VentureBeat |
- Verizon’s next 4G phone: Samsung’s Droid Charge, coming April 28 for $300
- Photo discovery startup Pixable raises $3.6M
- Micro-lending site Kiva goes green
- Amazon’s cloud collapse looks better in day 2, but problems continue
- App search engine Quixey gives developers an easy way to manage their stable of apps
- The pros and cons of dorm room startups
- Obama hopes Silicon Valley investment will pay off
- Select devs get souped up iPhone 4 with A5 chip to prep for iPhone 5
- Samsung files patent countersuits against Apple
- Game journalist may cash in on the making of Portal 2
- Android startups get their own A-Fund from DCM
- Japan’s Gree buys OpenFeint mobile social game platform for $104M
- Kaspersky Lab stays quiet on kidnapping of founder’s son
- AT&T craps on T-Mobile, self, in FCC filing
- Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers big outage
| Verizon’s next 4G phone: Samsung’s Droid Charge, coming April 28 for $300 Posted: 22 Apr 2011 09:24 AM PDT
The Charge is Samsung’s first LTE 4G smartphone to hit the market, and it comes on the heels of Motorola delaying its 4G Droid Bionic for Verizon. The most striking thing about the phone at this point is its $300 price tag. In an era where $200 smartphones are the norm, a $300 price sets a new precedent. But that just may be the cost for playing in Verizon’s 4G pool. It’s first 4G LTE smartphone, the HTC Thunderbolt, also broke the $200 barrier by launching at $250 with a two-year contract. The Charge’s specs are about what you’d expect: A 1 gigahertz processor (surprisingly, not dual core), 8 megapixel rear camera, 1.3 megapixel front camera and a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display. It will run Android 2.2. The phone’s high price may be worth it if you’re a heavy mobile hotspot user though. Verizon says that it will include the hotspot feature, which lets you connect up to 10 devices on the Charge’s 4G connection, for free for a limited time. The carrier normally charges an extra $20 a month for hotspot features on its phones.
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| Photo discovery startup Pixable raises $3.6M Posted: 22 Apr 2011 09:04 AM PDT
The company has released several apps, but its focus seems to be on Photofeed, an app which launched earlier this year (the company launched the iPad version at the DEMO conference co-produced by VentureBeat). Photofeed is supposed to help users explore the photos that their friends have already posted on Facebook, using Pixable’s “WonderRank” technology to prioritize the images that would be most personally interesting based on factors like Facebook Likes and what kind of photos users have liked in the past. Pixable says Photofeed has now sorted 10 billion photos for its 500,000 users. It has plans to expand beyond the Web and iPad to iPhone and Android devices, and to add video browsing too. The new round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Highland Capital. Pixable previously raised $2.5 million from Highland.
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| Micro-lending site Kiva goes green Posted: 22 Apr 2011 08:53 AM PDT
With the new green loans, 66-year-old Concepción (pictured), a farmer in Tarma, Peru, got a 12-month $550 loan to buy natural fertilizers. The amount of the loans vary, but individual lenders can contribute from $25 up. More than 500,000 entrepreneurs have received loans via Kiva, and the company has an impressive repayment rate of 98.71 percent. 81.38 percent of loans are made to female entrepreneurs. The secret of Kiva’s success seems to be the personal nature of the loans and the fact that individual lenders feel they can make a difference even when contributing small amounts. Kiva works with micro-finance groups worldwide who know their local communities and manage relationships with borrowers. Last year Kiva received a $5 million grant from impact investment fund the Omidyar Network. The grant will match up to $2 million in loans transacted on the site during 2010 and 2011. The Omidyar Network was started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, and it funds startups and projects that can bring about positive social or environmental change. Kiva was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco. Companies: Kiva, Omidyar Network
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| Amazon’s cloud collapse looks better in day 2, but problems continue Posted: 22 Apr 2011 08:48 AM PDT
Downtime is to be expected for any web service, but the prolonged failure of Amazon’s cloud (it first went down overnight on Wednesday, April 20) is particularly painful since so many companies rely on it for their sites and services. It serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of cloud services — Amazon had backup systems in place to prevent a scenario like this, but clearly they couldn’t foresee such a massive breakdown. At the moment, Amazon’s infrastructure in Northern Viriginia is showing the most trouble, including the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service. Here’s the latest update from Amazon’s engineers:
For some, Amazon’s lack of communication was their biggest problem: “Starting at 1:41 a.m. PST, Amazon's updates read as if they were written by their attorneys and accountants who were hedging against their stated SLA rather than being written by a tech guy trying to help another tech guy,” wrote BigDoor CEO Keith Smith. “We aren't just sitting around waiting for systems to recover,” he continued. “We are actively moving instances to areas within the AWS cloud that are actually functioning. If Amazon had been more forthcoming with what they are experiencing, we would have been able to restore our systems sooner.” Companies: Amazon, Foursquare, Reddit
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| App search engine Quixey gives developers an easy way to manage their stable of apps Posted: 22 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT
Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow devs to see what users are saying about their apps in one location. The company says it has received “extremely positive feedback” from developers who’ve been testing out the accounts. Quixey’s search technology will also scrape the web to find all available versions of apps, which will remind developers of the platforms they haven’t yet hit, and will offer consumers an easy way to see which platforms their favorite apps support. Quixey has built from scratch an app search engine that responds to user needs. For example, a query of “find cheap gas” will bring up apps that will help with just that. Founders Tomer Kagan and Liron Shapira call this “functional search” and they describe it as “a new type of search specifically for the app world.” The company will compete directly with Chomp, which has been attacking the app discovery problem for some time now — first with app recommendations, and now with a search engine focus. The Mountain View, Calif.,-based Quixey has raised $400,000 in seed funding from investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavours and Archimedes Ventures. The company currently plans to launch at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 23 to May 25. People: Liron Shapira, Tomer Kagan
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| The pros and cons of dorm room startups Posted: 22 Apr 2011 06:00 AM PDT Aaron Levie co-founded Box.net from his dorm room, but he quickly learned that there were some strong advantages and disadvantages to that. While the company’s overhead was minimal, providing customer service from an accounting class is hardly ideal – and investors are instinctively more wary of entrepreneurs who don’t commit. Levie discusses how he weighed the pros and cons in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture, given at Stanford University. (Can’t see the video? Click here.)
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| Obama hopes Silicon Valley investment will pay off Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:53 PM PDT
Obama’s second pilgrimage in two months to tech magnates here will no doubt help the coffers of his second presidential campaign. It shows that Obama is willing to invest time in a region that is always up for grabs when it comes to siding with Democratic or Republican candidates. If he wins Silicon Valley over, he can get his picture taken with young Zuck, be associated with cool companies and win the youth vote. That was one of the strategies that put him into the White House in the first place. Is it a little arrogant to think that Silicon Valley could get the next President of the United States elected? Of course. But the thinking is right, and the close association with the President ought to do wonders for tech policy causes. Those include a wide range of issues, including communications spectrum policy, Net Neutrality, clean energy, restrictive immigration laws for tech talent, cyber security, the dearth of engineers in the U.S., and business taxes. If Obama tells the tech industry what it wants to hear on those issues, Silicon Valley will be more liberal than ever. Benioff’s dinner raised more than $2 million for the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s re-election campaign. Benioff said, “He gets tech and we need to work with him.” The tech execs are climbing over each other to have the privilege of having their moment with Obama. According to USA Today, Benioff’s dinner included guests such as Evan Goldberg, co-founder of cloud-computing firm NetSuite; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; Drew Houston, CEO of online-storage vendor Dropbox; Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, angel investor Ron Conway and venture capitalist Sandy Robertson. Stevie Wonder sang to the crowd. About 60 people paid $35,800 each to dine at Benioff’s. With results like that, you can bet that Obama will be back. “I’m not a political person. I don’t consider myself a Democrat or Republican, but I am an American,” said Benioff. “But I do like the president. He’s had a rough couple years and done a good job.” Benioff said the idea for the fundraiser came from a “political operative.” Whoever it was, the timing was good. Good times have come to Silicon Valley, and if we’re in the midst of another tech bubble, as some have argued, then Obama better raise his funds while the going is good, before the next crash. “I’ve got a lot of friends in this room,” Obama said. “Some of you are involved in startups. Well, I was a startup not so very long ago … So many of you took a chance on me, and it was not at all likely I was going to win.” Companies: Salesforce.com People: Barack Obama, Marc Benioff
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| Select devs get souped up iPhone 4 with A5 chip to prep for iPhone 5 Posted: 21 Apr 2011 09:52 PM PDT
The extra-powerful iPhone 4 — dubbed the “iPhone 4S” by the site’s insider source — would let developers test the potential capabilities of Apple’s next iPhone without waiting several months for prototype devices to become available. Apple’s new A5 chip, which also powers the iPad 2 and offers nine times the gaming performance of the iPhone 4 and iPad 1, is expected to find its way to the next iPhone. So it makes sense for the company to focus on wowing the public with extra-polished games once the iPhone 5 launches. According to 9to5Mac’s source, the iPhone 4S is virtually identical to the iPhone 4 except for the inclusion of the A5 chip. The device runs a special version of iOS 4 that can recognize the A5 chip, but the next iPhone is expected to launch with iOS5 (at least, according to Apple’s past launches). The device spends its nights in a company safe — likely to avoid another crazy lost iPhone prototype scenario. If this report is true, it also lends credence to reports that the iPhone 5 won’t be available until the fall. If it were to launch in June as usual, Apple would likely have more complete prototypes available for developers. The iPhone 5 is expected to come with an 8-megapixel camera, world-phone capabilities (so that it can work on both AT&T and Verizon’s network), and it likely won’t be a huge design departure from the iPhone 4.
Companies: Apple
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| Samsung files patent countersuits against Apple Posted: 21 Apr 2011 08:45 PM PDT
Samsung said that Apple infringes five patents, but didn’t specify the technologies involved. The stakes are high and the litigation is just one among a number of companies jockeying to become the ultimate power in smartphones. Other lawsuits involve Apple against Nokia and HTC, Microsoft against Motorola, and Google against Oracle. “Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communications business,” the statement said. Apple filed a lawsuit last Friday alleging Samsung violated patents and trademarks of its iPhone and iPad. Tim Cook, chief operating officer at Apple, said during Apple’s earnings call that Samsung’s mobile division “crossed a line.” He said Apple is Samsung’s biggest customer and will continue to be so. But the companies discussed the matter for some time and Apple decided to take it to the courts, Cook said. Apple’s iPhone has taken off in a big way, with more than 18.65 million units sold in the first quarter. It’s not clear how many of the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab devices Samsung has sold. But Samsung is one of the leaders in the market for devices based on Google’s Android operating system. It’s no accident that Apple is going after Samsung in that respect.
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| Game journalist may cash in on the making of Portal 2 Posted: 21 Apr 2011 07:46 PM PDT
Keighley’s story will be available to readers as a $1.99 app for the Apple iPad. It will be an interesting test for journalists who have a long story to tell on a hot topic — Portal 2 is one of the biggest video games of the year and launched on Tuesday — but don’t quite have enough material to make it into a book. And if it takes off, Keighley will get a nice pay day. The app offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Portal 2, which has been in the works since 2007. Keighley spent more than three years talking to the team. The app takes advantage of the iPad’s large high-resolution display and “pushes video game journalism in a bold new direction, blending interactivity, storytelling and multimedia” to take readers inside Valve, Keighley says. It has in-depth interviews with Valve founder Gabe Newell and the team behind the game. The app has photos, audio clips, 360-degree panoramas, videos, polls and other interactive material. I used to read Keighley’s “Final Hours” pieces for GameSpot in the 1990s. He used to write 10,000-word stories about how blockbuster games were made. He got away from those magazine-length pieces after he made the move to TV. It’s nice to see him return to that. Keighley has been covering the game industry for more than 20 years. And for those of you who think he looks young, he actually started at age 13. Companies: Valve People: Gabe Newell, Geoff Keighley
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| Android startups get their own A-Fund from DCM Posted: 21 Apr 2011 06:14 PM PDT
That's what venture firm DCM annnounced today. The firm said in a press release that it's "open to startups and developers from around the world, at any stage and size, whose products will shape the future of the Android ecosystem." It sounds like this fund will be international in scope, with a particular focus on Asia. DCM itself has a presence in Beijing and Tokyo (as well as Silicon Valley), while Japanese mobile social gaming network GREE, Japanese mobile operator KDDI, and Chinese Internet giant Tencent are investors in the fund. "The A-Fund will give startups the ability to take advantage of Android's inherent international potential, and access to top investors and strategic partners across the world," said GREE founder and chief executive Yoshikazu Tanaka in the release. The fund size is $100 million, which was also the initial size of the iFund. DCM said it will be announcing more partners in the next few weeks, including a US semiconductor company.
Companies: DCM, Gree, KDDI, Tencent People: Yoshikazu Tanaka
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| Japan’s Gree buys OpenFeint mobile social game platform for $104M Posted: 21 Apr 2011 06:08 PM PDT
Yes, it’s time to start yelling “The Japanese are coming. The Japanese are coming.” Gree’s purchase of the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup follows the $403 million acquisition of San Francisco mobile game firm Ngmoco by Japan’s DeNA, which is a big rival of Gree’s. The deal shows that mobile is heating up, and multiple companies see the value of building a platform that helps mobile games get discovered. Like Ngmoco, OpenFeint operates a social platform for mobile games. By adopting OpenFeint’s development platform, mobile game developers can make their games more social, more discoverable, and easily cross-promoted. OpenFeint provides features such as multiplayer challenges, leaderboards, and cross promotion. Gree has more than 25 million users and a market value of $3 billion in Japan, where it operates a social mobile game platform that lets users buy games, socialize and interact with all sorts of content. OpenFeint has more than 5,000 games using its platform, and those games have more than 75 million users across iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) and Android devices. Gree is going to provide OpenFeint with additional operating capital to accelerate the platform’s growth. In contrast to Ngmoco and DeNA, Gree and OpenFeint will not build a uniform gaming network for all consumers worldwide. Rather, they will create tailored products for specific markets. It plans to provide OpenFeint and Gree services on a global level. Jason Citron, chief executive of OpenFeint, will remain as CEO. He and the OpenFeint team will have long-term incentives and grow the company into a “multibillion dollar business.” That’s consistent with the business vision of Neil Young, chief executive of Ngmoco, as stated in an interview with VentureBeat. Gree said it understands that there is a shift in gaming expectations toward higher-quality expectations and that social is now driving gaming. That’s why the company did this deal. OpenFeint is funded by YouWeb, the incubator headed by mobile and social gaming entrepreneur Peter Relan. DeNA had a stake in OpenFeint, but it evidently sold that off or is selling it off now. OpenFeint said it hopes to double its headcount within the year, although that is easier said than done in Silicon Valley, where there is a talent shortage. "At Gree, we are socializing the next evolution of games and, as the best-in-class US-based mobile social network, OpenFeint is the ideal partner for us to offer the best mobile social games to the largest global audience," said Yoshikazu Tanaka, founder and CEO of Gree, in a statement. "This acquisition further emphasizes Gree's commitment to providing the first and best global gaming ecosystem, with both the developer and consumer in mind," says Naoki Aoyagi, CEO of Gree International, the subsidiary that recently opened an office in San Francisco. Gree International will now be merged into OpenFeint. Gree has 24 million users on its mobile social network. Recently, Gree teamed up with feature-phone based mobile social network Mig33. Takafumi Kawane, vice president business operations for Gree International, said in an interview that there is no point in Gree duplicating the business of OpenFeint in North America and vice versa for Gree in Japan. Gree has more than 400 employees who work on the company’s social network service and its games in Japan. Gree has seven of its own games on feature phones in Japan, and its service hosts hundreds of other games from third parties. In the fiscal year ending March 31, the company is targeting revenues of $700 million. Citron said in an interview this evening that the move will accelerate OpenFeint’s expansion around the world. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, London and Beijing now. Developers will benefit because they can create games that run on the social platforms of OpenFeint, Gree, and Mig33 without having to rewrite them (once the companies create their joint applications programming interface). Citron thinks that OpenFeint has a multibillion dollar opportunity as smartphones and tablets will become the dominant devices of the new era. “The economic opportunity here is so tremendous and gaming is the killer app,” Citron said. “We are at the beginning of a new age.” Citron acknowledged that the purchase price wasn’t as big as other deals, but he said the deal was structured so that it will have a bigger payoff for OpenFeint employees down the road if they hit their milestones. He also confirmed that DeNA is no longer a part owner of OpenFeint. Companies: Gree, Ngmoco, OpenFeint People: Jason Citron, Neil Young
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| Kaspersky Lab stays quiet on kidnapping of founder’s son Posted: 21 Apr 2011 05:58 PM PDT
The Moscow-based company is one of Russia’s stand-out successes when it comes to technology. The kidnapping could draw attention to the business risks related to crime in Russia — risks that admittedly exist in any country — at a time when the Russian government is trying to establish a high-tech industry in Russia. It reminds me of our story entitled, “Investing in Russia? Better hire bodyguards and hunker down.” The consequence of such a kidnapping is that it could chill business creation in Russia, since no executive wants to go to a place with such personal risks. Of course, you could say the same thing about a lot of countries. But this kind of international story will likely keep the topic in the news. A spokesperson for the company declined comment to Cnet. Ivan Kaspersky, 20, the youngest son of the company founder, was reportedly kidnapped on Tuesday on his way to work at InfoWatch. That company is owned by his mother, according to Pravda. Someone reportedly called and asked for a $4.3 million ransom. Companies: Kaspersky Lab People: Eugene Kaspersky, Ivan Kaspersky
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| AT&T craps on T-Mobile, self, in FCC filing Posted: 21 Apr 2011 05:51 PM PDT
As first reported by Ars Technica, here are a few examples of how AT&T describes itself in an attempt to make it appear like the underdog who’s just trying to make it in the big ol’ mobile world:
And their friend T-Mobile? Surely it is better off?
Ouch. Maybe $39 billion will smooth over things between the two of them. Companies: AT&T, FCC, sprint, T Mobile
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| Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers big outage Posted: 21 Apr 2011 05:24 PM PDT
Sony is still investigating what’s wrong, but it predicted the service would likely take a day or two to bring back up. The outage comes on the same day that Amazon’s cloud-based web services business went down, taking lots of Web 2.0 businesses down too. It shows another hazard of operating cloud-based services. The PlayStation Network, or PSN, is Sony's attempt to engage its video-game console and PlayStation Portable audience in a larger online entertainment network that includes online games, movies and TV shows, as well as Sony exclusives such as Qore, a digital magazine, and The Tester original TV show. It's a strategic asset for the console maker as more of the-video game audience moves into the online world. On its blog, Sony said, “While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we'll update you again as soon as we can.” There are 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. There are also 31,000 movies and TV shows available for download, not counting the content available on Netflix, Hulu, and sports content. Just yesterday, Sony announced that it would launch its PlayStation Home service update for users who visit its gamer’s virtual world on the PlayStation Network. It’s not clear if that update was the cause of the crash. Companies: Sony
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The newest entry in Verizon’s super-fast LTE 4G smartphone crew is Samsung’s Droid Charge, which will be landing at the carrier on April 28 for a hefty $300 with a two-year contract.
Sunlight is finally beginning to shine through Amazon’s disastrous cloud crash, which seemed impossible to avoid yesterday as 
President Obama’s busy trip to Silicon Valley included a private fundraiser at the home of billionaire Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and a town hall meeting with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at the Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters of the social networking firm. I felt his impact by getting stuck in the “Obama jam,” as the accompany traffic snarl in San Francisco was called.
Apple is helping select game developers to gear up for the iPhone 5 by handing out super-powered iPhone 4s equipped with its new A5 chip, 
This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural 
Samsung Electronics has
Geoff Keighley is a well-known game journalist who hosts the show Game Trailers TV with Geoff Keighley on Friday nights on Spike TV. He has written a 15,000-word story on 
The tech world already has 
Japanese mobile social network 
Reports surfaced in Russia today that the son of Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive of antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped.
Like the kid who beat you up at the bus stop because he felt bad about being obese, AT&T is a bully because it hates itself. At least that’s how the mobile giant appears in its 
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