Synopsys buys chip design software maker Magma for $507M
In a big strategic shift for the chip design software industry, Synopsys said today it plans to buy Magma Design Automation for $507 million.
The deal leaves two juggernauts in electronic design automation software (EDA) — Synopsys and arch rival Cadence Design Systems — to battle it out as the software of choice for engineers who design electronic chips. Synopsys is buying Magma for $7.35 a share in cash, a 29 percent premium to Magma’s … Continue Reading
Humble Introversion Bundle sales rising over 150,000 with 6 days left
The Humble Bundle releases have become quite an event in the world of indie gaming, and the recent Humble Introversion Bundle is certainly no exception. With six days until its completion, the Bundle has already sold over 150,000 copies, earning the developers and the supported charities over $630,000.
This edition of the Humble Bundle includes Darwinia, Multiwinia, DEFCON and Uplink, Introversion’s entire catalog, for any donation at all, but as always, there is an incentive … Continue Reading
Saints Row: The Third stat tracker goes live — purple dildo kills 2 million
Players of Saints Row: The Third, the controversial open-world game from Volition and THQ, can now accurately measure the level of carnage they have created in the game, following the release of the stats and achievements tracker at the official website.
Stat tracking websites seem to be all the rage this winter, with EA releasing its Battlelog service alongside Battlefield 3, and Activision running its Call of Duty Elite service for Modern Warfare 3 players. … Continue Reading
Zynga IPO set for Dec. 15 at $10B valuation?
Social game maker Zynga is reportedly planning to go public on Dec. 15 at a valuation of $10 billion, according to a report by Reuters.
The valuation is much lower than the $15 billion to $20 billion that was rumored as Zynga’s expected valuation when it filed papers to go public on July 1. Reuters cited two unnamed sources close to the process.
The IPO will generate about $900 million in proceeds at a price … Continue Reading
Call of Duty Elite password reminders sent out in plain text
Activision’s troubled gaming service, Call of Duty Elite, has been sending out password reminders to its users in plain text.
Activision either stores player passwords on its servers in plain text format, or in some retrievable version, which makes the information susceptible to hackers if they found their way into the servers, according to a Eurogamer report.
Activision has insisted in a statement that: “All Call of Duty Elite personal data, including passwords are saved … Continue Reading
Wal-Mart’s new app mines Facebook data to help you buy better gifts
Wal-Mart, the mega corporation known for its mega discount stores, is ready to conquer a new mega frontier. It’s a land ripe with retail opportunity; it’s the land you already know as the social web.
WalmartLabs, the company’s seven month-old internal nerve center for social and mobile retail innovation, is releasing Shopycat, a Facebook application designed to help holiday and everyday-occasion shoppers skip stressful shopping nightmares and find better gifts for friends and family members.… Continue Reading
NewsCred offers a better kind of newswire, raises $4M round
Digital newswire service NewsCred has raised a new $4 million round of funding, the startup announced today.
NewsCred is basically a reinvention of the current newswire model made famous by the Associated Press. However, NewsCred doesn’t produce its own news, but it does intend to disrupt the traditional newswire business.
“We’re not trying to bash the AP, but with technology creating new digital distribution barriers you have to evolve. And that’s where we think there’s … Continue Reading
Secure.me is awesome and creepy, keeps you & your kids’ Facebook pages in check
You know how sometimes you stalk people on Facebook? Guess who 83 percent of all parents are stalking: their kids! And now they can use Secure.me to help them.
Secure.me lets parents know what happened last Friday night by actively watching outgoing and incoming messages, wall posts, and status updates. It can search for previously designated keywords, provided by Secure.me or created by the user, and alert you when it finds them. Photo recognition technology … Continue Reading
How Google will bring Google+ to more Google web apps (video)
Have you noticed how Google+ seems to be popping up everywhere lately?
We’ve taken deep dives into how Google+ is intended to unify all Google’s web products in the past. At the CloudBeat conference today, we stole a few precious moments of Googler Amit Singh’s time to chat about where Google+ will be popping up in the future.
Singh also talked a bit about how consumerization — a word that embodies concepts of simplicity, ease … Continue Reading
Eucalyptus CEO: We’re an espresso machine, Amazon is Starbucks
Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos really likes metaphors, and when you’re talking about something as complex as cloud-based app platforms, they seriously come in handy.
While talking onstage at CloudBeat 2011, Mickos compared Eucalyptus’ open-source cloud software platform to an espresso machine because it gives clients the tools to make their coffee (in this case, cloud software) at home. He said a company like Amazon, however, provides the cloud in a much more commercialized fashion … Continue Reading
AT&T and T-Mobile discussing joint venture if merger fails
Contrary to previous statements, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom are working on a backup plan that would take place if U.S. regulators don’t approve the $39 million sale of T-Mobile.
The “Plan B” both companies are discussing involves forming a joint venture that would pool wireless network assets, according to a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter. A joint venture of this nature has the potential to expand AT&T’s wireless … Continue Reading
Google Enterprise VP explains how Google Apps is being steadily adopted
Amit Singh, VP for enterprise at Google, is really high on Google Apps. Not just because it’s his job, but because many people are choosing it over Microsoft Office and he’s seeing real examples of how it works better.
Companies like Jaguar, Genentech and Motorola have already adopted Google Apps, and the company is picking up traction with more companies looking for cloud-based document and communication solutions. On stage at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt … Continue Reading
VMware scraps company-issued phones, lets employees bring their own
BYOM, or bring your own mobile, is the new mantra at virtualization software-maker VMware. The 10,000-person strong organization, founded in 1998, has chucked its company-issued phone policy in favor of something more hip to the modern mobile times.
VMware told all employees to BYOM a few weeks ago, Javier Soltero, CTO of SaaS and application services, said at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. (We’re livestreaming the event. You can watch it here.)
The … Continue Reading
Microsoft “not even relevant,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie
Aaron Levie, the dynamic co-founder and chief executive of cloud-based file sharing company Box (until recently known as Box.net) doesn’t hold back when it comes to his competitors.
“If [Microsoft] Sharepoint happened to work, that’s what we kind of do,” said Levie at the 2011 CloudBeat conference.
Box claims about 77 percent of the Fortune 500 as its customers, though admittedly the integration is mostly department-wide, as opposed to company-wide. Proctor and Gamble, however, made … Continue Reading
Whitman says future of webOS will be decided in two weeks
New HP CEO Meg Whitman has a tough decision about what to do with webOS, so she’s given herself a little more breathing room by saying the final call will come in two weeks.
HP, which bought webOS-creator Palm last year for $1.2 billion, is in a precarious position about what to do with the troubled mobile operating system. After HP axed the HP TouchPad and then saw incredible demand for the discontinued device at … Continue Reading
Heroku powers the New York Marathon as Platform as a Service (PaaS) picks up the pace
Today, businesses can do all their application development in the cloud, thanks to Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology. This is a fast-moving trend in enterprise technology, and while it sounds dry, things start to get very interesting when it touches people’s lives.
For example, shoe maker Asics created a very visible PaaS web application for the New York City Marathon that tracked the position of runners through radio frequency identification (RFID) stickers on the … Continue Reading
Big hardware & software companies are spreading FUD about the cloud (video)
Chief information officers get pitched on “the cloud” more than the rest of us, but when it comes to dealing with legacy vendors — the big boys like Dell, HP and IBM — they might hear a lot more fear, uncertainty and doubt (a.k.a. FUD) than the rest of us, too.
At the CloudBeat conference today, we sat down with Scott Bils, a partner at Everest Group, a consultancy with an eye on the cloud. … Continue Reading
How Netflix went from DVDs to cloud-based video & where it’s headed next
At the CloudBeat conference today, we got to talk to Netflix’s cloud architecture guru, Adrian Cockcroft.
Cockcroft took a moment to explain the massive changes Netflix had to go through to transition from a physical DVD rental company to a worldwide streaming video service. Of course, Netflix didn’t simply need the huge amount of bandwidth required for streaming video; it also needed to roll it out at human scale, and fast.
It was a tall … Continue Reading
Cloudwashing: More money for less tech (video)
At the CloudBeat conference today, we got to catch up with Randy Bias, CTO and co-founder of Cloudscaling.
Bias works with large enterprises and telecoms on cloud solutions for massive-scale applications — they call their products “the world’s largest clouds,” in fact.
So he knows a thing or two about what holds water in his industry and what doesn’t. In this brief interview, we chat about “cloudwashing,” the practice of applying an expensive-sounding “cloud” sticker … Continue Reading
eBay lobbies Congress to keep sales tax off the Internet
eBay is trying to prevent a new law from being passed that would require sales tax for online purchases.
Currently, online shoppers only pay sales tax on items purchased from a seller in the same state.
But a new proposed law, the Marketplace Equity Act of 2011 (or the Marketplace Fairness Act in the Senate), would allow states to collect sales tax from any buyer “without regard to the location of the seller.”
The tax … Continue Reading
