Sabtu, 16 April 2011

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Price cut for Wii ($169) takes effect early at Best Buy

Posted: 16 Apr 2011 08:47 AM PDT

Although scheduled for May 15, the Nintendo Wii price cut is now in effect at Best Buy. The retailer is now selling the console for $169.99.

The Japanese company has ruled this product generation of consoles with a majority market share ever since it launched the innovative motion-sensing Wii controller and its system in 2006. Because of that popularity, Nintendo has been much slower to cut prices on its console in this generation.

Word of the price cut from the $199 price leaked out last week, so it only makes sense for retailers to sell it for the lower price now. Otherwise, Wii sales would dry up at consumers wait for the lower price. This is the first price cut since September 2009, when Nintendo cut the price from $249 to $199. Target is rumored to be cutting its price on Monday.

And this will likely raise speculation that Nintendo plans to announce a new console to replace the original Wii at the E3 trade show in June. The rumored price cut was to sell the console for $149, so the $169 price is a bit of a surprise.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, said in February that all three console makers would have to cut their prices this year as demand starts to fade. Nintendo has played the pricing game masterfully in the past. It debuted the Wii at $249, much lower than the initial $599 price for the PlayStation 3 in 2006 and $399 in 2005 for the Xbox 360.

With a cheaper and more innovative console, Nintendo stole the No. 1 position from Sony. To date, Nintendo has sold around 86 million Wiis, compared to 53 million Xbox 360s and 49 million PS 3s. Nintendo has also dominated in handhelds, selling 147 million DS units versus 67 million PlayStation Portables.

Now we’ll see if Sony and Microsoft respond with their own price cuts.

In the last year, Nintendo sold about 7 million Wiis in the U.S. in 2010, compared to 9 million in 2009 and 10 million in 2008. In February, Microsoft sold 535,000 Xbox 360s while Nintendo sold 454,000 Wiis. Nintendo hasn't commented yet.

It's natural for the console makers to cut prices over time. The machines are expensive at the outset since the designers cram as much new technology into them as they can. Sony and Microsoft did this so much that they sold their initial machines at a loss, hoping to make up for that with game sales. Nintendo, on the other hand, has usually priced its hardware to make a profit.

As Moore's Law (the capacity of a chip doubles every two years) progresses, the console makers can produce the same chips in their machines for a lower cost. So they can reduce the number of parts inside the consoles and cut prices.





Entrepreneur Corner: Series seed documents and defying traditional models

Posted: 16 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT

Here’s the latest from Venturebeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

Will the ’series seed’ documents help you grow? – Series Seed documents might save you a ton on legal fees when you get an initial investment, but the fill-in-the-blank documents come with pros and cons. Attorney Scott Edward Walker tells you how to determine if they’re best for your business.

How to start a business that defies traditional models – Business models are real effective for paths that have been tread before. But if you’re venturing into new areas, the backward-facing philosophy of most models may work against you. Mark Edmiston, CEO of Nomad Editions and the former president of Newsweek, offers five things to keep in mind as you create your own model.

What if it's 1996, not 1999? – There’s a lot of talk about bubbles these days, but Jeff Bussgang, general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners says the math shows that rather than being in a situation where things are about to burst, we could simply be at the beginning of a tremendous growth curve.

Changing times: The venture capital social network – As entrepreneurs get younger and start companies outside the realm of research labs, it’s getting harder to venture capitalists to get an early bead on the next great idea. Charley Polachi of executive recruiting firm Polachi talks about how today’s VC is trying to stay ahead of the pack.

Screw you. Pay me. – If you’re in the b-to-b space, you’ve probably had a nightmare client who has tried to change terms midstream or pay less than the amount originally agreed upon. Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director at Mule Design, has a simple reply: “F*ck you. Pay me.”

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LivingSocial financials leaked: $2.9 billion valuation, $50 million monthly revenue

Posted: 16 Apr 2011 01:01 AM PDT

Financial details of daily deals service LivingSocial were recently leaked — revealing the company's valuation at $2.9 billion and total revenue of $50 million per month.

The information was revealed during LivingSocial's negotiations to purchase advertising network Social Media for 545,000 shares of LivingSocial common stock valued at $3 million, according to a report from TechCrunch.

While Social Media's success has slowed in the past few years, it still had potential as well as $10 million in funding, part of which came from mutual-fund company T. Rowe Price who recently confirmed investment in LivingSocial competitor Groupon. If the leaked LivingSocial financials are sound, then approval of the acquisition would be a lucrative move.

LivingSocial, is still far behind generating the kind of revenue its lead competitor Groupon is doing, but if they continue on their current pace they could clear upward of $1 billion in 2011.

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E-book sales triple in February to surpass paper

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 10:05 PM PDT

kindle nookSales of e-books in the U.S. tripled over last year to $90.3 million in February — surpassing paper to be the most popular book format among all major trade categories — the Association of American Publishers announced on Thursday.

That’s an impressive amount of growth for e-books — as a point of comparison, e-book sales totaled roughly the same amount ($91 million) for the entire first quarter of 2010, according to the International Digital Publishing Platform.

We can thank strong sales of e-book readers like the Kindle, as well as the iPad’s massive success and reinvention of the tablet form factor, for the overall increase in digital publishing popularity. The association also points out that post-holiday e-book buying likely had a major hand in the sales jump as well. Publishing houses are also telling the group that e-books have greatly increased their sales of backlog titles.

Audiobooks also grew compared to last year with $6.9 million in February sales, a 36.7 percent increase.

The biggest loser in publishing, not surprisingly, continues to be paper. Altogether, print book sales fell by 24.8 percent in all categories year-to-date, compared to e-books which rose by 169.4 percent. Don’t expect those print numbers to climb back up anytime soon, as they’ll have to contend with ever-cheaper e-book readers and tablets for the rest of this year.

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Photographic evidence of the new tech bubble

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 04:59 PM PDT

massageYes, it's true — there was a masseuse in VentureBeat's San Francisco office today, giving chair massages to our overworked staff.

There's been a lot of talk about whether the startup world has entered a new bubble. Judging from the disblieving messages I received this afternoon (publicly and privately) after I tweeted about the massages, it seems like "masseuse in a tech blog's office" is one of the clearest signs that we've returned to the days of crazy excess.

You can see the craziness for yourself in the photo above. And while it may look like VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall is luxuriating while I toil away in the background, I promise that I had a turn too.

So what does this mean? Did we pay our masseuse through an astonishingly huge round of funding? Have we been acquired by AOL? Well, no. It turns out that hiring a masseuse for a couple of hours makes for more affordable team bonding than a fancy dinner.

Oh, and by the way, VentureBeat is still looking for writers. You can read more details here. Just ignore all the stuff at the beginning — we've filled the other positions mentioned in the post.

[photo by Christopher Peri]

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Sean Parker joins Napster creator’s stealthy startup Supyo

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 04:07 PM PDT

sean-parkerSean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the pair behind the famous music-sharing service Napster, are working together again, according to reports in TechCrunch and Forbes.

Thanks to some regulatory filings, we already knew that Fanning was working on a new company called Supyo, but those filings didn't reveal that Parker had joined as an executive as well.

Both men have been involved in a number of other startups since their days at Napster. Most recently, Fanning was a co-founder at Path, a "personal network" for sharing photos and other media, while Parker is an investor at music startup Spotify, which he said will finish the job that Napster started. (Parker was also the president of Facebook in the company's early days, as dramatized in the movie The Social Network.)

TechCrunch also has a few more details about what Supyo will actually do: It will offer an online video chat service that connects people with similar interests. Both men were involved in video chat site ChatRoulette, and TechCrunch describes Supyo as "like Chatroulette but without some of the problems that service faced".

The San Francisco company has reportedly raised $10 million from the Founders Fund (where Parker is a partner) and various angel investors, including TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. I left a voicemail at the number listed on Supyo's regulatory filing, so maybe I'll have more details eventually.

Update: TechCrunch now says the round is closer to $5 million.

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Leaving in a Huff: or how AOL killed a beloved movie blog

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 03:09 PM PDT

One thing you may not know about me is that I am a writer. More specifically, I’m a freelance writer. This means I can have several clients at once, work from home in my underwear, and set my own hours. It is basically like being a prostitute, but with less stringent hygiene requirements.

Up until last week, one of the places I wrote for was Cinematical, a fine website devoted to news and commentary related to the film world. But now Cinematical has essentially been run into the ground by its corporate overlords. The writers were let go on Wednesday. The editors had already quit. What happened to this once-thriving movie blog? Gather ’round and pay heed and I will tell the tale!

The background

Cinematical’s parent company, AOL, recently purchased the Huffington Post blog empire from its owner, suspicious foreign person Arianna Huffington. They paid $315 million, which AOL had lying around from all the old people who still pay for AOL dial-up access even though they have cable Internet. Thrilled by her windfall, Arianna Huffington immediately used the money to buy a closetful of pantsuits made from the skins of poor people.

At first glance, AOL buying HuffPo might look like a good thing. Huffington is well-known for not paying her writers, who contribute work for free because it gives them a platform from which to make their voices heard. Perhaps AOL, as the new owner, would make HuffPo start paying its writers. Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They’re old-fashioned like that.

But this is not what happened. As it turns out, not paying people is what had attracted AOL to Huffington in the first place. “Tell us more about this ‘not paying people’ system,” AOL said, intrigued. AOL liked the cut of Arianna Huffington’s jib, if you’ll pardon the unpleasant imagery. They put her in charge of all the properties AOL already had — Cinematical, Moviefone, Engadget, TechCrunch, PopEater, TV Squad, and a bunch of other blogs.

I did mention Moviefone in that list. This will be important later, so I’d better explain it. Moviefone is a site that is very popular for its ability to tell you what time a movie starts once you tell it your zip code. In fact, within the field of telling you what time a movie starts after it knows your zip code, Moviefone is virtually unrivaled. (Except for Fandango.) But you may not realize that Moviefone also produces content, in the form of celebrity profiles and movie previews and such — sort of a fluffier, glossier, shallower version of a news-and-reviews site like Cinematical.

AOL has owned Moviefone since 1999, and Cinematical since 2005, but it wasn’t until 2010 that AOL slapped itself in the forehead and said, “Why the dickens do we own TWO movie websites?!” So they kind of — but not really — merged the two sites together, under Moviefone’s direction. Cinematical was still called Cinematical, but it was repositioned as Moviefone’s blog rather than its own site, and if you typed www.cinematical.com into your browser, it would take you to blog.moviefone.com. Cinematical continued to operate more or less as it had before, but now with an additional layer of bureaucracy and interference, and with readers being confused as to why we weren’t telling them what time the movies started.

I should stress that whatever problems we had, none of them were Moviefone’s fault. They were nice folks. They were tossed into an awkward situation just like we were. It was like Moviefone and Cinematical were stepsisters who’d been living in different wings of AOL’s house for years, until suddenly AOL made Cinematical move into Moviefone’s bedroom. And Moviefone, being older and more widely trafficked (I’ve lost the stepsisters analogy here), was put in charge. Where Cinematical used to be able to put up a poster on any wall it wanted to, now it had to check with Moviefone first, and Moviefone might say, “Well, I was gonna put something else there,” and there’d be some negotiating, and soon it got to where it was easier for Cinematical to just put up fewer posters.

The fiasco

So this is how things stood when, in early February, AOL bought Arianna Huffington. (Let’s make this easier and say they actually bought her.) Her blogs and AOL’s blogs were smushed together into a new thing called Huffington Post Media Group. The transition was going to be arduous and complicated. This was particularly true for the people who write AOL’s press releases, who had to work overtime issuing statements with business terms like “restructuring” (which means firing people), “streamlining” (which also means firing people), “re-branding” (which means making people forget all the negative associations they have with AOL and Arianna Huffington), and “synergy” (which doesn’t mean anything). In March, 200 of AOL’s full-time employees were laid off in the United States, plus another 400 in India. In other news, apparently AOL used to have 400 employees in India.

Next on the chopping block were all the freelance writers and editors who worked at the blogs — which was basically everyone. Huffington will no longer need these freelancers because she’s in the process of hiring full-time staffers to produce the content. Rather than pay independent contractors by the piece, it’s more cost-effective to have the work done in-house. That’s how newspapers operate, and goodness knows that industry is running smoothly.

What was to become of us freelancers? And when? For several weeks, AOL lived up to its reputation within the communications field by doing a terrific job of making it seem like they were communicating with us without actually conveying any information. Our only liaison with AOL was Moviefone’s editor-in-chief, and AOL wasn’t telling her much, either. We got occasional e-mails reassuring us that everything was going to be fine, that it was business as usual, that we should just keep on doin’ our thing. We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg.

Unhappy with the way things were heading, two of Cinematical’s editors, Scott Weinberg and Peter Hall, resigned. Then, on April 4, Erik Davis — the site’s managing editor, the captain of the team — also quit. AOL had offered him a full-time position under the new structure, but he wouldn’t take it. He didn’t want to see all his writers get fired while he got a promotion. Plus, he’s a movie guy. He knows that when space aliens invade, and a weaselly human swears allegiance to them in exchange for not being killed, the weaselly human always winds up getting killed anyway. Erik Davis is no dummy.

The next day, we all got an e-mail from Moviefone’s editor-in-chief. It began:

Dear Moviefone/Cinematical Writers,

I know there’s been a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of freelancers and your status as a writer for the site. I personally apologize for the lack of communication, but I’ll tell you what I can.

We will, indeed, be moving away from a freelancer model and toward one relying on full-time staffers. Sometime soon — this week, I believe — many of you will be receiving an email informing you that your services as a freelancer will no longer be required. You will be invited to contribute as part of our non-paid blogger system; and though I know that for many of you this will not be an option financially, I strongly encourage you to consider it if you’d like to keep writing for us, because we value all of your voices and input.

The ways in which this is hilarious and outrageous need hardly be enumerated. Several of us tendered our resignations immediately, to spare them the trouble of firing us. Nobody was going to take them up on their offer to contribute to the “non-paid blogger system.” We were rather insulted, actually, at least to the extent that it is possible to insult someone whose job requires him to write about Shia LaBeouf. “Non-paid blogger system”? Please. We may be whores, but we are not sluts.

Read the rest of this post at ericdsnider.com. Reposted here with permission by the author.

Eric D. Snider is a freelance writer, critic, columnist, humorist, bon vivant, raconteur and man-about-town. He was raised in Southern California, lived in Utah for 10 years, and now resides in beautiful Portland, Ore.

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Bamboom Labs raises $4.5M for live TV over the Web

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 01:28 PM PDT

Bamboom LabsBamboom Labs announced yesterday that it has raised $4.5 million in seed financing for developing technology that allows consumers watch live TV over the Internet. New York-based FirstMark Capital led the round, also participating were High Line Venture Partners, SV Angel, First Round Capital, and Highland Capital Partners.

Bamboom Labs is headed by Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia who's last startup Navic Networks was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

The company’s technologies allow customers to access free over-the-air broadcast signals over the Internet and direct it to connected devices.

The team includes people from Navic and Microsoft as well as RF and digital technology engineers from Andrew Corporation, Lucent and others.

Copyright laws make distributing the TV programming over the Internet quite tricky. There needs to be some creativity from Bamboom's side. The company cannot just redistribute the TV signal over the internet without facing the wrath of copyright holders. That means Bamboom would need to license content to retransmit it over the net — a costly and complicated process that even Google has had trouble with.

Bamboom's way around copyright issues at the moment is to rent a personal antenna to the customer. That way the customers, not the company, are responsible for recording and retransmitting. And that should take care of the issue, LA Times reports.

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Meet the Who’s Who in mobile at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 12:44 PM PDT

Just ten more days until the VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ve gathered 180 of the top movers and shakers in mobile we could find.

Every one of the 180 invitees is expected to participate in the debate, which will focus on the biggest challenges in mobile:

1) the future of HTML5 (yep, it’s complicated), and we’ll have Google’s new SVP for Chrome, Sundar Pichai debating the future of open mobile development with Facebook’s VP of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer;

2) the future of mobile payments (with NFC, we haven’t seen this much controversy and hype around a technology since the fabled Pointcast of the 1990s);

3) the future of mobile in the enterprise (Apple and other device makers are disrupting big-time, and folks like RIM and IBM are looking badly flat-footed);

4) the future of social and identity standards (we’ll hear about some new initiatives from Verizon, but lots of others will be at the table, including Zynga and Groupon);

5) the future of the mobile economy (advertising sucks on mobile, so other methods are desperately needed to make money — and Qualcomm, to name just one example, will preach that cutting edge augmented reality will be one of them).

It’s all happening at Cavallo Point on April 25/26.

Here are a few of the participants:

john-donovanJohn Donovan is chief technology officer for AT&T. In this role, he oversees the company's global technology direction and innovation road map, including product development, network and engineering operations, AT&T Labs and the security and intellectual property organizations.

Mike SchroepferMike Schroepfer is vice president of engineering at Facebook. Schroepfer is responsible for harnessing the engineering organization's culture of speed, creativity and exploration to build products, services and infrastructure that support the company's users, developers and partners around the world. Before joining Facebook, Schroepfer was vice president of engineering at Mozilla Corporation.

Sundar PichaiSundar Pichai is senior vice president of Chrome at Google. Previously, he lead the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's search and consumer products, including iGoogle, Google Toolbar, Desktop Search and Gadgets, Google Pack, and Gears. He joined Google in 2004. Before joining Google, he held various engineering and product management positions at Applied Materials and was a management consultant with McKinsey.

Michael ShimMichael Shim is the vice president of mobile partnerships at Groupon. He is responsible for developing the company’s partnerships with wireless operators, OEMs, mobile platforms and developers worldwide. Previously, he served as vice president, mobile partnerships and business development at Yahoo. Shim has held business development and strategy positions at AOL and was a corporate lawyer with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He holds a B.A. from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Tom GillisTom Gillis is vice president and general manager for the high-growth Security Technology Business Unit (STBU) at Cisco, where he is tasked with leading many of Cisco's mobile initiatives. He leads the company's businesses for security management, appliances, applications, and endpoint services. Formerly vice president of product management for the Cisco STBU, Gillis was promoted to the VP/GM position after significantly growing its security business and market share.

wallace paiWallace Pai is vice president of Motorola Mobility, Inc. and manages Motorola Mobility Ventures, the company's strategic investment arm responsible for identifying and executing minority-equity investments (at early and later stages) in start-up firms. His role includes working actively with entrepreneurs and portfolio companies to accelerate access to new technologies, new markets and new talent for all Motorola Mobility businesses.

russ mcguireRuss McGuire is VP of strategy for Sprint, where he is responsible for developing the strategic vision and framework for the $40B+ telecommunications giant. Prior to joining Sprint, he was chief strategy officer for TeleChoice. In this role he guided top executives from established and start-up telecom companies in developing core business and market strategies to leverage their capabilities into sustainable market positions.

marissa mayerMarissa Mayer is vice president of Location and Local Services at Google. She previously oversaw search products and user experience, and led the product management efforts in this and other areas, including web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and webserver teams at that time.

jim goetzJim Goetz is a General Partner at Sequoia Capital. He led the investment in Admob, the mobile ad company that sold to Google for $750 million in 2009. He serves on the board of Appirio, Barracuda, Clearwell, eMeter, Jive, Metaswitch Networks, Nimble Storage, Palo Alto Networks, Sencha and Widgetbox. He was previously on the boards of AdMob, Dash (RIM), PeakStream (Google), Peribit (Juniper), Rhapsody (Brocade) and involved with Timetra (Alcatel) and TopSpin (Cisco).

arron levieAaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, which he originally created as a college business project with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. Box.net was launched from Aaron's dorm room in 2005 with the help of CFO Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind Box's product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with the most effective elements of social business software.

david christopherDavid Christopher is chief marketing officer for AT&T's wireless unit, responsible for all aspects of marketing direction and execution. He leads marketing strategy, wireless advertising and media, customer lifecycle management, product management, national promotions and pricing. Prior to his role as chief marketing officer, he served as vice president of Product Management for voice products, devices and affiliate services for AT&T's wireless unit.

humphrey chenHumphrey D. Chen is executive director of New Technologies Development for Verizon Wireless and is focused on accelerating the commercialization of innovative venture-backed technologies amidst the increasingly competitive market dynamics within the wireless world. Prior to joining Verizon Wireless, Humphrey was responsible for driving the Google and Microsoft strategy for Avaya in the area of Enterprise Unified Communication.

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T. Rowe Price bets on Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 11:19 AM PDT

mark-zuckerbergMutual-fund company T. Rowe Price just disclosed investments in a number of high-profile, private Web companies, including Facebook.

These aren't the firm's first investments in this area — it previously participated in Twitter's funding round in 2009. But, like Goldman Sachs' investment in Facebook earlier this year, this news is another sign of the rapidly-growing interest from traditional financial institutions in Web startups.

T. Rowe Price has invested $290.5 million in Facebook, nearly $71.8 million in social gaming giant Zynga, and $86.8 million in group-buying site Groupon, according to filings released today and spotted by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Zynga and Groupon investments had already been reported, but they weren't confirmed by either company.

The firm also disclosed smaller stakes in Ning, Angie’s List, and YouKu.

I've emailed both Facebook and T. Rowe Price to see if they're willing to share any more details about the investment. I'll update the post if I hear back.

Update: Facebook responded … by declining to comment.

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MeeGo head says LG in its corner for phones (LG: not really)

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 10:11 AM PDT

With Nokia moving to Windows Phone 7 and not looking back, there doesn't seem to be much hope left for Intel's MeeGo mobile platform — especially because there still aren’t any phones that use it.

But Valterri Halla, the Intel group member who is spearheading the MeeGo initiative, is convinced that Nokia's absence will encourage other manufacturers to join in on the MeeGo party.

Speaking at a developer conference on Friday, Halla said that LG has joined ZTE and China Mobile to help bring MeeGo to phones. "It’s [Nokia's leaving] opening opportunities for the others to come in," Halla said. "Discussions are taking place. You’ll see things coming out this year, pretty soon.”

An LG spokesman splashed some cold water on Halla's excitement, telling Reuters that the company still has no plans to deliver MeeGo phones. "At this point in time LG has no definitive plans to mass produce devices with MeeGo other than car infotainment systems,” he said.

That doesn’t sound like a company that’s too excited about MeeGo. It also doesn’t make much sense for LG to split its efforts with MeeGo when it’s just starting to roll out attractive Android superphones like the G2x.

Nokia said previously that it still plans to deliver a single MeeGo phone this year as an experiment, but it won't be pursuing the platform beyond that.

MeeGo, which initially started as a joint project between Nokia and Intel, was a tough sell from the start. It was first announced as an open source Linux-based platform for netbooks, tablets and phones, but we've yet to see many MeeGo devices. There are some MeeGo netbooks and tablets available, but they're more technology demos than actual competitors to the iPad and Android.

Intel has said that it’s “not blinking on MeeGo," likely because it's already heavily invested in its development. But MeeGo isn't crucial to Intel — the company continues to support Windows Phone and Android. If MeeGo proves not to be worth the effort now that Nokia is effectively out of the project, it wouldn't be a surprise to see Intel give up on it entirely.

VB Mobile SummitCalling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

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Valve generates a consumer backlash with end of alternate reality game

Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:42 AM PDT

Valve concluded its Portal 2 alternate reality game Friday morning with a new message for gamers: You can speed your access to the game by purchasing more games from Valve’s Steam online game distribution service.

Users aren’t too happy about that, given the reaction on Twitter, as many assumed that the Portal 2 game would be unlocked early on Steam at the conclusion of the alternate reality game, which required users to solve puzzles collectively in the real world in order to make something happen in game fiction.

Portal 2 is one of the biggest game releases of the year, debuting April 19 on the consoles and the PC. But a message from GLaDOS, the evil artificial intelligence character from the original 2007 Portal game, says that the Portal 2 version on Steam can be unlocked early if enough “computing power” activates it. In other words, if you buy an indie game on Steam, you speed the launch date. In the original game, the player is trapped inside a test chamber. The player solves puzzles by shooting an entry portal into one wall and an exit portal into another place. The player jumps into a portal and then emerges from the exit portal. All the while GLaDOS throws obstacles in the way. Now GLaDOS is coming back online for the second game and is already taunting fans.

Fans’ reaction to the game’s conclusion is uniformly negative on Twitter, as they were not expecting to see the entertaining alternate reality game end with a crass commercial message. Twitter user Snowy1256 wrote, “Dear Valve, nice idea but you will not ever live it down. You shall be ranked among Activision in the evil department.” (Journalist Kyle Orland notes that some fans are quite happy that Valve is showing strong support for independently developed games, such as Super Meat Boy, which is part of the Valve Steam promotion).

On the Aperture Science web site, a timer has appeared ticking away the seconds to the April 19 launch. But apparently gamers can collectively speed that up with enough Steam activity. The message from the snooty AI says “computing power required for launch.”

The alternate reality game was quite engaging for fans, but it evidently left them with the impression that they would get access to the game at 9 am this morning. But the ARG only unlocked a timer. Still, it looks like only a few people want to cancel their Portal 2 preorders.

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