uptick Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:53 PM PST
If you've ever been to a Chinese market or even better, if you've ever been to China, you'll know that bargaining for the Chinese is not only essential but also a fine art, a skill passed down through generations. So it's no surprise that group bargaining has been a trend over the last few years. It's an outlet for people to express a collective power in a nation where there are a few ways to openly do so. Locally known as tuangou, what it entails is a group of Chinese buyers coming together at a set location and bargaining with a seller for huge numbers of a particular product or set of products. Because tuangou is both a life-skill and art, whenever the bargaining would reach a fervent pitch, the participants would hoot and clap. Tuangou is more than just a quirk that tech-trend observers can note and forget, it is a vital piece of information to keep in mind while analyzing Groupon's launch in one of the world's fastest growing markets. And tuangou is not purely an offline trend. Groups congregate using online networks and some tunagou meetings even happen online. Compared to China's tuangou trend, social buying arrived in the US through Groupon only in 2008. So, unlike fast food or supermarkets, Groupon isn't really taking anything new to the Eastern market. More importantly, China's penchant for imitation has led to not one or two but 4,000 group buying sites. How can Groupon compete or create a niche for itself in the Chinese market? Back home, Groupon faces deal fatigue from the user-end, and dealers are tired of salespeople from deal sites knocking at their doors. Asian bargaining is more nuanced than offering a few vouchers. Besides, in a nation of where generations have been big savers, urging impulse buying may be harder than it is in the West. In fact, the draw of tuangou in China isn't necessarily the discounted prices; the real appeal, some say, is the range of rare products offered in tuangou sales. Given the intense competition, group-buying profits in the Chinese market are not as great as what Groupon sees in the U.S., which roughly works out to a 40 to 45 % margin, with revenue shared with dealers on a ratio of 1: 1. Compare this to the Chinese profit margin, which only works out to a meagre 15 to 18 percent. What's worse is that the economic slow down in China (much slower compared to the West) has affected all industries, including the social-buying sector, and sales have further dipped by 5%. Reports about profits and gains are conflicting, to say the least, with some CEOs saying that close to 20% of the market is operating at a loss and Renren CEO Joseph Chen saying that all group-buying companies are functioning at a loss. Renren, which is the Facebook of China, also operates a group-buying site that earned US $900,000 in revenue but had operational costs of $4.6 million! Isn't this an absolutely dismal scenario for Groupon? Perhaps. Many group buying sites in the country are expecting to stay the course and still be around after the market has suffered heartbreak, nudged out small and weak players and consolidated well. Meanwhile, the sites are trying to market as hard as possible and are spending seemingly disproportionate sums on marketing. Multimedia ad campaigns for Groupon are visible, and early this year it was disclosed that the five major group-buying sites were spending as much as US$90 million. Will these aggressive marketing techniques nudge up impulse buying and complete the transition of tuangou to the online world? Only time will tell. Earlier last year, when Groupon China, locally known as Gaopeng, entered the market, there was a great positive reception. However, towards the end of the year, non-performing offices were closed, and employees were laid off. Not a good start for the first year. However, it is obvious that the company will except to earn back the losses and more in the long run. While customer-led revenue has not been very forthcoming, companies are trying all possible means to stay afloat and raise the funds that are desperately needed for growth. It hasn't been easy. Some companies have been able to attract investments and get listed on the U.S. stock market. However, many first-time entrepreneur-led business have been rejected by major banks due to concerns of poor financial booking. Certainly sounds like a drop in an ocean of downsides in the ailing social-buying industry.
Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Alienware launches its $699 X51 gamer PC for the mass market Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:50 PM PST
It seems like a smart move, since the consoles are starting to age now and a relatively cheap gamer PC can run circles around the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 in terms of graphics resolution for games such as Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3. That’s leading to a revival of interest in gamer PCs, said Jorge Perez, an Alienware marketing director, in an interview.
“We’ve already seen that enthusiast gamers want to connect their PC to the TV and take advantage of the big screen without sacrificing graphics,” Perez (pictured, right) said. “The goal is to make it accessible.” The $699 model uses an Intel Core i3 microprocessor with a discrete Nvidia graphics card (the GeForce GT 545, upgradeable to a high-end GT 555 card), a terabyte of hard disk space, four gigabytes of main memory, WiFi, a slot-loading DVD player (upgradeable to a Blu-ray player), and 1 GB of GDDR5 graphics memory. If you soup up the machine with extras, it can cost around $1,200 or $1,300. The system has a 240-watt power supply, upgradeable to 330 watts. Monitors are extra.
The cool thing about the small size of the console, with its signature Alienware logo and red or blue Alienware LED lighting, is that it looks like it fits in the living room. You can put it underneath a big-screen TV, hook it up via HDMI 1.4 cables, and play via a wireless Windows-compatible Xbox 360 game controller. All of a sudden, that transforms the X51 PC into a lean-back 10-foot experience, rather than a two-foot experience in a den.
Frank Azor of Alienware said in an interview that the living room option is a good one because it allows the full freedom of the PC as an open entertainment platform in the living room. If you want to watch Netflix movies or any other PC content on your TV, you can do so. The system is upgradeable so you can add a heavy-duty or next-generation graphics card when needed. “It’s not our goal to compete with consoles,” Azor (pictured left) said. “We want to give gamers a choice.” Alienware is also starting a new game brand in conjunction with the launch. The Game Victorious brand emphasizes skill, rather than a more overbearing “domination” theme that has been used with Alienware machines to date. That brand may also have broader appeal, just like the machine.
In terms of usage, the new machine might appeal to college students playing games in dorm rooms, where space is at a premium and there may not be room for a console, in addition to a PC for doing school work. Check out our video with Azor and Perez below. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Codecademy introduces summer semester inspired by Obama’s Summer Jobs+ Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:33 PM PST
Code Summer+ follows the company’s Code Year launch at the beginning of January. In keeping with Codecademy’s vision for making everyone programming literate, the company launched a year-long coding curriculum, which has attracted 345,628 people to sign up thus far. Code Summer+ is in the same vein and encourages people to learn Silicon Valley’s coding languages like they would an internship — by doing. “Programming is the new literacy,” said Zach Sims, co-founder of Codecademy, who went on to explain that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has signed up for CodeYear. Chopra, who held today’s event at the Twilio headquarters to talk about Obama’s jobs initiatives, described Sims’ and Codecademy’s efforts as “redonkulous.” He explained that programming knowledge is what will ultimately unlock the huge silos of data the U.S. government holds. For instance, Chopra was particularly impressed with one coder who created an app using the U.S. government’s database of baby’s car seats. The programmer hacked together an app that allows parents to find car seats that are easy to install in various cars, as well as where to go to get it properly installed.
For this reason the government has decided to team up with Schema.org to create a summer jobs database young people can use to connect with potential employers. In addition to the Schema.org partnership, which the government once used to create a similar database for Veteran’s, Chopra has issued a challenge to Silicon Valley. That is, to provide more internships and opportunities as the ground zero of innovation in this country. “You can’t be in the tech community…without realizing there’s a big shortage of talent,” said Mitch Kapor, founder of Kapor Capital, at the event. Tomorrow, Dr. Jill Biden and Chopra will thank the tech community as an end to a hackathon held with Code for America. This is where the tech community can start getting involved immediately. Inspired by the event, Chopra invited any developer able to build an app using Twilio to reach the National Resource Directory for those with limited access to computers. Showing the power of programming knowledge, within a half hour of issuing the challenge, a Twilio developer had created the system. Developers still have time to win the contest, enter here. Filed under: dev, VentureBeat        
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| Could collaborative consumption work in China? Not yet. Posted: 17 Jan 2012 06:16 PM PST T Much of this dynamic has been enabled by technology that allows us to create and form virtual networks in a very efficient way. By connecting with one another online, the speed and scale of the network can grow so quickly that it is impossible to know each other on a personal level. All we can care about is, does a person have what I want, and can I trust them to give it to me. But would collaborative consumption work in China? China is a rapidly developing economy and society. However, in my opinion, it still has some obvious obstacles to fully implementing collaborative consumption models. A major part of how collaborative consuption functions is “Can I trust them to give this to me or not steal/ruin what I am giving them?” But in China, this is exactly biggest problem — the lack of trust. There are already some well-known companies based on the collaborative consumption in the U.S. Airbnb is a website that allows people with a spare room or empty home to rent it out to other people for a fee. It was a take-off of Couchsurfing.org, a non-profit social network that connected backpackers with lend a spare beds and couches for free. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, Getaround is a car sharing site that allows people to rent their cars to people when they are not using them. Taskrabbit is a site that allows people to sell their spare time to other people. For example, if I need to someone to pick up my dry-cleaning or do my grocery shopping, I can find someone available on Taskrabbit. Lendingclub is a site that matches money lenders and borrowers. Skillshare is a site that allows people to teach people their skills. There are a lot of new models like this that are changing society from hyper-consumption to hyper-utlization. It makes sense for us to maximize the value of our things, so they’re not wasted. Sharing things means we don't always have to own something, but can instead borrow it from someone else. This makes it cheaper for someone who doesn't need it all the time, and generates extra money for the person lending it out. Rachel Botsman gave a TED Talk in 2010 and explained that this model of sharing helps the world by extending the term that is often used for environmental protection "reduce, re-use, recycle" and now "re-distribute." The implications of this are massive. It can greatly reduce the need to manufacture or produce as many things in the world, thereby saving the environment or using up tons of unnecessary energy, electricity, money and other resources. However, the collaborative consumption model might worry existing companies because they will no longer be able to sell as much. (I guess its payback time for all the companies that purposefully manufactured products to last less time that they potentially could, just so we’d have to buy more.) Again, a pre-cursor to us using such sites or collaborative consumption platforms is trust. However, the Internet over the past ten years has already started to build-in mechanisms that solve such issues. There are ratings, reviews, comments, background checks, and scores. Botsman points out in her talk that, since we spend so much time online, we are leaving traces of our personality and credibility everywhere. Instead of people needing a credit history to prove they are reliable, all the transactions, comments and interactions they've made online will form the value of our "social currency." You can see it on the streets here in China; people don't really trust one another. Usually it is the foreigner that is told to hold their bag in front of them, in case they are robbed. But in Beijing at least, I see Chinese people holding their bags in front too. There are so many people in China that the range of characters and trustworthiness immensely varies too. Even Chinese people tell me there is a trust issue here. When stories stick in people’s psyche about people cheating each other at the market or government officials being corrupt, it makes you wonder, who can you trust? In the e-commerce space, trust is an issue that has had to be resolved for tech companies to function properly. Alipay, the payment gateway of Alibaba (the PayPal of China) solved much of the problem by working as an escrow system. Money is paid through Alipay, the goods are delivered, and when goods are received the money is released to the seller. China needed this system before it could really grow into such a huge e-commerce industry. However collaborative consumption and e-commerce are different, whereby collaborative consumption has a stronger focus on the person. I know friends who are working on collaborative consumption models in China and have the vision to unlock the full potential of assets, reduce waste, and save the environment. This is a great mission and should be pursued in China. However I think that it will be a challenge to make it widely embraced in China, at least now. This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner based in China. Barter image via ShutterStock Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Israeli hackers attack Saudi & UAE stock exchange websites Posted: 17 Jan 2012 04:52 PM PST
The attack came in retaliation to a group of Saudi hackers, called "nightmare group”, shutting down the Tel Aviv stock exchange website and Israeli airline El Al’s website on Monday. These attacks are part of ongoing occurrences between several groups of Arab and Israeli hackers who have been hacking and releasing Facebook data and email account information over the last few weeks. One member of IDF-Team took to pastebin to post about the motivations behind the attack and to deliver a warning to Arab hackers:
It looks like the Middle East beginning to wage a cyber war, with both sides ready to release hacked information to the masses. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few weeks; perhaps this is the future of conflict in the Middle East. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Six million LittleBigPlanet user levels created; here are some of the best Posted: 17 Jan 2012 04:44 PM PST
LittleBigPlanet was a revelation among console games when the first instalment launched in 2008. Giving PS3 owners the tools to create and share their own levels, LBP had the potential to create a large, resilient community from the start. While some gamers may have found the creation aspect of the game a little daunting, others have revelled in it, and the number of levels currently sat on the Little Big Planet servers is certainly impressive. Media Molecule announced last year that it is stepping away from Little Big Planet. Development of the Vita edition of the game, due to launch in 2012, has instead been entrusted to Tarsier Studios and Double Eleven. Media Molecule's recent financial report explained that its main business risks were "largely as a result of the company's heavy reliance on the one LittleBigPlanet brand." The company spent about £4.1M ($6.29M) on research and development in the twelve months to March 2011, saying, "it is vital for Media Molecule to focus a high proportion of its resources on R&D to allow it to maintain its world leading position as a developer of innovative games." Whatever is next on the cards for Media Molecule, this six million level milestone provides a great opportunity to look at some of the most interesting content that has been created by the LBP community. Not all of these videos are of playable game levels, but they all showcase the creative potential of the LittleBigPlanet series, and its users. Little Big ComputerOne of the earliest LBP creations, dating back to Oct 2008, this is a working 'electronic' calculator. The calculator can perform decimal to binary conversions, and can add and subtract. It has been built from an incredible 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons and 70 emitters, amongst other parts. The Most Useless Machine EverIn direct contrast to the calculator, this LittleBigPlanet creation certainly lives up to its title. Switch it on and…..well, just take a look. Plants vs Little Big ZombiesThe release of LittleBigPlanet 2 brought with it more powerful creation tools, that enabled users to create their own original games in a variety of genres. Or just remake games that already exist. The zombie Sackboys on display here are surely deserving of their own plush toy range. Daft Punk ConcertThis level sadly remains unfinished, but the quality of work is incredible. With a full laser show, and Sackboy reigning supreme, to the tune of 'Around the World', it is a visual and audio treat. The complex logic behind this level only becomes apparent when watching the backstage tour, which starts at 3:20 minutes. Amazing stuff. Back To The Future RecreatedAs well as level creation, LBP 2 enabled users to create video cut-scenes, using the in game tools. This one is one of the best on offer, being a recreation of Doc and Marty McFly's efforts to get Back the The Future, in the famous time-travelling DeLorean. [more videos on Page 2] Filed under: games        
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| SOPA controversy creates rival to game industry group ESA; LFG aims to be “the NRA for gamers” Posted: 17 Jan 2012 04:33 PM PST Frustrated by the Entertainment Software Association‘s (ESA) support of the proposed anti-piracy SOPA and PIPA legislation, Red 5 Studios CEO Mark Kern has founded the League For Gamers (LFG), which intends to advocate for developers’ and gamers’ rights and give them a voice in Washington. The group’s first action is a petition to ESA to drop their support of the Stop Online Privacy Act bill and the Protect IP Act, “which would trample on the free speech of videogames and innovation in the game industry.” LFG also calls for a media boycott of the ESA-organized E3 tradeshow. LFG President and Red 5 Studios CEO Mark Kern is a former World of Warcraft team lead and a graduate of Boston University School of Law. Speaking to VentureBeat, Mark Kern criticized the ESA as “too focused on the large publisher, box retail product motif – part of their support for PIPA and SOPA stems from this. When are we going to learn from what happened to the music industry, and find new ways and new business models that offer consumers better alternatives to piracy? Rather than preserve a dying model in the face of digital distribution, free-to-play and cloud-based gaming, we should embrace the change and shift our focus to these new models.” Kern had a call with the ESA General Counsel where they agreed that tools are needed to combat piracy. But in Kern’s opinion “the ESA is blind to any potential for abuse and feels they and the courts will be fair arbiters of this extensive power. Anyone who has witnessed the recent DNS takedowns, and spurious DCMA actions last year, can see this is a ridiculous statement for blind and naive faith. I also pointed out that many developers oppose SOPA and PIPA, and [big companies] have all quietly dropped SOPA support… so who the heck is the ESA representing at this point?” When asked whether a second industry association besides ESA wouldn’t split and weaken the industry’s voice, Kern responded “The truth is that the ESA fractured the support base. They did so by going forward with $190,000 worth of PIPA and SOPA support without consulting their members, and by ignoring the fact that their membership was split on the issue. Even worse than that, they turned their backs on gamers, who supported them through their subsidiary organization, the VGVN (Video Game Voters Network). You can see hundreds of angry complaints on their Facebook page and in the press on their quite hypocritical and dual-faced stance. The ESA needed the VGVN to help fight and win First Amendment rights to free speech for videogames. Now they are conveniently ignoring the same gamers who helped them.” LFG was funded with a $50,000 pledge by Mark Kern and is currently filing for non-profit status. The next step is opening up a paid membership program with benefits that, according to Kern, “will foster gaming, in addition to representing gamers in Washington. We aim to be the NRA for gamers.” SOPA gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content (like a song, picture, video clip etc.), the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal. The LFG views it as “overbearing legislation which would not only fail to protect IP rights for developers, but would also have a chilling effect on free speech, live streaming, e-Sports, gaming innovation and user created content”. Red 5 Studios will join the likes of Wikipedia and shut down its web site on January 18th as a sign of protest “against misguided and overbearing legislative initiatives such as SOPA, (Stop Online Privacy Act), and PIPA, (Protect IP Act), in order to perpetuate and continue industry growth.” The test servers for the company’s upcoming free-to-play MMO Firefall will also be closed for the day. We’ve sent a message to the ESA for a response. Filed under: games        
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| Mobile processor company Audience files for $75M IPO Posted: 17 Jan 2012 02:55 PM PST
In its IPO filing, the company stated its plans to raise $75 million in the offering. In official documents filed today with the SEC, the company stated, “Our products enable a more consistent voice and audio experience, regardless of the use case or surrounding noise environment.” Audience will trade on the NASDAQ; the company plans to use the stock ticker ADNC. Audience has to date received $75 million in funding, the last of which came during a $15 million Series E. The company’s fifth and final round of institutional funding came from previous investors New Enterprise Associates, Tallwood Venture Capital, VentureTech Alliance and Vulcan Capital, the investment vehicle of Paul Allen. Allen’s other investments include DreamWorks SKG, Oxygen Media and more than two dozen other technology, media and content companies. Altogether, his investment portfolio is a multibillion dollar stable. Audience was founded way back in 2000 but did not publicly launch any products until 2008, when it debuted its first DSP voice processor at the CTIA Wireless trade show. To date, the company claims to have sold more than 135 million mobile and tablet processors. Audience’s earSmart voice processors are use in more than 50 mobile device models from manufacturers such as Samsung and HTC and carriers such as AT&T, Docomo and SKT. Audience claimed $47.9 million in revenue for 2012 and $79.9 million for the first three quarters of 2011. Filed under: deals, VentureBeat        
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| House debate over SOPA anti-piracy bill to resume in Feb. Posted: 17 Jan 2012 02:25 PM PST The U.S. House of Representatives has decided to push back a vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) for at least a month. The delay is due in large part to opposition from many companies and organizations in the tech industry, including Google, Wikipedia and others. The House Judiciary Committee announced the delay in a new statement today. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who authored SOPA, said he expects markup on the bill (a.k.a. debate, amendments and rewrites to the bill) to continue in February. The delay is also due to the many Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks that will keep many members of congress busy. “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy,” Smith said in a statement. "I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.” To summarize, SOPA would give both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content, the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal. SOPA has broad support in the entertainment industry, which claims it is suffering huge losses thanks to overseas piracy. It has pit Hollywood against Silicon Valley, however: Many leaders in the tech industry as well as online communities have banded together in protest of SOPA and the Senate version, known as the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Many sites, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, have pledged to go offline for a day on Wednesday, the originally-scheduled date for the House hearing, as a way of showing the potential ill effects of the bill. Earlier today, a group of tech leaders participated in a public discussion about the potential evils of bad copyright bills like SOPA/PIPA, as VentureBeat previously reported. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Apple attacks Samsung’s Android devices in Germany. Again. Posted: 17 Jan 2012 02:07 PM PST
The latest in a string of patent suits takes aim at 10 smartphone models. The suit was filed in the Dusseldorf Regional Court, Reuters reports. This is separate from a former lawsuit against five Samsung tablets. The continuing Apple-Samsung saga has Apple claiming that Samsung’s Android tablets and smartphones are too close to the designs for the iPad and iPhone. Last August, the iDevice maker successfully got Samsung’s Tab 10.1 blocked in Germany and temporarily banned in Australia. Samsung itself took a few patent-related shots at Apple in a French court. The epic tale of patent law got started in April 2011 when Apple first made waves over the Samsung Galaxy lineup. This first suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California, Apple’s home turf. “It's no coincidence that Samsung's latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple's intellectual property when companies steal our ideas,” an Apple spokesperson told reporters at the time. As is always the case in patent None of this is made any more awkward, we’re sure, by the fact that Samsung is the chip maker for Apple’s iPhones. Not awkward at all. In other mobile and Android-related patent suits, Apple has sued (and in some cases, settled with) just about every other major smartphone manufacturer, including Motorola, Nokia and HTC. Microsoft is locked in litigation with Motorola, and Oracle (which owns the company that owns Java, the language of the Android operating system) is suing Google (the company that owns the Android operating system). That little green robot just can’t get a break. Filed under: mobile        
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| Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang resigns from board of directors and all other roles Posted: 17 Jan 2012 02:02 PM PST
In a letter to board chairman Roy Bostock, Yang wrote:
Yang co-founded Yahoo with David Filo in 1995 and has been on the board of directors since March 1995. He served as CEO from June 2007 to Jan. 2009 and has had a hand in the direction of the company since that time. Bostock wrote positive words about Yang upon departure:
Yahoo has been in a volatile state since the firing of former CEO Carol Bartz. The company named former PayPal President Scott Thompson in early January to reign the company in and find ways to get it back on track. One mid-October report suggested Yang was extremely unhappy with the state of the company and was interested in taking it private. If that story had any truth to it, Yang could have been forced out by the board. Without Yang’s seemingly steady hand, it’s hard to guess what will happen next with Yahoo. We wrote a list of 5 things Yahoo should do with Thompson now at the head, including improving its core e-mail offering and restoring Flickr to greatness. And one report filed last week at All Things D suggests Yang may not be the only board member on the way out. The report said Bostock, Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi, and Gary Wilson also could be ready to take off. With Yang gone, it’s certainly possible others could follow. Do you think Yang was forced out? What will happen to Yahoo now? Jerry Yang photo via Flickr/Yodel Anecdotal Filed under: VentureBeat        
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Streaming music site 
Apple’s iPhone 4S is incredibly popular with consumers — so much so that it’s eating heavily into Android’s market share among those who’ve purchased smartphones within the past three months.
Who says gift cards aren’t cool? After 
he concept of “Collaborative Consumption” is not new in the West, but it is in the East and especially in China. The term collaborative consumption basically means sharing things with other people — via barter, trade, or rental — and giving access instead of ownership. The Internet has pushed this quaint notion beyond just sharing between friends to create a powerful business model.
Audience, a Silicon Valley-based company that counts Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (pictured) as a backer, has filed for an initial public offering.
Apple has once again gone after Samsung in Germany, filing suits to ban sales of the Galaxy S Plus and the S II.
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