VentureBeat

Electronic Arts tips its hand on big (and mysterious) titles in coming year

Electronic Arts is launching a number of big titles in the coming fiscal year that should get gamers excited, according to the company’s conference call with analysts today.

EA typically announces titles during its quarterly calls to get gamers frothing and to give analysts guidance about its expected financial performance. Those titles could always be delayed, but EA has been shipping more games on time than it used to.

During EA’s conference call with analysts,... Continue Reading

LEDs take the spotlight with flurry of recent, positive news

Last month, the U.S. government granted $37 million to 17 projects developing light-emitting diodesfor various applications ranging from lighting systems to screen technologies. All the while, ongoing research and development is finally driving down the costs and increasing the efficiency of LEDs and their organic, increasingly popular cousins.

With lifespans exceeding 50,000 hours, LEDs have incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs beat hand down. But so far they have been prohibitively expensive. Most of the work... Continue Reading

Minnesota’s frozen turbines raise new doubts about wind power

In Minnesota, the wind is blowing but turbines aren’t turning. The machines, bought used from California and installed last fall, are completely frozen in place. Even on the windiest days, the blades sit at a standstill, producing no power. Why should anyone care? The problem highlights some of the less intuitive challenges associated with wind power — long considered to be the most feasible and cost effective source of renewable energy.

The likely culprit in... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts beats reduced earnings forecasts

Electronic Arts reported third fiscal quarter results today that were in line with the reduced expectations analysts had.

For the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, EA reported revenue of $1.24 billion, down from $1.64 billion a year ago. Net loss was $82 million, compared to a net loss of $641 million a year ago. Loss per share was 25 cents compared to a loss of $2 per share a year ago. On a non-GAAP... Continue Reading

Areva buys Ausra, looks ahead to bright solar thermal future

French nuclear company Areva has just taken its first step into the solar market with the acquisition of Ausra, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of solar thermal equipment. The deal represents a major new market for Areva, while simultaneously propping up Ausra, which weathered some hard knocks last year.

Last year at this time, the solar startup provider scrapped plans to build several massive plants across the southwest and California deserts. Weakened by the economic... Continue Reading

Flixster continues rapid growth with new $12.5M

A little over a month after it gobbled up primary competitor Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster, a social-networking site for movie enthusiasts, has landed $12.5 million in a new round of equity and common stock, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Francisco company has already been growing fast, but the new money could kick it up another notch.

The January Rotten Tomatoes acquisition came at an opportune time. Flixster was looking to expand its... Continue Reading

Report: Gmail to add social networking features as soon as this week

Google is trying to push more media sharing and status update features into Gmail as soon as this week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users would be able to see a stream of status updates from friends as well as photos and videos shared through Picasa and YouTube.

Although Facebook has come to dominate the social networking space with 400 million users, Gmail contacts represent a formidable latent social network with hundreds or... Continue Reading

Is TechCrunch doomed by payola scandal?

Late last week, tech biz bloggers were shocked — and a few were cruelly happy — to read that TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington had fired 17-year-old intern, entrepreneur and Internet fameball Daniel Brusilovsky. Arrington said the teenage overachiever had accepted a computer from a company in exchange for coverage on TechCrunch. Brusilovsky also admitted, Arrington said, to asking a different startup for a MacBook Air, which led that company to complain to Arrington.

Not only... Continue Reading

Intel’s monster of a chip: an Itanium microprocessor with 2 billion transistors

Intel announced its Itanium 9300 series microprocessor today, a high-end supercomputing chip with 2 billion transistors on a single chip.

The number of transistors, or basic on-off switches that control the flow of electrical signals in a chip, is about twice as much as what Intel and other big companies normally put in a chip.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Architecture Group, said Intel will be able to put eight microprocessors together in a... Continue Reading

Disney and Google to buy into China’s largest bus media firm, Bus Online

In what will surely be a common trend over the next few years to take advantage of China’s growing population of media consumers, Reuters is reporting that a Disney-led consortium is in talks to buy a portion of China’s largest in-bus media firm, Bus Online. Google is a part of the consortium — even as they are currently seeking out the NSA’s help to deal with their recent security breach in China.

According to anonymous... Continue Reading

Real Networks updates media player for the Mac

Real Networks is launching a new beta version of its RealPlayer SP for the Mac.

That’s an early present for Mac fans, who have the option of attending the Steve Jobs-less Macworld in San Francisco this week.

The new version lets the Mac version catch up to features launched for the PC last year. The new downloadable media player lets people easily take videos from their Mac and put them on devices such as the... Continue Reading

Ad expert: Google’s Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to believe that Google’s 52-second “Parisian Love” ad that ran in the third quarter of yesterday’s Super Bowl was a spontaneous decision to take a popular YouTube video and “share it with a wider audience.”

Aw, a present. You shouldn’t have!

They didn’t. We got an email this morning from Martin McNulty, director of online ad agency Forward3D. Maybe because he’s a Brit, McNulty can see past Super Bowl... Continue Reading

Unity Technologies strikes multi-year deal with LEGO for 3-D browser games

Unity Technologies is announcing today it has struck a three-year deal with LEGO in which the toy company will use Unity’s 3-D animation engine in its upcoming online games.

San Francisco-based Unity makes a game engine, which is a set of tools that makes it easy to create a game. While many online games are based on Adobe’s Flash technology, those games tend to be two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Unity enables game developers using it to... Continue Reading

Sony Online Entertainment’s Free Realms hits 8M users

Free-to-play online games were pioneered in Asia and are making lots of money for game publishers there who sell virtual goods to users inside the free games.

That model seems to be taking off in the U.S. now, based on the latest announcement from Sony Online Entertainment. The San Diego, Calif.-based company’s Free Realms massively multiplayer online game has amassed 8 million registered users since its launch in April 2009. Prior to the launch of... Continue Reading

Google developing mobile language translation software

With the Nexus One, Google made voice commands an integral part of the phone’s user interface. In addition to voice searching — a feature on all Android phones — Nexus One users can also dictate e-mails, SMS messages, and use voice commands in Google Maps.

Now the Times Online is reporting that Google is seeking to take the next step with mobile voice. The company is developing software that will allow near-instant language translation... Continue Reading

Latest GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Facebook, GameStop Digital Ventures, Sony

We’re starting to get pretty excited about this. Our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Today’s featured speakers are as follows:

Gareth Davis, platform manager, Facebook. Davis has a big responsibility at Facebook. There are more than 400 million users on the social network, and the No. 1 activity they do is play games. And while those games... Continue Reading

Ideaworks Labs lets you publish mobile apps to multiple platforms

Creating a cross-platform smartphone app isn’t easy. It takes lots of work to port a single game or other app to the hundreds of different cell phones and carriers in the world.

Various attempts to make this easy have their pitfalls. But London-based Ideaworks Labs says it has solved the problem with its Airplay software development kit. It launched its fourth version of the software in October, and today it is adding a version for... Continue Reading