Leave it to Facebook to invent yet another way to keep us all glued to the site. The social network has made the status update stickier with the addition of embedded games that people can play as they skim the News Feed or a friend’s Timeline.

Friday, Facebook launched “feed gaming,” or the ability for users to anonymously play miniature versions of Facebook games in the News Feed or on Timeline with just a single click.

Feed gaming is both a feature for application developers and users of the social network. Application developers, with a few code tweaks, can now embed sample versions of their games into the story updates users already post to Facebook, and thus use the game-lets to hook new users.

So Joe Gamer plays Angry Birds as he normally would, but now when he gets a score he’s especially proud, he can post an update to Facebook challenging his friends to try to one-up him. The status update gets distributed, via News Feed and Timeline, to Joe’s friends who can then play the same level inside the update.

Game makers actually have a few choices here, so keep an eye out for mini-games, game replays, and level high-score challenges. Angry Birds, Idle Worship, Tetris Battle, and Bubble Witch Saga are a few games already employing feed gaming, Facebook engineer Gareth Morris said in a blog post on the new feature.

The addition of in-feed gaming is the logical next step for the social network, which has openly expressed interest in helping its games grow. Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook Platform, said at a conference in February that games are the reason millions of users keep coming back to the site.

“It’s critically important to us that games are successful,” Sjogreen said at the time. “We have a whole Platform team focused on just making sure games are going well. That includes building games-specific features … to create discovery for games.”

Of course, this all boils down to a new paradigm for game discovery on the social network. Facebook games find you and beg for just a second of your attention. A second turns into the promise of a few coins and soon you’re off installing the full version of the application to collect your rewards. Next you know, you’ve wasted away the workday trying to beat your buddies. Genius, right?

Photo credit: Matt Harnack/Facebook

If there is one application that personifies how Apple’s mega-popular iPad is transforming the enterprise, it could very well be the intuitive, luscious, and just-plain-cool Roambi, a business intelligence app that brings mundane data to life in unimaginable ways.

Roambi, which has attracted $30 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, lets you show your company’s SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce data on the iPad in bright charts and graphs. Each report is available for online or offline viewing, so you can always bust out your iPad for presentations or routine queries.

And unlike business intelligence players with iPad app support like MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos, or SAP BusinessObjects, Roambi does not tie you down to a single data source. “Roambi is unique because it is designed to aggregate across different data warehouses,” Forrester mobility analyst Ted Schadler told VentureBeat. “They pull it all into a single data dashboard for an executive.”

The Roambi app serves more than 230 large enterprise customers, charging $795 per user licence, and more than 4,000 mid-size customers with its Pro offering, charging $99 per user per year. Its large enterprise customers have purchased support for between a hundred and several thousand employees, meaning the company is bringing in strong revenue.

Roambi comes from San Diego-based development firm MeLLmo. The company’s founders originally picked the odd name to throw off the competition, but they are stuck with it now because all their contracts use the name. They try to make the best of their funny name and in some ways they are affectionate toward it — in the office, the guys are “MeLLMen” and the ladies are “MeLLmettes.”

A bold bet

Roambi stems from the day MeLLmo chief executive Santiago Becerra (left) stood in line to get his hands on the first-generation iPhone in June 2007. A lifelong fan of Apple products, Becerra had the time to stand in line because he had sold a startup eight months prior and was taking a break from work. He deeply identified with the idea of the iPhone and loved the concept of using a flat touchscreen display for interacting with applications and the web.

“I remember that first day of playing with the iPhone and the pre-loaded apps like the stock widget,” Becerra told VentureBeat. “It was truly different because it required no instruction manual. At the time, I asked myself ‘How long before business people will want to see data on this device?’”

Becerra was so excited about the idea of enterprise applications for the iPhone that he called up and pitched a few friends and business colleagues on the idea. A few people shied away from the idea, but he found a solid founding team that believed in it, including Quinton Alsbury, David Becerra, and Jaime Zuluaga.

Alsbury, now MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, loved Becerra’s idea from the start. He wasn’t as immediately bullish as Becerra was, but he was excited about the iPhone’s potential.

“It seemed obvious to anyone looking at the phone — there was no way that it would be relegated to just a consumer device,” Alsbury told me. “Apple being a computer company meant that they had everything they needed to make it a computing platform. It seemed obvious that the evolution of the iPhone would make it into a computing device. Motion and visual graphics didn’t exist in this form before.”

So Becerra, Alsbury, and the others talked about the idea until they finally formed MeLLmo as a stealth LLC in January 2008. Their goal was to create a touch-based data visualization app exclusively for the iPhone. But as they were just getting started, the team knew they’d have to overcome a host of obstacles, including convincing people their idea was sound. The biggest problem they had was that no software development kit existed for iPhone apps. The App Store didn’t even exist yet to distribute those apps.

From the outset, the team made two bets: One, that business users would eventually prefer using iPhones over BlackBerrys. And two, Apple would soon offer a distribution model for other applications.

Development and launch

The MeLLmo team started recruiting on the sly that January. Alsbury said the company chose the slogan “Bringing social networking 3.0 to web 2.0″ because, like the company name, it would not hint at what the company was building. Many developers and business folks saw the slogan and contacted the company about job opportunities. When the prospective employees came in, the team revealed they were actually working on a business app for iPhone. Some of the earliest prospects jumped at the idea and still work for the company today.

The most critical early hire for the company was Alex Schaefer, a part-time developer who created the popular app ApolloIM, which ran on jailbroken iPhones. Jailbreaking your iPhone opens the door to installing unapproved applications and using the phone on other carriers. Early in the life of the iPhone, jailbreaking was especially popular because Apple didn’t yet offer the ability to install apps, and people understood that the iPhone could do much more than it was allowed to do. Schaefer’s ability to work around Apple’s limitations was important for MeLLmo, since the team wanted to build an app without an SDK.

“[Schaefer] in himself is an interesting story,” Alsbury said. “He wasn’t even a full-fledged developer. He was a poetry major with two years of computer science. But we needed someone to take some of these early ideas and see what was even possible. We needed someone who could jailbreak and start messing around. When we hired him, we gave him the title of ‘iPro.’”

So about month before Apple released its first iOS SDK on March 6, 2008, MeLLmo was already hard at work figuring out app development and how its data visualization app would function. Becerra describes the earliest months of development as “difficult” because there were no rules and no playbook for creating these apps. There were only a few apps for the iPhone at that point, so designing an interface with touchscreen functionality was tedious.

“It was really a new paradigm,” Becerra said. “To us, the hardest part was to forget about the past and center on a new platform and new ways of thinking.”

The company remained in stealth mode until May 19, 2009. Just before coming out, the team met with bloggers, journalists, and analysts to preview the product, which MeLLmo expected to sell directly to corporations. They were met with lots of skeptical looks and some “well-known bloggers” told then it wouldn’t work.

“They told us we wouldn’t be successful unless we were on BlackBerry,” Alsbury said. “They said ‘No enterprise is going to buy software institutionally for the iPhone.’ They didn’t believe anyone would buy iPhone software.”

When the company finally launched Roambi for iPhone, many businesses complimented the intuitiveness of the design and realized that touch-based data visualization could add some pizzazz to sales calls, presentations, and meetings. Those businesses weren’t exactly lining up to get their hands on Roambi at first, but the response was generally positive. In fact, business users were slowly ditching their BlackBerrys in favor of more powerful and versatile iPhones and starting to find ways to use it for work and play alike.

“We were surprised how fast companies were buying into it at the beginning,” Becerra said.

Page two: How the iPad changed everything and where the company is headed next

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The main coders working on HP’s Enyo  — the HTML5 application framework first seen in the HP TouchPad — have jumped ship and are headed to Google, the Verge reports.

This puts a huge dent in HP’s plan to open source webOS, which admittedly was weak from the start. HP only announced that it was opening up webOS after it failed to find a suitable buyer. We reported that HP tried to sell its Palm assets for $1.2 billion — the same price it initially paid for them.

Sources tell the Verge that the departing crew wrote “99 percent of the code” for Enyo, and that also includes Matt McNulty, who headed the Enyo team. HP planned to release the first version of Open webOS later this year, but without the Enyo folks I can’t really see that happening. (In a statement to the Verge, HP said everything was on schedule.)

HP announced earlier this week that it’s laying off 27,000 employees — which likely gave the Enyo crew the impetus to move on.

The news doesn’t mean that we’ll start seeing great webOS design influences and features in Android. The Enyo team was instead focused on making it easier for developers to create apps for the platform. It’s still unclear where they’ll end up at Google, but it will likely be either the Android team (though Android apps are built in Java, not HTML5) or Google Chrome (which could use a robust HTMl5 app framework).

After watching their demo video (below), you’ll believe it too.

Briefly, what (T)ether does is allow individuals and groups to interact with virtual objects in real-time, simultaneously, creating a shared virtual space in which to build, create, and edit objects. Sounds simple? The implications are profound.

The (T)ether user interface enables manipulation of virtual objects spatially, with gestures, rather than through actual physical contact with a display device. It’s easier to show than to tell:

That difference is critical, because it enables both interaction with large objects or collections of objects …

… and easy collaboration with other connected devices and users:

And it’s this collaborative aspect that’s most exciting. As the group, composed of Matthew Blackshaw, Dávid Lakatos, Hiroshi Ishii, and Ken Perlin, post on their project page, “multiple people can edit the same virtual environment.”

As you can see around the four-minute mark in the video below, this enables powerful collaboration. Here’s a screen capture of the video showing two of the team members building and editing a virtual architecture together:

Currently the team is using iPads as their windows on the virtual world. However, imagine a Google Glass version, which seamlessly overlays the virtual onto the real via smart glasses, eliminating the need to physically hold up a device.

Go a step farther and envision increased fidelity, resolution, and processing power, and you have a solution that would enable an aircraft mechanic to virtually disassemble an ailing jet engine. Or enable an automotive engineer to visually create a model of how a new engine should fit together. The possibilities are endless.

Here’s the project video in its entirety:

That’s about to change. We’ve seen the next step — and it’s a really awesome, significant step — in mobile browsers, and it was made by none other than Yahoo.

Today, Yahoo launches Axis, a new way of getting around the web, both on mobile and in your typical desktop browser. Axis is available as a standalone web browser on iOS devices now (other platforms such as Windows Phone and Android are coming soon) and as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Yes, the tech press loves to hound Yahoo about its executive troubles and its oldster status, but the fact remains that the company still employs some of the best, brightest engineers I’ve met, and it is very much focused on creating bigger, better mobile products.

To explain Axis, we have to start with search — something that many have assumed Yahoo had given up. “Far from being outside the search game, we’re very much invested in it,” said Ethan Batraski, Yahoo’s director of product management for search, in a meeting with VentureBeat last week.

Bing has lately powering the Yahoo portal’s web search, but this has freed up Yahoo’s intellectual and engineering workforce “to rethink search… as a human experience in three steps,” said Batraski.

Those three steps — the query, the results, and the destination page — have long been locked in a lather-rinse-repeat loop, with users navigating back to a results page when the destination page is lacking, or refining their queries when the results page seems off.

“No matter how much Google or Bing tries to innovate on that experience, it’s pretty much the same way it’s been for the past decade,” said Batraski. And on small-screened phones and tablets with non-optimal wireless connections, that experience is as painful as a first-world technophile could imagine. Axis does something different, bringing queries closer to the objects they represent and bringing more data onto the results page for quicker, simpler, lower-bandwidth decision-making

Here’s how it works: You enter your search term, and Yahoo does some heavy lifting (not Bing-powered). You have the option of selecting a specific object that your query is related to; for example, if you search for “Roots,” Axis might give you options to refine the search for “Roots” the TV miniseries or “The Roots” the band. In that way, it’s quite similar to Google’s newly launched Knowledge Base. It can also direct you to “instant answers,” kind of like what Bing does these days.

That’s when things get really nifty. Axis serves up thumbnails and page previews as results instead of just a list of links, and the results are still available as you navigate through destination pages. Any time you need to get back to the results, you just pull down on the screen, and a horizontal slider of results from your last query appear at the top.

This is one case where a picture is worth a thousand words, so check out the images below (captured on an iPad) to get a better idea of how the mobile browser navigation works:

You can also see demo videos from Yahoo over here.

The main point is, you don’t have to go back and forth over a painfully slow connection to do normal web search; the results are just a finger-flick away at all times, and they’re stored in a convenient, visual slider that won’t hog the already small screen. It’s brilliant and long overdue.

Naturally, the browser also brings the features you’d expect from a modern app: tabbed browsing, gorgeous image search, bookmarks, social sharing options for every page, etc.

In addition to the usual suspects in mobile devices, keep an eye out for Axis on gaming consoles and smart TVs, where search and web browsing are equally painful for similar reasons.

Batraski said he got the idea while on vacation. “I was sitting in Bermuda on a chair with a margarita, and it dawns on me: There’s no real need for a results page. I’ve never been a big fan of it. So by building it into the browser, it’s the most utilitarian way of getting to content.” Six months later, the apps were built.

On feature of particular note is the desktop-to-mobile sync option for open tabs. Firefox for Android and Chrome for Android also have this feature, but until now, it hasn’t been an option for iPhone and iPad users.

That brings us to our next point: It’s absolutely fascinating to see this innovation in mobile browser tech making its debut on iOS. Mozilla has been blocked from putting its Firefox mobile browser on the iPhone and other Apple devices, and we’re pretty sure Google wouldn’t even have bothered to ask, given Apple’s history with outside mobile browsers. But for some reason, this Yahoo browser is the exception to the rule.

“Yahoo has a really good relationship with Apple,” said Batraski. “We power their weather and finance apps.” Batraski also pointed out that, while Axis for iOS uses the Safari web view API, “it’s a complete different browser, and it runs separately from Safari.”

Of course, techies will be quick to pick up and play with the mobile browser and related extensions, but what about the rest of the world?

“Any time you show something this different, it takes users time to adopt,” said Batraski. “Right now, we’re seeing a lot of traction with tech-forward users, where they really understand this makes the experience a lot more efficient.”

As for the less digitally minded masses, he said, “This is not the first time Yahoo has been in the browser business,” referring to the company’s Yahoo-tools-stuffed Firefox and Internet Explorer bundles, which currently claim “well over 100M users.” Axis will be built into Yahoo’s new browser bundles, and the company expects to see mainstream adoption start there.

Of course, any good idea begets other, eerily similar good ideas from competing companies. Batraski said he won’t be surprised to see Google or Microsoft lift the Axis interface and user experience for their own purposes. “I won’t be pissed off; I almost expect it,” he said.

“When they see it, I think they’re going to be really peeved: ‘Why didn’t I think of that’ It’s likely to cannibalize their search experience, and I don’t think they’re ready for that.”

Another interesting note is the browser’s architecture. Yahoo has been churning out some interesting mobile web-focused, Node.js-based tools called Cocktails, and it’s now clear why: The Axis team needed these tools to build the browser and extensions.

“Axis is the first fully Cocktails app we’re going to launch,” said Batraski. “We run off Manhattan as the app server, and then use the Mojito layer for a number of modular applications.”

Top image courtesy of David Hammonds, Shutterstock

The CTO and CIO of the U.S. government have announced a new digital roadmap for the U.S. that encourages the further use of open data, and tries to inspire developers to work for the government.

“We have an opportunity to make this country shine,” U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said along with Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel (pictured) today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York.

Both men spoke about their goal of improving the government’s digital initiatives as well as attracting talented developers to their cause.

The new roadmap is centered on five ideas:

• Open Data as the new default
• Anywhere, anytime on any device
• Everything should be an API
• Make government data social
• Change the meaning of social participation

One of the more interesting aspects VanRoekel noted was that the government would create no more .gov websites because there are already so many. He also said the government plans to focus on building everything on the web using HTML5 standards for broader and easier access to information by more people.

The government’s official document on its Digital Government Strategy broadly sets out to accomplish the following three things:

Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Operationalizing an information-centric model, we can architect our systems for interoperability and openness, modernize our content publication model, and deliver better, device-agnostic digital services at a lower cost.

Ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways.

Learning from the previous transition of moving information and services online, we now have an opportunity to break free from the inefficient, costly, and fragmented practices of the past, build a sound governance structure for digital services, and do mobile “right” from the beginning.

Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation across our Nation and improve the quality of services for the American people.

We must enable the public, entrepreneurs, and our own government programs to better leverage the rich wealth of federal data to pour into applications and services by ensuring that data is open and machine-readable by default.

Photo credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Precog launched at the Strata Conference in February, and developers across a variety of verticals are already using the beta version. Eli Portnoy, CEO of ThinkNear, which offers hyper-local mobile display ads within 100m of any location, is using Precog’s beta to capture thousands of interactions per second, and then surface targeted insights to advertisers.

Kirill Sheynkman, senior director of RTP Ventures, which led a $2 million funding round announced today, said there has been an investor frenzy around big data, but Precog is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the exploding market.

Importantly, Precog can analyze the growing amount of unstructured and semi-structured data like texts, tweets, and emails that offer a potential gold mine for application vendors.

“For an investor who spent 20 years building data-centric infrastructure businesses, seeing something shiny in big data’s murky waters was an epiphany,” said Sheynkman, who will join the board of directors alongside SendGrid CEO, Jim Franklin.

Precog chief executive John De Goes built the company to create the world’s first data intelligence-as-a-service offering. Application developers (ISVs) are becoming more savvy about leveraging data, but it can take months, or even years, to build a full infrastructure in-house.

He said the company aspires to be the Twilio of the space, referencing a company known for its dead-simple APIs. “We provide application vendors with the ability to solve any problem in data analysis without having to write piles of code,” he said.

De Goes has come a long way since being selected for the Boulder class of TechStars in 2011. Shortly after graduating from the startup accelerator, De Goes closed a seed round for ReportGrid, which provides SaaS vendors with nifty data visualization tools.

In addition to RTP Ventures, Resonate Venture Partners and TechStars‘ founder David Cohen also participated in Boulder-based Precog’s new funding round.

Adaptive design is an elegant solution to the thorny technical problem of having to deliver a content experience on multiple devices. And engineers love more than anything to apply the same hammer to multiple nails.

Unfortunately, users do not agree. Desktop web browsers, tablets, and mobile devices are fundamentally different and are used in very different ways. Across our properties at CBS Interactive, we have experimented with a variety of adaptive and direct designs and are learning the hard way that a one-size-fits-all solution delivers a subpar user experience.

Turn those mobile pages

The app has defined the mobile form factor. Users expect to see menus with only a few relevant options that do not require scrolling, titlebars with back buttons, and do not mind paging through content as long as it loads fast. In contrast, when a full size web page is adapted down to a mobile form factor, it forces a lot of vertical scrolling – even if some components are removed and others are made smaller.

Narrowing a mobile experience down to the essentials of what a user wants while mobile is critical. Tight menus and quick page loads compel users to turn more pages, which is essential in the small mobile form factor that has limited ads. Some ad units on mobile are worth more on mobile than desktop — for example, someone reading a product review on a mobile device in a store is likely contemplating buying that product.

Content publishers can learn a lot from airlines and banks, which are usually technology lagards. The mobile sites of United Airlines and Wells Fargo are tight, focused, and substantially different from their websites.

Tablets are for swiping

The tablet is essentially a magazine form factor, and users have been trained by numerous popular apps ranging from iBook to the New York Times to Flipboard that they should swipe right to left to page through content an a tablet. Users are perfectly happy to swipe through an article that is split into several pages, since this is what they did with magazines.

Rather than adapting a web page down to the tablet form factor and requiring users to scroll vertically, publishers should embrace swiping. Users are not perturbed at all to see a full page interstitial ad stuck into the mix while paging through content, making the tablet extremely monetizable.

Swiping is very difficult to code for mobile web. Fortunately, there are turnkey solutions such as Pressly and OnSwipe that make it easy for simple sites to create swipeable tablet editions. Extensions to jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch make it easy for programmers to add swiping features to their mobile HTML.

Let websites be websites

Website design is proven, monetizaton techniques work well, and users expect sites to function the way they currently function. There is no pressing need to substantially change how they work.

The trend of “iPadification” of websites is more about adding simplicity and whitespace rather than a complete restructuring of how a website should work. Some types of services, such as Twitter, provide a tablet-like experience on their website. Twitter’s website offers a clean design with white, rounded content areas and no dynamic menus. Users are comfortable scrolling vertically on tablets to see streams, so the same design works well for desktop web and tablet.

It is painful for engineers to have to support three different use cases for three different form factors. However, particularly for content sites, the effort bears worthwhile fruit in terms of mobile monetization.

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can follow him at @peteryared.

[Top image credit: Pressly]

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Two of the more interesting companies on the mobile-development landscape are announcing a new deal for developers today, and will be making great tools for location-based apps available for free.

If you’re into mobile development, Appcelerator and Geoloqi are probably both on your radar.

Appcelerator helps developers make all kinds of mobile apps on a variety of platforms, and Geoloqi brings mobile devs powerful, simple location features, such as proximity information and geofencing.

The two companies have been cozied up for a few months already. Now, they’re giving devs a two-month trial to test drive Geoloqi on Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. In a word, this means better location tools will be available for more kinds of apps, and they’ll be easier to use for a wider range of developers.

Titanium lets devs work quickly to get apps live on Android and iOS devices natively, as well as on the mobile web. With Geoloqi plugged in, devs will also have a complete location toolkit (including true geofencing), battery management features, and real-time data storage and analytics.

“Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, dependable geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform, and we found one in Geoloqi,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, in a statement this morning.

“It’s the first geolocation platform that enables individualized geo-triggered events within an application. This powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to offer Geoloqi technology to our customers.”

Geoloqi, which was founded by cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, was intended originally and primarily as a tool for large enterprises and government organizations. But Case told us earlier this year that the startup fully intended to bring its tools to the masses via partnerships such as this one.

“Appcelerator has been a fantastic partner, with a very impressive set of tools,” Case said in a release today. “We are thrilled to be enabling their developer base with the power of next-generation location services for their applications and look forward to unleashing the power of the creative commons with powerful, easy-to-use location features.”

To date, Geoloqi has raised $350,000 and is seeking future rounds of funding to continue growing its offerings, client base, and partnerships. Current clients include government and security teams.

Image courtesy of rangizzz, Shutterstock

GitHub has maintained a long and profitable love affair with all things Apple, but today, the folks behind the most popular code repository site are sullying their allegiance to Cupertino with — get ready to gasp and clutch your pearls — a Windows app.

The reason for the existence of the GitHub desktop app for Windows is easy enough to explain: GitHub users are sometimes also Windows users, and they often find collaborating on code projects to be a pain in the patootie.

“We thought Git was going to get better on its own on a couple other platforms, but it wasn’t advancing … and that’s sort of a shame,” said GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath in a phone conversation with VentureBeat.

“It’s the same situation on enterprise, but even more so — they want to use GitHub, but they’re having a hard time doing so,” he said. And of course, the bootstrapped startup doesn’t want to leave any of that tasty enterprise money on the table, and the enterprise is besotted with Windows.

But, Wanstrath said, the company made the decision primarily for love, not for money. “It was definitely motivated by the trouble people were having,” he told us.

Also, as the small company grows ever larger and as its userbase becomes more diverse, Windows tools are increasingly requested both inside and outside the company. GitHub has grown from a tiny collective of hackers to a 73-person small business, and naturally, some of those 73 folks are Windows enthusiasts.

“Our philosophy is that we wanted [the desktop app] to be by Windows developers for Windows developers,” said Wanstrath. “That’s been our success so far — the things we create, we want to use ourselves.”

That philosophy is part of why it took GitHub so long to roll out its Windows app in the first place: It needed to have the right people who would want to build the app for themselves and eat their own dogfood, to use a rather revolting idiom from the startup ghetto.

“We did the Mac app first because when we first started making desktop apps … we wanted to make something we’d use at the company, and most of the company was Mac users,” said Wanstrath. “We were a lot smaller then.”

The company also wanted to make sure that a desktop app would be used and loved by the community before sinking more resources into multiple applications, he said.

So of course, if you start thinking about platforms hackers love, you start thinking about Linux. But Wanstrath wasn’t ready to commit on that score — not yet, anyhow.

“We can’t really come out on that yet with a yes or no,” he said “but if that’s something people want, if that’s a neeed they have, maybe.”

Over the next few months, expect the Windows desktop app to see the same kind of loving attention and frequent updates the Mac desktop app has had since its launch. Wanstrath promised the Windows app would be maintained as well as the Mac app “if not better.”

“We’ve been growing a pretty serious team to work on this app,” he concluded. “It’s going to be a big part of GitHub.”

On the eve of the largest technology IPO in American history, the company at the center of all the hoopla is celebrating in a geeky-chic style emblematic of its eight-year history.

Friday morning at 6:30 a.m. Pacific, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will ring the opening bell in a remote ceremony held at the social network’s Menlo Park campus. Up until that moment, thousands of Facebookers will be participating in an all-night employee hackathon designing and coding away on what could be come the next Facebook Timeline. And from the looks of photos already trickling out on Facebook, this is one party not to be missed.

Facebook kicked off its hackathon, Hackathon 31 to be exact, at 7 p.m. Pacific Thursday evening. A crowd of several thousand employees gathered in an outdoor make-shift arena in the middle of the campus’ corridor (the same place where the bell-ringing will take place) to watch Zuckerberg and senior staffers rally the troops for one final night pre-IPO hacking. Zuckerberg, as pictured below, was greeted with a standing ovation from the crowd.

Thursday afternoon, Facebook priced its shares at $38 apiece for a $104 billion valuation. The company will debut on the NASDAQ tomorrow under the “FB” ticker symbol and raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) through its offering.

Tonight, however, Facebook celebrates its “Hacker Way” culture and, in the process, sends a message to Wall Street and the world that its focus will always be on building and shipping products.

To prove that the “Hacker Way” is alive and well at Facebook, the social network will be hosting an all-night, employee hackathon at its Menlo Park campus and satellite offices.

The event, dubbed Hackathon 31, is especially significant for the social network as it comes on the eve of its initial public offering and is meant to reinforce the mantra that, while its public listing is important, Facebook’s focus will always be on building and shipping products, a source familiar with the event told VentureBeat.

Facebook’s 31st hackathon starts tonight around 7 p.m. Pacific on campus at the company’s “Hacker Square,” and will run up until the company rings the opening bell early Friday morning. All participants will receive a commemorative Hackathon 31 t-shirt — t-shirts are a traditional part of Facebook hackathons — and are only required to work on a project that is not their day job. The hackathon is also said to be inclusive of all Facebook staffers, not just the engineers.

The event clearly reaffirms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to Facebook’s Hacker Way, a company philosophy that means code is the be all, end all and that “done is better than perfect.” The affair could even produce the next Facebook Timeline, chat, or video, all products that got their start at previous hackathons.

“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration,” Zuckerberg explained in a letter to investors included in the company’s prospectus. “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

There is the possibility that Facebook’s Hacker Way culture will clash with the demands that go along with being a public company, Altimeter Group digital advertising and media analyst Rebecca Lieb said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Under this mentally, Facebook sacrifices perfection for fast iteration. “That might be difficult for Facebook as a public company,” Lieb said. “The Street might want to see more instantaneous revenue generating results.”

The hackathon then serves as an important message to Wall Street that public company or not, Facebook will live and die by the ethos of code-based solutions, practicality over perfection, and risk-taking.

Photo credit: Matt Harnack/Facebook

Flexible screens, wearable computers, conductive ink, wires that move like muscles: These are the materials that will make up the gadgets of the future, and they’re being dreamed up and developed in do-it-yourself hacker labs and garages all around the world.

Sure, large manufacturers are working on these kinds of materials, too, but openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota says the real innovation is coming from the bottom up as makers, hackers, and DIY enthusiasts figure out how to do “the future” for themselves in their own home labs.

Smart materials have one or more properties that can be changed by external stimuli, such as temperature, moisture, a magnetic field, or an electric current. And these kinds of materials are changing how we think about hardware and what hardware is able to do.

At a hardware-hacking workshop sponsored by Make magazine today in Silicon Valley, Mota said she and a partner began looking for these kinds of smart materials for an art installation, but they ran into more hurdles than expected.

“We quickly realized the materials we wanted weren’t available in quantities or prices for makers like ourselves,” she said, noting that when they could get their hands on the materials, they couldn’t figure out how to use them, nor did they receive any instructions from the manufacturers, who were used to dealing with large-scale OEMs.

So, Mota concluded, she’d have to make the materials she wanted by herself.

“The only way to go about this was trial and error,” she said. “We’d make our best guess and change one thing at a time until we got the material to do what we wanted it to do.”

Eventually, the art installation fell by the wayside as Mota and her cohort became more and more fascinated by making and using these materials of the future. openMaterials is the result of their efforts, which include research and workshops on DIY smart materials.

Mota said that in 2009, she was only able to track down two or three manufacturers of smart materials. Today, there are many manufacturers of all sizes — and better still, the web is replete with information, instructions, and community resources for makers.

Here’s a gallery showing handmade smart materials and where you can find out more about them (or even learn how to make them yourself):

Top image courtesy of luxorphoto, Shutterstock

Thanks to CSS3 web design techniques and font-foundries, the ability to create gorgeous typography and beautiful design for browsers, is more accessible than ever.

The web is about content — finding it, delivering it, exploring it, and experiencing growth and possibility within it. What’s the fun of using a site that takes forever to load and is difficult to read? A poorly designed product can be the single deciding factor for whether a user stays on your page or makes a dishearteningly rapid exit. Fortunately, with the use of new code, integrating gorgeous design and Web typography into various browsers is easier than ever.

Since 1996 when CSS1 was first enacted, the Web has seen historical changes. Initially, there were only 9 fonts browsers read by default. The focus was mostly on legibility and monitor-only interactive readability.

Fast-forward 15 years: Designers now have the ability to use a multitude of typefaces from various font foundries to make the Web a more beautiful place. Comic Sans can, for instance, have embossed effects and gradients. Pages load faster, and the Internet is more beautiful, more interactive, and (most importantly) more readable.

“We are in a time like no other. Through the use of CSS3 we are able to make art from code,” said Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and representative to W3C HTML and CSS Working Groups, at CASCADE SF’s HTML5 presentation, on July 2010.

Want to make the Web more beautiful? Learn how-to Saturday, May 19th at Adobe HQ in San Francisco, CA.

This Saturday, May 19th, 2012 at Adobe HQ, Sean McBride, Engineer and Developer at Typekit will teach San Francisco how to create gorgeous web typographic posters, magazines, and effects using CSS3 text shadows, transitions, outlines, text-gradients, and a host of other need-to-knows. McBride’s talk at this year’s SXSW Interactive was highly recommended by developers who attended, and we anticipate a similarly enthusiastic turnout.

Sign up today.

CASCADE SF: San Francisco’s Web Design & CSS3 Organization

Founded in 2009, by Andi Galpern, web designer and technology events organizer, CASCADE SF, @cascadesf, promotes quality and innovation to teach latest tips and tricks from the top minds in the web industry.

Andi Galpern also recently launched “The Design Business“ dedicated to teach designers how to think like entrepreneurs and communicate more effectively with teams.

Typekit: The easiest way to add real fonts to your website.

Built around web standards, Typekit gives designers and developers a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites. They have over 250,000 customers including some of the largest sites on the web today: The New York Times, Conde Nast, IGN, Twitter, and many others. It is also actively integrating Typekit into hosted platforms such as WordPress, TypePad, and Posterous so that anyone with a website can use real fonts.

Twilio has finally released its Android client with a new native software development kit that will allow Android developers to add VoIP features to any Android app.

The startup’s iOS client has been around since February, and today, Android developers are basically getting the same set of tools — tools that allow you to easily make voice calls a feature, if not necessarily the main event, of your application. You can use the Twilio client on any existing Android app, or you can use it to build a new app from scratch.

(And yes — we can smell the Twilio Android/mobile hackathon coming already. These days, you can’t throw a rock in San Francisco on a weekend and not hit a hackathon, and Twilio’s last hackathon went pretty well. Stay tuned for more on that this fall, when the startup will host its second conference.)

Features for the Android version of the client include voice calling on any Android device with a data connection, tap-to-call capabilities, analytics, and feedback from voice calls.

Twilio first introduced this concept (voice features with minimal code) almost one year ago for web developers. At that time, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat, “The existing telephony network is a big dumb audiopipe. … Skype is obviously amazing and transformed the way people interact, but Skype is only one client. We want to make that available for millions of developers.”

Since then, the company has been earning rave reviews from developers and has leveraged its hacker street cred into $17 million from Silicon Valley’s finest VCs.

For a small Portland, Ore.-based startup, AppFog has managed to build a huge fan base.

AppFog offers a platform-as-a-service for developers building web applications. What that means in simple terms is that if you’ve got a program you want to write, AppFog will take care of setting up a virtual server, installing all the services you need, and getting everything ready so that all you have to do is drop in your code and get it running.

AppFog uses cloud-based services, primarily Amazon Web Services, under the hood, but provides a more straightforward, managed environment than cloud services offer. Its pricing is radically simpler, too.

And AppFog’s tens of thousands of customers are clearly passionate about the company. VentureBeat held an (admittedly unscientific) reader poll in the weeks leading up to Under the Radar, an event produced by DealMaker Media in Silicon Valley. There were 32 startups presenting at Under the Radar, and we asked readers to vote on their favorite.

We collected thousands of votes, and AppFog was neck-and-neck with cloud-based enterprise storage startup Zadara until the final hours. But in the end, AppFog won the contest.

The startup’s prize: A profile on VentureBeat. I interviewed AppFog founder and chief executive Lucas Carlson at the event, and after some delays, I’m posting it here. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here is your reader’s choice winner:

VentureBeat: What is it that you guys do?

Lucas Carlson: We make developers lives easier. That’s our mission and our focus, it’s what we’re good at. We do that by creating a platform as a service that connects developers with infrastructure and services in seconds.

VB: What kinds of services?

Carlson: MySQL, Mongo, Reddis, memCache, anything new and cool that you’ve heard about. Instead of figuring out how to compile it and get it up and running and managing it if it crashes, we do all that for you, and we hook it all together and make it seamless.

VB: Isn’t that the premise of existing cloud-based services, like Amazon, where they get everything together and spin up a server for you and run whatever you want on it?

Carlson: Yes, and there’s a big difference between what Amazon’s doing and what we’re doing. Amazon thinks of it like resources and services, and you have to figure out how to tie it all together and keep track of everything. And once you do that, you’re bound to it — you can’t move off the platform and you have no choice.

Instead of thinking of it as resources, we’re thinking of it holistically, like applications. So we can understand from an application downwards, the entire stack, the entire status of the program, and how it’s running, and what services it needs. That gives us a unique ability to do things like snapshot an entire app with its services, keep backups of it, and transfer it to other cloud providers in order to do disaster recovery and other services.

VB: So my apps will still be running on Amazon, or Rackspace, or HP Cloud, but you’re just giving me the ability to manage that and make it easier to create what I need and deploy the apps that I want?

Carlson: And not only that, we’ve incorporated Cloud Foundry, which is an open-source library that you can actually contribute to, so you have a say, for the first time, in the application life cycle that it runs in.

VB: Who’s using this?

Carlson: Tens of thousands of developers. Developers are our customers, they’re our bread and butter. We built something for developers, by developers. We’re not looking to switch that focus — we just want to make sure that we help. Developers live everywhere. We have developers that live in enterprises, in small businesses, in startups, even individual developers.

VB: Is there a particular platform or language that your customer base uses?

Carlson: Our company has specialized in PHP, and that was the first language that we supported. So we have a strong following in the PHP community.

VB: Still used for many, many websites.

Carlson: About a third of all websites run PHP. But since then we have actually, through Cloud Foundry, expanded to support Java, Ruby, Node, .NET, and others.

VB: So what does it cost?

Carlson: It starts out completely free, and from there it scales up with their needs. You can go as cheap as $29 a month. Unlike other cloud providers, scaling up is a linear process, instead of jumping to become very expensive as you go.

VB: As a proportion of what I’m spending on Amazon Web Services, or Rackspace, what would I pay?

Carlson: It’s very difficult to say, because the way that those services charge is by the hour of server time. That makes sense if you’re analyzing DNA, but most mobile and web applications live for a very long time. So charging hourly, it’s very hard to calculate. Our system is charged monthly, pro rata, so if you need to add capacity, you just add it for the part of the month that you need it.

VB: How big are you as a company and how are you funded?

Carlson: We’ve raised $10 million in funding from Ignition and Madrona and First Round Capital in two rounds. We’re about 28 people and still growing very quickly. We’re based in Portland, Oregon.

VB: There are a bunch of people here from Portland.

Carlson: Portland is heating up. It’s actually a great place for building a company. It’s a lot cheaper and the talent is really high quality.

VB: So you guys won the reader’s choice award in our poll. I was sort of surprised to see all these people piling into the comments saying, “Vote for these guys.” How did you do it?

Carlson: Our mission is to make developers’ lives easier, and if developers are saying these things, I guess we’re doing a pretty good job with that.

VB: So you’re saying this is purely grass roots? You didn’t send out a tweet saying “Vote for us”?

Carlson: No, we did send out tweets. But the love we did not ask for, that was purely their own doing.

Photo by Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Many game developers have moaned about the lack of quality and real gameplay in Facebook games. Checkpoint Studios was founded to do something about that, and the company is launching a high-end flight history simulation game today dubbed AviNation.

Inspired by Japanese titles where you can play as an airline manager or air traffic controller, AviNation lets players build an aviation empire through key decades of flight history from the 1930s onward. The game has rich 3D graphics and runs on the Unity 3D engine, giving it a leg up on other Facebook titles in graphics quality. And it’s the kind of game that hardcore player Brian Wiklem, co-founder and chief executive of Checkpoint, always wanted to play. AviNation will launch in June.

Your goal is to become a modern-day airline mogul. You manage your flight crew, run daily operations at the airport, and control air traffic by directing planes in and out of gates. You can open a network of friendly airports to increase your passenger traffic or ship freight. If you do your job right, the population of your town will grow, and you’ll earn achievements for completing quests.

“We’ve seen a lot of games that were flat and linear, ” Wiklem said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We were bored with point-and-click gameplay and virtual chores. They’re glorified activities, not games. You are led from one activity to the next, with no sense of discovery.”

Simulation games are still the biggest category on Facebook thanks to titles such as Zynga’s FarmVille and CityVille. But the airline genre is a fresher concept. It takes skill to run your airline and master the included minigames, Wiklem said.

The whole point is to move the industry forward from Social Games 1.0 to Social Games 2.0. That should increase engagement and lead to more loyal fans. The game is social because you can send flights to friends within your social network in real-world locations.

The 3D cartoon-style world has changing weather and day-to-night effects. The characters are cartoonish yet customizable and detailed. You can adjust the camera angle to zoom in close or get a bird’s-eye view.

The game has 250 aircraft, including authentic historic and modern aircraft that are licensed from Boeing and others. Other features coming include the ability to play any time, anywhere on smartphones and tablets. And Wiklem says the game has an innovative feature where spectators who watch messages from the game in a Facebook activity stream can click on the messages and actually help out. Such peer-to-peer interaction can happen even if your friends aren’t currently playing. Checkpoint has actually filed for patents on its cross-platform strategy.

The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011, and it has 30 employees. Rivals include Kixeye, Idol Games, 6waves, and Kabam. Larger rivals are Zynga, EA, and Disney-Playdom. Checkpoint’s investor is Marvelous AQL, a Tokyo, Japan-based publisher headed by Hayao Nakayama, former chief executive of Sega. Checkpoint has raised $5 million.

Wiklem said that he always remembered the answer that Pixar’s founders gave when they were asked why they made movies for children. They said they didn’t. Rather, they said they made movies that they wanted to see. By the same token, Wiklem said that social games don’t have to be crappy.

“I set out to change that,” he said.

Wiklem formerly worked at THQ’s Heavy Iron Studios and at Shiny Entertainment. He managed teams of 80 or more developers. He also spent eight years at Sony working on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games. He’s a commercial aviation enthusiast and founder of Jet-X-Models, a maker of die-cast model airplanes. He is joined by Todd Morgan, executive producer and head of studio operations (formerly of Obsidian Entertainment, Super Villain Studios, and Shiny Entertainment); Chris Masterton, chief technology officer (formerly of Heavy Iron Studios); and Chris Naves, art director (formerly of Foundation 9 and Shiny Entertainment).

Game industry veterans David Perry and David Jaffe both liked Wiklem’s idea but told him he wouldn’t get funding unless he made a Facebook game. So Wiklem reworked what he had into an idea that could be executed on Facebook. He happened to know a friend who knew Nakayama. He made the pitch and after a 15-minute pitch that turned into two hours, he sold Nakayama on the idea.

Check out the art gallery below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Insomniac Games, makers of the successful Ratchet & Clank and Resistance series, just announced their first Facebook game, Outernauts.

Outernauts is an adventure role-playing game where players control the elite Outernauts force as they train exotic alien beasts and uncover the riddle behind mysterious “ancients.”  The game takes place across a number of explorable planets and lets friends team up together as they examine the untamed universe and combat pirates and evil corporations.

“We see a huge opportunity to reach an entirely different audience of gamers through Facebook,” Ted Price, president and founder of Insomniac Games said in a statement. “As we have demonstrated for nearly twenty years in the console games space, we’re confident we can help evolve the definition of a game experience on Facebook. With Outernauts, we are delivering a deep story with real RPG strategy, coupled with Insomniac’s signature sense of humor.”

For 18 years, Insomniac developed exclusively for the PlayStation platform until the company announced its first game for the Electronic Arts Partners program, Overstrike. Outernauts is another project for the partners program is currently in closed beta. Insomniac hopes to launch the game this summer.

It isn’t easy to move to a new city, launch a new studio, and create a new game at the same time. But LightBox Interactive has done just that, and now Sony is finally releasing LightBox’s new sci-fi western-style game, Starhawk.

The third-person shooter game debuts today on the PlayStation 3. The predecessor game, Warhawk, debuted on the PS 3 as a multiplayer-only title. But with Starhawk, LightBox has stepped up and created a single-player campaign along with multiplayer and cooperative play as well. The frenetic action game requires you to be a good shot and a strategist at the same time.

During the production, chief executive Dylan Jobe said, the company watched the game industry change and saw the rise of Zynga, which focused on learning from its social game analytics and immediately modifying its games as a result. Jobe said that even after today’s release, LightBox will have a big job ahead of it tuning the game to what the fans want. It will not only have to fix bugs but will also change the game and come out with new content to keep the fans coming back. Game design, it seems, is always changing and never done.

Here’s a transcript of our interview with Jobe.

GamesBeat: How does it feel to have gotten to this point now?

Jobe: It feels great. It’s kind of tricky when you release a multiplayer game like this. I felt the same way with Warhawk. There’s that good feeling of having it done, yet at the same time you know that when you release a multiplayer game, especially to the global community, there’s still a lot of work ahead. There’ll be tuning and fixes and all kinds of thing that we’ll have to address and take care of for the community. So in some respects it’s like we’re done, but in other respects, we’ve just started.

GamesBeat: Tell me about some of the development history here. And also about Lightbox and starting that up.

Jobe: Sure. We are a new studio. Starhawk will be our first game, even though I and my business partners have been working with Sony for many, many years. Even going back to the good old days of SingleTrac. Originally, I actually was not in the game industry at all. I worked as a product designer for AT&T and NCR, National Cash Register, of all places.

But I always really loved video games. So I eventually just thought, ‘Well, I keep making Quake mods and all these things, I want to get into the industry.’ I ended up leaving NCR and going to SingleTrac in Utah. I worked there for a little while and then worked at Incognito Entertainment, where I got to work on Twisted Metal Black and then produced and directed War of the Monsters, and then of course Warhawk, the PSN multiplayer game.

About the same time, Scott Campbell — who was at the time the president of Incognito — and Dave Jaffe wanted to start a new company, Eat Sleep Play. So they went off to create that new company. And I took 12 guys. We moved from Utah down to Austin and from there started LightBox and started developing Starhawk for Sony. We’ve been working on Starhawk for just over two and a half years.

GamesBeat: What were some of the hard parts about starting a company at the same time you’re starting your first game?

Jobe: That’s actually a good question. The hard thing is maintaining the production timeline, because you have milestones due to your publisher, yet at the same time you’re building your company. You have to contend with milestone deliveries, and you have to make sure that build gets out on time, but you also have to make sure that the actual build-out of your space gets done on time. We started doing a little bit of development while we were still in our small space in Salt Lake City. It was kind of a weird jumble, because we had some people still working in Salt Lake City, and we had a temporary space in very startup fashion, one of these rent-a-office places in Austin, while we were looking around for office space.

At the time, the economy was not super great. Credit was pretty much locked up. We were able to get LightBox started without having to take out any small business loans at all. It was tricky to find office space that could accommodate a new studio. That was one of the challenges, but one of the upsides, because it was such an economic downturn, we were able to get a really good price on some of our general contracting, furniture, some of the other costs that probably would have cost a bit more money had we started the company while the economy was doing well. So it was kind of a balance. Managing all that, working with our electricians and everything, and at the same time continuing to deliver monthly prototypes to Sony was definitely challenging. It felt like a strategy game, like a Sid Meier’s video game.

GamesBeat: It seems like it’s pretty tricky to get people to move for your company, too, down in Austin.

Jobe: It turned out way better than I thought it was going to be. So what we did was work with 12 people in Utah. I was very up front with them. I said, “You know, we’re going to be starting a new studio in Austin.” Because at the time we were still Sony employees, Incognito Entertainment was a wholly owned company of Sony’s. I wanted to make sure that I was very up front with all the new employees. I and the business partners ensured that we were able to give everyone a ton of notice, saying, “We’re going to start on this day, here are your new employee packages when you do become LightBox employees, let us know any of your thoughts.” We gave people a ton of fair warning and information.

And as it turned out, everyone moved down with us. It worked out great. So what we did was, we pulled our 12 people down from Utah, but at the same time we were doing remote hiring. So we were able to staff up with about an additional 20 headcount, by doing deferred hires. We were bringing people out to interview, having them come on board, letting them know what was going on, and then we set their start date a little bit later, about the time — and this was all very stressful — about the time that we got our studio done. The furniture was installed, the infrastructure was all in place. We had a bunch of new people start, for what amounted to a kind of overnight transition from about 12 to 30 people. I think we got lucky, actually. At the time there were some studios in Austin and in Dallas that had suffered some hardships. There were people who were looking, on the market, who were kind of fresh blood injected into the Austin scene, and we seemed to be an attractive place to start.

GamesBeat: So how many did you wind up with altogether?

Jobe: Right now we’re at 43. LightBox Interactive is a small team compared to other big shooters. Just like all game developers, we put in long hours.

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Microsoft has just released hundreds of pre-built mobile app components, open-source projects, and SDKs for Windows Phone development into the wild.

The new components and APIs come via Verious, a marketplace for plug-and-play bits and pieces for mobile applications.

And from what we’ve been hearing from mobile developers around the world, this library of goodies couldn’t have come at a better time.

Developers are intrigued by Windows Phone’s gorgeous interface — the legendary Woz even said his Nokia Lumia handset was more like a friend than a phone.

But at the same time, developers are hesitant to make big investments of time, energy, and company or personal resources when the platform is still relatively unstable. The Lumia line, which put all Nokia’s eggs in Microsoft’s basket, has been notoriously underperforming, even to the point that some shareholders are suing the company. Why would a developer have any confidence that a Windows Phone app might be successful?

Today’s news takes some of the edge off that roadblock, at least cutting down development time significantly. Verious worked closely with Microsoft to get these components together and launched, and here are some examples from Verious’ Windows Phone collection:

• The largest existing collection of Metro-style icons, which is generally sold for $499
• A package of eight Silverlight UI controls to greatly reduce development time
• A collision detection system/physics engine for games, simulations, etc.
• A few mapping and charting tools

Don Pitt is a VP at Verious; in an email conversation with VentureBeat, he said that now is, indeed, an interesting time to dip one’s toes into the Windows Phone waters.

“We’ve seen a lot of interest in the platform with developers. You are correct that the Metro interface has a lot of them excited. We’re hearing that the Metro UI is an evolution of Visual Studio, so it is an easy transition for many developers.”

Ah, Visual Studio — don’t get me started. I love Visual Studio, and I was surprised to learn as a fairly green developer that quite a few (non-Microsoft) developers appreciate Visual Studio, as well.

However, there’s an existing and quite large community of Microsoft developers out there, too, especially in the enterprise; and Pitt points out that they might also feel quite comfortable developing for Windows Phone.

And of course, there’s the millions-strong army of general developers who can create hybrid mobile web apps for Windows Phone — and just about any other platform. Verious is also releasing a slew of HTML5 goodies today for mobile developers, and Pitt sees the convergence as highly beneficial.

“Hybrid HTML5/native apps is a big trend, that only becomes more compelling when you add a third platform like Windows Phone to the mix,” he said. “For companies that want to be on all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), they have to look at leveraging web technologies so that they have some shared assets across platforms. This is helping drive our component model and is a big reason why we are launching both Windows Phone and HTML5 categories at the same time.

“I definitely think that companies looking to move to Windows Phone from other platforms will look to web technologies to ease the transition.”

Of course, native functionality is still necessary for accessing certain hardware components — for now. But the mobile web is gaining a fearsome amount of traction these days, and it looks like Verious is right on trend.

Editor’s Note: I’ve already made public my affection for TERA’s real-time action gameplay and museum-worthy art design, but there’s also a third layer to the ambitious game yet to be covered. In the following GamesBeat-exclusive developer diary, David Noonan gives an intimate look into what it takes to craft the story to a 500-hour-long game originating from Korea. I hope you enjoy the read and the exclusive art publisher En Masse Entertainment has provided! ~Sebastian

TERA: A Writer’s Labor of Love

by David Noonan, Writing Team Manager

Like most gigs in this industry, writing for a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) like TERA is a labor of love. And that timeworn phrase sets the boundaries for my work. When I sit down at my desk each morning, fingers poised over the keyboard, I never really know whether the day will be mostly “labor” or mostly “love.”

Today is mostly labor. I spent my morning going through TERA’s 4,238 quest files, checking recent updates from my counterparts in Korea against bug fixes from our team here in Seattle. I have hundreds of little red icons, and until I click on one, I don’t know what I’m going to get. Maybe it’s just the matter of an extra space at the end of a line, or maybe it’s a completely redesigned quest line.

Click…click…click…the music in my headphones gets louder, and I desperately try to stay focused. The file management required to make a game when the team is divided by an ocean, two languages, and eight time zones is mind-boggling. It’s necessary, but make no mistake: it’s labor.

But there’s lots of love, too. One of my favorite things to do is log onto the quality assurance (QA) server late at night from a darkened room, turn the run speed up on my character, and just explore the world on fast-forward. Over countless builds and iterations, I’ve seen some amazing sights. One day I found a southern ocean autographed by the designer in hundred-mile-long initials. Way to sign your work! (No, it’s not there anymore.) Another time, we had a zone where every non-player character (NPC) had a castanic female body, but the head of another race. That was much creepier than you’d think.

I also love every groaner of a pun in a quest title. I love the character arc for Fraya, a commander you meet about halfway through the game. I love little bits of dialogue in the cinematics, like when Jelena tells the white-haired Elleon: “You look pale—even for you.” I love naming hundreds of swords, axes, and other weapons. I love all those little world-building moments.

Most of all, I love the size of TERA’s “story hole” (the space for narrative in the game). For me, every game is a story-driven RPG. I hold imaginary post-game interviews after I’ve played a console sports game. When I play Risk, I imagine the speech the president gives before he attacks Kamchatka. TERA is a chance to indulge that urge every day when I (and my coffee cup) arrive at En Masse.

For me, TERA will always be that mixture of labor and love. I try to convince myself that the two elements are separate, but every once in a while, I’ll realize that “labor” and “love” are two sides of the same coin. A few weeks ago, my daughter peered over my shoulder at TERA on my laptop. “Daddy, are you working or playing?” she asked.

Darned if I know, kiddo. Darned if I know.

If you’d like to know more about TERA, check out our massive gallery and classes breakdown. You may also be interested in our exclusive Pre-Mortem series. 

Ravenshire Castle is launching today on Facebook. It is the final chapter in the Raven World series created by a team of developers at Lolapps, which was once on the top charts of Facebook gaming. The fact that Ravenshire Castle made it this far is a minor miracle, and the history of this series tells a lot about the evolution of Facebook games.

Most of the development team at San Francisco-based Lolapps lost their jobs last month after their acquirer, Hong Kong-based 6waves, decided to scale back on its internal development studios to focus on mobile games and third-party development by outside developers. But the team was so close to finishing that a determined group decided to finish Ravenshire Castle, said Brady Flynn, product manager on the game.

Arjun Sethi, former chief executive of Lolapps, and Lolapps co-founders Kavin Stewart and Brian Rue put up the money for a new game studio, Silver Lake. The game was so close to completion at the time of the layoffs that they wanted to see it through, and Silver Lake obtained a third-party deal with 6waves to complete the game. A dozen developers from the team stayed on to finish the work, and the final team has shrunk to six. Glen Dahlgren served as lead designer on the project for most of its duration, though he left after the layoffs.

“We felt we owed this to the team,” Sethi said, in an interview with GamesBeat. “A lot of them had worked on it for a year. We all felt like it was a groundbreaking title.”

Zynga, the arch rival that pretty much put an end to Lolapps’ run on Facebook, launched its own castle game, CastleVille, back in December. But Flynn says the resemblance is in name only. While CastleVille is set in an outdoor environment, Ravenshire Castle shows its characters inside the castle, which has been abandoned and needs to be spruced up by the player.

The game has pretty two-dimensional graphics, and it uses Sean Cooper’s Fliso engine, which allows Adobe Flash to display many more moving objects without slowing down. Fliso version 3.1 also enables players to go full screen with a high-definition map space that is about eight times bigger than the original Ravenwood Fair game, Flynn said. The castles are beautiful, and they float in the sky. Characters are more fully animated, and they can move in more directions than is typical in a Facebook game. The music in the game is based on ten different tracks that fade in or fade out and give the game a more dramatic feeling.

You can build and decorate your castle through more than 40 levels of the game. You can also engage in player versus player competition, a first for the Raven World series. You can, for instance, visit the castles of your friends and raid them. Instead of fighting, though, you simply sneak into their castles and steal things from them. Your job is to nab stuff before the guards stop you, Flynn said.

“We’re proud of how we created the stealth game mechanic in a social games,” Flynn said. “We wanted to push the boundaries to a new level.”

The series endured a long roller coaster ride throughout its run. It started with Ravenwood Fair, designed by veteran game developers John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite. About 2.5 years ago, they created the first game with a small team of developers from Lolapps and launched it in October of 2010. It was a smash hit that quickly rose through the charts and put Lolapps on the map as a serious contender in competition with Zynga, Playfish, and Crowdstar.

Romero conceived several more games in the series, and Brathwaite did the initial work on the Ravenshire Castle game. She came up with an idea for building castles and created the name, but the work she did never materialized. Both Romero, the co-creator of the original Doom game, and Brathwaite, an equally well-known game developer, left in the spring of 2011 to create Loot Drop, a third-party developer of social games. The teams that stayed behind to work on Raven World games went off in their own direction. Brathwaite agrees that the game is far different from what she originally envisioned. Dahlgren led the the team that conceived of ideas such as stealth game play and the player versus player part of the game.

“They worked on the ideas, but we went in a different way with a team that was created after they left,” Flynn said.

[Update: On and off, the final team included Justin Rosenthal (engineer),Tom Wu (engineer),Vivek Tatineni (engineer), Alex Chee (designer/product manager), Brady Flynn (product manager), Tony Schuster (engineer), Constantine Hantzopoulos (producer), Glen Dalgren (game designer), Shawn Stone (game designer), and Jaypal Sethi (product).]

The Ravenwood Fair game once topped 20 million monthly active users. By April 2011, Lolapps followed up with Ravenstone Mine, an expansion to the first game. Then, in July 2011, Lolapps merged with 6waves, which mostly published games developed by other developers that it didn’t own. Lolapps was supposed to be the internal development arm of 6waves. In October 2011, Lolapps launched Ravenskye City, a sequel to the Ravenwood Fair game. By this time, Lolapps’ audience had been shrinking while Zynga had grown into a billion-dollar giant.

After that game shipped, Lolapps moved on to Ravenshire Castle, which was the final game in the series. But in the meantime, the Raven World series’ audience has dwindled. All of 6waves’ games now have only 5.3 million monthly active users. Ravenskye City has 2 million and Ravenwood Fair has 1.1 million players. If you add the traffic from third-party developers, 6waves has 20 million players, the company says.

With a dwindling audience, 6waves’ management decided to do less internal Facebook game development. It laid off about 80 percent of its game developers (most of the San Francisco Lolapps team), and the founders and Sethi departed. Since almost a year of development had already taken place on Ravenshire Castle, Sethi wanted to see the game completed, so he and the Lolapps co-founders provided the money.

When asked if Silver Lake would continue on as a developer, Flynn said that the company was formed simply to finish Ravenshire Castle. The remaining developers will share in the success if the title is successful, Sethi said.

Whatever happens after the launch is unclear. 6waves owns the rights to the Raven World franchise, and it has no plans to build more games. Ravenshire Castle is the swan song. It will be interesting to see if the fans return.

“It’s a bittersweet ending, since this is the last game,” Flynn said.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Nearly 60 percent of iOS developers don’t break even with the apps that they create and market, according to a recent study by App Promo.

While we hear a lot about blockbuster hits like Draw Something or Angry Birds Space, it’s all too easy for apps to get lost in the crowd of more than 600,000 apps in the App Store. Application marketing firm App Promo’s “First Annual Developer Survey” indicates that 59 percent of developers don’t generate enough revenue to break even.

The survey said that only 12 percent of apps earned $50,000 or more and that this “top earner” subset spent an average of 14 percent of their time on marketing. On the side of app developers who weren’t able to break even, 52 percent of app developers set aside $0 and less than 5 percent of their time promoting their apps. That certainly makes the case that apps need at least some marketing to see any real returns.

Check out App Promo’s infographic below for more data on iOS app success and failure, keeping in mind, of course, that the company has a vested interest in having app developers spend more on marketing:

Photo credit: miguel77/Flickr

Whether it’s a project-management app or another Instagram, one rule is constant: A successful app must be deeply integrated with the underlying platform.

But what do I mean by “deep integration”? Think about your favorite smartphone app. Does it take into account the native capabilities of the phone? Does the camera open seamlessly? Can you use your fingers to draw and swipe? Can you easily share a game, photo, or drawing with a friend? The same questions and issues apply to enterprise apps because, let’s face it, if the application doesn’t seamlessly integrate with the product your users “live in” (like an email inbox), users will struggle to find value in it.

Take Yelp’s monocle feature for example. It works flawlessly with your phone’s camera, GPS, and map. You’re able to stay inside one application while accessing all the information you need — location, name of restaurant or bar, and diner reviews.

Now imagine a similarly deep integration between your email and CRM. A tight enterprise integration will pull contacts, calendars, and order history or active deals into the email inbox where workers spend the majority of their time. The same strategy applies to security apps, project management extensions, and more.

So, how can developers be sure they’re building something that will deliver value to users? Here are a few tips to ensure you’re building a deeply integrated (and useful) application.

1. Understand what your customers use and the integrations they need

Survey your current customers. Find out which email platform they’re using, which CRM system your sales customers interact with everyday, and the plethora of other cloud services customers touch on a regular basis. Once you know which platform to integrate with, take plenty of time to investigate what features are missing, which can be improved on, and most importantly which features your users rely on.

Once you’ve settled on a platform for integration, do some research to make sure the platform isn’t working towards the same feature. A good question to ask yourself is, does my product compete with the platform, or does it fill a need for a niche industry or specific job function? For example, Google Apps typically develops features that every user in a given organization can use. It’s pretty safe to say that they will not build an accounting product, since it touches only a few users in an organization.

And if your product already competes directly with the platform, make sure it plays on another level. Common ways to differentiate your app from an existing feature include building an improved user experience or enhancing the functionality of native features.

2. Understand the strengths of your team and product

If your product is the best-in-breed security software, stick with what you’re good at. Building on top of a new platform doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Your customers use your product because it’s good, and integration will only make the product more valuable to a larger user base. Stick with your niche and don’t lose sight of where you came from.

3. Take advantage of opportunities to integrate

Platforms like Google Apps and Salesforce — and iOS and Android for that matter — make hundreds of APIs available, so take advantage of them. If you can integrate calendar scheduling into your project management app, do it. If shared contacts would make your CRM easier to use, build off of the relevant API. There’s nothing worse than installing a third-party app and finding out the app contains little integration beyond “single-sign on.”

4. Does your integrated product make your customers more efficient on a day-to-day basis?

If you’ve come up with your strategy and can’t answer this question, you probably have some rethinking to do. Admins aren’t going to shell out for an app that won’t make their workers more efficient and productive. If your app adds another step to an already complicated process, it won’t gain traction with admins or end-users.

Building a great product is more than half the battle. Setting up a deep integration should be fairly simple as long as you know what your customers want and need. As time goes on and platforms like Google Apps and Salesforce mature and gain a broader user base, opportunities for even deeper integrations will appear.

David Politis is founder and CEO of BetterCloud, a developer of enterprise security and management tools that integrate with Google Apps. Follow David on Twitter @DavePolitis and BetterCloud @bettercloud.

[[Top image credit:  chaoss/Shutterstock]

Microsoft and cloud communications startup Twilio have signed a deal to bring Twilio’s APIs to developers who use Windows Azure, the two companies announced today.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s data centers. Naturally, some of those companies and developers using Azure could benefit from the cloud-based phone and SMS technologies that Twilio offers. On top of API access, the deal will give Azure developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes. Interested developers can sign up here.

“In line with our commitment to serving developers, Windows Azure welcomes support from Twilio to make their voice and messaging APIs available on Windows Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in a statement. “We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio’s communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure’s scalability, reliability, and flexibility.”

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised around $33 million to date, with its most recent funding totaling $17 million. Twilio recently revealed that part of that funding was humorously delivered via a touchtone term sheet created using Twilio’s API.

Cloud photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Guess how much of LinkedIn’s new iPad app is actually mobile web and not native.

Go ahead — guess. We’ve had a lot of fun asking people to guess this over the past couple days. They’ll start with 40 percent and edge up to 70 percent, but no one comes close to the real figure: 95 percent.

Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.

We were shocked to hear this 95-percent figure from Kiran Prasad, who heads up LinkedIn’s mobile development team. Shocked, but not appalled — after all, Prasad was the engineering heft behind the company’s recent slew of gorgeous mobile apps, which were also heavily reliant on the mobile web.

But the new iPad app had struck us as so surprisingly sexy during our initial review that we had to know more about how Prasad and his team of four (yep, just four devs built this app) packed so much punch into a web app for a tablet.

Especially as Silicon Valley tech companies pick sides in the web-versus-native war, it’s fascinating to see the presumably conservative LinkedIn lean toward the more progressive side of mobile technology. But this is a stance this team has taken for a while now, and LinkedIn is currently one of the mobile web’s biggest supporters and strongest case studies.

LinkedIn and the mobile web

“Last year, we had just launched three different phone apps. We were starting to invest more in HTML5,” Prasad told VentureBeat yesterday.

“We had a 60/40 split where about 60 percent of any app was in HTML5.”

LinkedIn’s big news at that time was how it had employed Node.js in its at-scale mobile apps — what seemed to many to be a pretty big gamble for the company. But the other part of the story was how Prasad and his team combined native and mobile web functionality in iPhone and Android apps, creating hybrids that bridged the divide in the native-versus-web mobile debate.

Now, Prasad said the company relies on mobile web technologies more than ever. “Because we made that full investment, being able to get the mobile web on a tablet was really doable,” he said.

Of course, being able to have greater developer efficiency was a draw, but Prasad said that would never have come at the expense of creating a beautiful, responsive app that would be a pleasure to use.

“We always focus on user experience and app speed as a number one priority,” he told us. “If the performance wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have gone with the web.

“But with the iPad having the faster processor and being a more powerful mobile device, we felt like the web-based version could give us the performance we needed.”

In the end, Prasad continued, it came down to the little things: Did onscreen buttons depress and pop back up quickly when tapped with a fingertip? Was scrolling snappy? Did crossfades occur smoothly and without any lag?

“We did users studies in-house, and I don’t think people noticed a big difference. Nobody said, ‘Oh that’s native,’ or ‘Oh, that’s web,’” said Prasad. “As long as we can make the experience fast enough, nobody can tell the difference. It still feels right.”

And a lot of that performance, Prasad said, came from removing unnecessary design wankery (our verbiage, not his) — the rounded corners, the omnipresent gradients. By making things simple, clean, modern, flat, and even print magazine-like, the LinkedIn app only got faster and better on the performance side, as well.

“Our focus on trying to get a simpler design is actually helping us make things faster. It’s a good feedback loop,” said Prasad.

Here are some screenshots of those super-speedy mobile web pages for your reference. The first slide shows the sole native page:

Now, with more Node.js

In addition to seriously beefing up the company’s mobile web investment, Prasad is also leaning more heavily on Node.js — and with more confidence.

“We’re still full-on Node. We are excited that it can scale,” he said. “Over the past few months, we’ve made performance tweaks so we can scale even more. On four boxes, we can now handle 20 times the load we were handling before.”

Prasad said the company used to use nginx, an open source Web server and a reverse proxy server, due to the engineering team’s concerns about the stability of Node. “It was there to make us feel comfortable,” said Prasad. “If any of the nodes went down, nginx would report the errors.”

Today, however, Prasad no longer feels the need for the security blanket. “In the tablet version of the server, we’re still using Node, but now the clients are talking directly from the load balancers to Node, there’s no nginx.”

In addition to experiencing a growing confidence in the technology itself, Prasad et al. are also contributing to Node’s growing ecosystem of tools — stay tuned for those to be open-sourced.

“Some of the changes we’ve made are Node modules we’re going to release back into the community,” he said. “Some of it is application-specific… But overall, the tools for Node are becoming better.”

“Responsive design” just doesn’t work

Finally, Prasad wrapped up with an impassioned statement on a new trend in mobile applications: responsive design.

The core concept of responsive design is that the designer/developer would create a single design that can scale up and down fluidly across scores of different devices — laptops, tablets, TVs, mobile phones, etc. Many advocates exist for this solution to widespread connected-device fragmentation, and these advocates have founded companies and launched tools specifically to make responsive design simpler and faster.

But Prasad thinks it’s all wrong. Responsive design might work for uncomplicated, one-off websites, he said, but for applications or networks (such as LinkedIn is), responsive design is actually bad.

“We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users],” Prasad said, rapidly outlining a few of the ways people are interacting with digital information and highlighting how unique each of those scenarios can be — and how different are the needs they present.

“You can’t take a mobile app and just scale it up to tablet or desktop,” he said. “A lot of responsive design is building one site that works everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

Slashdot, the original gangster of web-based news for nerds, has just launched yet another site: SlashBI. The “BI” stands for business intelligence, and this news, while still somewhat nerdy, will appeal to the enterprise types more than the, ahem, neckbeard types.

It’s a new audience for Slashdot — one with ample money from corporate coffers that needs to be spent on IT projects. If we didn’t know better, we’d swear these Slashdot guys were trying to make money or something.

Mere weeks ago, Slashdot also launched its YouTube-for-nerds-themed video site, Slashdot.tv. The video site features the kind of typical Linux/security/science fare one would typically expect from a Slashdot-branded web property.

SlashBI, on the other hand, is a different sort of animal.

“We’re going to publish every business day with a mixture of news and analysis from journalists, business leaders, analysts, etc.,” wrote Nick Kolakowski, senior editor at Slashdot parent company GeekNet, in an email to VentureBeat.

“SlashBI is a complementary destination to Slashdot, designed to not intrude on the latter. The new site allows us to give our audience something extra — namely tons of news and analysis on everything B.I.-related — without infringing on the news-for-nerds aspect that made Slashdot so popular in the first place,” Kolakowski continued.

SlashBI so far brings a smattering of news about big data, open-source in the enterprise, cloud technologies, and storage for systems at scale.

Hilarious stock image courtesy of .shock, Shutterstock

What do HP, Salesforce, AMD, VMWare, and Alibaba all have in common?

They’re all partners in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project, a group that aims to revolutionize computer hardware through the power of open-source collaboration.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project is having its third Summit event today, and it’s bringing together some of the best minds in the world to solve problems of data center efficiency, server design, and more.

Most of its partner companies have a stake in the issue, either because they use massive server resources, because they design and sell hardware and chips, or because they are involved in creating the software that makes all this hardware more efficient.

“The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months — has been nothing short of amazing,” wrote Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware design guru, in a blog post this morning.

Frankovsky notes that the OCP now includes HP, AMD, Tencent, Salesforce, VMware, Canonical, Vantage, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling among its members, and that HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the project’s Incubation Committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals for official OCP support.

As far as new projects are concerned, Frankovksy said OCP has accepted proposals for a vanity-free storage server called “Knox”) and two high-efficiency motherboards, code-named “Roadrunner” and “Decathlete,” designed with the specific needs of financial services companies in mind.

OCP is also merging specs with Baidu and Tencent for its Open Rack design for servers.

Finally, the OCP project is doing what most open-source projects do these days: It’s launching support services for customers to easily and comfortably get started with its Open Rack designs. The OCP Solutions Provider program will allow companies to sell and use hardware based on OCP specs.

“Companies currently pursuing Solutions Provider status include Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet, as well as new business units from Quanta and Wistron (called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively) that have been launched to sell directly to consumers,” Frankovsky concluded.

The OCP got rolling about one year ago. At that time, Facebook’s vision of open-source hardware got started because Facebook itself was having trouble scaling its servers out in a way that made business sense.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” Facebook OCP lead Amir Michae told VentureBeat in an interview last fall.

“It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community,” Michael concluded, encouraging other companies to get involved in the open-source hardware project.

Stay tuned for more coming up soon from today’s Open Compute Project Summit.

Also, if this is a story you find interesting, you should check out what Facebook is doing with Ringark, its mobile browser testing suite, and the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

If you’ve got a great idea for a BlackBerry app, you might as well go ahead and develop it. If you don’t make at least $10,000 in the first year, RIM will write you a check for the difference.

At the company’s annual hype-fest today in Orlando, Fla., RIM announced that any developer creating quality applications for the new BlackBerry 10 would be guaranteed the $10,000 sum, so long as a couple of key conditions are met.

First, the app has to be determined to be of good quality by a third party. Second, the app has to make at least $1,000 on its own to be eligible. If it gets the requisite quality certification and nets between $1,000 and $9,999, RIM will send the app developer enough to bring the app’s total proceeds to $10,000.

BlackBerry 10 is the company’s new platform. New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins (pictured) called it a “mobile computing engine.”

The OS is based on the QNX operating system used in RIM’s PlayBook’s tablet. The OS features a simple, clean interface; a pared-down selection of buttons and widgets; and a swipe-able notifications bar. Also, BlackBerry 10 apps never stop running, which means users will be able to easy juggle multiple apps.

Although tracing the tracks of RIM’s tears has becoming something of a sport among the tech press, contrarians see a chance of success for the mobile oldster. In addition to revamping its OS, the company has also taken on a new team of lawyers to assist with a corporate overhaul.

via CrackBerry; Photo via The Verge

Google’s BigQuery application has launched into general availability with an aim to help businesses crunch “big data” sets easier and cheaper than ever, the company said Tuesday.

BigQuery, as we previously detailed in November, gives companies of all sizes a powerful cloud-based tool to analyze data. Traditionally, crunching big data sets has taken more IT investment than simply spinning up and uploading data to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) program.

The SaaS software stands in stark contrast to open-source data software Hadoop and companies like Cloudera that help companies get a handle on Hadoop. It’s also quite different from on-premise data crunching software like HP-owned Vertica and IBM-owned Netezza.

Google product manager Ju-kay Kwek, who is overseeing the company’s big data efforts, told me companies that rely on data and business intelligence would likely prefer BigQuery over other options because it’s easier to set up and it costs less.

“On-premise options like Netezza and Vertica are fast and powerful, but they will cost you,” Kwek said. “And with Hadoop, you need more heads and you have to build out a custom Hadoop system.”

Kwek said one of Google’s largest advertising customers used BigQuery verus its own on-premise Hadoop cluster as a test to see how well it worked. BigQuery crunched the data ten times faster, showing how much faster data crunching can be when using Google’s monstrous computing power.

While in limited preview, BigQuery was free to try for 30 days, but now that the service is all the way live, companies will have to pony up. Thankfully, the prices appear fairly reasonable. Here’s the breakdown:

Let us know in the comments if your company might give BigQuery a shot for its big data needs or if you prefer Hadoop, Netezza, or Vertica.

Data image: Toria/Shutterstock