VentureBeat |
- Nintendo launches a marketing blitz with 3DS debut
- Nintendo 3DS review: Is it worth $249 and $40 per game?
- Week in review: Rebecca Black is unstoppable on YouTube
- Silicon Valley is abuzz with bubble and recovery stories — too soon?
- Google enters group messaging fray with Disco
| Nintendo launches a marketing blitz with 3DS debut Posted: 27 Mar 2011 12:41 AM PDT
The launch was a managed extravaganza, like other big video game system launches in recent years. The point was to celebrate the launch and create a viral chain of lust for the new system, which can play stereoscopic 3D games without the need for special glasses. Nintendo hopes the hardcore gamers will get excited about the system and spread their infectious enthusiasm far and wide. Reggie Fils-Aime, (pictured right), president of Nintendo of America, was on hand at the Best Buy store in Union Square in New York to hand out the first 3DS as the rest of a big crowd waited outside in frigid temperatures. Michael Vitelli, (center) head of Best Buy in the Americas, handed over the first machine. Midnight launches are a tradition in gaming; Microsoft staged an event in Times Square and gamers lined up across the country in November to get their hands on the new Kinect motion-sensing system. Nintendo hasn’t had a launch as big as the 3DS event big since it debuted the Wii game console in 2006.
“Now I’m playing with power … the power of 3D!” Johnson announced as he held up his 3DS next to Fils-Aime. Nintendo will get good publicity from the launch and from Fils-Aime’s appearance on Friday night on the TV talk show Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Fils-Aime demonstrated the AR Games and Face Raider games, which are built into every 3DS. Fallon was appropriately ecstatic when Fils-Aime started shooting tennis balls at the image of Fallon in Face Raider. Meanwhile, you’ll see lots of Nintendo 3DS ads on TV and just about every else. Nintendo may sell out of the gadgets, but the key thing it has to cement in everyone’s mind right now is that this is the “must have” gaming system of the moment. That’s why the marketing blitz happens, even though Nintendo will likely have no problem selling out its initial supplies. Nintendo gave a special carrying case to the first 300 people in line. Hot dog vendors and other food trucks served food to those standing in the line in New York. Starting at noon on Saturday, Nintendo staged live music and demos of games for the crowd. Hundreds of others besides Johnson were also waiting their turn. See more photos of the launch at Joystiq and check out the video of Johnson below. Here’s our review of the 3DS. [photo credit: Joystiq]
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| Nintendo 3DS review: Is it worth $249 and $40 per game? Posted: 26 Mar 2011 09:00 PM PDT
The 3DS offers hope for portable games on a lot of fronts. The video game industry believes it will help reverse a slide in the hardcore game business, and Nintendo hopes it will stave off the threat from Apple’s iOS devices and tens of thousands of free or cheap games on smartphones and tablets. For consumers, the 3DS offers a promise of smarter portable devices that go beyond games, including new kinds of experiences such as 3D movies on a handheld. So far, I don’t see a killer app for this device. But a lot of people are likely going to buy this on faith. Game retailer GameStop says that demand for the 3DS is very strong, and you can expect to see fans lining up at stores around the country tonight for midnight launches. In London and across Europe, the crowds came out for the 3DS launch. I’m not going to be a grump about the 3DS and say you shouldn’t buy it. But you should know what you’re getting into. A big difference compared to the typical iPhone experience is that the games cost $40 each, compared to free or 99 cents for a lot of Apple or smartphone games. The 3DS’s big selling point is stereoscopic 3D, which you normally need special glasses to see. The 3DS has a “parallax barrier” technology that lets your eyes see a 3D image, essentially by presenting a slightly different image to each eye. It works, particularly with a slider control turned all the way up. But you have to keep your head still in a sweet spot; otherwise, you’ll lose the view and see a double image or something blurry.
Nintendo made a very good decision in including the slider control, which lets you turn the 3D all the way up, leave it in the middle or turn it off completely. Of course, if you turn it off completely, your $249 3DS become more like a $149 DSi. The 3DS is an extension of the Nintendo DS which first launched in 2004. Nintendo has sold more than 146 million units worldwide, which is fewer than the number of Apple iOS devices out there but a lot more than Sony’s PlayStation Portable, which has sold around 66 million units.
Sony evaluated the 3D viewing technology as well and opted not to include it in the NGP, a replacement for the PSP. I think they probably made the right decision on the NGP, which comes out later this year. 3D viewing still seems like too much of a gimmick in games, not a “must have.” Nintendo in its great wisdom didn’t send me a couple of the most interesting games, Steel Diver and Nintendogs+Cats, so I haven’t had a look at those highly-anticipated games beyond what I’ve seen in previews. I’d like to try watching a 3D movie as well, but we’ll have to wait for word about when the movies will be available. Among the 18 launch titles, I have found a couple of games that I like. One is Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Shadow Wars. It’s a top-down combat game where you control a team of elite soldiers who are caught behind enemy lines in Kazakhstan, trying to stop a crazy plot to start a giant war. In the tactical turn-based combat game, you select a soldier and determine whether to move or shoot, then the action plays out as the enemy takes a turn. The sound is pretty good and you can see the occasional cool animation, like smoke hovering over your soldiers in 3D. That is one of the few uses of 3D that I actually liked. Since this isn’t a fast-action game, it doesn’t mess you up when you lose the 3D sweet spot for a second.
I’ve also enjoyed Pilotwings Resort from Nintendo. In that game, you fly around Wuhu Island — from Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit — in a seaplane, jet pack, or hang glider. The game uses the new analog joystick game controller on the upper left-hand side of the lower 3DS screen. You use the analog controller to move your plane left, right, up or down. You can look down on the 2D map to see where you are and then up at the 3D screen to fly. The problem with the graphics is that the 3D makes the screen look nice when it is in focus. But when you move slightly and the image falls out of focus, you get slightly disoriented and have to take a second or two recover. I can fly better with the 3D turned off. The 3DS comes with a few built-in games and features that are a lot of fun. It has two cameras so you can take stereoscopic 3D images and use them in applications. One of the games is Face Raiders, where you can play mini games with faces that you shoot with the camera. That game is one of the best of the batch. You snap a picture of yourself and then it becomes a floating head with helmet and propeller on top. You spin around and shoot little balls at the head as it flies around you. When I was playing this game, I really didn’t think about the eye strain at all. That’s because it was fun. Another built-in game is Nintendo 3DS Sound, which plays music files and lets you mix your voice into them and produce funny sound effects. It’s cute and will make you smile. It’s one of those games kids can play around with in a social setting and have a great time. My kids gravitated to the Mii Maker, since they love to create the little cartoon characters, or avatars. You can create a Mii by snapping a picture of yourself. The program converts the image into a cartoon image which you can then modify. You can also play AR Games, which uses the 3DS cameras to create an augmented reality experience based on a set of playing cards. You point the camera at a card and it causes a certain 3D image to appear on the screen. In one of the games, a 3D dragon pops out of the two-dimensional card, like a Jack in the Box, and comes at you. You can shift around and shoot arrows at the dragon in its vulnerable spot. But if you move around too much, the 3DS camera loses sight of the AR card. You then have to interrupt the game and refocus your camera on the playing card. Looks nice, and it will make you giggle for a little while. But it’s just a little novelty game.
The device is heavier than a DS, weighing in at 8 ounces, and it is .8 inches thick. Nintendo says it has a battery life of about five hours with 3DS games and eight hours playing ordinary DS games. But I don’t think that’s true. The 3DS seems to run out of steam a lot sooner than five hours. For all its pluses and minuses, game publishers seem to believe that the device will pull in big audiences. Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Ubisoft in the U.S., said in an interview that his company is a big believer in the system and may launch 15 titles on the 3DS this year. “I think we are in a revival of portable gaming,” Key said. “There is a market for high-quality, unique game experiences.” As I said before, the 3DS is a nice system with a lot of trade-offs. I’d like to see more games exploit the motion control in the system, just as many iPhone games do. At this point, the system has potential. But if you’re strapped for cash, you might want to wait and see if that killer app comes along or not. Companies: Apple, nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft People: Tony Key
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| Week in review: Rebecca Black is unstoppable on YouTube Posted: 26 Mar 2011 12:21 PM PDT Here's our roundup of the week's tech business news. First, the most popular stories that VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Firefox 4 blows away Internet Explorer 9 with first day downloads — As if you needed a reminder that the next browser wars have begun, Mozilla's Firefox 4 browser managed to double Internet Explorer 9's first day downloads in less than 24 hours. Sprint smack talk luring away bitter T-Mobile customers? — Whether intentional or not, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse may have started bringing bitter T-Mobile subscribers to the Sprint network. Y Combinator's best startups ever? Here are my favorites — Was the most recent class of startups incubated by Y Combinator the best group ever? That's what entrepreneur (and current YC designer-in-residence) Garry Tan told me. Airport seating charges your phone with PowerKiss — The company just announced a partnership with airport seating supplier Zoeftig that should result in mobile users being able to charge their phones while they wait to board a plane or train. And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:
Is Motorola gearing up to abandon Android for its own OS? — It may sound crazy, but there's reason to believe that Motorola isn't content to rely entirely on Android for its mobile future. The pop culture alliance of Lady Gaga, Google, Twitter — and Rebecca Black – Pop singer Lady Gaga visited both Google and Twitter this week, and VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi has been wondering what that means for how celebrities are feeding off of Silicon Valley and vice versa. Rob Solomon: Too rich for Groupon? – The No. 2 executive at daily-deals purveyor Groupon, Rob Solomon, has taken advantage of the company's unlimited-paid-days-off policy — for good. Can tablets replace laptops and desktops in enterprise? – Tablet computers will one day completely replace laptops as the standard-issue workplace computer — at least, if some of the top tablet and phone manufacturers in the world have their way. Companies: Color, Google, Groupon, motorola, Mozilla, PowerKiss, sprint, T Mobile, Twitter, Y Combinator, YouTube, Zoeftig People: Garry Tan, Lady Gaga, Rebecca Black, Rob Solomon
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| Silicon Valley is abuzz with bubble and recovery stories — too soon? Posted: 26 Mar 2011 11:50 AM PDT
The front pages of the San Jose Mercury News and the New York Times both have stories today about the return of good times in Silicon Valley (and let’s not forget the Los Angeles Times). They point to both hard figures in unemployment data and anecdotal evidence of a recovery, rather than a bubble. One of the most astounding anecdotal signs of the good times is that Yuri Milner, the Russian investor who runs DST — which invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon — has bought a home in Silicon Valley’s Los Altos Hills for $75 million. The 25,500-square-feet home once belonged to chip pioneer Fred Chan. The good thing is that Milner’s spokesman denied rumors that he paid for it with Facebook stock. That would have been a sure sign of an overheated bubble. The purchase price was the largest ever in Silicon Valley’s history. State data shows that Santa Clara County — which includes the greater San Jose region of Silicon Valley — saw new job growth that was stronger than usual for this time of year, with the unemployment rate falling to 10.3 percent, compared to 11.8 percent a year ago and the lowest level in two years. San Francisco county is at 9.5 percent and San Mateo County is at 8.4 percent. Overall, California’s unemployment rate is 12.2 percent and the nation’s is 8.9 percent. So the region isn’t yet better off than the rest of the country when it comes to jobs. But tech led the local job growth in February. The jobless level is better than the peak unemployment rate of 12.1 percent for Santa Clara County in January, 2010. But it’s far above 4 percent in December 2006 and the 2.2 percent in November, 1999. As the numbers suggest, there are a lot of people out there who haven’t yet seen the fruits of any recovery in the region. The improving economy explains in part why the tech job recruiting picture is starting to look so good for skilled workers. The New York Times says the perks at places such as Google routinely include free meals, shuttle buses, and stock options. Zynga offers free haircuts and iPads to recruits. Instagram offers personal food and drink orders from employees. Starting salaries at Google for computer scientists are $90,000 to $105,000. HP, which had been stingy under its previous CEO Mark Hurd, restored cut pay under the new boss Leo Apotheker to stay competitive. The Los Angeles Times says Google has 24,000 employees and plans to increase its workforce by 25 percent to more than 30,000. Facebook has 2,000 employees, 1,400 in Silicon Valley. It is growing about 50 percent a year and so it is moving this summer a short distance away from Palo Alto to a 57-acre campus in Menlo Park, Calif., where Sun Microsystems once had a big campus. Social gaming firm Zynga has more than 1,500 (we hear it’s more than 1,700) and expects to more than double that in the next year. Twitter has more than 400 employees and wants to grow to more than 3,000 by mid-2013. Job site Dice.com has more than 5,000 open positions in Silicon Valley, up 41 percent from a year ago. Salaries have been going up for at least five months, when Google gave all of its employees a 10 percent pay raise in a war for talent. Steve Blank said last week “we’re now in the second internet bubble” and that “hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble” (although based on the unemployment numbers we’ve cited, that’s not exactly true). Fred Wilson, a blogging VC at Union Square Ventures, said that you can see evidence of the war for talent in Silicon Valley all over the place, particularly as companies struggle to win the hearts and minds of independent developers to support platforms. Facebook’s baby-faced founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was Time’s Person of the Year in 2010, and lots of young graduates want to follow in his footsteps by starting their own firms. Shannon Callahan, a recruiter for the portfolio companies of Andreessen Horowitz, told the New York Times that a third of the engineers she calls upon ask for financing for their own startups instead of taking jobs at existing firms. Exacerbating the shortage is the fact that a lot of foreign-born engineers are still having trouble getting visas to work in this country. Among startups, the valuations are starting to get big, with Zynga reportedly raising a round of $500 million at a valuation of $10 billion (that deal is still a rumor), and social pictures firm Color unveiling its $41 million this week. Others can laugh at such valuations if they want; but if that war chest is used to buy something with a lot of recognized value, it becomes much more real. That’s what happened in the last bubble when AOL bought Time Warner. Tim Draper, managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said this week that there isn’t a bubble yet and that a recovery that could last five years is just getting started. I tend to agree that most people haven’t yet seen the fruits of recovery yet. The dotcom era, if you recall, lasted from 1994 to 1999. Lots of people who predicted a bubble in 1994 — and therefore stayed out of the frothy stocks and investments — didn’t get rich during those days because they were overly cautious, or “sitting around and biting our nails,” as Wilson said. In other words, the period of recovery will likely last for some time before the craziness of a complete and utter bubble takes over. We don’t have to completely panic yet, since many of the hottest companies right now are nicely profitable. If we’re in a bubble, there’s still a lot of potential for the bubble to get a lot bigger based on continued momentum. Recognizing that you’re in a bubble shouldn’t paralyze you. Rather, you have to be aware that there’s a game of musical chairs happening. When the music stops, you don’t want to be the one without a chair. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andressen Horowitz, wrote on his blog that everybody is overly worried about today’s bubble compared to the dotcom bubble. He says, “high valuations are fine if the underlying value is there.” He notes that the valuation multiples of the bubble era were ten times higher than current multiples, suggesting that the company valuations today are based on real revenues and profits. He also notes that the flow of money into venture capital today is a quarter of what it was during the dotcom bubble. What we have instead, he said, is the long-awaited arrival of the internet boom.
On Google Trends you can search on the words “tech bubble” and find that there are more people typing those search terms now, but not as many as in late 2008. In the meantime, check out the post on question-and-answer site Quora where a number of folks asking about whether we’re in a bubble. Steve Case, co-founder of AOL and one of the folks who popped the first internet bubble with the AOL Time Warner deal, explains what led to the bursting of the last bubble. Please take our poll below on whether we are in a recovery or a bubble, and leave a comment explaining your vote. Companies: Facebook, Google, Zynga People: Fred Wilson, Steve Blank, Yuri Milner
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| Google enters group messaging fray with Disco Posted: 26 Mar 2011 11:31 AM PDT
Disco lets you organize group messaging with your contacts in a unified interface. Almost exactly like competing services, Disco requires that you sign up with a cell phone number; after that, you can set up groups of friends and contacts to communicate with. Disco’s interface is currently much more barebones than competing apps, supporting fewer features, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing: It adds to the speediness of the app. The web interface is also stark compared to those of some similar applications in their earlier releases. Perhaps noteworthy is the fact that the app isn’t a traditional project by Google, but more of a stepchild through its acquisition of Slide, which it seems was autonomously given the reigns in the app’s construction and release. As a result of Slide’s autonomy, the app is currently only available on the iPhone (and not Google’s own mobile OS, Android), and supports full integration with Facebook to import your friends’ details (again — not with any of Google’s own services). A mere peek at the list of group messaging applications already on the market points to the fact that there is a wave building in this space (earlier in the month, Facebook acquired contender Beluga for an undisclosed price). The looming question is whether that wave is pointed to shore, or simply headed to dissolution. Can Google’s Disco help carry it all the way?
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And the man at the head of the line today at Best Buy was Isaiah “Triforce” Johnson (above, with his back to the camera), who waited all week to get his pre-ordered 3DS. Johnson said that it was his own tradition that he had to live up to again. Early on during his wait, a Best Buy manager told him he had to leave and even called the police on him, Johnson said. All seemed forgotten as Johnson got the first machine for $249, plus $40 for each game.
The 3D is probably going to be annoying for a lot of people, so much so that they won’t like it. I’ve pointed in a previous post that 
On the DS, games like this felt like you were moving around toy soldiers. But the 3DS really brings the animated action to life. This reminds me that the processing power and graphics of the 3DS are a lot better than its predecessors, regardless of the 3D viewing. In fact, I played the Clancy game a lot with the 3D turned off, since I wanted to play longer than a 30-minute session. It’s not spectacular, but it held my interest a lot longer than some of the other games.
The 3DS also has an internet browser, but it won’t be operational until May or so, about the same time Nintendo opens a store that will let you download apps to the device. The SpotPass and StreetPass wireless applications let you wirelessly receive or send data while on the move, even in sleep mode. SpotPass senses wireless hot spots and it will let users access AT&T’s Wi-Fi hot spots at no charge starting in May.
The bulls are back in Silicon Valley in a variety of ways. Let’s hope reports of the recovery are true and that the optimism doesn’t get overheated too fast and turn into a bubble of the dot-com era’s scale.
The dangers of a bubble are always plentiful. If this ball gets rolling too fast, we’ll surely head into some event that will trigger a bursting of the bubble. That would be a shame, since a bursting bubble would stifle a recovery and stop the fruits of that recovery from reaching the wider group of unemployed workers out there. Yes, don’t ruin the party for the rest of us.
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