Did Sony do enough to satisfy angry PlayStation Network users? (poll)
Sony executives have formally apologized to users who were affected by the hacker attack on the PlayStation Network, the online entertainment service that has been down for more than 10 days.
Today, Sony’s Kaz Hirai repeatedly apologized to users for the data breach. The company said it would begin restoring the service for the PSN and Qriocity music and video service within a week. It offered to reimburse customers for the costs related to credit … Continue Reading
Sony says 10M credit card numbers may have been stolen
Sony executive Kaz Hirai said tonight that the number of exposed credit card numbers in the PlayStation Network hacker attack was about 10 million. But the Japanese company still does not know if those card numbers were actually stolen and if hackers are trying to use them in fraudulent purchases.
Hirai said that authorities are looking into the matter and that he could not yet say what the damages are from the incident, where hackers … Continue Reading
Sony executive Kaz Hirai apologizes for PlayStation Network outage
Sony executive Kaz Hirai apologized to gamers around the world today in a press event in the wake of the 10-day outage of the hacked PlayStation Network.
Hirai and other Sony executives apologized to users immediately upon coming out on stage at a press conference in Tokyo. As they did so, they bowed in front of the press. The executives described what happened with a “highly sophisticated attack” against the PSN.
Hackers attacked the PlayStation … Continue Reading
Week in review: Outages at Sony's PlayStation Network, Amazon, and Verizon
Here’s our roundup of the week’s top tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
In fourth day of outage, Sony says it is beefing up PlayStation Network security — It was a big week for outages at a number of online services. Sony’s PlayStation Network went down for several days, and the company said it would improve security as it worked to rebuild the system.
Possible iPhone … Continue Reading
Valve: first Portal 2 downloadable content will be free
Valve is bucking one of the largest trends in the video gaming industry — releasing additional content for games and charging extra for it — by releasing the next phase of content for its blockbuster hit Portal 2 for free for all gamers.
Downloadable content for games can be as big as the blockbuster games themselves. The Call of Duty series, a first-person shooting game set in wartime, has proven this point multiple times by … Continue Reading
Top Sony exec to brief media on Playstation Network outage tomorrow
Sony’s second-in-command, Kazuo Hirai, will hold a press conference tomorrow in the first public address by a Sony executive since its Playstation Network (PSN) online gaming network crashed.
Sensitive information about PSN users was stolen by hackers during an extensive attack and intrusion on the online gaming network, according to Sony. It was a massive security gaffe that has caused the U.S. government to get involved and demand answers — such as who attacked the … Continue Reading
Entrepreneur Corner: Charlie Sheen and clarifying VC term sheets
Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.
Demystifying the VC term sheet: Drag-along provisions – Attorney Scott Edward Walker continues his ongoing series about some of the common (and confusing) jargon in a VC term sheet, explaining how you might be forced to vote in favor of a merger or sale – even if you don’t want to.
4 essential ways to attract investors – It’s harder than ever to turn the head of a … Continue Reading
What Sony does next is critical to its future in games
Gamers are slow to forgive. Many own a PlayStation 3 today because they were angry at Microsoft for letting them down when the Xbox 360 suffered from a huge number of breakdowns due to a manufacturing flaw that led to overheating.
Microsoft’s consumer-unfriendly handling of the Xbox 360′s defects helped Sony recover from a poor launch of the PS 3, which went on sale for far too much money — $599 compared to the $399 … Continue Reading
Apple's Reading List takes on Instapaper, ReadItLater
Apple is working on a feature called “Reading List” for its Safari web browser that will let users save stories to read later — pretty much the same thing that Instapaper and ReadItLater are doing now — reports MacRumors.
At the moment, Reading List only appears to be something that’s in early builds of Mac OS X Lion, Apple’s next operating system — but I would wager that it will also be something that’s implemented … Continue Reading
The scorecard on royal wedding internet traffic
The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton generated traffic records as millions upon millions watched the live video on the internet.
Keynote Systems, a mobile and internet cloud monitoring service, said most news web sites held up pretty well. One major unnamed site got hit pretty hard with traffic. The site saw delays and sharp increases in response time due to a social media content item that didn’t “break” the page but delayed … Continue Reading
VentureBeat's Mobile Summit in photos
We held our very first Mobile Summit on Monday and Tuesday, where 180 executives gathered to discuss the industry’s top issues. During the summit, VentureBeat published a number of articles, interviews and presentations, and next week we’ll be posting videos too. In the meantime, here are some photos.
VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall interviews Michael Abbott, Twitter’s vice president of engineering. Abbott talked about Twitter’s focus on mobile and about Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s current involvement … Continue Reading
Verizon's big location tracking awareness campaign: warning stickers on phones
So it’s come to this: Verizon says it will be adding Surgeon General-style warnings on its phones to make users aware that the carrier will be tracking their location, Forbes reports.
The move comes as a response to inquiries from Congressman Joe Barton and Ed Markey, who were following up on a New York Times article that revealed the dramatic extent smartphones are tracking consumers.
In letters made public by the Congressman today, Verizon, AT&T, … Continue Reading
Congress wants to investigate PlayStation Network hack
A House of Representatives subcommittee asked Sony to provide information about the hacker attack that brought down the PlayStation Network and the Qriocity music and video service.
The network has been down for more than a week, denying 77 million registered gamers the ability to play online games, watch movies, listen to music or download other entertainment to their PlayStation 3 consoles and PlayStation Portable handhelds.
The letter was addressed to Kazuo Hirai, the head … Continue Reading
App downloads will hit 44 billion in 2016
The success of downloadable smartphone apps will continue at least through the next five years. A new study from ABI Research estimates that app industry will achieve 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016.
If the forecast is correct, it means that native apps will still rule over HTML5 and other new web programming technologies for websites in the browser. At least in the near future.
The latest figures from vendors suggest that the cumulative download … Continue Reading
Groupon tries to defuse controversy with Trump’s Apprentice
Group-buying powerhouse Groupon wants to be clear: It isn’t endorsing Donald Trump.
Specifically, the company just published a blog post clarifying the presence of its advertising on the web page of Trump’s TV show The Apprentice. Apparently, someone believing that Groupon was an Apprentice sponsor started a petition calling for a boycott after Trump used his show as a platform for a possible presidential campaign and to dredge up the tired old rumors that … Continue Reading
Qualcomm is working to get mobile web pages to load faster
Mobile web browsing can be slow and frustrating to users. It seems like there’s nothing that can be done about it, given the overburdened mobile networks of carriers that are facing increasing data usage.
But Sayeed Choudhury, director of product management and web technologies at Qualcomm, says it’s possible to optimize web browsers to take advantage of hardware such as Qualcomm’s mobile Snapdragon processors to deliver a better web experience. We spoke with him at … Continue Reading
Spotify CEO laughs off movie rumors
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek today refuted the rumors (reported by TechCrunch and others) that the Swedish streaming music service had negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to stream their content. On his Twitter stream Ek said, “Soon I’ll be reading that Spotify is launching a space rocket.”
Spotify offers a number of subscriptions. Spotify Free comes with ads. The Unlimited subscription is ad-free and costs €4.99 ($7.22) a month. Premium, which allows … Continue Reading
The new iPhone 4 is white, fat
Another day, another Apple “scandal” — at least, according to the tech world. Apparently a 0.2 millimeter difference in thickness between the black iPhone 4 and its new white sibling is enough to spawn tremendous interest across the web.
While the change is small, some customers that switched to the new phone are finding that their rigid phone cases won’t fit because of the size differential.
That means these customers will have to pick up … Continue Reading
Game fundings and acquisitions rise 130 percent to $1.89B in 2010
Video game acquisitions and funding deals rose 130 percent to $1.89 billion in 2010, up from $819 million in 2009, according to market researcher IHS Screen Digest.
The number of fundings and acquisition deals combined was 210 during last year, up 36 percent from a year earlier, thanks to the disruption in the game business caused by the growth of online and social networking games. Our own count found that game fundings hit $1.05 billion … Continue Reading
Amazon takes 5,700 words before apologizing for cloud crash
Amazon promised a detailed postmortem of its massive Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) crash from last week, and it certainly delivered today with a nearly 6,000 word breakdown of the fiasco by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team.
But despite being more open about the problem, it still took the company around 5,700 words before it finally apologized to its customers, which included major sites and services like Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora. Amazon will be offering … Continue Reading
