One of the best upgrades in Google TV 2.0 was the addition of a dedicated YouTube app — now, it’s about to get even better with an update set to launch this week.

The new YouTube GTV app will offer a smoother interface and a new feature called Discover that will (surprise!) make it easier to find interesting videos. Discover will be a particularly useful addition as Google readies its plans for YouTube original content, something that I’ve previously argued could be a killer app for Google TV if handled well.

Google is reportedly spending upwards of $100 million on its original content plans, which include shows by well-known personalities like skateboarder Tony Hawk, comedian Rainn Wilson, and self-hulp guru Deepak Chopra. The company wants to add more professional content to YouTube’s library, ultimately making it something more than a destination for user-created cat videos. Google is also offering a sweet deal to content creators: 55 percent of ad revenues (after it recoups its initial cash advances), the Wall Street Journal reports.

In addition to the Discovery feature, the new app has new channel pages that’ll also help with finding interesting videos, as well as the ability to easily find related videos.

The late Steve Jobs was honored with a Grammy Trustees Award on Saturday for his contributions to the music industry, which included helping to develop the iPod and reshaping the way music is sold with the iTunes Store.

The award is meant to “recognize contributions to the music industry in areas other than performance,” CBS News reports, and was accepted by Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue.

“Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him,” Cue said at the awards ceremony. “He told us that music shaped his life. It made him who he was. Everyone who knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and the Beatles had on him.”

Apple was previously awarded a technical Grammy in 2002, but this award is meant specifically for Jobs. Other recipients of this year’s Trustees Awards include band leader Dave Bartholomew and jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Past winners include Walt Disney and The Beatles, company that we’re sure Jobs wouldn’t mind standing alongside.

While it’s pretty much hit-or-miss these days, when Saturday Night Live scores, it still does so with a vengeance.

Last night the sketch comedy show aired a segment that ripped apart Verizon’s 4G LTE marketing confusion, bringing to light the biggest problems facing the smartphone market today when it comes to general consumers.

In short, there are too many devices vying for your attention (many with terrible names), and the advantages of 4G LTE seems like gibberish to people who have little frame of reference to compare it to 3G. It’s an important reminder that, amidst the hype and frenzy surrounding new gadgets and technology, general consumers may feel left out of the loop entirely.

Verizon isn’t the only guilty party though, it’s simply just trying to fight fire with fire. All U.S. carriers are now touting way too many devices and rely on confusing definitions of 4G to entice consumers. It’s a scatter shot method, but it’s been working fairly well for AT&T and Verizon so far (less so for Sprint and T-Mobile, which offer fewer devices).

Via The Verge

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

You can now add Microsoft to the list of companies that have recently been burned by hackers.

Microsoft’s online store in India was hacked this morning by Chinese hacker group EvilShadow team – 7z1&Ancker, reports WP Sauce. Even worse, it appears that the store’s database of usernames and passwords has been leaked as well, potentially exposing those users’ payment information.

At the time of this post, Microsoft’s India online store is still offline. We’ve dropped a word into Microsoft for more details on the situation.

While we can easily confirm that the site is offline,  it’s more difficult to prove if the store’s username database has been hacked. Screenshots potentially showing information from the database have been released by the Chinese site HackTeach, but Microsoft has yet to confirm that the data has been compromised. HackTeach is also reporting that the passwords were unsecured and saved in plain text, which if true, would be a shocking security blunder on Microsoft’s part.

Update: A Microsoft representative has sent along the following comment: “Microsoft is investigating the limited compromise of the company’s online store in India. Microsoft is diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected.”

The company is developing a huge 120,000 square foot “Google Experience Center,” which will serve as a sort of private museum and meeting center, as well as labs for secret projects and the company’s @Home automation endeavour, reports the Mercury News.

The new buildings are big part of Google’s $120 million constructions efforts at the Googleplex, and they show how the company is quickly transforming into something more than just a search giant.

The Experience Center, for example, will be a place for the company to share big ideas with important industry figures. It may host future entries of Google’s new Solve for X conference, given the description by one of the architects working on the building:

The Experience Center would not typically be open to the public — consisting of invited groups, and guests whose interests will be as vast as Google’s range of products, and often confidential… Therefore, the Experience Center must also operate somewhat like a museum, exhibit, or mercantile space allowing flexibility in the exhibits so that as Google’s products and needs change, the space can adapt.

Such a building would also give Google an easy way to demonstrate its products for future enterprise and government customers, technology analyst Rob Enderle tells the paper.

Not surprisingly, Google had little to say about the Experience Center, or about its secret lab space, dubbed Project X. It’ll likely be a larger area for Google X, the company’s lab for fantastical projects. According to the Mercury News, Project X could involve “precision optical technology.”

Google is also carving out a lab that can screen out wireless frequencies for its @Home automation service. Little is known about @Home at the moment,  but Google has hinted that it could do things like control your home lights, appliances, and will be powered by Android. The company’s recently rumored streaming music device could end up being a part of its @Home suite.

Photo Maria Ly/Flickr

The popular music streaming service has added support for extremely high quality 320 kbps music streaming and offline synchronizing — just about the best sound you can get from compressed music files.

Spotify originally offered low quality (96 kbps) and high quality (160 kbps) settings for streaming and syncing on its mobile apps, but an update over the weekend has added a new “extreme” quality setting for the iPhone. Spotify has already offered 320 kbps streaming on its desktop apps for premium subscribers.

The news is something that audiophiles, or anyone with a decent pair of headphones, should appreciate. 320 kbps music files sound virtually indistinguishable from audio CDs, and the increased level of quality on the iPhone makes the app even more versatile. If you’ve already synhronized music with the Spotify app, it’ll prompt you to resynchronize if you flip over to extreme quality.

Spotify’s apps are available to all of its users for free, but you’ll need to be a premium subscriber ($9.99 a month) to stream and synchronize music.

It’s unclear when the new setting will make its way over to Spotify’s other mobile apps, which include Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, but I suspect it won’t be too long.

Via The Next Web

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Here’s our photo gallery from the DICE Summit 2012. This year’s conference drew more than 700 game industry luminaries to a wide variety of talks on the art and science of making video games.

Todd Howard gave the opening keynote at DICE

The 20-year company club: Frank Pearce, Ted Price, and Mike Capps

Atari veterans Ed Rotberg, Owen Rubin and Rich Adam

Greg Kasavin and Amir Rao (Super Giant Games) get award for Bastion

Chainsaw baynot at Epic Games party

Daniel Kim, CEO of Nexon America

Denny thorley, CEO of Day 1 Studios

Robert Bowling of Infinity Ward

Ed Logg, creator of Asteroids, got the lifetime achievement award

Felicia Day, star of the Guild and Dragon Age Redemption

Frank Pearce of Blizzard Entertainment (he won't talk about Titan)

Glen Ballard, six time Grammy winner

Douche move: Eric Hirshberg replays criticism for Elite from Neils Hansen

Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, explains why COD Elite is not a douche move

Former Navy Seal Team Six member Isaac Gilmore talks on how to learn from failure

David Jaffe (Eat Sleep Play) says story can get in the way of good game play

Jay Mohr closed the Interactive Achievement Awards in his undies and robe

Jay Mohr hosted the Interactive Achievement Awards for the 7th year in a row

Julian Eggebrecht

Arnt Jensen and Dino Patti (Playdead) creators of Limbo

Martin Rae, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences

Matias Myllyrinne, managing director of Remedy Entertainment

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter

Min Kim, head of live games at Nexon, and new AIAS board member

Morgan Webb and Adam Sessler of G4

Perrin Kaplan of Zebra Partners, looking like she's saying "Whatever"

Rich Hilleman of Electronic Arts talked about world peace through games

Jesse Schell of Schell Games and David Perry of Gaikai

Seamus Blackley of Innovative Leisure

Sefton Hill of Rocksteady

Jamin Warren of Kill Screen Magazine looks at Adam Sessler's ankles

Shu Yoshida (head of Sony's game studios) shows off his PlayStation Vita

Tim Sweeney of Epic Games was inducted into the Hall of Fame

Todd Howard, creator of Skyrim, accepted the award for game of the year

It’s an empire state of mind. The world’s most famous musical couple has turned to New York’s Tumblr as the blogging platform of choice for showcasing the first photos of their new baby girl, Blue Ivy Carter.

Tumblr, founded by Manhattan’s David Karp, has defined itself as the best service for bloggers who want to showcase their creativity, especially through photos.

On their Tumblr, Jay-Z and Beyonce are clearly trying to nip the paparazzi in the bud. “Thank you for respecting our privacy during this beautiful time in our lives,” reads the header.

The couple had been encouraged by other celebs to sell the first photos of their baby, a move which earned Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a reported $14 million.

It’s the second time the couple has decided to strike out on their own with a digital homage to their daughter. Shortly after Blue Ivy was born the couple released Glory, which used a sample of the infant crying in the background. It made her the youngest person ever to hit the Billboard charts.

While other Tumblr users can follow Blue Ivy’s blog, the site’s standard options to “like” or “reblog” the posts have been removed, meaning there will be less chance for the masses to take the photos out of context or trolls to leave nasty comments.

In a release, Alabama Department of Homeland Security Director Spencer Collier said that his agency was conducting a forensic analysis to determine what information might have been obtained by the hackers.

The ties to Anonymous come from claims on the group’s Twitter and Tumblr feeds. As usual with the hacktivists, the attack was linked to a political protest. A page from the hacked site bore the tag line of the group and stated that this was a response to, “recent racist legislation in an attempt to punish immigrants as criminals.”

The Guy Fawkes masks worn by the group have become the symbol of their movement. They are a reference to the comic book series V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and first published in 1982. That story chronicles a masked man’s attempts to take down the British government.

Writing in The Guardian earlier this week, Moore said he approved of the movement which has borrowed his trademark mask. “Today’s response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane…As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying. In terms of a wildly uninformed guess at our political future, it feels something like V for validation.”

Then we flew back to SF on Thursday, where we invited some exciting new companies to pitch at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and found several we expect to invite to launch at DEMO this spring in Silicon Valley. That evening, we held a meet-up for some of the companies to pitch to a big crowd at the Dutch Goose. Entrepreneurs had no microphone, so they had to scream to make themselves heard.

In Boulder, we met with companies at Foundry, one of the most respected venture firms in Colorado. Afterward, we invited them and some other promising entrepreneurs to pitch at a party at Jill’s at the St. Julien Hotel (photos below).

Our executive editor Dylan Tweney will be back in Boulder in a couple of weeks for the VC conference, speaking alongside many other great minds from around the world.

We’re off to Boston, where the Atlas Venture team and others will host the 10-company pitch event on Tuesday, and soon after that we’ll be hitting Los Angeles (more about that meeting here), Chicago, Detroit, Singapore and Austin.

Much thanks again to the teams at Foundry and Kleiner!

Here are some photos from Boulder by Christina Kiffney:

Eric Darst (@teamflowh) from flowh.com with Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)

Steve Norman from DoubleScoop

Patrick Carter (@DigitalFolio) from Digital Folio

Carrie Requist (@UGrokIt_Carrie) from UGrokIt

Matt Marshall (@mmarshall) from VentureBeat

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group

Tim at the DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group with Jeff Makowka (@jmakowka) from AARP

After sticking with a fairly consistent unibody MacBook Pro design for some time, Apple may be gearing up to bring design elements from its popular MacBook Air line into its more powerful models later this year.

The company is preparing a “top-to-bottom revamp” of the MacBook Pro lineup that will result in thinner unibody cases and solid-state hard drives and the loss of optical disk drives, sources tell AppleInsider.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard such talk, as rumors of a MacBook Air-inspired redesign for the MacBook Pro first started last year.  There’s also word that Apple is working on a 15-inch MacBook Air model, which could be related to this report.

That Apple will finally redesign the MacBook Pro this year doesn’t come as a surprise—the real question is to what extent. I have a hard time believing that Apple will completely remove the choice of larger traditional hard drives (SSDs are much faster but hold much less) from the MacBook Pro. And while the optical disk drive is easy to forgo on an ultraportable laptop, consumers who rely on the MacBook Pro as their only computer would certainly miss the ability to throw in a DVD.

There are benefits to completely dropping older hardware on the MacBook Pro. It would allow Apple to bring the quick boot and instant-on capabilities of the MacBook Air to its wider notebook lineup, and it would also significantly improve battery life. And of course, such a move would help Apple one-up Intel and the many Ultrabook manufacturers trying to ape the style of the MacBook Air.

AppleInsider says that Apple is prioritizing the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s redesign over the 17-inch model, but that’s par for the course for Apple.

It’ll be interesting to see how Apple juggles its MacBook Pro and Air lines as they begin to more closely resemble each other. Most companies would be terrified about cannibalizing a successful new product, but Apple has already shown that it isn’t afraid to make sweeping changes if the result is better products.

For the scope of this article, I am leaving all of the commentary on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and such aside for others much more well-versed than I to discuss.

A lot of people have been asking me the same question lately: Just how do file-sharing sites like MegaUpload — recently taken down by an international collection of law enforcement — make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fund lottery-winner style lifestyles that include mansions and private jets?

It’s actually pretty straightforward. These sites use the same techniques as legitimate Web sites: search, social media, ad networks, and online payment processors.

Sites that feature links to illegal videos optimize for the keyword “links,” and users that seek such videos have learned to search for “links.” Generally, providers of legal content are not trying to land in searches for links; they are trying to land in searches for the word “videos.” So searching Google for a popular TV show such as NCIS followed by the words “free links” returns sites that feature links to pirated copies of the TV show.
Clicking on one of these Google links, such as TV-Links.com, returns a well-designed Web page featuring advertising from the likes of American Express and Hertz via retargeting ad networks such as Chango.

The page also features links to the latest NCIS episodes that are illegally hosted on download sites. Each link has a rating so that visitors will know when a file is no longer available due to a DCMA takedown. As there are numerous links available on numerous download sites, there is generally always an illegal copy available for viewing. It’s technically legal to link to illegally hosted copyrighted content, so these types of sites are seemingly doing nothing wrong.

Like many profit-oriented Web sites, clicking on one of these links actually takes you to a secondary page so that the site can generate an additional page view.
Clicking on a link sends the user to file-sharing sites such as VideoWeed.com that allow streaming video of hosted files, including retargeted ad networks ads from advertisers such as Virgin America.

After watching a set amount of video, users are incentivized to pay to watch more using their credit cards, processed by payment networks such as Skrill. You’re also offered the option to earn points towards viewing videos by accepting “offers,” such as a Netflix trial subscription.

If this all looks familiar and resembles so many media sites you come across, they’ve succeeded. That’s the intention.

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.

With TaskRabbit, you can hire someone local (called a “Rabbit”) to run errands or do small bits of random work for you, including grocery shopping, data entry, and transporting all kinds of objects hither and yon. The new open API is set up to be used in two ways. One is by companies that look for short-term workers on a regular basis, say for user tests or focus groups. The other is with to-do list apps and other tools that individuals use to stay organized. Now these busy people will be able to find someone to tackle the tasks they can’t from within those apps.

Two to-do management apps have already taken advantage of the API, Astrid and Producteev. People who use those apps can outsource anything on their to-do lists without making a separate trip to TaskRabbit. User-testing company YouEye has integrated TaskRabbit into its site and is using it to hire test subjects.

The service is currently available in nine U.S. cities: Boston, New York, LA, Portland, San Antonio, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, and Seattle. It’s headed to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston next.

The San Francisco-based startup has raised $24.7 million in funding so far. The latest round of $17.8 million was closed in December 2011. In January, TaskRabbit acquired SkillSlate, a New York-based service for people auctioning off their skills and time.

via AllThingsD

Baby bunnies image via ShutterStock

Social daily deals and shopping website Sneakpeeq announced Friday is has raised $2.67 million in funding.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, picking an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. Sneakpeeq recreates that by, for example, making you click a “peeq” button to see a price rather than blatantly displaying them. The Peeq button brings to mind Amazon’s “add to cart to see the price” practice, which can be irritating. Sneakpeeq isn’t trying it to be annoying; every time you click the button, you can get a discount on your purchase. It still adds an extra step to the buying process, but at least it doesn’t feel like extra work. You get a specific amount of “peeqs” per day and can earn more by interacting with the site.

It wouldn’t be a social shopping site without some Facebook integration, and the company encourages you to share items you want to buy with your Facebook friends. Buy sharing, you get “badges” that you can redeem for discounts and more peeqs. Sneakpeeq also has a Facebook integration that can post to your timeline every time you “peeq” at a price.

Sneakpeeq joins the ranks of many other discount social shopping sites, such as Fab.com and LuxeYard. Most of these sites, Sneakpeeq included, focus on action-driven buying, which encourages shoppers to share products and interact with other shoppers to get better prices.

The new funding comes from Bain Capital Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta. It will be used for new site features, including gift buying, mobile apps, and video features.

Sneakpeeq is based in San Francisco, Calif.

[Title image (not pictured above) via Shutterstock.]

In an admission that surprised many, Facebook revealed that while its monthly usage figures on mobile were of course jaw-droppingly huge, the company still hadn’t figured out a way to make real money from those mobile users. As the S-1 states: “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”

Recent reports now state that Facebook is readying its first foray into mobile ads, with the launch of “sponsored stories” – a well-timed move if so, knowing that its mobile vulnerabilities would be revealed in the S-1.

So, now that Facebook is finally ready to commit to mobile revenues, how can it reap the rewards of having such a huge mobile user base (a stunning achievement of 425 million monthly active users)? What are the secrets behind encouraging high grossing user behavior across the mobile platform?

In my role as VP of Mobile at Badoo, I’ve experienced first hand the challenges and the rewards of scaling mobile users and revenues on a global scale. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

Mobile ads aren’t Always the easy answer

To allow ads or not to allow ads – that’s the philosophical question that founders like Zuckerberg have long wrestled with. Facebook famously delayed advertising on its primary site until it had a critical mass of users that were already hooked into the experience, had willingly given up mounds of personal data, and who wouldn’t desert the addictive platform if ads came along.

So when it came to mobile, they took the same approach. “Users first, revenues later.” Of course, in the case of Facebook’s mobile strategy, it turned out to be revenues “much later.” But, many companies struggle to even get scale in terms of mobile users, and Facebook has managed that better than anyone – nearly half a billion monthly users.

And while we’re on the topic of mobile ads, let’s be clear, turning on an integrated ad platform is no simple task. And while the mobile advertising market is now projected to grow to $17.6 billion by 2015, for a long time, it’s been the runt of the litter in terms of overall digital ad revenues. So while Facebook has been slow on the uptake, it’s hard to fault them for prioritizing other revenue streams that speak to its Internet roots, while quietly building an unparalleled mobile user base.

The challenge for Facebook now is to “turn on” mobile ads effectively, without sacrificing users. At Badoo, we chose not to go the ad route and embraced a freemium model that enhanced the user experience and paid dividends across both web and mobile platforms.

Make the right decisions on what to mobilize

The features that have attracted millions of users and developers to the Facebook Web platform are not just the widely emulated social functions, but the FB “app” platform, messaging and credits, to name but a few. What differentiates mobile at this stage, compared to say, the Web four years ago, is that so much of what makes Facebook special on the Web has already been executed brilliantly on mobile.

Messaging? You’ve got that out of the box on mobile, or you can download apps that will talk to any one or all messaging platforms. Apps? As a mobile developer, I have loads to choose from and they are really rich. I can even get them to talk to Facebook and get access to the social gold mine they’ve built. Credits? Yes. (Although paying for anything on mobile globally is still a challenge.)

And in the latter case, the value chain is very long, from banks and card processors, through mobile carriers, aggregators, specialist payment providers and even Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. – none of whom will want to hand over this key part of their business to Facebook (although some might be too dumb to prevent it).

So Facebook’s challenge has a meta-layer – not how to “port” FB to mobile, but what to mobilize, and how to pull users from apps they might already be using. How they can offer people more than they’re already getting?

Build high grossing user behavior into the DNA of your mobile app

When it comes to mobile apps, analysts predict that in-app purchases and a freemium approach will become the dominant apps business model in the future, and that paid apps will decline as a main source of revenue.

So when considering how to make a freemium model work for your mobile app, you should think about the following:

• Are you making your users do the work? If you’re asking users to make purchases from within a free app, you need to make sure that purchase is a no-brainer and that it leads to some tangible and instant gratification.
• Is there a logical flow to the user experience, where purchases make sense? In Badoo’s case, we offer “Super Powers” which are micro-payments that help you stand out in an online crowd. If you want to meet new people using our app, Super Powers will help, so even though the core of our product is always free, there is real value from upgrading your account.
• Are you thinking beyond games? While Zynga regularly tops the chart of high grossing free apps, there is life beyond social games. So think about how to make your monetized features fun and engaging in different ways. And always link it back to the core user experience, and how an in-app purchase could deepen your relationship with your user.
• Location-based behavior can help encourage higher grossing user behavior, but remember users buy into products and services – not technologies. Your location-based services need to add to your product, rarely are they a product in themselves.

Think global, but respect local

There are many challenges inherent in scaling a mobile strategy globally. There is clearly huge diversity in terms of mobile user behavior, platforms and devices, as you look region by region, country by country and even sometimes city by city.

So, how can you build something that represents your global brand, but is local enough to appeal to every user and therefore unlock a high percentage of revenue-generating behavior?

It’s a lot of work. At Badoo, we’ve spent the last 18 months designing and deploying to acquire millions of users in 180+ countries onto our multiple mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry and WAP (for non-smartphones). And when you think about the hugely complex billing and carrier aspects of a global mobile deployment, which need to be carried out without a whiff of disruption to the user experience, it’s easy to see why mobile engineers are in such high demand. It’s a huge job, it isn’t easy and it takes time.

We built location-based behavior into the core of our product, guaranteeing local relevancy to every user, wherever they were in the world. But getting them there, keeping them there, and encouraging them to make purchases, was and still is, a mammoth undertaking.

There’s currently no good substitute for the hard work of identifying local partners for things like payment integration. In our case, our London location and hugely diverse team from over 25 countries gives us a great head start in building out our local services globally.

Interestingly, when it comes to our mobile revenues, we’ve found that our mobile web users are almost as likely to pay for additional features as our app users. This insight provides some useful cues for companies looking to build a mobile audience that goes beyond “early adopters” in highly developed countries and into the global mainstream.

While apps are clearly hugely successful, and we’ve talked about the potential for in-app monetization, there’s still plenty of room for the mobile web, particularly when building a global product. Don’t neglect core mobile web users at the expense of iPhone and Android users if you want to build a truly global path to mobile monetization.

Wrapping up

Facebook has consistently innovated and executed at a rate that has left most of us breathless over the last few years. While its mobile revenue strategy might have taken a back seat until now, the revelations in the S-1 have surely lit the fire. The path to mobile monetization still has many turns ahead, so it will be interesting to see how Facebook explores the global mobile opportunity.

Matt Woolf is VP of Mobile at Badoo, the largest social network for meeting new people, with more than 136 million users worldwide.

Facebook on Android phone photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tomonobu Itagaki was at the top of his game. The legendary Japanese game design leader of Team Ninja, known for his sunglasses and leather pants, was making top-selling games in the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fighting series.

Itagaki left Tecmo-Koei, the owner of Team Ninja, in mid-2008 and got into a bitter lawsuit with his former company over royalties. It was a wrenching separation, and Itagaki finally related his version of events yesterday at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking through a translator on stage, he talked about what happened during a dark episode in his career and how he bounced back to create a new game development company, Valhalla Game Studios.

Itagaki said he originally wanted to be a novelist when he was in high school. He wanted to know the techniques to move people. Books and movies, he believed, were tools to move the thoughts and hearts of people. But he also spent a lot of time in gambling halls. To win, he said, you needed to control your rivals heart and emotions.

He read books such as The Red and the Black by Stendahl, The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Old Man the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and the novels of Raymond Carver. When he was young, he didn’t quite grasp these books. But over time, they became relevant to his career in games.

In that career, he said he learned to focus on the “Happy Three.” This included the happiness of the audience, the happiness of creators, and the happiness of game publishers. Only two or three times in his game-making life did he achieve all three of these goals. For public companies, he said, the fourth requirement for happiness is shareholders.

“It is much more difficult to achieve the Happy Four than the Happy Three,” he said.

He managed to do that when he was creating the PlayStation 2 version of Dead or Alive. He created the game in part to help Tecmo go public. But the game production got started way too late to be a launch title for the PS 2. The game ran off schedule and a sales general manager came to him to borrow a copy of the game, which was still in development. Itagaki gave it to him. Then Itagaki said the disk was sent off to manufacturing for publication, even in its unfinished state. The company made huge profits and the IPO was a success.

“But I thought I would quit making games,” Itagaki said.”An incomplete game was released.”

Some coworkers didn’t mind that. But Itagaki became depressed. He stayed at home for several months. He drank alcohol from morning to night, “but no matter how much I drank I could never get drunk.” His wife suggested he watch movies and bought him a lot of DVDs.

“It was more like just looking at the screen than watching movies,” he said.

One DVD film touched his heart, the Armageddon action movie that starred Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Bay. Itagaki watched the movie over and over again. It had a song sung by Steven Tyler for his daughter Liv Tyler. Itagaki had a three-year-old daughter of his own. Finally, she told him she didn’t want to watch this movie anymore, because the father dies. The film brought tears to Itagaki’s eyes. He kept on drinking and crying. It was, Itagaki said, such as stupid life he was living.

“What a stupid decision I had made,” Itagaki said. “I died as a game developer without even making something for my daughter.”

He decided he had to stop hiding, fight for his family and friends, and returned to work.

“There were many people waiting for me,” he said.

Itagaki pushed to make a version of Dead or Alive for the Xbox, not Sony’s platform, because it was the most powerful platform. He used Steven Tyler songs in the games, because he thought that Aerosmith and Armageddon saved his life, family, and career.

He eventually left the job and became an independent game developer. There was a lawsuit and other controversy, and Itagaki did not directly address the details of his departure.

He is now making a game called The Devil’s Third for THQ. He only has to worry about the Happy Three for that game and is a stockholder himself. He urged game developers to make games that can personally inspire people to change their lives.

“Do whatever you want to do with all your passion, to make everyone happy,” he said. “Not just for your own satisfaction. Make something that can change the life of your audience. I believe video games have such power.”

Mark Cerny, a fellow game developer, said he was touched by Itagaki’s talk. He noted that while Itagaki looks tough on the outside, his talk in Japanese was genuine, polite and heartfelt.

With the launch of the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision Blizzard (the parent company) made some controversial moves. One of them was to create the Call of Duty Elite social networking service for game fans. The service offered things like networking with friends, videos, service enhancements. But the controversial idea was that Activision wanted to charge a subscription fee for the premium version of the service. When bloggers heard about that, they revolted, Hirshberg said, because they thought that Activision would charge for things that used to be free.

“It’s a douche move,” said Neils Hansen (pictured on big screen below), a blogger who runs the Gunn Shop report on YouTube. He said he couldn’t believe that the company would alienate its core gamer base by charging money. He organized a protest to boycott the Elite service, even before he fully knew what it was.

“We had a summer of criticism,” Hirshberg said, speaking at the DICE Summit game conference in Las Vegas.

But Hirshberg said he believed from his creative background as an artist and advertising executive that games are not products, they’re brands. While people buy products, Hirshberg said, they “buy into brands.” That means that brands are a cultural phenomenon built around products such as games that inspire people to buy those products over and over again. By treating Call of Duty as a brand, Hirshberg said, the company could get away from the traditions that held that a game was a product that sold for $60. After all, in 2011, Call of Duty was a top ten topic of conversation on Facebook; it was the only entertainment brand with a product you could buy on the list.

To convince game players that there was a core Call of Duty experience, Activision created a campaign with the tag line, “There’s a soldier in all of us,” showing people of all sorts engaging in faux combat, as the weekend warriors who play games like Call of Duty. The company also created a service that players could buy into on a year round basis, delivering them new map content, vidoeos, shows, contests, and community features that could make Call of Duty into an ongoing experience, not just a product.

The company had a chance to turn around attitudes by appealing to the hardcore fans and the culture of Call of Duty. Activision then announced Call of Duty XP, a live event in Los Angeles where it would announce Modern Warfare 3 and Elite as part of a gigantic fan appreciation event. The event involved everything from paintball on a real Call of Duty map to eating at a Burger Town restaurant, which is a fictional chain in the Call of Duty games. The event was a huge success, generating $21.5 million in media impressions, 175 million Facebook impressions, 10 mil Twitter conversations, 9.8 million YouTube views, and huge livestream traffic.

Finally, at the Call of Duty XP event, Hirshberg revealed the price. It was $4.99 a month and it included all of the map packs that would normally cost gamers about $60 a year. It was a price that generated annual subscription revenue for the company. And Hansen, the Gunn Shop blogger, came back and said that he would eat his words and subscribe. It wasn’t, after all, a douche move. Activision could only accomplish something like this by establishing Call of Duty as a brand, guaranteeing gamers a unique experience, and getting the gamers to buy into the value of what it offers, Hirshberg said.

Elite had a rocky launch and it is far from perfect, he said.

“This is not a victory lap and we had technology stumbles,” Hirshberg said.

But the company has 7 million sign-ups and 1.5 million paying subscribers so far. That’s a success, and one that forced Activision to look to what it could learn from creative concepts, not just business ideas. The new tagline for Elite, Hirshberg joked, is, “Call of Duty Elite. It’s not a douche move.”

If you live in Iran, however, the government celebrates by blocking access to all websites using the “HTTPS” protocol, which includes sites from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and basically any banking web service. Essentially, this means the internet is useless. Multiple sources reporting about the new internet restrictions, including Kabir News , believe that its related to the 33rd anniversary of the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s monarch leadership.

The restrictions are speculated to remain in place for the next few weeks at most. It also comes at a time where Iranian government authorities are enacting tougher web restrictions that drastically slow down connection speeds, require all local ISPs to keep records of all subscriber data, and force internet cafe owners to add video surveillance to record the faces of all patrons.

This isn’t this first time Iran has decided to clamp down on public decent by censoring the internet. The government routinely cut off internet access in response to the large amount of protest surrounding the country’s 2009 “elections”, which were believed by many to be little more than a puppet show. The government also recently sentenced U.S.-born Iranian citizen Amir Mizra Hekmati to death for developing games with a pro-westernization stance.

As for the current situation, plenty of code-savvy folks on Hacker News are already suggesting possible workarounds. (Obviously, the Iranian leadership hasn’t seen Serenity or they’d know you can’t stop the signal, Mal.)

[Internet censorship image via ShutterStock]

Electric car maker Tesla unveiled its latest electric vehicle last night, the Model X, a cross-over that offers more space than the company’s Model S sedan and original sporty Roadster.

For those waiting for a semi-affordable electric car that offers plenty of space, power, and versatility, the Model X looks to be the best option yet.

Like other cross-over vehicles, the Model X sits somewhere between a sedan and a SUV. But Tesla couldn’t help but add its own spin to the form: the Model X features funky rear doors, dubbed “Falcon Wings,” that flip up and allow you to easily step into the car.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the Falcon Wings are the largest rear door openings found in a passenger car, CNet reports.

Tesla expects the Model X to retail close to the Model S’ price, which starts at $49,000. The company will offer the same battery options as the Model S as well, which ranges from 160 mile to 300 mile configurations. The Model X will get around 10 to 12 percent less range than the Model S, due to its added weight.

The Model X features a full third-row of seating (accessible by sliding the middle row forward), allowing it to hold up to seven passengers and their cargo. Tesla will also offer an all-wheel drive option, a first for the company, in addition to the base rear-wheel model. Thanks to the Model X’s electric drivetrain, the car can intelligently tweak the torque of every wheel to easily adapt to changing driving situations.

Tesla plans to begin production of the Model X in late 2013, with deliveries starting in 2014.

The company says that it has surpassed 15 million connected users (it’s unclear how many of those are active) since its launch in 2006. Rebtel users have made over 500 million calls on the service and have chalked up over two billion minutes of international calls.

Rebtel offers mobile and desktop PC apps that let its users call each other for free, or make inexpensive calls to international numbers. The company’s service is also accessible through any landline or mobile phone without an app. Rebtel just recently released version 2.0 of its iPhone app, which added a first-ever feature to let you hop between voice and data networks during a call.

Not only is Rebtel growing quickly, the company boasts that its average revenue per user (ARPU) is triple Skype’s. Skype now sees a monthly ARPU of $8 per month, while Rebtel’s ARPU is $24. The company increased its revenue by more than 55 percent last year to reach $60 million, and it expects to earn $95 million in 2012.

The Swedish company has spent considerable funds and effort setting up the infrastructure for its service. CEO Andreas Bernstrom told us previously that it brought in $20 million worth of financing from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures in 2006 to build a system that could connect with operators around the world and terminate voice calls in any country. During 2011, the company put together the data side of its infrastructure, including codecs and stacks to carry voice over data connections.

VoIP call photo via Shutterstock

Much like the response to SOPA in the United States, online activists in Europe have been able to generate vigorous pushback through petitions and blackouts of certain sites. And while the movement against ACTA began on the internet, protests are being held in 60 Germany cities tomorrow.

While 22 out of 27 members of the EU have signed on to ACTA, many are now changing their tack in response to the public outcry. “I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention,” said the Slovenian ambassador to Japan, Helena Drnovsek Zorko, who had signed. “Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.”

Zynga’s rise to a social gaming juggernaut traded on the public markets—which now boasts a market cap roughly equal to long-established companies like Electronic Arts—highlights the rapid transformation of the gaming industry.

Boston’s Spark Capital, eager to tap the next wave of startups in that space, has added Nabeel Hyatt, a general manager who helped founded Zynga Boston, as their first venture partner.

Hyatt has a long history as a tech entrepreneur. He trained as a designer and engineer, and spent the early part of his career as vice president of product development for Ambient Devices, an MIT Media Lab startup creating glanceable technology, embedding Internet information in everyday objects such as light bulbs, mirrors, refrigerators and umbrellas to make the physical environment an interface to digital media.

Ambient was named in Ideas of the Year by The New York Times in 2002, and Hyatt was a nominee for the Top Innovators Under 30 by MIT Technology Review.

During the heady days of the dot-com boom, Nabeel was COO of Teamtalk, a publicly traded online sports content and technology company. He worked at the Cambridge based Conduit Labs, which started out making Flash based games for the web, and transitioned to building for the Facebook platform before being acquired by Zynga and becoming the centerpiece of their Boston operations.

“As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather carefully. I’ve been an entrepreneur as long as I’ve been anything, and I still have boundless energy to work in startups. For me it felt like time to see if I could shift my focus from building a single company to impacting the broader ecosystem,” Hyatt wrote on his blog. “Anyone who knows me knows I’m a deep believer in startup culture. Not the “startup scene” – who cares about that really – but the engine of learning, risk, and ownership culture that draws so many of us in. Thankfully that ecosystem feels really healthy right now, with more companies starting, and more angels supporting them, in those early days.”

Currently, Amazon offers its streaming video service as an added perk for members of its Prime membership, which costs $79 per year and includes free two-day shipping on lots of items sold on the online retail giant’s website. At its core, the Prime membership’s purpose is to make purchasing items through Amazon more attractive because people feel like they’re getting more of a deal since shipping fees aren’t factored into individual purchases.

“The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers. The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today—we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future,” Amazon Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition Brad Beale told Gigaom recently.

One reason people are speculating that Amazon will split off the Prime video portion into its own subscription service is that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said during the company’s fourth quarter earnings, “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours.”

Another reason people expect a standalone Prime video service Amazon’s aggressive pursuit of new streaming licensing agreements. In July, the company added streaming content from CBS and NBCUniversal. It added Fox Network content in September. And earlier this week, Amazon signed a deal to bring Viacom video content to Prime, which makes the Prime service’s streaming library more competitive with Netflix and Hulu.

Personally, I don’t expect Amazon to break its streaming video into a standalone service. And since the company’s main focus is to drive more sales to its retail business, it doesn’t make sense to provide ways for people to get only what they want without interacting with the main website. Right now Amazon doesn’t have to spend money promoting and marketing its Prime video for it to remain lucrative. That wouldn’t be true if it was a standalone service.

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

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

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.

As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.

But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.

Sketches of Double Fine's new game

“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”

The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.

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

The lousy performance of video game sales in physical retail stores masks what’s really happening as the industry transforms to digital sales, which aren’t captured in the retail numbers. Gamers are shifting their purchases to online, social, and mobile forms of gaming—dubbed digital gaming—while the retail side is shrinking fast. And the growth in digital isn’t quite big enough to offset the shrinking retail numbers.

In January, hardware sales were $199.5 million, down 38 percent from $324.0 million a year ago. Software was $355.9 million, down 38 percent from $576.0 million a year ago. Accessory sales were $195.2 million, down 18 percent from $237.1 million a year ago. In December, hardware sales were down 28 percent while software was down 14 percent.

Full told, the estimated total consumer spending on games includes physical video and retail games, used games, game rentals, subscriptions, full-game digital downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile games. Not counting hardware, sales were $379.6 million, down 37 percent from $603.2 million a year ago.

Liam Callahan, analyst at the NPD Group, said, “January retail performance experienced steep declines with a lack of software launches, and poor hardware and accessory performance partly related to bad comps from Kinect-related success in January 2011.” A year ago, there were a lot more releases of new video games in January.

He added, “Outside of new physical retail sales, we estimate that the consumer spend on other ways to acquire content including used games, full game and add-on content downloads, social network games, mobile games, rentals and subscriptions accounted for an additional $350 – $400 million in sales.  Our final quarterly estimate of the Q1 2012 consumer spend in these areas will be released in our Q1 Games Market Dynamics: U.S.”

David Dennis, spokesman for Microsoft, said that the Xbox 360 had another month as the leader in console sales. The Xbox 360 led U.S. hardware sales for the 13th month in a row, selling 270,000 units in January. Microsoft said it holds 49 percent share of console sales, with the total retail spend on Xbox hitting $301 million.

NPD is working with research company EEDAR to try to come up with more accurate numbers for global digital and physical game sales worldwide. The top-selling game of the month was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (pictured), which was launched in November and is the top-selling video game of all time.

The information about the Google-branded device comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed people briefed on the project. If true, it would mark the Google’s first attempt at creating a hardware product without the aid of an electronics manufacturing partner. The search giant has historically concentrated its resources on developing web-based services, and more recently its open-source Android operating system software for mobile and streaming media devices.

The report indicates that the device is being developed by Google’s Android department, which has previously worked with consumer electronics companies HTC and Samsung on a Google-branded smartphone running a “pure” version of the Android OS. The report also states that the device would allow people to make purchases through the Android Market, which may not be restricted to just music—meaning video, podcasts, etc.

In addition to the word-of-mouth rumors, there are several reasons to believe Google is indeed developing its own streaming device. Last week, an FCC application from Google was unearthed requesting permission to use an undisclosed new “entertainment device” in four major cities over the next six months. As I previously theorized, the data transfer process for the device described in the application would probably allow people to grab video or audio content from the Internet and then distribute it to all their other mobile devices or set-top boxes using Bluetooth technology. The benefit of this would be that people aren’t exhausting their overall network or racking up expensive data charges from wireless carriers.

Also, The timing of the news coincides with Google nearing approval from federal regulators on its acquisition of prominent consumer electronics company Motorola Mobility.

That includes both free and paid memberships, and it represents a sizable chunk of the overall numbers of consumers who bought the game. About 1.5 million of those users have chosen to pay $4.99 a month for the privilege of getting the latest content for titles such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which was the biggest-selling game of 2011. A subscription to Elite costs less per year than getting all of the downloadable content coming over the next nine months at full price.

Digital revenues, such as downloadable content or the social network subscriptions, added up to $1.6 billion for all of 2011. That was more than 34 percent of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company’s revenues for all of 2011.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 players have logged more than 639 million hours of game time through Dec. 31. The total number of unique online gamers playing the game was 12 percent greater than the number for last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops. (I’m one of those Modern Warfare 3 players, with a ranking of 71, or Major General II, on multiplayer).

Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, said in an analyst conference call, “We have grown the Call of Duty franchise every year for the past eight years.” Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops, and Modern Warfare 2 are the top three most-played games on Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service for the Xbox 360.

Hirshberg said that a new Call of Duty game will debut in 2012, repeating a pattern that has taken place every year in recent history. There are 40 million monthly active Call of Duty users, with more than 20 million for Modern Warfare 3 alone. Call of Duty China will also launch sometime soon.

Meanwhile, the company ‘s new Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure hybrid toy-game was a big success, with more than 20 million toys sold. Skylanders has more than 1 million registered users for the online version. A new version called Skylanders Giants is coming this year.

Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, said in an analyst conference call  that World of Warcraft continues to maintain its status as the No. 1 MMO in spite of EA’s heavily promoted launch of the Star Wars game on Dec. 20.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company is the largest independent publisher of video games, buoyed by franchises such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, World of Warcraft, and its new hybrid toy-game Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure.

Activision Blizzard plans to strike back against EA and rivals such as Trion World’s Rift by launching a new expansion for World of Warcraft, dubbed Mists of Pandaria.

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

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

On the same stage yesterday, Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen emphasized just how vital games are to the Facebook ecosystem (and growing Credits-based revenue) when he said, “It’s critically important to us that games are successful… There are some people who would find their Timeline incomplete without a lot of games activity.

“To the extent that we can help our games grow, because of that audience, it’s good for [game developers] and good for us.”

Sjogreen said that because games were such a big part of the Facebook experience, “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.”

“Discovery for games” can, for many normal social-media users, translate to “friends spamming me with gaming requests.” While Facebook owes a lot of its success to its games-loving users, Sjogreen acknowledged there are also many people who would be happy to never see a game-related update in their News Feeds.

As Google began ramping up for its own social network launch, it had to think carefully about both groups. Would it choose to cater to the game-players, who stir up a lot of third-party developer activity and who can bring lots of revenue through a network? Or would they protect the interests of the non-gamers who just want to chat, comment, and share without being invited to pet someone’s virtual mountain goat.

“We saw equal amounts of anticipation and… people who hoped we never allowed games on Google+,” said Glazer.

Currently, Google+ does have a small number of games, not more than “several dozen,” said Glazer. The company has limited the number of developers on the games side of the Google+ Platform for the same reasons it’s taking it slowly with all third-party developers: it wants to get the Platform right before it opens the platform up for a game-developer free-for-all.

While Google+ will allow individual users to reach out to friends and invite them to play and participate in games, Glazer said the company is trying to avoid spammy behaviors by letting People choose to whom they send those invitations, in true Circle-centric style.

“What we’re trying to mostly do is put control in the hands of users,” he said. “First and foremost, you choose your audience,” and approach Glazer said will make it easier for game developers to get distribution without being perceived as spamming.

And of course, more games-related APIs are coming. Currently, a few APIs exist for getting user IDs, issuing invitations, and processing payments.

Most importantly, right now games are largely separate from most other Google+ social activity. Glazer was asked if, given their controversial nature, games will always be segregated.

“Always is a big word,” Glazer responded. “Maybe. It will always be distributed in a way that respects the entire community.”

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

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

The big takeaways are that Microsoft plans to have WOA PCs available when other Windows 8 computers are shipping, and the company will also include desktop versions of optimized Office 15 apps in all WOA devices.

Windows on ARM running on an early test device

To refresh: Microsoft announced way back in January 2011 that it would be porting Windows over to ARM chips. Doing so would give device makers an alternative to more power-hungry chips from Intel and AMD when developing Windows devices, and it would allow Microsoft to take advantage of the advances in power efficiency being made by mobile ARM chips.

The Office 15 apps, which will include Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and OneNote, are among the few desktop apps that WOA will support. The OS will include the traditional Windows Explorer file manager, Windows Explorer, and other desktop Windows features, but it won’t run traditional x86/64 Windows apps. Metro style apps available on the Microsoft Store, however, will run across WOA and all other versions of Windows 8.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Office 15 is aiming for a simpler style than previous iterations. There’s more white space than usual for an Office app, and it’s clear that Microsoft is using its Metro design cues wherever it can.

Another interesting aspect of WOA PCs is that you’ll never be able to turn them off. Microsoft is instead relying on a new “Connected Standby” low-power mode that will purportedly last for weeks.  “Connected Standby permeates the engineering for WOA PCs from the hardware through the firmware, OS, WinRT platform, and apps,” Sinofsky writes. Microsoft is also working on bringing the low-power mode to other Windows 8 PCs as well, but you’ll still be able to turn those off completely.

Microsoft says it won’t release Windows on ARM separately, so it will only be something that you can get when purchasing a WOA tablet or PC. The company will also be rolling out test PCs to select developers and hardware partners around the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview at the end of this month.

Check out a video overview of Windows on ARM: