VentureBeat

iPhone app developers: Where do they come from?

Apple’s application platform for the iPhone — and soon, iPad — has proven far more popular than any other, including Facebook. Both in terms of supply and demand, Apple’s app market is far and away the biggest.

The latest monthly report from mobile app analytics company Flurry tries to break down Apple app developers into categories. Where did they come from? Flurry sorted them into six categories. From most to least populous:

... Continue Reading

Brian Fargo returns from exile with Hunted: the Demon’s Forge (video)

One of video game’s pioneers, Brian Fargo went into exile as the longtime company he created foundered earlier this decade. But he’s back with his own game studio, inXile Entertainment, and is announcing today a major new fantasy role-playing game.

Fargo is announcing Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, which he calls the “re-imagining of the classic dungeon crawl.” The game uses high-end graphics and lets players explore a dungeon cooperatively, playing alternatively a big brawling swordsman... Continue Reading

Chris Taylor takes a comedy break after launching Supreme Commander 2 (video)

Another year has gone by, so that means it’s time for another Chris Taylor game. This year, it’s the furious real-time combat game, Supreme Commander 2.

Taylor is the zany founder of Gas Powered Games, the game studio known for its real-time strategy games, where players fight each other simultaneously. Over its 12-year history, Taylor’s studio has cranked out lots of hits. His titles include Total Annihilation, Dungeon Seige, Dungeon Seige 2, Supreme Commander and... Continue Reading

Sentiment search engine RankSpeed puts spotlight on products

RankSpeed, an early player in searching Twitter and blog content for how people feel about subjects, relaunched itself today as a place where you can learn about products based on sentiment.

For example, you can search for ‘Facebook apps’ and the word ‘excellent’ and see which products are mentioned the most with that word. RankSpeed will show the percentage of users who have talked about the app and used words like ‘useful’ or ‘terrible’ along... Continue Reading

LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhone

There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location.

In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a... Continue Reading

CustomMade helps woodworkers move to the web

There are a growing number of websites serving shoppers looking for hand-crafted products. Now a startup called CustomMade hopes to find a similar audience for custom furniture.

If you’re familiar with artist marketplace Etsy, custom-jewelry site BlueNile, or custom-apparel site Zazzle, CustomMade.com may feel a bit underpowered. The site doesn’t include options to customize a product for yourself, like you can on BlueNile and Zazzle. You can’t even browse and buy products like you can... Continue Reading

AnyClip opens its quote database for movie buffs

Many of you have probably had a moment where you wanted to quote a favorite line from a movie, but couldn’t quite get the wording right. A site called AnyClip can help.

The New York City startup first launched at the TechCrunch50 conference last fall, promising to help users search for and watch their favorite movie moments. We called AnyClip our favorite company of the show, but some of the judges were concerned that the... Continue Reading

RateItAll helps businesses build their own Foursquare

RateItAll, the review site that has described itself as a “distributed Yelp for everything,” is going mobile. But it’s not just by releasing an iPhone app of its own — RateItAll wants to help companies build their own location check-in services.

There are a number of different companies that may want to build their own customized version of Foursquare, said chief executive Lawrence Coburn. A conference might want to encourage attendees to share their location... Continue Reading

Digg announces new “blazing fast” site, Mashable partnership at SXSW

Social news site Digg announced an upcoming launch of a radically overhauled site, new.digg.com, that will go public in the next few weeks. Personalized homepages and faster performance are among the site’s major changes, as Digg struggles to compete with Twitter and Facebook for the attention spans of Internet news junkies.

The new site is currently collecting email addresses of people who wish to be notified when it’s ready for user testing.

Digg CEO Jay... Continue Reading

Google admits Buzz mistakes, tries again at SXSW

A product manager from Google told attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas that Google had misstepped by launching its social network, Google Buzz, too broadly and too promiscuously. In the future, said Google’s Todd Jackson, the company will pre-test new features rather than roll them out to all customers at once.

Earlier at the conference, keynote speaker Danah Boyd, a social media researcher with Microsoft, complained that Gmail had been... Continue Reading

“How to be Black” grabs SXSW audience

Baratunde Thurston is The Onion’s Web and Politics editor. Thurston — best known as @baratunde on Twitter — is a comedian who understands the power of bar charts.

Sunday afternoon at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Thurston gave a just-the-right-amount-of-edgy talk on the Internet’s influence on black Americans, and vice versa.

While we wait for video to become available, @baratunde’s slides are online. How do black people differ from white people... Continue Reading

Five ways mobile games differ from apps

Games are apps, in theory. In practice, they’re a special kind of app. That’s what mobile analytics firm Motally learned after its first year providing in-game statistics for developers to use in defining or refining their products.

Motally’s app tools can tell, for example, how long a gamer spent on each screen of a game, and where they are located geographically. For example, my BlackBerry is often mistaken for Canadian by Google and other sites... Continue Reading

Palm moves to grab high-end 3D games for its phones

The strategic value of gamers isn’t lost on Palm, which is struggling to establish itself in the smartphone market.

Games are the most popular applications on both the iPhone and Google Android phones, and so now Palm is making its own push to get more games on its smartphones.

Last week, Palm showed off its Plug-in Developer Kit for its WebOS operating system that will enable game developers to easily port games that are made... Continue Reading

Apple fans estimate 120,000 iPads sold on first day

A group of stock investors who hang out at the members-only AAPL Sanity Board forum got together to guesstimate how many iPad tablet computers Apple had sold on Friday.

The group compared their own order numbers from the Apple Store, then extrapolated from the timestamps and confirmation serial numbers for 48 orders of 54 iPads. They calculate that Apple sold 120,000 of the touchscreen machines on Friday.

Apple-watching journalist Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who has tracked the... Continue Reading

Week in review: Modern Warfare 2’s Stimulus Package, OnLive’s launch date

Here’s our roundup of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories published in the last seven days:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 announces Stimulus Package for Xbox Live — Activision announced during the Game Developers Conference that “the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package will strike worldwide on March 30.” The name Stimulus Package is a potentially confusing tie-in to President Obama’s economic plan — sorry, you... Continue Reading

Spawn Labs lets you play your console games on the run (video)

Call it Slingbox for games. Spawn Labs lets you take a console game and play it over the web on a laptop or a computer.

As the Slingbox does with video, you can place shift your games and play them in high-definition on any computer, said David Wilson, chief executive at the Austin-based company. While the game is actually running on a console, you can interact with it and view it on a display on... Continue Reading

EC Roundup: Splitting equity and the entrepreneur retirement trap.

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Ask the attorney: What’s the best way to split equity? — Working on a new venture, even with friends, doesn’t necessarily mean everyone deserves an equal part in the company. Attorney Scott Edward Walker runs down factors you need to consider when it comes time to split equity.

Entrepreneurs and the retirement trap — Too many startup owners actually view their business as their retirement plan. Retirement planner... Continue Reading

Quotes from Sid Meier’s keynote GDC speech

Veteran game designer Sid Meier delivered the keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference today and during his hour-long session on the “Psychology of Game Design: Everything you Know is Wrong,” the creator of the Civilization franchise produced a series of key points, mantras, and worthwhile quotes captured here. Meier is the creative director at Firaxis and director of this fall’s Civilization V. (You can catch the full news story here.)

“Gameplay is a psychological... Continue Reading