The reaction from Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies online game community regarding the game’s closure come December 15 has officially gone from woefully nostalgic to comically outlandish.
A number of Star Wars Galaxies players have written to VentureBeat and said they want to file a lawsuit against Sony Online Entertainment. There’s basically zero chance that will happen. There are no grounds for a lawsuit against Sony, regardless of the circumstance, because all users signed an end-user license agreement (EULA) when they signed up for the game. The players are saying they will do so out of obvious frustration.
Sony Online Entertainment is completely in the right to shut down its own game. And if the game is no longer profitable, then it should be shut down.
“There’s a reason that we did this — the game was losing subscribers,” Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley said back in 2009. “We had to make this game more accessible to a wider audience or eventually we would not have a business.”
More than 2,500 Star Wars Galaxies players signed a petition asking Sony Online Entertainment to convert the game to a free-to-play game maintained through the sale of virtual goods. The petition also asks Sony to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and facilitate character transfer to reduce operational costs in order to keep the game running. But there is no guarantee that Star Wars Galaxies will be profitable — or even sustainable — if it shifts to a freemium model.
Other online games have success converting from a subscription-based model to a free-to-play model. Revenue from Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online doubled and its player base increased by 400 percent in the month after it went free to play. Revenue for the company's first experiment in going free-to-play, Dungeons and Dragons Online, jumped by about 500 percent after the shift.
The companies don’t disclose subscriber information for their games. But those games both had subscriber counts that were, upon visual inspection, orders of magnitude higher than the current subscription count for Star Wars Galaxies. Both games are also much newer than Star Wars Galaxies, which is already nearly a decade old. There was a massive difference in the number of players between the desolate streets of Coruscant, one time Star Wars Galaxies’ largest trade city, and the bustling cities in Lord of the Rings Online before the game converted to a freemium model.
Star Wars Galaxies fans also raised arms when Sony Online Entertainment tried began locking threads that advertised the petition and protested the game being shut down. But, again, the company is in the right to do so — when users began playing the game they effectively agreed to an end-user license agreement (EULA) that gives the company the right to lock threads and ban players that violate the EULA.
Sony Online Entertainment is able to terminate accounts that violate any provision of the EULA. That means that any player that violates any of the player rules of conduct located at the game’s website or The Station is fair game to be struck with a ban hammer. Any player that engages in gameplay, chat or any player activity whatsoever that the company determines is inappropriate and/or in violation of the spirit of the game can also be banned — so that includes protesting the game.
Yes, Star Wars Galaxies’ imminent doom is tragic. In its prime, it was very different from other online games on the market. Sony Online Entertainment watered it down to make it similar to World of Warcraft and appeal to a more mainstream audience, and that killed the game’s unique qualities and its subscriber base. It was a failed experiment and left the game with a much smaller — though much more fiercely loyal — community.
That community does not have to die with Star Wars Galaxies. It doesn’t have to move on to Electronic Arts’ next online Star Wars game, The Old Republic, either. Yet it seems to think those are the only options, according to the players that have written to VentureBeat.
Games come and go. Even the old Super Smash Bros. cartridge for the Nintendo 64, a console more than a decade old, I have sitting across the desk for me died out eventually. The Star Wars Galaxies community can, and should, live on and move on — even if it isn’t in a galaxy far, far away.
Microsoft on Tuesday released a second preview of its Internet Explorer 10 browser, which will give developers a chance to test out new features and technologies related to IE10. The new browser is expected to officially launch next year when Windows 8 is released.
Internet Explorer has been losing market share for years, first to Mozilla’s Firefox and now to both Firefox and Google’s Chrome. With the release of Internet Explorer 9, it appeared Microsoft recognized this problem by adding new features and pushing better performance to keep users from leaving. With Internet Explorer 10, Microsoft probably hopes to not only keep users from leaving but hopefully get some to come back as well.
The second preview of IE10, which comes 11 weeks after the first preview was launched, has lots of new features and background elements that enhance performance. It specifically includes “support for major platform features like HTML5 Parser, HTML5 Sandbox, Web Workers, HTML5 Forms, Media Query Listerners and more,” according to Microsoft’s release notes.
The arguably biggest enhancement is support for the Web Worker API, which lets developers take advantage of things like multi-core processors when they work with JavaScript. Basically, when a website is rendering images or something complex, IE10 will take advantage of hardware to make the site load more smoothly or even run scripts that are more complicated than ever before.
IE10′s second preview also outpaces the first preview’s HTML5 performance on www.html5test.com. The second preview scored a 231 while the first preview had a 125. Both of those scores, however, are easily beaten by Firefox 5′s 296 ad Chrome 12′s 327. At the very least, IE10 is a step in the right direction.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next with this browser. While I prefer Chrome 12 and Firefox 5 any day to Internet Explorer 9, I love the idea of using hardware acceleration to boost what you can get out of the web. The best part of the browser wars is that even if some company clearly loses, the resulting technology improvements from the fierce competition end up helping all of us.
Just as Blizzard Entertainment has Blizzcon for its game fans, Activision Blizzard is now creating Call of Duty XP 2011, a two-day convention for fans of the Call of Duty games.
The event is a stroke of marketing brilliance for Activision Blizzard, which wants to stoke the video game fans into a frenzy of excitement around upcoming titles such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which debuts Nov. 8. If it works, then fans will be more loyal and won’t have time for rival games such as Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3. This live event is a way for Activision Blizzard to preserve its leadership in the multibillion-dollar first-person shooter combat game market. It is consistent with the game’s focus on immersing fans deep into the culture of the game, similar to the way Activision’s sister company, Blizzard, does for its fans at the annual Blizzcon event.
The event will take place on a still-secret 12-acre venue in Los Angeles on Sept. 2-3. More than 6,000 fans will be able to attend the event, which will include news revelations about Modern Warfare 3′s multiplayer game. Attendees will be the first to get hands-on time with the multiplayer game and the title’s new Spec Ops survival co-op mode. (I played this mode with VentureBeat’s Matthew Lynley at E3 and it’s a lot of fun).
Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard, said in an interview that the event will fuse real-world Call of Duty action experiences — like a paintball battle in a scene that replicates the “Scrapyard” multiplayer map in the Call of Duty Black Ops game from last year. Activisin will also have a $1 million Call of Duty tournament sponsored by Activision and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console business.
“We’re pulling out all of the stops,” Hirshberg said. “You could say it is like Blizzcon, but this is going to be an event like no other.”
Players will have a chance to “speed-run” through the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 map, “The Pit,” in real life. Developers will be on hand for question-and-answer sessions. There will be an on-site Call of Duty armory and museum, and live entertainment.
Attendees will also be the first to see the full functionality of Call of Duty Elite, the new online social network for Call of Duty fans. Players can qualify for the tournament by playing Call of Duty Black Ops multiplayer in regional promotions. The players will then get a chance to compete to be the best Call of Duty player in the world. Fans can also watch the experience through TV and the web.
Tickets will cost $150 and all proceeds of the event will go toward benefiting war veterans through the Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit that helps veterans transition to civilian life. Tickets go on sale July 19. Call of Duty Black Ops, which debuted last November, still draws about 30 million fans a month and is the best-selling video game of all time.
Here’s an interview Rob Smith, editor of Machinima.com, did with Hirshberg.
If you were desperate to get a Google+ invite yesterday, there’s a very good chance you could have landed one tonight as Google gave existing Plus users the ability to invite anyone to test out the service.
But the revelry didn’t last too long — Google ended up turning off invites due to the sudden rush of new users. “We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand,” Google’s head of social Vic Gundotra announced on the service. “We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way.”
Google+ launched on Tuesday to a small cadre of users, so tonight’s invite rollout is the first time the service has had a chance to spread to normal folks. That the demand was strong enough for Google to turn off invites is telling. For Google, a company that has previously failed with social projects like Buzz and Wave, it’s a sign that consumers haven’t yet written it off when it comes to social services.
People seem to be engaging with the service, judging from the amount of folks on my Twitter feed who have been wrestling with Google+ all night. Some users praised the simplicity of Google’s Circles feature, which lets you easily sort friends, while others admitted to being confused by the onslaught of features in Google+. On Google+ itself, many users are posting updates about their baby steps with the service.
Even tech-savvy users will likely be confused when they first join Google+, so it’s less of a surprise that some mainstream users are having trouble. It took me about half an hour before I became fully comfortable with Circles and the plethora of options in Plus. I also tested out the limits of Plus’s HangOut feature with some friends by corralling ten people into a video chat room. Surprisingly, video and audio remained smooth for the most part — though for some reason the YouTube sharing option didn’t work at all.
IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in a new kind of memory chip that can record data 100 times faster than today’s flash memory chips. That means scientists are one step closer to creating a universal memory chip that is fast, permanent, and has lots of capacity.
If they really work as billed, these multi-bit phase-change memory chips could transform enterprise computing and storage by around 2016, according to IBM. It could lead to chips that are lower cost, faster, and more durable in storing applications for consumer devices, including mobile phones and cloud storage. It could also benefit enterprise data storage applications as well.
Scientists at the research labs of Big Blue have demonstrated that phase-change memory can reliably store multiple bits of data per cell for extended periods of time.
The technology moves science one step closer to finding a universal non-volatile memory. Dynamic random access memory — used for main memory in computers — is fast, but it can only store data when the power is turned on. Flash memory can store memory permanently, even when power is turned off, but it is slower and has less capacity than DRAM, and it’s also more expensive. Hard disk drives have a lot of capacity, but they’re slower. A universal memory would theoretically be able to store and fetch data quickly, keep it permanently, and have a low cost and high capacity.
Computers with a universal memory could boot instantly (like Apple’s flash-based MacBook Air) and have lots of storage capacity and fast performance that would be useful in enterprise computing. Phase-change memory can retrieve and write data 100 times faster than flash, enable high storage capacity and not lose data when the power is off. It is also durable and can endure for 10 million write cycles, compared to 30,000 cycles for enterprise flash memory and 3,000 cycles for consumer flash memory.
"As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed," said Haris Pozidis, mManager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research – Zurich. "By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM."
People shouldn’t get too excited until IBM can prove that it can mass produce the technology, since phase-change memory has been under research for a long time. The IBM scientists say they used advanced modulation coding techniques to get rid of a problem known as “short-term drift,” which changes resistance levels in chip circuitry over time and causes data read errors. Up to now, reliable retention of data has only been possible for single-bit-per cell phase change memory. Now IBM has demonstrated that multi-bit cell phase change memory can be made reliably.
The phase change memory leverages the change in resistance that occurs in the material, which is an alloy of various unnamed elements, when it changes from a crystal phase to an amorphous phase. The crystalline phase has low resistance while the amorphous has high-resistance. That can be changed by applying electrical voltage or pulses. Those changes can designate a switch from a one to a zero, which are the basic bits used in digital memory systems. Depending on the amount of voltage applied, part or all of the material will undergo a phase change; that means that multiple bits can be stored within a single memory cell, making the material cheaper to make.
It’s sort of like being able to put four people into a single family home, rather than just one. The housing cost per person goes down. IBM is able to put four distinct bits into one cell. IBM scientists made the writing process more reliably by writing and then measuring the accuracy of the write. If it isn’t accurate, the write action is performed again until it is accurate, Pozidis said.
The latency, or time it takes to get a task done, is 10 microseconds, which is 100 times faster than the fastest flash memory on the market today. But to be really useful, the phase change memory will have to be able to beat the flash chips that are on the market in 2016. IBM also used an advanced modulation coding technique that enabled better read accuracy. Reading and writing are the basic functions of a memory chip, in addition to storing data.
The phase change memory test chip was created by IBM scientists in located in Burlington, Vermont; Yorktown Heights, New York and in Zurich. The experiment for retaining data has been under way for more than five months. IBM presented a paper on the topic at the 3rd IEEE International Memory Workshop in Monterey, Calif.
More than 50 Star Wars Galaxies players intend to file a class-action lawsuit against Sony Online Entertainment tomorrow in response to the company quashing a petition to stop the online game from going offline come December 15.
Several players have written in to VentureBeat indicating that they will be jumping on board a class-action lawsuit that will be filed in court in Washington D.C. The impending lawsuit follows attempts by players to circulate a petition to keep the game from going offline, which gathered more than 3,000 signatures.
Sony Online Entertainment has been locking the petitions and banning players trying to spread the petitions. The company said promoting an online petition causes disruption within the community and does not provide gameplay feedback that our development team can use. One player said Sony Online Entertainment identified him as a “ring leader” in the protests and threatened to permanently ban him from the company’s games and file criminal charges against him for trying to cause “unlawful harm to the company.”
However, the company is in its right to lock threads and ban players that violate the end-user license agreement (EULA). Sony is able to terminate accounts that violate any provision of the EULA, violate any of the player rules of conduct located at the game’s website or The Station or engage in gameplay, chat or any player activity whatsoever that the company determines is inappropriate and/or in violation of the spirit of the game. So there might not be any ground for a lawsuit.
The petition asks Sony to convert the game to a free-to-play game maintained through the sale of virtual goods. The petition also asks Sony to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and facilitate character transfer to reduce operational costs in order to keep the game running. The campaign has spread like wildfire among the Star Wars Galaxies community and is beginning to take over the game's official Facebook page.
Other online games have had a lot of success converting from a subscription-based model to a free-to-play model. Revenue from Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online doubled and its player base increased by 400 percent in the month after it went free to play last fall. Revenue for the company's first experiment in going free-to-play, Dungeons and Dragons Online, jumped by about 500 percent after the shift.
I argued that the death of Star Wars Galaxies was basically a tragedy because it came at the hands of the game's own publisher rather than the popularity of another game. World of Warcraft, currently the top online role-playing game, helped reduce the game's total subscribers. But Sony's updates were what inevitably killed it and drove away players. Star Wars Galaxies – which once boasted a unique progression system, trading and crafting features – was basically converted to a watered down version of World of Warcraft through a number of updates.
Stay tuned for additional updates as more details emerge. VentureBeat has contacted Sony Online Entertainment for comment on the matter. Attempts to reach the company by phone were unsuccessful.
Blue Jeans Network came out of stealth mode Wednesday, making the cloud-based, multi-party video conferencing service commercially available. Dubbed "any(ware) video conferencing," Blue Jeans Network makes video conferencing accessible to pretty much everyone with practically any video-enabled device.
"What was once an elite boardroom technology has moved to the cloud,” said Krish Ramakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Blue Jeans Network in a press release. Alagu Periyannan, another co-founder is the company’s Chief Technical Officer.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Blue Jeans Network lets remote family members, friends, employees and clients participate in video meetings using Skype and a video-enabled desktop or mobile device.
Here’s how it works: Blue Jeans users each get a private "meeting room" where they can schedule, host and manage meetings through a simple web interface. Participants join meetings by dialing a number or clicking on a link. Since this is cloud technology, there’s no software to download. Users without access to video can still participate in a Blue Jeans meeting over audio from their phone. See it in action here.
I tried it out, and the video quality was great. The latest version of Skype must be installed to connect to the Blue Jeans Network. I even managed to get the user name “Regina,” an indication that not too many people are using the service yet (or my name is just really rare). The user interface is very straightforward and my test dummies, er, friends had no problem joining in the conversation.
Funded mainly by Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Norwest Venture Partners, Blue Jeans Network has raised $23.5 million. Blue Jeans also announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom, one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies.
The video conferencing market has struggled to keep up with audio conferencing. According to Wainhouse Research, there were 200 million video-conferencing service minutes used worldwide in 2010, compared to 80 billion minutes for audio conferencing services.
The Blue Jeans service has been in field trials since the beginning of 2011. Since mid-April, when the trials were opened to the public, the subscriber base has grown through word of mouth. Blue Jeans claims almost 4,000 subscribers with more than 500 companies represented in 100 countries. Current customers include Facebook, Fleming's Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar, Heidrick and Struggles, Internet2 and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
The company’s Board of Directors is composed of Matthew Howard, Norwest Venture Partners; Ping Li, Accel Partners; Scott Sandell, New Enterprise Associates; and independent board members Peter Wagner and Charlie Giancarlo.
Revenue from app stores like the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace will reach $14.1 billion by next year and $36.7 billion by 2015, according to tech research firm Canalys.
App Stores are expected to bring in $7.3 billion in revenue in 2011, which includes direct app purchases, in-app purchases and subscriptions. App Stores should bring in around $14.1 billion by 2012, a 92 percent increase, according to the firm.
The overwhelming number of apps on the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace might prove too daunting for consumers. That could open an opportunity for phone carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless to open customized app stores for their customers that suggest apps based off their usage data, the firm said. Carriers have better access to phone use statistics, which gives the carriers a better picture of the phone owner, the firm said.
Apple currently takes a 30 percent cut from all transactions for in-app purchases and in-app subscriptions. Apple also takes a 30 percent cut of the sales of paid applications. The Apple App Store has more than 425,000 apps.
The iPhone manufacturer has sold more than 200 million iOS devices, chief executive Steve Jobs said at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this year. That makes iOS the number one mobile operating system, he said. Apple sold more than 25 million iPads in the device’s first 14 months of being on sale. So the company has a pretty huge base of customers that regularly purchase applications from its App Store.
Apple product users have downloaded more than 14 billion apps from the App Store in less than three years. Apple has also paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the App Store. There are more than 225 million accounts on Apple's various stores, and the App Store.
When supplies of certain Apple products suddenly become scarce, Mac fans take notice. It often means that the product or model in short supply is being phased out to make way for an updated version.
No one, including AppleInsider, has received any word from Apple on a refresh, but it’s been a year since the MacBook was last updated. AppleInsider noted that the authorized resellers in the Mac Pricing Guide are completely sold out of white MacBooks. Those resellers include Amazon, MacConnection, On Sale and J&R.
The drop in supplies could also be due to a the white Macbook’s reduced price to $899 from $949. Consumers can purchase an 11-inch MacBook Air at a similar price ($999). MackBook Air has an 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with GeForce 320M graphics. Current MacBooks have GeForce 320M graphics and an Intel 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
Mothers have been telling children they are not the center of the universe ever since we knew what a universe was. Hitlantis respectfully disagrees. The Helsinki music discovery company is setting out to pull indie bands into the center of their universe. And now it’s raised $1.5 million in angel funding to help it do just that.
Hitlantis offers a unique user interface to facilitate indie music discovery. The app and web versions sport a solar-system-like look with the Hitlantis-core at the center. Artists orbit the core in their own bubbles and increase in size as content is shared, liked or bought.
Consider the bubble like an ego. The more attention you feed it, the bigger it gets and the closer it gravitates toward the center of the universe. Bands are even ranked on a "hotness scale", which conjures memories of the dreaded "Hot or Not" voting of the early 2000s.
Investors in Hitlantis include a variety of Finnish angels and private investors like Nokia executives. Juha Tynkkyen, an angel investor and CEO of T&T Enterprises, said, "With billions of apps, countless numbers of songs and videos, among other forms of content aimlessly flooding the market every day, we need a compelling and engaging way to filter and discover relevant new content, and clearly the Hitlantis visual browsing platform is that solution, which is already proving itself with music."
The free service saves on royalty fees by keeping with the indie theme. Bands can upload songs and post content as they do on Myspace. In fact, Hitlantis would have considered Myspace a direct competitor, had it not found itself on the auction block and ultimately bought by Specific Media. For now, they feel their competitors are search engines and the iTunes storefront, which Hitlantis says is "cluttered".
Unlike subscription-based services like Rdio and Spotify, Hitlantis wants to be seen as a music service driven by discovery. In a trip to Los Angeles this week, the company struck a deal with Island Def Jam to aid in their talent search. Universal Music is already engaging Hitlantis in their A&R department.
As for the future, Hitlantis sees opportunities to branch into other genres of content discovery. It could, for example, be an interesting outlet for apps and underdog developers.
Hitlantis has nearly one million users with a $4 million to $7 million first round of venture funding in the works for fall. The company plans on joining forces with other labels soon.
New owner of social networking site MySpace, Specific Media announced today that Emmy and Grammy winning artist Justin Timberlake will also take an ownership stake in the newly acquired company.
Timberlake will play a major role in developing the strategy and creative direction of MySpace moving forward, according to Specific Media. Both parties plan to unveil details of MySpace’s new direction later this summer.
"There's a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place," Timberlake said in a statement from Specific Media.
Online advertising firm Specific Media acquired MySpace from News Corp. for $35 million in a deal announced today. The Irvine, California-based company was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook and operates offices all over the world.
Cloudera, a maker of data-management software for large companies, has released an update for its enterprise software that will allow system administrators to quickly deploy applications based on the Hadoop software architecture.
Hadoop is an open-source data-management software framework. But Cloudera provides a version that is specifically for enterprise users, coupled with IT support and management. The software provides analytics and storage options for large-scale networks that have thousands of nodes and process petabytes (that's 1,000 terabytes) at any given second. Yahoo, Google and Facebook all also use Hadoop to power some of their services.
The new software, called Enterprise 3.5, automates a lot of the maintenance and administrative proceses like installing security software onto computing clusters running Hadoop-based software. The software also features an activity monitor that will relay information about data usage and creation in real time to system administrators and gives administrators ways to interact with the computing nodes in real time. For example, any time an anomaly occurs in the system, administrators can quickly lock down and secure the compromised computing node to prevent any further leaks.
The Cloudera software actually consists of 11 different open-source Hadoop projects lashed together into a single enterprise software service. It's similar to how some companies operate with Linux — the software is open source. Its main software offering for the enterprise, Cloudera Enterprise, also provides users with resource management and real-time monitoring of applications.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company was founded in 2008 and has so far raised $36 million. It has around 40 employees, and its clients include RapLeaf and Bank of America. Its most recent round of funding was led by Meritech Capital Partners, though existing investors Accel Partners and Greylock Partners also participated in the round.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will only take a minute. A new report surveying leaders of technology companies indicates the U.S. economic recovery is two years away, instead of previous forecasts that it will happen in 2012.
The report, from consulting firm KPMG, showed that tech executives don’t plan to go on a hiring spree any time soon. KMPG surveyed 102 executives for the report: 71 at software and hardware companies with revenue of more than $1 billion, and 31 in companies with revenue between $100 million and $1 billion.
"Companies are less optimistic this year than they were a year ago," KPMG partner Gary Matuszak said in an interview with Bloomberg. The silver lining? Many companies had an easier time showing growth in 2010 after 2009′s economic downturn.
Here are the 2011 survey’s top findings:
49 percent of executives interviewed put hiring on hold this year,
42 percent said hiring would return to pre-recession levels over the next 18 months,
21 percent said their headcount will never return to those levels,
52 percent said the U.S. market will lead their growth in the next 12 months, followed by China, Brazil and India.
65 percent ranked cloud computing as the biggest revenue driver, up from 55 percent a year earlier, followed by mobile applications and advanced data analytics.
Finally, some positive news for investment banks: Eight out of 10 technology executives said they expect their company will be involved in a merger or acquisition in the next two years.
We could be seeing the first result of the Skype-Microsoft union with Office 365, Microsoft’s new cloud service for email.
Details on the addition of Skype, a massively popular chat application, to Office 365 were vague during yesterday’s launch. That’s because, while U.S. regulators are allowing the merger to move forward, Microsoft is still awaiting approval from antitrust regulators in other countries.
On the Seattle Times’s site, Kurt DelBene, president of Microsoft’s Business division, mentioned Skype in connection with Lync, Microsoft’s rebranded and revamped instant messaging, audio- and videoconferencing product. “The ability to connect Lync users with Skype users is a huge opportunity for us,” DelBene said.
So it’s probably safe to assume Skype and Lync will be, well, linked together. PCWorld has a great report on why Lync is a necessary addition to Office 365. More and more small businesses require the virtual functionality of realtime communications as their employees travel abroad or collaborate in far-flung offices.
Office 365 will become generally available on June 28 and will get quarterly software updates, according to Microsoft. Prior to the Office 365 announcement, Microsoft said Skype’s technology would eventually be added to Xbox 360 and Kinect, Windows Phone and software like Outlook.
By licensing WebOS, HP would open up its mobile platform to be a true competitor against iOS and Android. Currently, device makers who want to develop a new phone or tablet have little choice beyond Google’s Android.
"We are talking to a number of companies," Apotheker told Bloomberg. "I can share with you that a number of companies have expressed interest. We are continuing our conversations."
One company who may be interested in WebOS is Samsung. The company has apparently been in talks with HP to bring WebOS to its phones, three sources in the know told Bloomberg. Samsung is currently the top Android manufacturer thanks to the smashing success of its Galaxy S smartphones, and the company is also developing its own software for mid-range phones called Bada. There’s little chance that Samsung would give up on its Android ambitions, but WebOS could serve as a sexier alternative to Bada, which has failed to find much developer support.
Licensing WebOS could provide a decent amount of pocket change for HP, who last month cut its sales forecast by $1 billion. It could also help to improve the platform’s viability, since the availability of more WebOS devices would encourage developers to create more apps.
AmazonFresh, a grocery service from Amazon.com, has released its first mobile app. In a peculiar fashion, the first platform to get the app is Windows Phone 7, which has much smaller market share than iPhone and Android.
But because AmazonFresh is only up and running in Seattle—where Microsoft resides and many Windows Phones are active—the launch of the mobile app is a smart, calculated move. Microsoft’s 40,000 employees are equipped with Windows Phones and may be interested in trying the service. iPhone owners, on the other hand, can use their mobile website to order from the service.
Microsoft must be happy to get a decent app for Windows Phone 7 before the likes of Apple and Google, even if it’s regional. The Windows Marketplace currently has more than 20,000 apps, compared to more than 300,000 in the Google Android Market and more than 500,000 in the Apple App Store.
On the heals of Hipmunkexciting the travel industry comes more news for the airborne community. GateGuru, an app specifically focused on quality airport experiences, has raised a modest $800k in angel funding and is simultaneously launching their Android app today.
Rejoice, Droid users, you will never be stuck wondering what is beyond the mysterious security line (until you go through it).
GataGuru, which launched in 2009, is one of those apps that collects a little dust until bam! You are traveling and need to know where the nearest Chili's is. The free app will tell you and, thankfully, does more than enable your poor eating habits.
Consider it a Rick Steves for terminals. In action, the app prompts you to choose your airport via location-based detection. You are then directed to the airport’s page where you can find reviews, tips, checkpoints or further refine your search by selecting a terminal and gate-range (ie: Terminal 1, Gates 20-36). Food options, shopping and services can be found on the individual terminal pages with user generated reviews and tips available per amenity as well.
The laundry list goes on to include itinerary management through partnerships with TripIt and Kayak, wait times, photos and more. If only it could tell you how many seats without a screaming baby or yappy dog are left at your gate.
Chief executive Dan Gellert created GateGuru after years of working as a venture capitalist. His job required frequent travel, and after one too many poor post-security food finds, he decided to relieve the travel headache. Apple also saw the value and included the app in a commercial for the iPhone (see below).
Now, Gellert has turned to angel investors help GateGuru soar (get it?). He targeted angel investors in particular because, "They understand the travel industry and what I am going through. I value their insight." To that end, Gellert used AngelList, an online community that aims to bring startups and potential investors together. Secured investors in this $800k round include Brad Harrison of BHVentures, Allen Morgan, Chamath Palihapitiya via Embarcadero Ventures, Tom Glocer, VEO of Thomas Reuters, Thomas Lehrman and Matt Daimlet, Founder of SeatGuru.com.
GateGuru's plans for the funds make it an app to watch. Their goal is three-part: to bring transactions to the app, integrate deeply with airports and (less excitingly) hire staff.
Ever been stuck in security with half an hour until your flight, jonesing for your AM coffee? GateGuru hopes to enable pre-ordering for food pick-up, so you can run to your gate and grab your joe, no hassles. Also in the works are larger purchases like car rentals and cabs.
What may really put GateGuru over the top is the plan to integrate with airports. Currently, wait times are updated through voluntary user submissions and are thus unreliable. "We need to put more work into this," admitted Gellert. According to the CEO, airports have wait-times on hand at any given moment, in particular security lines. With deeper airport integration and partnering, GateGuru will be able to use that data to bring consumers wait-times and flight delays in real-time.
The app is an exciting departure from the stress usually associated with travel. There are a lot of working components here that if smoothly integrated, could make GateGuru an app store must have. If you're traveling for the holiday weekend, download the app and test it out. Even if the timing aspect is not fully developed, you will definitely appreciate the duty free knowledge provided for amenities.
The deal will pay out a mix of cash and stock to online advertising company Specific Media — with News Corp retaining about 5 percent of Myspace, according to the report.
Significant cuts to Myspace’s 400-employee staff is expected to occur due to the sale, according to sources within the company. CEO Mike Jones and other top level-staff will likely remain on for an interim period, the report states.
News Corp. purchased the California-based social network in July 2005 for $580 million. The Myspace's revenue peaked at over $900 million in 2008.
Specific Media out bid others potential Myspace buyers such as private equity firm Golden Gate Capital. The company is expected to focus on Myspace’s music aspects in the future.
"Myspace is a recognized leader that has pioneered the social media space. The company has transformed the ways in which audiences discover, consume and engage with content online," said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook in an official press release. "There are many synergies between our companies as we are both focused on enhancing digital media experiences by fueling connections with relevance and interest."
Specific Media is an innovative global interactive media company that enables advertisers to connect with consumers in meaningful, impactful and relevant ways.
Irvine, California-based Specific media was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook. The company operates many offices around the world.
Zynga is launching a program that will give AT&T customers access to exclusive games and content and a number of other perks.
AT&T customers will receive free credits for Zynga’s games, which include Words with Friends and Facebook smash hit FarmVille. Zynga players typically have to buy credits for Zynga games with real-world money. Those credits help players advance in Zynga games more quickly than players that do not buy Zynga credits and give players access to exclusive items and content.
It’s Zynga’s first deal with a wireless provider. AT&T was the first carrier for the iPhone, which now features most of Zynga’s online games and is a huge part of Zynga’s mobile strategy. Zynga apps will appear on AT&T’s main site of the Android Marketplace, giving them preferential display treatment over other Android Marketplace apps, as part of the deal as well.
Zynga's latest social game, Empires and Allies, is another hit for the company. It attracted more players than Farmville, its first breakout hit, in just 25 days. Empires and Allies is gaining new users at a rate of a million a day and 8 million a week now, according to AppData.
The company has become a Facebook distribution powerhouse like no other game company. That makes it a lot easier for Zynga to generate revenue, since a percentage of users usually pays for items in otherwise free games. The company has delivered hit after hit to Facebook, including FarmVille and CityVille.
There were reports on Tuesday that Zynga might file for an initial public offering as early as Wednesday in order to raise up to $2 billion. Those reports indicate Zynga has a valuation somewhere between $15 and $20 billion. That would put the company well ahead of massive game publisher Electronic Arts, which currently has a market cap of $7.5 billion. Activision-Blizzard, which typically caters to console and hardcore gamers, has a market cap of around $13.3 billion.
The soap-opera-like legal battle between Samsung and Apple has taken another twist on word that Samsung has filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission that seeks to ban the import of Apple products, according to FOSS Patents.
The complaint with the ITC specifically calls out “Mobile Electronic Devices, Including Wireless Communication Devices, Portable Music and Data Processing Devices, and Tablet Computers.” Essentially, that’s Apple’s entire portfolio.
The request for an import ban is standard when a company files an ITC complaint. Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents says the complaint is likely to be investigated by the ITC and a decision will be reached in 16 to 18 months.
On top of the ongoing legal battles, there’s a rumor circulating that Apple has dropped Samsung as its chip manufacturer for iPhones and iPads in favor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. This news would make perfect sense in light of all the public squabbles between the two tech behemoths.
LivingSocial is in conversations with bankers about filing for an initial public offering at a valuation between $10 and $15 billion, according to CNBC.
The company operates “daily deals,” which let consumers purchase goods or services at steep discounts over the web. LivingSocial users can then redeem those deals through the individual businesses that are selling them through the site. LivingSocial famously sold a $20 Amazon gift card for $10 as a publicity stunt, which attracted more than 430,000 consumers to the site.
Lots of small, local businesses have inventory they can afford to give away — whether it's empty seats at a restaurant or space in a yoga class. They can offer heavily discounted fare to people who subscribe to email newsletters from the likes of Groupon, the dominant player in this business, or LivingSocial, the perennial runner-up. Each business basically bets that it will make money from the new customers it attracts.
Chicago-based Groupon, LivingSocial’s fiercest competitor and the top player in the daily deals market, filed a $750 million initial public offering earlier this month. The company has consistently lost money every quarter since launching in 2009 except for one — the first quarter of 2010, when it brought in an $8 million profit.
South Korean mobile game publisher Gamevil wants to break into the U.S. market and it announced today it will invest $10 million into partnerships with external game developers in America.
The goal is to line up high-quality smartphone game titles that Gamevil can publish. The decision to create the fund shows that the company believes it will have more success if it can attack the big American smartphone game market using local game developers who know the market best. And it shows that the battle for market share in smartphone gaming has become a global one.
Gamevil, which has a U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles, recently acquired exclusive publishing and partial intellectual property rights for the Cartoon Wars series as part of this initiative. The rights include titles such as Cartoon Wars, Cartoon Wars Gunner and Cartoon Wars 2, all of which have garnered a significant global fan base.
Since the end of last year, Gamevil has hooked up with 10 external game developers in the U.S. It has published titles such as Air Penguin, Chalk n’ Talk, Colosseum, Kami Metro, TouchMix, and Train City. Air Penguin hit No. 1 on Apple’s App Storehas become a hit title reaching the number one spot on Apple's App Store at its peak.
Gamevil said it is revamping its social game platform, Gamevil Live, and will publish titles for it in order to generate more user downloads for those games.
"As the market expands with smartphones at its center, partnering with promising and exceptional external developers has become more important," said Yong Kuk Lee, chief financial officer of Gamevil. "By working together with these creative developers and combining Gamevil’s understanding of the global smartphone game market, we will carve out success and growth for everyone involved."
Online couponing startup Groupon saw its market share of group deals decline in May, according to the latest report from Yipit, a site that aggregates deals from 482 sites.
Yipit’s report tracked 17,958 discounts offered in May across 30 North American cities including Miami, Atlanta, New York, Dallas, Denver and Toronto. Groupon had 48 percent of the group deals market in May – down four percent from the previous month.
Meanwhile, Groupon’s main competitor LivingSocial saw its market share rise four percent from the previous month to 24 percent in May. Trailing the two largest group deals sites in May were TravelZoo, BuyWithMe and Gilt City, according to the report.
Both Groupon and LivingSocial are making less money per deal than they had in previous months due to more group deals being offered on the web, said Yipit Data Product Manager David Sinsky, who spoke to Bloomberg. But while both sites may be making less money per deal, the number of deals sold has increased, which has boosted revenue.
Chicago-based Groupon filed a $750 million initial public offering earlier this month despite heavy criticism about the company’s long-term sustainability. The company has consistently lost money every quarter since launching in 2009 except for one — the first quarter of 2010, when it brought in an $8 million profit.
One reason for Groupon’s inability to generate a profit could be due to the company’s insane rate of growth. At roughly half the size of Groupon, LivingSocial doesn’t have that problem.
If LivingSocial can turn a profit despite its smaller size, it may become the more successful group deals company by default.
HTC‘s Status phone is a bit like a pug. It’s so ugly, and yet it’s so cute — and helpful for Facebook addicts. Despite all the design flaws (raised buttons are so 2000), you can’t resist the urge to pick it up and play.
HTC launched a new page on Facebook today for the Status, available this summer from AT&T.
This is the first device with a Facebook share button, “keeping you at the center of your social circle,” according to the company’s press release. One touch allows you to share music, photos, location and status updates. There’s also a live chat widget, the ability to do a one-touch check in at a location with Facebook Places, and the ability to share the music you are listening to directly to your Facebook wall.
Perhaps the most helpful part of the HTC Status is that when you get or make a call, you will see your friend’s or family member’s latest status update on the call screen. So if it’s their birthday, you’ll know. Doesn’t that make you want to scratch the device’s little “ear?”
There are front and back cameras on the device, along with the ability to edit photos in the viewfinder after they are captured. Another cool feature is the "Quiet ring on pickup" setting, which reduces the ring volume when you pick the phone up. A "Pocket mode" setting increases ring volume when your phone is in a pocket or bag and then returns the volume to a reasonable level when you take it out.
Here are the “Tech Specs” from HTC:
Platform: Android 2.3 + HTC Sense
Display: 2.6-inch touch screen with 480 x 320 resolution
The incredibly popular Angry Birds mobile game has finally landed on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Versions of the game already run on the iPhone, Android, webOS, B&N Nook, Intel AppUp for netbooks, and the Chrome web browser.
Angry Birds is one of the most popular games in the world and has had more than 200 million downloads. The game’s developer, Rovio, has released other versions of the game like Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Seasons, and it even plans to expand the brand with all sorts of merchandise and a TV show.
The Windows Phone 7 version is priced at $2.99 in the U.S., which is more expensive than its iPhone and Android counterparts. The iPhone app runs for 99 cents, while the Android version is free but has advertising.
Windows Phone 7 launched back in November, and it’s taken quite some time for Angry Birds to appear on the platform. After including an unapproved Angry Birds icon on WP7 launch materials, Microsoft said the game would arrive on the OS in the spring. Apparently it’s a little late, but late is better than never when a game has lots of hungry fans.
Will you be downloading Angry Birds for your Windows Phone?
That means GetGlue will be available to just about every smartphone or tablet device out there that has a mobile browser that supports HTML5. GetGlue is already available on the iPhone, BlackBerry and devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system. The company said around 10 percent of check-in data from applications like Foursquare come from mobile sites.
The mobile site is similar to the application and is designed to feel like a native app like the one available on the iPhone and Android devices. Users can check into content like television shows, sports shows, video games and songs. Like other check-in applications, users can earn badges and add friends that can follow a user’s check-in data.
There's a check-in app that users can download for their iPhone and iPad, but media companies can also add GetGlue's check-in technology to their own apps and websites. A network could add a widget to a TV show website, and fans could then use a widget to say, "I'm watching Doctor Who," which could then be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and within the GetGlue app itself.
GetGlue check-ins are already employed by broadcast companies like USA, Showtime, and Discovery. But the application isn't limited to TV check-ins. TV is the biggest part of the app, but users can also check in to content like movies, music, and books.
Foursquare, another incredibly popular check-in application that focuses on location instead of content, also has a browser-based check-in service. That application has picked up around 10 million users.
GetGlue has 1.2 million users and the company recorded 5.5 million check-ins in May. The number of check-ins through the application has doubled between June and March, according to the company.
New York, N.Y.-based ActiveBlue has received funding from Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, TimeWarner Investments and a number of prominent angel investors. The company raised $6 million in December last year.
Today we're revealing the seventh group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our newest slate of speakers will be part of a panel on the free-to-play mobile gaming market. They include Peter Driessen, chief executive of Spil Games; Julian Farrior, CEO of Backflip Studios; and Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville.
The GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Peter Driessen made an early bet on HTML5, the increasingly popular format for mobile games. He co-founded Spil Games as an online game company in 2004. Now the company has more than 130 million visitor to its game sites each month. Driessen believes that HTML5 will enable publishers to create games once that can run across a variety of mobile platforms. Driessen will speak on our panel on the Rise of Cross-Platform Games.
Julian Farrior is a veteran of several of our GamesBeat and DiscoveryBeat conferences. We like him because he always tells us the straight stuff about the Boulder, Colo.-based company’s progress in mobile gaming and he has keen insights into the business models that work. Farrior recently disclosed that the company’s games have been downloaded more than 100 million times. Backflip has produced one hit after another, including Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster, Ninjump, and Strike Knight. Farrior previously served as an executive at Earthscape and spent seven years at Yahoo in various management roles. He will speak on our panel on the Rise of Tablet Gaming.
Kris Duggan likes badges. He’s the CEO of Badgeville, which makes a social loyalty platform that makes it easy for businesses to increase customer loyalty and engagement Badgeville is one of the fast-growing companies in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun with game-like features. Prior to founding Badgeville in 2010, Duggan worked in roles at companies such as WebEx. He will appear on our breakout session on Gamifying Mobile Apps.
Our previous announced speakers include Jeferson Valadares, general manager of games at Flurry; Gabe Leydon, chief executive of Addmired; Lou Fasulo, chief operating officer of Z2Live; Dave Castelnuovo, CEO of Bolt Creative; David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong; Rich Wong, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners; Chris Bergstresser, executive vice president of online gaming portal Miniclip; Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco; Andrej Nabergoj, founder and chief executive of Outfit7; Jason Citron, founder and chief executive of OpenFeint; Steve Perlman, chief executive of games-on-demand firm OnLive; Bart Decrem, head of mobile games at Disney and former chief executive of Tapulous; Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate; Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb and chief executive of CrowdStar; Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile; David Ko, senior vice president for mobile at Zynga; our keynote speaker, longtime game entrepreneur and founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell; Tim Chang, partner at Norwest Venture Partners; Daniel Terry, co-founder of mobile game maker Pocket Gems; and Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts; Jennifer Lu, director of business development at TinyCo; Sana Choudary, CEO of game startup accelerator YetiZen; and Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital.
Each year, GamesBeat follows a big trend. In 2009, we focused on how All The World's a Game, with the explosion of games onto a global stage. Last year, GamesBeat@GDC focused on Disruption 2.0. This year, our theme is Mobile Games Level Up, and it focuses on the busy intersection of games and mobile technology. We'll focus on everything from smartphone games to tablets and handhelds.
Console games dominated the news in the past, but the center of attention is rapidly shifting toward mobile as more and more users play games on the run. While there are hundreds of millions of gamers on Facebook, analysts believe the number could be much higher for mobile games. Our speakers are right at this intersection of gaming and mobility. GamesBeat 2011 targets an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.
Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony’s games unit since 2006, will be replaced by Andrew House, head of the European video game unit, on Sept. 1. Hirai will continue to oversee the gaming business as the unit’s chairman and retain his post as executive deputy president of the entire Sony group.
With the upcoming launch of the PlayStation Vita portable console and the push to make the PlayStation 3 more popular, House will have plenty to do. The Vita faces stiff competition with the Nintendo 3DS, the successor to the mammoth-selling Nintendo DS.
Are you looking forward to Sony’s upcoming offerings? Do you trust them to keep your personal data safe again?
Applied Materials, the largest making of chip making equipment, announced what it called a “breakthrough” technology in manufacturing chips that could become critical for continued technological progress in electronics for years to come.
The advance comes in a category of chip-making equipment called “rapid thermal processsing,” or RTP. That involves heating a chip material to levels of heat similar to that of jet engine within a very short period of time. While it seems arcane, it could enable chip designers to continue creating chips that are faster, better, and smaller. And those chips are the building blocks of all future electronic devices, from smartphones to gaming consoles. To break that down further, without advances like this, you won’t have supercomputing power to deliver advanced 3D apps on your smartphone in the future.
“This represents multiple divisions in the company coming together to create a revolutionary technology,” said Sundar Ramamurthy (pictured at top) , appointed vice president and general manager in a division at Applied Materials.”This is about innovation at the transistor level.”
Applied has been making RTP machines for 15 years and nearly every chip manufacturer has one of its machines. But the new Applied Vantage Vulcan RTP system leapfrogs current equipment and brings a new level of precision and control to the process of annealing chip materials at high temperatures. This is important because tiny little defects are becoming a bigger and bigger problem as chip manufacturing enables the miniaturization of chip circuitry on a microscopic scale.
The variation in manufacturing, caused by a breakdown in the ability to create exactly uniform chips, makes it much harder for chip makers to create cheap semiconductors. One of the root causes is a lack of uniformity in heating within RTP machines. The result is that there are too many chips that are appropriate only for desktop computing functions, rather than low-power laptop or smartphone devices.
Applied’s solution is to heat the backside of a chip wafer (pictured at right; a wafer is a circular disk that is processed and then sliced into chips). That allows the variations in heating uniformity to go away, said Ramamurthy. The backside of the wafer absorbs the heat and then spreads it uniformly through the wafer.
The technology will be useful with circuitry at 28 nanometers or smaller. That means that the width between circuits is 20 nanometers, where a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. With this technology, Applied can heat a wafer at more than 200 degrees Celsius per second, up to 1,300 degrees Celsius.
Cisco today unveiled AppHQ, a white-label app store service for enterprises designed for its Cius enterprise tablet computer.
AppHQ will basically serve as an app store for an individual enterprise. Systems administrators can manage which apps appear on an AppHQ store and which devices can download them. Each AppHQ is a custom-branded app store for a single enterprise where employees can develop and publish applications. IT Managers can also select any of the 200,000 plus Android app store and include them in an AppHQ store.
Every application that goes through an AppHQ store goes through Cisco validation testing — regardless of whether it’s developed by a company, a third-party Android developer or an employee within the company. Cisco will deploy a large number of apps that can be distributed to every AppHQ store. The Cius will also have access to all of Cisco’s major services like online meeting service WebEx, its collaboration service Quad, its Jabber messaging system and the video conferencing service TelePresence.
Cisco will have its own “master” AppHQ store that Cius owners can access to download applications developed specifically for the Cius. But systems administers can still determine which applications users can download from Cisco’s own AppHQ store.
The Cius is not a consumer tablet. It’s built exclusively for enterprise use, compared to some other tablets that are designed with consumers in mind but are widely deployed in the enterprise. The iPad 2, for example, is one of the most popular devices in the enterprise but it is designed for consumers. But the device is designed to “appear” like the device has consumer choice with access to Android applications, according to Cisco. One interesting device quirk that will be useful for enterprise users is the ability to change out batteries in the device. The Cius is designed to run for around eight hours, but users can change out the battery and extend the life of the device.
Cisco is putting a lot of focus on giving IT managers and systems administrators control of the device. Administrators can control just about every aspect of the tablet, down to the ability to wipe the tablet remotely if it’s compromised. Larger companies, like those on the Fortune 500 list, demand those kinds of security features in smartphones and tablet computers because of internal regulations.
Cisco’s enterprise tablet runs on Google’s mobile operating system, Android. The company announced today that the Cius goes on sale July 31 and will cost $750, compared to the $500 price point most tablets on the market employ. The Cius was announced nearly a year ago but details about a launch date and price have been scarce.
AT&T announced that it will be selling the device, which will take advantage of its HSPA+ 4G network, this fall. Cisco will also launch a 4G version with Verizon Wireless.
SoloPower manufactures photovoltaic cells, which capture sunlight and convert it to electricity, on a flexible surface that can be bent and placed just about anywhere. They're called thin-film solar panels, but they are typically less efficient at capturing sunlight and converting it to electricity than hard wafer-style photovoltaic cells. Thin-film solar panels are usually able to convert about 15 to 20 percent of the light shining on the panel into energy.
The company filed a form with the SEC that indicated it raised $13.5 millin but only planned to raise around $20 million in March. The new filing indicates a much higher target for fundraising in its fifth round of funding.
SoloPower recently snagged a $197 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a thin-film solar panel factory in Wilsonville, Ore. It also raised $51 million in its fourth round of funding and a $20 million loan from Oregon's state government.
Crosslink Capital and Hudson Clean Energy Partner participated in this round of funding, according to the filing.
Gamzee, a mobile and social game developer founded by gaming veteran Howard Marks, has raised $1 million in seed funding.
The Los Angeles company (pronounced game-zee) will make games based on the HTML5 format, which allows developers to create games that span a variety of platforms. Marks, chief executive of the firm and a 25-year-veteran of games, said that the company raised the funding round in a short time. This shows that, despite years of funding for game companies, there are still openings in the market that are attracting veteran entrepreneurs.
Investors include Bristol Investment Fund; Jarl Mohn, former CEO of Liberty Digital; Heiko Hubertz, CEO of Bigpoint; and Paul Bricault, a partner at Greycroft Partners. Paul Ksller of Bristol Investment Fund joins Gamzee’s board. Marks is a co-founder of Activision and Acclaim Games and a former senior vice president at Disney Interactive Media Group. “We believe that we’re on the forefront of the next big explosion in games — one where you can play social games with your Facebook friends on any device with a Web connection. And apparently, we’re not alone in that belief,” Marks said.
The company’s first game isn’t announced yet, but development is under way on a title that has a “new twist on a classic social gaming genre.” The company plans to show off its concept and technology at Casual Connect in Seattle in mid-July. Marks said the company is in discussions with more potential strategic investors.
Over the course of 25 years, Marks helped revive an ailing Activision, which is now the biggest video game publisher. He bought the Acclaim name out of bankruptcy, started working on a number of online games, and sold the company to Playdom in 2010.
Marks thinks HTML5 is a big opportunity because it means that programmers can create a game once and have it run on a wide variety of platforms, from the web to mobile devices. In an earlier interview, Marks said he expects the company to launch its first game by October. By that time, fingers crossed, he believes that Facebook will shift to the HTML5 standard, eventually getting rid of Flash-based software.
And that means that a social game designed to run on Facebook should also run on all mobile devices and the web as well.
That's a risky and bold move in part because HTML5 is in its beginning stages. Some observers (such as the startup Sibblingz) say that HTML5 games, which run inside a web browser, run slow compared to native applications, or those that are designed to be downloaded to a device and take advantage of that device's special characteristics. But Marks believes that the universality of HTML5 will eventually overcome such objections, and that HTML5 will get faster over time with the adoption of new standards such as WebGL.
With HTML5 games, there are advantages. Marks says that if you share a link for an HTML5 game with someone, the person you shared it with can simply click on the link to start playing the game, regardless of the device they are using. You can also pick up where you left off easily. You could start playing on a PC and resume playing on a tablet or on a connected TV.
At first, Marks said the company will focus on simpler games that don't require extremely fast real-time graphics or lots of 3D. Most Facebook games don't use such features and they are still very successful. The team includes vice president of games Josh Levitan. The veteran staff comes from companies such as Playdom, Acclaim and Meteor Games.
The title will be free-to-play, which means users can start playing for free and pay real money for virtual goods in micro-transactions. Gamzee also expects derive a revenue stream from location-based features.
Marks started the company a few weeks ago. Rivals include Zynga, EA-Playfish, Disney-Playdom, Game Closure and CrowdStar. Marks said Gamzee is raising a round of funding.
We'll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.
We haven’t heard much from the New York-based company (with offices in San Francisco and Singapore) since it raised $4.4 million in June 2009 (when VentureBeat gave the company a glowing review), but apparently no news is good news for the company. Since launching in 2007, the company has grown to over three million registered users and 100,000 paying subscribers in more than 150 countries (a year ago they announced 750,000 total registered users, around 10 percent were paying customers).
The new funding will help Animoto expand its service, which allows consumers and businesses create and share professional-quality videos. A vist to Animoto’s sample video page will give you an idea of why we’re so gaga for the company.
“We’ve only just begun to realize the full potential of our original vision for the technology and product,” said Brad Jefferson, CEO and co-founder of Animoto in a company statement. Most of that potential will come from making the product mobile. Currently the company has a partner platform that enables third parties to include Animoto within their own software, web or mobile products.
In the past year, Animoto has launched a faster version, introduced HD capabilities, and updated its iPhone application. The Animoto API, used by Kodak Gallery, American Greetings’ Webshots, Aviary and more, allows sites to customize and monetize Animoto’s service.
The company also announced Ben Spero, Managing Director for Spectrum Equity Investors, is joining the Animoto Board of Directors. He also serves on the Boards of Spectrum’s portfolio companies Ancestry.com, SeamlessWeb, and SurveyMonkey. Spectrum has offices in Boston and Menlo Park and has raised $4.7 billion in capital across six funds.
MediaMall, the company behind the popular PlayOn video streaming service, is today launching a new service, PlayLater, that lets you download streaming video from any website to view later. Yes, it’s effectively a DVR for online video.
PlayLater seems like the perfect solution for Web video addicts who travel with their computer and aren’t always on a reliable Internet connection. But as with PlayOn, the service is basically a hack, so there’s always a chance that particular channels of content could stop working without warning.
PlayLater includes access to online video from TV networks like CBS, TBS, and SyFy, and it also hooks into Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. The service is simple to use — so much so that it’s easier to navigate than most Web video sites. Simply choose a channel, locate a program and select a particular episode to download. PlayLater will download the episode in the background, and all you have to do afterwards is hit play. It appears to download video in in real-time, so don’t expect BitTorrent speeds. (If it downloaded video faster, you can be sure Web video sites would quickly ban the service.)
At the moment, PlayLater only works on Windows PCs. And don’t expect to easily share downloaded video, as PlayLater’s videos are only viewable on the computer they were downloaded on. You can also view downloaded videos on your iPhone and iPad by going through MediaMall’s PlayOn service, which streams the files from your computer. The service will cost $4.99 a month or $49.99 per year. Signing up for the beta will snag you a free month of service.
In my brief testing, PlayLater appears to be well designed and organized. I downloaded an episode of How I Met Your Mother (watch it, seriously) from CBS and it played without issue. Quality-wise, it looked about the same as it does online, with the occasional added blockiness.
It’s hard to say anything about mobile gaming these days without discussing Angry Birds, the bird-slingshotting game that has been downloaded more than 200 million times. That’s why we’ll have an executive from Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, at this years GamesBeat 2011 conference on July 12-13 in San Francisco.
Wibe Wagemans, whose title is Humming Bird for Rovio, leads the company’s global brand advertising and analytics. He will be flying in from Finland to speak in a fireside chat with his interviewer and investor, Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners. Accel led the $42 million investment in Rovio back in March in a deal that we viewed as a watershed moment for mobile games.
Wong and Wagemans will talk about how Rovio plans to take the Angry Birds franchise to the next level as an entertainment property. Wagemans joined Rovio earlier this year. Prior to that, he oversaw international marketing for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, for both mobile and PCs. He also served eight years at Nokia as a senior marketing executive, reporting to the business group executive board. He has also held marketing and sales positions at Gillette. His job is to turn Angry Birds into an even bigger cultural phenomenon.
Originally called Relude, Rovio began as a mobile game firm started in 2003 by three students from the Helsinki University of Technology: Niklas Hed, Jarno Vakevainen and Kim Dikert. They had participated in a mobile game competition sponsored by Nokia and Hewlett-Packard. Peter Vesterbacka, then at HP, was one of the judges, and he suggested the trio start their own mobile game company. They did so and got Digital Chocolate to publish the game, King of the Cabbage World, on cell phones. They started doing work-for-hire games such as Need for Speed Carbon for Electronic Arts. Mikael Hed (pictured top right) joined them as CEO in early 2009 and steered them toward making internally produced games they could own. They hired subcontractors to do their work-for-hire jobs so they could free a team to focus on new iPhone games.
They wanted to exploit the iPhone's hardware, such as its touchscreen, and create memorable characters. They conceived Angry Birds — where the player would slingshot birds with bushy eyebrows at green pigs in fortresses — and targeted at everyone. They focused on every detail and wanted to get the slingshot game mechanic just right. They paid attention to details, such as the animations of the birds crashing into the pig fortresses and the laughter of the pigs whenever you failed to demolish them.
They launched the game on the iPhone in December, 2009, via Chillingo, a mobile game publisher. It caught on in Finland first and then became a hit in Sweden. It hit No. 1 on the App Store in the United Kingdom and then made its way to the top of the charts in the U.S. The title spread through social media and Apple featured it in the App Store. People began tweeting about Angry Birds every minute. Now the game has catapulted into the stratosphere in numbers of downloads.
We'll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.
(Editor's note: Brad Feld is an early stage investor and co-founder ofFoundry Group. This story originally appeared on his blog.)
Suddenly, title inflation is everywhere. I've seen more business cards or email sigs lately with adjectives like "executive" or "senior" or "senior executive" or "special" or "chief" in front of more traditional titles (e.g. "vice president"). The "chief" one is especially bizarre since it's not always obvious whether the CSO is a "Chief Sales Officer" or a "Chief Security Officer" which in and of itself is a problem.
I've never paid much attention to titles. This is especially true when I'm involved in helping recruit someone for a company. I'm much more focused on what the person is going to do and what they've done in the past than what their title is (or was). Every now and then an obsession with title is a positive trait as it drives an important discussion about roles. Most of the time it's an annoying obsession with title.
When I think about roles, regardless of where the person sits in the organization, I like to think of them as "head of something." That lets me focus on the "something" that the person is responsible for. This scales up and down the organization since the receptionist in a company is the "head of meeting people when they walk in the door and making sure the are comfortable and find their way to the meeting they are there for." More importantly, it forces senior execs, such as a COO, CSO, CPO, CRO, CIO, CTO, CDO, CAO, or CFO to define clearly what they are the "head" of.
I heard the phrase "be the CEO of your job" a while ago from Mark Pincus and have used it many times over the years. Whenever I'm talking to someone about their role in a company, I'm always trying to figure out what they are going to be the CEO (or head) of. When I have the inevitable board member / executive discussion about roles and responsibilities when there are issues, I always carry this metaphor around in my head (e.g. are you, the executive, being an effective CEO of your job). And, when I meet someone new and I see that their title is "Senior Technology Strategist – Digital Products Division", I try to figure out what they are "the head of", even if it is one specific thing.
If you are CEO of a company, try the following exercise. Take everyone that directly reports to you and change their title to "head of X". Scribble this on a white board and see if you have all the X's you need for your whole company covered. Is there overlap that is unnecessary or are there big holes. And are the right people the right heads of things?
Then, have each of your direct reports do this for their direct reports. Rather than worry about titles, put "head of X" for each person. Keep doing this down the hierarchy. Do you have what you need covered? Is there duplication and overlap? Are the right people heads of the right things?
While it may not be possible to kill title inflation for a variety of reasons, both internal to a company (mostly ego and culture driven) or external to a company (most ego and power driven), if you are a CEO, don't let it confuse you when you think about who is doing what in your company.
Business social networking company Jive published a study conducted by Penn Schoen Berland today that shows more than three-fourths of the top executives in large enterprises consider collaboration software like Yammer and Huddle a top priority.
The study also found most executives and at least half of the newest class of workers called “millennials” have downloaded an app for a smartphone or tablet that is work-related. Nearly all of those same people said the apps improved their productivity and more than half of them didn’t get permission from systems administrators before deploying them.
That means the strategy employed by a lot of enterprise startups — getting the apps in the hands of users and then forcing administrators to buy the service — is working. When enough employees employ a free version of a service like Zendesk or Yammer in a large company, administrators are inclined to purchase the full service so they can control the flow of information and prevent security leaks.
Jive — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — is taking a lot of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook and applying them to the enterprise. It’s just one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space.
For example, Yammer, another business social network, has picked up around 2 million verified corporate users and 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. Box.net currently has 6 million users and around 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Jive has said it has more than 15 million users.
Jive CEO Zingale took over the company earlier in 2010, first on an interim basis in February, then more permanently in May. When taking the reins full-time, Zingale told the Wall Street Journal he's hoping Jive will file for an initial public offering sometime in 2011. He told VentureBeat that an IPO was still planned for 2011 in an interview back in July 2010.
World of Warcraft, one of the top-selling online games in the world, will be free to download and play for a good chunk of the game’s introductory content.
The new program is another way Blizzard Entertainment is trying to rope in new players for its popular online game. New players will have to buy all three expansions in addition to the original game if they want to continue playing past the first 20 levels of the game. Blizzard Entertainment recently dropped the price for an original copy of the game and the first expansion to $20, but the other expansions are still priced at around $35.
World of Warcraft players can reach level 85, so the amount of content Blizzard Entertainment is making available for free is actually only a small fraction of the content available in the game. There is also an enormous amount of “end-game” content that is designed for players looking for additional challenges and better rewards once they reach level 85.
The company tried a number of “free trial” programs in the past, including a 48-hour trial and a one-week trial. By removing the time limit, Blizzard Entertainment gets a better chance at roping in casual players that need to play on their own schedules rather than a schedule defined by the game.
Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft is already a huge commercial success. The game boasts around 11.4 million monthly subscribers who pay around $12 a month to access the world of Azeroth. And the company makes a lot of money selling additional expansion packs and initial copies of the game. It has become one of Activision-Blizzard's most reliable sources of revenue.
Activision-Blizzard sold more than 4.7 million units of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm in the first month after it was released. On the first day, Cataclysm's sales topped 3.3 million sold. By comparison, World of Warcraft's previous expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 million units on its first day in 2008 and The Burning Crusade sold 2.4 million units on its first day in 2007. World of Warcraft's third expansion generated an estimated $188 million in retail sales in its first month.
If you need any further evidence that the mobile payments arena is going to be huge over the next few years, just look at Square.
The mobile payments startup, created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has raised $100 million in a third round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, skyrocketing the company’s valuation to more than $1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The funding has quadrupled Square’s valuation — the company’s last round valued it at just $240 million. That’s an impressive jump for any company, let alone one that’s just eight months old. The funding shows that investors are confident that Square can hold its own against the like of PayPal and Intuit, who are more established when it comes to payments, but are just now beginning to take mobile transactions seriously. And of course, Google’s recently launched mobile wallet could pose a threat as well.
As if there isn’t enough good news for Square, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker will join the company’s board. “We’re making a bet that Square has the right product at the right time,” she told the WSJ.
Square allows anyone to make credit card transactions on their mobile devices. The company offers free card readers that plug into your phone or tablet’s headphone jack, and it takes a 2.75 percent cut from every transaction. Signatures occur right on the device using your fingertip, and the transaction receipt gets emailed to you afterwards.
The technology was initially conceived of as a way for artists and flea market vendors to easily accept credit cards, but it could just as easily serve as a complete register for a small business with the recently released Register iPad app. Square also recently released Card Case, an app that allows consumers to automatically pay for purchases from stores without swiping any cards.
Chief operating officer Keith Rabois says that the company is processing nearly $4 million in payments every day, and it expects to surpass $1 billion by year’s end. Thinking strategically, Dorsey has also added heavyweights to Square’s board, including Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and former Obama chief economic adviser Larry Summers.
With its most recent round, Square’s funding now totals $137.5 million. Kleiner Perkins is just the latest in a bevy of powerful investors in the company — its last two rounds were led by Sequioa Capital and Kohsla Ventures.
As I sit awaiting my delayed flight, 5 out of 6 people on my row are using an iPad to consume content. I am the lone holdout, but only because my iPad is in my bag while I type this post on my MacBook.
Everyone knows that Apple dominates mindshare and wallet-share in mobile and tablet (70-80% iPad market share), and Apple is of course leveraging that momentum back into huge growth in Mac laptops.
He argues that Apple, like Microsoft before it, is at risk because of the proprietary nature of its approach and says that the standardization Apple is bringing to the table limits innovation, and runs counter to the mix-and-match openness that customers really want.
To the contrary, I'd argue that Apple is setting the stage for more innovation, and that iCloud is going to speed the maturation of cloud services by setting a foundation – indeed, a platform, that the rest of us can build around, and innovate on.
First of all, iCloud is nothing like Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud strategy (which, incidentally, is far from failing).
Furthermore, if we are all honest with ourselves, the combined annual revenue of online file-sharing companies, including my company, Alfresco — is less than 10% the annual revenue of Microsoft’s online enterprise file-sharing service, SharePoint. The reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
More importantly, though, I think Levie is missing the big point here: iCloud marks the “featurization” and standardization of the cloud file system.
Just like every computer and server has a pretty run-of-the-mill hierarchical file system, Apple is making content storage, organization, version control and synching standard features of a cloud operating environment. It's about time.
And Apple is going to get it right, considering what it has learned from Time Machine (making version control a no-brainer, incremental synch) and iPad (eliminating the need to “save” documents) — and the fact that it is cutting their teeth on large audio and video files in iTunes.
I have no doubt it is going to figure out documents in a few short months and eliminate my need for third-party file sharing or synch tools altogether.
But that’s just scratching the surface
Just like computer OS vendors of old, Apple is unleashing iCloud as a file system-like service for thousands of iOS, OSx and even Windows application developers.
It will be just another service that you use when building an app — significantly decreasing the need for application developers to integrate with DropBox, Box.net or even Amazon’s S3 to store files.
The easiest path will be just to use iCloud services for file management. I am already envisioning that when I download certain iOS apps, they are going to say, “This app wants to have access to your iCloud files. Do you accept?” — just like they do for location services today.
And here is why I will gladly accept: Standardization in this case enables new kinds of magic on top of commoditized (and to-date, chaotic) cloud services.
Once we have a standard, things get really interesting. Levie needs chaos so that Box still has a role to play. But what if the problems Box thinks it solves simply didn't exist in the first place? What if we could all just focus on creating high-order value, instead?
What if all this file system functionality was just a feature of a new breed of cloud applications?
That is precisely what is happening here. Apple introduced its original HFS (hierarchical file system), and it was certainly innovative at the time, but historically speaking, it only remains of note because of everything else it has since enabled.
For one, I’m hoping for a Roambi-like iPad app that, like Tableau, will be able to look into my spreadsheets in iCloud and present back to me beautiful, interactive visualizations of my spreadsheet data that I can share with my co-workers.
My own spreadsheets, always available in iCloud, become little online databases that I can control and update and allow apps to access.
Two, it's not difficult to imagine a Flipboard-style app that would build a channel around a folder of documents or a keyword search across my documents.
It would make reading a stack of PDF analyst reports a lot more exciting and interactive (maybe it would even pull in web searches for related articles from around the web, and display those fresh articles alongside a static report).
Or even how about an app that allows me to select one of my Keynote or PowerPoint presos, select a few contacts from my iPad contact list, and start up a WebEx-style group presentation (complete with audio) using FaceTime as the delivery mechanism?
iCloud as a cloud file system has some juicy possibilities when it’s a service available to Apple’s huge community of application developers. And in a few short months, iCloud will make the use cases for online file sharing a lot less relevant.
Now, if I could only convince Apple to support CMIS (content management interoperability services) so that third parties like Alfresco could enable smart, secure enterprise document sharing through iCloud … well, I can dream.
Todd Barr is the CMO of Alfresco. Alfresco is the largest open source content management company in the world, serving thousands of enterprises in 55 countries with an open source content collaboration and document management platform. Todd is @tbarr on Twitter, and blogs at socialcontent.com — a new blog about the intersection of social and content management, sponsored by Alfresco.
Social web browser developer RockMelt announced today that it has raised $30 million in its second round of funding led by Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and existing investor Andreessen-Horowitz.
RockMelt is a web browser that is closely integrated with Facebook and other social networking sites. Instead of having to constantly return to their favorite websites and social networks, RockMelt users can view their friends' Facebook and Twitter updates, get notified about new content on their favorite websites, and start Facebook Chats with their friends from the actual browser program.
The browser has three main components. On the left side of the page, there's a sidebar with a list of your top Facebook friends (as chosen by you), showing their updates on Facebook and Twitter and their availability for Facebook Chat. You can also use that sidebar to post content to Facebook or Twitter. On the right side, there's another sidebar listing your favorite websites and alerting you whenever they're updated (determined mostly by their RSS feeds).
And on the top, there's a box with an improved search experience. RockMelt opens a column of results instead of several tabs for individual searches. When you scroll down the column, the relevant webpage will open in the background. All of the pages are pre-rendered, so you should be able to scroll seamlessly, without waiting for each one to load.
RockMelt is built on top of Chromium, the open source project behind Google's Chrome browser. The browser has more than 1 million users, according to the company. It launched a private beta in November last year.
On average, RockMelt users spend more than six hours per day in the browser and share content every two to three days. The average user has three chats per day on RockMelt. The browser has a particularly young user base — with more than half of the browser’s users under the age of 24, according to the company.
RockMelt raised $9.9 million before closing its second round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and others. Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures are joining RockMelt’s board of directors as part of the funding agreement. Super-angel Ron Conway also participated in the funding round.
Microsoft has been granted a patent for a technology that could create wiretaps for several kinds of Internet communications, including video and voice calls over Skype, which Microsoft acquired in May.
The spying technology, called “Legal Intercept,” allows currently existing products to be modified to “cause the communication to be established via a path that includes a recording agent,” according to the filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Once a connection is established, the agent is able to “silently record” a conversation.
The filing specifically calls out the ability to record any kind of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) communications. “VoIP may include audio messages transmitted via gaming systems, instant messaging protocols that transmit audio, Skype and Skype-like applications, meeting software, video conferencing software, and the like,” Microsoft said in the filing.
Microsoft filed for the patent in Dec. 2009, far before it acquired Skype. It’s possible Microsoft simply had this on the books so it could profit from licensing the technology to law enforcement agencies. Alternately, Skype’s purchase could have been a strategic buy to help test and deploy this new technology.
What do you think of this new spying technology? Are you concerned about law enforcement agencies or corporations violating your privacy while you use the web?
Dynamics, the big winner in the 2010 DEMOfall conference, has raised $35 million in funding to accelerate its business of making computerized smartcards and payment systems.
The funding led by Bain Capital Ventures is the largest second funding round in the payments business this year and is the largest round in the history of Pittsburgh, Pa., where the company is based. That says a lot about the potential of Dynamics, which is seeking to bring old-fashioned credit cards into the modern computer age.
In the U.S., most credit cards use magnetic stripes that are read by 1970s-era card readers. Dynamics uses those same magnetic-stripe readers, but it has features built into the plastic of its Card 2.0 credit cards that enable more innovative features without requiring a multibillion-dollar upgrade in the payments infrastructure.
For instance, as you can see in the top image, a user can press a button on the card in order to switch it from a credit card to a debit card or vice versa. This “multiaccount” card can rewrite the numbers on the magnetic stripe as needed. That allows credit card issues — who spend $20 billion a year on marketing — to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack, said Jeff Mullen (pictured right), chief executive and founder of Dynamics, in an interview.
Mullen said the company is also preparing to expand beyond its first major customer, Citibank, to other credit card issuers. And it is also working to expand into new markets around the world, including the contact-chip card market in Europe, the radio frequency identification (RFID) card market in Asia, and the phone-based payment systems that are beginning to launch with smartphones.
“Our goal is to innovate in payments and be agnostic about the platforms,” Mullen said.
Bain Capital Venture’s Jeff Schwartz, managing director and founding partner, will join the board of Dynamics. Mullen said the round was oversubscribed and “Dynamics had a lot of suitors.” He said he chose to go with Bain because of its experience in financial technology investments.
Previously, Dynamics raised $5.7 million from Adams Capital Management, which also participated in the new round. Mullen said the company will use the money to more than double its workforce of 30 by the end of the year. Mullen said the company’s current customers are increasing their unit purchases of the cards and that Dynamics is arranging for high-volume manufacturing of the cards in the U.S. and abroad.
"The 40-year business model cycles at card issuers are turning into 3-year business model cycles," said Joel Adams, General Partner, Adams Capital Management. "As such, the industry is demanding a fast-cycle payments platform. With this investment, Dynamics will have the first fast-cycle, high-volume consumer electronic manufacturing capability in the payments industry."
He said payment systems have evolved slowly over time, but there’s a lot of money to be made if even a small percentage of the world’s consumers switch over to new kinds of payment systems. The incentives include better options and more security.
Scwhartz at Bain Capital Ventures said, “Dynamics' technology and product applications have been enthusiastically validated by several top card issuers, payment networks, and consumer groups, and we believe this will be the most impactful technology company in the payments industry.”
Dynamics hopes to upgrade magnetic stripe cards to computerized smartcards with better security and multiple accounts per card — without making any changes to the existing infrastructure of magnetic stripe readers in 60 million locations.
The ultimate goal isn't just to upgrade credit-card technology. It's to transform the existing credit-card business, with cookie-cutter cards and offers, into ones where consumers can give voice to their needs and banks can respond with personally customized offers.
The development could be very significant for credit-card issuing banks that have wanted to upgrade their service to engage and reward customers, only to be stymied by the limitations of magnetic-stripe cards. Every bank aims to be "top of wallet," or the card that a person will use for 70 percent or more of their transactions. The second card down will likely be used only 15 percent of the time, and the third card, 5 percent. If a bank can offer better rewards, make a card more secure, or otherwise convince someone to use a card more often, the financial gains can be enormous over the life of the customer relationship.
The Electronic Stripe is the brainchild of Mullen, who put himself through business school as he was starting his company in 2007. He has recruited a crack team of payment specialists such as Philip Yen, a former executive vice president at Visa.
If all goes well, the company hopes to move on from ordinary credit cards to security cards, medical cards, gift cards and other prepaid cards.
To the old-fashioned magnetic-stripe readers which still handle 90 percent of today's transactions, the card looks like any other. But each sliver-thin card has 70 electronic components and can be modified on the fly. That means the company can change the numbers that are fed to the magnetic-stripe reader.
For instance, if you press a button on one of Dynamic's cards, it will switch from one credit card number to a different one (and change the indicator light so you know which account is active). You can thus have multiple credit-card accounts from one bank, such as a personal account and a business account. The purchase is processed on Visa, MasterCard, or other card networks as a normal transaction.
Another type of card can offer improved security. Instead of a full 16-digit credit-card number, the numbers are interrupted by a display. The display will show the remaining numbers in the account only after the user types in a personal identification number on a set of five small buttons on the surface of the card. If a card is lost, a thief can't use it at all unless he or she knows the pin code. If the result is fewer fraudulent transactions, then the banks can see improved profits.
Dynamics stands a great chance at getting past the barrier of older infrastructure. Radio frequency identification tag (RFID) readers are being put in more places in order to accommodate electronic cards, but they still account for only about 3 percent of all of the readers in the market, even after billions of dollars in infrastructure investment. Another innovation, near-field communications, requires chips to be built into cell phones and it also means that merchants have to adopt new readers. But Dynamics' strategy has the most benefit for the least pain. A programmable card fits with the strategies of a lot of banks, which are issuing different cards for loyalty programs or budget management.
Mullen's company will sell the cards to banks. It hopes to manufacture tens of millions of the cards in the coming years and it is lining up multiple manufacturing sources so that it can do so. Mullen says each device has a small microprocessor and a certain amount of memory. The cards cost more than typical cards, but they also have more revenue potential for the issuers.
While the cards could disrupt older card makers, Mullen said his goal is to help the current ecosystem of banks and credit card companies, which is an easier sell than tearing up the entire landscape.
Mullen has put a lot of thought into the problem. He was trained as an electrical engineer at Carnegie Mellon and wanted to be a patent attorney after graduation. He went to law school and was a prolific inventor himself, with more than 150 issued and pending patents. But he wanted to start his own company, so he went back to Carnegie Mellon for his MBA and set up Dynamics in 2007 across the street from the school. By day, he ran the company and found time to get course work done when he could; his teachers accommodated his crazy schedule. The company won various grants in business school contests, adding up to more than $400,000.
Yen, the former Visa executive, worked for years in the payment innovation space and saw how it could take 15 years for a new innovation to work its way into the system. When he met Mullen, he decided to join and he helped recruit other payment professionals.
The report indicates that aggressive spending and expansion in clean technology would generate 1.1 million new jobs by 2030 and reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent. If the U.S. employs more federal mandates and provides funding for clean technology projects, those projects will generate 1.9 million jobs and reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent.
By 2050, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 55 percent without federal mandates and funding for clean technology projects. The U.S. will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 63 percent if the government introduces aggressive clean technology policies.
Google’s report focuses on two ways to increase the funding for clean technology projects. The first is a model in which the U.S. government aggressively expands its clean technology policies and increases the amount of nuclear power deployed. That model also assumes that there are additional carbon-capture projects deployed in the U.S.
The second model, which would have less of an impact than government intervention, involves taxing carbon emissions at $30 per ton. That would bring up the cost of power produced by plants that use coal, natural gas and other types of fossil fuels. It would bring the cost of electricity and power from those plants to something comparable with renewable energy sources like wind power and solar power.
With government intervention, clean technology spending would increase the United States’ GDP by around $244 billion per year and reduce household costs by $995 annually. With carbon taxes, the United States’ GDP would increase by $155 billion per year and U.S. consumers would save $942 annually.
Google has thus far invested $780 million in clean energy projects, $700 million this year alone. Google's clean energy investments don't come out of the company's traditional investment arm, Google Ventures. Instead, the money comes from the company's main treasury and is invested by the company's Green Business Operations team. Google typically makes financial investments in clean energy projects that will generate some kind of return, but it has also made investments that have resulted in power purchase agreements — meaning Google is the company that is using the renewable energy to power its data centers.
Formspring.me, the social network where users ask and reply to questions, announced that it has over 25 million registered members Yesterday, the company announced on its blog.
Over 3.4 billion total questions have been answered by Formspring users, the 18-month-old San Francisco-based startup told VentureBeat.
Formspring also released an infographic (embedded below) that illustrates some of the site’s more interesting statistics, like the 877 questions Marvel Comics Senior Vice President Tom Brevoort has responded to about the X-Men.
The company faces competition from site like Facebook and Tumblr that have added similar question/answer features to their services.
Founded in January 2010, Formspring has raised a total $14 million in funding from Redpoint Partners, Baseline Ventures and Polaris Ventures. The company told VentureBeat it’s working on monetizing the site.
When asked what advice she gives aspiring entrepreneurs, Eileen Gittins quickly responds with a common theme: “Never give up.” Gittins — a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year competition — is the founder and CEO of the do-it-yourself online book publisher, Blurb.
Gittins’ perseverance has paid off: Blurb is not only her third startup – she also founded search startup Verb and web-analytics firm Personify – it’s the one she says is the most rewarding.
Gittins says that, for her, “being an entrepreneur is like breathing.” We recently spoke about the beginnings of Blurb and what it takes to start a successful company.
According to Gittins, Blurb’s secret sauce in a competitive industry is simple: “We are the best at what we do.” Not only does Blurb offer a simple drag-and-drop book editor that removes the manual labor associated with book printing, but the company also offers an online store where anyone can sell their creations in what Gittins refers to as the “Blurbaverse”. This has allowed authors to step over traditional publishers and earn 100% of profits made from book sales. Gittins likened the Blurb bookstore to the Sundance Film Festival as a popular vehicle for independent artistic expression.
Gittins spoke of her persistence in the early days of Blurb by recounting her attempt to raise capital for the company. This was in 2004, just as blogs began to take off in popularity, and more of our media consumption was moving to the web. Transferring digital content back to print seemed counterintuitive to most investors. Gittins stuck with it, and seven years later, Blurb has close to 100 employees and a global network of printers that distribute books around the world.
Blurb was a perfect fit for Gittins, who is an avid photographer, reader and technology lover. As a business, Blurb has the potential to disrupt the world of publishing. But on a personal level, Gittins says she is satisfied every day with her work — work that allows others to create.
According to Gittins, the most important resource for any entrepreneur is a network of people that can help. “The smartest young entrepreneurs are the ones who know that they don’t know” according to Gittins. Entrepreneurs will often keep their ideas close to their chest in fear of others copying them, but Gittins urges founders to talk to anyone who will listen. It’s the best entrepreneurs who are able to filter out that feedback and find the right path to start and grow their company.
The Talking Friends have taken yet another step toward the entertainment industry. Last week, mobile gaming company Outfit7 announced a signed deal with talent agency William Morris Entertainment. Now, they have partnered with Beanstalk, the licensing agency behind brands like Mr. Clean, Jack Daniel's, Ford Motor Co., AT&T and more.
Beanstalk plans to launch a global licensing program for Outfit7 that will include toys, games, books and other goods tailored to children of various age groups. Products will engage children in speech, motor skill and sensory experiences as well as upper-level elements such as reading, writing and music.
Some of Outfit7′s key demographics may be surprising. Children aged two through eight as well as tweens are obvious targets, but also included are teens and adults – two demographics that the company already engages, according to chief marketing officer Paul Baldwin. Outfit7 has previously stated its desire to become, like Pixar, a company "for all ages." It’s even planning products in markets like home décor that could attract older audiences. Enough college dorm rooms have a Spongebob Squarepants plushie for me to believe there is money to be made in older demographics.
Beanstalk CEO Michael Stone takes a lot of interest in the evolution of apps as well as large-scale entertainment. "While video games, digital and online properties have a long history of brand extensions and licensing, we are just witnessing the tip of the iceberg for app-brand licensing. This is the new frontier of licensing and we are delighted to be a part of it."
Even Outfit7 employees have had experience taking video games to Hollywood. Baldwin cited his role in acquiring an agent for the Lara Croft video game character, which helped launch the digital dame into a key role for Angelina Jolie.
Outfit7 currently has 11 Talking Friends with 135 million downloads since July 2010. CEO Andrej Nabergoj is a speaker at GamesBeat.
Almost everyone needs the occasional leg up, but sometimes just putting your right foot forward can be tough. The DEMO Conference is aiming to fix that with the DEMO Scholarship Partner Program. Twenty startups that have raised less than $500,000 will receive a full ride to the same conference that launched Salesforce, TiVo, E-Trade, Netscape and more. Furthermore, 10 angel-funded companies who have received less than $1.5 million in seed funding will be offered partial scholarships.
The deadline to apply for our September DEMO event in Silicon Valley scholarships is July 15, 2011. What excites us is that all scholarship holders receive exactly what paying demonstrators enjoy. None of that you pay half, we give you half. You have the same opportunity to receive coaching, expert audio-visual aid for presentations, PR support, marketing support, high quality video and continued exposure through objective VentureBeat articles. DEMO is an amazing opportunity to take not only your company name but also your product to the next level.
We’d also like to say thank you to our sponsors, who see the value in disruptive technology and do not want to wait to showcase its significance in our space.
The DEMO conference launches high-quality startups and products that deserve the tech main stage. There are no Powerpoint presentations here, just you, your product and your thoughts on how it is disruptive. Check back to the DEMOBeat channel to read more about DEMO alumni and where they have gone since launch.
Got six minutes to launch your game changer? We're finding top-shelf thinkers from around the world ready to showcase their products at DEMO Fall, on the same stage where companies like Netscape, TiVo, E-Trade, and Java got their start. After you sweat out your six minutes of fame, head off the the DEMO pavilion to chat with potential investors, partners and show off the goods. Apply for your spot here. Demo Fall 2011 is located at the Hyatt Regency in Silicon Valley, September 12-14.
After months of waiting, Google today finally unveiled its new social project called Google+, which turns all of Google’s services into one giant social network.
The company has redesigned the top navigation bar to work across all of its services. It’s very similar to the notification bar found in Facebook, which alerts you whenever new activity occurs concerning your account.
“We'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests,” wrote Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra in a blog post.
Google+ has a handful of sub-services designed to match specific social needs for each situation. Circles, which lets users divide up which of their friends / followers can see which content. It’s a feature Facebook took quite a while to develop with “lists”. Also, there’s Hangouts, which works with each social Circle by creating access to a multi-person video chat. And since every respectable Facebook competitor needs one, the Sparks feature is a customized feed aggregator of content curated from across the web.
Google+ also has a mobile aspect, which is easily the portion that makes the most sense out of the entire project.
First of all, nearly every update made through Google+ lets users add location data. The company said it acknowledges the problem people have with unreliable wireless connections, which is why its built-in Instant Upload. The feature will save pictures that get cut off through faulty connections and upload them to the web later on. Finally, there’s Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on in real-time.
While it’s clear that Google as spent a lot of effort on Google+, the company has a poor track record of success with social products. Social network Orkut, Google Buzz and Google Wave are all examples of products that ended in failure.
Others like Dave Winer are skeptical of Google’s actions to challenge Facebook by turning its search product into a social network. In a blog post titled “Google Yawn“, he writes:
“…All you do is make your core product heavier. The thing you wanted to kill (Facebook) doesn’t go anywhere. It hardly notices what you did. The users might care to the extent that they’re annoyed… Products like the one Google just announced are hatched at off-sites at resorts near Monterey or in the Sierra, and were designed to meet the needs of the corporation that created it. A huge scared angry corporation.”
At least in Facebook’s case, it didn’t need a series of videos to explain how to use its service. Google, on the other hand, has six total videos demonstrating the various uses of Google+.
Google+ is now available on Android Market and the mobile web. The company is testing the full roll out of the service, which is only available by invitation only.
It’s usually just a minor annoyance when I click through the site to book a flight through Orbitz or through the flight site directly. I’ve paged through multiple flights on Hipmunk until I can find a flight that has wi-fi available. But Hipmunk is known for its almost fanatical devotion to efficient design on the site — so what might seem like a small feature is very representative of the company’s strategy. It should sound like a familiar strategy, too — Apple is particularly well-known for its hardcore focus on hardware design.
Hipmunk is a darling of the startup world. George Zachary, the Charles River Ventures partner who was an early investor in Twitter, said Hipmunk and his portfolio company Wanderfly were "the most innovative thing I've seen in travel" at the Launch Conference in San Francisco last week.
Part of Hipmunk's charm is its streamlined interface — the site only requires a user to enter a general area and a few dates. Like its flight search engine, the site pulls in information from flight and hotel booking engine Orbitz. Once users enter a search location and a date and find a flight they like, they can jump to Orbitz to book the flight.
Flights found through Hipmunk aren't actually booked through the site — instead, Hipmunk directs its users to Orbitz and other flight aggregators to purchase the tickets. The same is true for the iPad application, except the tickets cannot be purchased within the app. The Hipmunk app sends users to a Safari browser where they can buy the ticket or gives them a code to use to purchase the ticket when they can access a computer.
New owner of social networking site 
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Dynamics
When asked what advice she gives aspiring entrepreneurs, Eileen Gittins quickly responds with a common theme: “Never give up.” Gittins — a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year competition — is the founder and CEO of the do-it-yourself online book publisher, 
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