VentureBeat |
- Trion Worlds raises $85M for its online gaming platform business
- Digital textbooks fulfills a dream of Steve Jobs
- 10 things you need to know about SOPA and PIPA
- Mashable COO Adam Hirsch heading to nonprofit Do Something
- Image Metrics sells its Faceware face animation technology to spin-off
- Look out Groupon: Nearly 800 daily deals sites folded in the past 6 months
- Apple reinvents textbooks and curriculum with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, updated iTunes U
- Amazon sells the Kindle Fire at a loss because it makes so much money on media
- How New York’s Schoology beats Silicon Valley startups to win Palo Alto school district
- Trouble getting a loan from your bank? ZestCash gets $73M to help the underdogs
- iSwifter’s Rover browser aims to change classroom learning
- 25 senators come out against PIPA anti-piracy bill
- Booyah reinvents itself and the pets genre with Pet Town
- The moment of truth: Kodak files for bankruptcy
- Take that Leukemia! Photojojo’s Amit Gupta has found a donor
- Livescribe names Gilles Bouchard as CEO and raises $10M
- Developer shares costs and sales expectations as Whale Trail hits Android Market
- Customer loyalty is key to gaining a share of the in-app purchase riches
- Google+ lets you record and share video via webcam
- Facebook’s biggest change yet: Actions are here
- Zynga confirms it bought four mobile game companies
- More expensive AT&T data plans go into effect Jan. 22
- Foursquare gets meatier with addition of 13M menu items
- Walmart lets gadget companies compete for a spot on its shelves
- Silicon Valley luminaries protest SOPA in downtown San Francisco
- eBay beats expectations with $11B in revenue in 2011
- How to work around Wikipedia’s blackout: 5 easy options you can do at home
- The view from CES: The top 10 trends in technology for 2012
- Mark Zuckerberg asks his 11M Facebook subscribers to stop SOPA
- AT&T could buy Dish to gobble up its precious wireless spectrum
| Trion Worlds raises $85M for its online gaming platform business Posted: 19 Jan 2012 09:03 AM PST
The financing comes from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan as well as current Trion investor Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a division of media firm Bertelsmann.
“We are thrilled about entering this exciting period of growth with our investors,” said Lars Buttler (pictured), founder and chief executive of Trion Worlds. He said the new backing was a “massive endorsement for Trion.” More than 1 million players activated Rift accounts in less than four months. The game is an example of the high-quality MMO content that the company wants to continue to build. Upcoming titles include the real-time strategy game End of Nations, developed by Petroglyph Games. That title is expected to launch early this year. Another title is Defiance, an online action game developed alongside a SyFy Channel TV show. Trion also recently disclosed a new platform, called Project Red Door, is a way for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to make a lot more money than it otherwise would. The two-pronged initiative will have a consumer platform on the web and a publishing platform for game makers. If it can start publishing third-party games in the first part of 2012, Trion could become a much bigger player in the lucrative online game market. The new strategy shows that Trion is making one of the biggest bets that a startup has ever made in the video game industry. Prior to the $85 million raise, Trion had already raised more than $100 million since its founding in 2006. It has more than 500 employees. From a business view, the third-party platform makes sense because it allows Trion to amortize its technology investments over a much broader base of games. It also reduces Trion's dependence on its own internally produced games. Red Door will roll out in the spring of 2012. Buttler said in an earlier interview that Trion is talking with other game developers and publishers so that it can line up games that are "living worlds," or MMOs that take heavy investment. It's almost as if Trion is launching its own console, hoping to attract a lot of game companies to support it with their own games. Those who adopt Red Door could save years in development time, Buttler said. For consumers, Trion will deliver a single, trusted destination site for connected games with rich social features. Players will be able to discover and download content and enjoy a suite of flexible account services, Buttler said. Trion has game studios in Redwood City; San Diego; Austin, Texas; and London. On top of that, it has tapped Petroglyph Studios in Las Vegas to make End of Nations, which will be published as a free-to-play title, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. The company's other investors include Time Warner, Comcast, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Trinity Ventures and DCM. PricewaterhouseCoopers stats that show online games are growing at 21.3 percent a year, compared to console games that are shrinking in the U.S. Buttler said Trion can take advantage of the latest trends in providing dynamic services — where a game can be updated on the fly in response to user feedback — as well as modern monetization, analytics, and business intelligence tools. Buttler hopes to make Trion's site into a hub that consumers can trust as a brand that represents quality. Buttler says he doesn't think of the Red Door platform as a social network for MMO players. Rather, it's a destination for "games as a service," more like Microsoft's Xbox Live online game platform for the Xbox 360 game console. The risk for Trion is that it could be disrupted as well. While it focuses on the "deep end of gaming," casual game makers such as Zynga are attracting huge audiences at the "shallow end." Zynga can give away its games for free and charge for virtual items, undercutting the prices of subscription games such as Trion's Rift. But Buttler said Trion remains flexible enough to test new business models as well to see what resonates with players. The beauty of subscription revenues, he said, is that the revenue doesn't dry up after just a few months, in contrast to console games. And, compared to social games, the average revenue per users (ARPU) is far bigger. Much of the success of Rift is due to the Trion platform, the underlying technology that uses a distributed computing architecture. The servers were designed to work in a dynamic fashion. If the game needs more functional tasks, particularly in a certain part of the world, Trion can simply add more servers to handle tasks such as physics or artificial intelligence of player data. That way, the game can support a huge influx of players into one part of the world, as can happen when Trion stages an invasion of the world. When the world changes, Trion simply changes its servers. There is no reason to patch a gamer's own machine. Anyone who adopts the Trion platform can use those same kinds of features and live services in their own games. Filed under: games        
      This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Digital textbooks fulfills a dream of Steve Jobs Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:53 AM PST Apple’s event in New York showed that the iPad could eventually make paper textbooks an endangered species. And that’s just the way that former Apple chief executive Steve Jobs wanted it to be. In his biography of Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson wrote about how Jobs met with media magnate Rupert Murdoch to talk about education. The books says, “Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.” “In fact, Jobs had set his sights on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around.” The book quotes Jobs as saying, “The iPad would solve that.” His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions and make them a feature of the iPad. Jobs held meetings with major publishers such as Pearson Education about partnerships. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” Jobs said. “But if we can make textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.” Filed under: media        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| 10 things you need to know about SOPA and PIPA Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:52 AM PST The furor over SOPA and PIPA has died down, but the bills have not gone away. In fact, there’s more reason than ever to pay close attention to the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) and the Senate’s corresponding Protect Intellectual Property Act (S.968). These acts, while perhaps well-intentioned, are not well-written and could cause serious damage to the free flow of information on the Internet. That’s why VentureBeat opposes SOPA and PIPA. At the peak of yesterday’s SOPA protests and website blackouts, it might have been easy to draw the conclusion that the tide was moving against these flawed bills and that they are doomed. Not so: They have merely been delayed. That’s why it’s more important than ever to pay close attention to what Congress is doing. VentureBeat has had much internal discussion about the proposed anti-piracy legislation. There is a lot of misinformation — or perhaps misinterpretation — about what SOPA/PIPA is, how SOPA/PIPA will affect the internet, why SOPA/PIPA bad, etc. Understandably, it can get confusing. Based on our own reporting, we’ve concluded that both SOPA and PIPA are flawed a pieces of legislation, regardless of future amendments or rewrites. VentureBeat firmly opposes both bills because they have the potential to harm the tech industry and hinder the pace of innovation. And while we’re against SOPA/PIPA, we do not support piracy. Below is a list of things about SOPA and PIPA worth considering before reaching your own conclusion about the proposed legislation. 1) What the heck is SOPA? PIPA?The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — together with the corresponding Senate Protect IP Act (PIPA) — is a proposed piece of legislation intended to curb online piracy. As the bills are currently written, they 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 either bill becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For the full scope of information about the bills, check out VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA/PIPA coverage. 2) Which U.S. political party is displaying the most support for SOPA/PIPA?The answer is both — meaning both Republicans and Democrats are showing overwhelming support for these proposed pieces of legislation. If you need further proof, you should note who wrote the bills: SOPA was authored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R – Texas), while PIPA was authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D – Vt.). The White House has voiced its concerns about the legislation, but does agree that some kind of anti-piracy law is needed to protect American companies. It’s also worth noting that former sen. Christopher Dodd (D – Conn.) is now head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is one of the groups pushing for these bills to go through. 3) How do SOPA/PIPA intend to block websites?The bills allow the U.S. Department of Justice as well as copyright holders to seek out and prosecute foreign sites that commit acts of piracy. The DOJ needs a court order before it can proceed, which it can obtain if the site in question is operated by an organization outside of the U.S. or the owner of the website’s domain doesn’t have adequate contact information. Once a court order has been served, there are three main tools these bills give the DOJ and copyright holders for blocking websites. The first involves having an internet service provider (like Comcast, for example) block the site’s Domain Name Service (DNS) record. To do this, ISPs would be required to lower the level of security needed to verify each site’s identity and protect against malicious hackers. This also means SOPA/PIPA actually make the internet far less secure than it currently is. Authors of both bills have wavered on their stance when it comes to DNS blocking. Smith previously stated that he intends to remove the DNS blocking stipulation from SOPA. Leahy admitted that more study is needed regarding DNS blocking, but hasn’t gone as far as to say he will remove it from PIPA. Regardless of either author’s stated intentions, both bills in their current form still include DNS blocking as a means to stop piracy. Even if DNS blocking is removed from both SOPA and PIPA, the legislation still offers two tools to block websites. The second method of blocking involves mandating that major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) de-index an accused site from their search results. The logic behind this action is that if you can’t search for sites that commit acts of piracy, then most people won’t be able to find those sites, and they will eventually die. And finally, the third way prohibits any site accused of piracy from doing business with other services, such as PayPal or any advertising platform. If organizations that are selling pirated goods can’t use secure transaction services to collect purchases, they can’t make money. The same is true for ad networks. 4) Which sites can be blocked under SOPA/PIPA? |
| Mashable COO Adam Hirsch heading to nonprofit Do Something Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:38 AM PST Adam Hirsch, the Chief Operations Officer at Mashable, a leading independent news site covering social media and technology, is leaving his job to head up digital over at Do Something, the nonprofit that focuses on activating teens around social issues. This is a huge win for Do Something, who is looking to expand their content, partnerships and digital impact over the next year. Hirsch has been at Mashable, one of the more frequently read independent news sites with over 13 million unique visitors per month, since 2007. His responsibilities have included leading event planning, partnerships and sponsorships, marketing, and client relations (i.e. he is CEO and founder Pete Cashmore’s second-in-command). Do Something will be able to leverage Hirsch’s public facing, entrepreneurial persona and his success in developing online content, partnerships, and growing a company to achieve goals of expansion, increased visibility, and deeper engagement. Do Something began in 1993, founded by Andrew Shue (from the television show Melrose Place) and his co-founder Michael Sanchez. The nonprofit centered on making community service cool for young people fell under the radar after Melrose Place ended (we can't make this up) until 2003 when the founder of Dress for Success, Nancy Lublin stepped in to become the new CEO. In the last year alone, Lublin has more than doubled the number of employees, revenue, and web traffic and closed partnerships with the likes of Staples, Foot Locker, and Aeropostale by focusing on a strong digital strategy. The Do Something Union Square headquarters is filled with around 40 millennials (and some 30-45 year olds including Lublin, who calls herself "Chief Old Person") running around, talking web (Drupal) development, special projects, marketing, business development, incredibly successful text messaging campaigns, and even traditional food drives. They admittedly focus on "leveraging communications technologies to enable young people to convert their ideas and energy into positive action." "Having Adam leave a terrific job and growing company to come here is amazing–not just for DoSomething.org, but for the entire sector," said CEO and Chief Old Person, Nancy Lublin. "I hope more smart, talented, ambitious people consider a Jedi future with us." More nonprofits are becoming hip today, with charity:water and Pencils of Promise both founded and powered by millennials and generation Y'ers leading the pack. These nonprofits are behaving more like tech startups, and raising money and power boards through their emphasis on transparency and a digital forward strategy. Will the move from a startup like Mashable to a nonprofit like Do Something become a new trend? We'll be interested to see what Hirsch will do to shake up Do Something's digital and content strategy. If he has any remotely similar impact as he's had at Mashable, Do Something may indeed activate more young people (and dare we say social change) in the next few years. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Image Metrics sells its Faceware face animation technology to spin-off Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:31 AM PST
Santa Monica-based Image Metrics developed the Faceware technology to create realistic human faces for movies, animations and video games. The technology has been successfully used in a wide range of entertainment, from Assassin’s Creed II to Red Dead Redemption. Now Image Metrics will focus on delivering products based on its consumer animation and facial recognition technologies such as PortableYou, an app for adding 3D avatars to web sites, and the digital comic book Zombie Wars, where you can put your own face into an animated character. Faceware Technologies will focus on selling technology to professional animators. Financial details were not disclosed. “This transaction is a great opportunity for both Image Metrics and Faceware Technologies because each company can focus on delivering exceptional products and services to its target customers and enable both companies to unlock faster growth potential in each market,” said Robert Gehorsam, chief executive of Image Metrics. Ron Ryder, currently chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Image Metrics, will lead FTI during a transitional period. “There will be no interruption to the pace of innovation in the product line during 2012 and beyond,” Ryder said. Image Metrics was founded in 2000. The company has raised more than $14 million to date. Filed under: games, media, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Look out Groupon: Nearly 800 daily deals sites folded in the past 6 months Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:21 AM PST Watch your backs Groupon and LivingSocial. A new report suggests daily deals sites are loosing steam quickly, with 798 daily deal sites worldwide shutting down in the second half of 2011. Even since before Groupon went public in November, analysts have wondered whether the daily deals business model is sustainable. Groupon’s IPO price of $20 per share shot up to nearly $30 on its first day of trading but today the stock is trading around $21 a share. Its biggest competitor, LivingSocial, closed a massive $176 million round of funding in December and might go public this year. But a new report, written by Daily Deal Media, says that daily deals sites are in an extremely volatile position in the market. Asia in particular seems to be a bad market for these types of sites, with 1,348 Asian daily deal sites going under in the second half of 2011. On the positive side, Europe and Latin America saw overall gains in daily deals sites during the same time. There were 235 new daily deals sites in Europe and a gain of 324 deals sites in Latin America. Those numbers aren’t enough to detract from the rapid Asian decline but it’s still positive for those markets. The crazy volatility could also be a testament to Groupon owning the marketplace for daily deals. Groupon has a presence throughout the world with more than 150 markets in North America and more than 100 markets in Europe, Asia and South America. The company may be taking out competition before they can fully materialize. VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal has also made the point that merchants have gotten savvy about daily deals, which in turn mean less attractive deals for consumers. As consumers the world over see less good deals across the board, the less interest they have getting e-mails from that site. Do you think Groupon, LivingSocial, and similar sites can be sustainable in the long term? Money burning image via Shutterstock Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Apple reinvents textbooks and curriculum with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, updated iTunes U Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:01 AM PST
And so it did. Apple announced iBooks 2, an updated iPhone and iPad app that will offer highly interactive electronic textbooks, as well as a new textbook section in the iBookstore. The company also showed off a new version of iTunes U, which gives teachers the ability to do much more than create lectures for download. Catch all of our coverage from the event below. Apple and education“Education is deep in our DNA,” Apple marketing SVP Phil Schiller said as he introduced the event. “We’re so proud to help students learn. We try to bring the same passion and energy that we put into every product we make into our education business.” Schiller is positioning the iPad as a “remarkable” tool for education, and goes on to mention the poor state of education in America. In a short video played at the event, teachers discuss some of the problems facing education, like large class sizes and a lack of materials like textbooks. “These teachers need help. We try to figure out what we can do at Apple to help,” Schiller said. “One place we think we can help is in student engagement. It’s not a big surprise that students get excited to learn on the iPad. It was #1 on teen’s wish lists this holiday.” Schiller says there are over 20,000 education apps for the iPad currently, and that there are now 1.5 million iPads being used in education (I’d be interested to know how he got this number). Reinventing textbooks with iBooks 2, iBooks AuthorNow for the real meat of the event: Schiller says Apple has two methods in mind for helping education. First up, “reinventing the textbook.” He discussed how textbooks aren’t the best learning tools. For example, they’re not very portable, durable, searchable, interactive, and they can’t be kept up to date. But they do have great content. Schiller unveiled iBooks 2, Apple’s attempt to fix the traditional textbook. An Apple representative showed off the new app at the event, demonstrating how a biology book can have a dramatic introduction movie, the benefits it gets from multitouch capabilities, and support for nifty interactive elements like 3D cell models. If you want to just focus on the text of the book, you only need to rotate your iPad into the portrait orientation. Other nifty interactive elements: There’s a built in glossary for explaining individual concepts, easily accessible index links, as well as visual interactive Q&A sections at the end of chapters. You can also easily highlight and take notes in the e-books, which appears to be greatly helped by multitouch. iBooks 2 takes the notes a step further, allowing you to see all of your notes in a particular book in one spot. It also automatically turns your notes into study cards, along with glossary terms. Apple is adding a new textbook section to the iBookstore to make the new e-books easy to find, and it will also offer free samples. The company recruited early partners to create digital high school textbooks, priced at $14.99 or less. Apple is currently working with Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who make 90 percent of the textbooks available in the U.S. It has also partnered with DK Publishing and the E.O. Wilson foundation, the latter of which will be launching its next book, Life on Earth, exclusively on the iBookstore. To create these glossy new e-books, Apple also announced iBooks Author, a new free app for Macs. It offers simple templates, as well as drag and drop designing for laying out the pages. Building on the company’s experience with the Keynote presentation app, iBooks Author also allows you to easily make your own unique experiences within the e-books without any programming knowledge. The more technically inclined can also use HTML5 and Javascript programming in iBooks Author. There’s also a nifty preview function that will allow you to see your e-book in progress on your iPad. Reinventing curriculum with new iTunes UBut Apple isn’t done yet. Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, came on stage to discuss how the company is going to help teachers “reinvent the curriculum” with iTunes U, a service that lets students download lectures and other materials from iTunes. Cue says Apple has seen over 700 million downloads from iTunes U, and that it has mostly been used for lectures. Cue introduced a new version of iTunes U that seems to let teachers do everything course-related on their iPad, like manage a syllabus, office hours, and post assignments. It seems cool, though I wonder how students who don’t have iOS devices will feel about this. Students can still download lectures using the app, but they can now stream them as well. Over 100 courses have been created by participating colleges with iTunes U, Cue said. Even better, he says that Apple is opening the service up to K-12 schools now as well. All of this is very exciting, but it’s strange that Apple made no mention of how students can more easily get a hold of iPads in the classroom. While cool, Apple’s plans to reinvent education could leave a lot of students out in the cold. Via All Things D, The Verge’s live blogs; Front photo via Marcus Kwan Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Amazon sells the Kindle Fire at a loss because it makes so much money on media Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:46 AM PST  I'll take one of each.During the holiday season Amazon used its massive sales channel to push the Kindle Fire hard. It moves millions of units, and according to studies from IHS iSupply, was losing about $2 per unit. That’s a big difference from Apple, which makes a healthy profit on sales of its iPad tablet. But according to a new poll from RBC Capital, Amazon stands to earn about $136 in additional revenue from every customer who bought a Kindle Fire. So while the hardware might be a loss leader, overall the Kindle Fire is a win for Amazon’s bottom line. All that money is coming from sales of digital media. The poll asked Kindle Fire owners how they were spending on their new device. On average 80 percent had purchased an ebook and 58 percent had purchased three or more. Another big chunk of change is coming from app purchases. More than 60 percent of Kindle Fire owners bought one app and just under 50 percent bought three or more. There was no breakdown in this study on income from video, but Amazon is aggressively purchasing television shows and movies for its Amazon Prime streaming service. As connected TVs become the norm, the Kindle Fire may become a powerful tool for Amazon to lure new subscribers. Unlike the devices released by Apple, the Kindle Fire had a lot of bugs in its first iteration. Amazon promised to fix these, but the truth is that Android devices are often imperfect. They appeal to a class of consumers who would prefer to spend $199 as opposed to $499 and up. In the first two years of Android’s life with Google, from 2007-2009, it failed to gain more than 3 percent market share or produce a winning device. It wasn’t until the arrival of the Motorola Droid that Android turned the corner. It will be the same way with tablets, a slow painful evolution while Apple leaps ahead. In the meantime, however, it seems like Amazon has already found a way to make the Kindle Fire work for their business. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| How New York’s Schoology beats Silicon Valley startups to win Palo Alto school district Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:09 AM PST  Schoology founder Jeremy FriedmanWhen it came to their educational technology, The Palo Alto Unified School District could have chosen Edmodo, the free service backed by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Facebook’s Matt Cohler based right in their backyard. Instead they opted to pay for Schoology, a K-12 learning system that, up till now, has avoided any significant hype or funding. The success of Schoology is based in part on a new approach to education software, which creates an approachable social network that teachers and students can begin using without having the school officially sign on. Startups like Coursekit are taking a similar approach. “Getting around the slow, bureaucratic buying cycles of academic institutions is the first step,” said Schoology’s 24 year old founder Jeremy Friedman. “But from there you need to be able to scale up to meet the demands of an entire district.” The reason services like Schoology and Coursekit are pursuing a social networking interface as a wedge into the market is obvious. Students and teachers already rely on Facebook as the default space for communication. “Many of our teachers at the high schools had already moved away from the District provided platforms and were using Facebook in their classes. While this worked for them, we needed a manageable platform that could be expanded to all grade levels and provided education specific components such as an assignment dropbox,” said Ann Dunkin, director of technology at the Palo Alto Unified School District. Schoology is a mix of a free social networking tool that empowers teachers and a paid enterprise level system that lets schools handle everything from curicullum to professional development. Since a number of students and teachers in the Palo Alto district were already using Schoology, upgrading to the enterprise was a no brainer. “We want to be the operating system for education. You can add on as many modules as you need depending on how deeply you want to rely on our platform,” said Friedman. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Trouble getting a loan from your bank? ZestCash gets $73M to help the underdogs Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:00 AM PST
"ZestCash doesn't pull any information from credit burrows. Instead we use uses non obvious variables, like cell phone payment records and how much time applicants spend on our site, to offer loans to our customers," CEO Douglas Merrill told VentureBeat in an interview. Most banks approve borrowers for loans based on small amounts of data; usually a credit report and credit score from FICO, a company that evaluates credit risks. Since not every person has enough information on file with FICO, some people are turned away for loans from major lending institutions. ZestCash uses thousands of metrics to offer short-term installment loans to customers who can’t get loans elsewhere. Each loan is designed by the customer, based on how much money they need — up to $800– and how much time they need to pay it back. ZestCash emphasizes smaller payments over a longer time to pay back its loans to help their customers from getting too deep in debt. "We will use the $23 million capital from Matrix Partners to add more staff, increase our marketing efforts, and push forward with bringing loans to additional states. We will use the $50 million debt line Victory Park Capital to make loans to customers," said Merrill. This fundraising round included $23 million from Matrix Partners and $50 million in debt financing from Victory Park Capital. Lightspeed Venture Partners, GRP Partners, Flybridge Capital and Lighthouse Capital Partners participated as well. ZestCash was founded in 2009 by Douglas Merrill, former Google Chief Information Officer, and Shawn Budde, former Head of Subprime Credit Cards at Capital One and has more than 75 employees. Currently, ZestCash is able to offer loans to customers in Utah, Idaho, South Dakota and Missouri, with more states coming soon. Filed under: deals        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| iSwifter’s Rover browser aims to change classroom learning Posted: 19 Jan 2012 03:00 AM PST Startup iSwifter said that its Rover Browser for education has seen a quick start in downloads and rapid adoption among schools and teachers who want to use it to provide access to Flash-based internet content for classrooms. Since its introduction in December, the Rover Browser has climbed into the top 30 education apps in the Apple App Store. Rajat Gupta, chief executive of Menlo Park, Calif.-based iSwifter, said the Rover Browser can run on the iPads that many school districts are deploying for students. And the Rover for Education app on the iPad will offer firewall compliance and will meet standards for the Children’s Internet Protection Act in terms of protecting children from nasty online stuff. “We think this is going to make the lives of schoolchildren much easier,” Gupta said in an interview. As such, the Rover Browser will transform iPads into digital textbooks that can run Adobe Flash content. Much online education content runs on Flash, but the iPad doesn’t normally run Flash. But iSwifter can do so through its streaming technology. It runs the Adobe software in its web-connected data centers. Then it sends video images at high speeds to the iPads, which then display the Flash content as video. It also doesn’t allow access to unauthorized sites. iSwifter is launching an update to the Rover Browser that addresses feedback. It adds native controls for touch inputs, split keypad support, and D-pad control for educational games. Video and sound quality has also been improved. Teachers can automatically communicate with school information technology administrators to make sure they are in compliance with policies, even when students use the Rover Browser from home.The Rover Browser app has a rating of four stars out of five on the App STore. “We want to make it easier for teachers to communicate,” Gupta said. Craig Halper, vice president of Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications (owner of the Discovery Channel), said in an interview that the Rover Browser helps the company move Flash-based content quickly to the iPad without much pain. Most of Discovery Education’s content is cross-platform in the form of H.264 video, but some of it is specific to Flash and Halper said that part is where iSwifter is useful. Halper said that demand for the iPad in schools is clearly rising and students are using iPads not only in school but during the off hours as well. Delivering high-quality education apps to the iPad is thus a big priority for Discovery, Halper said. iSwifter, which is funded by incubator YouWeb, will also be able to stream Flash-based content from education sites such as Funbrain, and Mathletics. iSwifter’s mobile browser has been downloaded more than 1 million times over the past year or so. Filed under: games, media, mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| 25 senators come out against PIPA anti-piracy bill Posted: 19 Jan 2012 02:16 AM PST
The news comes a little over a day after several sites across the internet participated in a national protest against the bill. Reddit, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and several others instituted a full blackout of services, replacing their homepages with opposition messages about PIPA as well as the house version of the bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). And while internet giant Google didn’t shut down its own services, the company did replace the site’s logo with a “blacked out” version along with a link to a anti-SOPA/PIPA petition. PIPA previously gained support from over 40 senators, who co-sponsored the bill. As of today, that number has dropped significantly — with 25 senators publicly opposing and another 13 that are leaning toward opposition, according to OpenCongress. The bill, however, still has support from 33 senators. A handful of others have yet to make a statement for or against PIPA. Still, with all the bad press surrounding PIPA after yesterday’s opposition efforts, it seems very unlikely that it will pass the vote scheduled for Jan. 24. Below is a list of U.S. senators that have come out against PIPA:
Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Booyah reinvents itself and the pets genre with Pet Town Posted: 19 Jan 2012 12:34 AM PST Booyah, the maker of real-world social and mobile games, announced its newest game today, Pet Town. It is another step in the company’s reinvention of itself. San Francisco-based Booyah was founded in 2008 with early money for mobile games from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It saw its My Town franchise soar into the stratosphere in popularity, only to see it stall. Under a new chief executive, the company is now releasing a new slate of games that it says have put the company back on the growth path. The Pet Town game is now available in the Apple App Store and it is part of the company’s goal of being the category leader in real-world entertainment. In the game, players create the ultimate destination for an array of pets and make their dreams come true. It comes city-building gameplay with influences from simulation and role-playing game classics like Animal Crossing. The game asks, “What if pets were real, with dreams just like ours, and there were no zoos?” It lets you build a personalized community filled with lots of pets. You can help your pets make friends, open a business, and go on vacations in the real world. "It's exciting to see our creative teams deliver such a unique and innovative take on this popular style of play," said Jason Willig, chief executive of Booyah. He replaced founding CEO Keith Lee back in October. In the last five months, the company has released three new products. In future updates, the pets will cross the boundaries of their world and show up in real-world locations. The company did a soft launch in Canada to get critical feedback on the game. Booyah also released a major update to My Town 2, which was released in October as a location-based app akin to Monopoly, only set in the real world. MyTown 2 has been played by more than 3.5 million people, and the new update allows for features such as social gifting and citizen interactions as well as Facebook Connect support. The game is the No. 1 city-building game on the App Store. MyTown 2 players have created more than 2.4 million unique real world businesses in 130,000 cities across 43 countries. In a typical month, there are 75 million user sessions and 1.2 billion real-world business interactions. Besides Kleiner Perkins, Booyah’s investors include Accel Partners and DAG Ventures. Booyah has raised about $29.5 million to date and has about 50 employees. The company’s recent hits have been played by 10 million people. Early Bird, released in late August, has been installed 6.3 million times. Willig said that the fourth quarter was probably the best financial quarter in the company’s history, with several million dollars in bookings. The company has opened a second development studio in Seattle and it now has four development teams working on an aggressive slate for the first quarter. Filed under: games, mobile        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The moment of truth: Kodak files for bankruptcy Posted: 18 Jan 2012 11:56 PM PST
Kodak failed to make the transition from film to digital imaging, after years of trying. It couldn’t stave off the filing even though it filed patent lawsuits in recent days against Apple, HTC and Samsung. But the Rochester, N.Y.-based company isn’t calling it quits. It hopes to emerge from bankruptcy proceedings in 2013 continue its business with $950 million in financing from Citigroup. Kodak said it named Dominic DiNapoli, vice chairman of FTI Consulting, as chief restructuring officer. (That’s an unusual title). The filing in U.S. bankruptcy court in the southern district of New York is intended to bolster liquidity for the company in the U.S. and abroad and help it focus on its latest investments in products. Kodak said it will continue to pay employee wages and benefits and continue customer programs. Subsidiaries outside the U.S. are not subject to the proceedings. "Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation," said Antonio M. Perez, chairman and chief executive officer, in a statement. "At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003.” He added, “Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core IP assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company." He said the board unanimously backed the Chapter 11 filing. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Take that Leukemia! Photojojo’s Amit Gupta has found a donor Posted: 18 Jan 2012 09:57 PM PST Good news everyone! Photojojo co-founder Amit Gupta — who was diagnosed with Leukemia last September, and managed to whip up a storm of support from the tech community — announced today that he has found a perfectly matched bone marrow donor. If all goes well with the transplant, Gupta can look forward to many more years of fun and interesting tech projects. While in New York, he helped spark the tech community to life and started the co-working event Jelly. While at Amherst College (which we both attended), he created the Daily Jolt, a community site for colleges and universities. Finding a matching donor was particularly tough for Gupta. Being South Asian, there was about a 1 in 20,000 chance for him to find an existing genetic donor in the national bone marrow registry. So friends, family, and fellow techies from all over the world came to the rescue, putting together over 100 donor drives to register people of South Asian descent. Gupta says that he’ll be admitted tomorrow to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston tomorrow, where he’ll endure another round of heavy chemotherapy that will obliterate his immune system. Next week he’ll receive his donor’s stem cells and begin taking immunosuppressants, which will keep his body from rejecting the foreign cells. During this period, his body will be undergoing crazy changes, as Gupta writes:
There’s always the chance of a relapse occurring, and Gupta also has to deal with the possibility of rejection from the donor’s cells, but he’s certainly on a much better track now. “I've got a long road ahead,” Gupta writes. “But I've got a donor & amazing family & friends. A few months ago I didn't have many options. Today I have a plan.” Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Livescribe names Gilles Bouchard as CEO and raises $10M Posted: 18 Jan 2012 09:00 PM PST
Bouchard is a 25-year industry veteran. He will lead strategic planning, product management and operations for the Oakland, Calif.-based company. Margraff, the former CEO, will serve as a member of the board. Founded in 2007, Livescribe is a pioneer in digital smartpens, which can record data such as voice while you take notes and play the voice back when you tap a section of the written text. As such, it’s great for students taking notes in class or professionals who have to transcribe a lot of notes. Bouchard was previously chief executive and chief operating office of Opnext, a maker of fiber optic components for telecom and data networking companies. Before that, he spent 17 years at Hewlett-Packard in a variety of roles, including executive vice president for global operations at the end of his tenure. He oversaw a $50 billion supply chain. He also helped the Pavilion consumer PC division get off the ground in the Americas in the late 1990s as it grew to a multibillion-dollar business. He was very involved in the integration of the supply chains after HP merged with Compaq. He also managed operations for Carly Fiorina and later Mark Hurd, and served as chief information officer. “I’ve always enjoyed small companies where you take more risk,” Bouchard said. He takes over the digital writing company at a point where the company is poised for growth. He advised the company for a while, helped it raise funds, and worked at the company since early December. Margraff said he has been on a “spectacular journey” developing the Livescribe products and the company now has an opportunity to expand its market. The investors include the same group of existing investors, including VantagePoint Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, Translink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital, Lionhart, and Aeris Capital. Altogether, the company has raised $115 million. That’s a lot of money, but the company is promising in part because it really has no competition, except pen, paper, or tablet computers. “We are still in investment mode and need to expand our opportunities in digital writing,” Bouchard said. “We are not at the scale yet where we can completely self-sustain itself.” He said the company has done a good job creating a good product with a good ecosystem. But it’s such a novel invention that it’s harder to explain. “What we want to do now is leverage bigger ecosystems that are natural matches for us, like tablet users who want to take notes on a tablet or on paper next to it,” he said. “Those people want their paper notes available on the tablet. Our strategy will bring us much closer to this kind of solution.” The company will probably add features such as wireless networking, opening new kinds of opportunities. Livescribe has about 100 employees. Sales of the smartpens haven’t been disclosed, but they are approaching 1 million units sold. The prices are $99 for a 2-gigabyte pen and $199 for an 8-gigabyte pen.
Filed under: deals, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Developer shares costs and sales expectations as Whale Trail hits Android Market Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:53 PM PST The mobile game Whale Trail has been released on the Android platform this week, following steady sales of the iOS version late last year. With a refreshingly candid approach, developer UsTwo has talked about how much the game cost to develop, and whether it is likely to see a return on its investment. UsTwo co-founder Matt Mills has expressed his disappointment with Whale Trail sales to date. There have been 140,000 paid downloads of the iOS version of the game so far, but at a price of 99 cents, these haven’t yet covered total development costs. Speaking in August last year, Mills explained, “We’ve chosen to spend upwards of £100,000 (roughly $153,000) creating a premium game … and by premium I mean selling at a mere 69p (99 cents). We made sure that for our first release, we remained as far away as possible from the F-word – freemium.” Mills described the reason for avoiding a freemium model, where a game is initially free to play, but has extra features that must be paid for. “The freemium model doesn’t lend itself to our approach of making nuggets of quality perfection. We don’t want to hide the really good elements of what we’ve created behind a series of gated doors. We want to give the user the complete and best experience from the very first touch.” Whale Trail has now cost UsTwo £250,000 (roughly $383,000) to develop and update across the iOS and Android platforms, and Mills is looking for strong Android sales to help recoup that investment. “We simply need to see ROI [return on investment] over a shorter time period. I’m praying that I’m wrong and Whale Trail is a hit on Android. But, we’ve been here numerous times before. The likelihood is this will be the final UsTwo nail in the premium games coffin.” Based on its iOS performance to date, Mills is not convinced that the premium model was the correct one to adopt for Whale Trail. “We had invested a lot of money making and marketing a game for the masses and it failed to reach the masses. Although we’re still getting around 500-700 downloads a day on iOS, we quite rightly feel it’s not enough for a game of such quality. So our conclusion is that we were wrong to go premium.” While the success of Whale Trail is obviously important to UsTwo, the design studio has other projects on the go, including a partnership with Sony for a GoogleTV app . Speaking to Develop, Mills admitted that while he would like the game to do well, if it isn’t a financial success then the studio "would be fine with that." Other independent developers will no doubt be paying attention to Whale Trail’s performance, to see whether premium mobile games with high production values can still be a success on iOS or Android. When as many as 88 percent of iOS apps being downloaded are free, charging any upfront fee for its games may be something that UsTwo shies away from in the future. The developer is hoping for paid downloads in the region of 45,000 in the first few months on the Android Market. Failing to hit that mark could mean the end of the premium pricing model for UsTwo, with Mills saying, “If we shift less than this, then we can safely say premium is no longer sustainable for UsTwo and others like us in terms of investment.” UsTwo is a digital design studio that delivers pioneering user experiences as digital partner to the world's leading brands including Sony, Sony Ericsson, Intel, H&M, BBC, Turner and J.P.Morgan. It currently has studios in London and Malmö, Sweden, with a New York studio coming soon. You can listen to the suitably psychadelic Whale Trail theme song, by Gruff Rhys, formally of Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals, below. Filed under: games        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Customer loyalty is key to gaining a share of the in-app purchase riches Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:51 PM PST
With the majority of top grossing apps, such as Tap Zoo and Smurfs Village, now based on a freemium model, the Localytics study points out that in-App purchases are the lifeblood for many developers. While it may be tempting for developers to rush users to make their first in-app purchase, this research shows that building a relationship is more important in fostering long term usage, and maximizing sales revenue over time. The study, of nearly 30 million App-users, found that of all users who made an in-app purchase, 44 percent did not do this until they had used an app at least ten times. On average, a user who is going to make an in-app purchase will do so 12 days after first launching the app. This suggests that engaging a user for a good length of time is often going to be necessary before they start to make in-app purchases. Localytics also found that users who wait and interact with an app before making their first purchase make more valuable customers in the long run. Such users were found to make 25 percent more in-app purchases over their lifetime as a customer. Users making an in-app purchase during their first session with an app, went on to make an average of 2.8 purchases in total, compared to the average of 3.5 purchases made by users who waited before purchasing. Further analysis also rejects the idea that getting customers to make a purchase as quickly as possible is the ideal scenario. The study showed that only 16 percent of users who made a purchase during their first app session then went on to interact with that app 10 or more times. The overall percentage of users interacting to this level was much higher, at 26 percent. While these differences in in-app purchasing behavior may look small, they are exactly the type of margins that could mean the difference between the success and failure of an app. In summary, the Localytics study states that, “By building your app's engagement and your brand's presence in a user's mind, you can generate better overall revenue based on a loyal base of repeat users. Given the 12 day average time between downloading an app and making a purchase, driving loyalty across a period of weeks will often generate greater revenue.” Given last year’s finding that 26 percent of apps are used only once after being downloaded, it seems imperative that developers of freemium apps make a strong connection with users from the start. How this is accomplished is, of course, the $64M question. With $5.6 billion worth of in-app purchases expected by 2015 though, the question of how developers best maximise in-app revenue generation has perhaps never been more pertinent. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Google+ lets you record and share video via webcam Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:49 PM PST What’s better than posting photos or text updates? Sharing videos, of course. So says Google, which has slightly enhanced its Google+ social network today with a webcam video recording option. “Today we're making video a bit more fun by letting you record and share videos of yourself using your webcam,” Google+ Photos engineer Shana Gitnick wrote in an update on the social site. “To get started, click the video icon in the share box and choose Record Video, The feature isn’t particularly innovative. Social networks have popped up over the years (only to subsequently disappear) to give web denizens a quick and easy way to record and share short video messages — you may remember 12seconds and the original Seesmic — and even Facebook has a record-via-webcam status update option. But we totally get why Google is adding the new option: video, on the whole, is an essential part of the overall Google+ experience. The service’s Hangouts video conferencing feature and deep YouTube integration make the site an almost-unique social destination. Google appears to be rolling out webcam video recording to members on a rolling basis. We’ve yet to get the feature ourselves. [Image via guicry/Flickr] Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Facebook’s biggest change yet: Actions are here Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:28 PM PST
At a private event in San Francisco Wednesday night, the social network announced a slew of new partners are using Actions, the Facebook feature that will let developers make just about any verb a semantically cross-indexed link. What does all that mean? Let’s take a simple example as an illustration. Let’s suppose you just bought a Juicy Couture velour tracksuit. In days of yore, you might have hopped onto Facebook and told all your friends in a status update, “I am now the proud owner of a Juicy Couture tracksuit! It’s so blingy; I love it.” In the new world of Facebook Actions, you would simply click an “Own” button next to the tracksuit you bought on a Facebook partner site. On related parts of your Facebook profile, the app you used to show you “own” the tracksuit would add that item to a list featuring other purchases you’ve made. Other Facebook-linked apps you use might show other lists — for example, clothes you’ve worn, products you want, books you’ve read, movies you’ve reviewed — anything you’ve talked about on the network or on Facebook-connected sites around the web. Actions are kind of the Holy Grail of semantic data, defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses, and so much more. If users warm to the idea of Actions, it might also be one of the most valuable and lucrative move Facebook will ever make. All your apps, all your stories, all on Facebook
More than 60 partners are working with Facebook to create and roll out Actions for this initial launch. These partners are in verticals from food to fitness to travel and beyond. Companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pose, RottenTomatoes, Runkeeper, and Foodspotting will be among the initial partners. If you’re interested, you can start adding apps right now. Facebook has a video at that link explaining how the apps will interact with your Timeline. And starting today, any application that wants to integrate with Facebook Actions and Timelines will be approved in the coming weeks and months. Ideally, said Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen at tonight’s event, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a “Like” button or automating shares from that app to your Facebook wall — and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context. All activities from a given app will be summed up at the end of the month — for example, your “wanted” and “spotted” items on Foodspotting would appear in a visual graph together on each month in your Timeline. “The call to developers is to start your engines,” Sjogreen concluded. “We’re excited to see what you’re going to build.” Evolving beyond “Likes”
As one of the leading enablers of “f-commerce,” or retail and commerce occurring on and around Facebook, Payvment has been using “Want” and “Own” buttons linked to the Facebook social graph. In the image on the left, you can see Payvment’s buttons in action. “The Open Graph has been around for two years, but it was really based on the Like button, which never really worked,” said Taylor. “It really doesn’t mean anything to anybody.” Actions, he continued to say, would help to bring even more opportunities to learn about content and products to Facebook users. “These new buttons are really going to drive discovery, just like Spotify did with music.” At Facebook’s f8 developer conference last year, when Actions were first revealed, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that “Like” buttons were limited. "We're helping to define a new language for how people connect,” Zukcerberg said at that time. “When we started, the vocabulary was limited” to simple, inexpressive “Likes.” So starting now, instead of "liking" a book, you can tell friends you “Read” it through Facebook's new vocabulary of Actions. But you’re not just telling your friends; you’re telling Facebook and Facebook’s vast network of advertisers and brands. The more businesses large and small are able to understand the relationships between us consumers and the products we consume (and the sentiments we express around those interactions and relationships), the more targeted and effective they can make their marketing. It’s only as insidious as capitalism itself, and this type of intelligence is the kind of thing that could quickly bring online advertising to its evolutionary apex — at least for now. “The company will collect more data than ever, if you allow it, and it will offer you enticements to share that data,” wrote VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi in an op-ed back when Actions was first previewed. “[Facebook] can, for instance, take your information and mine it for useful nuggets. It can give you back statistical information about your behavior that you didn't know about… If there was any doubt that Facebook is a data mining company with a lot of ‘big data,’ that ended today.” Activity without annoyance
However, from the user’s perspective, one of the best parts about Actions is that you can use them without incessantly oversharing to your friends. When you share a post or update your status on Facebook, it will appear in your friends’ news feeds. But when you have an Action coming from the Open Graph (i.e., from a site that exists outside Facebook but that uses Facebook Connect in some way), that activity will only appear in the Ticker and on your own Timeline. (The Ticker is a lightweight, real-time stream of activity that shows up on the right side of the Facebook homepage. It showcases various minutiae from your friends, from Actions to songs they’re listening to and beyond.) Many Actions partners will offer granular settings to give you control over what you share. For example, design-centric flash-sale site Fab.com’s “Bought” actions are opt-in. Like the Actions turned on but don’t want to share a particular purchase with your friends? Mark it as a gift to hide it. Don’t worry about embarrassing buys; all Fab.com “adult” items are hidden by default. “You may not want your mom to know you just bought a sexy piece of lingerie, but you can change that,” said a Fab.com spokesperson. “We want to make sure our customers are as comfortable as possible with sharing.” For Actions coming into Facebook from outside apps, users won't get prompts for each Action they take; those blips on the radar will simply appear on the Ticker then vanish — mostly. Since this real-time stream generates a lot of noise with very little signal, the Actions will also be archived on users’ Facebook profiles, where deeper digging will unearth various kinds of actions he or she has taken in the past. Facebook’s redesign of profile pages in to Timelines has made this separation of high-level and low-level information possible and easy to navigate. “We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction,” said Facebook design chief Sam Lessin in a recent interview with VentureBeat about the Timeline design. "It's designed very differently from News Feed,” he continued, noting that while the elements of the Timeline you can see now are very much related to what’s going on in your life day by day and month by month, other sections of the profile are tailor-made for deeper digging. As Facebook executive Bret Taylor explained it, with the addition of Actions to Facebook profiles, "You can see everything you have ever done in any app.” Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Zynga confirms it bought four mobile game companies Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:25 PM PST
The company did not disclose the sums paid for those companies, which make smartphone and tablet games. In an interview with Reuters, Zynga senior vice president David Ko said that it had acquired German company Gamedoctors in December. Gamedoctors, based in Bielefeld near Hanover, created mobile game ZombieSmash. Zynga also purchased Page44 Studios, which is based in San Francisco, in September. That studio created the “World of Goo” game for Apple’s iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch). Zynga acquired San Francisco-based HipLogic in August. Ko also confirmed Zynga bought New York based Astro Ape Studios in August to develop new titles. (That acquisition was actually previously disclosed, but it is included in Reuters’ list of four new acquisitions). Zynga is dominant on Facebook but is trying to grow its share in mobile, where other players such as Electronic Arts and Gameloft grabbed market share earlier. Filed under: games, mobile        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| More expensive AT&T data plans go into effect Jan. 22 Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:09 PM PST
AT&T and chief rival Verizon Wireless used to offer unlimited data plans for their smartphones, but both have steadily moved away from those types of plans in the past few years. But as more customers pick up data-sucking iPhones, iPads, Android devices and Windows Phones, the networks get more bogged down and cost more to operate. “Customers are using more data than ever before,” David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T Mobility, said in a statement. “Our new plans are driven by this increasing demand in a highly competitive environment and continue to deliver a great value to customers.” AT&T requires its smartphone owners to have a data plan, and current customers pay $15 for 200MB per month or $25 for 2GB per month. The least-expensive plan will now be a $20 plan for 300MB of data per month. The next-highest plan will be $30 for 3GB of data per month. The new prices will only effect new customers, but existing customers can change to these data plans if they choose. I, for one, will be sticking with my current data plan because I already find my bill too expensive. The company’s three smartphone data plans will now be: • AT&T DataPlus 300MB: $20 for 300MB And its tablet data pricing has changed to: • AT&T DataConnect 250MB: $15 for 250MB What do you think of the new pricing? Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Foursquare gets meatier with addition of 13M menu items Posted: 18 Jan 2012 04:41 PM PST
The new menu feature, powered by SinglePlatform, provides members with a detailed look at more than 13 million menu items offered at restaurants, with caloric information and pricing available for some locations. Menus can be found on the web and at the company’s mobile site – but not yet inside the mobile apps. Foursquare, the startup that popularized the place check-in, is in the midst of a rebranding initiative to become better known as your one-stop-shop for location-based content. The startup has more than 15 million members who’ve checked in at venues a total of 1.5 billion times to date. Foursquare is using that data to make intelligent recommendations, via the Explore feature, on where people can go to eat, drink and be merry at any given time. With the addition of menus, Foursquare has taken a far less scientific route to add even more practical, everyday purpose to the experience, especially for the passive person who’d prefer to consume information rather than share it. Menus might even keep people from navigating over to competitor Yelp for more venue details (Yelp listings don’t yet include full menus). Of course, we’d love to have our cake and eat it too. That is, we’d like have menu items associated with related Foursquare tips and vice versa. Now that would be nifty. [Image via bradleygee/Flickr] Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Walmart lets gadget companies compete for a spot on its shelves Posted: 18 Jan 2012 03:36 PM PST
Walmart Labs, the retail giant’s innovation arm aimed at developing new products for commerce, is hosting the campaign. Get on the Shelf allows companies to bypass the sales process and compete for a spot on Walmart’s website, as well as in its stores. Technology companies with a hardware product often run into roadblocks trying to market their product. Getting a product to market is a one-sided relationship, where the company and its sales representatives pitch products left and right just to gain interest. Marketplaces such as Walmart are on the hook for the type of products they sell and vet those products to make sure they won’t have to deal with lots of returns. "For a long time, the ability to get a product into a retail store was at the sole discretion of the store buyer,” said Venky Harinarayan, senior vice president of Walmart Global e-commerce. “We are removing these barriers by giving anyone a chance to launch their product at Walmart and reach millions of shoppers nationwide." This is a particularly good opportunity for the startups of Silicon Valley who are talented in creating interesting videos and graphics to go along with their products. In order to compete, a company must enter a video of the product. Videos will then be posted for public voting, after being screened in case someone slips something not family-friendly into the mix. From that point, the competition becomes, as Walmart describes it, “American Idol” style. Voting will lead to a finalist round of 10 videos, from there three will be chosen, and then finally the grand prize winner. Walmart has already received submissions through its sneak preview round where it collected a cube-game as well as a pillow for the iPad. All videos must be submitted by February 22. Voting begins March 7th. Enter here. Check out our list of the top eight great gadget startups, maybe they’ll be on Walmart’s shelves soon. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Silicon Valley luminaries protest SOPA in downtown San Francisco Posted: 18 Jan 2012 02:39 PM PST Angel investor Ron Conway, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Craiglist founder Craig Newmark, and rapper MC Hammer spoke to a crowd of more than a hundred people today at an anti-SOPA protest in San Francisco. One speaker who garnered a lot attention was MC Hammer, who spoke out as a content producer and artist. He emphasized that legislators should not create laws which would stifle creativity. “This SOPA bill, on the surface they say it’s to protect rights and content…but as you drill down you see all the clauses that would put a tremendous burden upon service providers and give the government the ability to shut down sites without due process,” said Hammer. A group of tech entrepreneurs, software developers, and start-up employees assembled in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall on Wednesday to show their staunch opposition to SOPA, the anti-piracy bill. The speeches all had one general theme: Don’t let SOPA cripple start-up businesses and technology jobs. One major piece of the proposed legislation would give the government the ability to take down and block foreign websites which contain any copyright material used without permission. Start-up companies could be hit the hardest, because they wouldn’t necessarily have the resources to fight back if their website or business was affected by SOPA. Many of protesters expressed that SOPA would take away jobs and harm start-ups. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, ended her speech by reading all of the signs the protesters held. Messages included “SOPA will kill jobs and innovation,” “Don’t break the Internet,” and “Censorship causes blindness.” While the speakers had a lot to say about their opposition to SOPA, many protesters expressed their anti-SOPA sentiments as well. “I am pro start-ups, pro tech, and pro new jobs,” said protester Katherine Adams, “I don’t like the ideas behind [SOPA], if we give them this inch, they will take a mile and I don’t want to give them that mile.” Another protestor, Randy Lubin, expressed his happiness with the growing opposition to SOPA. “It’s been really fun to see the opposition building in the last few months,” Lubin said. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| eBay beats expectations with $11B in revenue in 2011 Posted: 18 Jan 2012 02:14 PM PST
The company generated net income on a GAAP basis of $3.2 billion ($2.7 billion in non-GAAP net income) for the full year. eBay closed out the year with $3.4 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, according to an earnings report released Wednesday. The retail giant, which operates PayPal, GSI and X.commerce, saw its fourth quarter earnings jump 35 percent from the same quarter last year, in part by a gain on the sale of its remaining investment in Skype. “We had a strong fourth quarter finish to an excellent year, increasing our confidence in our three-year outlook,” eBay president and CEO John Donahoe said. “We are a different eBay today, no longer just an ecommerce leader but a stronger, more diverse global commerce company shaping the future of shopping and payments.” During an earnings call with analysts, Donahoe talked up eBay’s impressive holiday sales and the success of its mobile applications, which helped the company rake in money faster than ever. On Cyber Monday, eBay processed more than 10,000 transactions per second, a new transactions per second milestone for the company. And altogether, eBay mobile payment volume reached $4 billion for the year, up five times from the mobile payment volume of 2010, Donahoe said. eBay expects mobile payment volume to reach $7 billion in 2012. Donahoe also spoke of eBay’s ability to capitalize on an inflection point, driven by consumers and enabled by new technologies, happening in the shopping space. He stressed that the company is no longer just an e-commerce site but a full-service business with products that merge the online and offline shopping experiences. “We intend to make shopping more locally convenient and more globally accessible,” Donahoe said. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| How to work around Wikipedia’s blackout: 5 easy options you can do at home Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:49 PM PST
Here’s how you can get the information you want and need while the Internet is busy taking a stand on SOPA and PIPA. 1. Hit the escape key as the page is loading. This is by far the easiest and most convenient way to get to the Wikipedia pages you need. Do your usual keyword search search on Google, adding the word “wiki” to the search terms. Click the appropriate Wikipedia link; then, as the page is loading and before it goes to the default blackout screen, hit the escape key on the top left side of your keyboard. You’ll get to read the article to your heart’s content. If you mess up the timing, just reload the page and hit the escape key a bit sooner (if you’re stuck on the blackout page) or a bit later (if you’re stuck on a blank white page with no content at all). 2. Use some easy URL magic. An intrepid reader informs us that adding “?banner=false” to the end of any Wikipedia URL will bypass the blackout page. For example, you could use the URL 3. Try it in another language. If you’re down with other languages aside from English, sehr gut pour vous, querido. Also, if you use the Chrome web browser, you might be able to get (sometimes confusing) translations from the other-language page into English. For example, the first sentence of the page 4. Use the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive may not contain the most current information available, so if you’re researching, say the Republican 2012 presidential wannabes, use extreme caution. But for more evergreen topics, do not hesitate to hop on over to Archive.org, where you can enter just about any Wikipedia URL and see a cached version of the page. 5. Use a cached URL from Google’s web search. Google caches the web pages it crawls, so it should have a fairly recent version of the Wikipedia page you’re searching for. Just enter in your keywords plus the word “wiki,” which should yield a relevant Wikipedia page or two. Then, hover over the gray arrow to the right of the link. There, you will see an option to view the cached page. Click that link, and you’re on your way to wiki town. If you don’t get the whole SOPA/PIPA hoopla, take some time to read up on the issues and learn why these two bills have the Internet in such a messy, blacked-out uproar. Or, you could just watch this video of a guy singing a song about SOPA, PIPA, blackouts, and LOLcats. I’m sure it’ll be a lot funnier when I’m sky-high on Triazolam. Filed under: VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| The view from CES: The top 10 trends in technology for 2012 Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:00 PM PST The International Consumer Electronics Show is a huge festival of gadgetry, but there’s no better place to get a bead on where technology is going in the coming year. Among the 153,000 attendees at the show in Las Vegas last week were five VentureBeat staffers who were sniffing out the big trends. This story is our list of the most evident trends among the rows and rows of gadgets at CES. The convention is like a step into the future, with many companies showing off the TVs, smartphones, computers and tablets that they will be bringing to market in the coming months. When you see the same kind of product over and over again, that’s a good sign that it will be dominating the tech headlines in the near future. This story was written by Dean Takahashi, Dylan Tweney, Sean Ludwig, and Devindra Hardawar. Also check out the 10 most promising products of the coming year. For fun, here’s the link to last year’s top trends from CES 2011.
|
| Mark Zuckerberg asks his 11M Facebook subscribers to stop SOPA Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:00 PM PST
“The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development,” Zuckerberg wrote in a note posted to Facebook. “Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.” Zuckerberg’s concise missive is currently spreading through the social network at breakneck speed as his nearly 11 million subscribers help to disperse the message for him. The note has more than 260,000 “likes” and 50,000 shares at the time of this posting, roughly one hour since the note was posted. “The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet,” Zuckerbeg also said. “We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.” Facebook’s views are consistent with a growing cadre of Internet companies that are also speaking about the controversial pieces of legislation Wednesday. Zuckerberg alone has the potential to reach the masses who spend the bulk of their days on the social network — it is perhaps a different bunch than those who will find the blackout messages on Google, Tumblr, WordPress, Flickr and a slew of other sites — but is it enough? The message is strong and clear, but it seems strangely minimalistic and quiet when compared to the blackout campaigns of Facebook’s fellow web companies. [Image via Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook] Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| AT&T could buy Dish to gobble up its precious wireless spectrum Posted: 18 Jan 2012 11:43 AM PST
AT&T’s primary motivation to buy T-Mobile USA was to get access to that company’s spectrum, a high-value commodity that makes it possible for customers to make calls and send and receive wireless data. AT&T simply doesn’t have enough 4G spectrum to provide a good experience for future customers, especially if its customer base grows. Chief AT&T rival Verizon Wireless, on the other hand, has much more spectrum available thanks to an enterprising $3.6 billion deal it made with cable companies. A Dish Network acquisition, as first written about by Bloomberg, could be the solution to AT&T’s woes. Dish owns lots of wireless spectrum to deliver its television service to customers and it even has talked in the past about partnering with T-Mobile to offer wireless phone service. Bloomberg’s report suggests AT&T could pay as much to $50 a share for Dish, which would be a 77 percent premium. That would be the biggest acquisition premium in more than a decade. Dish’s stock is currently trading at about $29 a share. Other options for AT&T (or its rivals) to get more spectrum could be to purchase regional carriers or mid-size carriers like MetroPCS, Cricket, Leap Wireless, and Clearwire. But Dish would be easier to get regulatory approval from the government versus a carrier, because we all know what happened last time. Do you think buying Dish would be a good move for AT&T? Filed under: deals, media, mobile        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
I can’t remember the last time anyone was so interested in education technology, but leave it up to Apple to whip up excitement. The company held an 
A total of 25 U.S. senators have publicly stated their opposition to the highly debated piece of anti-piracy legislation, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
It’s the worst-kept secret on the Internet: Facebook Actions, a new way of interacting with apps, content, and brands, are coming to the social network.
Facebook’s initial partners for the Actions launch.
We recently spoke with 
The Ticker on the Facebook homepage. Actions will appear here. Rolling over Ticker activity will trigger a flyout with more information and interactions.
Delivering on its promise to make the real world easier to use, location-sharing startup 
Fresh off hot 
Whether you’re doing homework, researching the latest advances in sedation dentistry, or just wasting time “educating” yourself on the bottomless pit of trivia that is Wikipedia, you’re probably a little bit inconvenienced by today’s site-wide blackout.
When Mark Zuckerberg speaks, people listen. Wednesday, the celebrity 
| You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |