Facebook Messenger for Windows is more than a chat app — and you can get it now
Update: Facebook has made the download link available in the Help Center.
Facebook is busy perfecting a Messenger desktop application for Windows that compacts the best of Facebook — chat, ticker and notifications — into an always-accessible, dock-able miniature window. The social network may not be ready to officially show Messenger for Windows to the world, but don’t let that stop you from getting it now.
The trial application was initially released to a … Continue Reading
The most interesting phones of 2011: what mattered most in a year of smartphone overload
It seems like every week a must-have smartphone is either announced or released. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to track which phones are actually worth paying attention to and which will be swiftly thrown into the scrap heap of devices nobody cares about.
So, after a year of smartphone overload, we want to look back and see which devices this year actually mattered. Some will be obvious, others less so. But perhaps by paying special attention … Continue Reading
Mystery mobile-social app Just.Me raises $2.7M
See that? Someone just gave that $2.7 million dollars.
The video is a promotional vehicle for stealth startup Just.Me. Yes, we’re in the kind of bubble where “stealth” companies make promo videos for tech conferences (Le Web, in this case) and post them to YouTube.
Just.Me has notified its friends at the SEC that it’s raised $2.7 million. We’re sure it had more to do with the team and the app than the promo video, … Continue Reading
Verizon plans to charge a ‘convenience fee’ to pay your bill
The country’s largest wireless carrier, Verizon, will begin charging its subscribers a $2 “convenience fee” to pay their bills.
The only way to avoid this fee is to sign up for automatic payments through Verizon’s website, according to a report from Droid-Life. The new fee will go into effect beginning Jan. 15, 2012. Verizon’s actions follow the same policy Sprint implemented earlier this year to get more people signed up for automatic payments.
Verizon subscribers … Continue Reading
Thiel Foundation: Silicon Valley needs to stop requiring college degrees
Everybody knows that if you’re smart and ambitious, you attend college. Why? Tradition. But if we’re ambitious about creating a better twenty-first century, should we follow traditions from the nineteenth?
In the past hundred years, technology entrepreneurs have given us cars, jets, vaccines, cell phones and computers. The college industry, meanwhile, has made remarkable innovations in raising prices and offering novel forms of debt.
College tuition has gone up 500 percent in the last 30 … Continue Reading
Samsung has already shipped more than 1 million Galaxy Note tablet-phone hybrids
Samsung’s Galaxy Note hasn’t yet arrived in the U.S., but it’s seeing robust initial sales in other markets around the world.
While Samsung can’t seem to decide whether the “smart device” is a tablet, a phone or something in between, the company did confirm in a press release today that the Note has reached the 1 million milestone for units shipped globally.
Worldwide, Galaxy Note sales are rising in Europe and Asia. Samsung specifically mentioned … Continue Reading
Foursquare’s claim to fame, the check-in, could become its downfall
What is Foursquare? The answer is far more complex than it should be. The startup’s purpose in life is so muddled that it now finds itself in the midst of a self-imposed identity crisis that could cause it to fall victim to Facebook.
“The biggest misconception about Foursquare is that it is a check-in service,” founder Dennis Crowley told me in a recent in-depth interview. “We’re most interested in taking the data from check-ins to … Continue Reading
Meet 8 families who are making kid-friendly apps
Families are launching their own apps. With ideas that spark in living room labs, moms and dads are capturing great ideas and turning them into digital playgrounds. In this post you will meet several Bay Area developers who were inspired by the children in their lives to invent modern outlets for creative play. Their goal is to emphasize the conversational and educational potential of mobile technology.
Everyone profiled is part of the Moms With Apps … Continue Reading
Alibaba preps for possible Yahoo takeover by hiring U.S. legal eagles
Asian web powerhouse Alibaba has taken yet another step toward snatching up Yahoo.
The Chinese company has hired a Washington, DC-based lobby firm and a law firm specializing in cross-border mergers and acquisitions — likely a necessary step in the foreign, censorship-heavy entity’s plan to take over a major U.S. corporation.
Alibaba has hired the Duberstein Group, an independent strategic political planning and consulting company headed by Kenneth Duberstein (pictured), Reuters reports. Duberstein is a … Continue Reading
Amazon: 4M Kindles sold in Dec., e-book sales up 175 percent
Online retail giant Amazon sold over 4 million Kindle devices this month — about a million per week — to help make it the most successful holiday shopping season ever, the company announced today.
Amazon launched a new line of Kindle products in November, which included the Kindle, the Kindle Touch and a seven-inch Kindle Fire tablet computer. Amazon is making little or no money on the devices, but it’s using them as a means … Continue Reading
The best GamesBeat stories of 2011
The year is coming to an end and we agree with the observation that 2011 was a historic year for the game industry.
Here are 33 of our favorite, original GamesBeat stories that we toiled over during 2011. These aren’t necessarily the biggest stories of the year, which is a separate list for us. But we had the most fun writing these pieces and we think you’ll have fun reading them.
We like to look … Continue Reading
iPad 3 rumor mill: two new iPads planned for January, says report
We’re not even in 2012 yet, but the iPad 3 rumor mill is in full swing.
The latest rumor: Apple is preparing two new iPad models for a January debut. That’s according to sources cited by the Taiwanese news site Digitimes (which has recently been off the mark quite a bit with Apple rumors).
Previously, we expected Apple to announce the iPad 3 in February or March for an April release.
The new iPads will … Continue Reading
Blizzard makes $26M on World of Warcraft security authenticators [update]
![Blizzard makes $26M on World of Warcraft security authenticators [update]](http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/authenticator-e1325160195498.jpg?w=150&h=150&crop=1)
Update: As pointed out below in the reader comments, these estimates are likely off by a sizable amount as they do not take into account the free Battle.net Mobile Authenticator. Users of the free app are entitled to the Core Hound Pup in-game pet (which was used to come up with the $26 million figure) just as users of the paid authenticator are, so it’s virtually impossible to calculate how much revenue has actually been … Continue Reading
Stratfor puts off website relaunch for a week after Anonymous attack
Following a major attack by the hacker group Anonymous, security research firm Strategic Forecasting, better known as Stratfor, has said it will delay putting its website back online by about a week.
Stratfor yesterday sent an e-mail to its free subscribers about the delay, Reuters reports. Its website has been offline since the attack on December 24.
By not relaunching immediately, the firm, which provides “non-ideological, independent analysis of international affairs and security threats,” will … Continue Reading
Cool private companies: 3 business services for doing more with less
As a software securities analyst for investment banking firm Canaccord Genuity, Richard Davis spends 200 days a year on the road visiting companies. He goes to public companies such as Oracle and Salesforce.com, but he also visits up-and-coming software companies he thinks will go public in the near future. In his new column, Davis talks about some candidates he thinks may be ripe for the IPO class of 2012 or 2013.
Xactly Corporation: Compensation management
Ocean Marketing fiasco addressed in official press release
Ocean Marketing, a one-man PR firm led by Paul Christoforo, underwent instantaneous destruction this week, as we reported yesterday.
It’s hard to judge precisely when Christoforo’s career ended: Was it after the heinously rude and offensive emails assaulting a polite customer? Was it the moment he told Mike Krahulik, the co-founder of the world famous Penny Arcade webcomic, Child’s Play charity, and Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), that he could attend PAX East whenever he so … Continue Reading
PlayStation Vita sales see 78% drop during Christmas week
Sales of the PlayStation Vita portable gaming device in Japan have dropped sharply in its second week on the market, according to sales data from Media Create (translated by NeoGAF).
The PS Vita sold an estimated 72,479 units Christmas week, compared to 324,859 units sold in the previous week. That’s a drop of nearly 78 percent. The Vita was outsold by older portable devices like its predecessor, the PlayStation Portable (PSP), and the Nintendo 3DS, … Continue Reading
Google and Facebook reign as the most-visited sites of 2011
Facebook may be growing in popularity, but Google is still the web brand to beat.
In 2011, an average 153.4 million people in the U.S. visited Google sites each month, making the search giant the most-visited U.S. web brand of the year, according to Nielsen.
Facebook was the second most-visited U.S. web brand and the top social network, averaging 137.6 million visitors per month, Nielsen found. In the social networking and blogs category, Facebook beat … Continue Reading
McAfee says Anonymous will reorganize or disband in 2012
McAfee released its online security threat predictions for 2012 today, predicting that much of the hacking drama that started in 2011 will only grow in the new year.
When technology evolves, so do cyber criminals’ tactics for compromising new software, hardware, online accounts and more. Whole conferences, such as the Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas, focus on how people are able to gain access to our machines without permission. But 2011 was … Continue Reading
Recipes become shopping lists with Say Mmm and Evernote
Recipes hoarders and cooking enthusiasts can now organize all of their recipes into grocery lists with Evernote and Say Mmm. These two web-based organization companies have come together to shopping for tonight’s dinner much easier.
By adding the “Say Mmm” tag to any note in Evernote, a shopping list will be automatically generated with quantities for each ingredient and estimated nutritional information of the recipe. Say Mmm will even categorize each ingredient for you based … Continue Reading
