VentureBeat

China’s online game sales expected to grow 38 percent to $3.8 billion this year

[updated with interview] While sales of console games in the U.S. have stalled, there is no sign of a slowdown in China’s online game market. The country is expected to see online game sales grow 38 percent to $3.8 billion in 2009, up from $2.75 billion last year, according to market researcher Niko Partners.

There are now 58 million game players in China, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Niko. The market is strong because online games… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Massive in-game ad business takes hits among 3,000 overall layoffs

[updated with new Microsoft comment] Microsoft announced a new round of layoffs today as it struggles to right itself after reporting tepid results last month. We’ve learned that Massive, the company’s in-game advertising business, suffered 28 percent like 75 percent layoffs.

Microsoft declined to comment yesterday on the Massive layoffs but offered a correction today, saying the layoffs were not as high as we thought.

Today’s cuts amounted to more than 3,000 jobs and are part of… Continue Reading

Introducing DEMO’s AlphaPitch: a necessary change (and tickets)

DEMO has long been an awesome conference for launching emerging technology products. The alumni say it all: Adobe Acrobat, Sun’s Java, Netscape’s Navigator, Palm Computing — they’ve all launched at DEMO, and that’s just the start of the list.

The reason these companies keep coming: DEMO’s focus on quality. The producers have consistently picked the best companies, bar none. Another reason is the media: Everyone from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg to the top writers… Continue Reading

Electronic Arts reports lower loss than expected, readies huge Sims 3 launch

Electronic Arts posted a smaller loss than expected in part because it cut back on expenses much faster than it previously indicated.

A bellwether for the console game industry, EA is one of the largest video game publishers, and its attempt to turn its financial fortunes around is being closely watched. Critical to EA’s future is the June 2 launch of The Sims 3, the latest incarnation in a series of people simulators that have sold… Continue Reading

Gist raises $6.75M for a smarter email inbox

Gist, a startup that helps people cope with information overload by organizing their email and more, has raised $6.75 million in a first round of institutional funding.

The Seattle startup is still in private beta testing, and I haven’t had a chance to see the product in action. Still, the concept sounds very cool — it integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Gmail to aggregate emails and related material (links, attachments, news articles) by people and company…. Continue Reading

VentureBeat named most influential business blog

We’ve seen several attempts to rank blogs by influence, traffic or other measures. Public relations are among the groups that like producing such lists. They often send us these lists hoping we’ll link to the study to give it some publicity. Well, this time I’ll bite.

We got one survey in our inbox this week conducted by public relations firm Text100. It scoured the mainstream media to count and rank the citations made to different blogs,… Continue Reading

Share your handwritten presentations with Livescribe pencasts

Livescribe, whose Pulse smartpen takes audio recordings linked to your handwritten notes, is making it possible to share those notes and recordings in what it calls a “pencast” — and then to embed those pencasts on any blog or website.

Users have been uploading Livescribe pencasts to the Oakland, Calif. startup’s online community since last year, but now Livescribe is bringing pencasts to the rest of the web as embeddable Flash videos. I’ve embedded a pencast… Continue Reading

SeeWhy tracks why people abandon web sites

SeeWhy, a company that tells web sites why people leave behind empty shopping carts, half-filled registration forms, etc., has launched a free service that tracks web site abandonment and promises to retain 30 percent of site visitors who may have otherwise left.

Competing with analytics companies like Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends, this new service — called Abandonment Tracker Free — allows web sites to follow up with page viewers who jumped ship in the form of… Continue Reading

IM brings Hi5 one step closer to “social entertainment”

Hi5 decided to bet big on games and “social entertainment” starting last year — by the end of 2009 it hopes to have 3-D avatars for its users, that they can use within games. Today, it has come a little bit closer to its vision, introducing a web-based instant messaging feature. It’s a sort of static bar that you see at the bottom of every page on the site, and use to chat with friends… Continue Reading

Dune snags $8.3M more for networking chips

Dune Networks, provider of network chips used to scale data centers and carrier equipment, has added $8.3 million to its second round of funding from Evergreen Venture Partners, Berkeley Ventures, Aurum-SBC Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. Previously, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company had raised $12 million in the round.

Dune says the new financing will go toward product development. It has raised $53 million in capital total — including contributions from past backers Cipio… Continue Reading

DealBase — a good way to find a hotel deal

DealBase.com, a web site that crawls the Web to provide readers with the best hotel prices and package deals, is now giving you an even better way to refine searches by limiting results to, say, “five-star hotels” or accommodations with “spa credit.”

The company, based in San Mateo, Calif., today also announced a first round of funding: $1 million from angel investors including Russ Siegelman, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Bob Zipp,… Continue Reading

Apple’s FileMaker division launches Bento personal assistant iPhone app

In a rare move, one of Apple’s own divisions is launching an app for the iPhone.

Apple’s FileMaker is publishing its Bento personal database app today for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The point of Bento is to create an organizer to take care of all of the details of a busy life.

The $4.99 app comes with 25 templates that you can customize to handle everything from recipes with star-ratings on them for personal use to… Continue Reading

Unity Mobile launches cross-mobile publishing platform

Creating mobile marketing campaigns isn’t nearly as easy as it should be. Unity Mobile wants to change that with the launch today of its web-based platform, which lets developers create cross-platform apps and marketing campaigns for both mobile phones and Internet web sites.

This is one of many developments that will make it much easier for businesses to reach people via the mobile web. Doctors could send out appointment reminders with maps to their offices. Real… Continue Reading

BeamME Pitch uses your iPhone to beam a sales pitch

First you could trade business cards wirelessly with your friends via the iPhone. Now you can give somebody a full-blown sales pitch the same way.

The beamME Pitch software comes courtesy of rmbrME, a New York company headed by Gabe Zichermann, who we’ve written about frequently for his views on funware. This new beamME pitch software adds to rmbrME’s growing list of fun apps.

With beamME Pitch, you can wirelessly transfer a document from your iPhone or… Continue Reading

Report: Online employers want you to sell, sell, sell

Everyone knows that it’s a rotten time to be looking for a job (and if you don’t, Google will graph those rising unemployment numbers for you). The real question is what to do about it. There’s plenty of advice out there, including a series of career and job advice posts on professional networking site LinkedIn. But online outsourcing marketplace Elance is offering something a bit more specific, because its Elance Online Work Index lists the… Continue Reading

Roundup: An Apple netbook hoax, a BlackBerry sales victory, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Is this the new Apple netbook? — Cult of Mac published an image from “a trusted contributor.” But no, it actually turned out to be a student-created wooden model. Oops.

RIM’s BlackBerry Curve unseats Apple’s iPhone in sales – One of the big drivers of this victory? An aggressive “buy one get one free” campaign by Verizon.

FTC looks at overlap of Apple and Google boards — The question is whether those ties reduce competition between… Continue Reading

Recession be damned, RGM Group launches online media firm for the affluent

RGM Group is launching an online media network for luxury brands today by pooling together four existing divisions.

While it seems like a silly idea in this economic environment, the company claims its first-quarter revenues were up 35 percent from a year ago and that growth continues because its web-focused advertising options can deliver measurable, targeted results compared to other forms of media.

The Venice, Calif.-based company enables advertisers to zero in on people who make more… Continue Reading