Keas announced at Healthbeat today two new content partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia that will help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs. 

Businesses use Keas to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation. Keas’ CEO Josh Stevens said that seventy to eighty percent of health care costs are preventable, like those caused by smoking and over-eating, or conditions triggered by certain habits and behaviors. Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity and the business bears the brunt of these costs. Keas uses gamification to make losing weight and making healthy choices a fun, social, and mobile experience. 

“It is in employers’ best interest to motivate their employees to do the right thing,” Stevens said. “Healthcare costs are rising and every time an employee takes personal time off to visit a doctor or fill a prescription can result in $250-$500 in productivity costs. The productivity savings of health employees are huge.” 

Stevens said his goal is to provide solutions for the “99 percent of a patient’s life when they are not a patient.” Often this means supporting actions like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing stress. Obesity-related conditions cost around $150 billion a year and a nutritious diet is a central element of overall wellness. 

Keas recently conducted a survey to track employee sentiment towards nutrition and gain insight into what it can do to improve workforce habits. The survey found that 73 percent of the U.S. workforce frequently or always reads nutrition labels, 86 percent is eating breakfast at least 5 days a week, and 94 percent is increasing the daily intake of fruits and vegetables. 63 percent believe that fast food and junk food are leading causes of obesity, and an increasing number of people are turning to home-cooking in an effort to eat healthier. 

The partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia will help employees do things like prepare green smoothies for the morning and provide inspiration for simple-to-prepare healthy dinners.  

“These are the folks that publish best content in nutrition,” Stevens said. “They provide meal planning and recipe ideas from experts that employees can use for inspiration. We want to bring everyone together, including CFOs, HR teams, wellness experts, and employees in one central portal.”

The easier it is to integrate nutritious eating into every day life, the healthier employees will be and the less employers will have to pay. It seems like a win-win, except for, maybe, the fast food franchises.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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The mechanics of the innovation are simple and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view.

But thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh

As The Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent.

Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively.

This means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true:

1. If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”
2. Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past 10 years.”
3. And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”

There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: if the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission.

Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers.

“We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today.

Image credits: Twitter icons

Pinterest is not just a place to collect and organize inspiring images. The powerhouse social site has improved its enviable good looks and upped the IQ of its pins so that everyone, including businesses, can get more out of pinning and Pinterest, in turn, can get money from businesses.

The company that made it possible to organize and collect (aka “pin”) things from around the web has worked hard to make pins useful by adding relevant information to certain types of pins and making it possible to pin from mobile apps.

If you’ve ever clicked on a pretty bootie or a mouth-watering boozy popsicle, only to land on a dead-end Flickr album or broken link, you will especially appreciate the backend improvements that Pinterest has just rolled out.

Product pins now have more information so you can see where that boot is from (Nordstrom) and whether it’s in stock before you even leave the site (it is). Similarly, recipe pins from your favorite food bloggers now include cook time, ingredients, and servings. Movie pins now include content ratings and cast members. It will automatically update all your old pins that have contextual data.

So far only product, recipe, and movie pins contain more information. But as software engineer Anna Majkowska says in a blog post announcing these changes, “This is just the beginning and we hope to make all pins more useful in the coming months.”

To start off, Pinterest worked with some popular websites like Anthropologie, Etsy, Bon Apetit, Real Simple, and Netflix to add more information to pins. Companies that want to make their pins “richer” can join Pinterest as a business or convert their account.  They will have to prep their website with meta tags and apply to get on Pinterset. Is it a coincidence that Pinterest has coined these useful, business-oriented pins “rich pins?”

And because everyone is getting more mobile these days, Pinterest is making the Pin It button available on apps such as Modcloth, The North Face, and Jetsetter so you can really pin wherever you are.

It’s too early to tell how much effect these changes will have on people’s pinning habits, but it does seem like a way to both monetize and help users get more out of perusing pins.

Photo via Pinterest

According to a test by Ars Technica, Microsoft is intercepting, decrypting, and reading at least some Skype messages — to the point where URLs embedded in Skype chat are being visited by machines at IP addresses belonging to Microsoft … most likely a bot, but potentially a human being.

“And this can only happen,” Ars’ security expert Dan Goodin writes, “If Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.”

Skype currently uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure communications between users, which is considered very secure. Secure, perhaps, but not necessarily private. When Ars sent messages via Skype containing four web links created specifically for this experiment, two of them were accessed by a Microsoft-controlled machine.

Skype’s privacy policy openly states that Skype may check instant messages and SMS texts for spam, fraud, or phishing attempts, and, in some cases, have a human being check them. Ergo, we can decrypt our own encryptions and can know what you say and know what you send.

Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links. In limited instances, Skype may capture and manually review instant messages or SMS in connection with Spam prevention efforts. Skype may, in its sole discretion, block or prevent delivery of suspected Spam, and remove suspicious links from messages.

That’s not good if you have an expectation of and desire for privacy. And now that it’s obvious that Microsoft itself can read your private messages, the question is, who else has that ability?

Almost a year ago, the FBI requested private backdoor access into multiple communication and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Skype. Wiretaps are increasingly useless, the FBI realized, and modern communications were defeating the bureau’s attempts at surveillance. Whether the requested access was ever granted is unclear, but Microsoft has a patent on ways to make it happen.

And Skype’s terms of use also say the company can route your communications to law enforcement agencies:

Skype may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims, to protect Skype’s interests, fight against fraud and to enforce our policies or to protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety.

However, if you want more security — and privacy — on Skype, you can have it. You simply have to pre-encrpt any messages (as a Polish professor discovered) and then decrypt them on the receiving end.

I won’t do that, and most Skype users won’t do that, probably because we’re not discussing matters of national security or engaging in nefarious behavior. But it’s disappointing, if only the cold slap of reality in a dangerous and violent world, that private isn’t really private any more.

And it would be nice to know the exact limits of Skype privacy and security.

I have talked to a Microsoft representative about this story and am awaiting a statement or comment from the company.

A new economic model is emerging as the millennials are thinking smart about ways to make money on everything they own. As the “sharing economy” proliferates, peer to peer and point-to-point luxury cars are being used by the minute and sophisticated car owners are earning cash for their cars while at work. Instead of paying retail prices for top fashion, folks are using online platforms to choose and swap clothing with others. Vacationers are staying at people’s townhouses and mansions and even pitching tents in people’s gardens while homeowners turn a profit on renting out their assets.

Time and space limitations, uneasy economic times, and increasing sustainability and community values have collided to trigger a shift in in behavior, a new business philosophy. While “sharing” has been around for some time, mobile applications, advances in payment technologies and connected social networks are putting in place an infrastructure that supports trust and accessibility for community sharing – pushing this movement to a whole new level.

The impact is in the numbers. Car-sharing revenue is expected to reach over $3 billion by 2016 and peer-to-peer rentals are expected to expand to become a $26 billion industry. Perhaps most telling is the estimated total market for the sharing economy, which is projected to be $110 billion within the next few years. This market is emerging and continuing to expand at a rapid pace.

Join MIT-Stanford VLAB on May 21 for a dynamic discussion on collaborative consumption.

Topics of discussion are to include:

• What made Airbnb such a commodity, and will this work for others startups and in which verticals?
• How do the changes in auto sharing impact auto manufacturing?
• How do insurance models work in the “sharing economy”?
• What barriers are inhibiting this movement to scale?
• Should you trust just anybody with your home, car, dress, or power saw?
• The regulatory environment around this movement.

Moderator:
Kanyi Maqubela, Venture Partner, Collaborative Fund

Panelists:
Andre Haddad, CEO, RelayRides
Ronny Conway, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Peter Dempster, Advanced Technologies Engineer — Energy Topics, BMW Group
Andy Ruben, Founder, Yerdle

Where: Stanford University – Oberndorf Event Center (Parking and Directions)
Knight Management Center, 3rd Floor
641 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305

When: Tuesday, May 21
6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.: Networking and Refreshments
7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.: Panel Discussion and Q&A

Register here for this upcoming event.

Event Twitter Hashtag: #VLABCollab

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Peter Molyneux, the father of “god games” and founder of 22cans, has gone mobile and is announcing that his Godus title will be published by Japan’s DeNA.

The game is an ambitious attempt to reinvent the god-game genre for mobile. And Molyneux, who has made heavy-duty console games like the Fable series, is bullish on mobile. His entry into that market is another sign that mobile is becoming to big a market to ignore, even for triple-A game developers.

DeNA, a mobile-social game network with a multibillion-dollar valuation, is expanding to publish Western content. Based in the United Kingdom, 22cans is developing its title for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. The game will use DeNA’s Mobage mobile-social game platform in the West, Japan, and Korea.

“We have huge respect for DeNA’s successes in mobile gaming. By fusing their expertise and experience with our passion and dedication, we are going to make Godus a truly groundbreaking reinvention of the god-game genre,” said Peter Molyneux said in a statement. “As a global leader in developing and publishing mobile games, DeNA is the ideal partner for us to collaborate with on the launch of Godus.”

In Godus, you play a god. You can wield divine powers over your devoted followers. It’s similar to Molyneux’s older title, Black and White. If you advance your civilization, your people will believe in you more. With that belief, you can sculpt entire lands, beautifying them with your touch.

But you face challenges from rival gods. You can also be an angry god, creating earthquakes, volcanoes, or tornadoes to unleash upon the rival gods and their worlds. You and your people will clash with other gods in multiplayer battles.

“One of my first jobs in the video game industry was working on the quality assurance team for Peter’s Populous 2. That title and its predecessor set the tone for a whole new generation of games,” said Clive Downie, the chief executive of DeNA West. “Fast forward to 2013, and it’s an honor to have the opportunity to work with Peter again on the launch of Godus. Our team is looking forward to working with 22cans on a game that we know will set a new standard for the mobile generation.”

No launch date has been set yet.

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Developer PopCap is a master of delightfully colorful and deviously addictive games, and it just launched its newest title on Facebook.

Plants vs. Zombies Adventures is available to play now on Facebook. It is a free-to-play social game that combines the tower-defense elements of the original title with some new town-building mechanics — and I just spent 20 minutes playing it instead of writing this post.

This is PopCap’s second Plants vs. Zombies game. The developer launched the original in 2009 for PC. It later released it on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Nintendo DS, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mac, and more.

PopCap is also working on a separate Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time that will more closely follow the mechanics of the original game. The studio plans to release that game in June.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

Nevahold is a platform where people rally together to get the attention of large companies. Users compose a “shout” and share it with the community to rally support for their cause. Other members of the community can join in the action by sharing on their social media accounts. The ultimate goal is that enough people participate to elicit a response.

“In today’s culture of huge, faceless companies, chances are high that you’ve hit the hair-pulling, mind-numbing, high-pitched-screeching frustration of overpaying for services, buying cheap quality products, being hit with hidden fees, dealing with the worst of customer service skills, or not even getting through to customer service and staying on an endless elevator-music hold cycle,” said cofounder Kena Amoah to VentureBeat. “Nevahold allows consumers to crowd source their social media accounts to harness their power and increase their influence when reaching out to a company.”

Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a means to express their gripes, grievances, and appreciation for products and services. On the other end, businesses across the board are using social media to connect with consumers and for customer service support. Nevahold’s goal is to give consumers as much efficacy as possible when reaching out to these companies and is based on the principle of “strength in numbers.”

On Nevahold, people send their shout to a company’s social media contact and wait 30 minutes for a response. A shout can include photos, videos, or be a simple comment. If the company is radio silent, then advocates start to retweet an share the shout until the company responds. If the company still doesn’t respond, the question is shared one all of Nevahold’s 12 social media channels.

Nevahold gives each company a customer service score based on their response rates and time. The compare tool helps consumer see how different companies fare side-by-side. There is also a campaign feature that consumers can use to petition for a change in the company’s policy or service.

Amoah said that during beta testing, Nevahold has helped resolve 23,990 questions and complaints in the airline, wireless, and consumer electronics industry and had a 91.5 percent response rate. It recently helped students traveling to a conference stand up against American Airlines and against Barclays U.K.

The three founders met at the Meltwater School of Technology in Ghana. Meltwater Foundation has invested $90,000. Competitors include Gripevine, Gri.pe and Publikdemand.

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

You’d think Twitter cofounder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey would be a whiz at social media. But his posts to Twitter’s young video-sharing service Vine are a mix of weirdly creepy and just-plain-boring clips.

Vine launched in January and carries an official description in the iOS app store as “the best way to see and share life in motion.” The app appears to have had a profound effect on Dorsey.

Back in late April, Dorsey admitted that he has a hard time simply taking pictures anymore and thinks Vine’s 6-second videos have changed how he sees art. He said: “I think it’s an entirely new art form, and I think it’s amazing — every picture I look at right now, I want it to move; I’m waiting for it to move. Where’s the sound?”

But Dorsey doesn’t appear to know what’s worth capturing in motion, and sometimes he’s being downright creepy.

I’ll be the first admit that I’m not that great at Vine. We all can’t be majestic Vine artists. But I don’t post Vines often, and I certainly don’t spam my Twitter followers with Vine videos because I’m bored.

For example, just today Dorsey has posted three relatively dull Vines from the same plane window:

A cursory look through Dorsey’s other Vine videos isn’t much better. Often he takes Vines where a picture would have been sufficient. Instead of a snapshot of a moment, we’re subjected to 6 seconds of some ho-hum event.

Here’s Dorsey standing in a line:

Here’s Dorsey showing off the “energy” of the Square NY office:

Here’s Dorsey looking at a street in Manhattan:

Here’s Dorsey looking at some “street art”:

Here’s Dorsey in a cab:

And then there are these creepy Vines, where Dorsey looks into the camera and captures other people behind him:

Occasionally, Dorsey does use Vine in a way that goes with the spirit of the service.

It’d be nice to see Dorsey post more Vines like these. We’re wishing you luck, Jack.

Top screenshot via Jack Dorsey/Vine

If you’re like me, you’re wondering who actually uses Yahoo newsfeed service when there are plenty of popular competitors available. However, for the second time in the last month, the company is making some changes to its newsfeed that will presumably attempt to boost interest and improve the overall experience of reading the news.

Crazy, I know. But this sort of strategy (of doing something instead of, well, nothing) is part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan to revitalize the company’s products through building, buying, and partnering. Back in April, it debuted newly built Yahoo newsfeed advertising units. And now, Yahoo has forged a partnership with Twitter that will bring embedded tweets directly into Yahoo’s U.S. newsfeed service. (See screenshot below.)

“Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information. 140 characters can connect athletes with their fans, capture live chatter from the red carpet, and inspire global debate,” Mayer wrote on the company’s blog today. “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed.”

Essentially, that means the news feed will now feature tweets from important people (or even random users if their tweets are relevant) from each respective news genre (celebrity, sports, politics, etc.), lovingly curated by the newsfeed’s editors. Overall, it seems like a pretty good way for  the Yahoo newsfeed to pull in new users, who don’t have time to review all the important updates in their Twitter feed and keep up with the daily news.

The new Twitter integration into Yahoo newsfeed is rolling out now in the U.S., and I’d suspect other regions to follow if this partnership proves successful.

Over the last few years, media companies and brands have turned to Mass Relevance’s social curating platform for plenty of projects, and now the startup said it’s hit a big milestone.

Today, Mass Relevance announced that it’s pushed 25 billion pieces of “social content” (tweets, Vines, status updates, Instagram photos, and such) through its platform from the more than 250 big media companies that are its clients. That’s a lot of social content when you consider that Mass Relevance’s tech is focused on reviewing everything  before it goes out and doing it in a way that’s, well … pretty. And if you haven’t heard of Mass Relevance, that’s because the company stays largely behind the scenes.

Mass Relevance is worth keeping an eye on because it’s helping Twitter and Facebook use their social interaction data in unique ways that are appealing to media companies and big brands during live or notable events. For example, it’s in the CBS’s best interest to curate and increase social interactions during the Super Bowl because it can then justify the higher advertising rate prices to advertisers that want to run a commercial during the big game.

The platform itself allows highly visible media companies to manage the flow of social information they’re consistently getting hit with. It takes social data streams from various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and others) and weaves them into a single console for clients. From there you can set word/hashtag filters, audience demographic filters (age range, gender, geography), media or social network filters, and so on — basically fine-tuning all that social data for a specific purpose. The platform can also help its clients display that “social content” intelligently through mobile apps, live TV broadcasts, websites, projector screens at conferences, stadium displays, and other visualizations that run alongside media events.

Source: Mass Relevance

Mass Relevance CTO Eric Falcao presenting to President Obama during his recent trip to Austin, Texas.

You’ve probably experienced Mass Relevance’s tech in action without realizing it, too. It’s already working with all four major broadcast TV stations (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC) as well as the most socially engaged prime time television shows (X Factor, Glee, American Idol, and The Voice). Previously, the company curating tweeted questions from audience members watching panels at SXSWi back in March, helped launch the first Twitter Town Hall for President Barack Obama, managed Twitter data during the 2012 Olympic Games, integrated Facebook data for CNN’s coverage of the 2012 election, and also worked with some of last year’s biggest media events (2012 Grammys, MTV music video awards, Super Bowl XLVI, the BET awards, NBA Finals).

Mass Relevance isn’t the only startup offering media companies (and brands) a way to streamline interactions from across multiple social networks. One example is indirect competitor Echo, which has seen success of its own platform of social curation tools with clients like pro wrestling company WWE. Yet, Mass Relevance does seem to be emerging as a leader when it comes to building tools for large events. While it didn’t disclose financial figures, the company said its revenue quadrupled in 2012 (compared to the previous year), and estimates doubling revenue again by the end of 2013.

Founded in 2010, the Austin-based startup has previously raised $5.5 million in total funding to date. Mass Relevance has 90 employees, but plans to double its R&D team in the next year as well as open an international office in London, U.K. this month.

Photos via Mass Relevance

“SimulTV puts the social in TV – literally – by merging the second screen with the first,” the company says.

The second screen is the biggest phenomena in traditional media, supposedly. Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV. It’s such a big phenomenon that TV Guide rolled out an app to see what’s playing, watch whatever’s on, and also tweet, post, and blog about it. And that Apple is rumored to be releasing a mini-TV tablet to enable an iOS-style second-screen experience.

Of course, when I go to watch TV, I go to chill, or to immerse myself in a story … not to tweet about it or share. But I am, admittedly, not 20 anymore.

For those who want to stay socially connected while watching the big game or the last episode of can’t-miss-TV, SimulTV’s solution is to combine both screens, right on the web. So your football game, Twitter conversations, Facebook messages, online search, and text and voice chat with others on SimulTV who are watching the same thing as you.

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

I tried the service myself, and besides the fact that it’s Flash-based — at least the code that asks for control of your microphone and webcam in order to participate in on-site chat — and fairly processor-intensive, it seems useful and a better solution than a standard two-device second-screen setup.

Currently, there are only a few channels, but by this summer, SimulTV promises to have more than 100 channels, including ”top channels” from Latin America, China, Japan and Europe, plus 5,000 video-on-demand titles. The service is HD-quality, with picture-in-picture for the truly ADHD social TV aficionados, and according to the company, takes only half the bandwidth of typically required.

Most importantly, however, SimulTV is a service that — depending on the channels the company actually brings on this summer — allows you to cut the cord and simply use your computer or tablet to watch TV.

The service will be free initially, and eventually will cost between $5 and $20.

Image credit: John Koetsier

I don’t use Google + and chances are you don’t, either. Google, however, really, really wants to change that.

Google is rolling out a major overhaul to the design of Google+, which now looks like a freakish three-column lovechild between Pinterest and Facebook.

The updates, which are among the 42 new features that are headed to Google+, adds a lot of polish to a social network that has so very been awfully bereft of it. I can only applaud Google’s decision to change things up.

In addition, Google+ will now automatically tag your photos, which is either horrifying or awesome, depending on how you look at it. During the presentation, Google senior VP Vic Gundotra used the example of a photo of the Effiel Tower, which, after being analyzed, was tagged with, um, #effieltower.

“We are incredibly grateful to the millions of you who’ve joined Google+, and we can think of no better thank you than to keep innovating,” Gundotra said.

Hangouts, the free multiperson video chat and messaging service inside Google+, has been broken out into its own standalone applications for iOS, Android, and Chrome.

“Technology can just go away and people can focus on what makes them happiest, just hanging out.” Google SVP Vic Gundotra said today at Google I/O.

The new Hangouts service unifies all communication across Google’s platforms. It’s replacing all prior apps like Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and Hangout video chats with Hangouts. This new app handles texts, shares photos, video chats, and more.

No matter which app you use to access Hangouts, you’ll have access to a list of conversations that it backs up in the cloud. You’ll be able to message people even if they aren’t online.

Importantly, Hangouts will challenge WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging services that are supplanting traditional text messaging.

The Hangout apps for iOS, Android, and Chrome will be available today.

Can’t make it to Google I/O? You can still watch the festivities from Google’s massive developer conference via livestream.

Check out our Google I/O keynote liveblog here.

Google will stream the biggest sessions — including today’s 3-hour long keynote — for the world to see. Today’s stream will start at 9 a.m. Pacific, starting with the keynote.

News announced so far:

• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Check out Google’s new Star Trek-like voice search (video)
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chrome apps
• Google Glass is for dorks — and for doctors
• Google Glass gets first news app for the ‘connected generation’
• Google gives mobile developers some massive love with 5 new money-making features
• Google’s latest Nexus phone is an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 with pure Android
• Google Chrome reaches milestone of 750M montly active users
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Google releases location APIs that may hugely help fitness apps
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google Play has 48B app installs, 2.5B in the last month alone
• 900M Android activations to date, Google says

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It’s been years since community news sharing site Reddit has made a major change to how things appear on its coveted front page of popular submissions, but today the company announced a new feature called multireddits that could do just that.

Reddit enables its users to submit links or self-authored posts to a variety of “subreddits” (aka a specific category). The multireddit feature enables you to combine several of those subreddits together, which can then be subscribed to on its own. It’s worth noting that the capability to create a multireddit has been around for a while (manually typing each subreddit’s name in the URL), but now the Reddit team is making it easier to share and browse through them. Previously, if you wanted this kind of functionality, you’d have to create another user account and subscribe to only the subreddits you wanted to collect or create a new folder of content on iOS app AlienBlue.

“We’re working on making browsing reddit easier and more diverse,” Reddit developer Max Goodman (aka chromakode) wrote about the new feature. “The first step is giving you deeper control over what makes up your front page.”

The new feature is only available to those with a Reddit Gold account, the company’s premium subscription service that gives members early access to new features. Gold account users can choose to toggle on the multireddit feature by visiting a separate page. After that, you’re brought to your personalized homepage that feature a new sidebar on the left with a list of all the multireddits you’re currently subscribed to. For instance, you could create a “Reddit Pets” multireddit that contains submissions from subreddits like aww, dachshund, cute, and corgi. Or maybe you want a multireddit for comedy, which would contain submissions from funny, humor, and advice animals.

Each multireddit has its own tab that pulls up submissions in your main feed/river when you click it, and not all the submissions from subreddits you’re subscribed to on your personal front page. The new sidebar also adds tabs for all submissions across the entire site, submissions from subreddits you moderate, and saved submissions. [See screenshot below]

This is a bold move for Reddit and one that has the potential to really change up the way people are interacting with the site. There are certain subreddits that I didn’t want appearing on my front page, but would happily navigate to separately. And now I have the option of throwing all of those subreddits into a multireddit. It’s also a smart move because it keeps people checking their front page, a central location that is extremely valuable to advertisers and promoters, especially because the company is ultraselective about those advertisements. (And I don’t at all think Reddit will change its stance on advertising based on its strategy with multireddits.)

The multireddit feature is currently in beta testing, which means it could change depending on what works and what doesn’t. Reddit said for now, the multireddits you create aren’t sharable with other users, but that may be added in the future. The company is also providing an API for the multireddits feature for developers.

What do you think of the new multireddit feature? Let us know in the comments below.

Top image via Reddit Postcards

But, he adds, Google co-founder Sergei Brin tells him he’s a better CEO because he says less.

Page lost his left vocal cord over a decade ago after a bad cold and a hoarse voice that never really recovered. Doctors couldn’t explain the problem, never identifying a cause, and assured him that losing the other vocal cord was a virtual impossibility. Fast forward to last year, and again after a cold and a hoarse voice, Page learned that his right vocal cord now had limited movement also.

Both injuries resulted in vocal issues — the first in a slightly weaker voice than normal, and the second with even more impact — but Page says he’s been able to recover, at least partially:

Thankfully, after some initial recovery I’m fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before. And giving long monologues is more tedious for me and probably the audience.  But overall over the last year there has been some improvement with people telling me they think I sound better.

But Page, who says he’s actually feeling quite lucky overall, also says that having paralyzed vocal cords may have made him a better CEO. Why? As co-founder Brin told him, Page is forced to choose his words more carefully … which probably gives him the time to think through what he wants to say before saying it, and also reduces the number of occasions in which thoughtless words cause damage.

I’ve heard that personally on Google earnings calls — Page speaks a little slowly, a lot softly, and with carefully-selected, well-chosen words.

As a result of these challenges, Page came into contact with a Harvard doctor, Steven Zeitels, who is leading a research project on vocal cord paralysis. The problem is relatively rare, he says, and there’s not enough information currently to help doctors learn more about it, and to treat it.

The project is starting with a patient survey to “gather information about the prevalence and extent of vocal paralysis and paresis” from people who have similar problems.

Page’s journey surfaces the question: would every CEO be better by saying less?

Image credit: Google Zeitgeist video

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Or, at least, where they’re the most open about displaying their antisocial views.

The picture doesn’t look good for the Eastern states, although admittedly the bulk of the population is there as well. Areas in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama show up bright red on the map, as do areas in more central states Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The map is part of a larger project, called the Geography of Hate, by Humboldt State professor Dr. Monica Stephens. The data that forms the map comes from an analysis of every tweet posted between June 2012 and April 2013 that contained at least one of 10 designated “hate words,” including dyke, fag, chink, gook, wetback, and cripple.

Source: Hate Map

California seems relatively hate-free

But while the original list of tweets was generated by a machine, every single one of the 150,000 tweets containing one of the target words was individually examined by undergraduate students. As the project description states:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing “hate words” as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To protect the identity of potentially racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted Twitter users, the tweets were aggregated up to the county level, and counties with high levels of hate speech were colored red on the map. Areas with moderate levels — though still higher than the national average — are varying shades of blue, and unshaded areas were below the national average.

Smaller towns seem to have a higher incidence of hate speech — in Virginia, for example, Palmyra is more hateful on Twitter than Richmond. And in Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are less hateful than smaller towns nearby.

Image credits: Geography of Hate

Collegefeed is a social network along the lines of LinkedIn, but it’s geared toward students and recent graduates. The online career marketplace helps them find desirable opportunities and companies use the network to search for candidates without having to go from campus-to-campus.

Founder Sanjeev Agrawal used to be Google’s head of products. He observed college students struggling to enter the workforce and saddled by record amounts of debt. At the same time, companies like Google were struggling to fill open positions and willing to spend thousands of dollars to find the right candidate. LinkedIn and Monster.com are often not effective for students who don’t have the professional network or work experience to stand out, and on-the-ground recruiting is a time-consuming and expensive process for employers.

This is the problem Collegefeed is trying to solve.

“It is no easier to get a good start in life today than it was 20 years ago preweb, presocial, premobile,” Agrawal said in a Q&A. “Starting this week, 1-plus million new college graduates will struggle to enter the workforce. Almost 50 percent of them will fail, according to most recent research, but more and more companies understand that their future is somewhere in college right now. Think of Collegefeed as a social career platform that brings together students, employers, alums, industry insiders and college career services in one place.”

Students create short profiles with their work experience, skill sets, and interests and the system will search for matching jobs and internships. They can also enter the names of companies they like and a recommendation engine will suggest similar companies and jobs, “like Netflix does for movies.” Agrawal said this will help them discover new opportunities with companies they may not have heard of or considered before. Students can browse through custom news feeds with updates on their preferred employers. It also has networking and educational opportunities, and students can share experiences with each other.

Employers on Collegefeed benefit from access to a wider network of potential hires at a lower cost. They can push content to news feeds, sponsor contests, and get a newsfeed of their own with recommended students.

Collegefeed launched in private beta in March with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Melon. Agrawal said students have already secured interviews, jobs, internships, and financial awards with companies including YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft. Today, Collegefeed is open nationwide to any students and employer.

Agrawal said that over the past few years, multiple companies have popped up using social media to address challenges in recruiting and hiring, but “no-one has created a new social network that combines everything together in one place for both students and employers.” Competitors include LinkedIn, Readyforce, and AfterCollege. However, Collegefeed makes use of “push” technology and the popularity of news feeds to curate, aggregate, and present the information in digestible form to both students and employers.

The founding team of six has 10 college degrees between them and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s a bootstrapped company.

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

This is a guest post by Yoav Dembak, CEO and co-founder of Colabo, a self-service marketing analytics tool.

Google Alerts has long had the reputation of being a simple, user-friendly email alert service for news stories and general web mentions, extracted from a customized search query. As one of Google’s oldest tools, the product has been held to a high standard of reliability and accuracy.

Recently, Google has taken the turn for the worst, killing off Google Reader, a valuable RSS tool for a variety of users. Many fear that, given Google Alerts’ recent issues, it will soon be added to the quickly growing list of “Google Graveyarders.”

For professional users who are looking to keep track of a product or competitor, Google Alerts’ service has never been ideal. Too often, alerts are missing important data or not being sent in real time. The results are dry in their presentation, making it hard to see across multiple sources. Lastly, the complex syntax and Boolean operators can be challenging for users, leaving them with unwanted results or missing relevant information.

With Google Alerts’ recent performance issues, the door is open for a new hot market. Many companies have taken advantage of the problems and have created solutions to improve where Google went wrong. Ranging from entry- to enterprise-level tools, there are now solutions for any professional to receive the most reliable results in real time. Here are seven options for various needs and budgets:

Entry level replacements

These tools replicate Google Alerts’ interface and functionality but also include a few more social sources, such as Twitter and Tumblr.

1. For similar interface and functionality — Talkwalker advertises itself as “the best free and easy alternative to Google Alerts.” If you like the functionality of the Google Alerts search query, this is the product for you. Receive alerts in real time from the web via email or in an RSS feed reader.

2. For simple social monitoring — Social Mention is a free and reputable product in the social search engine arena, tracking alerts across the web and social media channels. Additionally, Social Mention provides sentiment analysis on social media mentions and hashtag tracking as part of its service.

Mid-level replacements

These tools offer a configuration of data sources, such as proprietary sources, specific media outlets, and Google Analytics. In addition, they have a better UI, analytics, and custom reports suited for the professional user.

1. Social and traditional media monitoring — Mention is a high-end version of Google Alerts with the addition of select social sources. Mention offers a free version with limited capabilities and an unlimited version starting at $19.99 a month and provides real-time alerts via email and push notifications to your cellular device. Alerts are flagged by importance of mentions according to the latest source interactions by influence and authority.

2. Tracking TV and media campaign alerts — Trendrr lets you harness the power of social media to see how a TV ad or a show is received by the audience. The service starts at $499 a month.

3. Customizing sources and adding proprietary sources — My own company, Colabo provides unlimited data sources and self-service analytics. Additionally, you can add searches from internal databases, such as your CRM or paid services like Hoovers. And you can add notifications for key terms and receive them in real time. Colabo starts at $90 a month with a limited free trial.

High-end replacements

These tools usually offer their own proprietary news sources per industry and often can be combined with a service offering that filters the news for you.

1. Proprietary news source per industry with a financial focus — Bloomberg’s recently launched platform, Bloomberg Professional, provides a different scope of information. Starting in the thousand-dollar range, financial professionals are able to receive alerts from any device in real-time that include news and analytics.

2. PR management — Meltwater News is a full solution aimed at PR and marketing professionals for both inbound and outbound coverage. The product covers news features, online media monitoring, and delivers breaking news about your brand from more than 190,000 news publications, including some social sources like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs in the form of daily alerts. A subscription starts around $6,000 a year.

Yoav Dembak is the CEO and co-founder of Colabo, a self-service marketing analytics tool. Prior to Colabo, Yoav was an executive at VMware in charge of Product Marketing for the data center management product suite. Yoav was the CEO of B-hive and before that he held various marketing and sales roles at Breach Security, Gilian Technologies, and Gilat Satellite Networks.

Alert icon via Pavel Ignatov/Shutterstock

CEO Noah Pepper announced the acquisition this afternoon on the Lucky Sort’s website. The company has been building a visualization and data navigation engine called TopicWatch, which can discover real-time patterns in streams of data, and took in $500,000 in seed funding from Neu Venture Capital in early 2012.

The startup had operated in stealth mode, but it caught the attention of investors and the press when it raised seed funds from a roster of “big data” experts, including chaos theory physicist Dr. Norman Packard.

Pretty clearly, there’s a strong Twitter tie-in, as Twitter is nothing more than a live stream of data, continuously updated by millions of people. Where Twitter will use the technology was not fully disclosed, but Pepper did offer a hint.

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout.

Twitter has been beefing up its ad tools in the past few months, releasing new functionality for keyword targeting, self-service tools for interest, platform, fan, and gender targeting, and more. And as it ramps up for a possible IPO this year, it needs to give advertisers even better tools for placing, targeting, and evaluating their Twitter ad spend. It’s likely that Lucky Sort technologies will be helpful for that purpose.

In any case, the existing Lucky Sort toolset will be shut down, Pepper stated:

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

Twitter has been acquiring small companies at a fairly rapid pace lately, having just acquired big data startup Ubalo. And in 2012, Twitter was the fourth-most acquisitive company, buying a total of 10 startups and ranking just behind Facebook, Google, and Groupon.

Here is Lucky Sort’s full announcement:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

CharityBuzz is auctioning off a 30-60 minute coffee break with Tim Cook, and after 85 competitive bids, the current highest offer is $605,000. The amount is now so high that prospective bidders need to personally phone and verify their banking details and ability to pay in order to place a new bid.

“It’s truly amazing,” CharityBuzz’ representative Glenda Felden told me this morning. “We’re really excited.”

The current CharityBuzz record-holder is a March auction of a 2013 Lamborghini Aventador, Felden told me. The 700-horsepower car boasts a 6.5-liter V-12 engine that propels the car from 0-60 mph in under three seconds, and it reaches speeds in excess of 215 mph.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Tim Cook, last October at an Apple event.

But that sweet Italian supercar may not be worth more than a quick cuppa with Cook.

Cook’s auction started almost a month ago at $50,000, and quickly shot up to $160,000 in a single day. And with one day left, it seems likely to become the highest-value auction ever held on CharityBuzz, Felden said.

Bids close tomorrow at 4:08 p.m., and a potentially winning new bid will have to be at least $610,000, as bid increments are $5,000 each.

That’s $610,000 for a 30-60 minute meeting, travel and accommodations not included. Or over $10,000 for each minute, if it goes the full 60.

Proceeds benefit the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

“Charitybuzz is blown away by the incredible support we’ve seen for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights through our coffee with Tim Cook online auction,” CharityBuzz CEO Coppy Holzman said. “With 140 experiences on the auction block closing this Tuesday to benefit the RFK Center, including exclusive access to Robert DeNiro, Alec Baldwin, Peyton Manning and more, we expect to raise well over one million dollars for human rights.”

Image credit: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Lockwood Publishing, a successful free-to-play publisher on Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world, is expanding to mobile games today. The Nottingham, England-based studio is launching a new 3D avatar that exists across mobile games on a variety of platforms.

The company is rolling out the avatar for the first time in its own title, Avakin Poker, which debuts this spring on iOS, Android, and Web browsers. The 3D avatars allow players to create realistic human characters based on the Unity 3D game engine. The poker offering features 3D renders, and it will feel much more like you’re sitting at a poker table in Las Vegas, the company said.

“This reflects a big change in the game industry,” said Joel Kemp, Lockwood Publishing’s co-founder, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have learned a lot through PlayStation Home and established a strong community there.”

Lockwood is famous for publishing games such as Sodium and Sodium 2 on PlayStation Home. The company pioneered free-to-play high-end releases on the Sony virtual world, and it continues to maintain those games on Home.

“We had great success with Sony, but this is what we have been doing over the last couple of years,” Kemp said.

Now, the organization is expanding into mobile using the cross-platform Unity technology. Similar to systems like Xbox Live Avatars and PlayStation Home, players can create a custom 3D avatar and use it across games. They can have a single XP inventory and a single account across multiple platforms. The poker game is the first of multiple releases that will use Avakin avatars. Players can log into the same account across different channels and play against the same people.

But in contrast to Xbox Live and PlayStation Home, Lockwood has focused its avatars on mobile devices, which haven’t been powerful enough in the past to run 3D avatars. Now, those options are catching up with the consoles, and the time is ripe for this change, Kemp said. Lockwood is considering licensing the Avakin technology to other mobile-game companies.

The avatars will enable player-versus-player competition across platforms in real-time. That’s not easy to do, and Lockwood believes it is the first to do that with 3D avatars (Jawfish Games is doing it with 2D games). Lockwood has created its own cloud-based backend service, which connects different systems. It uses off-the-shelf backend components like Smart Fox server, Edgecast, and Amazon EC2, along with its own software and its home-grown metrics system called Playmetrix. Lockwood will make Playmetrix available to third parties.

The company will release the Avakin technology in the United Kingdom first and tweak it based on consumer feedback. Then, Lockwood will launch it in the Latin American market through BoaCompra, a South American game publisher, this summer. The publisher is pursuing partnerships in other territories where free-to-play business models are big.

Lockwood started in 2005 on social platforms but got a game deal with Sony to work on Home titles. The self-funded firm primarily makes rich 3D games that serve as social multiplayer experiences. The company has more than 40 people working on multiple projects. Rivals include 3D avatar games such as PKR and platforms such as IMVU. Others include Stardoll and Habbo, but those offerings focus on younger audiences.

Kemp said the company will continue to work on console games for next-generation systems in the future. If mobile games one day run on consoles, Kemp says his company will be ready since the games will run on Unity, which should run across all platforms.

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Google is evidently serious about making games easier to discover on the Android platform. Android Police reported Saturday that it received a leak of a full document describing the new Google Play Games service that makes Android games more social.

The platform is much like Game Center on Apple’s iOS platform. Google Play Games, which will be part of Google Play Services v3.1.36, will have multiplayer functionality, leaderboards, achievements, and cloud game saves. By offering these services as a part of its platform, Google will offload that work from game developers. It will also make Google Play games more viral, since players will be able to share their game achievements with friends and engage those friends in the game via a social chain reaction. Developers have been calling for such a platform for a while, and rival platforms have emerged to offer the same thing, such as the iOS-Google Play cross-platform service coming from OpenKit.

We have put in a request for comment to Google.

The services are a recognition of how games have become to the Google mobile platform. In the U.S., games account for three-fourths of all revenue on the Google Play store, according to App Annie. In South Korea, the percentage of revenue that comes from games is 95 percent.

In the Play Games Settings part of the Google Play menu, you will be able to turn on game notifications and manage who can send those notifications to you. Google+ will hand identification of players. The code that Android Police reviewed showed a Synced Game Saves function, where you can save your game to Google’s cloud so you don’t have to worry about losing it if you lose your phone or you switch to play on another device. Play Games will handle invites and matchmaking. It also has features for unlocking achievements, lobbies, icon badges, and in-game chat.

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Disney has found that it can improve the experience and engagement of its guests at its theme parks by building deeper stories and light adventures into the settings and rides. In doing so, it brought lessons from movies and video games into the real world of guest entertainment.

The Imagineers wanted to reproduce in the theme parks the feeling of extended, engaged entertainment that people get from great movies or video games, said Asa Kalama, the creative director for Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. Imagineering is responsible for creating the rides at theme parks like Disneyland and Disney World, and the job of the Imagineers is to find cool new technologies that can be integrated into the fantasy entertainment in the parks. He spoke about the experiment at the Interactive Storytelling Symposium on Friday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event was sponsored by the University of Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media. 

In the past, Disney moved into digital characters by showing off animated creatures such as the alien Stitch from Lido & Stitch in its Paris and Hong Kong theme parks. Those “living characters” held unrehearsed, real-time conversations in French and English with children in the parks. Disney used its own proprietary software to respond to queries in a different way for each show, depending on the questions it received from the audience.

“The guest feedback from the living characters was absolutely phenomenal,” Kalama said. “Guests didn’t just sit back and spectate. They go to actively participate. So we decided to take that same paradigm and apply it to everything. What if we decided to let our guests participate in ‘living stories.’ We have all of these amazing experiences, parks built with great play sets. Why not use them to tell our own emergent story experiences?”

The Disney Imagineers saw they had a big opportunity because they had amazing sets in the fantasy environments at the theme parks. It had staff that it called “cast members,” and so the situation was ripe to build movie or game-like experiences.

Kalama said the team envisioned experiences that were like movies where the character was immersed in a virtual world, such as West World, The Game, or The Truman Show.

“The guests get to live their own story, with a narrative overlay on the experience that can last a whole day,” he said.

“The critical thing is whether this is a fun experience,” Kalama said. “We had to test to see if this is something that our guests wanted.”

They conceived experiences like a multiday pirate adventure, where guests had to move to a certain location and dig up pirate treasure. There were activities such as fireworks roped into the story. But it was a pretty expensive experience, with a lot of staff workers involved. To make it scale more broadly, Disney had to consider how to automate the storytelling.

The team created a “story engine” using software. They needed an “artificially intelligent director” that could create narratives on the fly for the guests. It would write scenes for the guests as needed in response to what they were saying or doing.

They partnered with Georgia Tech University experts and filmmakers. They built a story-authoring tool. It would take an example of a good story and then remanipulate the scenes within it to create a unique experience for the different guests. Then they did a play test. They found that they were initially creating stories with way too much backstory that the guests didn’t want to learn or read. Those backstories just got in the way of the experience, and so the Imagineers scaled that back.

“We didn’t give our participants enough credit for creating their own backstories,” he said.

They also made use of their live cast members to participate in the stories. In the stories, the guests were assigned goals that had to be reached. The Imagineers didn’t care how those goals were reached, so the guests could create their own paths to reaching the goal. The tests showed that the guests didn’t really want to change the ending or influence it. They were happy to reach the desired ending, but they wanted to get their in a different way. They could pursue a bunch of tasks in any order they wanted.

Then they tested it. The results were enthusiastic. They also started taking the stories that people performed and using them for future stories.

Kalama said, “The guests loved the experience. Our experience showed you had to have a clear qualitative and creative vision that was entirely guest focused. You pick the right tools for reach the goal that you know the guests want. Don’t choose your tools first.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Ted Ullyot, general counsel at Facebook, is leaving the social network to take time off, according to AllThingsD.

Facebook confirmed the departure yesterday. Ullyot, 45, will depart in July. The search for his replacement is going to include outside and inside candidates.

Ullyot had a tough job, overseeing controversial legal issues ranging from Facebook’s ownership battle with the Winklevoss twins to investor lawsuits over the company’s initial public offering. He also had to stand guard on privacy issues related to the company’s giant social network.

Ullyot joined Facebook in the fall of 2008. At that time, he had been a high-powered Washington, D.C. lawyer who previously held senior legal positions at AOL, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Developers are speculating that Google is about to launch a Game Center for Android, or a meta app for games that will improve discoverability in the vast Google Play app store and make mobile games into a more social and lucrative experience.

So OpenKit is heading off that news with an announcement of its own: a universal social graph that makes games more social across both Apple and Google mobile platforms. The OpenKit technology will enable developers to create a common social network for their games regardless of what platform a user is on. OpenKit is on a fast-track effort because thousands of game developers were caught unprepared when Gree unexpectedly shut down OpenFeint, a mobile social platform, just before the holidays. They had no way to get their user data or code out of the platform and had to scramble to find an alternative.

Peter Relan, head of the YouWeb incubator that spawned OpenFeint, decided in December to create an open platform that developers could use to make their games more social. OpenKit was born (the company name and its open source project bear the same name) with the goal of providing common app services to game developers, who could simply integrate it and then focus on making their games.

“We’ll create a universal social graph for developers on mobile platforms,” Relan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “That’s important. I want to be able to play a game with my son, who is too young to be on Facebook. With OpenKit, I can send him an invite and play the same game. Players don’t have to worry, and developers don’t have to worry.”

With OpenKit, developers could integrate an applications programming interface (API) into their games that made it easy to set up social features such as leaderboards, user identity, and cloud storage. And they could do so with the confidence that the platform would be open. They wouldn’t be locked into it. They could take their data and code and move to another platform. And they would use it to help their games spread to other users via social means and then engage those users more readily. Players could issue challenges and get their friends hooked on the same game.

OpenKit will essentially duplicate some (but not all) of the services that OpenFeint delivered, such as the ability to identify users, authenticate their accounts and passwords, store their information on the Internet-connected data centers known as the cloud, and embed push communications in a game. Many of those features are headaches for developers, so OpenKit will provide cloud-based backend services that take the chores off the developers hands. The features are critical because they will enable “frictionless user acquisition,” or a cheap way to find new users.

That’s the long-term goal. For now, OpenKit is testing more limited features. In March, OpenKit launched its closed beta with features including cloud storage, achievements, universal authentication, Unity plug-ins, and leaderboards. Google could offer these features as well, but it would have no interest in making games on its platform interoperable with those on Apple platforms.

Relan said that OpenKit will allow players who are on iOS or Android to interact with each other across platforms. They won’t be tied to Apple, which has its wall garden in the form of Game Center, or Android, which is expected to have its own form of Game Center soon, based on rumors about next week’s Google I/O event.

Relan said the company plans to develop “smart invites” so that the platform will detect the invitee’s device and present the right app from the right app store in the invitation.

“We are taking away the developer nervousness about the platform,” Relan said.

More than 1,500 developers are testing the service, and more features will be added before June.

“We are doubling down on this theme of removing friction: With iOS and Android equally prevalent among users, they need to be able to interact socially with each other regardless of what device they use,” Relan said. “Developers will also come out ahead because there will be frictionless sharing and inviting which will lead to more downloads for their games and apps.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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