VentureBeat

Scrapblog launches “Share the Love” Facebook app for scrapbook fans

Scrapblog, a photo sharing site for scrapbook fans, is launching a Facebook app dubbed Share the Love today. The cool thing about it is that is an example of “game-ification,” where a non-game app incorporates game-like features.

Scrapblog was, until recently, a Miami-based company that operated a stand-alone web site dedicated to scrapbook fans. It launched a very interesting virtual goods application. Users could post their photos and incorporate them into online scrapbooks that they... Continue Reading

Micron will acquire memory chip maker Numonyx for $1.27 billion

In a big victory for a new kind of memory chip and the little startup making it, Micron Technology announced today it is buying Numonyx in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.27 billion.

Boise, Idaho,-based Micron is the largest U.S. maker of main memory chips used in PCs and other electronics. Numonyx, meanwhile, is a flash memory chip maker that has been working on a universal memory chip — which combines the best features of... Continue Reading

Ubisoft hits reduced expectations, announces new Tom Clancy game

Ubisoft, the big French game company, reported third fiscal quarter results that met reduced expectations for its sales of video games in the busy holiday quarter.

Sales for the quarter were 495 million euros, down 2.7 percent from 508 million euros a year earlier. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, sales were down 22.5 percent. Ubisoft said it is refocusing its high-end game strategy by concentrating on more regular releases for its... Continue Reading

AMD releases details on its graphics-microprocessor combo chip

Yesterday, Advanced Micro Devices showed off the progress it has made designing a chip that combines graphics and a processor in a single chip.

Dubbed Fusion, the family of chips is getting nearer to commercial release. The chip design, which AMD revealed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, has been years in the making. AMD says the idea for the chip bubbled up from observations of how consumers began using their... Continue Reading

Nvidia’s Optimus adjusts your laptop graphics to fit the app

Nvidia is launching its Optimus technology today in an effort to match your laptop’s graphics horsepower to a given application.

The technology will assess a running application and decide whether to engage Nvidia’s own graphics chip or an Intel-provided graphics component that is part of a laptop’s chip set. Optimus can thus deliver the most appropriate graphics power while preserving battery life.

The new technology recognizes an old fact. A lot of laptops come with... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts makes a huge bet with Dante’s Inferno

Fresh off the success of Mass Effect 2, Electronic Arts is launching one of its big bets on a brand new video game as it debuts Dante’s Inferno.

The game goes on sale today. EA spent an estimated $3 million or so on a Super Bowl commercial touting the game. EA chief executive John Ricciteillo said the ad helped drive more than 3 million downloads of content related to the game as well as strong... Continue Reading

BioShock 2 Q&A: the trick to creating a critically acclaimed sequel

The first BioShock game surprised gamers when it debuted on the Xbox 360 in August, 2007. It was a horror-shooting game with mature themes and an imaginative story set in an underwater paradise gone bad. Today, Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games division is launching the sequel, BioShock 2. The first game sold more than 3 million copies and got an average review rating of 94 out of 100 on the review aggregator Metacritic. Jordan Thomas, creative... Continue Reading

More GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Helgason, Pham and Mahoney

VentureBeat’s upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Here are some of the latest speakers we’ve added to the program:

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. He will be on a panel on Disruptive Innovation. Helgason’s company makes a 3-D game engine that enables just about anybody to create 3-D games that run inside a web browser, with no... Continue Reading

Offerpal Media lets you pay for games by putting you to work

Offerpal Media is launching a new way to pay for games and other social apps today. Basically, Offerpal is going to put you to work.

The new alternative to making a payment for a game with a credit card is called Offerpal Tasks. With it, you can get what you want — a virtual good that would ordinarily cost money — by performing a task that someone on the Internet needs to get done.

Offerpal... Continue Reading

Nasuni lets businesses add cloud storage on the fly

In an move to simplify storage of data in a web-based cloud, Nasuni is unveiling new storage technology, the Nasuni Filer.

It’s a complex solution, but it simplifies how mid-sized and small businesses can get additional storage. You can sign up to get a new account and start uploading data to the cloud storage in as little as 15 minutes. The Natick, Mass., company says it effectively creates a “storage as a service” business.

Businesses... Continue Reading

Zeus Research and STi let you use phone cards to buy virtual goods

STi Prepaid has created a huge empire with prepaid phone cards, selling over 200 million cards a year in 200,000 stores.

In a smart move, Zeus Research is teaming up with STi to create a way to use those cards to pay for virtual goods inside online games.

San Francisco-based Zeus research is announcing today that STi will provide a massive increase in distribution for Zues’ online entertainment partners. Virtual goods are turning into a... Continue Reading

Displax forgot to tell us it doesn’t make plastic nanowire film

One of our most popular stories in recent days has been about Displax, a company in Portugal that plans to start selling a plastic film that turns any surface into a touchscreen.

By July, Displax said it is planning to begin commercial sales of its “multitouch skin” which can be thinner than paper. The ideal is to spread a nanowire-laced plastic film over any flat or curved surface — glass, plastic or wood — so... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts tips its hand on big (and mysterious) titles in coming year

Electronic Arts is launching a number of big titles in the coming fiscal year that should get gamers excited, according to the company’s conference call with analysts today.

EA typically announces titles during its quarterly calls to get gamers frothing and to give analysts guidance about its expected financial performance. Those titles could always be delayed, but EA has been shipping more games on time than it used to.

During today’s conference call, EA chief... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts beats reduced earnings forecasts

Electronic Arts reported third fiscal quarter results today that were in line with the reduced expectations analysts had.

For the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, EA reported revenue of $1.24 billion, down from $1.64 billion a year ago. Net loss was $82 million, compared to a net loss of $641 million a year ago. Loss per share was 25 cents compared to a loss of $2 per share a year ago. On a non-GAAP... Continue Reading

Intel’s monster of a chip: an Itanium microprocessor with 2 billion transistors

Intel announced its Itanium 9300 series microprocessor today, a high-end supercomputing chip with 2 billion transistors on a single chip.

The number of transistors, or basic on-off switches that control the flow of electrical signals in a chip, is about twice as much as what Intel and other big companies normally put in a chip.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Architecture Group, said Intel will be able to put eight microprocessors together in a... Continue Reading

Real Networks updates media player for the Mac

Real Networks is launching a new beta version of its RealPlayer SP for the Mac.

That’s an early present for Mac fans, who have the option of attending the Steve Jobs-less Macworld in San Francisco this week.

The new version lets the Mac version catch up to features launched for the PC last year. The new downloadable media player lets people easily take videos from their Mac and put them on devices such as the... Continue Reading

Unity Technologies strikes multi-year deal with LEGO for 3-D browser games

Unity Technologies is announcing today it has struck a three-year deal with LEGO in which the toy company will use Unity’s 3-D animation engine in its upcoming online games.

San Francisco-based Unity makes a game engine, which is a set of tools that makes it easy to create a game. While many online games are based on Adobe’s Flash technology, those games tend to be two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Unity enables game developers using it to... Continue Reading

Sony Online Entertainment’s Free Realms hits 8M users

Free-to-play online games were pioneered in Asia and are making lots of money for game publishers there who sell virtual goods to users inside the free games.

That model seems to be taking off in the U.S. now, based on the latest announcement from Sony Online Entertainment. The San Diego, Calif.-based company’s Free Realms massively multiplayer online game has amassed 8 million registered users since its launch in April 2009. Prior to the launch of... Continue Reading

Latest GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Facebook, GameStop Digital Ventures, Sony

We’re starting to get pretty excited about this. Our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Today’s featured speakers are as follows:

Gareth Davis, platform manager, Facebook. Davis has a big responsibility at Facebook. There are more than 400 million users on the social network, and the No. 1 activity they do is play games. And while those games... Continue Reading

Ideaworks Labs lets you publish mobile apps to multiple platforms

Creating a cross-platform smartphone app isn’t easy. It takes lots of work to port a single game or other app to the hundreds of different cell phones and carriers in the world.

Various attempts to make this easy have their pitfalls. But London-based Ideaworks Labs says it has solved the problem with its Airplay software development kit. It launched its fourth version of the software in October, and today it is adding a version for... Continue Reading