VentureBeat

More evidence of Facebook’s worldwide impact on politics

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook is being used as an agent of political change around the world — a phenomenon he’s been talking about for years. And, as usual, the audience chuckled derisively. Sure, more hard data is needed to either support or refute his claim, but the anecdotes are mounting up in Zuckerberg’s favor.

In Saudi Arabia, a Facebook group was used…

Q&A with Nvidia CEO: Jen-Hsun Huang on visual computing, tension with Intel, and product bugs

Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, started his graphics chip company in 1993 and is now the last man standing. Back then, no one could have predicted that PCs and game machines would spawn the powerful visual computing we have today. In a speech in San Jose, Calif., Huang talked about how video games and movie special effects are only the tip of the iceberg for visual computing, which encompasses everything from digital art to…

Q&A with digital arts guru Lorne Lanning: Will we learn to appreciate digital art as a profession and a business?

Lorne Lanning has had a wide-ranging artistic career: He’s a classically trained canvas artist. He’s been a voice actor. He co-founded video game firm Oddworld Inhabitants and made four Oddworld games before shutting the studio in 2005. Lately, he’s been working on a new digital entertainment business.

He will be one of the speakers at Nvidia’s Nvision 08 this week in San Jose, where he will expound upon digital art. Lanning says digital art will…

An interview with energy expert Chris Nelder on peak oil and cleantech opportunities

While covering cleantech on VentureBeat, we write often about individual technologies, but rarely about the driving forces behind the market. Global warming is an oft-cited reason for developing renewable energy, but there’s also peak oil — the idea that some day we will hit the maximum possible production of oil, and that supplies will thereafter decrease as the world’s reservoirs diminish.

Author Chris Nelder has been writing on the subject for years, and believes that we…

Q&A with Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief operating officer, on post-merger life

Paul Sams is the chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is a division of Activision Blizzard, the newly created gaming powerhouse created from the $18 billion merger of Activision and Vivendi Games. Sams is one of the top executives responsible for making sure that Blizzard keeps pumping out hits like “World of Warcraft,” which has 10-million-plus paying subscribers.

VB: How many people do you have in Blizzard?

PS: It’s around 3,000 globally.

VB: Will Blizzard…

Interview with Epic Games’ Mike Capps, on teaming up with Electronic Arts

Mike Capps, president of hit video game developer Epic Games announced today that Electronic Arts will publish a new action game from Epic’s new subsidiary, People Can Fly.

People Can Fly is the game developer based in Poland which created the hit “Painkiller” shooting game. I sat down with Capps today in a joint interview with VentureBeat contributor John Gaudiosi.

Capps, a former professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, can be considered the adult supervisor at Epic….

Q&A: an interview with Sega’s Simon Jeffery on monkeying around with iPhone games and the Wii

Simon Jeffery is the president of Sega of America. He joined the U.S. arm of the Japanese publisher, famous for games such as Sonic the Hedgehog, in 2005 to recruit U.S. and European game developers to work with Sega on both original games and to Westernize its portfolio. Before joining Sega, Jeffery was the president of LucasArts from 2000 to 2003. We spoke about how the Japanese company is doing at its “Westernization” strategy and…

A Q&A that is 25 years late: David Scott Lewis, the mystery hacker who inspired the film “War Games”

“War Games” was the seminal geek hacker movie that inspired many a young cyber sleuth when it debuted in 1983. The movie told the story of how a kid found a back door into a military computer and accidentally set off a nuclear confrontation and launched the careers of actors Ally Sheedy and Mathew Broderick. Twenty five years later, the movie is still credited for creating the public’s impression of the life of hackers. David…

Q&A: A chat with Black Hat/Defcon organizer Jeff “The Dark Tangent” Moss

Jeff “The Dark Tangent” Moss is the founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences which just concluded in Las Vegas. Moss ran an early social network for computer and phone hackers out of Canada and he founded Defcon (named after “defense condition 1” for imminent war in the hacker film “War Games”) as a gathering for hackers in 1993. He started Black Hat in 1997 as an education and research-oriented show for security…

Black Hat: An interview with Dan Kaminsky, the DNS dude who saved the Internet

Dan Kaminsky showed up at the Black Hat conference in a Pac-Man T-shirt and jeans. But he was the man of the hour at a presentation yesterday that held 1,000 people spellbound during his ninth talk in 10 years. The 29-year-old self-described DNS guy talked about the flaw he discovered earlier this year and managed to keep secret as security researchers prepared a patch for it, thereby allowing the Internet to avoid a train wreck….

Q&A: Microsoft game exec John Schappert talks about Xbox Live, Netflix deal, and Blu-ray

John Schappert is the corporate vice president who runs pieces of Microsoft’s game business such as its Xbox Live online gaming service. One of the new front men for Microsoft’s game efforts, Schappert is a seasoned game developer who started Tiburon Entertainment, which Electronic Arts bought in 1998. He left his job as the No. 2 executive at EA’s game studios to take the Microsoft position. I caught up with him after he took the…

Q&A: Sony’s new worldwide game studio chief recalls the humble underdog years

Earlier this year, SHU YOSHIDA became president of Sony’s worldwide game development studios. He is a natural to lead that job since he ran the U.S. game studios before taking the worldwide job and was among the original Sony staff who helped get the PlayStation off the ground in the early 1990s. Ever since, he has been involved in making games for Sony. We caught up with Yoshida at the recent E3 conference in Los…

Nintendo sales chief Cammie Dunaway on the quest for a broader game market

Hardcore gamers threw a fit when Nintendo didn’t talk much about hardcore games at its E3 press conference in Los Angeles. But the company has bigger fish to fry, as its choice of executives suggests. Cammie Dunaway joined Nintendo of America in November 2007 as executive vice president of sales and marketing. She led off the Nintendo press conference at E3 with a chat about breaking her wrist while snowboarding and a demo of the…

E3 perspective: Q&A with Chairman Strauss Zelnick on the future of Take-Two Interactive

Strauss Zelnick is chairman of Take-Two Interactive, the hottest video game company on the planet thanks to its popular Grand Theft Auto IV, which sold more than 6 million copies in the first week alone. He is CEO of entertainment investment company ZelnickMedia and was previously CEO of music and entertainment company BMG Entertainment (now Sony BMG). Prior to joining BMG in 1994, he was CEO of video game developer Crystal Dynamics and president of…

E3 perspective: An interview with John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts

John Riccitiello has been driving a lot of change at Electronic Arts. He was president and chief operating officer of the big independent video game publisher from 1997 to 2004. Then he left to co-found Elevation Partners. He engineered a deal to invest $400 million in acquiring a majority stake in the game development firms, BioWare and Pandemic. While he was gone, EA suffered lackluster financial performance and its games were often mocked as dull…

E3 preview: A Q&A with Mike Gallagher, head of the Entertainment Software Association

If there’s a place video game developers show up to show off their wares, it’s the annual “E3” summit.

It runs Monday through Thursday at the Los Angeles Convention Center (it’s not open to the public).

At the head of it all is Mike Gallagher, the new Mr. E3.

He runs the Entertainment Software Association, responsible for ensuring the video game industry’s official media and analyst show projects an image befitting the $50 billion industry. Gallagher started his…

Interview: Gameloft gung ho about iPhone gaming

PARIS—The largest mobile game publisher in the world, Gameloft, has a line-up of six games ready for today’s launch of Apple’s new App Store, which coincides with the release of the new 3G iPhones. Gonzague de Vallois, senior vice president of publishing at Gameloft, overseas all development at the company across all gaming platforms. In addition to showing VentureBeat playable versions of Gameloft’s launch titles, de Vallois took some time to discuss what impact Apple’s…

Interview with Vinod Dham, father of the Pentium, on a life in technology and venture investing

Vinod Dham has lived the quintessential Silicon Valley rags to riches immigrant story. Born in Pune, India, he came to the U.S. in 1975 as an engineering student with just $8 in his pocket. He became a chip engineer and helped invent Intel’s first flash memory chip.  He went on to manage Intel’s microprocessor projects, including the breakaway Pentium chip that debuted in 1993 and cemented the company’s position as the world’s biggest chip maker….

Q&A with Insomniac Games chief Ted Price on cloning the golden goose

Ted Price is one of the stalwarts of video game development. He founded Insomniac Games as an independent video game development studio in 1994. Since then, the company has sold more than 28.5 million video games. The president and chief executive of Burbank, Calif.-based Insomniac is perhaps the biggest die-hard PlayStation developer outside of Sony. Even as many other studios go cross-platform, Price’s studio has made games exclusively for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation…

Interview with Robbie Bach, part 3, on Windows Mobile

Robbie Bach has to put on a happy face when he talks about all of his children. Of all of the businesses in his Entertainment & Devices group at Microsoft, Windows Mobile is one of the toughest businesses to run. It has more than 20 million units in the marketplace, but it’s up against competitors such as Apple, Nokia, and pretty soon Google. This is the third and final edited transcript of a recent gathering…