VentureBeat |
- Need storage? Find it with SpareFoot — which just raised $1.5M
- Why messaging app Kik just got $8M: “It’s so frickin’ fast”
- Sprint’s gadget plans: Nexus S 4G, EVO 3D phone, EVO View tablet
- RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet demo shows off multitasking with games (video)
- Western Digital buys Hitachi’s storage business for $4.3B
- 5 things to include in a separation agreement
- How World of Warcraft maker keeps the hits coming
- SEO platform BrightEdge adds tools to become fully “social”
- Samplify raises $11.2M round for analog chips that can cut electronics costs
- Security experts decipher malware that attacked Android phones
| Need storage? Find it with SpareFoot — which just raised $1.5M Posted: 07 Mar 2011 09:11 AM PST
Seriously — I wish I knew about this site when I was at the University of North Carolina. Users type in their location and can quickly find nearby self-storage companies that have storage units available. The sites are sorted by price and indicate whether the storage companies are offering any kind of deal. Users can view photos of each storage site and reserve the unit through the site. Looking for cheap storage spots, sometimes for just a few weeks at a time, was one of the most infuriating and expensive parts of the dead spot between semesters. It was even worse being an out-of-state student without a whole lot of support and open garage space sitting around during my first year. The most popular search on that site is “college summer storage” — not that it should come as any kind of surprise. I really doubt my experience dealing with storage companies was a fringe case. There’s a huge amount of competition for storage space as the semester comes to an end. I would have personally saved at least a few hours — and a bit of drama — if I had access to a list of storage locations in the area that had open units. SpareFoot was part of Capital Factory’s startup incubation program in 2009 — which includes mentorship and $20,000 in funding. The latest round is an extension of its second round of funding. The company raised $2 million in June last year. That brings the company’s full second round of funding to $3.5 million. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in Austin, Texas. It’s backed by Floodgate and Silverton Partners. Companies: SpareFoot
      |
| Why messaging app Kik just got $8M: “It’s so frickin’ fast” Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:23 AM PST
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, who joined the company’s board with the investment, said he invested in the company despite there being multiple competitors in the market, because the “product is fast, so frickin’ fast, way faster than anything the market. … If you look at a list of ten things a web app needs, it starts with speed.” Wilson spoke to me this morning about the investment. I’d asked him why on earth he and the other investors would pump in this sort of money into Kik when there were already so many competitors out there, including Beluga (which was just acquired by Facebook), WhatsApp, HighNote, and PingChat. Adding to the stress on Kik, RIM has booted Kik off its platform, giving Kik a handicap for users who would like to chat with each other across mobile platforms. Aside from the app’s speed, Wilson said it was the team. He said he has met with most of the management teams of the other applications and had decided that Kik’s team is the one to back. Kik founder Ted Livingston, 23, was a strategist at Blackberry Messenger before leaving that company two years ago to found Kik and is now based in small offices in Waterloo just across the street from Kik. VentureBeat was the first to write about the company’s launch in Oct. 2010, a story in which we commented on Kik’s impressive growth and deep technology. Indeed, Kik became such a threat to RIM’s own Blackberry Messenger product that RIM subsequently booted Kik off it’s platform, initially citing a breach of contractual obligations and later patent infringement. This theoretically gives RIM an edge, because RIM is developing the Messenger product to support Android and Apple’s iOS phones. However, RIM still hasn’t released that support, and it’s still trying to figure out its pricing. Kik, meanwhile, is surging ahead without RIM support. In preparation for the SXSW conference coming up next week in Austin, Texas, Kik today released a new version for iOS and Android devices that features real-time group chat for up to 10 people. Kik has also introduced picture sharing — an expected next step. Until now, it had kept things simple with just text. RRE’s Adam Ludwin also joins company’s board. Wilson said Blackberry Messenger will remain a powerful product for Blackberry users, but that people who have moved away from those phones have done it for a reason and are thus likely to consider competing apps such as Kik. He said there will likely to be three or four market leaders. As for Beluga, Wilson suggested Facebook’s acquisition may have killed its chances for breakout: “All the things Facebook has bought to date have basically withered and died. I don’t know if Beluga will be any different.” Kik now has 3.41 million users. It grew quickly by scanning your address book and telling you which friends have already downloaded Kik. Earlier, it was particularly aggressive in this tactic, proposing even people who it thought were similar to folks in your address book, but it has since taken a more conservative approach. Companies: Kik, RIM, RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures People: Fred Wilson, Ted Livingston
   |
| Sprint’s gadget plans: Nexus S 4G, EVO 3D phone, EVO View tablet Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:18 AM PST
Sprint has scheduled a massive two-and-a-half hour presentation at CTIA. That’s a sign that the company is going to launch some major new products. Most company presentations at trade shows run between 45 and 90 minutes. The CTIA conference takes place March 22 to March 24 in Orlando, Fla. The Nexus S 4G will be an updated version of the phone for Sprint’s WiMAX 4G network (the phone originally launched in December on T-Mobile’s network). The EVO 3D will be a 3D update of the popular EVO 4G smartphone (expect to see plenty of 3D phones this year), while the EVO View is likely a renamed HTC Flyer tablet. If accurate, this is a solid, but not groundbreaking, lineup for Sprint at CTIA. The carrier didn’t have much to show at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, aside from the diminutive EVO Shift 4G. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless ruled CES with its 4G LTE lineup, which included some of the hottest devices at the show, like Motorola’s Xoom tablet. At this point, Sprint’s 4G network is beginning to look slow and obsolete even compared to T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 4G network, which was originally just an improved version of its 3G network. T-Mobile’s 4G network was recently shown to be slightly faster than Sprint’s, and the company has said that its 4G speed will be doubled to 42 megabits per second by the end of 2011. Sprint was the first company to deploy its 4G network, but now it looks like it may be paying the price for jumping into the 4G pool so soon.
   |
| RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet demo shows off multitasking with games (video) Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:00 AM PST
Tyler Lassard, head of BlackBerry developer relations for RIM, was at the Game Developers Conference last week showing off the multitasking and game capabilities of the new RIM tablet computer, which is set to debut in March or April. The demo shows that the user interface is appealing and fast. You can swipe your finger across the screen to cruise through a menu of choices. You can easily look at sharp photos on the 7-inch LCD screen and tap on the tablet’s touch-sensitive bezel. The user interface is simple and pretty. It’s easy to minimize apps or close them. Lassard showed that you can swipe up on an app screen to get back to your home screen. If you do that in the middle of a video, you can see a minimized window of the video while it still continues to play. Then you can start a game or another video. The PlayBook is quite capable of handling multiple tasks at the same time. The device is enterprise ready, able to handle your corporate email. But in case you need a break, you can play games such as Machinarium or Need for Speed Shift on it. Lassard said the open source version of Quake was ported over to the PlayBook in about a week. Electronic Arts in the meantime has created a native version of Need for Speed for the device and makes use of its built-in accelerometer, which lets you control the game by tilting it back and forth. The Flash-based Machinarium game was ported in a matter of days to the PlayBook. There’s a growing list of apps on the tablet, such as an Elmo kids game (it’s funny to hear Elmo talking over the Quake game in the video). The screen resolution is 1024 x 600 and the device can play 1080p high-definition video. It will be able to run the full Adobe Flash 10.1 software when that is ready and it has support for HTML5. It runs the QNX operating system with true multitasking. It has a Texas Instruments dual-core 1-gigahertz OMAP 4 processor with a gigabyte of main memory. For an earlier look at the PlayBook, check out what VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar wrote about the PlayBook in January. The big selling point for the PlayBook will be 4G high-speed internet connectivity. But it isn’t exactly clear just how soon that will be available. The device also has a 3-megapixel forward-facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, which will allow you to do video conferencing. Apple’s iPad 2 is more impressive, but RIM just might be able to carve out a reason for being if it targets this at enterprise users and comes out with a good price. Check out our video of the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook below. Companies: Research In Motion, RIM People: Tyler Lassard
   |
| Western Digital buys Hitachi’s storage business for $4.3B Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:08 AM PST
The acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies signals a new phase of consolidation in the hard disk drive business, where Seagate and WD are fierce rivals. The deal is the biggest in hard drives since Seagate bought Maxtor for $2 billion in 2005. The deal includes $3.5 billion in cash and $750 million in WD common stock. Steve Milligan, chief executive of Hitachi GST, will join Irvine, Calif.-based WD as president, while WD’s John Coyne will remain as chief executive. The companies said the result will be a customer-focused storage company with significant operating scale, strong global talent and the industry’s broadest product portfolio. Under the terms of the agreement, WD will acquire Hitachi GST for $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at $750 million, based on a WD closing stock price of $30.01 as of last Friday. Japanese conglomerate Hitachi will own 10 percent of Western Digital shares after the deal and two Hitachi representatives will sit on WD’s board. The deal is approved by the companies’ boards and is expected to close in the third quarter. WD will fund the deal by paying a combination of cash and borrowing $2.5 billion. It will be interesting to see how this changes the competition with Seagate, the world’s largest storage company. Companies: Hitachi, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Seagate, Western Digital
   |
| 5 things to include in a separation agreement Posted: 07 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PST (Editor's note: Curtis Smolar is a partner at Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) A reader asks: A former employee is going on FaceBook, threatening to sue us, making negative and untrue statements about things she claimed happened at our company while she was there—what can we do? Answer: This is one of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. By fashioning a strong separation agreement, you can prevent bad-mouthing former employees from posting negative comments about your company, spreading trade secrets, suing you and/or doing other things to hurt your company. A separation agreement can save you the headaches and potential liability of a former employee smearing your company's name on Facebook or other social media platforms. Know, however, that separation agreements quickly fall into the realm of highly specialized legal instruments. Therefore, you should consult a legal professional to draft your separation agreement, which will take into consideration the specific state and federal laws that may be applicable. That said, here are five things you probably want to include: Release of all claims – When an employee leaves, always include a release of all claims in the separation agreement. The purpose of this provision is very basic and critically important: to protect you from additional expenditures of time and money resulting from further claims. At a small company where there is not a lot of money, this may be the difference between success and failure. The release should cover any and all unknown claims, since a general release may not be sufficient. Non-disparagement agreement – One solution to prevent an employee from bad mouthing your company may be to have the departing employee sign a separation agreement with a non-disparagment agreement, which should:
You may also wish to include a liquidated damages provision. Be aware, however, that overly aggressive provisions will heighten the risk that a court may decline to enforce the agreement on the ground that it unconscionable. Agreement not to apply for another job – Often, employees who are leaving realize that they are precluded from suing an employer because of a release they signed while at the company. A clever lawyer may instruct a former employee to re-apply for the job, so as to be denied employment and thereby to set up a new cause of action against the former employer. To preclude this possibility, include a clause in the separation agreement that says that the former employee will not re-apply employment. State clearly that this provision is material to the separation agreement. Confidentiality/trade secret and proprietary invention agreement – In a previous column, I discussed the advantages of confidentiality agreements, trade secret and Proprietary Information Agreements. In a separation agreement, it is imperative to include these clauses – and they should survive any other challenge to the agreement. The employee should also acknowledge that an injunction is a proper remedy for a breach of the agreement. Additional payment for the separation agreement – For a separation agreement to be enforceable, it needs what is called "additional consideration." This means that you cannot pay an employee simply what she is owed to the last day of employment. Instead, you have to make an additional payment. Startup owners: Got a legal question about your business? Submit it in the comments below or email Curtis directly. It could end up in an upcoming "Ask the Attorney" column. Disclaimer: This "Ask the Attorney" post discusses general legal issues, but it does not constitute legal advice in any respect. No reader should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information presented herein without seeking the advice of counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. VentureBeat, the author and the author's firm expressly disclaim all liability in respect of any actions taken or not taken based on any contents of this post.
   |
| How World of Warcraft maker keeps the hits coming Posted: 07 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PST
He’s one of the top executives responsible for making sure Blizzard keeps pumping out hits like World of Warcraft, which has 12-million-plus paying subscribers. This year, Blizzard celebrated its 20th anniversary, and 2010 was its biggest financial success in its history, thanks to the launches of World of Warcraft Cataclysm and StarCraft II. By far, World of Warcraft is the most successful game in Blizzard’s history; author Jane McGonigal says gamers have collectively played about 5.93 million years of WoW. WoW players put in about 30 million hours a day. Blizzard continues to work on ground-breaking titles, including Diablo III, a new StarCraft expansion, and a secret massively multiplayer online game called Project Titan. But the competitive environment around it is changing. Lots of game companies are diving into free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay small amounts of real money for virtual goods. Companies such as Microsoft are diving into this business model for online games with titles such as Age of Empires Online. Electronic Arts will also challenge Blizzard with a Star Wars MMO this year and Trion Worlds has recently launched its fantasy MMO, Rift, in direct competition with WoW. There isn’t any real danger yet. But at some point, those games could conceivably threaten World of Warcraft’s base of paying subscribers. Here’s our Q&A with Sams, and read here for our previous Q&A with Sams.
PS: Back in the early days, we didn’t think 20 years out into the future. We didn’t think it was possible to have the type of success we have been fortunate enough to have. But when I sit back and I reflect on these two decades, it’s been an incredible ride for us. We’ve maintained our core mission of making the most out of our games. We focus on making the most epic entertainment experiences ever, and I think we’ve really stuck with our values. It drives our decisions and has allowed us to provide a level of consistency in what we’ve been able to deliver. We have been able to make many of the top-selling PC games in the world for many years. It’s tough to run a successful company for 20 years. We are very proud and humbled by it. VB: How many people are working for you? PS: We’ve got around 5,000 globally. We’ve got offices in Irvine, Calif., which is our global headquarters. Our U.S. call center is out in Austin. We’ve got about 800 people there. Then we’ve got our offices just outside of Paris and the European main call center is in Cork, Ireland. And then when you get over to Asia, we’ve got Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore and other places. A lot of good things have come from having a global presence. One of our company values is to think globally, so we’ve really done that and I think we were truly the first company in the game space that did global launches. And when I say global launches, I don't mean just U.S. and Europe. I mean Japan. I mean Asia. There is really no other company that’s really done that and there is no other company that has been able to reach top position regardless of company in each of those markets.
PS: They’ve all either gone away or they’ve been acquired. Our average senior executive tenure is over 15 years. So we’ve got our same management and even if we’ve gone through a number of transitions with various parent companies or sister companies over the last couple of decades, we’ve been able to maintain our identity. We’ve been able to maintain control of our business and the decision-making over what products we make and when we release them and how big or small they are and what audiences we reach. So we’ve been very fortunate, and I think the reason we’ve been fortunate is because we’ve consistently been able to deliver the results. VB: And nobody messes with the golden goose. PS: I think that’s true when you are performing the way that we have, thankfully, been able to continue to perform. It doesn't make a lot of sense to mess with that. We’ve been fortunate that, with each of the parties we’ve been involved with, we’ve been able to convince them through our actions and our results that they really should be focusing in other parts of the business and not on us because we are going to deliver what we promise. VB: I remember when you folks talked at the Dice Summit about how many games Blizzard had developed by decided not to ship over the years. That said a lot about your stance on quality control. PS: There is a huge number of those games. VB: You are brutal on yourselves that way.
VB: How many developers do you have? PS: It’s less than 1,000 of the 5,000 who are in development. The rest are service as well as headquarters and the other functions that you anticipate like in PR. So we have the largest number of community team members of any game company out there. We listen to our players intently, and we really try to be focused on delivering what they are asking for. We are on the forums, we read every post, we get tons of petitions and contacts. All of those pieces of information come in we break down to bite-sized actionable chunks. We deliver this intelligence to the applicable people so they can effectively address concerns and issues quickly. We do make mistakes, and we hope we learn from them faster.
PS: It might and it might not. I will tell you that with very few exceptions, most games don’t have the life cycle to last as a subscription game. If you look at the historically most successful subscription games, World of Warcraft is at the top. We are continuing to grow that game in our seventh year. You look at games like Lineage in Asia, they continue to be chart toppers. Those are subscription-based games. If you look at some of the other more item-focused games, with the virtual goods models, they don't last as long. Those are the games that tend to have four sequels because they’ve got to do something new to compel those players to keep playing. As it relates to free to play, I do think that is an interesting business model. But it is not going to allow those companies to create the type of complexity and experience that a subscription-based title like World of Warcraft can have. The fact of the matter is, the companies that make high-quality games have to have monetary backing and they have to be able to generate revenue that covers the costs of initial and ongoing development. We have these recurring revenue streams, which allows us to invest and to provide experiences and services to our players unlike any other company. The free-to-play games have to go about trying to find other revenue streams, and those revenue streams are inherently smaller. That means the game development budgets are inherently smaller. That is not to say you cannot have an awesome free-to-play game that costs less to make. There are lots of examples of those successful games. I do think that with the free-to-play games you may reach audiences that you don't traditionally reach with the subscription games. That makes sense because you are not going to find a lot of casual first-time gamers signing up for a $15 a month subscription. The free-to-play games serve an important role. Like the theme parks that compete with Disneyland. You can go see all of those experiences, and then you will come and do it all with us. We are going to create the most immersive experience and the most engaging, deep experiences. That is because we can put a big budget behind our efforts that the free-to-play games can’t match. I like these other games personally and I dig the fact that small development teams can work on games again. There was a period of time that was not possible because the budgets had gotten so big.
We are always looking for the best and brightest people to hire. There was a time when it was harder to find independent garage teams. We had to expand to other countries and recruit beyond areas we had gone to before just to tap the talent pool. Now there are all these people who love games. Maybe they don’t have the experience and capability to come work for one of the big companies yet. They may also say, screw it, we’re are going to do this ourselves. And they do these smaller things, they see some success, they start getting the budgets to do more, and they produce cooler stuff. Then they do have experience that is applicable to our games. VB: What is your thinking about when to do a new game instead of continuously refining your older game? When do you do the next MMO? PS: We have another MMO that I don't think we’ve been talking about. VB: Project Titan, right? Based on the leaked schedule. PS: We will just talk about “the project” [meaning he won't acknowledge the leaked code name]. VB: Yeah, so how do you decide that? PS: We intend to do more expansions too. There is no change in our thinking. We intend absolutely positively to continue to support the existing World of Warcraft product. There are over 12 million global paying subscribers that are active in our game. We are not going to turn our back on them and we intend to continue to support that franchise for many many years to come. As to our new unannounced game, we believe that it will be more complementary than competitive. And while people do have a limited amount of free time that they can devote to these types of games, we do think that people will want to check out the new and the old. We think the new one is very compelling and is going to capture a lot of hearts and minds and will be very successful for us. But we also believe that many people will continue playing World of Warcraft because they have such a huge collection of friends and community. We have taken some of our most experienced developers and put them on this project. We believe we have a dream team. These are the people who made WoW a success. We are going to blow people’s minds.
PS: Yeah (Blizzard CEO) Mike Morhaime talked about this. We really try to learn from what we’ve done in the past. When you architect the game, you architect it with the vision that exists at that time. We’ve got some vision for what is coming and how gaming has evolved. Some of the new things that maybe we would want to do, we can’t do as elegantly because of the way we’ve architected the old game. It’s easier if we are starting fresh. So that being said, we are doing that sort of thing and it’s also not the same game. It’s a different game, so we do feel it’s important to our developers as well as the players for us to deliver something else that can expand their gaming experiences. VB: And what’s your observation about social games and mobile games and how fast they have come into the center of the discussion? PS: They are obviously very hot, and I personally I am very geeked up about it. I have an iPhone. I’ve got an iPad. I am very engaged in playing those games. I dig them, I’ve got a lot of them. My kids are playing and they both have iPads. Both my sons and my daughter have an iPod Touch. So they all are playing games and they are sharing their gaming time between a PC and Xbox 360. Their tablets are handhelds. They play on the DS. The games are getting cooler and are so much more easily accessible because you can download from the App Store and they don't have to get mom and dad to take them to a store. I am stoked about it because I rarely have long periods of time to play. I have a lot of 5 minute chunks here and there. Hey, I think if I’ve got five minutes and no kids are bugging me and no one is calling me to do something, I will often look at my emails. If I don’t want to do that, I might play a little Angry Birds. I mean it just happens. VB: So you play when you are in the bathroom? PS: Well, I can, I don't know about you, but….
PS: I personally believe that our back-end infrastructure gives us a competitive advantage over other MMO companies. We have the biggest single audience of subscription gamers. It’s very complex and there are thousands of systems that support us. If you talk to certain hardware manufacturers that we use, they will tell you that we push the hardest. We push more than any other company or any other industry when it comes to making our servers produce. We push for the technical advances for server and blade architectures. We have the numbers that justify pushing hard on the edge of technology. When I see a new company, and they talk about a cool-looking game, I think about how they are going to operate it. People forget that with Battle.net, we developed the world’s largest free online gaming network starting in 1996 for StarCraft. We learned that you have to do the right thing for your customers when you make decisions about infrastructure. There are no other companies that have had that experience. We have a lot of experience dealing with people around the world, millions of players simultaneously. It is non trivial. Some companies launch their games and often lose entire days of downtime because they don’t have the experience. We are able to launch on a worldwide basis when we have a new game. We do that fearlessly. Companies: Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment People: Paul Sams
   |
| SEO platform BrightEdge adds tools to become fully “social” Posted: 07 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PST
San Mateo, Calif.-based BrightEdge uses tools to help companies increase their prominence on search engines like Google. The company said it is now integrating social media signals into its platform, giving marketers valuable insights that allow them to optimize their social media activity for SEO return on investment. As such, BrightEdge will also analyze the content of Tweets and Facebook “likes” and “shares” to pinpoint the exact areas in social media that will boost SEO, and offer specific recommendations to increase activity in these places. “Search is the starting point for the vast majority of transactions on the Internet,” said Yu. “With the top search result on Google receiving up to 10 times the clicks of the top pay per click ad, it's critical for marketers to manage SEO and break their brands through increasing clutter on the Web.” The money at stake is huge. The SEO market opportunity in the U.S. is greater than $40 billion, three to four times larger than paid search which, according to independent technology and market research company Forrester, was close to a $13 billion market in 2009. Studies have shown that for every click on a paid ad, there are three clicks on natural search results. BrightEdge is now capitalizing on those metrics more cohesively, said Yu. “This means that [our] social media teams, which have been siloed off from SEO and focused on generating conversations and sentiment, now have a huge opportunity to influence SEO, improve search rankings, and increase revenue coming from organic search,” he added. The company uses a scalable infrastructure of crawlers that follows the latest “politeness” rules to deal with the challenge of frequent scans on a large number of keywords, pages, backlinks, and sites. Its closest competitors are customized in-house solutions and similar SEO companies Covario and SearchLight. BrightEdge has been growing at a rapid pace. In the last few months, the company says it became the first SEO platform with global capabilities; was joined by the former chief architect of Baidu to consult on international platform expansion; and introduced BrandSafe Link Audit to expose disreputable SEO techniques to brand marketers before they end up in the headlines. Founded in 2007, BrightEdge has so far raised $8.5 million from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures. Companies: Altos Ventures, Baidu, Battery Ventures, BrightEdge, Covario, Facebook, Forrester, Google, illuminate Ventures, SearchLight People: Jim Yu
   |
| Samplify raises $11.2M round for analog chips that can cut electronics costs Posted: 07 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PST
The company focuses on analog chips that can make the processing of real world data such as sound more efficient and thereby less costly. If Samplify’s technology catches on, it could sweep through a lot of electronics devices and make them cheaper. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have stayed away from chip startups because they’ve become very capital-intensive, with a few chip companies raising more than $100 million. But Santa Clara, Calif.-based Samplify can get by with a smaller amount of money and a smaller team by focusing on one sector of the analogy chip business that requires a lot of engineering expertise but not a lot of bodies. Investors include Integrated Device Technology, Charles River Ventures, Formative Ventures, and Schlumberger. Woodside Capital Partners acted as an advisor. Samplify creates chips that convert analog data to digital data. In other words, they convert things like sound into the ones and zeroes of digital computerese. These chips are necessary for everything from baby ultrasound pictures to wireless communications infrastructure. They’re also being used in industrial and defense markets.
The analog chip market is normally dominated by big chip companies such as Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Maxim Integrated Products, Linear Technology, and Analog Devices. But Samplify figured out how to make the chips better in a way that takes a lot of cost out of a system. Typically, analog chips are built in old, depreciated chip factories that use old chip-making processes (such as 0.35 micron or 0.25 micron features, a measurement of the width between circuits). Those older plants are fine for analog circuits and they're really cheap. But it doesn't pay to put digital circuitry on the same chip, because the process for the digital circuitry is really inefficient. Consequently, many data converter chips have a lot of analog and just a little bit of digital circuitry on them. Or they simply do the analog processing and then pass the data on to a second chip (dubbed a field programmable gate array) that handles the digital compression. The problem is that moving data in uncompressed form is far more inefficient than moving it around in compressed digital form. The transmission side and the receiving side need sophisticated circuitry that can handle a lot of analog data movement. That's costly.
A system that once needed the ability to send 200 gigabits of data throughout the system each second might now get by with just 60 gigabits a second. An example is a wireless antenna in a train station or an airport. It often requires a fiber optic cable to move data in analog form. That expensive infrastructure could be eliminated if the data were moved in digital form. By doing this, Samplify can dramatically reduce the costs of electronic gadgetry. The company is focused on markets where this kind of solution matters a lot, such as chips for ultrasound machines or cat-scan machines. The chips can also be used in cell phone infrastructure, military equipment, test equipment, and data acquisition equipment. The technology was dreamed up by Al Wegener, chief technology officer of Samplify. Wegener started working on the technology in 1999. His bosses at Texas Instruments didn't want the technology, so he got permission to take it to a startup. He received initial funding from Charles River Ventures in the fall of 2006. The company raised a second round in March 2007. Besides Charles River Ventures, Formative Ventures and angels also invested. With the new round, Samplify has raised $22.5 million. At first, the company sought to license its technology to others. It has been showing the technology to potential customers or chip makers in the past year. But there is more money in making chips. So the company is now designing its own chips, which will be fabricated by a contract chip manufacturer, Taiwan's United Microelectronics. Sparkman said earlier that the company was able to get its first sample chip done on a budget of $5.6 million. In 2009, Samplify introduced its SAM1600 family of analog-to-digital converter chips. It also introduced its AutoFocus “beamforming” technology for the ultrasound market. Taiwan’s UMC contractor chip manufacturer fabricates the chip for Samplify. Samplify says it has more than 30 customers in medical imaging and wireless infrastructure. The company will use the proceeds from the new round to bolster its customer service and accelerate its expansion into new markets. Companies: Samplify People: Tom Sparkman
   |
| Security experts decipher malware that attacked Android phones Posted: 07 Mar 2011 12:20 AM PST
A close look at the malware — which was found in 58 now-deleted apps on the Android Market — shows that criminal hackers are coming up with more ways to attack mobile devices. Users had better be more careful and install protections for their phones or they may risk running into the same kind of cyber attacks that are prevalent on the PC. And mobile companies had better beef up their security or face rising liability risks as the cybercriminals attack. Lookout, which produces a mobile security app, says that the DroidDream malware is a powerful “zombie agent” which can install any applications silently and execute code with root privileges (basically do anything on a phone) at will. Lookout says DroidDream is the first piece of Android malware that uses an exploit, or known vulnerability, to gain access to the phone’s system code. It can take substantial control of a phone and it generally operates while the user is likely to be sleeping: from 11 pm to 8 am. That means the malware is cleverly written so that the user won’t notice something strange with the phone. “We've concluded that its purpose is to download additional applications and install them silently as system applications on the device,” Lookout said. “The first phase of the malware served to gain root access on the device while the second phase predominantly serves to maintain a connection to the server to download and install other files.” Once in place, the malware sends the following information to its server: product identification, the partner who makes the phone, IMSI (a unique identification associated with a user), IMEI (a unique identification associated with a mobile phone), the model and software version, and the user identification (though this is evidently not fully implemented on the malware). Google patched the two vulnerabilities (exploid and rageagainstthecage) used by DroidDream with the Android version 2.3 (code-named Gingerbread). But not everyone has the updated software on their phones. The DroidDream software uses those vulnerabilities to break out of the security container within the Android operating system. That allows it to then install a second application on the device. Once that app is installed, the malware can send sensitive information (mentioned above) to a remote server. It can also download other apps onto the infected device. Google said on Saturday that it will attempt to “remote kill” the infected apps on users’ phones from afar. It has also deleted all infected apps from the Android Market. But it can only communicate the need to do that to carriers that have their own alternative Android marketplaces. Lookout says its own free security software will be able to detect and delete DroidDream on a user’s phone. Lookout also says that users should not perform a “factory reset” in hopes of wiping the DroidDream off the phone. Companies: Google, Lookout Mobile Security
   |
Mobile chat application 
Sprint may be gearing up to take the upcoming CTIA wireless trade show by storm: The company is supposedly planning to launch a 4G version of the Nexus S, a 3D version of the EVO 4G, and a tablet dubbed the EVO View, 
The Apple iPad 2 is getting a lot of 
The question facing RIM’s tablet is whether there is room in the market for smaller players to grab some market share that neither Apple nor Google Android tablets can snare. RIM”s device is perfectly functional, but its acceptance depends on the timing of its launch and the pricing. RIM hasn’t announced that yet.
Who’s responsible for Blizzard Entertainment’s string of money-minting video games? Meet Paul Sams, the chief operating officer of Blizzard, now a division of 
VB: So what are your observations about Blizzard’s 20th anniversary?
VB: I would guess there are very few surviving game companies that were started about the same time yours was.
PS: I will tell you something. When you look at our brand, players support us and trust us. From our perspective, you get very few opportunities to build that trust, to keep that trust, and if you deliver a game that does not meet their expectations and it's just okay, it's acceptable, well then you breach that trust. We are very thankful to have the players that support us. They consistently vote with their pocket books that we are fulfilling their expectations and their wants and dreams as it relates to games. And we are very mindful about what those people feel about us, what they think about our games and whether or not we’ve addressed their wants and needs. We are very connected with them. We’ve got a few thousand customer service people. I think we have the largest service group of any video game company in the world.
VB: So what do you think of the word “disruption” when it comes to the video game industry. Will subscription gaming be disrupted?
Now we can see small groups making mobile and iPad games. That is positive for us. That means a lot of developers can spread their wings and build new kinds of games. We want them to graduate to doing bigger games, and we hope to draw from them from a talent perspective.
VB: That’s a tease. It sounds like you can take some lessons from seven years of WoW and apply them to a new game?
VB: Do you think that the back-end server infrastructure that Blizzard has built is now a competitive advantage?
Chip startups are rare these days. But 
Normally, analog chips just convert data and pass it along. But Samplify's chips can convert data and then compress it too. This may result in cheaper and more accurate products for consumers. This kind of task requires expertise in "mixed signal" technology, or the combination of analog and digital functions on the same chip.
Tom Sparkman (pictured), chief executive of Samplify,
Lookout Mobile Security has deciphered the DroidDream malware that managed to infect numerous apps on the Android Market. Google has taken action to deal with DroidDream, but the risk of infection is still there given the wide diversity of the Android ecosystem.| You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar