VentureBeat

True Crime

Re-entering the highly competitive crime-filled sandbox genre made famous by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, Activision today showed live gameplay footage of its re-boot entrée, True Crime, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA.

Many thought the series dead after a disappointing critical and fiscal second effort in 2006 with the second in the series, True Crime: New York. But Activision tapped United Front Games (ModRacers), which–with former employees from Radical Games (The... Continue Reading

Hoover’s Near Here app brings sales data to the iPhone

Hoover’s, a well-known service that provides business data to salespeople and marketers, just released its first iPhone app. If you’re a salesperson who spends a lot of time on the road, the Hoover’s Near Here app may help you find potential sales.

Basically, the app is a location-based directory of sales leads. So if a salesperson is on a business trip and suddenly finds that they have some time to kill, they don’t have to... Continue Reading

Andreessen Horowitz-backed Burbn bets location is more than a check-in

Can the world handle yet another location-based social network?

Andreessen-Horowitz is betting it can, after investing $500,000 with Baseline Ventures into Burbn. Burbn is a stealth location-sharing project from a well-connected former Googler, Kevin Systrom, who has had stints at several different companies including Odeo, the podcasting startup that begat Twitter.

Several blogs reported the funding last week, but few had details on what it actually was.

So what is it? It’s a web-based location app where... Continue Reading

The ‘Mario of Facebook’ is yet to come

Gareth Davis, the platform manager in charge of Games at Facebook, delivered his keynote today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Davis focused his talk on the changes in social gaming and told the audience that, despite FarmVille, the killer social game is still “out there”.

“Early cinema evolved into a specific language for that media, bringing about cuts and edits and certain types of shots,” Davis said. “Every new media brings new... Continue Reading

Facebook to launch one of its many geolocation projects next month

Facebook will finally make itself heard in the rapidly developing world of location-based services, according to The New York Times. The company will unveil a location-based feature at its f8 conference in late April.

Nick Bilton reports:

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other... Continue Reading

Imeem founder raising funds for a new, stealthy startup

Updated

Dalton Caldwell, co-founder and former chief executive of music startup Imeem, appears to be working on a new company called Mixed Media Labs. And he has raised $370,000 of a targeted $600,000 in debt financing to get started, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Despite getting off to a promising start, Imeem struggled to make its business work, and was acquired and shut down by MySpace last year. Most of... Continue Reading

Out: Blogging for dollars. In: Blogging for pennies

A new micropayment system designed specifically for bloggers will test the idea that on the Internet, there’s a wide audience who will pay for content directly, rather than expecting it to be either supported by ads, or flat-out free. By charging as little as a penny a post per person, its founders say, bloggers might make a decent income.

Fraxion Payments is the brainchild of Chris Wilkins and Dan Stevens. Fraxion’s payment system is built... Continue Reading

EA signs baseball star Curt Schilling to make fantasy role-playing game

Electronic Arts has teamed up with baseball star Curt Schilling to make a game. But this isn’t a sports game. It’s a deal with Schilling’s fantasy role-playing game studio, 38 Studios.

Schilling is developing an epic single role-playing game code-named Project Mercury. It’s not the big massively multiplayer role-playing game, code-named Coperinicus, which is due to launch in 2011. Rather, Mercury is a single-player role-playing game that is being made by the former Big Huge... Continue Reading

New York Times to offer Book Review as a standalone e-reader product

The New York Times has big digital plans for its Book Review supplement — one of the most popular and influential book review publications. The paper is planning to make Book Review an individual product (separate from the rest of the NYT’s e-reader content) on the three major e-reader platforms — Sony’s e-reader platform, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook.

Poynter Online reports that the NYT is carving out Book Review as part of a... Continue Reading

Bubbly, a voice-based Twitter, gains 500,000 users in India

Bubbly, a service that allows users to send voice messages to multiple followers, has gained 500,000 users in India in the first four weeks of launch.

The number blasted expectations out of the water, said Tom Clayton, chief executive of Bubble Motion, the Sequoia Capital-backed startup that created the Bubbly service.

“We were expecting 10,000 to 20,000 users in the first couple months,” Clayton said. “We haven’t even really told anyone about it, it’s just... Continue Reading

Google testing Android-based TV search on Dish Network

If you thought your TV would be safe from Google’s search empire, think again. Google is currently testing a service on Dish Network that will allow users to search through TV listings and web video (including Youtube) on their televisions.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal (via Silicon Alley Insider), the service is driven by new set-top boxes that replace the standard Dish Network box. Intriguingly, the new boxes are running “elements” of Google’s... Continue Reading

iPhone app usage peaks at 9PM on weeknights, study finds

Mobile analytics company Localytics plotted observed iPhone activity by the hour, adjusted for timezones, and came up with a chart that validates most people’s suspicions: iPhone owners use their apps much more on nights and weekends rather than during the weekday. The obvious conclusion: The iPhone is used much more a personal gadget rather than a professional tool.

Boston-based Localytics gets its data directly from apps that incorporate the company’s analytics tracking tools. The data... Continue Reading

Go Tribal aims to be a better way to plan hangouts

There are a lot of companies out there that let you share plans with friends — in fact, a startup called Plancast just raised funding to do just that. But Shruti Challa, chief executive and founder of a startup called Tribal Atmosphere, said none of them seem to address the needs she had as a fresh-out-of-college entrepreneur living in San Francisco.

That’s where her company’s new application, Go Tribal, comes in. The problem with a... Continue Reading

Frosmo expands into the Asian casual game tournament market

It’s easy to see why Frosmo, a Helsinki-based company that makes a tournament platform for social games, wants to expand into the Asian game market. It’s the next logical step, since the Finnish company has already spread its tournament game system across Europe.

Now the company will let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system. Those sites — 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren and Mixi — can reach more than a billion people.... Continue Reading

Revised video game financing list: 115 game companies raised $663.1M in 2009

[Update: We've added our list with new fundings we've heard about from readers and Engage Digital Media].

Game startups continued to score big investments in 2009, but the amount of money raised in the year fell considerably compared to 2008. We’ll be discussing the funding levels at our GamesBeat@GDC conference on Wednesday in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference.

Our revised analysis shows that 115 game startups raised $663.1 million in 2009, down 29... Continue Reading

Countdown to GamesBeat@GDC on Wednesday

We’ve come down to the wire for the GamesBeat@GDC conference, which takes place on Wednesday at rooms 305/307 in the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. This year we are inside the Game Developers Conference.

Tickets are still available if you buy them in person. You can buy one on-site for $399 if you want to get into GamesBeat@GDC only. You can also get in if you have summit pass or an all-access GDC pass.... Continue Reading

SiBEAM raises $36.5M for wireless video transfer technology

SiBEAM has a big job to do networking homes so they can wirelessly transfer high-definition video from one place in the house to another. That’s why the chip maker is announcing today that it has raised $36.5 million in a fourth round of funding.

That amount of money is impressive, but it also suggests the enormity of the task ahead. Foundation Capital led the round. Other existing investors have also joined in, including U.S. Venture... Continue Reading

WHERE joins the mobile advertising business with WHERE Ads

The mobile search and recommendation service WHERE announced today the launch of its new hyper-local mobile advertising network, WHERE Ads.

WHERE’s claim to fame is its immensely useful mobile application which goes by the same name. The app allows you to search for restaurants, entertainment, news, and more based on your location. It’s currently available for iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS, and Blackberry platforms.

WHERE Ads will allow the company to leverage its mobile platform further... Continue Reading

Spigit offers social media platform for company contests

Spigit, the maker of a social networking platform that lets businesses use crowdsourcing to solve internal problems, is launching a new platform today that will allow external crowdsourcing as well.

ContestSpigit is a $5,000 a month software-as-a-service offering for businesses that want to interact with an external audience of customers, partners or the community at large, said Richard Tso, head of marketing for the Pleasanton, Calif.-based firm. “It’s like the next generation of crowdsourcing, if... Continue Reading