VentureBeat |
- HighlightCam aims to make video editing simple and mobile
- Grameen IT CEO on how technology transformed Bangladesh
- iPad 2 rumors settle on thinner body and cameras, no high-res display
- Why China could rule the new age of games
- Making Fun debuts as the video-game arm of Rupert Murdoch’s empire
- Mobile game maker TinyCo scores $18M from Andreessen Horowitz
- OpenFeint and Adknowledge open up a new way to make money from mobile games
- George Zachary: No bubble yet, but one’s building
- Will Trion’s Rift be cataclysmic for World of WarCraft?
- A first look at Gears of War 3’s super-bloody multiplayer (video)
- Room 77 and StackOverflow win Launch’s big prize
- Gamification company GreenGoose to close $500,000 funding round tomorrow
- Get ready for the most social DEMO ever
- eEvent helps event organizers spread the word
- Find out where to meet friends with Echoecho
| HighlightCam aims to make video editing simple and mobile Posted: 25 Feb 2011 09:00 AM PST
Using "objective-based video editing," a user can create “edited” minimovies without having to do any manual editing themselves. “Think of it like having your own personal video editor: you send them the footage, and tell them what you want, and they do all the editing,” said Neivert. “For us, you send us your footage and tell us what you want, and we do the work and send it back to your iPhone, including scene selection, fades, cutting out of bad shots, audio fading, and more. Just like a professional editor would.” It “edits” a user’s footage using machine vision systems to analyze both the images and the audio track and convert them into a complex series of scores about factors such as quality, activity, voice and human faces. Then, based on the user's objective, HighLightCam simulates a human editor’s decisions and implements them in conjunction with the user's stated objectives. It also allows someone to publish minimovies to YouTube or Facebook in one step. Neivert said the company wants to begin centering video creation around the mobile device and not the PC. It currently works on the iPhone or iPod Touch, with an Android component soon to come. Although HighLightCam does not have any direct competitors, there are other video editors for the iPhone including iMovie, and entertainment companies such as Animoto and Instagram who focus on images, but provide similar entertainment value. Founded in 2009, the company currently has four employees. “Our ideal user is an iPhone user that shoots video and want to share it, but does not have time to manually edit it,” said Neivert. “We expect this will be strongly represented by parents with small children and pet owners who tend to shoot a large amount of casual video, but don’t have the time or skill to manually edit all the footage.” So far the startup has received $350,000 in one seed round from Quest Venture Partners, K9, Pong Lim, and other smaller investors. Companies: Animoto, Highlightcam, Instagram, K9, Quest Venture Partners People: pong kim, robert neivert
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| Grameen IT CEO on how technology transformed Bangladesh Posted: 25 Feb 2011 08:13 AM PST Kazi Islam describes his job as “implementing the future”. He is the CEO of Grameen IT which runs the IT services of Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s biggest mobile carrier. Islam grew up in the U.S. “I lived in the future. I went back into the past. My job is to implement the future” he says. Islam is convinced that emerging countries like Bangladesh will determine which technologies survive and dominate in that future. I talked to him about how technology has transformed his country and why tech companies need to pay attention. Grameenphone is a billion dollar business in a country where the average revenue per subscriber is 1 or 2 dollars. One of company’s first innovations was the Village Phone scheme, established at a time when a mobile handset still cost $1000. The program gave villagers access to micro credit to buy a mobile phone that could then be rented out to other villagers. Islam told me that 10 years on Village Phone has become a victim of its own success as handsets and minutes dropped in price. Now you can buy a handset for 10 dollars. “The village phone concept completely changed a nation through a technology. The measuring stick is how many people are using mobile phones today. 12, 15 years ago if you were telling me that 60 million people (in Bangladesh) would have a mobile phone, people would just laugh at you.” he explains.
BillPay allows instant payment via mobile. Islam told me that a surprising side effect is that “people are voluntarily going and paying. Before people would put it off. From the government side their revenue went up significantly.” Buying a train ticket used to take a whole day. Now 50 percent of all train tickets are sold through mobile services and a huge number of tickets can be sold in a matter of hours. Grameenphone also provides a hotline where farmers can get advice on problems with their crops. “60 percent of our employment is agri-based. If your crop is infected, for example, you have no way of finding out what is really happening. You can make a phone call and describe. You can take a photo on a mobile phone and send it in an MMS”. Mobile healthcare is also an important focus, in a country where 390 out of 1000 women die due to complications in childbirth and access to basic health information is limited. “On average our very optimistic number is that we live to be around 62 years. That means compared to the U.S. we live 10 years less. A significant part of that is because their mother was not healthy and their birth was not perfect. So we start with birth.” I queried Islam on the biggest misunderstanding on how new technology is used in emerging markets. “The biggest misconception is that there is no business opportunity. In my mind that misconception comes from laziness.” He also thinks that making fast money should not be the first priority of an entrepreneur. In his opinion, this is one of the reasons that most startups focus on the US and European markets. “Worry about people first. Whatever technology you build if it is people-focused and ultimately people embrace it, you are going to make a decent living” he insists.
“In none of them you will see a criterion which says that this particular product has to be applicable to emerging countries,” he says. “If you forced innovators to think about this the world would be different. That particular tick box is missing. If companies are still not thinking about emerging markets and emerging market populations, they are committing two big crimes. One is to themselves; they are missing out on the financial opportunity. They are also depriving these people of the benefit of this technology.” When I asked Islam about the technology sectors in which emerging countries will lead his answer was emphatic: “Everything”. While developed countries have made huge investments in infrastructure like fixed line telephony, emerging markets are an open field. “In Bangladesh there are less than 250,000 fixed line phones but there are 66 million mobile phones. Emerging markets will dominate in line of what innovations succeed in the future. Mobile is a big example of it”. Bangladesh also has one of the largest deployment of individual solar home systems covering 300,000 rural homes. How is this possible when people are only making a dollar a day? According to Islam, entrepreneurs have developed new business models as well as technology to sell to this market. One technology which Islam predicts will create an explosion of new business is mobile finance. Bangladesh is a cash-based economy where very few people have bank accounts. “The moment you solve the mobile financial part of it, your service industry is going to explode since the service providers can collect the money.” Grameenphone is planning to introduce P2P mobile payments and other financial services. “If you look at Bangladesh, 10 years ago our per capita income was 200$. Today our per capita income is around $900. Can you imagine in the US people’s per capita income going up by 500 percent in 10 years? It is happening because of technology” Islam concludes. People: kazi islam
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| iPad 2 rumors settle on thinner body and cameras, no high-res display Posted: 25 Feb 2011 07:48 AM PST
Missing on that list are the often-rumored high-resolution display for the iPad 2, as well as a Secure Digital card slot for expanding memory. The source, which Engadget describes as being “dead right on specific Apple plans”, says that engineering issues led Apple to drop the features. If true, the news means the iPad 2 will feature the same 1024 by 768 resolution display as the iPad 1, which pales in comparison to the sharper resolutions found on competing tablets like the Motorola Xoom (which has a 1280 by 800 display). It also keeps the iPad 2’s display from rendering text and images as well as the iPhone 4’s incredibly sharp “Retina Display.” The iPad 2 is expected to run Apple’s new dual-core A5 chip, which will likely makes its way to the iPhone 5 as well. It will have more RAM than the original model (512 megabytes), and at this point it’s pretty certain that the tablet will have front and rear cameras. Apple may also use the iPad 2 launch event to show off some new features in iOS 5, the next major version of its mobile operating system. The lack of an SD card slot may work against the iPad 2, as competing tablets often include it as a standard feature. It allows users to plug in their own memory cards to expand the storage on their tablets. The iPad 2 may seem overly restrictive in comparison. But of course, that won’t stop Apple from selling a ton of them. Companies: Apple
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| Why China could rule the new age of games Posted: 25 Feb 2011 07:00 AM PST
That’s the bold prediction from Tim Merel, who has made a splash analyzing the video game market in the past couple of years as the managing director at investment bank Digi-Capital. Merel believes that in 2010, video game investment and acquisition activity changed fundamentally and accelerated in a way that it never had in the industry’s decades-long history.
As the video game industry gathers for the Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco, it’s a sobering thought. What if the U.S. video game companies aren’t moving fast enough into the new social and mobile markets and will lose their grip on financing and innovation? Right now, it’s easy to disagree with Merel. Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts are giants in the traditional game business. But that business is expected to be flat or down. Zynga is leading in social games, with a commanding leadership on Facebook with 266 million monthly active users. The company reportedly had revenue of $850 million in 2010 and a profit of $400 million and it is reportedly raising a round of funding at a $10 billion valuation. DeNA, the Japanese firm that acquired iPhone game maker Ngmoco for $403 million last year, is also a force to be reckoned with in mobile. That seems to suggest that, for 2011, the game industry is still pretty strong in the West and in Japan. What’s more, video games are just about at their finest hour, with total hardware and software revenue of $77 billion coming near global film revenue at $85 billion. And the games that are delivering the best cinematic experience are console titles such as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Call of Duty Black Ops. Still, Merel says that Tencent’s $315 million acquisition of Riot Games a couple of weeks ago is a portent of more to come. Tencent’s valuation is more than $49 billion, and that gives it the market power to acquire just about every major video game company in the U.S. The company gets 20 million simultaneous players for its online games and it enjoys 50 percent gross profit margins on its games. By comparison, U.S. game publishers have to dish out $20 million to invest in a top game and sell a million units to break even.
“The time to act is now, whether raising funds to accelerate growth prior to consolidation, create joint ventures and strategic partnerships to enter major foreign markets,” Merel said, or just exit and take the money and run. “Major console publishers must evolve to survive.” Merel believes that major conglomerates in the media and entertainment space have the best chance to adapt. They can assemble all of the assets across the different sectors, while pure play console publishers have less money available to invest in the new markets. In other words, Disney is better off than Ubisoft. Just as Tencent moved beyond the Chinese market with the Riot Games deal, Merel predicts the Asian companies will lead the wave of consolidation as they push into the U.S. and European markets. That will lead to Chinese domination of the video game market. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising, as China could very well dominate every technology market. But the path for the Chinese game companies is pretty clear and it’s not such a stretch to predict this outcome anymore. The good news is that video games should grow to $87 billion in 2014, with mobile and online games growing at an 18 percent compound annual growth rate from 2009 to 2014. The major market sectors include console games, social online, casual In 2009, Merel said the $19 billion in revenue related to online games and mobile was about 32 percent of total video game revenue worldwide. By 2014, that should grow to $44 billion, or 50 percent of video game global revenue. What do you think? Please take our poll below. Merel’s report is at the bottom. Digi-Capital Global Video Games Investment Review View more presentations from Tim Merel. People: Tim Merel
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| Making Fun debuts as the video-game arm of Rupert Murdoch’s empire Posted: 25 Feb 2011 06:30 AM PST
News Corp., Murdoch’s media conglomerate, quietly got in the game business by purchasing Making Fun, a San Francisco social-game startup that is run by video game veterans John Welch, cofounder of PlayFirst, and Lee Crawford, cofounder of Twofish. Welch said in an interview that the division of News Corp. Digital Media Group will make social games for social networking sites, smartphones, tablets and other devices. Welch and Crawford started Making Fun in March 2009, about the time both left their former companies. They had both worked together before at Shockwave.com and Sega. They self-financed the company and started doing work for hire for various brands: For example, the company made a game for amusement-park operator Six Flags on Facebook. “We were very excited to be free at the same time,” Welch said. “We wanted to create content that could fit the new model of digital distribution.” At PlayFirst, Welch built a reputation for pioneering the casual game market — quick, easily playable, often Web-based titles such as Diner Dash, which sold more than 500 million copies in its various forms over the years. PlayFirst was founded in 2003 and it was one of the first modern game companies to attract venture-capital funding. Welch said it was already evident that Zynga was becoming a leader in social games on Facebook and Ngmoco (now owned by Japan’s DeNA) was a leader in iPhone games. So they decided to sell their company to News Corp. in November and battle the competition as the game-publishing arm of the media giant. Making Fun has just 14 employees, but is now recruiting game developers, particularly at next week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. “News Corp. is patient,” said Welch. “It wants to get into games, but not by spending a massive amount of money very quickly. It is willing to grow organically and start slow. On the other hand, News Corp. doesn’t make investments so that it can create slow-growing businesses.”
While News Corp. owns the struggling MySpace social network, Welch said Making Fun will target its games at Facebook, mainly because with 600 million-plus users, Facebook is the powerhouse of the social networking business. If any deals with MySpace or News Corp.’s IGN game-media business make sense, Making Fun will pursue them, Welch said. Making Fun will set its own direction and is mostly investing in original games now, not licensed properties. Welch said he is excited about the future of games ahead, as he believes that Zynga has only won the first round of social gaming, but the market still has huge growth and opportunities ahead. “Our goal is not to out-Zynga Zynga,” he said. “We’ve done games like Diner Dash that have gotten hundreds of millions of people. We are looking at the next games that could get those kinds of audiences. One of the interesting twists is that Sean Ryan was the News Corp. executive who negotiated the purchase of Making Fun. But Ryan recently left to become the head of game-developer relations at Facebook. Ryan will now work with Welch to signal what is coming ahead for the platform related to games. That’s important, Welch said, because Facebook games take six months to build now, not six weeks, so developers need to know the changes coming to the platform. Welch said the company’s first games will launch in the summer. Companies: Facebook, IGN, Making Fun, MySpace, News Corp People: John Welch, Lee Crawford
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| Mobile game maker TinyCo scores $18M from Andreessen Horowitz Posted: 25 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST
The $18 million figure is a pretty big amount for a young company such as TinyCo. TinyCo was founded by Ian Spivey and Suleman Ali, two serial entrepreneurs in their late 20s who met while they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Digital Chocolate, an established maker of cell phone and social games, raised $12 million earlier this week. Pocket Games raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital in December. And everyone is bullish on the mobile game market ever since Japan’s DeNA bought iPhone game maker Ngmoco for up to $403 million last year. Overall, game companies raised $1.05 billion in 2010, up 58 percent from a year earlier. “We think that a billion-dollar company will be created in this market in the next 12 to 24 months,” Spivey said. That’s not an insane statement. People were stunned early on when Zynga’s Mafia Wars started making $1 million in revenues a month. Now CityVille, which has 93 million monthly active users, is making far more than Mafia Wars ever did. This year, Spivey is expecting Apple to sell 50 million iPhones and iPads, while Android device sales may top 100 million. That will create a bigger and bigger market for TinyCo’s games. One measure of how important the game market has become is that Andreessen himself, who serves on the boards of Hewlett-Packard, eBay, and Facebook, is joining TinyCo’s board. TinyCo started as a Facebook-app company a couple of years ago. But the founders decided to switch to mobile games about seven months ago with the arrival of the iPad and the wave of growth in Android smartphones, Spivey said in an interview. At that time, they had around six people; they have now grown to 40. TinyCo has been hiring veterans from companies such as Playdom, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, PlayFirst, Digital Chocolate and others. The change in direction turned out to be a good move. Both Spivey and Ali studied the market and figured out that two categories that were hits on other platforms — simulations and management games — were underrepresented on smartphones. So they set about building them and two of the company’s three games have been huge hits. Together, Tap Resort Party (above, a resort simulation game) and Tiny Chef (top, a restaurant management game) have more than 10 million downloads between them. Those games were successful enough to make the company profitable. Now it is undergoing an expansion and hopes to launch 10 games this year. That’s the great thing about the App Store, which has 50,884 games. Titles from small concerns such as TinyCo can sit alongside games from Electronic Arts on the list of top sellers. On the Internet, no one knows you’re tiny. Companies: Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz, Digital Chocolate, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Playfirst, Pocket Gems, TinyCo People: Ian Spivey, Suleman Ali
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| OpenFeint and Adknowledge open up a new way to make money from mobile games Posted: 25 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST
It isn’t a new idea, but it certainly shows that game app makers won’t be hurting for ways to monetize mobile games. It is one more way that the mobile gaming market could take off and become as lucrative as the multibillion-dollar social gaming market on social networks. This is how it works. Developers create their games with the OpenFeint social mobile games platform. The OpenFeint software carefully tracks how far a user gets into a free-to-play game, or one where a user can start playing for free. When the gamer crosses a certain threshhold, OpenFeint offers an option for the gamer to pay in order to make further progress. The user can pay, or they can pursue a different path. That’s where Adknowledge comes it with its offers, or alternative payment options which are really special ads. The player can receive free virtual currency — which the player would otherwise buy with real money — in exchange for doing something like signing up for Netflix or installing an app. The latter is called “pay-per-install” distribution, and it will now be offered as a standard monetization path for the game developers and publishers who use OpenFeint. Game developers can use pay-per-install distribution to boost the sales of their own games. They can, for instance, put an ad into another game that rewards those players with virtual currency if they install the game developers’ app. The game player uses the virtual currency reward to buy goods in a game that they would otherwise have to spend real money on. OpenFeint keeps a slice of the revenue for itself. But developers wind up with a new way to make money. Rival mobile distribution firm Tapjoy has also created what it calls a “pay-per-action” monetization platform, which goes a step further. That system uses analytics from Apsalar to figure out how far a gamer gets into a game. It then gives them rewards for being more engaged in a game. Flurry also has a variation on the same business with its AppCircle app recommendation engine, which recommends games to players and then gets a cut of the business if the user installs the game. “Mobile is the new frontier for game developers looking to reach the next wave of gamers," said Chris Smutny, general manager for Adknowledge. "The free-to-play phenomenon that became popular on Facebook is about to explode on mobile.” OpenFeint has more than 4,800 developers using its software development kit and those developers have more than 66 million game players. One developer that will use the new OFX 2.0 platform is CrowdStar, a sister company of OpenFeint’s (both are funded by YouWeb). The OFX 2.0 platform will be available on March 7. Companies: Adknowledge, OpenFeint People: Chris Smutny
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| George Zachary: No bubble yet, but one’s building Posted: 25 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST For the past seven years, George Zachary has led Charles River Ventures’ investments in a number of big firms, including Areae, Geni.com, GoTV, Millennial Media, Skyrider, SocialMedia Networks and (most notably) Twitter. He’s a man who can spot trends. In his keynote address at the Founder Showcase event in Silicon Valley at the beginning of the month, Zachery covered a variety of topics – including his thoughts on the signs of another growing bubble. We’re not in one yet, he notes, but said one is building – and the hiring of musician Will.i.am as Director of Creative Innovation at Intel is an ominous sign. Zachery also addressed the recent announcement by Russian investor Yuri Milner and Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway that they’d invest in every startup incubated by Y Combinator with no-cap, no discount convertible loans, terms that many believe could spoil deals for other tech investors. Zachery said this type of investing will not permeate the marketplace, because Zachery himself experienced a significant backlash when rolling out Charles River Ventures’ similar QuickStart program a few years ago (which has since been changed). Zachery said there is a wave of capital available right now, and entrepreneurs need to be taking advantage of it. The market is overcapitalized with “undifferentiated money.” He also discussed the most common pitching mistake he hears from almost every entrepreneur he meets. The full 52-minute keynote is embedded below. Separately, the application deadlines for Founder Institute Spring Semesters are coming up soon in Berlin, San Diego, Paris, Brussels, Washington D.C. and New York City. Click here for more information. Founder Showcase: George Zachary Keynote from CRV from Founder Institute on Vimeo. http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/29/yuri-milner-and-ron-conway-aim-to-disrupt-angel-investing-with-latest-proposal/ Companies: Charles River Ventures, Twitter People: George Zachary, Yuri Milner
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| Will Trion’s Rift be cataclysmic for World of WarCraft? Posted: 25 Feb 2011 05:00 AM PST
The big feature of Rift is that it is dynamic. Users can log in one day and find that their beautiful city or bucolic town is under an attack via a “rift,” or a hole in the fabric of the world through which enemy forces can invade. As the rifts open up, the players have to band together and, like people helping each other in a fire brigade, put out the fires one by one. The world can thus change more often than its rival, World of WarCraft, and offer endless variations of content. We caught up with Buttler at Trion’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. VB: You are getting close to being done. LB: Yes. March 1st is the North American retail street date. March 4th in Europe. We also have a head start on February 24th for everybody who pre ordered the game and we have the beta going. So we are actually in the middle of launching. You can't really say that March 1st is the launch anymore. You should think about how it starts and then keeps continuing as we add more content.
LB: (We now know there are a million registrations). I mean I can tell you that for a Western online game beta, we have a historic first in many ways for a new game. We are still in beta but the audience is seeing much more responsiveness on our side than you have typically seen. We have issued a lot of patch notes, interacted with people on the forums, responded to the feedback. We want to demonstrate in beta what a live game should be like as you play it and as we run it. A real massively multiplayer online game should have epic events that bring people together. It should have unexpected things happen, and it should also react and respond to what people like or dislike. This has always been part of what we discussed when we said what a premium video game franchise should look like in the connected world. We always had a big component of this being truly dynamic, a world that changes as you play it. We are proving in the beta that we can open up a “rift” in the world and completely change the environment. VB: What are some examples of what is happening n the world?
VB: Do you use another company's technology for that or did you guys do that in-house? LB: We did it all in-house. And we use Twitter’s platform. This is going extremely well. So you know we have huge numbers of people playing, and they talk to their friends obviously. Word of mouth is incredibly important to us. And now they also tweet to all their friends about it. At the end of the day, we are a new company with a new idea and we decided to make the beta so big and so open because we have a terrific product and we want people to know, and we want people to talk about it, and we want people to tweet about it. So typically betas have been small and people had to pre-order the games to even get into the betas apart from the last push and open beta. Our beta events after the third or fourth waves of people have been so big, there has been virtually no barrier to get into it, and we don't believe in keeping anything secret. If you have a great product, let people experience it.
LB: The architecture is holding up with the live events. These are all invasions, live invasions going on in the world where someone opens a rift and all of these beings from another world invade. There are so many players in one place. This is massively social. It’s so epic. VB: What sort of customers are in the beta? Are they WoW players? LB: That is a very good question; I think we have everybody in the game. We have people who are WoW players, EverQuest players, Lord of the Rings Online players, and Ultima Online players. There are also lots of new players who come to us from more of the free-to-play audience and are trying their first real high-quality game. It goes across the board. VB: And are you resetting the game after the beta is over, which means all the players start over? LB: Yes, so when Head Start begins on February 24th, everybody starts from scratch to be fair to the people who didn't have the time or who didn’t participate in the beta. It will cause some hardships. I say this smiling because some people are already in love with their characters and with their achievements. I think everybody is cool with it, as it is also standard procedure in MMOs.
LB: I am sure you saw the ad that went incredibly viral and was discussed all over the internet. It was a television ad, but it was essentially discussed everywhere. It shows the opening of the Rift and then some dramatic in-game footage, and then it ends. So this was obviously discussed everywhere and it said, “We are not in Azeroth anymore.” (That’s a reference to the world in World of WarCraft). VB: It went viral because it mentioned Azeroth? LB: Yes, exactly. I mean obviously because our world looks great and it says we are in a different world and we are maybe in a more dangerous place. People started to send it around to comment on it, tweet about it, Facebook about it, and so yes so we have TV ads running now on Sci-Fi Channel, on G4 on Adult Swim. It is all starting now. The Sci-Fi Channel ads started a while ago because they are a close partner of ours and the rest of the networks that are relevant to reach out. But TV is a small percentage of our advertising. The bulk is online advertising, which gives us the ability to very clearly measure our customer acquisition cost. Our net to acquire customers is the entire internet space. We are not bound to a particular social network or any particular site. We can advertise wherever our audience is, and we are actually doing it right now. We are casting a very wide net and we measure everything. I mean it is getting cheaper and cheaper to acquire people, which means they must like the game and we are finding the right sites to advertise on, which is fantastic. Also, our Facebook site is growing exponentially so we are using social networking incredibly creatively and in a very powerful way. But we have more and more fan sites, very strong fan sites in North America, in France, in Germany, in the UK. Every week we have more, and I can tell you honestly that all of this exceeds our own expectations and goals that we set at the beginning. Every single item is exceeding our expectations.
LB: We did a big beta event, let lots of people play, and that was a big stress test for all of us. We collected every bit of feedback that we could and then we went to work. What we could fix quickly, we fixed during the beta. And what took a little more thinking or a little more engineering we basically fixed in between betas. We are trying to preserve an absolute balance in the game. In large events, the balancing can’t be tested except with hundreds of thousands of people. Our platform is built to allow us to react quickly, and the team is so focused on responsiveness and on delivering the best consumer experience, I think the betas allowed us not only to create a strong following for the game but also to create friends and followers of the company of Trion. VB: What does it take to get users excited? LB: We believe there is kind of recipe to create a hit franchise premium game. For 2011 and beyond, what you still need to have is a big game draw. Whether you are doing a role-playing game, strategy, action, shooter — you still have to have premium quality. It has to be complete in terms of game systems. It has to have highly polished game play, stunning visuals, and online play. But then on top of it, we believe the games need to be fully dynamic. This means the game is constantly evolving, getting better. The game can be unpredictably exciting and extremely responsive to what users want. That has a lot to do with the technology choices we made and the dedication of our team. There are so many aspects to being a dynamic game. We believe a big online game has to be massively social. Your game architecture has to accommodate massive events. People get an incredible kick out of these epic events. You should have digital revenue sources and you should have a clear cross-platform strategy. VB: Do you want to introduce digital revenues in this game, like selling virtual goods? LB: It's not really something that we want to aggressively pursue at the beginning just because you buy the game and you subscribe to it. But in agreement with our audience, as they want more things without disturbing the game balance, there will be additional opportunities to buy digital goods just like other games have done. But we clearly don't want to destroy the high quality user base and audience and experience that we have for Rift right now. VB: You have said there is a shallow way to connect people and a deep way? LB: At the end of the day, there is absolutely no ignoring the fact that gaming is literally going through a revolution. You cannot call this anything else I think at this point. And it is happening in casual games first because it is always happening in casual games first; it is easier to pull off. There are shorter development cycles and you can experiment more. But this change is also happening at the deep end of gaming, the premium games, the video games, the core console games. You have all these stand-alone game publishers trying to adapt to online. Then you have new platforms like Facebook and mobile. We have come along to create content for the connected world, and that does not mean the PC only. The industry is now creating content for every connected device. Games will stay the same, but they will be distributed in completely different ways. They can be downloaded or streamed. It’s still the same game. If you are making a game in 2011, don’t even try to do it without the connected strategy. You need quality, great graphics, great game play, and you need to be connected. VB: Where do you go next? LB: The beauty is that Rift is a great showcase for our platform, but it is just the first product. We go much further in exploiting our platform with End of Nations, where we actually create a connected strategy game franchise. And we are working on a third major game in our partnership with Sci-Fi. We are seeing that the disruption of the game industry is coming to the deep end of gaming where we are focused. If you are building a AAA gaming franchise for the connected era, you want to use the Trion platform. We have filed for a dozen patents in this space, not just for video games but for creating dynamic synthetic worlds. VB: Have you said how much you’ve spent? The company has raised more than $100 million. LB: No. I have heard it said that it is a $50 million game. That is out there in the public. I did say that. Our other games leverage our platform. We have about 300 people and about 120 worked on the core Rift team. There is significant outsourcing across the globe too. VB: And you have not gone on the record as saying you are doing a World of WarCraft killer? LB: I have never said that. We will have nothing to do with that. We are intrinsically motivated to build the best product we could possibly build. As a matter of fact, I think that our mission as a company, our core purpose is to deliver the most exciting, most emotionally engaging entertainment experience in the world. I mean that doesn't include killing anybody or fighting anybody else. If we meet our goal, that takes care of the economic equation. You don’t think about the economics first, but the quality first. If you start the other way around, you can fall flat. Companies: Trion Worlds People: Lars Buttler
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| A first look at Gears of War 3’s super-bloody multiplayer (video) Posted: 25 Feb 2011 12:22 AM PST
The only thing really holding back Gears of War from reaching wider audiences is that some people just have an objection to absolute combat carnage. (I can’t imagine why). Having seen the game up close, I can assure the carnage fans that they won’t be disappointed by this game. Gears of War 3 is, like Epic’s just released Bulletstorm, a celebration of violence that is so severe that it’s almost comical. When you’re firing at someone or they’re firing at you, the screen quickly fills up with the color red and you hear squishy sounds of as body parts explode. You can take a chainsaw bayonet and saw your opponent in half. Yet it’s also a thinking shooter’s game, as you have to take cover to hide from enemies to survive on the battlefield and outflank rivals as well. In Gears of War 3, you’re either shouting, sweating, or laughing through the experience.
Originally, Microsoft planned to release the game in April. But it decided to delay the game to make it more polished and make sure that it could incorporate feedback from a multiplayer beta test. That’s costly to do that, but it’s probably the smart decision for the sake of the long-term brand. In my own turn at the game today, I got to play on the side of the bad guys, the Locust horde, who fight the heavily armed humans. In the Team Deathmatch mode, every team has 20 lives per round. When the lives run out, the players can’t respawn anymore. The dead players have to watch as their comrades try to survive as long as possible on their last life. I didn’t realize this and I probably consumed more lives than the rest of my teammates. But no one cursed at me. A lot of the time, I got wounded and had to crawl around on the floor hoping someone from my team would revive me. Generally, I could shoot someone for a sustained time and kill them. But if I did so, someone else would nail me from another direction. It definitely paid off to take cover behind the plentiful stone blocks and to take on enemies from the flanks. The maps are good. One was like the inside of a wrecked grocery store and another was set in a splendid outdoor garden for a place that resembled a French château. I got to enjoy grabbing a mortar weapon in the center of one map. But the map was so small I didn’t really have very far to shoot the mortar. The shots went up high and landed somewhat randomly in the middle of my enemies. But those rivals just got in close and dismembered me before I could get off more than a couple of shots. The maps that I played today were not particularly large, at least in comparison to Killzone 3 or Call of Duty Black Ops maps. That’s because the Gears-style fighting is all about close combat and getting the drop on someone who is a mere yards away from you. The sound was cacaphonous and there was absolutely no communication or cooperation possible, as I think we were all too busy just trying to stay alive. One of the best things that makes the multiplayer maps easier to understand is that Epic actually shows you a map of the game area at the beginning of the round and shows you where all the best weapons are hidden. That way, it’s easier for new players to master the map and play competitively against the diehards who have already memorized the map. You can also play any of several female characters, which is something new for the game, which typically stars Marine-like male grunts. Check out our interview with Epic Games’ Rod Fergusson, the executive producer of Gears of War 3. Companies: epic games, Microsoft People: Rod Fergusson
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| Room 77 and StackOverflow win Launch’s big prize Posted: 24 Feb 2011 07:19 PM PST
There were a bunch of different categories, but three companies walked away with wins. Room 77, the new search and recommendation tool for hotel rooms, won the prize for best company launching for the first time. StackOverflow, the programming Q&A site that just launched a programming jobs service, won the prize for best existing company launching a new service. And GreenGoose, the company that uses stickers to turn exercise and healthy eating into a game, won the prize for best company that was plucked from the demo pit. The company won an even better prize on-stage — the judges, who are also investors, have already committed about $500,000 in funding. Companies: GreenGoose, Room 77, StackOverflow
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| Gamification company GreenGoose to close $500,000 funding round tomorrow Posted: 24 Feb 2011 06:50 PM PST
The company won the best overall startup award for Launch Pad companies at the conference — those are the startups that were offering demos in the pit outside of the presentation room at the Launch Conference. GreenGoose wasn’t scheduled to present, but judges liked the company so much that it was brought on stage. Investors include Jason Calacanis, the Launch Conference host, and Warner. Late-stage venture capitalist Jay Levy and angel investor Shervin Pishevar committed $100,000 in funding to GreenGoose last night during a crazy on-stage fundraising event. The company makes stickers that users put on things like drinking bottles, vitamin bottles and toothbrushes. They then register with GreenGoose online to start collecting points. Whenever someone takes a drink of water or brushes their teeth, the site awards points. There's also an accelerometer that measures how long users exercise, and awards points for that. The batteries in the stickers last for around a year. Companies: GreenGoose People: Bill Warner, Jason Calacanis, Jay Levy, Shervin Pishevar
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| Get ready for the most social DEMO ever Posted: 24 Feb 2011 06:19 PM PST
I’ve been trotting the globe looking for companies ready to take the legendary DEMO stage in Palm Desert, Calif. And one theme I’ve found that’s universal in nature is that everything’s going social. I’m not talking about the unstoppable rise of Facebook — though the rise of social-networking platforms has surely made people think about social in new ways. The new social wave isn’t about social networks or social media or social games — it’s about socially enabling and informing everything: from commerce to communication to collaboration. We’re even transforming the DEMO program to be more social. For example, when we realized the first night of DEMO fell on the Oscars, we decided to turn the opening reception into a big, open viewing party. I don’t expect to see a lot of fancy dresses — Palm Desert and DEMO share a casual vibe — but I expect it will add to the buzz on Sunday. Through networking events sprinkled throughout the DEMO program, presenters and attendees form a special bond that goes way deeper than friend requests.
That’s just a taste of what DEMO attendees will experience. I hope to see you there — but if you can’t make it, check out DEMO.com and VentureBeat’s complete DEMO coverage for every twist and turn of the most social DEMO ever.
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| eEvent helps event organizers spread the word Posted: 24 Feb 2011 05:30 PM PST
The company offers a full platform for managing your event, with features like an event website builder and ticketing, but the most interesting feature is the Ambassador program. It turns every attendee into a potential event promoter by offering prizes to people who encourage their friends to attend. So if you grow the attendance at an event, you could earn badges on the event site, and even better, real-world prizes like VIP seating and free parking. One of the Launch judges, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, said that other event sites including Involver have tried similar programs and they run out of steam very quickly. It’s a cool idea, but people start getting annoyed and ignoring what they see as spam from these so-called ambassadors. eEvent has been available for a month and the company says it has already been used for 350 events in the United States. Companies: eEvent
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| Find out where to meet friends with Echoecho Posted: 24 Feb 2011 05:22 PM PST
Echoecho is trying to make that process a little easier by showing where nearby friends are on a map and suggesting nearby locations to meet. The company unveiled its iPhone application at the Launch Conference in San Francisco today. When one Echoecho user finds a nearby person they want to meet, they can send them a message through the app. They can text message their friends or call them directly from the application just by touching them once or twice. The two users then share each other’s locations through the application and determine where to meet from there. Echoecho uses the phone’s existing address book contacts to build a social network of sorts within the application. If the other person has the application, they get a push notification that takes them to a map and shows what storefronts are nearby. If they don’t have the application, Echoecho sends the other person a text message that has a link to download the application. The application is already on the Apple app store, where it has a score of two and a half stars out of five. It’s also available for Google’s mobile operating system Android, Symbian, BlackBerry’s operating system and Windows Mobile. So far Echoecho isn’t too worried about making money. But it might rely on lead generation — basically letting merchants pay for a top spot in the recommendation list — to generate revenue once it gets rolling. One other option would be adding advertisements to the map, but the company doesn’t plan to try that strategy because it would mar the user experience. Companies: Echoecho
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Mobile video startup 
GrameenPhone now provides a range of services which go way beyond the traditional scope of a mobile carrier. One of the most popular is BillPay. Paying a utility bill in Bangladesh, and many emerging companies, is an arduous business involving hours of queueing to pay the bill and then queueing again to confirm that the money was received by the utility.
Islam also condemns technology companies for not taking the emerging countries, home of half of the world’s population, into consideration when designing new products.
Now that we’re only a week away from 
As the games business transitions from console and PC titles to social and mobile games, China is set to take away the United States’ leadership in the business.
In a 68-page report released this week, Merel (pictured) predicts that revenue from online and mobile games will grow from one-third of industry revenues now to half of industry revenue, or $44 billion, by 2014. China will make up nearly half of sales, increasing its share from 12 percent of the worldwide market today to 25 percent. Meanwhile, the U.S. share of the game market is expected to fall from 26 percent to 22 percent.
Venture capital investment has moved to the online and mobile markets. Fundings for game companies were up 52 percent in 2010 from the year before, with funding amounts returning to the peak level in 2007. Mergers and acquisitions were up 60 percent in value in 2010. The Chinese stock market — inflated as it might be — has given billion-dollar valuations to Shanda, ChangYou.com, Giant and NetEase. By 2014, Merel estimates that Asia and Europe will account for 90 percent of the revenues in online and mobile games.
online, smartphones and tablets, browser-based massively multiplayer online games, retail MMO games, online skill-based gaming, and online gambling. (The latter is usually considered outside of gaming). Each one of these sectors has successful game companies that are substantially growing the market and making lots of profits. Each sector also has clear investment, acquisition and joint venture opportunities, Merel said.
Media baron Rupert Murdoch is going into video games — but not in his usually splashy way. Although he could easily drop a billion dollars on the burgeoning games business, he’s instead placing an uncharacteristically cautious small bet.
Welch said the company already has three projects under way. Making Fun will work closely with small teams of developers. When it finds a really good development studio and builds a solid relationship with it, the company will consider an acquisition.
When uber-investor Marc Andreessen moves into a market, you have to figure it’s hot. Today, his firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $18 million in TinyCo, an iPhone-game publisher.
Andreessen, you may recall, cofounded Netscape, the creator of the first commercially successful Web browser. so take his word for it: Mobile gaming is hot, thanks to the popularity of smartphones such as the iPhone and tablet computers such as the iPad. While social games on Facebook have become a huge market in just a few years, many observers think that mobile gaming will be even bigger. That’s why there’s a gold rush on now by investors.
The days when game developers could only get 99 cents for a mobile game are fast disappearing. Now they’re figuring out new ways to make money. 
To put the registrations in perspective, that’s about how many users Trion would need to generate $180 million in subscription revenues a year, in addition to selling copies of the initial game. To topple the market leader, World of WarCraft, Trion would need to get more than 12 million paying subscribers a year. That’s a tall order, but Trion chief executive Lars Buttler has focused on making a game with the highest quality and a number of new innovations in a bid to outdo WoW. If anyone can topple WoW — and many have died trying — they get a license to print money.
VB: So do you have anything to disclose — like how many people are in the beta?
LB: There is so much happening. We introduced the automatic broadcasting of achievements out of the game into the social world, on services such as Twitter. This was always something we said a top video game for the connected era should have. People spend hours and hours in the world and their achievements and their status in the world is really important to them. And we always felt that it's not only important to people they meet in the game but to their larger social circles and their friends. So we have integrated an automated Twitter function. If you go to Twitter and you look at number sign Rift (#rift), you see about ten tweets a second out of the game. You basically tweet your achievement and you can also tweet a screenshot and a picture with it automatically.
VB: And the crowds have not hurt the game’s performance?
VB: And what else are you doing to make sure it takes off? How are you advertising?
VB: You are ready for lots of people to come on?
The super-carnage video game 
Gears of War 3 is one of those games that could take off into the financial stratosphere; that is, the sales of this third game in the series could turn out to be much better than the sales of the first and games, in contrast to the usual pattern of decline for a movie series. Since Microsoft has sold more than 50 million consoles, the possible audience for a Gears of War 3 is far bigger than it was for the original Gears of War that debuted in 2006. If Epic Games adds the right touches to the game in its third version, then Gears of War 3 could become an even bigger cultural phenomenon and help Microsoft hold its own in the ongoing console war of 2011.
Rod Fergusson (pictured in red), executive producer of Gears of War 3, says the company is trying hard to make this the biggest and best game yet. It’s particularly important because the third story will bring an end to the planned trilogy. The story about humanity’s struggle with a fierce underground race of has always been a big part of why fans like the series was popular. Fans have the right to feel like they got an ending to the story, Fergusson said. He says the company has simplified the multiplayer modes and tailored the achievement rewards in multiplayer to encourage gamers.
The Launch conference, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis’ event for launching startups and products, just wrapped up in San Francisco, and the award winners have been announced.
Gamification company 
DEMO Spring 2011, the industry’s ultimate showcase for new products, is just days away — and as the event’s executive producer, I can’t wait to show you the startups and speakers I have in store.
On Monday, I’ll be talking to Salesforce.com’s George Hu (left) about how the sales process is going social. Salesforce.com, of course, is a DEMO alum, having launched at DEMO more than a decade ago and returned to unveil new products — just one of the many truly world-changing companies like Netscape, VMware, and Adobe that debuted at DEMO. And before and after that, there will be a host of socially-infused startups — ah, but I can’t give away their secrets. You’ll have to wait until Monday.
On the second day of DEMO, my VentureBeat colleague, executive editor Owen Thomas, will interview Doug Mack (pictured right), the CEO of online home-furnishings merchant One Kings Lane. Haven’t heard of One Kings Lane? You’re probably a dude like me. One Kings Lane is rapidly becoming a household name among women — and savvy venture capitalists like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock 
And then we’ll talk to Mike Maples Jr. (left), managing partner of the Floodgate Fund, an entrepreneur turned investor who spotted the social wave early and backed companies like Twitter, Chegg, and Kongregate. Some of his portfolio companies drive social interactions directly, while others benefit from the trend in surprising ways. We’ll discuss how all this is changing early-stage investing.
Everyone has been in that situation — stuck in a back-and-forth texting war with a friend deciding where to meet for coffee or lunch. It can be a bit of a hassle.| You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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