VentureBeat |
- Boxee rolls out 1.5 software update with Live TV support
- Highlight knows who is standing on that corner…and will tell you
- With powerful new apps, Producteev is the task management service of your dreams
- Shopkick is on a mobile shopping tear with 3M users, over 1B offers viewed
- Vimeo begins rolling out silky smooth redesign with huge videos
- Verizon reports strong Q4 with iPhone 4S, LTE leading the way
- Facebook added $15.3B and 230k jobs to European economy in 2011
- King.com launches first game on Google+
- Apple’s “thermonuclear war” against Android is an expensive dud
- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: MPAA chairman Christopher Dodd should be fired
- FitBit raises $12M for personal fitness-tracking devices
- Founder of Facebook for Russia donates $1M to Wikipedia at DLD
- eBay CEO John Donahoe: 2012 will be an “inflection point in retail, shopping, and paying”
- Playcast snags French TV provider to debut cloud gaming service (exclusive)
- Arrest fallout: Kim Dotcom falls to No. 2 rank in Modern Warfare 3
- Will Microsoft phase out its virtual currency system?
- Solar storm coming Tuesday: should you let your iPad out of the house?
- Choose your own sale with LuxeYard, launching today
- Parse.ly launches predictive analytics dashboard for publishers
- Microsoft to open two new Kinect studios?
- Set hidden traps for cyber criminals with Mykonos Software
- Which way next? Live webcasts from Singularity University
- 15 file-sharing sites like Megaupload that the Feds may target next
- Google+ introduces new Q&A feature for crowdsourcing answers from friends
- Yes, ITV really did use video game footage during an IRA propaganda piece
- VBWeekly: Megaupload, Kodak and iBooks
- Semiconductor startup Avalanche closes $11.5M funding round
- Gilt Groupe lays off 10 percent of employees and shutters regional offices
- Online photo editor Aviary hopes to take Picnik’s place
- Absinthe jailbreak for iPhone 4S, iPad 2 saw 1M first day downloads
| Boxee rolls out 1.5 software update with Live TV support Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:50 AM PST Boxee is rolling out some major updates to its connected television platform today with a new software update that adds support for live TV stick. The Boxee Box is a streaming set-top box featuring Boxee's open-source media software, which transforms televisions into internet connected media centers. Previously the company announced the addition of a Live TV stick, a $49 addon that basically acts a high-powered HD antenna to provides Boxee Box owners with local channels like ABC, CBS, Fox, CW and NBC with no monthly fee. Boxee is betting that the combination of free basic live TV channels with videos from services such as YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and others will be enough for many people to end their expensive cable subscriptions (a.k.a. cut the cord). The Live TV stick gives Boxee Box owners access to a new social channel listings section, sharing via social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). It functions basically like any other channel listing guide, but the biggest difference with Boxee’s version is that it shows you who else is watching a particular program in real time. While flipping through the available channels, this has the potential to help dictate what you plan on watching. Of course, with the limited number of free HD broadcast channels available, the feature won’t have nearly the impact it could if added to the hundreds of channels available through a cable or satellite television provider. The Live TV update also includes a channel editing feature and a simplified user interface that makes it easy to flip back and forth between Live TV and OnDemand content. However, one thing that isn’t included with the Live TV stick update is DVR functionality. The Boxee 1.5 software update, which is the last version that will support desktop computer integration, also includes a new user interface, improved search, a revised content library, pop-up management for Boxee’s web browser, and integration with movie review service Rotten Tomatoes. The Boxee said it’s staggering the release of the software update over the next 72 hours. However, the Live TV stick is available for order now. Screenshots of Boxee 1.5 below: Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Highlight knows who is standing on that corner…and will tell you Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST
Highlight is the creation of Paul Davidson, the former entrepreneur in residence of Benchmark Capital. While formulating a company at Benchmark, Davidson kept returning to this “serendipity” that is meeting someone. And unlike the romantics who appreciate life’s little meet cutes, Davidson wants to remold chance encounters into opportunities to have a working knowledge of someone off the bat. “The real world is just this bizarre-o version of Facebook and every profile is just a single photo,” Davidson said in an interview, “That version sucks.” The app, available on the iPhone, is pretty simple. You download it, connect to Facebook and then are asked to close the app. That’s pretty much it. Once installed, however, the app runs in the background, checking for the app on people’s phones physically close to your. If that person has Highlight installed, you will receive a notification with their profile information. This profile information includes name, photo, brief description, locations, history of places you’ve crossed paths, mutual friends and more. “I’m completely convinced that in ten years you’ll be able to walk into a room and know everyone’s name, all the things you have in common with them…it’ll just be like a sixth sense we’ll all have,” said Davidson. So what about people who may use the app for bad, try and stalk people around them or case the people they’re going to mug before doing so. Davidson believes that the benefits will outweigh the negatives. He likens the product to Facebook, a social network that holds data that touches just about every part of our lives. Having that data can seem like a vulnerability, but being able to interact socially, share your interests and connect with people digitally is enough to quell most concerns that their profiles will be used inappropriately.
Davidson explained, “With the right privacy controls, I think anyone would be willing to share some subset of information with some subset of people.” And users do have some privacy controls, at this point, though they are limited. You can make your profile public, or available only to friends of friends. Davidson says privacy controls will evolve as people try the app and make suggestions. You can also pause the app if you’d like it to stop running while you’re in a particular place. It won’t turn back on until you open the app again. Perhaps we’re all turning into some digital representation of ourselves. Highlight speeds up the Facebook stalking part of getting to know someone, that has become somewhat customary amongst those of the information age. “It’s not about meting people,” he said. “It’s about having the technology to surface the meta data of people around you.” Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| With powerful new apps, Producteev is the task management service of your dreams Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST If you’re like me, you’ve tried and abandoned countless task management services. It’s easy to make a half-hearted promise with yourself to organize your tasks, it’s tougher to find a service that’s flexible and simple enough to use without becoming a chore in itself. Producteev, which is launching a slew of new apps today, comes the closest to being the task management service I’ve always wanted. It works on a multitude platforms, can be used for both group and individual tasks, and even integrates directly with other task services (including some that it’s directly competing with). The company also announced today that it has landed over 1,000 paying business customers, including companies like Orbitz, Financial Times, and Logitech. That figure alone shows Producteev’s flexibility, as it works just as well for large group tasks and small projects, as it does for managing your home shopping list. It’s even more impressive considering that the company doesn’t even have a marketing budget — it’s growth is entirely based on good word of mouth. After being disappointed with the state of task management years ago, Producteev co-founder and CEO Ilan Abehassera told VentureBeat in an interview, “We wanted to build a better task service, both for individuals and teams.” The New York City-based company was founded in 2008, and has steadily improved its offering with features like e-mail integration, which helps add actionable tasks right from within your inbox. With its most recent apps though, Producteev has reached a whole new level of task management. The company rebuilt its synchronization engine from the ground up, so now updating and finding your tasks across devices is easier than ever. Producteev is also launching a revamped iPhone and web app, as well as debuting an Android and Windows 7 app. Abehassera tells me that the company’s goal is to make all of its features available from every app. They all sport revamped interfaces, natural language processing, and the ability to create multiple task workspaces (free workspaces support up to two users, while team workspaces cost $20 a month). Producteev is also the first company to utilize TaskRabbit’s new API, allowing you to seamlessly outsource simple tasks to people in your community with just one click. Abehassera called the TaskRabbit integration an “interesting way to get into crowdsourcing… not just managing tasks, but also completing them.” As for what’s on the horizon, Abhessera tells me the company is focused on delivering iPad and Windows Phone 7 apps next. Thus far, Producteev has received $1.3 million in funding. (Disclosure: Producteev angel Aydin Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat.) You can take a look at Producteev’s new features below:
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| Shopkick is on a mobile shopping tear with 3M users, over 1B offers viewed Posted: 24 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST
The company announced today that it has over 3 million active users since it launched over a year ago, and that over a billion of its in-app deals and offers have been viewed. Shopkick’s app communicates with a patent-pending device in stores, letting customers seamlessly earn rewards simply by strolling into a store and looking at products. All you need to do is have the app open to earn rewards — there’s no hunting and pecking for locations (and praying that GPS functionality works) with something like Foursquare. The success of the app shows that Shopkick is certainly on to something. Consumers love earning rewards and free stuff, and retailers get a simple way to target specific customers. Not surprisingly, the app saw a big bump in usage over the last holiday season, with 5 million walk-ins to Shopkick-equipped stores in December 2011 alone. That was double the amount of walk-ins from four months prior. During the holidays, Shopkick users interacted with stores over 3.1 million times a day, up from just 1 million in August. Shopkick’s technology has now been deployed in over 4,000 stores and 250 malls cross America. Recent partner brands include Old Navy, Disney, and Levi’s. Other notable stats: The company has seen over 150 million interactions with retailers since it added Old Navy in November. Sixty four percent of Shopkick users are women (more than half of which have kids), and the average user is 30 years old. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Shopkick has raised a total of $20 million from Kleiner, Greylock, Hoffman (investing as an individual before he became a partner at Greylock), Citi Growth Ventures & Innovation Group, and Ron Conway's SV Angel. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Vimeo begins rolling out silky smooth redesign with huge videos Posted: 24 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST Prominent video sharing site Vimeo has begun rolling out a striking redesign that emphasizes clean aesthetics and larger videos that promote immersion, the company revealed today. With a goal of providing a better video viewing experience no matter where you are, the redesign goes hand in hand with the recent launch of Android and Windows Phone apps and soon-to-launch iOS apps. No matter where you go, the service aims to “put video first,” a phrase the company’s employees like to trot out often. Vimeo has essentially had the same design since 2007, and while users of popular sites often protest design changes, this one could go over smoothly. The redesigned site echoes the old design in several ways, but it comes off as much more sophisticated and smooth. Vimeo CEO Dae Mellencamp told us that during the testing process that it has been quite hard for her to go back to the old design. “The old design feels clunky by comparison,” Mellencamp told VentureBeat. “There were tons of features and functions we wanted to add, so we’re using a new code base. We’ve put video front and center.” The most notable change to the site can be found on video pages. As you can see in the photo above, the video player now takes up twice as much space on the page. It’s so big you don’t have to make the video full-screen to immerse yourself in it. Unlike Vimeo’s old design or YouTube’s popular player, there are now no related videos featured on the right-hand side. To see more videos, all you have to do to click the tab at the top right that says “More Videos” and a bar of other videos to choose from will pop down from the top. Other important changes in the redesign include a cleaner “Inbox” where you can watch new videos posted by people you follow, new profile pages with larger photos, more privacy settings, easy access to Creative Commons videos, threaded comments that allow for replies, and advanced search options. Vimeo has even created a “10 Reasons Why You Will Love The New Vimeo” to make sure users get up to speed on what’s coming. Registered users that want in on the redesign can sign up today to take part in a closed beta test. The Vimeo team plans to give many more users the chance to sign up to use the new design in the next few weeks. More details on the roll out process can be found over on Vimeo’s blog. Vimeo has been owned by IAC, which also owns companies like OKCupid, Match.com, Urbanspoon and The Daily Beast, since August 2006. Vimeo doesn't reveal paid subscriber numbers, but it does have more than 8 million registered users. It notably attracted 65 million unique vistors in Dec. 2011, and that doesn't include embedded views across the web. You can look at comparisons of Vimeo’s old design and new design in the first four screenshots below. I’ve also included screen grabs from the profile page and how comments now appear under videos. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Verizon reports strong Q4 with iPhone 4S, LTE leading the way Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:46 AM PST
Ultimately though, the company reported a fourth quarter loss of 71 cents in diluted earnings per share due to pension charges. In comparison, Verizon saw overall earnings of $0.93 per share in the fourth quarter last year. Verizon’s hot wireless business saw its best quarter ever with $18.3 billion in quarterly revenues, up 13 percent from last year. Data revenue accounted for $6.3 billion, while other service revenues made up $15.1 billion of the total. The wireless arm reported that it added 1 million total net connections for the quarter, 1.5 million retail customers (some of which were existing customers), 1.2 million of which were postpaid (anyone paying a monthly bill) subscribers. Verizon sold a total of 7.7 million smartphones in the quarter, 4.2 million of which were iPhones (according to a prior announcement), and 2.3 million were LTE-equipped. The success of the iPhone was a double-edged sword for the company, as its heavy subsidies ate into wireless margins. In its wired business, Verizon added 201,000 new FiOS internet customers, making for a total of 4.8 million FiOS Internet users (4.2 million of which also subscribe to FiOS Video). Wired revenue was $10.1 billion, down 1.5 percent from last year. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Facebook added $15.3B and 230k jobs to European economy in 2011 Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:23 AM PST Facebook added $15.3 billion in value to the European economy in the past year, COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Tuesday. Sandberg, in her closing keynote on how social media is reshaping opportunities for economic growth, added that the social network added 230,000 jobs in Europe in 2011. Sandberg cited the findings from a joint study between Facebook and Deloitte, being released today, and also announced that the company is launching a new “Ad Boost” program to help small businesses in Europe. Facebook will give €100 in credits to 50,000 businesses for marketing on the site. The social network will work with local partners to dole out the credits to small businesses. Sandberg specifically called out Spotify’s success on the Facebook platform. Spotify has added 7 million additional users since its U.S. launch with Facebook six months ago and now has 2.5 million paying customers, Sandberg said. She also talked about the successes veteran and big brands are seeing thanks to Facebook. The distance between one person and one million, for a brand, is just four steps on Facebook, she said. Burberry, Sandberg said, is seeing remarkable results on Facebook. The brand launched its “Body” fragrance exclusively on Facebook and used the social network to distribute 2,000 samples in two weeks. But more importantly to Burbery, Sandberg said, was that the company was able to give out samples to people that really wanted them. Today, Burberry spends a majority of their marketing budget online, with most of those online dollars going to Facebook, Sandberg said. The first lady of Facebook’s DLD talk also centered around the significance of social media and its ability to bring people together. She argued that we’re living in the midst of a revolution and said that social media has resulted in three key trends: the shift from anonymity to authentic identity, the shift from wisdom of the crowds to wisdom of the people, and the shift from being receivers of information to being broadcasters of information. “This is a revolution that touches every aspect of our lives,” Sandberg said. Social media, she said, is word of mouth at scale. [Image via Hubert Burda Media/Flickr] Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| King.com launches first game on Google+ Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST King.com has more than 150 games on the web. In the past year, it successfully moved five of the games to Facebook, garnering 23.8 million monthly active users on the social network. And today, the company is launching its first game on the Google+ social network. The company is unveiling its most popular game, Bubble Witch Saga, on Google’s social network, which now has more than 90 million users. If the company succeeds there, it will have a brand new platform with the potential to generate lots of users and revenues for the years ahead. Alex Dale, chief marketing officer at London-based King.com, said that the company has slowly moved its games over onto the social networks because it is focusing on making quality casual social experiences. In the process, the company has added a social layer to its games, which offer prizes for winners. “It takes a lot of time, effort and creativity to do great games,” Dale said. So far, it has moved over its most successful titles, and is doing so again with Bubble Witch Saga, which has four million daily active users on Facebook. The game has been played 1.5 billion times on Facebook, mostly by women ages 25 and up. “We want all of our games to run across multiple platforms,” Dale said. “We look forward to having a good relationship with Google. This is virgin territory, but it has been easy to do.” Dale said the Googe+ game applications programming interface made it easy to port Bubble Witch Saga. More games will be ported in the future. King.com has more than 30 million unique players and a billion games played a month across platforms that include the web, Facebook, Goolge+, Android and iOS. King.com was started in 2003 and it has more than 100 employees. Rivals include Worldwinner, Prize Room, Game Duell, and YooMee Games. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Apple’s “thermonuclear war” against Android is an expensive dud Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:56 AM PST  Can lawsuits take a bite out of the competition?This morning Reuters reported that Apple had lost an appeal to ban Android tablets in the Netherlands. It’s another failure for an expensive legal strategy that has done nothing to stem the growth of Android’s marketshare in the smartphone and tablet space. As Dan Lyons reported yesterday, Apple is said to have spent as much as $100 million bringing claims against HTC, a Taiwanese manufacturer of numerous Android devices. Of the 84 claims it brought to the International Trade Commission on ten patents it claimed were infringed, Apple managed to win a ruling on just one. “That got reported as a victory for Apple. But in reality the infringement involved a relatively tiny software feature, one that lets you press on a phone number in an email or Web page and bring up a menu from which you can choose to call the number, send a text message, and so on,” writes Lyons. “HTC can resolve the infringement simply be removing that feature from phones it sells in the United States, or by finding a different way to implement that feature that sidesteps the patent.” Apple doesn’t show any signs of letting up. Last week it filed lawsuits against Samsung in Germany claiming infringement on the design of 15 devices. With its massive cash reserves, Apple can afford to fight this battle as well or better than any other company. But it seems to be producing very little bang for its buck. In fact analysts and shareholders are worried that this aggressive approach to intellectual property is actually hurting the value of Apple stock. “A scorched-earth strategy is bad news because it doesn't optimize the value of their patents — because people will get around them," said Kevin Rivette, a managing partner at 3LP Advisors LLC, a firm that advises on intellectual property, told Bloomberg News. "It's like a dam. Using their patents to keep rivals out of the market is like putting rocks in a stream. The stream is going to find a way around. Wouldn't it be better to direct where the water goes?” Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: MPAA chairman Christopher Dodd should be fired Posted: 24 Jan 2012 03:02 AM PST Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had fighting words for Motion Picture Association of America chairman Christopher Dodd, calling the former Senator and current lobbyist out on his recent threats and pronouncing that the MPAA should fire its chief. “Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd said to Fox News recently. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.” Wales argued that these transparent statements make the MPAA out to be a corrupt, Congress-buying organization. He also challenged Dodd’s assertion that Wikipedia’s decision to blackout its site in protest of SOPA, an effort Wales said was a “massive success,” constituted an abuse of power. 10 million people contacted Congress, Wales said. “That’s not an abuse of power, that’s democracy,” he said. “[Dodd] had best get used to it.” The heated war of words between Wales and Dodd has to do with each others’ opposing viewpoints on SOPA and PIPA, two almost-dead pieces of legislation that would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign websites associated with infringing intellectual property. Wales is so opposed to the legislation that he helped champion a web-wide protest. But Wales told the audience at the Design Life Digital conference in Munich that he believes digital piracy is a very real problem that needs to be addressed with better legislation. “I hope to see … a window of opportunity for Hollywood to come to the table and talk to Silicon Valley with a little more humility,” Wales said. “The laws need to be tweaked … but we do not need a Draconian new regime.” [Image via Hubert Burda Media/Flickr] Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| FitBit raises $12M for personal fitness-tracking devices Posted: 24 Jan 2012 03:00 AM PST FitBit, a maker of personal fitness-tracking gadgets, has raised $12 million in a third round of venture funding. The money comes investors that include Foundry Group and True Ventures, who are betting that fitness tracking will soon become a national obsession. FitBit makes devices like the FitBit Ultra, which measures how many steps you have taken in a day, how much sleep you got, and the calories that you’ve burned. You can hang it on a belt clip (or your bra, I guess) and its built-in sensors detect and decipher your motions.
For sure, not everyone wants to measure every single facet of their lives. But James Park, chief executive and founder of FitBit, said in an interview that lots of people will take to these devices if they’re convenient and easy to use. “That’s where our focus has been,” Park said. “It’s more about making fitness convenient, affordable, accessible, and fun.” As far as the quantified self movement goes, Park said, “I worry the name itself is way too geeky. We are focused on getting all Americans interested.” The FitBit Ultra device is designed to hang on to your clothes despite vigorous activity. And you can attach it to a wristband and it will measure your sleep pattern and automatically upload the data to your web-based fitness dashboard. The dashboard gives you information such as steps taken, miles traveled, calories burned, calories consumed (if you enter your food intake), how long you slept and other data. The web access is free, but you can pay for a monthly subscription if you want to delve deeper into the data. These devices can thus offer a lot more than the $5 pedometers that sometimes work and often don’t. Other investors include SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures. The capital will be used to help grow the company. In the past six months, the company launched the FitBit Ultra, expanded its retail and international distribution, and introduced Aria, its WiFi-enabled Smart Scale. That last introduction has moved the company beyond a single product. Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group said that the digital health and fitness business requires a lot of expertise from years of experience and FitBit has shown that it has the ability to grow the fledgling market to its full potential. Park said the company will launch more products in 2012 and it now has a retail partnership with Target stores. Overall, the mobile health information market will grow to $4.6 billion by 2014 and $12 billion by 2020. According to the MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest, the products include personal emergency response services, telemedicine, mobile medical equipment, mobile health information, remote tracking and health and fitness software. Park started the company in 2007 with Eric Friedman. Park said he was out of shape from working at a bunch of startups and he was inspired by the motion-sensing Nintendo Wii. He thought the same sensors — accelerometers and gyroscopes — used in the game consoles could be applied to portable technology. “We were driven by our own personal interests,” Park said. They launched their first product in 2009 and released a second version in October; that new version has an altimeter for counting stair steps. The FitBit Ultra sells for $99.95 and the WiFi Smart Scale sells for $129.95. The company now has 50 people and it has raised $23.4 million to date. Rivals include Jawbone, Basic Science, Striiv, Nike, and others. “There’s a Cambrian explosion of devices,” Park said. While there is a lot of competition, Park said he feels comfortable with the product and retail leadership. The FitBit Ultra is now in 5,000 locations, including Target, Best Buy, Radio Shack and 24 Hour Fitness. “We come in to work every day motivated to help people feel better,” Park said. “That’s a different mission from a lot of companies in Silicon Valley.” Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Founder of Facebook for Russia donates $1M to Wikipedia at DLD Posted: 24 Jan 2012 02:31 AM PST
Twenty-seven year-old entrepreneur Pavel Durov founded Russian social network VKontakte, or VK for short, five years ago. The site has grown to 33 million daily unique visitors, 17 million monthly active users and a total of 160 million registered users. VK, he said, is the reason why Facebook has yet to be successful in Russia and is the fourth most-viewed website among Europeans, according to comScore. But Durov has an unabashed appreciation for Wikipedia and said that the site serves as a much more altruistic and important web service than his own for the larger global community. And so Durov, who finds the unpredictable financial future and fundraising efforts of Wikipedia troubling, pledged to donate $1 million to support the cause, marking the first time anyone has used the DLD stage to make such a donation. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was onstage to witness Durov’s compassionate financial vow. “How old are you?,” Wales asked Durov. I wish I could give away $1 million when I was 27, he joked. The donation comes just weeks after the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, announced that it had gathered a record $20 million from more than one million donors during its 2011 online fundraising efforts. [Image via DLD/Tumblr] Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat        
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| eBay CEO John Donahoe: 2012 will be an “inflection point in retail, shopping, and paying” Posted: 24 Jan 2012 01:40 AM PST “I believe that you’re going to see more change in how consumers shop and pay … in the next three years, than we’ve seen in the last 20 years,” eBay president and CEO John Donahoe said today at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. Donahoe, interviewed at DLD by Accel Europe partner Sonali De Rycker, added that 2012 will be an “inflection point in retail, shopping, and paying.” Why is that? Consumers, he said, are blurring the line between offline and online shopping at a “stunningly fast” rate. For half the retail transactions last year, the consumer accessed the web at some point during the shopping experience, he explained. As a result, Donahoe said, some of the world’s largest retailers have asked eBay for help in competing in this “multichannel world,” as he calls it. Donahoe talked extensively about eBay’s role as a friend to the retailer — criticizing Amazon’s competitive approach without specifically naming the company — and how through the acquisitions of GSI, RedLaser, and Milo, along with payments solution PayPal, eBay has transformed itself from an auction site to an open commerce platform (X.commerce). The auction side of eBay’s business, he added, now represents just 10 percent of the overall business. “We’re enablers,” Donahoe said. “The real winners are going to be retailers … the retailers that adapt a multichannel shopping experience.” Donahoe also reiterated statements made during eBay’s latest earning calls, saying that consumers, not retailers, are driving innovation in retail. The shift in the amount of money spent in the fourth quarter at physical stores to that spent via mobile devices was stunning, he said. “We’re providing mobile capabilities that consumers are grabbing … but the consumer is in charge here.” eBay made $11 billion in revenue in 2011 and closed out the year with an especially strong fourth quarter thanks in no small part to its mobile applications. eBay’s mobile applications, Donahoe said, have been downloaded more than 65 million times and accounted for $5 billion in sales volume. [Image via Hubert Burda Media/Flickr] Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Playcast snags French TV provider to debut cloud gaming service (exclusive) Posted: 24 Jan 2012 01:00 AM PST
The new service will debut in June as an option on a million set-tops in French homes. Playcast uses streaming from game servers to enable consumers to play console-quality video games on their set-top boxes. Guy de Beer (pictured), chief executive of Playcast, said in an interivew the deal too about six months to complete and gives Playcast its first real foothold in the French market. Playcast also has service available in Portugal and Singapore. Like rivals OnLive and Gaikai, Playcast streams games to users. It runs the games on servers in its web-connected data centers and then its streams 720p video to the user’s set-top box. The user plays the game using a universal serial bus (USB) game controller hooked up to the set-top box. The box then sends the commands from the controllers back to the servers. Bouygues Telecom “triple play” subcribers will be able to play high-quality video games on their TVs without requiring additional hardware. The company offers Bbox set-top boxes with internet protocol TV, games, voice-over-internet calling, and internet connectivity. “Cloud gaming is becoming an important play in France,” De Beer said. De Beer said that Playcast’s game publisher partners are Activision, Atari, Capcom, Codemasters, Disney, Sega, THQ, Warner Bros. and more. The service will play games such as Street Fighter, Sonic Generations, MotoGP, Call of Duty (older versions), Homefront and Lego Batman. Most of the games will come from the existing library of games, but De Beer said the titles will include new games as well. Olivier Roussat, Bouygues Telecom CEO, said, “We are very proud to be the first telecom operator in the French market to bring such high profile games franchises and AAA titles directly to our customers' TVs, through an easy-to-use interface.” De Beer said that Bouygues hopes to set itself apart in the competitive French digital TV market by offering the high-quality games, which normally would require a high-end computer or game console to play. Offering games in this way makes it more convenient for players to access their games. Bouygues uses fixed broadband technology to offer internet protocol to IP TV partners. Playcast was founded in 2007 and it has raised $12.5 million from MK Capital, JVP, Xenia Venture Capital and C.Mer Industries. Playcast has 40 employees. Pricing and the exact number of titles available hasn’t been disclosed. But de Beer said it will cost in the single-digit dollars per month to subscribe to the Playcast games. Rivals include OnLive and Gaikai, as well as G-cluster, owned by Japan’s Softbank. By year end, de Beer said Playcast will be able to reach 10 million homes. Filed under: games, VentureBeat        
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| Arrest fallout: Kim Dotcom falls to No. 2 rank in Modern Warfare 3 Posted: 23 Jan 2012 11:15 PM PST Getting arrested for illegal downloading of copyrighted material hasn’t done wonders for Kim Dotcom, also known as MEGARACER, who is now the former No. 1 player in the world for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. In the past day, MEGARACER slipped from No. 1 to No. 2. He was overtaken by a player named Arazos. Perhaps Dotcom has been busy doing other things. We noted in a popular story that Dotcom was hiding in plain sight. At the same time he was on the top of the FBI’s list of alleged digital pirates, he was also extremely competitive in Modern Warfare 3, the most popular video game of all time with perhaps 15 million users. Dotcom, born Kim Schmitz, is the founder of recently indicted file-sharing company Megaupload, and was the top player in a game for which he was also possibly the top pirate. Dotcom reportedly has assets worth $175 million, thanks to his Megaupload business, which feds said made most of its money from illegally distributing copyrighted video and audio. He was arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, last week as part of a major sting against Megaupload. His assets included a Rolls Royce, numerous Mercedes-Benz cars, cash, and many guns. And apparently he was so rich, he had plenty of time to become a master of Modern Warfare 3. Dotcom has been dueling on and off for weeks to be the No. 1 player. And in this video posted on YouTube on New Year’s Eve, he took the No. 1 spot. But Arazos now has 9.09 million points on the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 leaderboard, compared to 9.05 million for MEGARACER. Arazos has 181,800 kills and 63,418 deaths, with a kill/death ratio of 2.87. MEGARACER has 180,980 kills and 86,241 deaths for a kill/death ratio of 2.10. Of course, these are extremely good stats. By comparison, I have played the game for 28 hours and am ranked at level 60, or Colonel. I have 1,458 kills and 3,435 deaths, for a kill/death ratio of 0.42. My accuracy rate is 9 percent, while MEGARACER has a 17.45 percent accuracy rate. He has 4,481 wins. The new maps for Modern Warfare 3 come out tomorrow. If MEGARACER’s legal troubles subside, maybe he’ll have a chance to play and win back his No. 1 status. I for one would like to see a match between MEGARACER and Arazos. And if I worked for Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Modern Warfare 3, I would put up his bail money. Filed under: games        
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| Will Microsoft phase out its virtual currency system? Posted: 23 Jan 2012 10:03 PM PST
Citing an unnamed source, the publication said the change will affect all developers of apps for Windows Phone, the Zune marketplace and Xbox Live. By the end of 2012, the transactions will be based on the region set on the purchasing account. Real money will be used to purchase all Windows Phone apps. That aligns the Windows Phone Marketplace with the practices used in the Apple App Store and the Google Android Market. We asked Microsoft to confirm the story, but a spokesman declined to comment. Mobile app developers who have publisher agreements with Microsoft are being told to plan their future downloadable content and in-app purchases (where users buy things such as virtual goods in games) to match with the change. Customers who have existing Microsoft Points balances — 1600 points equals $20 — will receive the amount in their own local currency. Microsoft Points are used to buy games and media on Xbox Live, the Zune Marketplace, the PC, and Windows Phone. Microsoft has gradually introduced cash purchases to Xbox Live, the most popular platform for Points. One of the criticisms is that the Points to dollar conversion ratio is confusing and it forces consumers to buy more Points than they really need for a transactions. The smallest amount of points a consumer can buy is 400, or $5 worth. Filed under: games, mobile        
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| Solar storm coming Tuesday: should you let your iPad out of the house? Posted: 23 Jan 2012 09:32 PM PST
The consequences could be tough for electronics that don’t have the proper shielding. Solar storms can knock out satellites in orbit and force planes to alter their routes over the polar caps, where the planet’s geomagnetic shielding is thin, according to Scientific American. They can also create a light show, bringing the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, down to lower latitudes, perhaps as far south as Illinois and Oregon. It could cause blackouts, disrupt satellite-based navigation systems, and interrupt radio communications. The last time this happened on this scale was 2005. The so-called Coronal Mass Ejection could hit the Earth around 6 am Pacific time. But the timing is not certain. [Update: the event has come and gone without widespread reports of fried electronics. So it was safe to take your iPad out of the house.] [photo: NASA] Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Choose your own sale with LuxeYard, launching today Posted: 23 Jan 2012 09:01 PM PST
LuxeYard, a new flash sale site focused on luxury home furnishings and decor, delivers a fresh feature to the daily deal market: it lets its customers request which items they want offered at a discount. The site launched Monday evening with $3.5 million in funding from private investors. The company has two notable features not seen on other flash sale sites: Concierge Buying and Group Buy. Concierge Buying lets customers request items they’d like to buy at a discounted price. Any product can be submitted and voted on by the LuxeYard community and the most popular products will be offered for sale. LuxeYard works with the manufacturer to make the product available to its customers. If LuxeYard can’t offer the exact item, it will find a substitute of equal or higher quality. LuxeYard’s Group Buy feature lowers the price of an item as more people purchase it. By broadcasting the discount on social platforms such as Facebook, customers can drive up the demand for the deal and lower the purchase price. Once the deal is over, everyone who purchased the product pays the lowest final price. "We are using this round of funding for a number of important aspects of our startup. Because we are a new kind of flash sale site that fills two significant holes in our industry – community and personalization – we are focusing our dollars on parts of our site that are giving our members a unique experience,” said LuxeYard CEO Braden Richter in a statement to VentureBeat. “To make this happen, we are also spending on a number of other parts of our business, including software development, focus on getting member bases up, accounting and hiring new members for our team, as we expect to grow in the same vein as flash sale sites have been." One King’s Lane operates in the same space as LuxeYard, offering home furnishings at similar discounts. LuxeYard is relying on its Concierge Buying and Group Buy features to set itself apart from One King’s Lane and its other competition. LuxeYard offers discounts up to 70 percent off on luxury home decor and furnishing items — think high-end lamps, rugs, dishes, and furniture. Every item is shipped directly from the manufacturer — LuxeYard doesn’t keep any inventory, which keeps its operating costs low. Like most deal sites, you must become a member to see each deal and make purchases, but membership is free. LuxeYard was founded in 2011 and is based in Marina Del Ray, California. It currently has a team of 30 employees. Luxury furniture image via Shutterstock Filed under: deals        
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| Parse.ly launches predictive analytics dashboard for publishers Posted: 23 Jan 2012 09:01 PM PST
New York-based startup Parse.ly is releasing its flagship product, Dash, into general availability Tuesday. It’s meant to help publishers and media companies optimize their content and grow their readership by giving them better insights into what people are reading, how they get there (social media or search), and what topics are trending. The product is akin to your run-of-the-mill web traffic dashboard (think Google Analytics or Chartbeat) — except Dash is more tied in to the content and topics behind all those page views. It strives to quench publishers’ thirst for more page view juice. Dash runs on top of Parse.ly’s optimization platform, developed over a two year period, which crawls a publisher’s website. The tool indexes every piece of text on the site and parses it all to identify topics, people, places and events. The product then allows for realtime article performance analysis around a variety of variables and seeks to predict the topics that will produce the most successful stories. “Dash is the evolution of spending a couple of years working with publishers to understand their pain points,” Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar told VentureBeat. “We thought we had the opportunity to create an amazing tool because the web is interactive, and because current systems are not capturing data in a way that is meaningful.” The dashboard tool, already used by Atlantic Media Group, U.S. News and The Press-Enterprise as well as VentureBeat, offers publishers and editors a means to slice and dice past and present content by topics, authors, sections and referrers. The tool takes the standard analytics capabilities of a Google Analytics-type product and throws in a few additional layers for an (ideally) more comprehensive view of site and author performance and potential. Dash tracks authors’ top posts, velocity and page view trends, susses out the topics on your site that are on fire or fading, allows for comparative site section analysis, measures social media impact, and identifies top influencers on social networks. The dashboard’s most unique feature is the Webwide Trends component, which rolls up data from across Parse.ly’s widespread publisher network to find topical traffic trends (during its year-long private beta period, Parse.ly crawled 4 million URLs and tracked 4 billion page views). Here Dash looks at what’s bubbling up on the web and determines the best opportunities for coverage. Users can also search for particular topics to gauge whether they’re trending or flatlining, and look at the performance of multiple topics in a comparison chart. VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney is hooked on Dash, referring to it as “catnip for editors.” “The ways that Dash lets you slice and dice page view data, posts, authors and topics is incredibly powerful,” he said. “It’s given me much better insight into what our readers like (and where they’re coming from) as well as what my writers are up to and how effective they’re being.” (VentureBeat is a non-paying beta customer of Dash.) Dash could be a powerful tool with profound consequences. The publisher gains insight into how best to write for more traffic, but at what cost to the reader and the writer? Understanding hot topics, broader trends and historical data are important pieces of the digital publishing process, but the unfortunate side effect is that this could correlate to an influx of more cheap, low quality, search and social media-optimized content. Hip hip, hooray? The fact is the predictive side to the product can’t possibly understand what readers actually want to read or will fully appreciate, and instead looks at data to determine what type of content has the highest potential to bring in the most page views. Content optimization does not equate to optimal content. And any writer, blogger or journalist with a true passion for story-telling knows how unfulfilling it is to frame or chase stories based on their page view potential. Parse.ly’s Dash won’t be to blame for perpetuating the problem, per se — it’s just the catch-22 of the industry — but don’t be surprised to see media sites flock to this type of tool. Dash doesn’t come cheap. The product starts at $499 per month for the most basic plan. Parse.ly was incubated at DreamIT Ventures. The start has seven full-time employees and has raised $1.8 million in funding to date. Filed under: media        
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| Microsoft to open two new Kinect studios? Posted: 23 Jan 2012 05:48 PM PST
Spotted by the eagle-eyed members of NeoGAF, one job listing is for a senior human resources manager who will support two of the company’s internal studios – Halo developer 343 Industries and Platform Next Studios, which Microsoft claims is “pioneering experiences on Kinect.” The company is also looking for a level designer for something called LEAP. “We're the people that developed Kinect and profoundly changed the way people interact with technology,” the job posting reads. “Now our incubation team is ready to change the world again, but we need your help!” Both jobs were listed for work in Redmond, Wash. VentureBeat contacted Microsoft to confirm whether or not plans for new studios are in fact underway and received the following official statement:
Microsoft recently revealed at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show that it has sold more than 18 million Kinect devices since its launch in November 2010. It has also said in the past that future versions of the Xbox console will ship with Kinect already built in. A PC version of the device will be available starting February 1 for $250. Filed under: games        
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| Set hidden traps for cyber criminals with Mykonos Software Posted: 23 Jan 2012 04:54 PM PST
“After 20 years of leading technology companies that sell to large enterprises, I believe that Mykonos' ability to use deception in cyber security could forever change the economics of hacking,” said investor Jeff Clarke, who serves on the board of Red Hat, in a statement. The company’s technology, called Web Intrusion Prevention Systems, is designed to add elements to your Web application’s code that have nothing to do with the web app itself. These include different forms or server files that act as a part of the code that a hacker must work around, but in reality are just a tip-off that an attack is in progress. Having the altered code stand, not as a piece of the web app, but as a decoy is what Mykonos considers a fail-safe for fake positives. Mykonos’ investors include founder and chairman of Paychex Tom Golisano, who led the round, founder of Ironport Scott Banister, Clover Capital founder Mike Jones, and Jeff Clarke. The company plans to use the funding to build out its engineering team and security assets, along with more sales and marketing pushes. David Koretz founded the company in 2009, which is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. Filed under: security        
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| Which way next? Live webcasts from Singularity University Posted: 23 Jan 2012 03:48 PM PST
Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital manufacturing are undoubtedly going to revolutionize manufacturing during this decade, enabling us to design and "print" complex products and "manufacture" these in our own homes. Exponentially advancing technologies will provide major new opportunities for entrepreneurs to create world-changing technologies, but they also may threaten industries and jobs around the world. What are these technologies, where exactly do the opportunities lie, and where will the jobs go? These are some of the topics that Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and Singularity University VP of Academics and Innovation Vivek Wadhwa will discuss in the next Which Way Next? live webcast from Singularity University on Tuesday, January 24th at 12:00 pm Pacific Time. Register in advance to participate in the live webcast at: www.singularityu.org Which Way Next?, produced by Singularity University, is sponsored by VentureBeat. Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact garrett@venturebeat.com. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| 15 file-sharing sites like Megaupload that the Feds may target next Posted: 23 Jan 2012 03:31 PM PST As more details come to light in the much-publicized Megaupload case, other file-sharing sites around the web are shutting their doors in fear that they could be targeted next by the U.S. Department of Justice. Over the weekend, popular Megaupload alternatives FileSonic and FileServe completely turned off the ability to share files with other people. And another well-trafficked site, Uploaded.to, has blocked all U.S.-based IP addresses in fear of getting in serious trouble with the U.S. government. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload employees were arrested after being named in a 72-page indictment issued Thursday by the DOJ. The indictment alleges Megaupload is connected to a vast criminal enterprise and has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company’s executives could serve many years in prison. Even with trouble brewing, many sites that emulate Megaupload’s basic capabilities still work just fine. The CEO of popular file-sharing site MediaFire told me Sunday the company isn’t too concerned about government scrutiny because it is a legitimate business and doesn’t incentivize piracy like Megaupload did. That said, just because a company is confident about its legitimacy and employees don’t absurdly flaunt their wealth, doesn’t guarantee the government won’t investigate it. “At this point, it’s hard to tell how far you can extrapolate, but I don’t think anyone should rest easy,” said Felix Wu, assistant law professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The Megaupload case will set precedent for these types of businesses and how liable they are.” With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 15 file-sharing sites still up and running that the government could potentially target next (in alphabetical order). Take a look: 1. BayFiles
2. DepositFiles
3. Divx Stage
4. HulkShare
5. MediaFire
6. MegaShares
7. NovaMov
8. OvFile
9. PutLocker
10. RapidShare
11. SockShare
12. UploadHere
13. UploadKing
14. WUpload
15. ZShare
Filed under: cloud, media, VentureBeat        
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| Google+ introduces new Q&A feature for crowdsourcing answers from friends Posted: 23 Jan 2012 03:07 PM PST
Google is testing the new "Ask on Google+" feature, which pops up at the bottom of your search results. Click the link to ask your friends any question related to restaurants, movies, how to make friends on Google+, or other topics. Your question will automatically be posted to your Google+ stream for your friends to answer. “Our goal for search is to help you find the best answers to your questions, and sometimes the best answers come from your friends," a Google spokesperson said. "To help you find those answers, we're experimenting with a new link at the bottom of the search results page that invites you to ‘Ask your friends’ for information about the topics you're searching for.” For now, the the questions option is only appearing for select, active Google+ users. The feature is a mixture between Yahoo Answers and the similar, if mostly ignored, Facebook Questions feature. Whether or not this feature will get more interest from diehard Facebook fans, or have more success than Facebook’s similar feature, is yet to be determined. Photo via Walknboston/Flickr Filed under: social, Top stories, VentureBeat        
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| Yes, ITV really did use video game footage during an IRA propaganda piece Posted: 23 Jan 2012 02:44 PM PST ITV, one of the United Kingdom’s major commercial television networks, has been found guilty of deceptively using video game footage during what it claimed to be an IRA (Irish Republican Army) propaganda video in September, 2011. The final ruling comes from Ofcom, which for us Yanks is the equivalent of the FCC, the same people who call foul whenever there’s a wardrobe malfunction on US television. The clip was labeled “IRA film in 1988″ during an ITV segment called Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA, but was in actuality a blurry clip of the PC game ArmA 2. ITV released an official statement: “The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers. This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologize.” Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, claimed that the mistake was a “significant breach of audience trust.” ITV was also recently accused of (and admitted to) marking riot footage from Northern Ireland–this time involving real people–from July 2011, when in fact it was from a much earlier date. Ofcom has found ITV in breach of the UK broadcasting code, stating that it is “greatly concerned” with the company’s operations. Ofcom said there were “significant and easily identifiable differences” between both the riot footage and the video game footage, and that it was ”not sufficient for a broadcaster or program maker to rely on footage provided by a third-party source, on the basis that that source had previously supplied other broadcasters with archive footage”. “We take into account that ITV: apologised; removed the programme from its catch-up video-on-demand service; and has now put in place various changes to its compliance procedures to ensure such incidents do not happen in future,” Ofcom said. ”However, the viewers of this serious current affairs program were misled as to the nature of the material they were watching.” Below is an actual gameplay video from ArmA 2. It’s pretty obvious that the game is hard to mistake for real-world footage (with no offense to Bohemia Interactive), and that the clip used by ITV was clearly doctored to feel more authentic. Filed under: games, media, VentureBeat        
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| VBWeekly: Megaupload, Kodak and iBooks Posted: 23 Jan 2012 02:32 PM PST In this week’s installment of our weekly video show, Christopher Peri and I talk about one of the most entertaining news stories so far this year: The colorful indictment of alleged pirate content site Megaupload.com. The site’s founder, Kim Dotcom, is an amazing character, who lived large (in a New Zealand mansion surrounded by gorgeous, rare cars) and became the #1 ranked Modern Warcraft 3 player, amazingly enough. We’ll be watching this story closely to report on the allegations and Megaupload’s spirited defense. We also tackle the sad story of iconic camera company Kodak, which went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, ending more than a century of innovation and invention. And finally, we discuss Apple’s attempt to reinvent the textbook market by creating a new version of iBooks. The catch? Students need to have an iPad to use these newfangled textbooks. Filed under: video        
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| Semiconductor startup Avalanche closes $11.5M funding round Posted: 23 Jan 2012 02:13 PM PST
This is the semiconductor startup’s third round of institutional funding. Previous investors Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Leader Ventures all participated in the round, which was led by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. "This round of funding will enable Avalanche to deliver on the promises of magnetic random access memory,” said Avalanche co-founder and CEO said Petro Estakhri in a release today. Explaining the significance of the funding, Estakhri continued, “Avalanche is moving quickly toward delivering this groundbreaking technology ideally suited for high-volume embedded as well as stand-alone applications targeting markets with a global [total addressable market] well above $30 billion.” Longtime board member and Mezzanine Capital Partners managing director Will Stewart also said in a release, “Avalanche's products will blur the gap between memory and storage, cost-effectively enabling radical changes in system architectures and performance across a number of major market segments… I have tremendous confidence in their ability to execute." Avalanche was founded in 2006 and is based in Fremont, California — just across San Francisco Bay from Silicon Valley. The startup took a $7.5 million round of funding in February 2010; participants in that round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Thomvest Ventures. SPMEM, the memory technology Avalanche is currently working on, is well suited, the company claims, to a gamut of applications across telecommunications, computing, mobile, and networking verticals. SPMEM uses Avalanche’s proprietary “spin current and voltage switching technology allowing for lower write current, smaller cell size, and excellent scalability to future technology nodes beyond 10nm,” the company says. “It is the only true scalable new memory technology providing non-volatility, scalability, low power dissipation, unlimited-write-endurance, high-density, and high performance,” Avalanche says. “It is particularly well suited to applications requiring high data reliability and high performance and has the unique potential of becoming the next generation of universal embedded memory technology for SOC as well as stand-alone devices in a number of high availability storage and mobile applications.” Additionally, Avalanche says its SPMEM technology requires fewer manufacturing steps than do competing technologies and integrates easily with standard CMOS processes found in wafer foundries globally. Filed under: deals        
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| Gilt Groupe lays off 10 percent of employees and shutters regional offices Posted: 23 Jan 2012 02:10 PM PST  Sulky James Dean model needs a new gigAfter denying early reports that big layoffs were coming to Gilt Groupe, CEO Kevin Ryan confirmed today that the Gilt Groupe had let go between 80-90 staffers, about 10 percent of its overall workforce. Gilt announced the depature of two executives, John Auerbach of Park and Bond and Nate Richardson, president of Gilt City. And it said it will close down six offices regional offices in Seattle, Dallas and Atlanta San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia. My former site Betabeat was the first publication to report on the layoffs. Ryan responded via All Things D, where he called the reports overblown and dsiputed certain specifics which turned out to be accurate, like the fact that John Auerbach was on his way out. In total, Ryan said Gilt expected to cut about 50 staffers. That turned out be downplaying the cutbacks. New York magazine reported that the lean times at Gilt extended beyond staffing changes. “A refrigerator in one office is said to bear a sign that reads, ‘Gilt has made a New Year's Resolution to cut the following items from our purchasing diet across all locations: all fruits, all yogurt, all cheeses, Thomas’ English muffins, granola and health bars, Rice Krispie treats, Poptarts, and Pellegrino.’” Gilt Groupe raised $138 million in May of 2010, and Ryan has been adamant that these cuts will get the company to cash flow positive and eventually profit in time for an IPO in late 2012 or 2013. He has said that Gilt Groupe could now run with a leaner staff, having set up a number of new businesses in the last year outside its founding flash sales market. There have been a lot of cuts around the daily deal industry lately. BuyWithMe, which was eventually acquired by Gilt, axed hundreds of staffers. Rue La La laid off around 65 workers in its Boston and Lot18, trimmed its staff after poaching an executive from Gilt. All and all a game of musical chairs as the fast growing sector falls back to earth a bit in the wake of Groupon’s underwhelming IPO. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Online photo editor Aviary hopes to take Picnik’s place Posted: 23 Jan 2012 02:01 PM PST Sad that Google’s online photo editor Picnik is meeting its demise this year? Well, veteran photo editing service Aviary is plotting to take its place. On Monday the company announced it’s bringing its photo editing services to the Web with a new Facebook app. “We took the best pieces of our original software, made it lightweight, and launched into Facebook. We were founded to try to bring creativity to the masses,” Alexander Taub, Aviary’s lead of business development and partnerships, told VentureBeat. Aviary started out in 2007 as a powerful editing service for professionals — “Photoshop in the cloud” as Taub calls it. In 2011, the company moved into the mobile device market with a mobile API. Aviary lets you do all the basic photo edits you’d expect; crop, brightness, and contrast. Beyond simple edits, Aviary has several photo filters and stickers to add personality to your pictures. The filters give your photos the in-demand retro Instagram-look, a feature Picnik lacked. With Picnik gone, Aviary hopes to be the better and more powerful answer to Picnik, with more tools and faster photo editing. It also hopes to offer its services on a larger online scale. “Picnik built their offering into third party apps such as Flickr. We want to fill the gap Picnik has created with those services,” said Taub. Aviary is based in New York City and has raised a total of $11M from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Spark Capital. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Absinthe jailbreak for iPhone 4S, iPad 2 saw 1M first day downloads Posted: 23 Jan 2012 01:49 PM PST
Even more impressive, the number only includes downloads for the Mac version of Absinthe, as the Windows client debuted a day later, Cult of Mac reports. The figure shows that jailbreaking — or hacking your iPhone to run unauthorized apps and services — is on the cusp of becoming mainstream. MuscleNerd, a member of the hacker group iPhone Dev Team, points out that there were over 250,000 new installs of the Cydia jailbreak app repository over the first weekend, which implies that a considerable number of Absinthe users were jailbreaking their phones for the first time. Absinthe, developed by the hacker collective Chronic Dev Team, was the first untethered jailbreak tool available for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, meaning it can retain the jailbreak after you reboot the phone. Typically, untethered jailbreaks appear fairly quickly with the arrival of new Apple hardware, but the combination of the iPhone 4S and iPad 2′s A5 processor, together with complications from iOS 5, made it difficult for hackers to achieve the untethered hack sooner. As Cult of Mac points out, the last time we saw such a widely adopted jailbreak was with the release of the JailbreakMe website last year, which let you jailbreak your iPhone simply by visiting a website. Absinthe isn’t as easy to use as JailbreakMe, but it’s certainly a step up over complicated jailbreaking methods of yore. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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The massive success of the iPhone 4S, together with its next-generation LTE 4G network, helped Verizon see
The founder of Russia’s largest social network proclaimed his love and support for Wikipedia today by promising to donate $1 million to the not-for-profit organization while onstage at the 
Online publishing is about to get a lot smoother for publishers. Whether that’s a good thing for readers is another question, however.
A startup is hard at work making a new type of high-speed memory that stores data even when the power is turned off. 
Proving that anticipation was exceptionally high for a full iPhone 4S jailbreak, the folks behind
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