 | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
YouTube is taking a major step today with its first live sports broadcast deal. It will be streaming live the Indian Premier League Championships. Such live broadcast deals have hitherto been the bastion of traditional pay TV operators. The Google-owned site signed an agreement with the organizers back in January and retains rights for two seasons.
The IPL is a tournament of a short-form of cricket that has become extremely popular in the last couple of years. The tournament spans 60 matches over the next 45 days. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Twitter is abuzz today with a story attributed to popular news wire service The Associated Press. The new trending topic spotlights Formspring.me, a social network that lets users create profiles to post and answer questions anonymously, and its CEO, who was supposedly arrested two days ago for an elaborate scheme to release private customer information to the public on April 1.
But the story was just dubbed a hoax by news site The Inquisitr, which points out numerous “mistakes” in the supposed AP story: there’s no record of the story existing on the AP’s web site, there’s no set date for the story and it doesn’t fit AP style guidelines. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Michigan is taking a lot of hits lately. Not only is its traditional automotive industry winding down, but new electric car companies are being lured elsewhere too, despite state efforts. It’s one ray of hope has been the advanced battery business, with $300 million in tax cuts successfully attracting major companies to the region. Today, that ray just got a bit brighter, with Korea’s LG Chem announcing plans to open a $303 million battery cell factory in Holland, Mich.
The location is pretty advantageous for the corporation, which has a deal to supply battery cells to Detroit-based General Motors for its much-hyped plug-in Chevy Volt. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Location-based gaming in the real world is a hit with gamers and a broader community of mobile app users. Booyah’s Keith Lee has learned that with the rapid growth of his company’s MyTown app on the iPhone.
Lee, chief executive of Booyah, was one of the speakers at our GamesBeat@GDC panel on disruptive innovation.
He said MyTown has grown to more than 1.3 million players in a short time, making it the most popular game that takes into account your real world location on the iPhone platform. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Location-based gaming in the real world is a hit with gamers and a broader community of mobile app users. Booyah’s Keith Lee has learned that with the rapid growth of his company’s MyTown app on the iPhone.
Lee, chief executive of Booyah, was one of the speakers at our GamesBeat@GDC panel on disruptive innovation.
He said MyTown has grown to more than 1.3 million players in a short time, making it the most popular game that takes into account your real world location on the iPhone platform. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Sid Meier knows how gamers think. He has been making hit games such as Civilization for decades. Today, he shared his learnings about gamer psychology and how he has had to change his assumptions about how players behave. More often than not, he said, players just don’t act logically.
Early on, Meier learned that players are egomaniacs. If you want to create a civilization that rules the world, you’re by definition an egomaniac. That has a lot of implications, such as how you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Sid Meier knows how gamers think. He has been making hit games such as Civilization for decades. Today, he shared his insights on gamer psychology and how he has had to change his assumptions about how players behave. More often than not, he said, players just don’t act logically.
Early on, Meier learned that players are egomaniacs. If you want to create a civilization that rules the world, you’re by definition an egomaniac. That has a lot of implications, such as how you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
About a month ago, email assistant startup Cc:Betty renamed itself Threadbox and said it was rebuilding the product into a more work-focused collaboration tool. At 5pm Pacific today, users will get a chance to try out the new app, as Threadbox enters an invite-only beta testing phase.
Previously, Cc:Betty was supposed to help users organize email conversations and find the important content like documents and locations. You sent emails into the system by cc’ing “betty@ccbetty.com.” That was cute, but according to chief executive Michael Cerda, it also confused the people users’ were emailing because they had no idea who “Betty” was. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
About a month ago, email assistant startup Cc:Betty renamed itself Threadbox and said it was rebuilding the product into a more work-focused collaboration tool. At 5pm Pacific today, users will get a chance to try out the new app, as Threadbox enters an invite-only beta testing phase.
Previously, Cc:Betty was supposed to help users organize email conversations and find the important content like documents and locations. You sent emails into the system by cc’ing “betty@ccbetty.com.” That was cute, but according to chief executive Michael Cerda, it also confused the people users’ were emailing because they had no idea who “Betty” was. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Plastic Logic announced today that it will have to delay the release of its hotly anticipated Que eBook reader until this summer. The company was originally aiming for a mid-April release.
It’s an inopportune time to announce such a big delay, considering that Apple just opened up preorders for the iPad today. Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta said that the delay is meant to “fine-tune the features and enhance the overall product experience”, according to the Wall Street Journal. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Plastic Logic announced today that it will have to delay the release of its hotly anticipated Que eBook reader until this summer. The company was originally aiming for a mid-April release.
It’s an inopportune time to announce such a big delay, considering that Apple just opened up preorders for the iPad today. Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta said that the delay is meant to “fine-tune the features and enhance the overall product experience”, according to the Wall Street Journal. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Santa-Barbara-based Sonos sells wireless multi-room home music systems. They’re kind of pricey, but they work at least as well as trying to hook all your computers together with iTunes. Plus you don’t have to stop the music to reboot your PC.
Sonos, founded in the Wi-Fi-crazy days of 2003, has survived the intervening bad years and emerged with a new round of funding: $25 million led by Index Ventures, which has added VC Mike Volpi to Sonos’ board of directors.
As AllThings D reports, Sonos plans to use the funding to expand sales into China and Japan. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners, spoke about where he wants to put his firm’s venture money in the game business on a panel at the GamesBeat@GDC conference on Wednesday.
Part of the discussion focused on “game-ification,” or using the techniques of game design to get people more interested in non-game applicaitons. Investors aren’t just looking to fund game makers, or even new technologies — they are looking ahead to the application of gaming mechanics in people’s real lives. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Early this morning, Apple finally opened the floodgates for iPad preorders. You can preorder the tablet at the Apple online store for free home delivery on its launch day, April 3. You can also choose to reserve an iPad for pickup at an Apple store on April 3.
The iPad starts at $499 for the 16GB model with Wi-Fi, and there’s also a 32GB model available for $599, and a $699 64GB version. If you want 3G included, tack an extra $130 on your model of choice, and be prepared to wait until late April for it to ship. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
The saying a picture is worth a thousand words just got another real-world illustration. FunMobility, a mobile content community, today announced the launch of FunTweet, a website that adds a visual component to tweets that are related to the text.
FunTweet is a simple idea, but one that could become popular as people look to spice up their tweets. By visiting the website, a user can type in a key word or their own Twitter username. From there, each tweet is given a background image that relates to keywords and phrases in the text. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Disruption 2.0 was the theme at our GamesBeat@GDC conference about the business of innovation in the video game industry. We had a great crowd and it was standing-room only for many of the presentations. We’re grateful to everybody who came and our speakers as well. By way of thanks, we’re posting the opening video that we played at the conference, where key luminaries of games shared their thoughts on what disruption means for the game business. The speakers in the video include Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and chief executive of Digital Chocolate; Sebastien DeHalleux, president of EA’s Playfish; Tom Kalinske, former head of Sega and chairman of Moonshoot; and Peter Relan chairman of incubator YouWeb, Sibblingz, Crowdstar, and Aurora Feint. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Angel investor Ron Conway has put money in over 500 companies, so he knows a few things about what works and what doesn’t. In this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture at Stanford University, Conway and fellow investor Mike Maples Jr. of Maples Investments discuss ways to stay competitive and make your money last. Tip one: Don’t be in a hurry to grow your staff as fast as you might be tempted.
Tags: lean and mean, Stanford University
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
OnLive keeps rolling out news for its games on demand service. On Wednesday, the company announced it would launch its server-based game service on June 17. And today the company said it will launch a game portal web site that will offer game demos for free.
Steve Perlman, chief executive of OnLive said tonight at his company’s after-party at the Game Developers Conference that OnLive Game Portal will be a free companion to the OnLive Game Service, which will charge gamers $15 a month for social networking and multiplayer game play. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
DoubleVerify, a company that tracks online ad placement, has raised $10 million in second round funding.
Given the importance of online advertisements as a key source of revenue on the web, its also important to make sure that the ads are getting served correctly. DoubleVerify’s ad verification service does just that, and allows those in the ad supply chain — including publishers, marketers, agencies, and ad networks — to better keep track of individual ads.
We’ve previously covered the launch of DoubleVerify’s realtime ad verification service, which crawls websites and automatically captures screenshots of offending ad placement. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Fresh off its recent Android launch, Canadian social media startup HootSuite acquired developer Swift App to beef up its presence on Google’s mobile platform.
Sebastian Delmont, the developer behind Swift App, will join HootSuite as a mobile adviser. His company built a Twitter client of the same name for Android phones (the first picture below). Neither company released terms of the deal.
HootSuite builds products that let people and businesses manage their presences across multiple social networks. [...]
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