Salesforce shows off its updated social media monitoring platform, Radian6

Enterprise cloud computing service Salesforce is showing off its newly revamped Radian6, the web-based social media monitoring platform, at the company’s Cloudforce event in New York today.

Salesforce purchased Radian6 earlier this year for $326 million. Until now, the company has resisted integrating Radian6 into its own suite of cloud-based enterprise products.

The point of Radian6 is to create meaningful interaction between customers through social media. This is somewhat of a problem for large companies … Continue Reading

Interview with Nexon America’s Min Kim, head of new Live Games division

Game developer and publisher Nexon America has named longtime marketing executive Min Kim as its head of Live Games. Kim has also been elected to the Merchant Risk Council advisory board, a merchant driven organization dedicated to preventing online fraud and promoting secure e-Commerce.

As head of Live Games, Kim will focus on monitoring and managing production, marketing, and communication efforts, working with both Nexon America and developers in Korea. Kim was one of the … Continue Reading

FCC report blasts T-Mobile merger, AT&T cries about it

The Federal Communications Commission last night released a damning 157-page report (PDF) against AT&T’s proposed $39 billion T-Mobile takeover, which concludes that the merger would ultimately hurt US consumers and the wireless market.

AT&T, not surprisingly, is none too pleased. The company objected to the release of the report, calling it merely a “draft” that doesn’t have any legal standing, reports Politico. AT&T also took issue with the fact that it didn’t get to see … Continue Reading

Cloud services pick up steam, but IT execs still cautious (exclusive)

Companies love to use the term “cloud” when hyping their internet-based services. But what do technology executives really think about the cloud?

With our exclusive conference on cloud computing, CloudBeat 2011, starting today, we decided to ask.

VentureBeat commissioned an exclusive survey of technology executives at companies of at least 250 employees. The results show that, yes, the push to cloud services is gaining momentum: It’s already playing a significant role in IT executives’ decisions … Continue Reading

U.S. immigration chief getting serious about startups & immigrant entrepreneurs (exclusive)

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Alejandro Mayorkas is getting serious about creating reforms that would make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to settle in the US.

A group of VCs, academics and thought leaders recently petitioned Mayorkas about the roadblocks to foreigners creating startups in the United States.

To their surprise, Mayorkas responded immediately and quite positively, asking for more advice and promising swift action to welcome more foreign entrepreneurs.

Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur, … Continue Reading

Former Marvel CEO invests in kid’s superhero MMO Herotopia

Herotainment, developer of popular children’s massively multiplayer browser game Herotopia, has announced a new round of investment from Cuneo & Co., headed by former Marvel chief executive Peter Cuneo.

The amount of investment from Cuneo & Co. was not disclosed. The funds will be used for further development on Herotopia, an online game that lets kids create their own superhero avatar and explore fantasy worlds with other players across the globe. The game was launched … Continue Reading

New publisher of computer books embraces e-books and authors, not DRM

For technical books, publishing has a nearly fatal lack of speed. E-books are increasingly popular, but they’re usually not produced until after the print edition is already complete. That makes about as much sense as posting Instagram photos of yesterday’s paper, and the results are often just about as usable.

A new company, Fair Trade Digital Exchange, aims to fix the problem by going straight to digital and publishing e-books on technical topics, like what’s … Continue Reading

Salesforce’s AppExchange now points smartphones to cool cloud apps

AppExchange, SalesForce’s cloud app marketplace, has just received a facelift to spotlight mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

For Salesforce, a cloud business software giant, the revamped AppExchange will be a useful avenue for suggesting cloud mobile apps to its users — something it previously didn’t have before.

The AppExchange has been around for five years and has generated over 1 million installs, Salesforce’s Mike Rosenbaum, VP of the app marketplace, told VentureBeat in … Continue Reading

EA shows mobile and social games for winter fun, from Battlefield 3 Aftershock to a new Tetris

Electronics Arts showed off its new mobile and social games for the holiday season and beyond today at an event in San Francisco. Among the big titles were Battlefield 3 Aftershock for Apple devices, a free version of The Sims for Apple, and a refresh of the classic Tetris game for both Apple and Android.

Battlefield 3 Aftershock (pictured above) is an iPhone and iPad game that was still in an early alpha state. The … Continue Reading

White is the new black — on all Google products

Leave it to Google to dispel the myth that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. The search giant and social network contender has stripped off the ominous, horizontal black bar hovering atop its pages to reveal a milky-fresh new hue for each of its web-based products.

The new Google bar occupies the same space as the Google logo and search box in most products and now provides people with one- or two-click access to … Continue Reading

Hold onto your mustache! Foursquare gets Scoutmob location-based deals

Two great mobile apps have gotten together to make deal-hunting and city exploration an even better experience, as Foursquare has integrated Scoutmob deals.

Scoutmob is a deals app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry that lets users claim deals only once they’ve reached a destination. Two things make Scoutmob distinctive: One, customers don’t pay Scoutmob to get these deals, they just press a button and receive the deal as an e-mail coupon; and two, the designers … Continue Reading

World of Warcraft patched as Blizzard Entertainment tries to reverse declining subscriptions

Blizzard Entertainment  released a huge patch on Tuesday for its hit game World of Warcraft, as part of an effort to turn around a significant drop in subscribers. As we reported earlier this month, player numbers dropped from 11.1 million to 10.3 million in the third quarter of 2011, and parent company Activision Blizzard must surely now be looking over its shoulder at the upcoming big budget rival Star Wars: The Old Republic.

A fourth … Continue Reading

Berg creates Little Printer with plans for connected device household line

Internet-connected devices are taking over the household. Case in point: Berg’s Little Printer and new Internet connection box called BergCloud.

Berg believes that small household products that are connected to the Internet can become like a part of the family, with much more characterization and meaning with the power of the Web behind it. The first of these products is Little Printer. It prints out tiny pictures, but there’s a bigger picture in the thought … Continue Reading

Business network Viadeo buys Soocial for cloud-based contact management

Intensifying the competition among professional social networks, French company Viadeo has acquired Soocial, a Dutch startup that manages contact details in the cloud.

Soocial, which operates on 500 platforms and messaging services, unifies your address book across devices. When someone else on the Soocial network changes their contact information, Soocial automatically updates your address book. If a contact gets a new phone number or changes jobs, you can stay connected to them without the hassle … Continue Reading

New Apple TV may be optimized for motion sensitive controllers & Siri

Apple might be planning a new version of its Apple TV, the $99 set-top box that lets owners stream media to their television, according to component information found within the code of iOS 5.1 beta.

The code references the next generation Apple TV (3,1) that could contain Bluetooth 4.0 technology as well as a more powerful A5 chip, reports 9to5Mac. What does this actually mean for you? Well for starters it means, a better remote … Continue Reading

Review: Gua-Le-Ni game brings art and science to the iPad

A fun new iPad game is pushing the limits of psychology and gameplay. Gua-Le-Ni, Or: The Horrendous Parade is a beautiful series of memory puzzles that are supposed to give you the jitters.

The object of the game is to match disjointed paper drawings of animals with cubes that have different sections of animals’ bodies on each side, all while the drawn critter marches across the screen. For example, the drawing might have the the … Continue Reading

Dylan’s Desk: How I learned to stop worrying and love “the cloud”

As I write, the VentureBeat offices sit enveloped by a cloud. In all directions, the fog wraps our office building in a soft, gray fuzz, obscuring the views of downtown San Francisco, the bay, and the ocean.

It’s not unlike the cloud of marketing and hype surrounding “cloud” technologies. A fog of jargony words and needlessly ugly acronyms obscure understanding and make everything look like the same, soft grayish fog.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, cloudware, private … Continue Reading

At $1.25B, Cyber Monday was biggest ecommerce shopping day in history

This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest day in online spending ever, with $1.25 billion spent at online retailers, up 22 percent from a year ago.

Market researcher comScore reported that the first 28 days of November generated $15 billion in online sales, up 15 percent from $13 billion in the corresponding days a year ago. This year’s Cyber Monday — as the first Monday after Thanksgiving is called — was the second day ever … Continue Reading

Need an abortion, Plan B or birth control? Don’t expect Siri to help you out

Siri, the iPhone 4S’s virtual assistant, has a puzzling new glitch — one with significant moral and political overtones.

If you ask Siri to direct you to a Planned Parenthood, you get the results you’d expect. But if you ask for an abortion clinic more generally, Siri will not return any results, even if they’re available. In some cases, Siri will even return results for “crisis pregnancy centers” that counsel women against abortions.

Similarly, if … Continue Reading

Xbox 360 sees biggest sales week in its 7-year history

Microsoft today announced it sold more than 960,000 Xbox 360 consoles in the U.S. during the week of Black Friday, making it the biggest sales week in Xbox history.

The company says more than 800,000 of the 960,000 consoles sold this week were sold within a period of 24 hours. More than 750,000 Kinect sensors were also sold this week, both bundled with the 360 console and as a standalone product. The current holiday sales … Continue Reading