|  |  |  | | | | | VentureBeat | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active publishers is a much more achievable goal for Google to reach.
There are two different types of social networks, private and public — each defined by its default privacy setting. Facebook is by default private and meant to connect actual friends. Twitter by default is public and anyone can follow anyone else. Google+ is decidedly in the Twitter camp — meaning you can follow anyone, including Google CEO Larry Page. Google+ lets you see Page’s posts and “like” his photos of kite surfing in Alaska. When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes "everyone" as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+'s default setting would be pubic posts. Although Twitter is growing (having just hit 200 million tweets a day), Twitter has left itself open to be displaced with a slow pace of adding features. Even newly returned founder Jack Dorsey has said that it was too difficult for “normal” people to use Twitter. So, how can Google go after the 21 million people who are actively publishing on Twitter, and, more importantly, the few thousands that own the majority of Twitter followers? These types of posters are generally publishers, and Google’s core competence is serving publishers. Publishers pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and on-site advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick. Publishers are interested in increasing their search rankings and improving their reach. Posting content to Google+1 increases search rankings. The black toolbar across the top of all Google services (other than YouTube), which integrates both Google+ and Google+ notifications, definitely provides reach and is now in front of as many user minutes as Facebook commands. Users commenting or liking on items from publishers will show up in their friends’ toolbars. Even if they only have a few friends, the overall traffic bump will be significant.  While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google was turned down when it tried to buy Twitter for $10 billion, and now it is going to try to replicate it. With Google+, the company actually has a shot.
Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can follow him on Twitter.
Filed under: Business and Technology, social, Social Media, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Yes, Microsoft is a slow, lumbering giant. It has been working on cloud for years, with numerous iterations, that took so long cloud proponent Ray Ozzie got fed up and left. Microsoft had to work through cannibalizing reseller arrangements, reconciling how to reach consumers versus businesses and a host of other issues. With Office 365, Microsoft has finally delivered an end-to-end cloud platform for businesses that encompass not only its desktop Office software, but also its server software, such as Exchange and SharePoint.
Contrary to Google’s narrative, cloud based office software is still a wide open market. The three million businesses that have “Gone Google” — proclaimed on billboards in San Francisco airport’s new Terminal 2 — are for the most part Gmail users, who are still happily using Microsoft Office and even Microsoft Outlook. Gmail is a fast, cheap, spam-free and great solution for business email, especially relative to the expensive, lumbering email service providers. Google Apps has definitely found a niche for online collaboration, but generally for low-end project management types of spreadsheets and small documents. The presentation and drawing Google Apps are barely used. Yes, there are definitely Google Apps wins, since it seems cheap. On implementation, businesses find that switching to Gmail is one thing, but switching their entire business infrastructure to Google Apps is a completely different animal that goes far beyond simply changing how employees are writing memos. Imagine you are a 25-person law firm in Kansas City running Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange for email and calendaring, Windows Server for file sharing, SharePoint for wiki/collaboration, and have a custom billing application written in .Net and running on Microsoft SQL Server. Like the majority of small to medium-sized businesses, you are an all-Microsoft shop. Google comes in and presents: Google Apps looks primitive and doesn’t have all the features of Word and especially Excel and PowerPoint. It also doesn’t work offline. Email and calendar is sort of the same, but you should really use a browser instead of Outlook to get full functionality. Plus, you have to manually move all of your SharePoint content over to Google Sites, the file server isn’t integrated with the Windows or Mac desktops, and you have to keep your .Net app the way it is or rewrite it into Google AppEngine. Compare this experience to the Microsoft value prop: go home on Friday, and on Monday when you come back everything will look the same, except now we are hosting it all and you can lay off your IT staff. There’s no training required. Employees can run apps on the desktop or in the browser, whichever they like, and the browser version looks like the desktop version, only cheaper. For a regular business where technology really is just a pain and an expense item — not a mission in life — it’s really a no-brainer. In addition, Microsoft has historically been very smart about seeding nonprofits and educational institutions with copies of software that are virtually free, which it will likely also do with Office 365. The thing about Microsoft Office 365 is that it looks really good, and look and act just like the well-known native Office apps. The ribbon interface is intuitive and the apps are fast and responsive. Google Apps, conversely, looks like it was made by college students from a weekend project. I don’t understand how Marissa Mayer loves fashion like Oscar de la Renta at night, but goes to work during the day and insists on data-driven web sites that look like crap. Google hasn’t shipped a good user interface since Google Maps. The different between Office 365 and Google Apps is glaring. Microsoft definitely has a few issues to work out. As Google pointed out, collaboration is not very simple, since you have to be a Microsoft Office 365 subscriber in order to collaborate. However, Microsoft already launched Docs.com, a free Office offering with free collaboration. Microsoft will likely integrate Skype into Office 365, which will offer chat, audio and video conferencing, screen sharing and (probably) free document collaboration based on Docs.com. Google’s claim that Office 365 doesn’t support many platforms is moot. It works fine on my Mac OS X with Chrome, and officially supports Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Office definitely has numerous pricing tiers. The lowest tier is on par with Google Apps and the higher tiers include subscriptions to the desktop software, which help to transition Microsoft from feature-driven bloatware to subscriptions — a model that has worked for Adobe.
Google Apps will definitely have a place for new businesses and small businesses with younger employees that aren’t tied to the Office user interface. Google App Engine is a hidden jewel within Google Apps and its hands down the fastest solution for programmers to create and deploy a comprehensive web app. However, with Office 365, Microsoft is clearly on a trajectory to continue its Office hegemony. Microsoft is much more concerned about Apple than Google at this point, and insuring that it monetizes Apple devices like it used to make more per Mac than Apple did in the early 1990s. Conversely, Google should be much more concerned about Microsoft, which now has almost 30% marketshare in search. Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can follow him on Twitter.
Filed under: Business and Technology, dev, DevBeat, enterprise, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  This article is part of a series of posts where we write about DEMO alumni and news of their progress. Total Immersion launched at DEMO in 2004 and returned to launch a separate product in 2007. Check out their 2007 video here and more at DEMO.
Crowdsourcing has taken a turn for the tweens with MyFlipbook, a Facebook application from augmented reality company Total Immersion. The app was launched this week by Hollywood Records in support of recording artist Selena Gomez’s new album. To Total Immersion, MyFlipbook provides a unique outlet for users to have customizable experiences with their technology and social media. There's a lot more here, though. The broad reach of social media in tandem with personalized interactions can develop sincere brand loyalty. In order to be a part of your own music video, Total Immersion's technology provides a randomly selected word for the user to hold up in a photo of themselves. The photo is then spliced in with other crowdsourced photos taken by your friends and timed with the words to Gomez's song, "Who Says". Around 9:30am PT yesterday, Gomez announced MyFlipbook on her Facebook fan page. Since then, the post has received 9,440 likes and 2,123 comments. To give this perspective, most of her posts receive this kind of attention. But with hundreds of people already participating in the MyFlipbooks found on YouTube, it shows fans are listening and acting. This isn't Total Immersion's first go with the tween demographic. In 2010, the company paired up with the Disney popstar to create My Interview with Selena Gomez. This time, Total Immersion provided questions for fans to answer and then timed them with Gomez's pre-recorded answers in a "web cam interview" scenario. Engaging consumers in a customizable way yields rich interactions and fosters repeat user relationships. Social media in general has s dynamic engagement that makes people feel unique and part of the conversation. Saying Twitter and Facebook simply have repeat users is a major understatement, which is why Total Immersion is targeting social media for their latest augmented reality initiatives. "Total Immersion understands the importance and influence of social networks on individuals' lives, and we have the ability to create dynamic, unique and customized experiences for our customers based on those networks," said Bruno Uzzan, chief executive of Total Immersion. Total Immersion is best known for their augmented reality software, D'Fusion, which integrates 3D imaging in real time onto a live video stream. The company raised $5.5 million in funding last March to expand the software and its global operations.   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.
Filed under: DEMO, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Online gamers should on average generate $3 of value per hour, regardless of the game they are playing — and game designers should aim for that target, said Bing Gordon, partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
That’s the sweet spot for creating a level of satisfaction for gamers when they play an online game, Gordon said. That’s based on the reward that players generate for playing the game for an hour. For example, the amount of gold a player earns in online game World of Warcraft, should sell for around $3 on secondary or black markets. In games like FarmVille, players should generate $3 per hour in terms of gifts or coins. “In games, all online games, the clearing price of assets is $3 an hour,” Gordon said. “The stuff you can make in World of Warcraft can sell on the open or black market for $3 an hour.” Similar to achieving something in real life, gamers want to generate some kind of real value out of the game — even if the game is just meant to waste time. Players are much more likely to continue playing a game if there’s an illusion of creating value in the game, Gordon said. The lines between games and the real world are blurring now that the world is becoming “gamified.” Many games give players rewards for doing just about the game. That’s prompted several apps like Foursquare to jump on the trend by rewarding players for doing everyday things in the real world — like visiting a gym or announcing that they are watching a TV show. The latest generation of gamers that actively use apps like Foursquare demand more value out of the games they are playing. In a game like World of Warcraft, gamers want to wear the best armor or have the fastest mounts as a way to signify that they are “winning” the game. Games have to make sure they deliver rewards at just the right pace that makes the experience of getting a powerful item rewarding, but not too easy — amounting to around $3 an hour, he said. Social games like FarmVille and Empires & Allies, both developed by social gaming company Zynga, are credited for starting the “gamification” craze by giving players a reason to constantly return to the game with incremental rewards. Zynga has since 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. 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. Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner's investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million. Kleiner also invested in Zynga, which might file for an initial public offering in the not too distant future at a valuation between $10 billion and $20 billion, according to a number of reports. The company is looking to raise up to $2 billion, according to the reports.
Filed under: games         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  While the majority of people are still waiting to experience the plethora of new features available Google’s new social service Google+, there are portions of the site that no one has access to yet. An examination of Google+’s code reveals references to both Google Games and Google Questions, reports Engadget.
Social Games were noticeably absent from the list of things available on Google+, which is Google’s response to popular social network Facebook. Google likely wants to mimic the success that games like Mafia Wars and Farmville brought to Facebook’s platform — especially since the search engine giant has invested a significant amount of money to social game company Zynga. Given the vastness of Google+ – which offers a multitude of ways to communicate with various social circles — I can see why it wasn’t included in the testing launch. The same can be said for Google Questions. A question/answer feature is something most social networking sites added to their sites as a direct response to the popularity of Formspring.me. Both Facebook and Tumbler now have Q&A features. So, it makes perfect sense for it to pop up in Google+ at some point. It’s unknown when we’ll see either games or questions debut on Google+. But since the company is re-assessing its invite process, releasing new Google+ features is probably pretty low on the list of priorities. 
Filed under: Business and Technology, games, News, social, Social Media, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Microsoft on Thursday announced it will turn the lights off on Hohm, an electricity monitoring tool that allows people to find ways to reduce consumption. Hohm will go dark on May 31, 2012.
“The feedback from customers and partners has remained encouraging throughout Microsoft Hohm's beta period,” the company wrote in a blog post. “However, due to the slow overall market adoption of the service, we are instead focusing our efforts on products and solutions more capable of supporting long-standing growth within this evolving market.” The announcement comes only days after Google announced it was pulling the plug on PowerMeter, its own electricity monitoring tool. PowerMeter will be retired even earlier on Sept. 16. Google also cited low usage rates as the reason for shutting down its PowerMeter product. Because the two products were so similar and both lagging in customers, it appears both Microsoft and Google were simply waiting for the other to blink first—a game of green chicken, if you will. Despite shutting down Hohm, Microsoft said it will “continue to focus on developing products, solutions and partnership that span a wide spectrum of industries, such as power generation, distribution grids, buildings and transportations systems.” Are you a user of Hohm? Will you be sad to see it go?
Filed under: green, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  In a passionate open letter this morning, a high-level Research in Motion executive offered up some suggestions on how CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis could reshape the company to avoid certain doom. But instead of assuring the executive that things will get better (or even responding to his actual points), all RIM had to offer up in response was a hilariously defensive blog post.
If you were worried about RIM’s prospects before, the company’s response today makes it seem even more dangerously out of touch. The letter, which was published on the mobile site Boy Genius Report, offers up some common sense solutions like focusing more on end-user experience (like Apple), fostering better relationships with developers, and cutting complicated projects down to the bone. BGR confirmed the writer’s identity, and the letter clearly seems to be written by someone who is heavily invested in RIM’s future. “Mike and Jim, please take the time to really absorb and digest the content of this letter because it reflects the feeling across a huge percentage of your employee base,” the executive wrote. “You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects.” In its response, RIM found it difficult to fathom that the executive’s motives were pure: [I]t is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner, but regardless of whether the letter is real, fake, exaggerated or written with ulterior motivations, it is fair to say that the senior management team at RIM is nonetheless fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company's challenges and its opportunities.
RIM went on to point out that it was “in a solid business and financial position” with nearly $3 billion in cash and no debt, as well as “strong profitability” with $695 million net income last quarter. Of course, there was no mention of the slow BlackBerry sales and reduced outlook that cast a cloud over the company’s first quarter earnings, or its poorly performing stock. There’s no denying that RIM is in a tough spot, but it’s difficult to feel bad for a company that seems so oblivious to its own flaws. One potentially big change that could help the company is ousting Balsillie and Lazaridis from their CEO roles. As the anonymous RIM exec wrote, “perhaps it is time to seriously consider a new, fresh thinking, experienced CEO. There is no shame in no longer being a CEO. Mike, you could focus on innovation. Jim, you could focus on our carriers/customers… They are our lifeblood.”
Filed under: Business and Technology, mobile, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  This post is sponsored by The Telecom Council.
Although some VCs and entrepreneurs would rather go to market over or around the telcos, operators are still at the center of the telecom ecosystem. Because operators build the network, deploy the devices, collect subscriptions and bring scale to any communications service, they are optimal partners or channels for many communications services and tools. Luckily for innovators at large, and entrepreneurs in particular, the age of telcos building all of their own innovations and refusing to look outside their walls is over. Telcos are now making serious efforts to scout, support and integrate outside innovation into their networks. In Silicon Valley, for example, you don't have to look far to find development centers, trial networks, venture funds and incubation labs set up by carriers from 3 continents to prove this point. That's one of the reasons that TC3 is held every year in Silicon Valley. The Telecom Council Carrier Connections Summit, or TC3, is the seminal venue for carriers around the world to draw attention to their innovative sides – to market their innovation activities throughout the ecosystem, to attract entrepreneurs and developers and to promote innovation inside and outside their labs. This is a one-day conference with a very senior audience from across the ecosystem – from fixed and wireless to content, apps and infrastructure – where the speakers are responsible for the innovation strategies and activities of their respective carriers. If you are involved in telecom innovation, whether from the financial, market or engineering side, you will want to join this year's TC3 speakers from Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, Docomo, Swisscom, Orange/France Telecom and others to get an inside look how at they are planning and executing their innovation efforts and how they seek to partner with new, young companies. Some carriers will also be presenting case studies of startups who have been through these channels and who have many experiences to share. Limited registration, demo tables and some marketing opportunities are still available for TC3.
Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  After a fan campaign asked Nintendo to release North American versions of Wii Japanese RPGs Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower, the company on Thursday said it has heard the pleas but has no plans to localize the games.
All three titles are published by Nintendo in Japan, so the company has full control over which countries the games will be released. Two of the titles—Xenoblade and The Last Story—will be released in Europe in the near future, much to the chagrin of U.S. and Canadian gamers. The campaign to get the three games to North America was called “Operation Rainfall,” and it asked fans to call, email, send Facebook messages and Tweets, and more to Nintendo of America. Nintendo of American responded to the responses on Facebook with this rather robotic response: “Thank you for your enthusiasm. We promised an update, so here it is. We never say ‘never,’ but we can confirm that there are no plans to bring these three games to the Americas at this time. Thanks so much for your passion, and for being such great fans!” Nintendo said it had trouble attracting a hardcore demographic to the Wii and intended to remedy that problem with its new Wii U console. Perhaps it could start winning over the minds of hardcore gamers by localizing well-liked Japanese RPGs on the Wii.
Filed under: games, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I'm Dell and I want you to buy my lapt op. The only problem is, I have no clue who you are. Radian6 has been telling me you are out there, my Bit.ly links show that you are clicking, but how do I get in touch? Enter social analytics SaaS company, ViralHeat, which has just raised $4.25M in first round funding to fulfill those enterprise love connections. With its new service, Human Intent, ViralHeat is moving towards "future-tense" social media – analyzing social decision-making as opposed to measuring past actions. Color it a Match.com for customer relationship management — you have a product, they want your product, ViralHeat gives you the tools to overcome the barrier and start that relationship. At the moment, Human Intent focuses on fostering sales relationships by grouping social media interactions that display desire to buy. Consumer contacts are provided to the participating business, which then pursues the sales It may seem stalkerish, but if you put your laptop longing on twitter, you should be glad to have the laptops come to you. ViralHeat has even provided Salesforce integration for Human Intent. Consumer data can easily be exported to the digital Rolodex for immediate access by sales teams. This is a nice, smooth feature that can expedite proactive sales support. 
Interestingly, Salesforce is also a pseudo-competitor post its acquisition of Radian6. Vishal Sankhla, chief technology officer and co-founder explains that though Radian6 does provide social analytics, it does not have the ability to detect intent, and thus it is not a complete solution. "They are great at creating and generating reports, we are fostering organic interactions." Interactions that chief executive and co-founder Raj Kadam says they would like to take in house. "Right now businesses have to use services like TweetDeck to interact,” he told VentureBeat, “We want to add engagement to ViralHeat." This will take the form of a communication tool integrated into the Human Intent platform for quick and easy access to influencers in their sales ring. Also in the plans is a layer of artificial intelligence that will assign need priority to customers. In addition to sales, customer service gripe control is also in the works. While these might not be the love letters businesses hope to get from their consumers, having direct connection to grievances may increase customer retention and satisfaction rates. Currently in testing, Human Intent is being used by companies like Dell and Microsoft. ViralHeat received its round entirely from Mayfield Fund and currently has a remarkably inexpensive tiered pricing model of $10, $30 or $90 with varying levels of access.
Filed under: deals, Social Media, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  For a mere $25 million in cash, mobile messaging service provider Synchronica has conditionally agreed to acquire Nokia’s email and instant messaging services. This is a bargain deal, because it means Synchronica will acquire six million users across ten North American carriers, including giants AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint. Synchronica’s market will now extend to approximately 1.8 billion end-users worldwide.
The news comes a week after Nokia finalized a deal to outsource its Symbian OS to Accenture (this deal has been in the works for years). Nokia, a Finish company, is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world but its market share is falling due to the growing smartphone market. The company abandoned Symbian as its primary mobile OS earlier this year and is now working on building flagship Windows Phone 7 devices. Rumors continue that the troubled company’s phone business could be bought out by the likes of Microsoft or even of Samsung. This is a giant acquisition for England-based Synchronica which has, until now, focused on messaging services in developing and emerging countries in Latin America, Africa, Russia, and Asia (it has more than 80 existing carrier contracts). The technology acquired in today’s deal with Synchronica includes Nokia’s email, IM, and social networking gateway and client software, which Synchronica says it will continue the development and merge with its own Mobile Gateway infrastructure. Synchronic says it’s relationship with Nokia will be “long-term,” but doesn’t give any specific timeline. Synchronica says it will provide the messaging software which Nokia will continue to pre-load on Nokia Series 40 phones. MocoNews.net reports Synchronica will be paid $18.2 million over in the next 18 months for Nokia to continue to preload the services into its own devices. Synchronica isn’t just getting technology. Approximately 250 employees, externals, and contractors are planned to transfer from Nokia. Synchronica also gets 10 patents as part of the deal (eight remain with Nokia, but Synchronica will have a royalty free license to them). The all-cash deal of $25 million also includes 18.3 million warrants to Nokia, to be exercised in three years to potentially buy shares in Synchronica.
Filed under: mobile         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  The Apple iPad reached a new milestone today as the App Store now carries more than 100,000 apps tailored specifically for the iPad.
The first Apple iPad was released to much fanfare in April 2010 and the brouhaha continued with the launch of the more powerful iPad 2 in March. One way the iPad has asserted its dominance over other consumer tablets is the number of high-quality applications the platform provides. It only took 16 months for the iPad to hit six figures, and the count does not tally all the iPhone apps that also run on the iPad. The iPhone took more than two years to hit the 100,000 marker but now counts more than 425,000 apps. The other major mobile app store, Google’s Android Market, only carries about 1,400 apps optimized for tablets. In total, the Android Market carries around 300,00 apps but as you can see, most of those are meant for Android phones and not tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Motorola Xoom.
Filed under: VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Jeff Jordan, former chairman and chief executive officer of OpenTable, has joined Andreessen-Horowitz as the firm’s fifth partner.
Jordan formerly led online auction site eBay to acquisitions of PayPal and Half.com as the company’s general manager. He then led PayPal as President before going on to OpenTable, a site that lets people reserve tables at restaurants through a slick web interface. It looks like Jordan has some experience making big-time deals based on his history with PayPal and OpenTable, which is now a publicly-traded company with more than 200 million diners served. Jordan’s first investment is a $5 million drop into LikeALittle (or LAL), an application designed to help individuals connect with people in their immediate vicinity. You know — the same kind of goal Color was shooting for with its photo-sharing application. The app was originally designed as a tool that let college students flirt with each other. Andreessen-Horowitz, while new, is one of the top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. The company has funded Web 2.0 supergiants like Groupon and Facebook, as well as news aggregator Digg and photo-sharing app Instagram. Marc Andreessen, the entrepreneur who co-founded the first significant Web browser Netscape at 22, joined Ben Horowitz to form the firm in 2009. The venture capital firm recently added enterprise pro Peter Levine in March. He was brought on board to focus on mobile enterprise technology — the kind developed by companies like cloud storage provider Box.net.
Filed under: deals         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  It looks like Kevin Rose isn’t taking his departure from news aggregator Digg that badly.
The former Digg founder said on Twitter today that he doesn’t even use aggregators like Digg as part of his online reading habits. It’s peculiar given that he founded one of the first and most popular news aggregation sites in the world. “My tech news reading behaviors have changed,” he said on his Twitter account. “I click @techmeme browse their tweets, then click out from there.” Rose might very well be onto something. While aggregator Reddit has seen massive growth, it seems to be the only news aggregator site doing that well. He left Digg in March to work on his latest startup, Milk. Rose launched Digg in 2004. He always shied away from being a direct leader of Digg, instead hiring Jay Adelson (who later got the boot) and most recently Amazon.com's Matt Williamsto run the company. Digg decided to remake the site and kill a number of features, leading to a mass exodus of its users to competing news aggregation site Reddit. Traffic research company Quantcast indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 14 million unique visitors, according to the numbers it released today. Since then, Rose was less of a direct leader of the site and more of an adviser. That didn't stop him from intervening in the site's activities from time to time — such as asking his Twitter followers whether or not the site should bring back its "bury" function, which pushes submitted links out of sight if they are unpopular enough. Rose’s latest startup is designed to be a place where developers can bring in an interesting idea and quickly turn it into some kind of operational mobile application. Most of them will probably fail, but Milk's goal is to find the few applications that end up turning into big hits on the scale of Angry Birds and Foursquare.
Filed under: media         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | by Bernard Moon, contributor. I've been testing out Google+ for the past couple of days. I admit that I had my doubts after Google’s prior failures with Buzz, Wave, and Lively. With Google+, though, I'm pleasantly surprised that I can see myself using it in the future. It will be interesting to see how it complements or replaces my other social networking activities. Here are my big three takeaways on what they did well. Circles. I believe Circles allows for the complexities of real-world relationships to be organized in a better way than what's currently available in social networking. It’s a convenience that I can see many people come to appreciate as they use Google+. I have some friends who are like George from Seinfeld – they don't like their worlds colliding. They don't like it that all their friends are gathered on Facebook without any controls and can share in mutual roasting and mocking or even mutual congratulations of their life activities.  I'm probably on the other end of the spectrum. I want my friends to meet online, and eventually offline. I want my worlds to collide. I share everything from pictures to new clips to random thoughts. I haven't gone completely open – I separate many of my professional contacts from my Facebook world and keep them on Linkedin. But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook "friends" to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously comfortable with Facebook to potentially "let loose". Lastly, Circles allows for social graphs that weren't previously available. For example, with online games you sometimes just want a person to be a gaming buddy on Facebook, but not for anything else. So what do you do? You bite the bullet or you just don't friend them, neither of which is an ideal choice. Circles can create a social gaming graph for such situations, not just one circle but as many as you need. Millionaire City friends? Sure. Petville friends? Awesome. Hangout. Multi-user video chat and video sharing has been done by standalone startups, but the convenience if including it within a social network is potentially tricky. What's cool with Hangout is that you can select and share Youtube videos with each other. Social discovery real-time can be a time suck for some people. It will be interesting to see what's integrated beyond watching Youtube videos with friends and family. I'm especially interested in gaming, which I can see becoming a huge driver for hanging out on Google+. Playing online poker with friends or Tetris Battle on Hangout? Killer. Multi-player Angry Birds? Uh-oh. Google Apps? Web store integration? Lots of potential here. Buzz. For me, it seems forced into Google+ profiles. If it doesn't have a life of it's own, I would suggest just letting it die. Also, it would be ideal if that Buzz column on my profile page were removed and replaced by a Twitter column. Maybe Google should just buy Twitter now. While I believe Twitter is here to stay, I'm not sure that it's a standalone company that can deliver long-term revenues. Twitter would be a nice fit into the Google universe, but I disgress. Those are my initial thoughts from using Google+. What are yours? Bernard Moon is co-founder & CEO of XS Groupe, an online private sale startup. He blogs at Silicon Moon.
Filed under: VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Amazon on Thursday said it had dropped the California members of its marketing affiliates program as retaliation to the state’s new law to charge sales taxes on online goods. Amazon competitor Overstock also intends to drop its California affiliates.
Amazon is by far the largest online retailer with more than $34 billion in annual sales. Until now, Amazon and other digital retailers have had a significant advantage over local stores because it doesn’t have to charge sales tax in any state where it doesn’t have a substantial corporate presence. In an e-mail to its California affiliates, Amazon said it opposed the bill because it is “unconstitutional and counterproductive.” Amazon further asserts that the bill is supported by big-box retailers that out to harm their competitors. California introduced the law, which issues Amazon and its affiliates to pay sales taxes, in the wake of a staggering budget deficit and hopes the online sales tax could help defray those costs. In 2008, Amazon axed its affiliate programs in New York, North Carolina, Hawaii, and Rhode Island after those states added online sales taxes. Last year, Amazon cut off Colorado for the same reasons. Other states are still fighting with Amazon on this issue as well. Texas, for example, sent Amazon a $269 million invoice on four years of unpaid taxes in late 2010. What do you think of Amazon’s move? Do you think Amazon should continue to not have to issue sales taxes?
Filed under: VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Hellgate: London, an online game developed by former members of Blizzard Entertainment that was shut down in 2009, has returned from the dead and is now free-to-play.
T3Fun will now operate the game now that the original studio is defunct. Many members of the team behind Diablo, a smash-hit online game, left Blizzard Entertainment to found Flagship Studios and begin work on Hellgate: London. The game originally came out in 2007, but the development studio filed for bankruptcy shortly after that. The game ran on a subscription-based model that cost players $10 a month, with an option to buy a lifetime subscription for $150. Hellgate: London still had a “free” element to the game, but players that didn’t by a subscription were severely weakened when compared to premium players. Premium players had access to player-versus-player content and could bypass lines to get into servers and begin playing the game. Free players could carry fewer items and could not create player communities like guilds, for example It was another online subscription-based game that became a casualty to supergiant online game World of Warcraft, which now has around 11.4 million users. World of Warcraft came out in 2005 and quickly became the most popular online game. The game cost players around $12 a month, making it hard to justify paying for a second game’s monthly subscription. Here's how the free-to-play, or "freemium", model works: players are able to play online games with persistent worlds like Lord of the Rings Online for free but must pay for additional perks like armor or becoming more powerful at a quicker pace. 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. Hellgate: London was a first-person shooter (FPS) online game that featured several elements from games like Diablo. It includes randomly-generated dungeons, monsters and loot that are designed to add a lot of chance to the game and encourage players to continue playing. It also features role-playing game elements like leveling up to become more powerful.
Filed under: games         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Online and mobile payments company Braintree banked $34 million today in a funding round from Accel Partners. The Chicago-based company got started in 2007 and now claims a $3 billion run rate in transaction volume.
The company works with more than 2,000 merchants, including daily deals site LivingSocial, vacation rental site Airbnb, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable and mobile reservation company GoMobo. Braintree was founded by CEO Bryan Johnson. CTO Dan Manges is a former Geek Squad member. “We believe that the payments industry is undergoing a transformative change as significant as what occurred with Netflix and Blockbuster,” said Johnson in the company’s (untraditionally written, slightly entertaining) press release. “We believe that the industry will consolidate dramatically and payments will be bundled with a larger set of services.” Johnson says Braintree bootstrapped for four years until meeting with Accel. Ryan Sweeney, a partner at Accel, is now on Braintree’s board. "Braintree caught our attention when we realized the vast majority of our portfolio companies were turning to them for payments,” said Sweeny in the Braintree release. “We're backing a team that has accomplished a tremendous amount with very few resources.” Braintree hopes to use the funding to improve its core products and “pursue exciting opportunities in payments.”
Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Google has launched Google Takeout, a service that downloads all of a user’s saved information on Google’s servers.
Google users can download all the information stored on Google’s servers related to Google Buzz, Gmail contacts, the Google+ activity stream, Picasa photo albums and their Google profile. All the files are then compiled on Google’s end and wrapped up into a single file that users can unzip and peruse. Google gives users a quick glance at the size of the file before giving them an option to create an archive and download the information. There are a number of reasons a user would want to use Google Takeout. For example, if users sign up to Google+, the company’s latest attempt at a social network, but decide they don’t like it, they can download all the important information from the time they used the service and then abandon it. It’s also useful considering Google+ does not work for Google Apps customers yet — just users with a free Gmail account and Google profile. So Google Apps users can employ Takeout to get all their contacts, photos and the like and upload it to a separate Google account for the purposes of activating a fleshed out Google+ account. Social network Facebook also has a similar option that lets users download all their photos, videos and other pieces of profile information. Facebook compiles all the information on the back-end and then emails the user when the file is ready instead of displaying the compiling process in real time like Google+. Facebook is infamous for having a web of hoops that users have to jump through to secure all their data before deleting a Facebook account. “We believe that if we make it easy for you to leave Google, we’ll have to work just that much harder to make sure you don’t,” the company’s “data liberation front” said in a video unveiling the service. Google+ launched yesterday, but the company stopped letting users send out invitations because it was growing too quickly. 
Filed under: social         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  China has more than 800 million mobile phones and a huge Android device market. So PapayaMobile hopes to leverage its prime location in Beijing to introduce Western Android game developers to the Chinese market.
The company’s new Gateway to China program is a one-stop solution that lets developers launch their Android games in China. The program recognizes the fact that China is one of best expansion markets for developers who have created hit games in Western countries. The virtual goods market in China is expected to hit $4 billion in 2011 and a growing chunk of that is in mobile games. The developers participating in the program includes BulkyPix, Kiloo, Connect2Media, Mindstorm Studios and Digital Prunes. They will get access to free China localization services, game Reviews and access to other marketing channels, distribution and management of games in China App stores, introductions to Chinese phone makers for pre-installed apps on phones, and easy access to China billing solutions through Papaya Social software development kit. PapayaMobile makes it easy for developers to add social features to their mobile games. "With three years of experience working in China, PapayaMobile has established relationships with key handset manufacturers, app stores, wireless operators and press making Papaya the most widely distributed mobile Social Networking Service in this territory," said Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile. "Our goal is to share these relationships with our developers so that they too can monetize the largest mobile market in the world." Shen is speaking on a panel on Mobile Social Networks of the Future at our GamesBeat 2011 conference, as described below. China isn’t an easy market to enter because of differences in culture, economy and regulations. The Android Marketplace is absent on all legally sold Android phones, so the market is fragmented into a variety of app stores. Developers need to launch their games in as many as 10 app stores to get real distribution. Jacob Moller, CEO of Kiloo, partnered with PapayaMobile to launch games on Android because of the difficulties. The company sees the large potential of mobile games in China and wants to establish a presence now.  We'll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, 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 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us atsponsors@venturebeat.com.
Filed under: games, mobile, social         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  The “TDL-4″ botnet now has more than 4.5 million infected PCs running on it and is the “most sophisticated threat” to computer security today, according to Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov.
Botnets are a series of malware-infected computers that are used for malicious activities, such as sending spam, stealing personal information, launching hacker attacks, and infecting other computers with viruses. They are so hard to defeat because there are so many infected machines. Kaspersky’s anti-virus software identifies the botnet as TDSS. “TDSS uses a range of methods to evade signature, heuristic, and proactive detection, and uses encryption to facilitate communication between its bots and the botnet command and control center,” Golovanov wrote earlier this week. “TDSS also has a powerful rootkit component, which allows it to conceal the presence of any other types of malware in the system.” The TDL-4 botnet started hitting computers in 2008, and it goes undetected because it infects the master boot record of a computer. This means the operating system and security software can’t detect it because the infection is so deep. It’s also strong because it has its own “anti-virus” that prevents other botnets from taking it over. Add this to the the fact that the TDL-4 uses a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network to operate and you have yourself a practically “indestructible” botnet, according to Golovanov. People can unwittingly infect their computers with a botnet by downloading something that appears harmless, such as a humorous video or picture. The infected file is usually attached to something inane and could easily be via e-mail, so its important to have active security software to scan all of your downloads.
Filed under: security, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Now this is truly White House 2.0: President Obama will host his first Town Hall on Twitter next week on July 6th, the White House announced in a tweet this morning.
The White House has created a new twitter account, @townhall, that will serve as a central source of updates for the event. Twitter has also set up a special site for the event to promote the #AskObama hashtag, which will be the way for Twitter users to submit questions for the event. And as with all Twitter hashtags, you can also search it on the site to keep track of the conversation. The Twitter Town Hall is the latest entry in Obama’s White House 2.0 initiative, which aims to make the White House more accessible via web services like Facebook and YouTube. It’s surprising that there hasn’t been a Town Hall event yet using Twitter, though the White House has asked for questions from the service for past events. In April, Obama held a similar Town Hall on Facebook. The news also coincides with the announcement last week that Obama has begun tweeting from his own account, @BarackObama. As his presidential campaign gears up again for 2012, I suspect we’ll be seeing even more online outreach from Obama as he strives to recapture the youth vote that helped him win the White House in 2008.
Filed under: Social Media, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  The creators of the Halo video game series are jumping into the social and mobile game markets with the establishment of their Bungie Aerospace division today.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based venture will help independent game developers create and publish mobile and social games. Bungie Aerospace will give indie studios creative freedom and resources they need, such as access to the huge Bungie community and Bungie.net platform, to launch their games. The move shows that social and mobile games are proving irresistible for game makers, even for a company as successful as Bungie, which has sold tens of millions of copies of its Halo console games. "Bungie has always been passionate about making and playing great games, regardless of platform," said Pete Parsons, Bungie’s chief operating officer. "Bungie Aerospace will allow us to explore game creation in multiple formats with some amazingly talented teams. Now that we've returned to our roots as an independent studio, we are in a position to launch Bungie Aerospace to support, foster, and elevate like-minded, independent developers." Bungie Aerospace's first official partnership is with Seattle-based developer Harebrained Schemes, headed by Jordan Weisman, one of the biggest creative minds in the game industry. Weisman has created a wide range of games and companies over time. His projects include Halo 2's "I Love Bees" alternate reality game, FASA Interactive, Wizkids, the MechWarrior and Shadowrun universes, and dozens of other creations. The studio's first mobile gaming title, “Crimson,” will launch on this summer Apple iOS and Android devices. More details will be revealed in the coming weeks. Bungie was originally founded in 1991 with two goals: to develop games that combine brilliant storytelling, beautiful art, and deep gameplay, and then to sell enough copies of those games to fund the studio's real goal of world domination.Bungie scored big with Halo on the Xbox in 2001 and released a series of Halo games culminating with Halo Reach last year. Now it has moved on to create a new sci-fi universe in a deal with Activision Blizzard.
Filed under: VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 
Aiming for an advantage in graphics in social games, Lolapps has acquired the Fliso Engine from Sean Cooper Games and hired its creator. The Fliso Engine is an engine, or foundation for creating games, that designers can used to create games in Adobe’s Flash environment on platforms such as Facebook. By acquiring it, Lolapps is making a power play to outdo rivals when it comes to beautiful-looking graphics in its games. It also opens up a new licensing business for Lolapps, which is one of the largest social game makers with millions of users. Lolapps will now brand the engine as the Lolapps Fliso Engine and license it to other game companies. Veteran game creator Sean Cooper created the Fliso Engine, which has the ability to run fast isometric Flash games without taxing a computer’s memory. That means it can run a beautiful scene like the pseudo-3D one above. at full speed without bogging down your computer, even on a relatively slow platform like Facebook. Arjun Sethi, chief executive of Lolapps, said that his company came into contact with Cooper about 18 months ago and used the Fliso engine to create its Critter Island game, which was noteworthy because it was able to display lots of moving critters on an island at the same time. When that game debuted last year, it was a step above the animation quality of many other Facebook games. “It’s a strategic move for us,” Sethi said in an interview. Lolapps used the engine again in its groundbreaking title, Ravenwood Fair, which was designed by game veteran John Romero. That game let players create a camp in the middle of a large forest with lots of trees, numerous animals, and transparent clouds that floated across the sky. For a cartoon-style game, it looked quite pretty. That game took off (it still has six million monthly active users on Facebook) and Lolapps began creating more and more titles based on the Ravenwood theme, including Ravenstone Mine. Cooper began helping with the games and the parties started talking. Under the deal, Lolapps acquires Cooper’s company and Cooper will work for Lolapps as chief Flash architect, reporting directly to Sethi. The company will maintain support for existing engine licensees and try to sign up more of them, Sethi said. In other words, Lolapps won’t keep the technology completely exclusive for its own internal game design purposes. Four out of the top five social game makers now license the engine. Besides making games prettier, the engine also reduces the amount of time and money to develop games. And it expands the audience that can run Flash games at high speeds, as it allows weaker computers to run the games. Games built with the engine can have more interaction. "I'm excited to be joining Lolapps where I believe the technology I've developed can be leveraged to bring the highest level of creativity to life," said Cooper. "The strength of the team chemistry between the art and technology teams at Lolapps will continue to give them a massive advantage in creating the most immersive game worlds." Cooper has worked on games that have sold more than 20 million copies. He resides in the United Kingdom and has worked at Bullfrog Productions and Electronic Arts, working on titles such as Command & Conquer. He started making casual games in 2005 and created Fliso in order to make better games. His Fliso engine is now on version 2. Sethi said that future games, such as Ravenshire Castle, pictured above, will have much larger territories for players to explore, thanks to the more efficient engine. Another title, Ravensky City, will also use the Fliso engine.
Filed under: deals, games, social         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Google Calendar just got a lot less ugly. The web calendar service received was revamped this morning as a part of Google’s new focus on user experience. Judging from what we’re seeing in the new Calendar today, I’m excited to see what Google comes up with for other services, especially Gmail. In addition to an overall visual change, Google also streamlined other aspects of Calendar’s interface. Among the changes, calendar lists on the left side of the screen are now collapsed by default (which just looks neater), visual indicator icons only appear when you hover over calendar events, and the Print and Refresh buttons are now icons instead of links. Google offers the ability to jump back to the classic Calendar look — but why would you want to? The company says the design changes were made with its three new design principles in mind: focus, elasticity, and effortlessness. Google announced its new design imitative on Tuesday following Google+’s launch. Basically, the company is now focusing on making its interfaces less cluttered, easily transitioned from desktop and mobile devices, and combining power with simplicity. The latter may not sound too different from the minimalist Google interfaces that we’ve grown used to, but judging from the visual flourishes in Google+ and the eye-pleasing changes in Calendar, it seems like Google is finally paying more attention to aesthetics rather than being completely pragmatic in its designs.
Filed under: Business and Technology, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  55 percent of U.S. consumers who purchased a new phone in the last three months bought a smartphone, according to data from Nielsen’s May mobile consumer survey.
This marks the first time, at least according to Nielsen’s data, that smartphones have outranked feature phones (often known as “dumb phones”) in sales. And with smartphone sales speeding up, there’s little chance this trend will be reversed anytime soon. Last year, only 34 percent of consumers reported purchasing a smartphone. Overall, about 38 percent of consumers own smartphones now, and 62 percent own feature phones, according to Nielsen’s data. Android is still the most dominant mobile platform, with 38 percent of smartphone owners running Android devices, but the research firm also notes that its growth seems to have plateaued over the past few months. Android jumped from holding 21 percent of new purchases in November to 27 percent in February, but it hasn’t grown beyond that figure since then. Apple’s iPhone, on the other hand, continues to be a rising star among new smartphone buyers. After accounting for 10 percent of new smartphone purchases in February, the iPhone has jumped to 17 percent as of May. The Verizon iPhone’s launch was likely a driving factor in that growth, so it’ll be interesting to see if Apple can keep snapping up new users for the remainder of the year.  We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.
Filed under: Business and Technology, mobile, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Tired of overflowing bins and roads blocked by waste vans? Quebec’s new Cité Verte (green city) eco urban development will use a vacuum-powered (pneumatic), underground waste system from Swedish company Envac.
A system of underground pipes will connect directly to 3 types of waste drop off points for organic waste, recyclables and all other waste respectively. A massive vacuum of 20-30 kilopascal of pressure is created to suck the waste into a local “substation” where organic waste is generally turned into biogas while other waste is incinerated to produce electricity or heat. In Envac installations, the waste may travel 8-9 kilometers at up to 50 km/hour. It takes 10 seconds to empty a waste point. The whole system is entirely automated and substations are unmanned. The same piping is used for all types of waste, with cleaning at intervals in between.  While Envac’s system may sound like something out of a Steampunk novel, it has been in use in parts of Sweden for many years. Envac’s marketing director Jonas Tornblom showed me around an early green development in Stockholm where the system has been in use since 1995.
One set of waste drop off points serves 30-50 families. In a clever piece of social engineering the drop off point is clearly visible from most of the apartments in the development, discouraging misuse and dumping of waste beside the bins (I wish this was the case in my area of Amsterdam). Early on there were some problems with the purity of the biogas being produced from the organic waste because residents didn’t always deposit the correct types of waste but after an education program the gas is now up to 95 percent purity. Tornblom also gave a tour of the local waste “substation”, where the waste is collected and processed. Entirely unmanned, it must be the neatest waste dump I’ve ever seen; just a series of pipes and containers. The visiting journalists got quite giddy with excitement when a loud “whoosh” indicated that the next round of waste is being sucked through the pipes. Waste management shouldn’t be this much fun. The company just completed an installation in a park in central Stockholm which had a big problem with littering. The litter bins often overflowed attracting birds, rats and cats who pulled the waste out. Envac’s new self emptying litter bins have sensors which detect when they are full. A total of 100,000 people in Stockholm are served by Envac’s system. The biggest deployments elsewhere are in South Korea and China, where there are several installations in new developments handling waste from over 40,000 households. Envac sees the biggest future market potential in China and India, where the urbanization rate is extremely high, there is little space available to store the waste and high temperatures and humidity make storage problematic.  Another popular installation involves retrofitting of city centers. Envac already has deployments in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca and the company is currently retrofitting the Quartier International in central Montreal. In total there are close to 700 installations worldwide.
Envac does the complete installation ourselves from initial design to operation and maintenance. An Envac system is expensive to install because of the construction cost but the running costs are very low in comparison to a conventional waste collection system. In the U.S., Envac has a competitor called Transvac, which specializes in vacuum waste systems for hospitals Envac is based in Stockholm and has 600 employees. The company was founded in 1952, but initially specialized in vacuum dust systems.
Filed under: green, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Today we're revealing the eighth group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. They’re the oddballs fo the group because they aren’t necessarily from the mobile game industry, which is the focus of the conference. Rather, these folks all have experience with their panel topic, Raising a Big Pile of Money.
The speakers include Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds; Shervin Pishevar, managing director of Menlo Ventures and founder of SGN; Joe Kraus, principle of Google Ventures; Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam; and game industry consultant Mark Friedler, the moderator. Stay tuned on this channel. By the end of this, we could have more than 70 speakers. In fact, we’ve got 58 speakers already who are the who’s who in gaming. (see our agenda). This group is uniquely qualified to talk about the topic of raising a lot of venture capital money. They can talk about it from multiple point of views. Kraus, for instance, led the investment in Chou’s Kabam.  Lars Buttler’s Trion Worlds has raised more than $100 million to create a factory for massively multiplayer online games. The company took almost five years to launch its first game, Rift, which has topped a million users for the subscription-based game. More MMOs are coming because Buttler made a huge bet, hiring multiple teams to work on multiple MMOs at the same time. Buttler previously was the vice president for global online at Electronic Arts, where he ran EA’s strategy for online games. He also worked at the Carlyle Group and Wingcast Europe. Buttler is also serving on another session at GamesBeat 2011 that we’ll talk about a little later.You’ll like it.
 Shervin Pishevar joined Menlo Ventures just a few weeks ago to invest in social web, consumer internet, and mobile investments. Before that, he was chief application officer and general manager at Mozilla. He also founded Social Gaming Network, which was recently acquired by Mindjolt. he also founded Webs.com, Hyperoffice, and Hotprints and has invested in more than 40 companies as an angel investor, including Aardvark, Milo.com and others. He is active in social media and isn’t shy about expressing his opinion.
 Joe Kraus has been a partner at Google Ventures since 2009. His focus is on mobile, gaming and local services. Prior to Google, Kraus was a two-time entrepreneur. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, one of the pioneers in internet search. And in 2004, he co-founded JotSpot, a wiki company that Google bought in 2006. At Google, he has had roles with products such as Blogger, Picasa, Sites, Friend Connect and OpenSocial. He has been an angel investor in LinkedIn, Aardvark, Kongregate and Open Candy. Among the deals he has handled in games is the investment in Kabam.
 Kevin Chou recently raised $85 million for Kabam, which focuses on hardcore gamers on Facebook. Kabam has raised more than $125 million to date. The large amount of money suggests the opportunity before Kabam is huge, as the company races to build games (such as Dragons of Atlantis, Kingdoms of Camelot, Global Warfare and Glory of Rome) that appeal to gamers who play six or seven days a week and don’t mind spending to get ahead in their games. Kabam only has about 8 million users, for less than Facebook game leader Zynga. But those users are spending a lot of money in their games.
 Mark Friedler is a consultant for game companies in the mobile, social and ad/media markets. He was a founder of companies including IndustryGamers.com (acquired by Eurogamer), GameDaily (acquired by AOL/Time Warner), Gigex, and V-Cast (acquired by Verizon Wireless). He’s also a veteran moderator at our GamesBeat events.
The GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Our previous announced speakers include Peter Driessen, CEO of Spil Games; Julian Farrior, CEO of Backflip Studios; Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville; 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; 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.  We'll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, 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 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us atsponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who's Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.
Filed under: games, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Boku is announcing today that it is enabling one-tap billing for Android devices in 56 countries.That allows users to pay for things such as virtual goods in social games by using their mobile phone numbers rather than a credit card.
 The bill goes directly to a user’s monthly phone bill with a simple tap on the screen. Users don’t have to enter their long credit card numbers or personally identifiable information in a transaction.
Boku previously announced its plans to move to Android and now it is releasing the production version of its Android software development kit, which game and app developers can use to make their apps enabled for mobile number payments. Zong, a rival to Boku, has also been testing its one-click payment system on Android. San Francisco-based Boku can now enable developers to aggressively expand their revenues as they launch free-to-play games, or those where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in the games. The free-to-play model is now possible on Android since Google enabled in-app purchases, or the ability to buy something without leaving an app. The in-app purchase makes it convenient to buy something in a game. And Boku’s solution makes it easy to pay for that something. That makes mobile purchase much more convenient for a broader audience, which is good for game developers. Boku supports 32 different languages and 40 different currencies. It works with Android 1.5 devices and up. “When we developed the beta version, the reaction was tremendous and the value to developers was immediately clear," said Erich Ringewald, chief technology officer at Boku. "The production version released today includes global country coverage, faster end-to-end transaction time, clear messaging to consumers and enhanced error handling. All these new features help to increase conversion rates to merchants while providing a seamless and secure purchase experience." The process for making a purchase works like this. The user chooses what to buy and starts the transaction. The user confirms on screen that they want to buy the item. The transaction completes within seconds. The user can then continue to use he application and the charge appears on the user’s monthly phone bill. Supported countries include: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Filed under: games, mobile, social         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Editor's note: Chad Little is the founder and CEO of FetchBack. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) As entrepreneurs we tend to beat ourselves up over the tiniest mistakes – but sometimes we make big ones. I’ve been part of four ventures over 20 years, but some of the biggest I’ve made came when I launched Sandbox Entertainment. We had millions of customers – but little revenue. I was the founder – but ultimately, I was fired. We had roughly 100 employees – but no team. The good thing about mistakes is you can learn from them. Here’s what I did wrong. Mistake #1: Not prioritizing the company culture – At Sandbox, I was so focused on things like fundraising and acquiring customers that culture wasn't on my priority list. During the course of building the company we acquired another entity, whose employees had a culture that didn't match ours (or that of a startup company). Through no fault of their own, they continued working as they always had, which unfortunately didn't mesh well with our existing way of running things. It’s something I should have paid attention to, but didn’t – and that was a huge screw-up. By the time I realized there was a problem, the internal culture was completely out of synch. Trying to re-synch the process was so burdensome that it began to take time away from innovating the product and creating a sustainable model. My takeaway from this was to spend time building a company culture that contributed to the overall success from the very beginning. I also learned to pay attention to the symptoms of a workforce that isn't working and deal with it swiftly. Mistake #2: False sense of financial security – The ability to raise capital and high valuations was completely out of hand in the 90s and we all know how that ended. Like so many dot-coms, we were handed a pile of money that made us feel secure, but it was an illusion. Because of that influx, we spent cash like it was guaranteed to keep flowing. Because of a ripe market and some really smart viral marketing, we had an amazing growth in our user base early on, but that didn't mean we had a sustainable revenue plan (something we considered to be a minor detail at the time, thanks to the cash infusion). I knew that it would take years for the organization to drive big revenue, but we could have easily implemented another model to curb some of the mounting costs, and probably would have made the business cash flow neutral. Here's the kicker: without a large bank account, we might have been forced to come to that conclusion, or another creative way to keep revenue coming in the door. This effort may have even saved the company. But we didn't feel the need to go there, since our bank account was padded by VC dollars. Ultimately, we realized we shouldn’t have taken the big round. Mistake #3: No clear vision – Sandbox had no clear vision – and, at the time, no one realized how problematic this was. Before you talk to an investor – hell, before you talk to your first prospective customer – pull your partners and executive team together and come to terms on this. Take as much time as you need here because this will be what you go back to when things go awry (and they will go awry). I was rightly fired from the company I had founded and I believe it partly goes back to my failure to take this step. After I was dismissed, Sandbox was merged into another company – and the remaining executives weren't able to stand their ground on how the company should grow, because they had no ground. Had we built a formal vision and stuck to our guns, things might have turned out quite differently.
Filed under: EC Media, Entrepreneur Corner, Financing, Management, Product Development, VentureBeat         
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  VentureBeat is delighted to announce our all-star panel of judges for our third-annual Who’s Got Game? contest. This contest selects the best game start-up after a grueling on-stage bake-off.
 This year’s contest, to be held during the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel on July 12-13, will be moderated by Sana Choudary, chief executive of the game accelerator YetiZen. A new start-up itself, YetiZen take start-ups under its wing and helps them hone their businesses, introducing them to game industry insiders, lawyers, investors and game designers during three-month classes. Choudary is well-versed in the game industry and co-hosts the monthly SF Game Developers Workshop series, which draws hundreds of people each month to educational events and parties.
Our other judges include Tim Chang, a partner at venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners; Michael Chang, director of corporate development at Electronic Arts; and Terence Fung, head of corporate development at Zynga.  Tim Chang is one of the well-known experts on the game industry in investor circles. At Norwest, he focuses on investments in mobile, gaming, digital media and also leads NVP’s investment practice in China and Asia-Pacific. He was named to the 2011 Forbes Midas List of Top VCs and his venture investments have generated more than $1.3 billion in merger and acquisition exit value. He serves on the boards of Basis, AdChina, Lumos Labs, and AllReach Media. Two of Tim’s big investments were Ngmoco, which was acquired by DeNA for up to $403 million, and Playdom, acquired by Disney for up to $763.2 million.
 Terence Fung is in charge of buying companies for Zynga. I don’t think they let Terence out much, since Zynga has been buying a game studio at a pace of one per month for the past year. Fung joined Zynga in January, 2010 and he heads the corporate development team. Previously, he was a senior banker at the investment bank Lazard, where he focused on domestic and cross-border technology and digital media advisory for 10 years. Prior to that, he was at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell.
 And our last judge is Michael Chang, director of the corporate development team at EA, responsible for acquisitions and investments for the big video game publisher. He joined the company in July, 2010. Prior to that, he held roles at venture capital and private equity firms, including Bertram Capital, Apax Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Yes, we’ll have Zynga and EA on the same stage. Hopefully, one day, they’re be fighting over which of our finalists to buy.
As much as these folks look alike (Sana excluded), they are not related. And they are sure to raise good questions, make interesting observations, and otherwise keep us entertained for what is usually one of the most fun parts of our events. The contest will be similar to the presentations at our DEMO conferences. Each startup will get on stage for a few minutes. The judges will have a chance to ask a question or offer feedback. It will be great for the entrepreneurs to be exposed to some of the most discerning judges who have to look for great start-ups for a living. The judges will look at the companies based on their big ideas, originality, freshness, momentum, likelihood for business success, and their potential for making fun products. These judges have worked hard for their on-stage glory. They read through 39 applications for the contest. We’ve already gone through our preliminary judging round today and we’ll announce our eight finalists shortly. The contest itself will take place on the afternoon of July 13th and we’ll announce the winner at the close of the conference that day. To see the latest speakers, check out our post from yesterday.  We'll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, 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 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.
Filed under: games         
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As the Facebook game industry shifts toward Facebook’s Facebook Credits virtual currency ahead of the July 1 deadline, Live Gamer is making itself useful in helping with the transition. New York-based Live Gamer is announcing today that it will handle Facebook Credits on an exclusive basis for Sid Meier’s Civilization World, one of the most anticipated social games of the season. Take-Two Interactive, which is publishing the Civilization World game this summer, will use Live Gamer to power the virtual goods transactions and manage the virtual economy in the social game, which will be free-to-play. That is, gamers can play it for free but pay real money for virtual goods in small transactions. The 2K label of Take-Two will use Live Gamer Elements to handle everything from analytics to integration with Facebook Credits for payments. I’m in the midst of trying out Civilization World now in a closed beta and I’m very curious whether it will be appealing to Civilization’s fans, who have bought more than 10 million games over the years. It will be interesting to watch how the entire Facebook game industry migrates from their own virtual currencies to Facebook Credits, which is the social network’s new universal currency for digital goods purchases, in the coming days. Live Gamer has a wide range of clients — from Electronic Arts to THQ — with more than 90 million users in 23 countries. Facebook is making Credits mandatory.
Filed under: games, VentureBeat         
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Apple is adopting a more aggressive strategy toward iPad shipments that should ensure the device is free of delays in the immediate future.
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