Heyzap raises $3M round for social game platform expansion
Heyzap has raised $3 million to beef up its platform and help Facebook game developers port their games to other web sites.
The investors include Union Square Ventures, which led the previous round, entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Chris Dixon from Founder Collective.
Heyzap made its name by indexing and monetizing the world’s independently developed Flash games. It has more than 30,000 such games now, and it distributes those games to more than 220,000 web sites. … Continue Reading
11 ways Flickr just got better
If you’re not a heavy Flickr user, you might not spot the changes in the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service’s forthcoming redesign, to which you can opt in now. Click on the screenshot at right to see it full size. The old and new pages look alike at first, but there are key differences:
The default display size of photos has been increased 30 percent, from 500 pixels wide to 640. Newer computers with larger, more high-resolution
Recurve locks in $8M to make your home energy tight
Recurve, a startup that helps homeowners identify and execute tasks that can make their homes more energy-efficient and thereby slash their monthly electricity bills, has brought in $8 million in a second round of capital. Notably, about $4 million came from major hardware store chain Lowe’s.
This isn’t the first time the company has worked with Recurve. They teamed up about a year ago to sell energy efficiency-audits and modifications to Lowe’s customers. This boosted … Continue Reading
Russian president makes his inaugural tweet from Twitter headquarters
It’s been a big week for social networking CEOs and politics.
Twitter’s head, Ev Williams, just hosted Russian president Dmitry Medvedev at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. The visit comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg met face-to-face with new U.K. prime minister David Cameron while in London.
The brief visit included the president’s very first tweet from the service through the @KremlinRussia account. So far his tweets have covered the view from his hotel … Continue Reading
Amazon CTO: The cloud is about much more than servers
Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels delivered a speech on “The State of the Cloud” this morning in San Francisco, where he looked at the cloud computing industry’s recent past, as well as its future.
Speaking at GigaOm’s Structure conference, Vogels said one of the big trends in 2009 was the rise of cloud computing myths. It’s typical for existing companies to spread “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” when they’re threatened by upstart businesses, and he … Continue Reading
Bing bets big on entertainment: Adds music streams, games, TV shows, and movies
Bing is on a roll with updates for the summer. Yesterday, we reported on the search engine’s revamped iPhone app, and last night it unveiled its new entertainment section. The new portion of the site offers music lyrics and streaming, a collection of online games, a detailed list of TV episodes available to watch on the web, and improved movie-going resources.
The updates are in response to trends Bing has been seeing on the web. … Continue Reading
Zurb gives entrepreneurs visible website feedback with Bounce
Trying to get feedback from others around website development or design can be a difficult process. Especially when you’re trying to do it through email or over the phone. In an effort to make the process a bit easier, design and consulting firm Zurb today announced the release of Bounce, a new visual feedback application for websites.
The free application helps make it easy and fast to communicate your website ideas. No login or registration … Continue Reading
Facebook CEO promises 1,000,000,000 users
Sometime next year, Facebook’s billionth customer will sign up, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in the south of France.
British newspaper the Guardian reported that Zuckerberg said there was “no chance” of hitting the one billion mark this year, but “it is almost a guarantee that it will happen.”
Despite the widespread complaining about Facebook’s personal privacy controls, the social network is still growing. The rate of … Continue Reading
Zuora brings its subscription technology to cloud providers
Zuora chief executive and cofounder Tien Tzuo has been evangelizing about the shift to “the subscription economy,” and his company has been trying to sell its subscription technology to all kinds of companies — Web startups, media companies, Facebook application developers. Now it’s adding providers of cloud computing infrastructure to that list, with a new service called Z-Commerce for the Cloud.
Since this is Zuora’s first product focused on infrastructure, rather than Web applications or … Continue Reading
App Store may be a mere 1% of Apple's gross profit
Apple’s App Store — which houses applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad — may not be the huge moneymaker that some think. Just two weeks ago, Steve Jobs announced at the WorldWide Developer Convention that over 5 billion apps have been downloaded, and $1 billion has been paid to developers.
Using those figures, Piper Jeffray analyst Gene Munster created an independent model of the App Store’s business that confirms Apple’s previous claims about … Continue Reading
PapayaMobile raises $4M, launches mobile social game platform for Android (exclusive)
PapayaMobile has raised $4 million for the launch of its new mobile social networking platform on Android devices.
The Beijing-based company already has more than 3.5 million global users for its cross-platform mobile games. The company got those users in the past year by launching its own social games on mobile phones. Now it’s opening up the platform to third-party developers who can integrate the social platform into their own games.
The announcement shows that … Continue Reading
Will Sony's Move controller find a niche between the Wii and Kinect? (videos)
Sony showed off a smorgasbord of games coming for its Sony Move motion-sensing controller, which debuts this fall.
The big question about this device is whether it will really carve out a unique place for itself in the video game accessory market. Microsoft’s Kinect uses only a 3D camera to detect motion, leaving you with that magical feeling that you can control a game with your body and no controller.
But Sony’s handheld Move controller … Continue Reading
VenueGen lowers pricing to take virtual meetings to the masses
VenueGen said today that it’s taking its 3D virtual meeting tools to a new audience, with a version aimed at freelancers, small businesses, bloggers, and do-good organizations.
Company president Jeff Crown said that most of the existing virtual world products for businesses, such as those offered by Inxpo and Unisfair, are out of reach for smaller organizations, because they cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. And VenueGen’s initial service, which it launched at … Continue Reading
What comes after the minimally viable product?
(Editor’s note: Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur and the founder and CTO of HubSpot, which provides marketing software for small businesses. This column originally appeared on his blog. )
One of the key parts of Eric Ries lean startup movement is the concept of a “minimally viable product”. The MVP is a product that has the minimum set of features needed to learn what the market wants. The idea behind the MVP is … Continue Reading
Threadsy harnesses Facebook "likes" to highlight your mutual passions
Threadsy, a startup with an ambitious goal of compressing all of your online communication through e-mail and social networks into a single inbox, is harnessing Facebook’s Open Graph and “likes” data in a novel way.
When a friend or stranger reaches out to you, Threadsy will show all of the common interests you share with them. This is, of course, provided that they haven’t changed their privacy settings so their likes remain public.
It’s potentially … Continue Reading
Facebook design tweaks make for a more visual news feed
Facebook is testing out a new few tweaks thats make the news feed more visual. A screenshot from Hotlou shows that three larger images appear at the top of the news feed, leading into friends’ photo albums that are popular.
Underneath are tiny icons allowing users to like or comment on the albums.
What’s interesting is that the new photos almost resemble promos or “skyboxes” that become popular on the top of newspaper front pages … Continue Reading
The designer behind Facebook CEO's mysterious hoodie speaks up
Earlier this month, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg ignited a baffling brouhaha in the press when he took off a hoodie on-stage at the AllThingsD conference only to reveal a circular design imprinted on the inside.
AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher joked to Zuckerberg, “What are you in, some kind of cult?” and SF Weekly’s Alexia Tsotsis had the insignia recreated and analyzed. Then one intrepid employee put the hoodie up for sale on eBay and saw … Continue Reading
Nintendo CEO warns that game industry is boring consumers
Satoru Iwata, chief executive of Nintendo, proudly waved the Nintendo 3DS on stage this week as the company showed off a surprisingly well received handheld game player that can depict movies and games in 3D without the annoying 3D glasses. We caught up with Iwata at the end of the E3 video game convention to talk about how Nintendo created the handheld, which was the talk of the show. We also talked about the state … Continue Reading
Verizon, AT&T to offload network overload by joining Wi-Fi interoperability group
However fast your current 3G or 4G cellular data network is, it still pales in comparison to an average Wi-Fi network — which are most often connected to residential or commercial broadband networks. And with the increasing popularity of smartphones, carriers will need to promote Wi-Fi access heavily to prevent over-saturation on their networks. Earlier this week, Verizon and AT&T joined the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) to do just that, reports Cnet.
Since 2003, the … Continue Reading
Roundup: Google delves into HTML5, LinkedIn gets more social, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Google launches its own HTML5 site — Competing with Apple’s HTML5 demonstration site, the search giant has debuted HTML5Rocks, a site hosting nine tutorials and tools developers can use to generate their own code and innovations.
Clickable joins forces with American Express — Clickable is powering SearchManager, a new service offered through American Express’s OPEN small business program, granting clients access to the big search engines and advertising services like Google … Continue Reading
