New speakers, sponsors for DiscoveryBeat; today is last day for early-bird discount
We’ve got some great momentum for VentureBeat’s upcoming DiscoveryBeat event, which will attack the problem of how to get attention for an app in the midst of a lot of noise.
One of our newest speakers is Randy Breen, chief operating officer at Social Gaming Network, where he oversees game development, business development, strategy and executive management. He has worked in the game industry since 1986 at companies such as Electronic Arts, LucasArts and Emotiv Systems.
Today… Continue Reading
LaDiDa brings reverse karaoke to your iPhone
There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.
There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.
Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do… Continue Reading
French game maker Gameloft ditches the Android platform
French mobile phone games publisher Gameloft said it is giving up on the Google Android platform.
The company said it is cutting back investment in making games and other apps for Android-based cell phones, even though Android has won a lot of attention lately with new models from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, according to Reuters.
“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at… Continue Reading
FunMail livens up your iPhone messages
FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones’ multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities.
It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.
Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages is sent… Continue Reading
Adobe’s Acrobat.com comes to smartphones
Updated
Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share… Continue Reading
eBay completes sale of Skype at $2.75 billion valuation
eBay said it has completed the sale of a 70-percent stake in Skype communications service for an amount that values the company at $2.75 billion.
The buyer is an investor consortium led by Silver Lake Partners, the private equity buyout firm. It includes participation from Joltid, the company founded by Skype’s founders. Other members include Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.
eBay is getting $1.9 billion in cash and a note from buyer… Continue Reading
Foursquare makes global push: 50 new cities
Popular location-sharing game Foursquare has just gone global with the announcement of 50 new cities worldwide, doubling the service’s previous coverage. The company says it chose the cities based on feedback from users requesting the service.
The new cities take the service across six continents, but it’s not so long since it was a strictly a tech-insider phenomenon in the US. As cofounder Dennis Crowley (pictured below) told me last week “The goal is to build… Continue Reading
Boku gains momentum with mobile payments for social games
Mobile payments provider Boku has gained a lot of momentum as a provider of alternate payment for social games.
The company said in September that it’s service was seeing big growth, but it has made more progress now. It’s announcing today that 12 more game developers have signed up to use its mobile payments system. These new companies alone will help Boku reach 200 million more customers who play 250 social and casual games.
With Boku, game… Continue Reading
Flurry launches AppCircle to help apps get discovered
With 100,000 apps in Apple’s AppStore, it has become ridiculously hard to get an app discovered. At any given time, perhaps 100 apps are easy to find on the featured apps or top apps lists. That’s why analytics startup Flurry is launching a new platform, AppCircle, whose aim is to get iPhone and iPod Touch apps noticed.
The platform is a natural extension of the analytics business that has become very popular. With AppCircle, Flurry can… Continue Reading
Is Google working on its own Android phone?
Google isn’t content making the Android software that runs on cell phones and other devices. Now it is apparently working on its own Google-branded Android phone, according to Techcrunch.
The upcoming Android device would be thinner than a Motorola Droid (another recently launched Android phone on Verizon), this phone is called the Google Phone. We don’t know if the rumor is true. Google declined comment.
It’s always an interesting choice when a platform creator chooses to make… Continue Reading
Placecast lands $5M more for location-triggered mobile advertisements
San Francisco’s 1020 Placecast, a company working on new mobile advertising technology, said today it raised $5 million in more funding to continue developing its opt-in location-triggered ad service.
Placecast, which previously raised $4 million, pushes advertisements from major brands to the consumer’s phone depending on their physical location, but allows users to opt-in to the system. Here’s a scenario: You’re shopping and have opted in to receive advertisement alerts from your favorite store, say GAP (you can… Continue Reading
Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special
Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie weighed in at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference today on the battle between different smartphone platforms (including Windows Mobile). It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.
“All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said. “I don’t think there’s going to be differentiation at… Continue Reading
Qualcomm’s FLO TV makes a bid to become the mobile TV king
Bill Stone, president of Qualcomm’s FLO TV division, is making a huge bet that users won’t mind paying for mobile TV subscriptions to view shows on their tiny screens.
Speaking at the Streaming Media West show in San Jose, Calif. today, Stone said Qualcomm has collectively invested more than a billion dollars in lining up the digital spectrum license and other infrastructure to make the company’s live mobile digital broadcast TV service a reality. That investment… Continue Reading
AdMob launches interactive video ads on the iPhone
AdMob, the mobile ad network that Google plans to acquire for $750 million, announced that it’s supporting a new kind of iPhone ad — interactive video.
This is the first interactive video ad unit for iPhones, AdMob says. Mainly, the new feature allows application developers to run a video ad while the application is loading, the way video sometimes plays when you load a website. (You’re a big fan of those ads, right?) Advertisers can also… Continue Reading
ARM sets up Android gadget development effort
Google’s Android mobile operating system is picking up steam. The latest evidence is a move by ARM, the low-power chip design company, to create an Android Solutions Center that will make it easier for companies to build Android-based gadgets.
The solution center consists of a bunch of tools that companies can use to create their own Android hardware, built around ARM’s chips, said James Bruce, mobile segment manager for ARM, in an interview. More than 35… Continue Reading
Warner Bros. launches first Harry Potter iPhone app
Independent developers have had great success creating apps for the iPhone in the past couple of years. But big brands are expected to elbow their way into the market as it grows more mainstream.
So it’s worth nothing that Warner Bros. has launched its first Harry Potter app on the AppStore this morning. Harry Potter Spells is a magic game that lets players cast spells at their opponents by using their phones as wands. With more… Continue Reading
Chelsio raises $17M for high-speed networking adapters
The transition to high-speed 10-gigabit per second networking adapters has spawned a lot of broadband communications companies. One of them, Chelsio, has raised $17 million to expand its business of making 10 gigabit Ethernet network adapters, chips and storage solutions.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Chelsio designs a family of custom chips dubbed the Terminator (T3) ASIC. It uses those chips in network adapter cards for enterprise computers and storage devices. The storage devices include high-speed network-attached storage devices,… Continue Reading
Smarter Agent expands mobile presence for real estate listings
Smarter Agent has given real estate agents a lot of help in the difficult housing market in the past year. The company provides real estate listings via mobile phones with navigation data so that potential home buyers can easily find homes for sale while driving.
Now the Camden, N.J.-based company is expanding to cover Verizon Wireless phones as well as phones based on the Google Android platform. With those distribution deals in place, Smarter Agent is… Continue Reading
Verizon boosts smartphone cancellation fee to $350
Ditching a BlackBerry, Android or other smartphone from Verizon will cost twice as much as it used to starting next week. Canceling a two-year service contract early on top-of-the-line phones will cost $350 at first, sliding down to $110 at the end of two years.
New York Times gadget guy David Pogue asks the fairly obvious math question about Verizon’s charges: “If the premise of the early-termination fee is to help Verizon recoup its original cost… Continue Reading
Voxeo raises $9M for voice communications business
Voxeo said today it has raised $9 million in funding for its voice communications business.
The Orlando, Fla.-based company is focused on making open platforms based on what it calls “unlocked communications,” such as voice-over-Internet-protocol on mobile platforms or unified messaging and voice communications. It essentially helps companies run their phone systems using modern web-based technologies. The investors include North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. The company will use the money for acquisitions and… Continue Reading