Take-Two Interactive struggles to move beyond Grand Theft Auto
It’s not all that easy for a video game publisher to diversify away from good-old-fashioned-street-violence-racing-mayhem.
Take-Two Interactive Software reported its results for the second fiscal quarter ended April 30 were far below last year’s sales, when the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV generated huge sales.
This company’s results rise or fall with the launch of Grand Theft Auto series games, which are hardcore violent games. The stock price ebbs and flows on the question … Continue Reading
MarkLogic raises $12.5M more for publishing infrastructure
MarkLogic, which makes software to help other companies deliver content, has raised $12.5 million in a fourth round of funding from existing backers Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital (previously Lehman Brothers Venture Partners).
The San Carlos, Calif., company’s flagship product is the MarkLogic Server, an XML server that allows companies to share information across various information systems, including the web. The company says it has more than 150 customers.
MarkLogic has raised a total of … Continue Reading
Zuckerberg and Milner, on Facebook's latest funding — and social networking revenue
Why did Facebook just decide to raise money from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies — aside from generally wanting a “cushion” of $200 million before it goes public? As Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and DST chief executive Yuri Milner tell me in the interview below, there are lots of reasons. One is that DST has invested in five Russian and Eastern Europe-based social networks already — and all of them are “very profitable,” … Continue Reading
LogLogic scores $8M for data management services
LogLogic, the San Jose, Calif. company that manages data for information technology departments, says it brought in $8.8 million in a fourth round of funding to take better advantage of its recent acquisition, Exaprotect, a similar company base in Europe. It says it will use the money to build its overseas presence and adapt its new software offerings for more predictive and analytics services.
The recent round came from Invesco Private Capital, SAP Ventures, Sequoia … Continue Reading
Visual search engine Ziipa lets you stumble with your eyes
Editor’s note: This is part of VentureBeat’s series “Startup Spotlight.” Every week, we’ll sift through the scores of companies applying to be promoted and profile the best one. Companies can sign up here at the Entrepreneur Corner, which is currently sponsored by Microsoft. (Of course, we’re still interested in covering startup news and innovation in our day-to-day coverage.) Today, we continue the series with Ziipa, below.
Ziipa is a rare combination of semantic search, crowdsourcing, … Continue Reading
Intel's coming processors to attack high end of server chip market
Intel said today that a new Xeon series server chip debuting in the second half of the year will attack the highest end of the server processor market. That means Intel is targeting IBM as well as another division of Intel that sells the Itanium processors.
The code-named Nehalem-EX processor will launch in the second half of the year and appear in computer servers in early 2010. The chip extends the Nehalem-EP processor that launched … Continue Reading
How to Achieve Elegance
I interviewed Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, about the topic of elegance. He says that the four qualities of elegance are: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. If you’re interested in creating elegant products and services, you’ll find it very interesting. Check out the interview here. Please mark it “found useful” if you did.
More on elegance and design at Design.alltop.
How to Build a Brand Community
Dave Balter, the founder of BzzAgent, provided me with ten tips for building a brand community. Check out his tips here if you’re trying to build an online community for your company. Please mark it “found useful” if you did.
More about social media at Socialmedia.alltop.
What’s next: A butler for your idle computer?
Idle grid computing — applying unused computer time to a task — is a great solution in need of a problem. Hundreds of millions of computers sit unused two-thirds of the day. Most of these PCs have the CPU, storage, and internet access to run complex tasks, but instead just suck power.
Dozens of free programs let people use this time for worthy causes: Seti@Home searches for ET, Folding@Home analyzes proteins, neuGrid studies brain diseases. … Continue Reading
New York Times appoints a "social media editor"
How’s this for a dream job? America’s paper of record has reassigned one of its editors to be the in-house expert on Facebook and Twitter.
You can read up on Jennifer Preston’s background in this morning’s entertainingly cruel Gawker post. More important is that the New York Times as an organization takes social networks seriously as a work tool. A leaked internal email describes Preston’s role:
Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? … Continue Reading
It's official: Facebook raises $200M from Russian investor
After months of rumors about whether Facebook is raising more money — or even if it needs the money to pay the bills — the company has officially confirmed that it has taken a new round of funding.
Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies is putting in $200 million for 1.96 percent of the company, at a $10 billion valuation.
DST is also planning to purchase up to $100 million in current and former employee stock, … Continue Reading
Nokia begins launching Ovi Store for apps (slowly)
Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, has begun rolling out the Ovi store, its answer to Apple’s App Store.
Upon launch, the Ovi store was loading very slowly, and continues to.
It is available in some countries, but not others. Here in the U.S., AT&T will support Ovi Store, but timing for that U.S. launch hasn’t been announced yet.
Nokia’s big step forward with the store, as we’ve reported, is that it allows “direct … Continue Reading
Canesta shows off gesture controls for TV, PCs, games and more
Ever since the Nintendo Wii took the video game market by storm with its motion-sensing controller, next-generation user interfaces have become a big attraction. Canesta is one of the companies trying to upstage the Wii with a 3-D vision system.
The webcam-like camera lets you control your PC, TV, games and other things with natural hand gestures rather than a controller or remote control. The camera detects your movements and then calculates exactly where you … Continue Reading
OpenX raises $10 million for open-source ad server business
The odds are good you’ve never heard of OpenX. But the company makes the open-source ad servers that are behind more than 150,000 web sites. Its software serves more than 300 billion ads a month into those web sites. Not bad for a little old company from Pasadena, Calif.
And today the company’s announcing it’s raised $10 million in a third round of funding. DAG Ventures led the round, and existing investors Accel Partners, Index … Continue Reading
What's Google's fatal flaw? Microsoft spending $100M to call it out
AdAge reports that Microsoft has budgeted up to $100 million to advertise Bing, its yet-unlaunched search engine, on TV, on radio, online and in print. The Bing campaign is so big that ad agency JWT has hired additional creative staff, according to AdAge.
Getting customers to switch from Google will be tough. Internal Google tests found that most users favored results branded with the Google logo, even when Google swapped logos with another search engine … Continue Reading
Samsung I7500 has iPhone-like keyboard, Android software
An Android phone without a hardware keyboard, Samsung’s I75500 also sports a five megapixel camera. Yet its winning feature may not be the keyboard, but Android’s live folders, which let phone apps fill your phone with data in the background so you can access it later, even without a connection. Yes, this is a Twitter phone.
Samsung’s design isn’t just plain, it’s boring. Powered off, it has none of the sexiness of a Blackberry or … Continue Reading
Video parodies Microsoft's vision of the future
You’re working today? Kick back with IGN’s saracastic re-narration of a Microsoft blue-sky video we blogged a while back. My favorite aspect of this utopia is it runs two and a half minutes without a layoff.
http://videomedia.ign.com/ev/ev.swf
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VentureLoop advertises venture-funded startup jobs
VentureLoop has partnered with Widgetbox to advertise the jobs available at startups that have been funded by VentureLoop’s venture capital clients.
VentureLoop hosts career sites for venture capital firms. It will use Widgetbox (a widget maker that reaches 90 million people) to post job openings on Facebook, blogs and other social networks. Widgetbox’s Blidget and Blidget Pro tools let publishers and marketers convert feeds into custom branded widgets.
Jeremy McCarthy, VentureLoop’s chief executive, said the … Continue Reading
Google geeks shaking with excitement over this week's Android surprise
Arrogance isn’t a word you would use to describe Andy Rubin and his team of engineers who build Google’s Android software for mobile phones. Rubin, who developed handheld gadgets for Apple and Danger before Google beamed him aboard, isn’t one to call his own work revolutionary.
Until now. Four years after the Android project began in Mountain View, insiders are telling VentureBeat that we can’t miss this week’s Google I/O developer conference, which runs Wednesday … Continue Reading
Write4net lets you tweet past 140 characters
Brevity is one of Twitter’s strong points. Restricting updates to 140 characters of text, including any hypertext links, forces Twitterers to write tightly. It keeps users from boring each other. But sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough, even for a master of verbal compression. If you don’t already have a blog to which you can link for a longer post, what do you do?
Write4net is a site from Brazilian company Webi4. It’s designed as an … Continue Reading
