July 9-10, 2013
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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Ubisoft showed off its Just Dance 2014 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and while it’s a multiplatform affair, it has something special for players of the Nintendo Wii U: the capability to recognize up to six players at once.

The new game is the sequel to last year’s Just Dance 4 and is part of a series that has become the No. 1 dance franchise of all time, with more than 40 million games sold to date. It’s biggest platform was Nintendo’s Wii, so the Wii U version will likely be highly anticipated. It will also play on the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and other platforms.

Last year, Just Dance 4 was the fifth largest-selling video game on all platforms. In this version, you will see 40 new tracks, such as “Pound the Alarm” by Nicki Minaj and “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. One new feature is World Dance Floor, an online multiplayer mode where players join a virtual crew with other fans.

Here’s our video of Just Dance 2014 on the Wii U.

Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — As the senior producer on Plants vs. Zombies 2, Allen Murray plays it a lot. It debuts on July 18, but Murray already has loads of tips for how to survive those giant waves of zombies that attack your house and moan while traversing your deadly lawn.

We caught up with Murray at a recent press briefing and played a round of PVZ2. We wanted to learn about all of the tactics you can use to protect your brainz from the zombies. The first PVZ debuted almost four years ago, and it became a huge hit across multiple platforms. It sold millions of units and PopCap got diverted doing lots of ports. Now it has revamped the gameplay of the new title and added new gameplay elements, like plant food. You can use that to feed your plants and help them stave off zombies attacks.

PVZ2 debuts on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch on July 18. It’s being revealed today at the E3 game trade show in Los Angeles.

Here’s a video of our interview with Murray.

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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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Square Enix has come up with a great original game in Murdered: Soul Suspect.

Airtight Games is developing Murdered for release on unnamed next-generation platforms early next year. Eric Studer, the senior design producer, said in an interview with GamesBeat said it was thrilling to work on a new intellectual property with a unique story. You play the ghost of a murdered detective who can only find peace by finding his killer and bringing him to justice. It is a creative title that blends a detective mystery with a scary ghost tale.

At a time when the consoles are in transition, it is gratifying to see companies make a big bet on a cinematic game. Studer talked with out about the inspirations for the game and the unique detective style gameplay that distinguishes it.

Here’s our video interview with Studer.

[Video editing by Alejandro Quan-Madrid]

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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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Sega’s Total War: Rome II is going to pack a nice surprise for gamers when it arrives on the PC this fall. It’s going to be two games in one. The title combines turn-based strategy in its Civilization-like campaign map of ancient Rome with the hectic combat of real-time gameplay.

Al Bickham, the communications manager for Sega’s The Creative Assembly studio, told us about this hybrid strategy of mixing Civ-like empire building with on-the-ground combat.

Here’s our interview with Bickham below.

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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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Halo: Spartan Assault is debuting on a Windows tablet, bringing the blockbuster franchise to mobile fans for the first time. It’s a twin-stick, arcade-style action-shooting game that uses a top-down perspective of the sci-fi battlefield.

You control the game with your fingers, tapping the screen turn shoot or turn your character. (Here’s our full preview). The vision was to give Halo fans a new way to experience the franchise that has sold more than 50 million copies since 2001 and generated more than $3.4 billion in revenue. The team tried out more than 15 versions of the mobile game over a period of years before they felt they got it right.

You play as Sarah Palmer, the character from Halo 4′s Spartan Ops missions. The time is set in 2552, when the cease-fire with the Covenant alien races has been broken. You can customize your armor and acquire boosts. You can choose to use just about everything from the franchise assets: vehicles, weapons, armor abilities, and Skulls. The graphics do look good, but it’s hard to say if hardcore gamers are going to go crazy of this.

Vanguard Entertainment made Spartan Assault under the direction of Microsoft-owned Halo development studio 343 Industries. It runs on Windows 8 and Windows 8 Mobile devices. The game will debut in July for $6.99. It’s a risk for Microsoft to make it captive to its own hardware, but it might also be one of the only ways to get the Microsoft-branded tablets to sell. It has 25 missions.

We sat down with developer Graeme Jennings of 343 Industries at a recent pre-E3 preview. Jennings told us that the team spent a long time making the game more accessible. One of the challenges was making the game easy to play for people with different hand sizes.

“It took loads of user testing to get it right,” Jennings said. “One of the key things about this game is production values.”

Here’s our video interview below.

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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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Gran Turismo 6 will be a smooth ride. That’s the promise from series creator Kazunori Yamauchi, who has worked on the PlayStation racing franchise for 15 years and has watched it sell more than 70 million units since 1997. That’s several billion dollars in revenue.

Room for improvement still exists, and that’s what the focus of the sixth version of the game is all about.

Yamauchi recently unveiled the latest title in the series, which arrives this fall. We caught up on some of the details with Taku Imasaki (right), the North American producer of Gran Turismo 6 at Sony Computer Entertainment America. To sell another 10 million units, the next game has to feature more than just better graphics. After all, nobody complained about the fake graphics in Gran Turismo 5, which debuted on the PlayStation 3 in 2010. To broaden the audience, Sony will reach out to new markets where consoles are just taking off.

“Wherever there are car fans, we want to reach them,” Imasaki said.

But Imasaki says that Gran Turismo 5 turned into a complex beast, especially on the programming side. The new entry will have a compact game engine with better performance and more flexibility to deal with downloadable content. It will also connect to other devices such as smartphones and tablets. And it will have more social functions.

Gran Turismo has outlasted other racing-game franchises because of its focus on authentic racing simulation. The cars look super realistic, and the tracks are beautiful recreations of the real thing. The latest game will have a new physics engine with more accurate suspension and kinematics calculations.

Yamauchi’s Polyphony Digital studio is preparing more than 1,200 cars and 77 tracks for the PS3 version coming this holiday season. Those cars will have thousands of aerodynamic parts and custom wheels. Players can personalize their own custom cars far more than in the past. Sony recently announced the title at the Silverstone raceway in the United Kingdom. That track is one of seven new locations in Gran Turismo 6, bringing the total to 33 with multiple layouts for each course.

Not many games have made it to their 15th anniversary. Gran Turismo shows what happens when you have a relentless focus on quality. The payoff becomes bigger over time as a loyal fan base comes back over and over again. We’ll see if these new advancements are enough to keep the audience growing, even in the midst of a console transition.

See our video interview with Imasaki below.

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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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Storytelling is one of Naughty Dog’s strengths, but the path through its latest video game, The Last of Us for Sony’s PlayStation 3, isn’t just a linear one. It’s a tale about Joel and Ellie, the main characters, and their quest for survival. But there are many ways to do that.

Naughty Dog game designer Ricky Cambier told us in a video interview that the Lincoln chapter that we saw last night — something that Sony will show at the upcoming E3 game trade show — will allow players to explore different parts of a small town and view some sidequests in the game.

In many of the levels, Ellie and Joel have a mission. In Lincoln, they need to get a car from a reluctant friend named Bill. But Cambier tells us there are explorations available in the small town — like when Ellie discovers an arcade machine — that reveal the nature of the relationship between Joel, who knew life before a pandemic wiped out most people on Earth, and Ellie, who was born after it and grew up and knows nothing else but the struggle to survive.

Here’s our complete video interview with Cambier, with scenes from the new Lincoln chapter. GamesBeat correspondent Alejandro Quan-Madrid edited the video.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

One of the more unique offerings in VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit event are breakout sessions where executives can talk off the record about some of the most pressing problems in the mobile world.

While “who said what” is somewhat anonymous, attendees can take notes and ideas down from these sessions to take back to their own companies. We also dedicate time at the end of the Mobile Summit to communicate lessons learned from the boardroom sessions so everyone gets to hear a bit from each session. A representative from each session comes up on stage and gives a quick play-by-play of the biggest takeaways.

At our last Mobile Summit, which took place two weeks ago at Cavallo Point resort (in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge), we covered the following topics and takeaways during the boardroom sessions.

Check out the full recap of the boardroom sessions in the video, below the bullet point summaries.

User experience and design

• Many companies are moving away from “mobile first.”
• We want unique identifiers for people at large.
• App discovery still needs serious work.
• Communication between apps is a problem.
• Huge problem is having content people want.
• Design around specific use cases.
• Privacy can be hurdle to good design.

User acquisition

• More platforms are needed — there’s too much dominance by iOS and Android.
• Search needs to be optimized for apps.
• App stores don’t have enough transparency.
• Marketing can’t be an afterthought.

Mobile commerce

• Frictionless user experiences (like Uber) offer the most compelling experiences.
• Apple, Google, and Amazon have millions of credit cards but aren’t going to work together on a single payments platform.
• The majority of attendees were not bullish on NFC.
• We need to get more details about our customers (Google could help with this).

Infrastructure and mobile ecosystem roles

• The ecosystem needs to work better together.
• Mobile operators could help by offering location, billing tools, and better relationships with customers.

Mobile device as a remote control for your life

• We need to think about all consumers, not just early adopters.
• A lot of love for Nest as mobile connection improving your life and saving you money.

Mobile enterprise

• Security is a big issue (maybe the biggest) for the enterprise and creating a unified framework is a big concern.
• 80 percent of companies are doing BYOD, and 10 percent actually have BYOD policies — that needs to change.
• Educate users better about their devices and the full-range of these devices.
• Apps should also improve employees’ lives.

Mobile monetization

• There are multiple revenue streams — microtransactions are working particularly well at the moment.
• Software and services on devices shouldn’t be blanketed with nonrelevant ads.
• Consumers spending a lot of time in mobile, but ad dollars aren’t following.

Photo by Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Nvidia‘s Project Shield remains on schedule for release in the second quarter, the company’s chief executive said.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the world’s biggest standalone graphics chip maker, said in a speech today to investors that Nvidia is targeting Project Shield — a game controller with a 5-inch screen attached — at the most enthusiastic gamers on the Android platform.

“Shield becomes the ultimate Android gaming device,” he said.

He also noted that Nvidia has invested around $10 million in the project. That’s similar to the $8 million-plus raised via Kickstarter for the Ouya microconsole, but it’s also a lot less than major home console makers spend on a launch. On the other hand, Nvidia spends $880 million a year on the core R&D behind its chips and $300 million more on Tegra itself. All of that money makes it easier to launch Project Shield.

He did not share many other details. He said that Project Shield will “hopefully be on shelves by the end of Q2. It is going into production soon.”

Project Shield lets players enjoy free-to-play Android games on a big screen TV by connecting the Shield device to the TV via a HDMI cable. The aim is to bring the disruptive power of an app store full of free-to-play games to the television in direct competition with $60 games.

With Shield, you can play PC games — like those from the digital distribution service Steam — on the TV or its small portable display. The PC does the hard work of processing the game, using a GeForce graphics processing unit (GPU). It then displays the image on the TV or monitor. Then you can control the game with the Project Shield controller. The PC can also use Wi-Fi to stream the video of the game to the Project Shield screen.

I played the PC version of Borderlands 2 on the Shield today, and it worked great. The graphics are top-notch, and they look good on both the TV screen and the small screen. That capability to play PC games is an edge that Shield has over the likes of Moga, Green Throttle Games, and other devices that can only play Android games. Project Shield is also a good match in this respect for the PC-focused Razor Edge, which Razor will sell for $1,200 or more. You can bet that Nvidia isn’t going to be charging that much for Project Shield. (It has not announced a price).

Nvidia hasn’t announced any Project Shield exclusive games yet — nor has it announced any games at all. On the other hand, it doesn’t have to. It can run your existing collection of PC and Android games.

Project Shield will use Nvidia’s latest Tegra 4 processor, which is going to have PC-like graphics performance. Shield can also tap games that are available on Android in Nvidia’s Tegra Zone game portal. It’s cool to get Android games in the living room. But Huang said that “Android is not just a mobile operating system. It is a computing system.”

Tegra Zone’s user base has grown by 80 percent over the year, said Phil Carmack, head of Nvidia’s Tegra business. Carmack noted that 76 percent of revenue in the Google Play app store is now coming from games.

Here’s a video I shot today with Andrew Coonrad, tech marketing analyst at Nvidia, about Project Shield. Hopefully, Nvidia will have more details available soon.

Project Shield demo from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

NEW YORK CITY — T-Mobile is finally getting the iPhone next month — and it looks like the beleaguered carrier’s customers can expect speeds similar to the competition.

In my brief testing of T-Mobile’s iPhone 5 at its press event today, I saw a download speed of around 16 megabits per second and an upload speed of 7.4 Mbps. That’s typical real-world speed for both AT&T and Verizon’s LTE networks in congested areas, and it’s slightly faster from what I’ve seen of T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network (its fastest network so far).

T-Mobile’s LTE network certainly has the potential to be faster, just like its competitors. Earlier benchmarks on the same iPhone 5 unit I was testing achieved download speeds of 40 Mbps and 20 Mbps and upload speeds up to 12 Mbps. It’s also tough to judge T-Mobile’s LTE network at the moment, as it only turned on LTE connectivity in New York City today. T-Mobile CEO John Legere said today that it expects to cover 100 million people with LTE by the middle of 2013 and 200 million people by the end of the year.

As a comparison, I saw a Samsung Galaxy Note II achieve download speeds of close to 60 Mbps at T-Mobile’s event today. After a certain point, though, consumers likely won’t notice the difference between two blazing fast connections.

Below, check out a demonstration of T-Mobile’s iPhone 5 by Apple senior director Stan Ng.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We got a look inside the latest Lamborghini Avenntador sports car last week at Nvidia’s GPU Technology conference in San Jose, Calif. It was there because it sports a sci-fi style user interface on the inside, as if you were piloting a fighter jet. As you can tell from the inside of this car, the future of the automobile will include a lot of technology that powers the touchscreens, instrument clusters, and gauges. Once stodgy, cars are racing ahead, so to speak, so they can keep up with the trends in technology.

Danny Shapiro, the director of automotive products at graphics chip maker Nvidia, showed us the car and the cool electronics inside it. Nvidia has scored a deal to get its Tegra mobile computing chips into a whole fleet of cars under the Volkswagen Group, including Audi, VW, Bentley, and Lamborghini. The Lamborghini infotainment screen shows Google Maps in full 3D. You can zoom in or zoom out; the system is very responsive. The device uses a Tegra 3 processor, the same mobile processor found in smartphones and tablets. The reason is that car makers are racing to make their cars compatible with all of the mobile devices that drivers are carrying, and they are doing so with safety and comfort in mind.

The Lamborghini’s computer system has its own features, as the user interfaces are customizable and based on the design style of the car. The Audi group cars designers are adopting the Tegra VCM, a module that enables them to add a new kind of Tegra chip every year, fitting it into the same slot in the car’s electronics system. That way, the cars can swap out for a better processor each year. The Audi Connect technology (not used in the Lamborghini) makes it possible to connect the car on a wireless network that gives you more services. Tesla’s Model S car also uses a Tegra 3 chip to power a 17-inch touchscreen.

I took a test drive in a BMW 7 series car last week and was particularly impressed with the heads-up display on the windshield, which told me the speed that I was traveling and the speed limit on that street. That information did not obstruct my view, but its presence on the windshield meant that I did not need to look down to see it. It really does make you feel like a fighter pilot.

Here’s our video interview with Shapiro.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The Creative Finder is a network for creative professionals, such as photographers, illustrators, and designers. We caught up with the Singapore-based company last week at SXSW in Austin, where it was launching its newest product, Imgembed.

Imgembed is a simple tool for uploading images and tracking their use. People who want to use the image (for instance, on a blog) can do so easily just by clicking the little “embed” button, as seen in the screenshot above. That gives you a code to put on your own blog or website. The photographer’s name will automatically be included with the image, so bloggers don’t have to hassle with typing that data in separately (and image owners can be sure that others won’t use their images without attribution).

If someone wants to use an image without the embedded attribution, they can pay the creator a small amount. The amount you pay depends on how many people actually view the image; The Creative Finder takes 30 percent, and the rest goes to the creator.

“Many people just use an image without putting the name of the photographer under it. So with Imgembed, we make it so easy to use, and it’s totally for free, that people … no longer have any need to steal images from Google Images or anywhere on the Internet,” says founder Alex Goh.

Watch the full video interview with Goh here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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I’ll admit, I’m no fan of big phones. But with the Galaxy S4, which Samsung announced tonight in New York City, the company shows you can make a large screen fit into a surprisingly thin and light device.

After having a chance to use the Galaxy S4 tonight, I was surprised how much more polished it felt than the Galaxy S III. It’s made of the same plastic, but it’s lighter and rests in your hand more snugly. The polycarbonate trim along the sides of the phone gives it a nice accent — even though it’s not as attractive as metal. I still prefer the more elegant metal design of the HTC One, but Samsung’s design certainly won’t disappoint its fans.

As you can see in the video below, the screen is the real star of the Galaxy S4. At five inches with a 1080p display, it’s incredibly sharp and vibrant. It even bested the Galaxy S III’s already-bright screen.

Even though it has a bigger screen than the Galaxy S III, the Galaxy S4 is actually thinner. When placed alongside its predecessor and the Galaxy Note II, it’s easy to see how Samsung’s design sense has become more refined over the past year.

Check out the video below for more impressions:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The #WinSXSW crew just spent five days at South by Southwest shooting interviews with 126 different up-and-coming startups.

Every one’s a winner, of course, in our hearts. But in the cold light of reality, only a few rise to the top of the popularity contest we call #WinSXSW. (VentureBeat is co-hosting the contest along with Fandrop.)

By now, you know the rules: Companies give 30-second answers to our interview questions. We post the videos on WinSXSW.com. Then you vote on the pitches you like the best, by sharing those videos through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn. The winners are those companies with the most votes at the end of the contest, but we also picked daily winners for each of the days of SXSW Interactive.

So far, more than 50,000 people have visited the #WinSXSW site to view videos or cast votes.

The winner for day three was Citybot, a mobile app that helps people plan trips and map out their itineraries. (Vote for Citybot on #WinSXSW here.)

And for day four, the top vote-getter was Jobhuk, a crowdsourcing platform for referring potential hires and hiring new employees.

(Vote for Jobhuk on #WinSXSW here.)

Since SXSW Interactive is over, we’re not interviewing any more companies. But you can still enter if you want — we just created a new category, for “Best Product Video,” and all you need to do to enter is register and then upload your own product video.

And there’s still time to vote on your favorites. Voting ends on Friday, the 15th, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, and we’ll announce the winners on March 20. Check the full list of #WinSXSW entries to see the current front-runners in each category.

Oh, and by the way, there are real prizes, including cash and services worth more than $100,000, plus introductions to top investors at A-list venture firms, and the possibility of coverage on VentureBeat.

Top photo: Snapr/Flickr

Live game video streaming site Twitch is hitting its stride, as the company announced today it drew 28 million unique viewers in February alone.

Those viewers watched more than 600,000 players broadcast their own games, and each of the viewers watched more than 90 minutes of video per day. This suggests that the video game community is becoming hooked on live events and watching other gamers play.

“Twitch launched in June of 2011 and our growth ever since has exceeded even my expectations, which were not small,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. “A year-and-a-half later, the community of broadcasters and viewers has multiplied hundreds of percent.”

Publishers like Electronic Arts, Activision, and Sony Online Entertainment have begun integrating Twitch directly into their games. They have found that tapping the community is a good way to spread word of mouth about a game. That reduces the need to spend money on traditional advertising.

Twitch has created a broadcasting software development kit that game companies can use to easily add in-game broadcasting. Players can share their gameplay with the whole Twitch community — as they are playing — with only a few clicks. Professional gamers are starting to draw big audiences that way.

“Twitch has become the go-to live video platform for the entire video game ecosystem,” said Matthew DiPietro, Twitch’s VP of marketing. “Our broadcaster base includes everybody from passionate individual gamers to large video game companies and organizations. E-sports organizations, gaming media outlets, game developers, video game talk shows, conventions, charities and more all find a home on Twitch, with a passionate audience craving their content.”

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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AUSTIN, Tex. — We Are Pop Up is a startup that is working to match landlords with short-term commercial tenants.

For instance, if you are a retailer and want to rent a space for a pop-up store, or if you want to rent an office space for a week or two, We Are Pop Up can help you find the right space.

There really isn’t a business model for finding short-term commercial leases like this yet, so anyone looking for a short-term commercial lease has to resort to a number of complicated and inefficient alternatives, like Craigslist. We Are Pop Up aims to make a platform to lower the costs and increase the efficiency of the market.

Two of the founders are based in the U.S. but cofounder Alastair Moore is based in London. He loves the mix of skills, industries, and sectors in the city.

Check out the interview we did with Moore at SXSW below.

Find out how the UK can help your business grow.

The giant fantasy role-playing universe of Ultima had humble beginnings. Richard Garriott, the head of Portalarium game studio, created the first elements of that universe when he was a kid in the 1970s.

He was one of the first adopters of the paper-and-pencil Dungeons & Dragons game, and he started creating campaigns. One of the stories he wrote was about “Lord British.” In high school, he was a poor student in English class, but one of his rare A’s was a story that told the story of one of his D&D dungeons. Garriott still has a copy of that story, which mentions the evil wizard Lord Mondain, the land of Sosaria, the Village of the Moon, and Lord British, which became Garriott’s own alias in computer games.

“Years before I had a computer, I was writing Ultima,” he said.

Garriott’s first game was Akalabeth: World of Doom, a predecessor to the Ultima series for the Apple II computer. He sold it in plastic bags in stores for $19 to $35. The game sold 30,000 copies, and Garriott made $150,000 from it. His father, who was an astronaut for NASA, was making less than half that in a year.

Garriott was still in high school.

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness was published as a computer game in 1981. In the first Ultima, the Stranger is summoned to Sosaria to defeat the evil wizard Mondain. The series turned out to be one of the biggest in gaming history, with millions of units sold, nine games in the main Ultima line, spinoffs such as Ultima: Underworld, and Ultima Online. In 1983, Garriott founded his company, Origin Systems, based on the revenues from Ultima and sold it to Electronic Arts in 2004. EA still owns the rights to the Ultima name.

When Garriott created the Ultima universe, he didn’t just write the story. He also wrote all of the details in the backstory and the chronology of the world. He wrote about the locations of magic items and other things that could help him keep track of everything in his notebook. He did that after studying J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the way that Tolkien created a huge backstory (chronicled in later books like The Silmarillion, which used the word Akallabêth), complete with languages and history. That is still the way Garriott creates his games today.

Here’s the video interview with Garriott, who is working on a new role-playing game series for the first time in 15 years:

Richard Garriott shows us how Lord British got his start from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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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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Michael Nankin has been working on the Defiance television show that ties in with the massively multiplayer online game of the same name from Trion Worlds. The project has occupied hundreds of creators for years and is finally coming to a head. The game debuts April 2, and its story builds to the beginning of the TV show that debuts on April 15.

“There’s a seamless transition from one to the other, and we are hoping that will lead gamers — after becoming attached to the characters after two weeks of play — into the pilot,” Nankin said.

You can play the game without ever watching the show and vice versa, but as TV series goes on, some characters will leave the show and transition into the game. Global issues affect both worlds, as the show is set in St. Louis and the game is based in the San Francisco area. The sci-fi show has the flavor of a western, but Nankin describes it more as an immigrant drama.

The first season will have 13 episodes. Some are finished and some aren’t. That’s what you call real-time production. Here’s our video interview with Nankin.

SyFy’s Michael Nankin tells us about the making of the Defiance television show from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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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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Trion Worlds’ Nick Beliaeff has been working on Defiance, the online game and television show “transmedia” project, for the better part of five years. The game is set to debut on April 2, two weeks before the April 15 launch of SyFy’s television show. Making the massively multiplayer online game has been a harrowing journey for Trion’s team, but it has sent the first version of the game off to manufacturing so retailers can begin selling the disks on time.

So Beliaeff is a little tired. But he doesn’t have time to rest, as Trion still has many episodes to do, and the the game is going run as a continuous service alongside the TV season. Both the show and the game reinforce each other as a single entertainment property.

“We’re so excited this labor of love is about to see the light of day,” he said in an interview with GamesBeat.

In our video interview with Beliaeff, he was breathing a sigh of relief about finishing the launch part of the game. But he is still preoccupied with all of the details that still need attention in the ongoing project. Trion raised more than $150 million and hired more than 500 people across its studios to make dynamic MMOs like Defiance, which is a cross-platform shooting game. Defiance itself occupied the time of more than 150 people, and SyFy has had more than 150 working on the TV show.

The first two weeks of the game follow two of the characters in the San Francisco and Marin County regions of Earth,after seven alien races have crash-landed on the planet. The two characters, Joshua Nolan and Erisa, will move from the game into the beginning of the TV pilot, which is set in St. Louis, in a seamless way. That will be the first of a number of crossover points between show and game. Trion has generated enough content for hundreds of hours of gameplay. But the development has seen a distinct hand-off between the first two weeks of the game and the start of the TV show.

Beliaeff’s team has completed its first patch and the content update that happens with the start of the TV show. But he’s also got to get his team moving on the game content to go with the second season of the TV show.

In the meantime, Comcast and NBC Universal (owner of SyFy) are building a crescendo of marketing noise so that everyone on Earth knows about Defiance. Here’s our video interview with Beliaeff.

Trion Worlds’ Nick Beliaeff describes Defiance’s run to the finish line after five years of development from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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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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Richard Garriott, chief executive of Portalarium and known under the handle Lord British, announced his first new fantasy role-playing game in 15 years today. His Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is the spiritual successor of the Ultima series, and Garriott explained why that is the case in an interview with GamesBeat.

Garriott is one of the craftsmen of the video game business, and he shows how he designs games in our video interview. His fantasy role-playing universe of Ultima had its origins as a Dungeons & Dragons paper-based story from his high school years. Garriott’s first game was Akalabeth: World of Doom, a predecessor to the Ultima series on the Apple II computer. He sold in plastic bags in stores for $19 to $35. The game sold 30,000 units and Garriott made $150,000 from it. His father, who was an astronaut for NASA, was making less than half that in a year.

Garriott was still in high school at this time.

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, was published as a computer game in 1981. In that title, the Stranger is summoned to Sosaria to defeat the evil wizard Mondain. The series turned out to be one of the biggest in gaming history, with millions of units sold and a dozen or so titles published. In 1983, Garriott founded his company, Origin Systems, based on the revenues from Ultima and sold it to Electronic Arts in 1992. EA still owns the rights to the Ultima name.

So when he went about creating Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, he returned to his old style of game design. He wrote a narrative as well as a backstory, with things like the locations of magic items and hex-based maps that captured everything in the land. He kept expanding the size of the maps until (at 96-by-96 hexes) they reflected the proper distances in the computer world, and then he turned it over to his artists, who turned it into a beautiful overlay for the new world. The first episode of the new game is just one map of a bunch that Garriott and his team will introduce over time.

When Garriott created the Ultima universe, he didn’t just write the story. He also wrote all of the details in the backstory and the chronology of the world. He wrote about the locations of magic items and other things that could help him keep track of everything in his notebook. He did that after studying J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the way that Tolkien created a huge backstory (chronicled in later books like The Silmarillion, which used the word ‘Akallabêth’ ), complete with languages and history. That is still the way Garriott creates his games today.

In fact, Garriott is launching a Kickstarter campaign for the new game today and he will give away cloth maps to those who donate additional money for the crowdfunding effort. The cloth maps are not unlike those he included in Ultima II: the Revenge of the Enchantress, which was published in a nice box (pictured) by Sierra in 1982.

Here’s the first of two video interviews we did with Garriott.

Richard Garriott shows how he went from Ultima to his ultimate RPG from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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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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Video ads in mobile games and apps saw huge growth last year, according to AdColony, which created a platform for just such a thing. The Los Angeles startup said users watched more than a billion high-definition videos via its platform since 2011.

Privately held AdColony doesn’t disclose its revenues. But it said that it had 565 percent revenue growth in 2012, compared to 2011. And the fourth quarter of 2012 was its six consecutive quarter of record revenue. Spending on mobile video ads grew about 122 percent from 2011 to 2012, and spending on mobile ads of all kinds in the U.S. rose 180 percent over the previous year.

Will Kassoy, the chief executive of AdColony, told GamesBeat that the company should see a seventh quarter of record revenue in the first quarter of 2013 and that it is growing faster than the overall market. Kassoy said the growth happened because mobile users and brand advertisers have waited for a platform that delivers high-quality mobile video. AdColony focuses on delivering high-definition, instantly playable video ads, which users can view as an option in mobile games. If they watch the full ad, they get virtual coins to spend in a game. AdColony’s technology eliminates load times and buffering delays in video ad playback regardless of the connection strength.

“Video has become a very powerful tool in mobile,” Kassoy said.

The results are good because the ads deliver videos that users want to see, such as game or movie trailers, he said. AdColony launched in March 2011. That’s a short time ago, but AdColony is now working with Fortune 500 brands and more than half of the top-grossing publishers in the Apple iTunes App Store. The ads are viewable in 65 countries on both iOS and Android.

Kassoy said advertisers are moving away from standard ad units like banners and toward mobile video. In a survey of clients, two-thirds of advertisers said video ads were more effective for app-marketing campaigns than display ads or offer walls. And 50 percent of respondents said they plan to shift more budget to mobile video in 2013. This year, Kassoy said companies are focused on video ads for monetization and user acquisition.

AdColony said its completed video views grew 3.5 times in the past year. AdColony’s average publisher earnings per thousand views (eCPM rates) grew 60 percent year-over-year. Click-through rates on video ad campaigns grew 27 percent year-over-year. The average session time for apps in AdColony’s network is more than 10 minutes.

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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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Ubisoft’s next big online shooter will live or die based on support from the hardcore gaming community.

ShootMania Storm boils down the first-person shooter genre to its essence of running and gunning. Designed for multiplayer tournament play, Shootmania actively encourages players to create their own levels.

Putting together a level is as simple as creating something with Lego blocks. The editor for the maps is simple to use, in a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) style.

Still in an open beta test, ShootMania Storm launched on Steam last week, and it officially releases on April 10. ShootMania is a competitive e-sport in the IGN Pro League. It isn’t gory, so it could have more broad appeal than many other, bloodier games.

“You can jump in, play the game, create your own maps, and it’s so easy” said Joshua Milligan, the senior director of online strategy at Ubisoft, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Players have already created 20,000 maps from the closed beta test, and now Milligan said he looks forward to a ton more.

The PC game is being built by Paris-based Nadeo, which developed the ManiaPlanet series of games such as the highly successful TrackMania and the still unreleased QuestMania.

I played a few rounds of ShootMania Storm at Ubisoft’s Digital Day last week in San Francisco and found the learning curve to be pretty easy. In the maps we played, you raced toward a flag. Once someone takes the flag, Shootmania triggered a storm that slowly moved in from all sides, killing anyone who was unlucky to get caught in it. That forced all players to charge into the center and fight each other with rocket launchers. You have to hit your enemies twice with a rocket launcher to bring them down. You can pretty much learn how to play in a few seconds and start taking out enemies in a matter of minutes.

The graphics look nice, and Shootmania’s design is all about speed kills. Once you die, you respawn at your start point, and you can jump right back into the action.

Ubisoft already has cash tournaments going, such as a $100,000 prize event running now. The Twitch streaming video platform is integrated into Shootmania, so you can easily watch tournaments.

Check out our interview with Milligan below.

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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 San Francisco company wants to reinvent chat by creating a better user interface for grouping people together. The aim is to replace clunky video chat with a reimagined look and feel that is akin to having isolated conversations with a few people at a larger party. As we noted in our debut story about them, the result is very interesting video chat app that you can use to share anything — movies, music, photos, and more — with your friends, transforming video chat into social communication.

The new investors include Google Ventures, CrunchFund, and Bebo founder Michael Birch. Existing investors also participated.

“Rabbit’s design and user experience is unlike anything I’ve seen,” said Kevin Rose, the general partner at Google Ventures. “Video chatting is always designed for utility, but Rabbit has created an online social experience that is closer to hanging out with your friends in real life. I can’t wait for the world to see it.”

The founders include Stephanie Morgan, who hails from the video game and music industries. The app is now live as a private beta test on Mac OS X (version 10.7 or higher), and it competes with Google Hangouts and Skype. Rabbit has a very different feel than those, more like something fun than a utility.

“We wanted to take a huge step away from how video chat has been approached,” Morgan told VentureBeat in an earlier interview. “We want to have a meaningful connection with people by doing things together with them. And we want to make this a fun and exciting space.”

When you log in, you may enter a variety of different conversations, which could be organized around any label. If you click on one, you will hear a mishmash of voices as if you just walking into a party at somebody’s house. You’ll see circles with the faces of people attending the online gathering. You can people-watch before you go in.

You’ll see them talking and moving their faces in real-time. If you hover your mouse cursor over an image, you’ll get more details about the person. If someone is attached to several other circles, that means he is engaged in a conversation with them. You can click to join that conversation as long as it isn’t roped off as private. You’ll find that the sound changes to match the voices in the room. No longer will you hear the murmur of other people in the larger party. Then, you can chat.

The team has paid close attention to the user-interface design. Morgan says that the people are in circles instead of squares so that you don’t see the wall or room behind them. The focus is on the face of the person and what they’re talking about. The person doing the talking is at the top of the screen, right near the webcam on your laptop, so that you can look at the camera at eye level. The other people in the conversation will see your face, and not your chin.

You can talk with an unlimited number of people in your circle. But it’s ideal for a group of around six or seven people. Right now, it’s not easy to do simultaneous listening and talking in such groups in other applications.

By studying people, Morgan found that young folks like to stay connected on chat services such as Skype for hours at a time, leaving the line to a friend open while they multitask. It’s about spending time together, not just communicating a message and then leaving.

In addition to Morgan, the company has seasoned founders. Philippe Clavel is former technical director at Sony Online Entertainment and Hands-On Mobile. Greg Fischbach, former head of game publisher Acclaim Entertainment, is now an entrepreneur and early-stage investor. And Nicholas Reichenbach is chairman of Guestdriven and was executive vice president of publishing at Magmic Games.

Bebo founder Michael Birch said, “I became incredibly interested in video chat and live social networking a couple years ago when the technology and internet infrastructure looked like it could handle real-time communication – in fact, we even prototyped some concepts around video chat and social ourselves.”

He added, “So, when I first saw Rabbit, I was instantly intrigued. It was like seeing the future of real-time social interaction, one that I believe will be how everyone will communicate and socialize together moving forward. Rabbit’s [user interface] is beautiful and intuitive, and it’s designed to make video chatting fun, which is not how video chat apps are typically designed.”

“Rabbit is one of those things that should have existed before but couldn’t because the technology simply wasn’t where it needed to be,” said MG Siegler from CrunchFund. “In the age of always-on internet, we’re ready for a paradigm shift in online communication and interaction. And this is the team to deliver on that promise.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cable network AMC and Nerdist Industries have formed a partnership to take their videos across platforms.

Under the deal, comedian Chris Hardwick’s popular Nerdist YouTube channel — which pulls in 15-20 million unique visitors monthly – will show bonus footage from AMC’s Talking Dead, the live The Walking Dead aftershow hosted by Hardwick. The extended conversations and couch talk extras will also be available on Talkingdead.com. AMC has also signed a development deal with Nerdist to develop its most successful YouTube program, All Star Celebrity Bowling, as a potential TV series for the network.

It’s a case of Internet video moving to TV and vice versa. Nerdist Industries, founded by Hardwick in 2008, is a cross-platform entertainment company. Legendary Entertainment acquired the firm in 2012.

Hardwick said, “It has always been one of our main goals with Nerdist to grow content in the digital garden of the Internet which we could then evolve onto other platforms. AMC has been incredibly forward-thinking with us through this process in addition to allowing us to distribute bonus segments of Talking Dead on the Nerdist YouTube Channel. We are excited to work with them to potentially bring All Star Bowling to television. Platforms unite!”

Joel Stillerman, an executive vice president of AMC, said, “Nerdist has built a great following by producing incredibly smart, compelling, and entertaining content. This is a great way for us to expand our relationship with Chris and Nerdist, and we love the multi-platform synergy on a project like this.”

The All Star Bowling development project is being produced by Nerdist Industries and High Noon Entertainment, with Hardwick, Peter Levin, and Jim Berger serving as executive producers.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Can your diary organize your professional contacts or remind you to pick up a carton of milk? Not yet. But in the future it may, with the help of Evernote, a digital notebook that wants to be your diary, personal assistant and collaboration tool rolled into one.

The Evernote tagline “Remember everything” holds a certain charm. But chief executive Phil Libin wants to go one step further in actually boosting your cognitive abilities. ”We want to make you smarter,” Libin said, referring to the popular note-taking service as an “external brain.”

Evernote has a worldwide reach, with 45 million people adopting this easy-to-use notetaking tool. The company has raised over $250 million in five funding rounds, led by investors like Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler, and Valiant Capital Partners. And while previous reports have suggested Evernote plans a 2013 or 2014 public offering, Libin told us that an IPO is even further off that that: In 2015 or 2016, he says.

For most Evernote devotees, the app is a way to keep track of life’s minutia, meeting minutes, favorite web pages, and other things. But one particular customer struck a chord with Libin. Colorado Springs resident Patrick Jones suffers from a traumatic brain injury that has led to profound short-term memory loss. According to a blog post from a couple years ago, Jones uses Evernote to “piece together the basic memory flows we take for granted.”

VentureBeat invited Libin to our office to discuss his vision for his company’s future, which includes a new COO, and the host of new features designed to appeal to busy professionals. And don’t miss the short video interview on company culture at the bottom.

VentureBeat: Here’s a deceptively tough question to kick things off. How would you describe Evernote to your grandma?

Phil Libin: It’s hard to have a pithy one-line answer. Believe me, I’ve heard countless pitches. I say something like, “We want to make you smarter.” It’s a set of products and goals to give you an external brain. It’s a way to help you remember everything.

VentureBeat: Interesting. Have you looked into brain-training tools like Lumosity?

Libin: Yes, we were talking with them about making some games. I was a subscriber for a while, but I’d have to look into the science to see if it’s conclusive. But it’s the type of thing I could see us doing.

VentureBeat: Evernote has grown so rapidly; do you plan to keep up the pace of innovation?

Libin: Startups that get to our size can get paralyzed and afraid to innovate. But you have to keep innovating quickly until you find something that sticks.

VentureBeat: Can you shed any light on the company’s IPO plans?

Libin: I’ve always been pretty unambiguous. It’s definitely not going to be this year. We want to build a 100-year company and don’t want to be acquired. Going public is the morally correct thing to do, but it’s a step you can get wrong (editor’s note: research has found that most job creation occurs after a company goes public). We have been planning it for a while now and it will happen in 2015 or 2016.

VentureBeat: How about acquisitions? You’ve made about five or six so far. …

Libin: We bought five small teams and will keep our eye out. The size of the companies we acquire will get larger as we spend more on mergers and acquisitions. Our criteria is to look for products that we would want to use.

VentureBeat: I love that my Evernote notebook is just for me — it feels so personal. Will that change as you add more collaboration tools?

Libin: We used to say that Evernote is antisocial. But sometimes, when you are trying to achieve something, you’ll do it in a small group. With Evernote Business, we want to make it easier for five or 10 people to collaborate. But it can also still be private and all about you.

VentureBeat: Evernote is great for storing notes — but will there be any actionable or automated reminders?

Libin: Yes, we’re adding intelligence to the things you capture in Evernote. When you meet someone, for instance, you can push a button in the Evernote Hello app and it will automatically send an email saying, “Great to meet you and here’s my contact info.”

VentureBeat: I can see the upside to data analysis. But is their any kind of guarantee that my private thoughts won’t be packaged and sold to advertisers?

Libin: We just changed our legal terms of service to make it as clear as possible. Your data is yours; it’s not ours and we will never make money off of it!

For more, check out our video on Libin’s shift to a more user-centric design.

The Intel ID card of Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, from the Computer History Museum

Ann Bowers knew Bob Noyce, the “mayor of Silicon Valley,” better than anyone. She was married to the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and witnessed the magnetic effect he had on the people who followed him to the region that will be chronicled in an American Experience history documentary on PBS on Tuesday (Feb. 5) at 8 pm. The film is called Silicon Valley: Where the Future Was Born, and it captures the people like Noyce, who died in 1990, and how they made such a mark that their impact is still reverberating today.

Last week, Bowers (pictured right) spoke about Noyce on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where the surviving pioneers of Silicon Valley gathered to celebrate the film and the man at the center of it. The event was a chance to hear about the living history of the technology era from some of the people who created it. Bowers tried to convey what it was like to be in the same room with Noyce, who had a magnetic personality. At the same time, he wasn’t a taskmaster and had to bring in Andy Grove, later the legendary CEO of Intel, to keep order.

Noyce isn’t depicted as some superhero, since he had his flaws. But, like David Packard and Bill Hewlett before him, he was a very big part of the fuel that set the valley on fire. To grow like it did, Silicon Valley need a visionary like Noyce, a researcher-like co-founder Gordon Moore, and a tough guy like Grove — they were all there at the critical time. Noyce’s efforts shaped the technology, business, money, politics, and culture of Silicon Valley. Bowers brought Noyce down to the human level.

At the start of the event, host Hari Sreenivasan asked Bowers about the many talents of Noyce. He played the oboe. He was the state diving champion. He lettered on the swim team. He was in the drama club. And he knew more about transistors than just about anyone on the planet. Bowers smiled and answered a quick “yes” to each one of the facts.

“How is this possible, where did that confidence come from?” Sreenivasan asked.

“It’s important to understand the kind of family that Bob came from,” Bowers said. “His father was a congregation minister. There were four boys. They had very little by way of financial resources. But they had a lot of other resources. They were a tight family. They worked hard. Respected others. They were generous. And they took care of themselves. By their own effort. That was where a lot of Bob’s attitudes came from.”

Asked about Noyce’s “halo effect” and magnetism, Bowers laughed and said, “Well he did, obviously! He could project that from the podium. He seemed like he was talking directly at you. You might feel like he was talking to you and you were the only person in the room. He had that ability. He was listening. He was not talking at you. He was talking with you.”

Noyce grew up in Grinnell, a small town in Iowa, in a world without electronics except for ham radios and the equipment used to operate a farm. While his father was religious, Noyce was an agnostic. He and the other migrants to California’s Santa Clara Valley shared “middle American values,” said Michael S. Malone, a longtime Silicon Valley author, speaking in the film.

“They were honest, good as a handshake,” he said. “They were small town and masters of the universe. That tension drove these guys on.”

The film tries to convey the “sense of possibilities, the risk taking, and the moment in time that allowed Silicon Valley to happen,” said Randy Maclowry (pictured left, on far left), director of the film. “They found themselves at the right place and the right time, and they had the technological chops and understanding of what was possible to take the risks.”

Noyce had migrated to the Santa Clara Valley to work for William Shockley, the Nobel-prize winning physicist who co-invented the transistor and moved West to Palo Alto, Calif., to set up Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory — and be near his mother.

Asked what Noyce would have thought about technology today, Bowers said he would have appreciated all of the access to information that we have today with the internet.

Bowers arrived at Intel in January, 1970.

“What was so profound about Bob and Intel was the sense that it was all about a challenge and discovery,” she said. “It wasn’t about making a lot of money or having a lot of power. You see challenges, and you see opportunities.”

Noyce was married to Elizabeth Bottomly in 1953, but they were divorced. Noyce and Bowers got married in 1974. Bowers introduced Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, to Noyce. Jobs was looking around for a mentor. He hit it off with Noyce, and they talked about all sorts of ideas. Bowers found Jobs to be “extremely annoying because he was so self-centered.” She said Jobs’ parents didn’t seem to know what to do with him because he was a genius who needed someone to talk to.

“They would talk about almost anything,” Bowers said.

Noyce wasn’t a follow-through guy, and he wasn’t good at being tough on people. That was why Noyce and Moore brought in Andy Grove, Bowers said.

Bowers drew the biggest laugh of the evening when she said, “I can’t imagine Bob tweeting.”

Noyce loved cars and the most modern cameras. He felt a lot of the things he was interested in were made better by the integrated circuits he created. He was proud that chips formed the heart of a personal computer, which was an “everyman’s tool.”

Bowers held jobs such as director of personnel for Intel, and she was the first vice president of  human resources for Apple. She currently serves as the chair of the Noyce Foundation.

By the end of his career, Noyce had organized efforts such as the Semiconductor Industry Association and Sematech to ensure that U.S., which was in stiff competition with Japan, was able to hold on to its technological edge, educate its next generation of engineers, and make sure that semiconductor jobs stayed in the country. While nations such as China, Korea, and Japan have risen on the global stage, the United States is still the largest country in terms of market share in the chip business in the world. You can thank Noyce for a lot of that, and you shouldn’t miss this film.

Here’s a snippet of the video of Ann Bowers on stage with Hari Sreenivasan, a host of the PBS News Hour.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We’re in the age of billions of video clips on YouTube and other sites, and it’s overwhelming.

Want to find a video of the protests in Syria? There were more than 350,000 uploaded last year to YouTube alone. How do you find the best one?

That’s why Magnify, a New York startup, is betting online publishers will want to help viewers find the “best” videos, and it has built a platform to let them do that. It lets publishers curate videos, using their own judgment about how to order videos — giving them ways to profile certain videos by tagging and other variables, and letting them bury others. Magnify has almost finished raising $1M, as a first tranche of a total $7M planned second round of funding, VentureBeat has learned. Leading the round is Chris Kelly, the former General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook, who also ran for Attorney General of California in 2010.

The company, which until last year had served enterprise, is now focused on serving any publisher of content, including consumer sites. Aside from offering curation tools, Magnify also lets sites aggregate and host content. Take a look at the site of popular event company, TEDx, for example. Not only does Magnify let TEDx pull in all of its videos from YouTube in an organized way, it offers a nice index box on the left to help users find videos according to language, most popular, and so on. It supports the import of videos from almost any other site, including from YouTube.

There are a number of other video curation tools on the market: Vodpod and ShortForm, for example. There are also companies such as Brightcove and Ooyala, which are online video platforms for uploading, encoding and hosting video. While Magnify overlaps with several of these with its features, none of these competitors give offer curation tools to such an open and customized extent, says CEO Steve Rosenbaum. For example, if  a customer site already works with Brightcove, Magnify plays nice and lets the customer import the Brightcove player, but Magnify still manages the site’s video page design and aggregation. Magnify’s other customers include New York Magazine, Vibe.com, USAFootball.com, and the Lincoln Center in New York.

Magnify averaged 7 million video views a month across its customers, and expects to be profitable by the second quarter, Rosenbaum said.
The company will use the funds to invest in its technical team and sales efforts, Rosenbaum said.

Kelly, the former Facebooker, has made several strategic investments in web companies, including in Path in 2010, and more recently Evergram, Well and Galavantier.

In a statement to VentureBeat, Kelly said he thinks Magnify could become a sort of standard for publishers, or a “Wordpress for video curation on the Web.” He continued: ”The combination of human editorial and algorithmic automation is still in its nascent stages. When I saw Magnify.net, I was able for the first time to imagine a world of video content organization that could rival conventional television and cable by providing publishers and brands with the tools to create unique, targeted, contextual video.”

The new financing round represents the first West Coast money in the company, Rosenbaum said. Rosenbaum founded the company in 2006, and the company has since pivoted twice. The company previously raised $2.7 million.

Last year, Rosenbaum was named New York City’s first Entrepreneur In Residence

[Editor’s note: Rosenbaum will join VentureBeat in an invite-only cocktail event in New York City on Feb 20, where we will debate whether New York City will remain the media center of the world, or whether the programmatic ad buying algorithms of Silicon Valley players like Google will take over. If you’re interested in joining us, please contact Shannon Dow with your title and company name.]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If you feel like it takes too long to surf through video channels to find what you want, then Vuemix has an app for you. With the new Vuemix iPad app, you can play nine videos on the screen at the same time so that you can figure out which channel you want to watch more easily. And it does so without choking your Internet bandwidth.

Available today for the iPad in the Apple iTunes App Store, Vuemix is the latest app to take advantage of cloud computing. It takes a variety of Internet video sources and mixes them together into a single video stream in a web-connected data center, or cloud. Then it sends a single video stream to you with nine videos embedded within it.

“All the videos come in and we mix it on the fly,” said Govind Kizhepat, the chief executive of Vuemix, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s a brand-new primary technology to search, browse, and share videos on the web.”

This streaming technology with multiple active video windows lets you see what is happening on each web video channel, much like the picture-in-picture function that is available in most televisions. But Vuemix takes that function to its limit by enabling you to watch nine videos side-by-side. It also organizes them for you, grouping videos into sections (see picture at right) such as Sports, Movies, Fashion, Technology, News, Comedy, Entertainment, Social, Music, Business, and more.

You can tap one section to drill down on it, and then Vuemix gives you with nine different choices within that category. If you pick news, you can see videos from CNN, Fox News, NBC, and more. You can upgrade your app for a $2.99 in-app purchase after a “try before you buy” period. The app works with version 5 of Apple’s iOS operating system.

It has a limit to how much you’ll see at once, in terms of how long the videos play for. If something is being livestreamed, then Vuemix can’t turn that into a live screen on your iPad. But once a video is posted, then it is up for grabs.

Vuemix plays about 45 seconds of video for each of the channels showing at any one time. Kizhepat figures that gives you plenty of time to decide which one you want to watch. The iPad is capable of playing just one video at a time. So when Vuemix plays a video, it may be a single stream of a single channel, when you are watching just one show, or it may be a single stream that mixes a bunch of videos into a single stream, like when you are looking at nine videos playing at the same time. If you hover over one video, the audio engages.

Yahoo, Google, and other video companies crawl the web for video. Vuemix does that, too, but it goes a step further. It indexes the pages, but it also grabs the videos and indexes them continuously. Then it separates the videos into categories. Extracting video is an extremely complex matter, Kizhepat said.

“We have a sophisticated browser emulator in the crowd to grab the videos,” he said. “Once it is grabbed, it is indexed. Then, once it is indexed, we cache it. Caching has been around for a while” with companies such as Akamai. But as a user, you click on a video and they send you one video stream. With Vuemix, the videos are dynamically transcoded (converted instantaneously) in the cloud and mixed into a single stream. It changes the formatting from HTML5 to Flash or another format, as needed.

“That’s all happening in the cloud,” he said.

You can search through your Vuemix videos the same way you do a text search. You enter the topic that interests you and choose from the videos that are playing. You can view multiple videos of the search results simultaneously, without having to click through video after video to find the one you want. You can tap on one video and expand it to full screen at high resolution. When you do so, Vuemix connects the user to the web site (such as YouTube), which then serves the video to the user. In this manner, Vuemix’s video infrastructure hands off the user to the video content owner. So when you use internet bandwidth to view a video, you use the bandwidth of the content owner, not Vuemix. That keeps Vuemix’s costs low.

“It’s just like Google search,” Kizhepat said. “They show you web pages. We show you nine videos.”

Kizhepat said his company is working with multiple TV service operators to bring its technology to “second screen” experiences for subscribers. In this scenario, the second screen (the iPad) can act as a remote control. Those deals could roll out in the second half of the year. In that role, Vuemix could become a white-label service for those operators. On top of that, it will operate its own consumer apps.

“Vuemix will change the way people search, view and consume video content,” said Kizhepat. “By being able to view multiple videos simultaneously, the Vuemix platform not only delivers a custom interactive experience that is not possible using today’s conventional video platforms, but also makes video searching and browsing a lot quicker.”

You can also build your own “mix” to share with Facebook friends. You select your own favorite videos and share the collage of videos on your Facebook wall with one click. That means you can become a re-broadcaster of video content, and other people can subscribe to your broadcast. You can mark your video mixes as public or private. Web broadcasters will like it because Vuemix will deliver views to those broadcasters, Kizhepat said.

“The cable and satellite operators will love this,” he said. “You will see the electronic programming guide [on your TV] turned upside down.”

Vuemix also gives content owners the ability to create a customizable multitile video experience for each consumer. Kizhepat says that gives the channel owner a chance to significantly increase the time that a person stays engaged with it. The platform conforms to web and HTTP standards. It generates video formats dynamically depending on the receiving device of the consumer. The company plans to expand to iMac, Android, and Windows devices. Vuemix has to change its app depending on the screen size you are using.

Kizhepat is a pioneer in consumer audio and video compression. He previously led NetXen, a 10G Ethernet chip company that was acquired by Qlogic. He was also the founder of iCompression. Other members of his team come from Qlogic, Netflix, Akamai and a variety of other web and media companies.

Kizhepat started research in early 2010 and then incorporated the firm in 2011. Vuemix has raised $3 million in two rounds, including a seed round and a Series A led by a top-tier venture capital firm, Kizhepat said.

Streaming videos can be expensive, particularly if there is a lot of goo plugging the tubes of the internet. Uplynk’s business is making sure that your video streams properly and gets around that goo.

That’s not exactly how they describe it, but that’s my interpretation. The Los Angeles company is emerging from stealth mode today with the release of its HD Adaptive Streaming Platform. One of its major customers is Disney and its ABC Television Group. The Uplynk platform delivers video to multiple platforms with flexibility and low costs. This is important to video web sites as the number of platforms multiplies. Companies such as Netflix have to encode a single movie as many as 120 times to reach the audience it wants to hit.

It does so by encoding video in the cloud using a single, non-proprietary adaptive format. That enables video to play on all major platforms and devices, including  iOS, Android, Windows 8, Roku and all PC/Mac/Linux browser combinations. In turn, that gets rid of the need to encode a video multiple times or repackage it on the fly. Uplynk has applied for patents on this adaptive playback technology. By reducing the amount of video, it cuts costs for encoding, storage, encryption and distribution. It can turnaround video faster, as it uploads, encrypts and encodes video simultaneously.

Disney/ABC Television Group chose Uplynk to deliver its content across platforms. Uplynk manages video encoding for web, mobile and tablet streaming apps for the ABC Player, ABC Family and Watch Disney apps, including Watch Disney Channel, Watch Disney Junior, and Watch Disney XD. Uplynk is a managed software as a service solution.

“Uplynk is changing the way broadcasters stream video by collapsing the traditional video workflow,” said Ken Brueck, Chief Marketing Officer of upLynk.

Uplynk was founded in 2010 and it has 10 employees. It competes against home-grown solutions at major media companies. Uplynk is self-funded. Its founder includes David Brueck, who was part of the team that holds the patent for adaptive bitrate streaming. David Brueck has a decade of streaming experience.

“It’s not so much about managing complexity with the cloud, but removing complexity using the cloud,” said Skarpi Hedinsson, senior vice president of technology and platform at Disney Interactive Media Group. “The upLynk platform offers significant operational efficiency and simplifies the process of reaching audiences on any device or platform while maintaining a high quality viewing experience.”

In an effort to uncover the truth about the American startup scene, Australian entrepreneur Simon Walker embarked upon a quest. He flew around the world to visit 10 American cities in 20 days. He met with local members of the startup community and created a video series called the Leeap Project documenting his journey. His goal is to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of startup life in those areas and inspire people around the world to start (and invest) in emerging companies.

The latest installment of the Leeap Project takes place in San Francisco. Walker and I met for coffee shortly after his arrival to discuss the project. Due to my perpetual lateness, he was forced to wait for 15 minutes on a street corner of questionable character. Fortunately, he did not hold this against me, and we were able to discuss the local entrepreneurial ecosystem over black coffees.

“People in Australia and New Zealand get a skewed perspective on startups,” he said. “Their perception is generalized to all of America, and they think that everyone that wants to have a startup can just get cash easily. Back in Melbourne, I really wanted to know what life was really like here for entrepreneurs and knew others who felt the same. I am trying to create an educated, informed, and outside perspective.”

While here, Walker stayed at the Villa of Bravo’s Silicon Valley reality show infamy. He met with local influencers and discovered a few key points about San Francisco. First and foremost, he realized that referring to the city as “San Fran” is the kiss of death.

I reconnected with Walker after he returned to Australia and finished this video to find out what else he learned.

“One unique aspect about S.F. seemed to be the capability to raise funds on an idea fueled by passion, rather than a proven business with preexisting traction and users/customers,” he said. “Most of the entrepreneurs I spoke with also seemed to have very much an insular or ‘tunnel vision’ view toward things. Everyone in S.F. seems to be so completely consumed with their own startup that the bigger picture sometimes didn’t even come into view.”

Watch the full video below:

Check out the first installment of the Leeap Project in Los Angeles.