Amazon exec says standalone Prime streaming video service isn’t likely

Despite an aggressive push to increase its variety of TV shows and movies, Amazon isn’t planning to split off its Prime streaming video service into a standalone subscription offering, according to the company’s management team. At least not anytime soon.

Currently, Amazon offers its streaming video service as an added perk for members of its Prime membership, which costs $79 per year and includes free two-day shipping on lots of items sold on the online … Continue Reading

Silver Lake buys stake in Conduit, giving Israeli investors 200x return

Yozma Venture Capital is in talks to sell its share of Conduit, an Israel-based company that creates user engagement tools, for more than $200 million, Globes reported Thursday.

The buyer is Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm, which is paying between $200 and $250 million for the stake of the company. Globes describes the firm as a “large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars in assets under management.”

Yozma invested … Continue Reading

Stripe attracts $18M in funding at $100M valuation

Stripe, an online-payment system company going after PayPal, is said to have raised $18 million at a $1oo million valuation from Sequoia Capital and other investors, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

The deal has not been finalized but a few unnamed sources revealed that Sequoia was responsible for $17 million of the funding. Lawyer Michael J. Patrick from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There must be something red hot … Continue Reading

Double Fine Adventure shatters Kickstarter record with $1M raised in first 24 hours (updated)

Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.

Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, a project from gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million on Kickstarter and it shows no signs of slowing down.… Continue Reading

Core video games crash in January by 34 percent as free games take their toll

Video game sales crashed 34 percent in January, with total industry sales falling 34 percent to $750.6 million from $1.14 billion a year ago, according to market researcher NPD Group.

The lousy performance of video game sales in physical retail stores masks what’s really happening as the industry transforms to digital sales, which aren’t captured in the retail numbers. Gamers are shifting their purchases to online, social, and mobile forms of gaming—dubbed digital gaming—while the … Continue Reading

LinkedIn revenue up 105% in fourth quarter 2011

LinkedIn announced its earnings today, with revenue making an impressive jump up 105 percent, beating street estimates.

The company is a business-centric social network that aims to connect people for networking, job opportunities, resources, and more. In May of 2011, the company completed its initial public offering, to a good reception, but then leveled out in the third quarter. LinkedIn’s revenue topped at $167.7 million in the fourth quarter, 67 percent of which was revenue … Continue Reading

Google-branded streaming music device in development, report says

Google is allegedly working on creating a company-branded entertainment device capable of streaming music in multiple locations throughout a person’s home.

The information about the Google-branded device comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed people briefed on the project. If true, it would mark the Google’s first attempt at creating a hardware product without the aid of an electronics manufacturing partner. The search giant has historically concentrated its resources on developing web-based … Continue Reading

Epic’s Tim Sweeney predicts the next 20 years in gaming technology

As chief executive of Gears of War developer Epic Games, Tim Sweeney has been on the forefront of video game graphics for a couple of decades. So the DICE Summit, which is giving him a high honor today, turned to him to explain how graphics technology for games will evolve over the next 20 years.

Sweeney, a shy but brilliant programmer who helped create the backbone graphics engine for Epic’s blockbusters, predicted in his talk … Continue Reading

140 characters can get Indonesians 12 years in jail

Indonesia’s Communications and Information Minister has declared that anyone tweeting illegal content, such as blasphemy, pornography, and threats, could spend up to 12 years in prison.

Indonesia has a strained history with free speech issues and open media, so a law that would punish Twitter users harshly for their words isn’t entirely surprising. The case of Prita Mulyasari is one big example of how uncomfortable the country is with online communication. Mulyasari was jailed and … Continue Reading

Google Wallet flaw takes the lock off your mobile money (updated)

Updated with comment from Google at 5:14pm PT.

A new vulnerability in Google Wallet gives thieves access to your funds, even if the application data has been erased.

Google Wallet lets you digitize your credit cards and pay for things using near-field communication (NFC). That is, all you have to do is touch your phone to an NFC device and the item you’re buying is automatically charged to your account. Google has touted that its … Continue Reading

Say goodbye to your address book, Evernote’s contact app Hello is better

Every phone has a contact list, but how useful is it? According to Evernote chief executive officer Phil Libin, not very useful at all.

His answer to the standard address book is Evernote Hello, a photo-based contact app, which organizes contacts “visually, chronologically and contextually.“ The app got some major updates today that may help it kill the contact list once and for all.

Hello was released in December 2011 and didn’t take … Continue Reading

Activision Blizzard earnings: Call of Duty Elite snares 7M subscribers

Activision Blizzard reported today that its new Call of Duty Elite social network service for hardcore gamers has signed up 7 million subscribers since going live in November.

That includes both free and paid memberships, and it represents a sizable chunk of the overall numbers of consumers who bought the game. About 1.5 million of those users have chosen to pay $4.99 a month for the privilege of getting the latest content for titles such … Continue Reading

Activision Blizzard earnings: World of Warcraft resists the assault from EA’s Star Wars

Activision Blizzard has beaten earnings expectations for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31, and its major cash cow is still holding up. World of Warcraft didn’t suffer after Electronic Arts launched its massively multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic. World of Warcraft ended the year with 10.2 million paying subscribers, down only slightly from 10.3 million in the previous quarter.

Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, said in an analyst … Continue Reading

How Google plans to avoid Facebook’s “games ghetto” with Google+

“We’ve seen communities ruined by games,” said Google+ engineering director David Glazer to a room full of app developers.

“How do we find that balance between people who are interested in games… without having the problem of more spam?”

Glazer said these words onstage today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, and it was quite clear which community he was talking about: Facebook, which itself sees gaming as a sort of double-edged … Continue Reading

Windows on ARM coming around Windows 8 release, will have Office 15 apps

Microsoft’s plan to bring Windows to ARM chips has been a curious endeavor, mainly because the company hasn’t offered up many specifics about how the new version of Windows will differ from the traditional x86 and 64-bit versions of the operating system.

That all changed today with a nearly-9,000 word blog post by Microsoft’s Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky, in which he divulged a slew of details on Windows on ARM (WOA).

The big takeaways … Continue Reading

Stealth-mode app TimeRazor helps you find time for your favorite events, raises $3.4M

TimeRazor is a mobile application launching in March that will help you find events and offers near you. The company announced today it has raised $3.4 million from private investors.

TimeRazor is tackling the “fear of missing out” or FOMO as the company calls it. It proposes people are often so busy with errands and tasks they need to do, that they miss out on the fun events they want to do. TimeRazor is set … Continue Reading

When the Google+ Platform is opening for developers and why it’s taking so long

The Google+ Platform is still a relatively small collection of read-only APIs, but Google is definitely preparing for a wide and varied set of features for developers.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco Thursday, Google+ engineering director David Glazer (pictured) revealed that Google will roll out more enhancements to the social networking platform “when we’re delighted with how it’s working.”

It’s a vague answer to an important question, and it has a … Continue Reading

Hasbro licenses game characters and brands from Zynga

Hasbro and Zynga are announcing a deal where the big toy company will create toys based on Zynga’s game characters and social gaming brands. It’s a marriage of the old new game worlds that makes sense as the physical and digital worlds converge.

The deal helps keep Hasbro more relevant for a generation of kids who are growing up with online social games. While Facebook is still technically not for kids, a lot of social-game … Continue Reading

What a Navy Seal Team Six veteran can teach professionals about failure

U.S. Navy Seal Team Six became famous as an elite military group for succeeding in its quest to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. But a nine-year veteran from the team talked to an audience of game developers today about failing and how to deal with it.

Isaac Gilmore retired from the Seals last August and is now consulting as managing partner at 3SJ Tactical Solutions. It turns out that his experiences working with one … Continue Reading

Groupon keeps moving the goalposts, leaving investors scratching their heads

Groupon reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company this week and blew away its numbers — in the sense that it stopped reporting key numbers investors need to assess the health of its business.

Based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), the daily-deals company continues to lose money. But the bigger concern for investors is Groupon keeps changing how it wants to be measured and hiding metrics that point toward a deterioration of … Continue Reading