Salesforce.com to acquire hard-sell business directory Jigsaw for $142M

Salesforce.com, whose no-download business software is used by companies to organize their operations, announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Jigsaw, a “data as a service” company that offers access to its crowdsourced online business directory. Salesforce will pay $142 million for the company, along with a performance-based earn out up to 10 percent of the purchase price.

We last covered Jigsaw when it announced that it was profitable last year, … Continue Reading

Cooliris aims to boost pageviews for publishers of its 3D wall

Cooliris, a much-watched maker of tools for browsing images and videos on websites, has been promoting its Cooliris Wall as a way for publishers to add lots of good-looking, engaging content. Through the Wall, they can present images, videos, and more in a format that visitors can scroll through quickly and smoothly. While the time users spend on such features can be presented to advertisers through a metric called “engagement,” for many Web publishers the … Continue Reading

Qualtré raises $8M to get your gadgets moving

Get ready to move: Qualtré announced Wednesday that it raised $8 million in a second round of funding. The money will kickstart its business of selling chip-based gyroscopes that can serve as motion sensors for game consoles and consumer electronics gadgets.

Motion sensing is becoming important in a lot of devices, thanks to the success of Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wii game controller and Apple’s motion-sensing iPhone. Those devices use accelerometers, which are cheap but imprecise.

The … Continue Reading

Warner Bros. acquires Lord of the Rings Online game publisher Turbine

The world of Middle Earth is no longer divided, at least when it comes to video game and film property rights.

Warner Bros. has acquired online game publisher Turbine, the creator of Lord of the Rings Online, a massively multiplayer game where you can parade around as an elf and kill orcs in perpetuity.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Boston Globe reports that the purchase price was as high as $160 … Continue Reading

Google buys mysterious hardware startup — what's it building?

Update: A Google spokesman wrote in an email, “We’re pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don’t have any additional information to share right now.”

Google has acquired a stealth company called Agnilux, according to a report in PEHub. The startup never publicly announced what it does, and Google isn’t explaining the acquisition, but what little is known prompts some suggestive speculation.

Apparently the company was tight-lipped with reporters from The … Continue Reading

Reed Hastings puts money in startup that mixes learning and games

Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said his passion for education led him to the acquisition today of DreamBox Learning, an education game startup with an interesting approach to learning software.

In an interview, Hastings explained why he got so excited about the Bellevue, Wash.-based company that he decided to buy it along with Charter Fund. He used his own personal money in the deal, the amount of which was not disclosed. But both Hastings … Continue Reading

Zynga's Mark Pincus: Time for Facebook to choose

Facebook’s biggest partner had a suggestion for the adolescent social network: figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.

“Facebook is at a crossroads,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. “They have to decide whether its more important to be the web’s social platform, to make their social plumbing pervasive,” presumably through an expansion of more open technologies and communications infrastructure such as Facebook Connect. It’s sort of like being the plumber for … Continue Reading

Apple's Tim Cook: iPads are infinitely better than netbooks

Given the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet earlier this month, it’s not surprising that analysts on the company’s earnings call today were trying to get some insight into how big a hit the device will be. That’s not just important for Apple, but also the developers looking at the iPad as a new platform for their applications.

Apple didn’t share any numbers about early iPad sales, since it was only available for preorder during the … Continue Reading

Five ways to make great social games from Zynga's Mark Pincus

Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, runs the most successful social game company on Facebook, with more than 252 million monthly active users for games such as FarmVille.

His company has nearly 800 employees and is worth, by one educated estimate, about $5 billion. So his advice counts when it comes to figuring out what it takes to make a great social game.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, he offered the … Continue Reading

Yahoo profits up while revenue stagnates

It looks like Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz made real progress in turning the troubled Web giant around. In its earnings report for the first quarter of 2010, profits were up dramatically compared to the same period last year, even as revenue remained relatively stable.

But Yahoo has long been cutting its way to profits. And the lack of bottom-line growth shows how hard it is to be one of the top Web properties these … Continue Reading

Boring website? Step on up to the Heyzap Social Games Bar

Heyzap is announcing today that it is launching a “social games bar” that companies can integrate into their websites to add 30,000 games available to users.

The bar is the company’s latest bid to make websites more interesting to users by hooking them with games. Previously, Heyzap made its games available to website owners through an integrated widget or an application programming interface. Right now, more than 180,000 websites are using Heyzap’s games through those … Continue Reading

Apple posts another blowout quarter as all product lines beat targets

Apple reported today that its second fiscal quarters earnings blew away expectations once again as all major product lines exceeded targets.

Revenues were $13.5 billion and earnings were $3.07 billion, or $3.33 a share. The company sold 8.74 million iPhones (up 131 percent from a year ago), 2.94 million Macs (up 33 percent from a year ago), and 10.89 million iPods in the quarter (down 1 percent). A year ago, Apple reported revenue of $9.08 … Continue Reading

EA Playfish exec: the billion-dollar social game is achievable

Someone is going to create a social game that pulls in a billion dollars a year in short order, said Sebastien DeHalleux, vice president of business development and strategy at EA Interactive and former chief operating officer of EA’s Playfish social game division.

Speaking at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco today, DeHalleux said that hitting that milestone for the social game industry — which is only about two years old on Facebook … Continue Reading

As Google looms, shopping startup Milo moves to mom-and-pop shops

Local shopping search tool Milo is moving past big-box retailers and is starting to track real-time product availability from one-of-a-kind stores. That brings the total number of products the Palo Alto-based company tracks to 2.8 million.

Milo’s vision is to let consumers know which stores have what right now for every product in the country. For example, when a consumer searches for a product on the site, the company returns in-stock results from nearby outlets. … Continue Reading

Risks and opportunities — what Facebook may unveil tomorrow

Facebook will unveil a raft of new features when it takes the stage tomorrow at its first f8 developer conference in two years. That’s one week after its social networking rival Twitter unveiled its own competitive vision for the social web and finally debuted an ad network at its inaugural developer conference. Who will win this round in the battle for the social web?

There are much-anticipated rumored products like the company’s new “like” button … Continue Reading

Will motion controls kill traditional game controllers?

Before 1983, video games controls were clunky. Instead of thumbs and fingers to play, palms and entire fists were used to push, pull, and jerk joysticks. The interface worked, but it wasn’t ideal.

Then along came Nintendo with a thumb-friendly joypad (or gamepad), and everything changed. Controls were more precise. The competition realized this, then followed Nintendo’s lead within a few years by abandoning the joystick altogether.

Fast forward to 2006. Nintendo shuns the joypad … Continue Reading

From zero to more than $1 billion in 18 months: Groupon and social buying

Social buying, the hot trend in e-commerce today, had an inauspicious beginning. Eighteen months ago, it seemed like Andrew Mason’s site ThePoint.com wasn’t going anywhere.

“It was a collective action forum for people to solve problems they couldn’t otherwise fix,” said Eric Lefkofsky, who funded ThePoint. “We did that for 18 months and we originally thought the site would garner enough traffic that we could sell ads. It just wasn’t happening.”

So the team began … Continue Reading

TellApart to rival ad targeters: We have you in our sights

With $4.75 million from Greylock Partners and several angel investors, TellApart is launching a technology that could make waves in e-commerce by nailing down which ads actually bring customers through online stores’ virtual doors.

The company helps e-commerce sites analyze their customers’ behavior and then place ads on other websites those users visit as they surf the Web, a technique known as “retargeting” that’s gaining traction in online advertising. As the e-commerce sector heats up, … Continue Reading

Zerista raises more funding for mobile-centric social tools

Zerista chief executive Charlie Savage has called his company’s product “the first community platform designed from the ground up for the mobile web.” First or not, Zerista was chosen as one of the best startups for VentureBeat’s DEMO Spring 2010 conference in March. Today, the Denver startup announced a round of funding from Kickstart Seed Fund in Salt Lake City. Kickstart had previously funded Zerista with an amount under $1 million.

Neither Zerista nor Kickstart … Continue Reading