The business model begins: Twitter to promote FM and Microsoft-backed ExecTweets
If you’ve used Twitter’s website in the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed a small rectangle promoting its widgets and Twitter Search. It’s no accident that it looks like an ad unit, because it actually is an ad unit. Shortly, it will be used to promote a new project by blog advertising network Federated Media, and sponsored by Microsoft.
That project is ExecTweets, the latest third-party site to use Twitter’s immense amount of data … Continue Reading
Curt Schilling retires from baseball, but is ready to play and build video games
Curt Schilling said today he’s retiring from Major League Baseball with four World Series and three World Championships under his belt. Baseball’s loss is gaming’s gain. Schilling is the founder and chairman of 38 Studios , a startup creating a massively multiplayer online role-playing game code-named Copernicus.
He last pitched a game in 2007. Over his lifetime, the 42-year-old Schilling had a win-loss record of 216-146. He scored 3,116 strikeouts. He helped the Boston Red … Continue Reading
Ardian pumps in $47M for high blood pressure device
Ardian , developer of a device that could help treat high blood pressure, has brought in $47 million in a third round of funding led by Medtronic and including Emergent Medical Partners , Advanced Technology Ventures , Morgenthaler Ventures and Split Rock Partners .
Based in Palo Alto, the company claims that its technology relieves hypertension and risk of coronary disease or stroke to a greater degree than drug treatments like ACE inhibitors and beta … Continue Reading
Meebo's chat advertising service expands to the web
Social networks like myYearbook and movie fan network Flixster already integrate Meebo’s white-label instant message service, Community IM , so their users can chat across instant message services without having to leave their sites. Those users will be getting small banner and icon ads within the chat toolbar on the Community IM interface later this month. Click on the icon and you get a 900 x 400 ad, like the one for Havaianas, below.
It’s … Continue Reading
5AM Ventures closes $119M for third life science fund
5AM Ventures , a Menlo Park, Calif. venture firm specializing in seed or early-stage life science and biopharmaceutical investments, announced that it’s raised $119.25 million toward a third fund of at least $150 million. The money came from a grab bag of undisclosed private investors, endowments, foundations and pensions.
5AM raised its first fund, totaling $65 million, in 2002, and its $150 million second fund in 2006. The latter handed out chunks of $12 to … Continue Reading
MyGameMug releases job board for recruiting World of Warcraft guilds
MyGameMug started out as one of a bunch of social networks for gamers . Now it’s launching WoW Headhunter , which is a tool to recruit players for World of Warcraft guilds.
Many players have more fun playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing fantasy game by joining groups of player friends known as guilds. They go on missions together and share in the loot. WoW Headhunter is an intelligent job board that analyzes guild leaders’ … Continue Reading
Data switch-maker Hammerhead dead in the water
Telecom data-switching company Hammerhead Systems has folded due to the poor economy, reports VentureWire. Specifically, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company failed to recruit enough mobile carriers as customers for its Ethernet aggregation switches, which rout data from mobile users back to operator networks.
The company claims this functionality helped carriers adapt aging equipment to modern traffic demands — but to no avail. It just let go 50 of its 53 employees, and the several that … Continue Reading
Survey: iPhone has biggest potential for games
Apple’s iPhone will be the games industry’s favorite platform going forward, according to a survey just conducted of industry executives and interested readers.
The survey also found that micro-transactions, such as purchases of virtual goods in online games, are expected to have the highest impact on the video game industry in the next five years.
The results are from VentureBeat’s first game industry survey, conducted on the eve of our GamesBeat 2009 conference being held … Continue Reading
Industry Ventures takes $265M for secondary fund
Capital may be running thin these days, but the secondary market — where already-issued stocks, bonds, options and futures are sold — continues to thrive. Industry Ventures , which specializes in acquiring venture portfolios and limited partnership interests, is a major beneficiary of the trend, drawing $265 million for its recent fund — much more than its initial projection of $200 million and hard cap of $250 million.
Institutional pension funds like the state of … Continue Reading
Study: Marketers flock to social networks, but payoff still unclear
According to a new study by WhitePaperSource , social networks are becoming a high-priority tool for marketers. The study, which questioned some 900 marketers, reports that 88 percent are using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter , to market their businesses. The study also indicates that this is a new trend, given that almost two thirds of respondents said they’d only been using social network channels for a couple of months.
Michael A. Stelzner, … Continue Reading
Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights on how cloud computing will impact games
[Editor's note: The following is a guest column contributed by Denis Dyack, founder and president of Silicon Knights, one of the world’s largest independent game developers.]
Anyone who creates videos games understands that its key differentiator from other entertainment media is its interactivity. Video games are non-linear entertainment in the sense that traditional narratives, as in film, novels and television, are always experienced in predetermined sequence, and repeat experiences are the same in structure. While … Continue Reading
GCube Capital loses two partners, shifts investment strategy
GCube Ventures drew a lot of attention when we wrote about them last August as an investment fund that would focus on the game industry. Many observers saw it as a sign of financial maturity for the game industry, which had long struggled to gain favor among venture capitalists. And, in fact, 2008 was probably the best year in history for VC investments in game companies and virtual worlds, with at least $885 million raised. … Continue Reading
Digital River and Playxpert to co-market e-commerce inside games
Digital River and Playxpert are pitching a tool for game developers to build e-commerce solutions inside their game worlds.
The two companies are combining their products to make it easy for developers to build online games where you can buy things that you see in the world, such as a better sword, with real currency. Many of today’s online games don’t even have stores where gamers can buy things, or they have stores that exist … Continue Reading
Bigfoot Networks launches second-generation gaming network card
Bigfoot Networks is launching the second-generation of its gaming network card for PCs to deal with the problem of lag.
Lag is the problem gamers see when they’re getting ready to blast someone in a multiplayer combat game and the computer screen slows down so much that their aim is off. By speeding up the network, Bigfoot’s products can keep trigger-happy gamers satisfied.
The Austin, Texas-based company has partnered with game computer maker Alienware and … Continue Reading
MyPunchbowl revamps birthday reminders
Keeping track of birthdays online is a drag. Sure, every social networking site now has a system for reminders. But, unless you have the same group of friends on every site, a lot of those reminders end up spread out across the web. MyPunchbowl, an upstart event planning site, has a solution: a centralized Birthday Reminder service.
The premise for MyPunchbowl’s newest product is simple. The company’s web-based Birthday Reminder service lets users store, categorize, … Continue Reading
iPhone game developer Ngmoco raises second round of funding
The iPhone game publisher Ngmoco is announcing today that it has raised $10 million in a second round of funding — in its ninth month as a company.
The funding — led by Norwest Venture Partners and put together in a matter of weeks — shows how hot the iPhone game sector is and how the San Francisco company in particular is riding a wave of excitement. The company was founded by Electronic Arts executive … Continue Reading
Salesforce.com lets you answer customer complaints on Twitter
Most people on popular microblogging site Twitter (which just turned three) have probably seen customer service-type queries from other users — questions about how to make a product work, or complaints that it’s broken. I have even posted some complaints of my own. That’s one of the reasons companies like Google have created their own Twitter accounts, and its why Salesforce.com is adding Twitter integration to its customer service product, which it calls the Service … Continue Reading
Game Developers Conference preview
The Game Developers Conference kicks off Monday with a week-long series of events in San Francisco.
The main conference runs Wednesday through Friday, but a bunch of summits run Monday and Tuesday. Attendance is expected to be down slightly from last year’s 18,000, according to Meggan Scavio, director of the GDC, in an interview with the Associated Press. The event should be a mix of celebration and gloom. While the larger economy is shrinking, U.S. … Continue Reading
Twitter trounces the terrible twos, turns three
Twitter turns three today. It’s a birthday some might not have thought the service would live to see after severe downtime and reliability issues during its second year in existence. But Twitter made the hires it needed to, kicked its problems, and endured. Actually, it thrived.
When it launched back in 2006, it was known as Twttr, and was a side project of podcasting service Odeo. We briefly covered it in July of that year, … Continue Reading
Facebook's redesign: Good concept, but not there yet
Has Facebook just destroyed its usefulness? Is the design, introduced a week ago, killing the site’s ability to help you share information with your real-life friends? That’s what a vocal and perhaps large group of people think. That’s at least judging from a poll of around a million people who self-selectively voiced their displeasure, various reports of “100 percent” of people’s Facebook friends hating it, and the well-articulated dissatisfaction of many readers here on VentureBeat.… Continue Reading
