Akamai is acquiring Cotendo for $286M
App delivery company Akamai is acquiring app delivery network Contendo, the companies jointly announced today.
Akamai will purchase all of Cotendo’s outstanding equity for a net cash payment of $268 million.
Pending regulatory approval and other typical acquisition conditions, the deal is expected to close sometime over the next six months.
In a release today, the companies stated that they expect their combined technologies, which each have a lot to do with safely and securely … Continue Reading
‘Game Type’ joyfully lampoons the new Xbox Live Dashboard
An indie developer has created a game satirizing the new look Xbox Live dashboard. Amid concerns that Microsoft is neglecting its indie games channel, ‘Game Type’ has emerged joyfully on the very platform it is sending up.
We recently reported on the discontent of many indie developers with the new Xbox Live dashboard . The main complaint was that Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) are now so well hidden on the new dashboard, that they … Continue Reading
CES 2012 to be one of the biggest tech trade shows ever, with Ultrabooks and startups galore
Putting recession fears behind it, the Consumer Electronics Show coming in January looks like it’s going to be one of the biggest in history.
The biggest U.S. tech trade show (officially called the 2012 International CES) will draw an estimated 149,000 attendees to Las Vegas this year, about the same number as attended in January 2011 and not far from the record of 152,000 set in 2006. The big deal will be the Ultrabook, a … Continue Reading
Sony’s next Xperia sports 4.5″ screen, 13MP camera, 4G LTE
Looking to make a splash in the US smartphone market, Sony Ericsson is gearing up to release a new superphone that will outmatch Google’s flagship Galaxy Nexus.
The phone, currently referred to as the Sony Ericsson LT28at (expect a better name soon), will feature one of the most powerful smartphone cameras on the market, clocking in at 13 megapixels, reports the Xperia Blog. (Pictured right, an existing Xperia model.)
Its other specs are no joke: … Continue Reading
Mindbloom app reveals how men and women want to improve in 2012 (exclusive)
Mindbloom launched its Life Game mobile and web app in September as a novelty that makes you feel good about playing a game. It helps you improve your quality of life by rewarding you for doing the things that are really important.
Some 36,000 people have played the game and it helped them follow through on 1.2 million commitments that they have made to improve their lives. The results of the game play have yielded … Continue Reading
ChuChu Rocket! coming to Android free by way of GetJar
ChuChu Rocket!, the classic Dreamcast puzzler by Sonic Team (of Sonic the Hedgehog and NiGHTS fame) will be available for free on Android devices starting tomorrow, December 23. This is happening by way of GetJar, a free app market that claims over 2 billion downloads to date.
Senior VP of digital business at SEGA, Haruki Satomi, said “With the continuing popularity of ChuChu Rocket!, we knew it was a perfect for the world’s largest free … Continue Reading
Cloudability raises $1M, helps keep your cloud spending in check
Cloudability, a company that helps people manage cloud services spending, has secured $1 million in its latest investment round. This seed investment round was led by Trinity Ventures and Walden Venture Capital, including $250,000 in funding from Portland-based angel investors.
In November, Cloudability launched its beta service to help companies become more efficient with their cloud spending.
“We are focused on three main tasks: preventing big overages, saving time, and identifying areas of [spending] waste,” … Continue Reading
Skitch’s new iPad app is worthy of drawing your attention
Image sketching service Skitch rolled out a new iPad app today that lets you to draw or visually annotate anything that appears on the tablet’s screen.
Skitch previously launched an Android application that coincided with the company’s sale to note taking service Evernote in August. “We built our iOS version of Skitch first for iPad because it’s the ideal form factor for tactile annotation,” Evernote VP of Marketing Andrew Sinkov wrote in a blog post.… Continue Reading
Zelda Data Restoration Channel fixes save file in Skyward Sword
Nintendo has finally released the solution to the game-breaking bug in Skyward Sword in the form of a separate downloadable channel. The Zelda Data Restoration Channel is currently only available in Japan. The channel will be available for download from the Wii Shopping Channel when and if it releases globally.
Nintendo has been aware of the issue for weeks, and has distributed a detailed guide on how to avoid the bug until they could create … Continue Reading
New Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 DLC announced
Microsoft has revealed the third piece of downloadable content (DLC) for Gears of War 3, one of GamesBeat’s top 10 games of the year.
Titled “Fenix Rising,” the DLC will add five new maps and a few new character skins.
The new maps will playable across all multiplayer modes (Versus, Horde, Beast) and include:
Academy
Anvil
Depths
Escalation
The Slab
Gamers familiar with the campaigns throughout the Gears of War trilogy will recognize most of … Continue Reading
AMD introduces world’s fastest graphics chip with new Radeon line
Advanced Micro Devices is launching what it calls the world’s fastest graphics chip with a new family of Radeon graphics chips today.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker said the code-named Southern Islands chips use a revolutionary new architecture that the company has been working on for five or six years. Dubbed “Graphics Core Next,” the architecture takes AMD’s graphics chips into the 28-nanometer generation of chip manufacturing process. That process enables AMD to put 4.3 … Continue Reading
Facebook on government audit: “We could have been more transparent.”
After a thorough audit from the Irish government, Facebook has stepped forward with a statement on how it could have handled some privacy issues a little bit better.
While the company said the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) commended its security measures, its lack of user-tracking software and its real-names-only policy, the DPC also noted a few areas where improvement was needed — and Facebook agreed.
For facial recognition features in Tag … Continue Reading
Scribd is disappearing word by word, page by page, thanks to SOPA
Due to new legislation from the U.S. government, Scribd is disappearing from the Internet — every document, every word.
At least, that’s what could happen if certain bills make their way to congressional approval.
Scribd is a popular online publishing tool, and to make a point about SOPA, it’s voluntarily removing its documents from the Internet and urging users to put a stop to this legislation.
SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, and PIPA (Protect … Continue Reading
Amazon’s “CEO” apologizes for Kindle Fire’s issues on Conan
In this clip from Conan O’Brien’s late night show, “Jeff Bezos” takes a moment to apologize for the Kindle Fire’s poor performance and idiosyncratic touchscreen. In classic tech founder fashion, he bills the bugs as features and offers a few nonsensical fixes.
Of course, this isn’t Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos but an actor. However, the Kindle Fire’s performance issues are all too real.
Amazon did issue an over-the-air update today to squash those pesky bugs. … Continue Reading
Move over Farmville, Gardens of Time is Facebook’s most popular game
To the dismay of bosses and spouses everywhere, Facebook, by way of third-party social games, offered social networkers a daily distraction they could not go without in 2011. But no game commanded more attention or unrequited love than Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time.
The hidden object game beat out Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social and Zynga’s Cityville for the title of the most popular game of 2011, Facebook revealed Wednesday.
In Gardens of Time, players … Continue Reading
AOL’s media business is in trouble, says major investor
One of AOL’s largest shareholders, Starboard Value LP, has warned Chief Executive Tim Armstrong that his strategy of transforming the company into a media powerhouse isn’t working.
Over the past few years, AOL has attempted to shift away from its roots as a dial-up internet service provider in favor growing its media and advertising business. The company has also made a number of high-profile acquisitions since 2009, including the $25 million purchase of TechCrunch and … Continue Reading
Limited number of Cruchies Awards tickets are on sale now
Tickets for Silicon Valley’s hottest annual event are on sale now.
That’s right, you can now buy the second, extremely limited batch of tickets to the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards, which recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups of the year. This year’s event is coming up January 31, 2012. The first batch of tickets sold out right away, so act fast if you want to nab one of the remaining 250 tickets and attend!… Continue Reading
Ingk Labs rescues technology behind SwapThing to build the next eBay (exclusive)
Proving that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, New York-based incubator Ingk Labs has salvaged an e-commerce patent gem from a defunct startup. It hopes to use that second-hand technology to corner the online-bartering market and take on eBay and Amazon.
Ingk Labs rescues undervalued intellectual property (IP) from dying startups, and then brings its IP buys back to life as new companies. Today, it has resurrected the technology behind SwapThing, a now obsolete site … Continue Reading
Unity Technologies developers will be able to publish 3D games via Adobe Flash
Unity Technologies announced today that its developers will be able to take the games they’ve created and publish them in the Flash 3D format, allowing them to reach much bigger audiences on the web than before.
Unity is beginning the open beta test for its Unity 3.5 game development engine. Since Adobe published its Flash Player 11 in October, Flash games are able to run 3D graphics and take advantage of 3D hardware in a … Continue Reading
Cyber-Ark gets $40M in funding to protect sensitive corporate data
Cyber-Ark, a security services company that manages and protects highly sensitive information, announced Wednesday that it has received a new $40 million round of funding. The round was led by Goldman Sachs and Jerusalem Venture Partners.
Cyber-Ark protects important and sensitive data including passwords, financial records and top secret files. “Cyber-Ark has always been focused on solving sophisticated threats that enterprises are facing” Cyber-Ark CEO Udi Mokady told VentureBeat. The company helps protect its customers … Continue Reading
