Stonetrip’s 3-D game engine will bring high-quality games to Android phonesThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology French company Stonetrip has announced today that it has created tools that will enable developers to create cool 3-D games and apps on Google Android phones. The ShiVa 3D engine for Android will be released in a couple of weeks. The engine is a software platform that lets 3-D games run on Android phones. It will compete with the Unity Technologies, whose Unity 3D game engine is used to make a lot of games that run on the iPhone, the web and other paltforms. Sophia-Antipolis, France-based Stonetrip licensed its technology to developer DVide, which ported the game Crusade of Destiny to the Android platform using its engine. [...] Read more |
Stonetrip’s 3D game engine will bring high-quality games to Android phonesThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology French company Stonetrip announced today that it has created tools to help developers create cool 3D games and apps on Google Android phones. The ShiVa 3D engine for Android will be released in a couple of weeks. The engine is a software platform that lets 3D games run on Android phones. It will compete with Unity Technologies, whose Unity 3D game engine is used to make a lot of games that run on the iPhone, the web and other platforms. Stonetrip, based in Sophia-Antipolis, France, licensed its technology to developer DVide, which ported the game Crusade of Destiny to the Android platform using its engine. [...] Read more |
Four ways to make money “selling” free mobile appsThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology The mobile app market is heating up, both for paid and free apps. And we’re seeing numerous app developers and content publishers jumping into the market every day looking to make money on this opportunity. If you can get consumers to pay for your app, great. But with all the free apps already available for smartphones and tablet devices such as Apple’s upcoming iPad, many newcomer apps will likely have to be free, too, in order to compete. But free doesn’t mean you don’t make money on your app. [...] Read more |
Open source video company Kaltura joins with Wikimedia to promote HTML5 videoThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Kaltura, developer of an open source video platform, has joined with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Open Video Alliance to launch two initiatives to promote HTML5 video on the web. HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the programming language that makes up most of the web. It’s being looked at as a challenger to Adobe Flash in many ways, since it allows for web animations and video without the use of a plugin. Many sites are currently pursuing HTML5 video players, including YouTube and Vimeo. [...] Read more |
Gift card marketplace CardPool pays users to recommend friendsThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology CardPool, a new startup incubated by Y Combinator, helps users get money for gift cards that they don’t want. Now it’s also offering a financial incentive for those users to recruit their friends. The concept behind San Francisco-based CardPool is pretty straightforward. It acts as the middleman between people who want to unload unwanted cards and people interested in buying them for a discount. The site says it pays sellers up to 90 percent of the value of a gift card, then offers them to buyers for as much as 30 percent off. [...] Read more |
Viacom thought YouTube would have made a ‘transformative acquisition’Thursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Well before Viacom sued Google for $1 billion in damages over copyright infringement in 2007, the media conglomerate thought that the video-sharing site would have made a “transformative acquisition” for the company, according to court briefs released today. (The briefs are here, here and here.) Only once YouTube fell into the hands of Google for close to $1.8 billion in 2006 did Viacom turn around and take serious action. But the relationship remained complicated. Even during the acquisition, Viacom initially allowed its content to stay on the site. [...] Read more |
Smartling lands $4M, continues momentum for translation solutionsThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology It looks like competition among translation startups is heating up, with a number of companies popping up making substantial announcements in the last few months. Smartling, a startup that helps businesses to better use their websites by speaking to customers in their native language in real time, announced today it has secured a first round of funding for $4 million. Smartling is one of many services targeting internet companies looking to do global business. The company claims that more than 70% of internet users don’t speak English. [...] Read more |
Smartling lands $4M, continues frenzy of web translationThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology It looks like competition among translation startups is heating up, with a number of companies popping up making substantial announcements in the last few months. Smartling, a startup that helps businesses to better use their websites by speaking to customers in their native language in real time, announced today it has secured a first round of funding for $4 million. Smartling is one of many services targeting internet companies looking to do global business. The company claims that more than 70% of internet users don’t speak English. [...] Read more |
BioShock 2: Great game hurt by a special trick that is too powerful and addictiveThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology At a certain point in BioShock 2, I figured out what I needed to do to win the video game. I had to hypnotize the enemies so that they would shoot each other and not me. It’s a fun trick to play, but it wound up ruining the game in a lot of ways. It made finishing the game too easy. Don’t get me wrong. I just finished the game and loved the experience. I rank this game as a 9 out of 10. It is a wonderful combination of horror, nostalgic art style, addictive game play, and an engrossing story. [...] Read more |
Amazon releases Kindle ebook reader application for MacsThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Amazon has finally released a version of its Kindle ebook reading software for the Mac. The company previously released a Kindle app for the iPhone a year ago, and has plans for an iPad version of the software as well. The free Kindle for Mac includes all of the features that you would expect: You can buy and read books from Amazon’s Kindle Store, access your library of previously purchased Kindle books, synchronize your bookmarks and last page read with other Kindle apps or devices, and view notes and highlights. [...] Read more |
Roundup: Yahoo snaps up Citizen Sports, Doerr departs Amazon board and moreThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Here’s the latest action: Yahoo dips into social game space with Citizen Sports buy — Yahoo announced that it is acquiring Citizen Sports, a company that offers sports-related applications for the iPhone and Facebook. The search engine says that the deal will boost to its already popular sports vertical by giving it a presence across more platforms. According to an interview on paidContent, Yahoo has felt left out of the conquest of Facebook, which is quickly becoming the epicenter of online fantasy sports. [...] Read more |
EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 blasts out 2.3M unit salesThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Electronic Arts said today that its Battlefield: Bad Company 2 video game has sold more than 2.3 million units sold, putting the game on track to be a contender for best seller of the month. The game — where you can destroy environments as you shoot at enemies — went on sale on March 2 on the PlayStation 3, the PC and Xbox 360. The brisk sales should come as a relief to EA, the struggling game giant that has laid off 1,500 people, or 15 percent of its staff, during the past couple of quarters. [...] Read more |
GetGlue helps you find Taste Neighbors who like the same books, movies, and musicThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology GetGlue, the social recommendation service from startup Adaptive Blue, has been collecting data about what its users like since its launch in November. Now it’s taking using that data to help those users find others who like the same things. To do this, the service (which works through both the GetGlue website and a browser add-on) is introducing a new feature called Taste Neighbors. Previously, users probably followed the activity of other users if they were already friends. GetGlue didn’t provide a systematic way to find new connections. [...] Read more |
As digital distribution looms, GameStop keeps opening retail storesThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology GameStop, the worlds biggest video game retailer, managed to grow in its fourth fiscal quarter thanks to sales of used games and new store openings. Even in the age of digital distribution from rivals such as OnLive, GameStop plans on opening 400 stores in the coming year. The Grapevine, Texas-based company reported that sales for the fourth fiscal quarter ended Jan. 30 grew 1 percent to $3.52 billion from $3.49 billion a year ago. Earnings were $215.9 million, down 7.1 percent from $232.3 million a year ago, though earnings a year ago got a $12 million boost due to a merger. [...] Read more |
10 things you won’t learn in schoolThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology (Editor’s note: Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher are partners with AKF Partners and have recently published The Art of Scalability. They submitted this story to VentureBeat.) You can learn a lot of things in the classroom. A lot of the knowledge you’ll glean comes in the form of facts (or “laws”) on how and why certain things work. A few lessons involve behaviors, such as team work. On very rare occasions, one learns a life lesson. But there are some things you’ll never learn in the classroom. [...] Read more |
Videoplaza raises $5 million for video ad-serving technologyThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Videoplaza, a Swedish startup that helps publishers optimize the way they serve video ads, raised $5 million to expand across Europe. Creandum and Northzone, two leading Scandinavian venture capital firms, led the round for the company which started breaking even in November. The company has spent more than two years building sophisticated technology that helps online sites figure out which videos ads to use when, so that they elicit the highest click-through rates. Stockholm-based Videoplaza is not an ad network like VideoEgg, but rather a set of tools that can determine when to show a consumer a pre-roll ad, post-roll or a branded overlay that sits on top of a player. [...] Read more |
Videoplaza raises $5M for video ad-serving technologyThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Videoplaza, a Swedish startup that helps publishers optimize the way they serve video ads, raised $5 million to expand across Europe. Creandum and Northzone, two leading Scandinavian venture capital firms, led the round for the company which started breaking even in November. The company has spent more than two years building sophisticated technology that helps online sites figure out which videos ads to use when, so that they elicit the highest click-through rates. Stockholm-based Videoplaza is not an ad network like VideoEgg, but rather a set of tools that can determine when to show a consumer a pre-roll ad, post-roll or a branded overlay that sits on top of a player. [...] Read more |
Radian6 caps off first year in the black, as social media becomes profitableThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology An early venture-backed player in the social media marketing space is seeing its foresight pay off. Radian6, a company that helps brands manage online conversations across the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook, capped off its first profitable year and is looking to increase its research and development spending by 50 percent this year. Based far, far away from Silicon Valley in New Brunswick, Canada, the company built a roster of 1,300 clients including MTV, Dell and Walmart as these companies have started spending on serious experimentation with social media marketing. [...] Read more |
Not to be left out, Sprint gets Google’s Nexus One tooThursday, March 18, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Only a day after Google announced that it was offering an AT&T-compatible version of its Nexus One smartphone, Sprint has announced that the phone will be headed to its network as well. While there are no details on when the phone will be available on Sprint, the carrier confirmed that it won’t be selling the Nexus One in stores. Instead, you’ll have to buy it directly from Google. There are no pricing details either, but I would suspect something similar to Google’s deal with T-Mobile — which makes the Nexus One $179 with a two-year contract, or $529 purchased on its own. [...] Read more |
Zillow launches on Android, as its iPhone app hits 1M downloadsWednesday, March 17, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Real estate site Zillow is following the success of its iPhone application today with a shiny new version for Android that will provide users with housing price data and more right on their phones. Making the case for its mobile presence, the company also announced that its iPhone app has passed the 1 million downloads mark, with users viewing 2 million homes every month. When Zillow first came to the iPhone in April last year, it had 88 million U.S. homes in its database — now it has information, including price, floorplans, and special features, for more than 95 million. [...] Read more |
