VentureBeat

DEMO: Here are the presenting companies

DEMO, the technology launchpad conference co-produced by VentureBeat, kicks off next week in Palm Springs. Companies will be launching new products in five key areas: Mobile, social media, consumer, cloud, and enterprise.

My boss, VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall, is about to head down to Palm Springs. For the past two conferences, Matt shared the stage with longtime DEMO executive producer Chris Shipley, but this is his first time leading the conference solo — keeping things... Continue Reading

Mobile analytics firm Motally hires Nielsen exec as CEO

John Forese — pronounced for EE see — has taken over as CEO of mobile analytics firm Motally, whose monthly reports VentureBeat usually writes about. Forese was senior vice president of product management for Nielsen, a position he landed after serving as an SVP at mobile analytics firm Telephia, which Nielsen acquired in 2007.

Motally also recently added former Googler Doug Garland, a vice president of product development for the search company, to Motally’s board... Continue Reading

DEMO: Massive disruption starts Monday

We’ve got a very impressive set of companies launching at DEMO this spring — they’re better than I’ve ever seen in past years.

I’m more excited than ever about the trends of innovation we are seeing in Silicon Valley and beyond right now. And this conference — just next week in Palm Springs — is going to highlight them all in a brand new format. We’re breaking companies in key sector trends: Mobile, social media,... Continue Reading

Location history now shows who was with you

The increasingly popular location-based mobile game Foursquare recently announced a new addition to its service. A history function now shows who you were with in addition to where you were at a particular time. You will have a record of all the friends you were with at the Grizzly Bear concert two months ago–and the friends you didn’t invite can see that, too. The function could prove to be more than just a tool for... Continue Reading

Now you can data mine with Google queries too

Geek comic artist Randall Munroe, better known as XKCD’s creator, revealed a little-known Google Spreadsheets secret yesterday. You can plot out the estimated volume of Google search results against different queries.

How do you do it? Alex Chitu at Google Operating System says:

If you are familiar with Google Spreadsheets, try to create a sheet that lets you enter a query like “My IQ is X”, a variable name and... Continue Reading

Yoichi Wada’s Final Fantasy: 96 million and counting

Yoichi Wada is kind of greedy. His company, Square Enix, has shipped more than 96 million copies of its Final Fantasy games since 1987. But he wants people to buy more, more, more. On March 8, the Japanese company began selling Final Fantasy XIII, the latest edition in the long-running role-playing game. This title has a lot more action in it and loads of movie-like animations in between the fighting sequences. But it remains true... Continue Reading

Real-time search engine OneRiot makes it ads more mainstream

Real-time search startup OneRiot is making its content ads fit in with industry standards, as it pushes for broader distribution across the web.

It’s launching ad units today that match Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines (see right). Before, partners had to integrate OneRiot’s raw data feed and design their own user interface for the ads, so that was a natural barrier to widespread adoption.

The company’s ads usually have links to recently published content related to certain keywords.... Continue Reading

RealGames hires execs to pivot into social gaming

Real Networks‘ game division has hired two new executives as part of a push into social games.

The Seattle-based company said today it appointed Wilf Russell as chief technology officer and Jeffrey Revoy as vice president of social games.

The moves are part of the company’s attempt to adapt its business, which has struggled to keep pace with the changes in the game industry. Real Networks still plans to spin off RealGames into an independent... Continue Reading

Twitter’s commercial accounts may finally land at Chirp conference next month

Commercial accounts for businesses on Twitter may finally make their debut next month at the company’s inaugural developer conference, Chirp.

Twitter’s head of product management and monetization, Anamitra Banerji, will be leading a session on commercial accounts in the afternoon at the conference. Last summer, co-founder Biz Stone told us the company was planning to launch a commercial layer over its ecosystem by year-end. They’re several months behind, but it looks like it may finally... Continue Reading

Gift card swapping startup Plastic Jungle raises $7.4M

Plastic Jungle, a site where you can sell unwanted gift cards or buy those cards at a discount, has raised $7.4 million in a second round of funding.

I actually wrote about new site with a similar idea called CardPool just a few hours ago. Both CardPool and Plastic Jungle are part of a larger category of gift card marketplaces, which also includes Swapagift. One of Plastic Jungle’s more attractive features is the ability to... Continue Reading

YouTube founder pushed for growth “through whatever tactics, however evil”

Steve Chen, co-founder of the wildly successful video sharing site YouTube, sold the site to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. No doubt he’s since internalized Google’s “Don’t be evil” ideology, at least as a talking point. But in January of that year, Chen’s thinking was exactly the opposite. In the text of an instant message to a YouTube product manager, he used the e-word.

Here’s the quote from a court brief filed by... Continue Reading

SXSW wrap-up: Maybe it really does suck now

San Franciscans complain that Burning Man used to be better. New Yorkers claim that everything used to be better. While it’s no surprise that some attendees of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas, deemed SXSW to be “over” compared to previous years, what’s interesting is the why. The complainers cited three major themes.

Bigger event

This year’s Interactive portion of SXSW (there are also separate multi-day events... Continue Reading

Microsoft rumored to allow external USB storage on Xbox 360s

Microsoft is preparing a software update that will allow Universal Serial Bus (USB) mass storage devices to be used with the Xbox 360, according to a report by Joystiq.

This will allow gamers to store and load saved games via external USB storage devices. Until now, users had to use Microsoft Xbox 360 hard drives or flash memory units, also from Microsoft. The change is supposed to happen with a software update this spring.... Continue Reading

Stonetrip’s 3D game engine will bring high-quality games to Android phones

French company Stonetrip announced today that it has created tools to help developers create cool 3D games and apps on Google Android phones.

The ShiVa 3D engine for Android will be released in a couple of weeks. The engine is a software platform that lets 3D games run on Android phones. It will compete with Unity Technologies, whose Unity 3D game engine is used to make a lot of games that run on the iPhone,... Continue Reading

Four ways to make money “selling” free mobile apps

The mobile app market is heating up, both for paid and free apps. And we’re seeing numerous app developers and content publishers jumping into the market every day looking to make money on this opportunity. If you can get consumers to pay for your app, great. But with all the free apps already available for smartphones and tablet devices such as Apple’s upcoming iPad, many newcomer apps will likely have to be free, too, in... Continue Reading

Open source video company Kaltura joins with Wikimedia to promote HTML5 video

Kaltura, developer of an open source video platform, has joined with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Open Video Alliance to launch two initiatives to promote HTML5 video on the web.

HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the programming language that makes up most of the web. It’s being looked at as a challenger to Adobe Flash in many ways, since it allows for web animations and video without the use of... Continue Reading

Gift card marketplace CardPool pays users to recommend friends

CardPool, a new startup incubated by Y Combinator, helps users get money for gift cards that they don’t want. Now it’s also offering a financial incentive for those users to recruit their friends.

The concept behind San Francisco-based CardPool is pretty straightforward. It acts as the middleman between people who want to unload unwanted cards and people interested in buying them for a discount. The site says it pays sellers up to 90 percent of... Continue Reading

Viacom thought YouTube would have made a ‘transformative acquisition’

Well before media conglomerate Viacom sued Google for $1 billion in damages over copyright infringement in 2007, the media conglomerate thought that video-sharing site YouTube would have made a “transformative acquisition” for the company, according to court briefs released today. (The briefs are here, here and here.)

Only once YouTube fell into the hands of Google for close to $1.8 billion in 2006 did Viacom turn around and take serious action. But the relationship remained complicated.... Continue Reading

Smartling lands $4M, continues frenzy of web translation

It looks like competition among translation startups is heating up, with a number of companies popping up making substantial announcements in the last few months. Smartling, a startup that helps businesses to better use their websites by speaking to customers in their native language in real time, announced today it has secured a first round of funding for $4 million.

Smartling is one of many services targeting internet companies looking to do global business. The company claims that more than 70% of... Continue Reading