Quick Hit out to tackle Madden football game market
As summer inches closer, Madden NFL Football from Electronic Arts is arriving in video game stores almost like clockwork. Lots of rivals have failed to tackle Madden, which has become a multi-billion-dollar franchise. But Jeff Anderson’s Quick Hit (previously named Play Hard Sports) has a decent chance of winning some fans, not with a long bomb but with a game for those with short attention spans. Anderson’s venture-funded team has designed Madden and other football … Continue Reading
Nvidia scores first major customer for Ion graphics platform
When Nvidia launched its Ion graphics platform for netbooks and small laptops in December, it landed with a thud. But today, the company is announcing that Lenovo is going to use the platform to create a small laptop with 10 times more graphics horsepower than typical laptops.
Ion is a chip that combines an Nvidia graphics chip with a chip set. It’s meant to be paired with low-cost processors such as Intel’s Atom microprocessor in … Continue Reading
TwitVid.io strikes back — lets you tweet directly from webcam
updated
The combination of Twitter and real-time video is nirvana for the socialite.
What more would you want than to be able to sit there and tweet videos of yourself in rapid fire, all day long?
Now TwitVid.io is letting you do just that: tweet videos directly from your webcam on your computer. It will be ready by the end of the weekend, says TwitVid.io co-founder Chrys Bader. You’ll just hit a button directly on … Continue Reading
Twitvid.com lets you tweet videos, astonishingly quick
Updated
A San Francisco company has just launched Twidvid.com, an easy way to stream videos when you tweet.
But it does more than just let you link to a video when you tweet. It uploads the video in real time so that it’s essentially a live stream.
Now, I don’t blame you if you’re scratching your head about this, because it seems every version imaginable of Tweet-(fill-in-the-blank) has launched in the last few months.
In … Continue Reading
Russia's DST offers to invest in Facebook — and buy out employees too
Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet-investment group, has offered to invest $200 million in Facebook, the WSJ is reporting, and which our own sources close to the company have since said is “accurate.” However, the company itself has declined to comment.
The offer was for preferred stock and values Facebook at $10 billion. It’s not clear whether the deal will go through. While Facebook has consistently said it doesn’t need extra cash for now, the … Continue Reading
CryptoZoo alternate reality game gets your heart pumping
CryptoZoo aims to get gamers off the couch and into the streets, letting them find clues about mythical animals in the real world and exercise in their spare moments.
It’s an alternate reality game — mixing computer fantasy with real world tasks — and was designed with health goals in mind by a team led by Jane McGonigal, (right and bottom) director of game research at the Silicon Valley think tank Institute for the Future. … Continue Reading
Roundup: Facebook snares more funding? Craigslist wins injunction, eBay beats L'Oreal
Here’s the latest action:
From Russia With Love– Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investor, is offering to put more money into Facebook, raising its valuation to $10 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. [We've since confirmed.]
Court backs Craigslist in South Carolina injunction — A federal judge blocked the state’s attorney general from filing criminal charges against Craigslist related to prostitution charges.
Cartier files, then withdraws lawsuit over iPhone apps – The jewelry … Continue Reading
One reason why StockTwits is growing: Those Twitter ads
Twitter‘s management seems to have mixed feelings about advertising. But here’s anecdotal evidence that those text ads it has been running lately are worth something.
StockTwits, a site for sharing stock-related tweets, saw a sharp uptick in users last month, around the same time that Twitter began running ads for it.
In March, StockTwits had nearly 50,000 users but grew to more than 210,000 in April, according to Compete. Around the same time that Twitter … Continue Reading
Twitter Astronaut turns out to be tweeting via email
The underscore in his username should’ve made us wary. Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino, known as @Astro_Mike on Twitter, drew a third of a million followers for what most presumed were Massimino’s real-time tweets from space.
The Orlando Sentinel burst our balloon this morning by reporting how Massimino actually transfers his tweets from shuttle Atlantis’ orbit to Twitter’s servers in San Francisco.
Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston, where … Continue Reading
Chances improving for Climate Bill in the Senate?
Democratic nerves are running high that the Senate will kill the so-called “Climate Bill” that just made it out of committee in the House. But a 9-13 vote yesterday in its Energy and Natural Resources Committee prevented the removal of renewable energy mandates from a broader energy bill — suggesting that the Senate might be more amenable to the controversial American Clean Energy and Security Act than previously thought.
Even more encouraging to the climate … Continue Reading
White House looking for more open government ideas
In my coverage of yesterday’s launch of Data.gov, the Obama administration’s new central website for sharing government data with the public, it looks like I missed an important piece of the administration’s efforts to make government more open — the launch of opengov.ideascale.com, a site where users can make and vote on suggestions of how the government can take further steps in this direction.
It also looks like I wasn’t the only one to miss … Continue Reading
Stanford's Bill Dally leaps from academia to the computer graphics wars
Bill Dally recently made the jump from head of the computer science department at Stanford University to being chief scientist at graphics chip maker Nvidia. Now he has to be the chief visionary for the products that Nvidia will make in the future. His expertise is in parallel computing, which he believes will come to dominate the picture. If he’s right, we’ll see a shift of billions of dollars of sales from one part of … Continue Reading
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
Another study shows Craigslist is killing newspapers
Most newspaper-industry watchers know that online classified sites, particularly Craigslist, have dealt a major blow to newspaper revenue. Now a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project does a good job summarizing the shift: Between 2005 and 2009, the number of adults who have used online classifieds more than doubled, from 22 percent to 49 percent. At the same time, newspaper classified revenue dropped from around $17 billion to $10 billion.
That … Continue Reading
LED TVs hit the market, but will they sell?
With Samsung leading the charge, several television makers are turning to light-emitting diode technology to build thinner, crisper and more energy efficient products, VentureWire points out today. The catch is that the LEDs take price tags up a few notches — so will consumers go for it?
So far, the strategy employed by Samsung, LG and Sony — which all have LED models of their own on the market — has been to emphasize energy … Continue Reading
Paris Hilton's lost BlackBerry needs a kill switch
She did it again! After having her phone’s address book cracked a few years ago, Famous-for-being-famous heiress Paris Hilton lost her BlackBerry Thursday night at this week’s Festival de Cannes film convention in the south of France.
With smartphones replacing laptops as easy-to-lose repositories of confidential information, I wish AT&T and Verizon would offer something like Absolute Software’s Computrace system, which can remotely order a BlackBerry or Windows phone to erase files the next time … Continue Reading
Wireless networking co. NextG gives up on IPO
NextG Networks, a San Jose, Calif., provider of antenna systems used to carry mobile phone signals, has withdrawn its filing to go public due to unfavorable market conditions — even in the wake of successful SolarWinds and OpenTable IPOs earlier this week, reports VentureWire. It had planned to sell $150 million in common stock.
Not only has the company been in the red since 2001, it is starting to see wireless carriers implementing their own … Continue Reading
Medem channels $1.7M for online medical services
Medem, the company that operates the consumer-facing iHealth Network, has raised $1.7 million of an anticipated $2 million round of debt financing and rights. It plans to raise the rest before the end of the year. The network sends patients appointment reminders, prescription renewals and personalized consultations, reports VentureWire. In addition to these notifications, Medem provides interactive risk assessment tools to educate patients in preventive care, FDA warnings and alerts, and secure email transfers between … Continue Reading
OwnEnergy catches new funds for wind farms
OwnEnergy, a company that works with landowners to build and manage 10 to 80-megawatt wind farms, added an undisclosed amount to its first round of funding, bringing new investors Clearpoint Ventures and GoGreen Capital into its fold. Following a first chunk of funds received in October, this extension pushes the company closer to the $100 million mark it needs to hit for a 51-megawatt project in north Texas.
Based in New York, the company has … Continue Reading
Visible Technologies raises $6M to help companies track buzz
Visible Technologies, a service that lets companies follow what’s being said about them across the web, has brought in $6 million in a third round of funding. This bumps its total capital raised to $18 million since its founding in 2003. Based in Bellevue, Wash., the company’s investors include Ignition Partners and WPP Group. Two other companies, BuzzLogic and BuzzMetrics do roughly the same thing, reports paidContent.
Its two main products, TruCast and TruView, monitor … Continue Reading
