Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid, CEO Jesper Jensen said that the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And, presumably it makes sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Is the PC market shrinking? Not if you’re Lenovo

Over the past few quarters, Lenovo’s PC sales have remained steady, even as the larger PC market itself has declined. Its latest quarter is no exception: The company’s net income increased to $126.9 million from $66.8 million last year.

Those numbers come as Lenovo’s share of the PC market increased to 15.3 percent, according to an April report from IDC. In fact, Lenovo was the only top PC company to post a gain in PC shipments rather than a decline, says IDC.

Lenovo’s PC sales contrast strongly with those of industry leader HP, which last quarter saw its PC and notebook shipments decrease 18 percent and 24 percent, respectively. At 15.7 percent, HP’s share of the PC market is just barely higher than that of Lenovo — though not for much longer this rate.

Lenovo’s numbers were also boosted by sales of its smartphones, which are sold in countries like India, Russia, and Indonesia. Lenovo is the second-largest smartphone vendor in China behind Samsung, and it expects its global smartphone shipments to increase to 50 million this year. Lenovo may be mostly a PC company, but it’s pretty clearly showing it wants to be so much more.

We all know Microsoft likes to challenge its competitors head on, especially Google. Now Microsoft is taking a swing at Apple in a new 30-second advertisement that uses Siri’s voice to make fun of the iPad.

The ad shows a Windows 8 tablet sitting side-by-side with the iPad. As the Windows 8 tablet shows off various functions — like updating its tiles or moving through a PowerPoint presentation — Siri admits that she can’t help with those things. Finally Siri says, “Should we just play Chopsticks?” The tagline for the ad? “Less talking. More doing.”

At the end of the video, it shows two prices — $699 for a 64GB iPad and $449 for the 64GB Asus VivoTab Smart running Windows 8. Microsoft also has a dedicated comparison page set up to compare the original iPad to Windows 8 tablets on the market.

Check out the video above to see the combative ad.

Like a polished and mobile-first Craigslist, New York City-based Bondsy is building a social network that lets you trade just about anything with your friends. No strangers allowed.

Bondsy graduated a year ago from TechStars NYC as a simple social network for selling stuff from your phone — but since then it has evolved into a tool that could help you reconnect with your friends in the real world. So far, people have used the service to trade handwritten letters in exchange for handwritten replies, gadgets for homemade dinners, and my favorite example, bacon for coffee beans.

Diego Zambrano, Bondsy’s founder, CEO, and serious beard curator, tells me that he learned a lot simply by letting users approach the social network as they saw fit.

“If you give tools that allow people to be creative, people get very creative,” Zambrano said in an interview. “If we go beyond transaction and become a platform that allows people to express themselves, that creates a true bond between people. Those are the most exciting things for us.”

The company’s free iPhone app lets you create a trade listing for just about anything. Maybe you want to get rid of your old records, maybe you’re trying to sell a piece of furniture, or maybe you just want to have dinner with your friends. Bondsy appears to be trying to recreate social connections in the real world that were common before social networks pushed us to the digital world.

Unlike most other marketplaces, Bondsy takes a freeform approach to price tags. While there are plenty of Bondsy posts asking for cash, the ones that truly stand out ask for something interesting, like a lunch or dinner. It’s a good way for you to reconnect with people you haven’t seen in a while, but it could be used for just about anything.

In Brazil, Bondsy users are using the social network to sell cars. In China, it’s being used to set up intriguing gamified challenges. Zambrano embraces all of it.

“My take is that we’ve been going through this whole phase of trying to make everything frictionless, and I noticed that the most meaningful experience I’ve had were the ones that actually had some friction,” he said.

To encourage creativity, Bondsy places a premium on privacy. The company decided to build its own social graph, rather than latch onto an existing network like Facebook and Twitter, because it didn’t trust the way other companies managed their privacy settings.

“By building the way we’re building, it directly changes what people share,” Zambrano said. “It directly changes how open people are.”

Bondsy has received seed funding from Thrive Capital, Betaworks, Chris Dixon, David Tisch, and others.

“What is interesting about leaving Bondsy open and not very structured is that we allow our users to define how they want to use it,” Zambrano said. “It’s a sin to kill these possible behaviors by creating too much structure.”

Soccer is one of the world’s most popular sports, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a mobile title based on the game has established a large dedicated fan base.

Today, developer Nordeus is celebrating the three-year anniversary of its soccer-management title Top Eleven. The game puts players in control of a major soccer club on Facebook, Android, and iOS. As manager, players will make all the decisions that lead to a winning team.

“I think the ability for the users to take the game wherever they are — on smartphones or on Facebook and have continuous gameplay — that is driving a lot of our success,” Nordeus head of strategic partnerships Assaf Vaknin told GamesBeat. “We know how to use Facebook and the social graph — I don’t want to say we’re aggressive — but we know how to put [Top Eleven] out there in a visible way for users to connect with their friends.”

That strategy is paying off. Top Eleven has over 40 million registered users. It’s retained over a quarter of those for 11 million monthly active users. More than that, Vaknin pointed out that the title is one of the top-five highest-grossing apps in over 53 countries on both iOS and Android.

For Vaknin, he believes it’s the games focus on authenticity that is helping it stick with gamers.

“We try our best to keep it as real as possible,” said Vaknin. “We work hard to come up with crazy cool features that will get the players engaged and that has shown in terms of our overall numbers — in terms of retention, and a 40 percent DAU-to-MAU ratio.”

Nordeus also landed a huge celebrity endorsement deal in March when it tapped Real Madrid head coach José Mourinho to act as the face of Top Eleven. Additionally, the studio worked with Real Mardrid, Liverpool, Arsenal, AC Milan, and more to bring in authentically licensed items for players to purchase and customize their teams.

Top Eleven is available for free on Android, iOS, and Facebook.

---

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!

---

Multi-platform messaging service Imo.im has raised $13 million in second-round funding and updated its iOS and Android apps with a new feature called “Broadcasts.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imo.im offers web, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for communicating with friends and family. The new Broadcasts feature inside iOS and Android creates a channel where Imo.im users can meet new people who have similar interests and discuss those interests. Connections to new people are auto-generated based on your interests, location, and friends. Users can also share photos directly to the Broadcasts feed.

“Social discovery is an important feature,” Imo.im CEO Ralph Harik said in a statement. “We want users to find relevant and useful information, people, news, and other content that will make their lives better. imo broadcasts is a platform to achieve that.”

Imo.im claims that its apps have been downloaded more than 7 million times and that its 750,000 unique daily visitors send 50 million messages per day.

While those numbers might sound good, the messaging landscape is incredibly competitive now. Hot messaging service MessageMe just announced that it hit 5 million registered users just 75 days after launching. And then there’s WhatsApp, the hugely popular service that claims to be processing more than 20 billion messages per day.

The new funding was led by Imo.im co-founder Georges Harik, who is also known for being one of Google’s first 10 employees.

Photo via Imo.im

Phil Harrison was once head of worldwide development for Sony’s PlayStation brand, leading that platform for years. But now he is a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) and took a prominent role in this week’s Xbox One video game console announcement — including being part of the company’s confusing messaging about used games.

On Tuesday, he sat down with us to talk about the Xbox One, the company’s first new video game console since 2005. This time, Harrison is one of the executives touting Microsoft’s expansion into non-game entertainment and future investment of more than $1 billion in the next generation of games.

That includes eight new creative works and 15 internally developed games in the coming year. That’s a pretty ambitious plan, and it’s more than Microsoft has spent on a console launch before. In the meantime, Harrison has to try to stamp out fears that Microsoft will be anti-consumer in its policies for dealing with used games, backward compatibility, and always-on Internet connection requirements.

He also argues that Microsoft will preserve an element of “curation” in allowing games onto its platform. In short, Harrison says that the company isn’t headed in the wrong direction.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Phil Harrison: It gives me great pleasure to say, “Welcome to Microsoft.” Isn’t that a strange thing for me to be able to say to you?

GamesBeat: What’s it like being on the inside of the empire that you used to fight against?

Harrison: Did we have a fight? I don’t know. I enjoy it. I love the team. You know these guys well from your various inside perspectives on the Microsoft team. I think it’s a very smart team. Not just inside the Xbox group, too, but the broader Microsoft family. They have impressive people and capability and technology. It’s great.

So what resonated with you? What sort of things were you surprised or impressed by?

GamesBeat: Kinect has a very large design space. You could do a whole lot more with it. They measured our heartbeats and so on. It’s a very big room, a wider angle, covering six people.

Harrison: Kinect for 360 was very innovative. It delivered some incredible experiences. But the degree of movement was quite exaggerated. Now, as you’ve seen with Kinect for Xbox One, it’s millimeters and nanoseconds now. That level of precision can actually equal subtlety. I think subtlety is one of those things that game designers are going to enjoy.

GamesBeat: Based on what’s in the works for Kinect, will games go in a direction that they haven’t gone before?

Harrison: The fundamental, most impactful thing is that there’s a Kinect in every box now. There’s the ubiquity of the platform having Kinect whereas before it was always a subset. That made it difficult for developers to invest against 20 percent of the installed base or whatever it was.

Having it as 100 percent — that’s a game-changer. There are games that are not using motion but using voice in a very subtle way. The conversational understanding in Kinect for Xbox One is super sensitive and smart. It allows us to do some subtle things with voice that we couldn’t do on 360. You’ll see that at E3 [Electronic Entertainment Expo]. I’ll point them out to you.

We have a couple of cool examples of that where — even though your game is a fundamentally controller-based experience — the voice becomes this augmented menu system. Previously, you’d have to go down N number of menu trees to get to a particular feature. Now you can just say it. That’s pretty cool.

And then movement can be subtle. While you’re playing the game, it could be just doing some very gentle movements that [Kinect] can pick up and then amplify in the world.

GamesBeat: On strategy this time around, what is some of the thinking? How much of a walled garden are you going to build? How closed or open should it be? We’re in this different world with iOS and Android now. There are other kinds of devices you want to connect to. What’s the thinking for design in that space?

Harrison: We like an element of curation in the content landscape and the content experience, but that is definitely getting more broadly curated than it has been in the past. I’m not sure I would describe it as closed versus open because that implies a more binary shift. I don’t think you can be partly closed or partly open. It’s more about curating content — the developer tools for building games or building snap-to applications — particularly the snap-to applications. That’s much closer to Windows 8 development. The developer ecosystem that we can tap into has gotten orders of magnitude bigger, which is great.

In the past, as you know, Xbox had retail games, it had Xbox Live Arcade games, and it had the indie channel. These were three very discrete clubs that we didn’t really cross-pollinate. Now they’re just games. The discovery tools that we’ve built into the system, the recommendation engine we’ve built into the system, and also something we didn’t talk about today, which is game DVR — that’s the ability for your game moments to become video, which you can then share socially — that becomes a great discovery tools for developers. It solves one of the massive discovery problems that you have in games irrespective of platform.

We will make more announcements at E3. We’ve done some very smart platform architecture work that unlocks it at a platform level. Then we can build various features and functionalities on top of that. We’re doing something that will show more of it at E3.

GamesBeat: There’s been a lot of chatter on particular controversial subjects leading up to this. People want to know about used games, about backward compatibility, and about the constant connection. What are some of the facts on those? Can you play used games on the Xbox One? Do you have to pay a fee?

Harrison: Just like today, if you have a game disc that you buy from the store, you can play that game. The game is now installed to the hard drive. Any user who is associated with that Xbox One can play that game. I can give that game disc to my son and he can go and take it to another machine inside the house and play it on that machine. Just like today, only one of us can play it at any one time.

The difference, though — the benefit of Xbox One is that that data can roam with me. I can go to my friend’s house. I can log in as myself into his machine. I can then play that game on his machine, and while I’m logged in, he can play it as well.

Pages: 1 2

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mailbox is bringing its war on email inefficiency to another front: the iPad.

The email client, which launched in February on the iPhone, has been one of the most popular ways for iPhone owners to manage and reply to emails. It’s simple, clean, and according to people who use it, gets email out of the way quickly.

Mailbox for iPad, is more of the same and is, at its heart, just a blown-up version of Mailbox for iPhone — so don’t expect any big, earth-shaking changes here. The one notable shift with the app is that the message panel is now on the left side of the screen rather than the right so that it’s consistent with the iPad’s default Mail app. (The app doesn’t work in portrait mode, by the way.)

It’s also notable that Mailbox for iPad comes with no hints of the app’s change in ownership. Dropbox acquired Mailbox a month after its launch, though it doesn’t look like the company is eager to put its stamp on it just yet.

Also, Android owners — don’t feel left out. Mailbox says that it’s also working on a version of the app for Google’s mobile operating system, though there’s no indication of when that app will arrive.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The next time you enter a tiny Shibuya noodle bar, you could end up paying with one of Square’s payment technologies.

The startup announced today that it’s launching in Japan, its second location outside of the U.S. (it hit Canada in October 2012), and its first market outside of of North America. Square partnered with Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation (SMCC) to make the move, the same company that helped bring Visa to Japan.

Square’s mobile credit card reader and apps will be free to us, and it’s charging a 3.25 percent transaction fee (slightly higher than the 2.75 percent fee it charges in North America).

It makes sense for Square to target Japan next — it’s a country that’s been heavily dependent on mobile technology long before smartphones were big in the U.S.. Square’s founder Jack Dorsey has also been a big proponent of the Japanese design philosophy wabi-sabi, which focuses on the beauty of impermanent and imperfect things.

Following Microsoft’s 60-minute press conference on Tuesday, in which it revealed the Xbox One to much anticipation, an unfortunate feeling of melancholy grew inside me. It was immediately and painfully clear that I am no longer Microsoft’s target audience. Instead, the company’s new key demographic is the casual audience that has kept the Xbox 360 selling in recent years, and with this choice, the Xbox brand has transformed from a gaming system to an all-in-one entertainment device.

Over the course of the hour-long press conference, I slowly felt more and more out of place as if this wasn’t intended for me … as if it wasn’t a place I should or want to be. The wild ride of buzzwords and snappy features introduced us to an impressive multimedia center — one that could stream films, play live television, and initiate video chat via Skype. Microsoft gave a worryingly small amount of attention to games. This new console will obviously be innovative in how it “Kinects” people (har har), but the question I regularly asked myself over that hour was why, as a gamer, do I care about most of this?

It was frustrating to watch many big names march out and discuss features that will barely impact or improve the future of gaming. Being able to review fantasy football or basketball leagues during live matches sounds cool, but as I’m not a massive sports fan, the early sections of the press conference might as well have been white noise. Equally frustrating was how anything that did reference the gaming potential of the Xbox One did so through loose terminology — merely suggesting how the console was going to offer enhanced “experiences” or “content.” I can’t say I saw anything that could provide the innovation I was sorely hoping to see.

At least we now know some of the specs for the Xbox One: 8 CPU cores, 8GB of (nondescript) RAM, multichannel 802.11n WiFi, and a Blu-ray drive definitely sound good. However, instead of showing us how this technology will be put to use, such as through the numerous demonstrations we saw during Sony’s PlayStation 4 press conference in February, we merely witnessed a handful of cinematics and teaser trailers.

While the games look good, the graphical fidelity isn’t mind-blowing. The visuals are not as ground-breaking as the HD leap from the previous generation. And sadly, the only new creative work announced, Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break, was a predominantly live-action trailer sprinkled with in-game cinematics. This teaser was severely underwhelming and didn’t provide nearly enough information (assuming the game isn’t about a little girl who makes boats collide with bridges) to generate serious interest.

Because we saw nothing resembling real gameplay, it’s difficult to picture how each experience will feel when it’s eventually in our hands. If these new titles do nothing but improve graphics, it’s hard to be too excited about them. Even the new Call of Duty felt a little flat. Eric Hirshberg, the chief executive of Activision, presented a lovely trailer for Call of Duty: Ghosts, but I had to chuckle when Mark Rubin of Infinity Ward added, “America’s military is in disarray, and as the player, you’re the underdog fighting back against superior forces.” I don’t want to steal your thunder, Mark, but I’m pretty sure that’s the storyline of every Call of Duty since Modern Warfare 2 — not to mention numerous other shooters, such as Homefront. But hey, we get a really fancy-looking dog, so that’s innovative, right? … Right?

Still, the most surprising element of the conference was not what Microsoft did mention but what it didn’t.

Microsoft had the gaming world’s attention; the show was its chance to put millions at ease regarding the worrying issues of digital-rights management and preowned games. Rather than addressing any of these concerns, Microsoft chose to ignore the community’s queries about persistent Internet requirements. This decision has led to evasive and confusing explanations spawning from Twitter or interviews that went up immediately after the event.

It now appears that Xbox One will require access to the Internet to install games and enable regular play. Used games will also involve an activation fee. If you’re going to take such drastic actions, Microsoft, at least have the balls to come out with it head on and explain why you feel such changes are necessary and how they potentially improve your console. Don’t sweep our questions under the rug and hope we forget about it because I can assure you — we won’t.

Other interesting aspects barely covered at the show were the alterations to the controller and computing assistance from the cloud. I understand that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is imminent and you don’t want to blow your load now, but gamers need a reason to be excited for your console, Microsoft. Making a lackluster first impression can only hurt your sales potential. The dip in value of Microsoft’s shares — and the consequential increase in Sony’s — is evidence of this.

Microsoft would be wise not to forget who bought the Xbox 360 and the original Xbox during their infancy: core gamers. These early adopters and evangelists will buy these consoles at any price because they have a desperate need to play great games that they can only experience on Xbox. Unfortunately, Microsoft has done very little to prove we need the Xbox One right now. The system’s new focus as a futuristic hub that houses all your entertainment needs may backfire as the intense hardware and forced inclusion of Kinect will likely lead to a substantial price point. The casual sector probably won’t experience the same uncontrollable craving for new content as the core gamer and may keep its distance until the price drops.

The beauty of the Xbox 360 was how its target market migrated from core to casual slowly as its price fell and multimedia functionality improved. After all, $200 isn’t an overwhelming cost for a system that can fulfill multiple functions in the home, and the eventual introduction of the Kinect presented additional novelty for young children and new gamers.

Now Microsoft seems confident that the casual market is ready to throw down considerable cash to replace their 360s with a new and improved Xbox, and it has bypassed the core gamer almost completely. But will the casual market be willing to spend double or more of the current cost of a 360 just for enhanced social and multimedia functionality? Do people like our parents really care about a device that can make phone calls while they watch a movie? The system will obviously sell after release, but what portion of the casual audience will pass it up, and how big an impact with this have on Microsoft?

Maybe I’m speaking prematurely. E3 is right around the corner, and Phil Spencer, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios, did make a bold statement announcing 15 exclusive titles for Xbox One within its first year of launch. Even still, I’m dubious how many of these 15 will actually release in that time. Console launches rarely ever go as planned, like with the Wii U’s debut games lineup. I also wonder how many of these 15 will be exclusive sports, fitness, or family games for the Kinect, which core gamers have close to zero interest in.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope Microsoft comes out at E3 and wows us all with some incredible new intellectual properties and a revelation in how the Xbox One will change how we game. Unfortunately, right now I can count the things that interest me about this new Xbox on one hand.

Thanks for reading. For this and other rambles, please check out my blog or follow me on Twitter.

---

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!

---

For gamers, slow-moving zombies are laughable as a threat. You just pull out your shotgun, and it’s like a turkey shoot. But fast-moving zombies are scary as they’ll eat your brains before you know it. The new next-generation game Dying Light from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will expose you to both kinds of zombies depending on whether it is day or night.

During the day, the zombies are lethargic and easy to kill. As a scavenger, you spend your time gathering resources and getting ready for the night. At dark, the zombies become more alert and aware, and other kinds of creatures come out to hunt you down. The duality of night and day will make this game dramatic and intense as it will give you a deadline to get your work done before it’s too late. It is an interesting twist on the zombie genre, and it could very well be enough to launch a successful new intellectual property in a game industry that is full of sequels.

The title, coming in 2013 for a bunch of platforms, is under development at Techland, the creator of the zombie-killing game Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide. Truthfully, when I first heard this demo was for another zombie game, I wasn’t too excited. But the graphics of the next-generation game are beautiful. The developer once again draws a contrast between the gorgeous scenery of a European town and the horror of fighting flesh-eating zombies.

“We are doing a huge open world filled with zombies,” Blazej Krakowiak, the international brand manager of Techland, told GamesBeat.

In this world, you pick up objects in the day. “At night, you become prey,” Krakowiak said. “It’s a horror game at night. The day is when you prepare for the night.”

In addition, you could pretty much travel in any direction you wanted through the seaside town. Inside a cabinet, you find a girl. You can talk to her or move on with your mission of finding supplies that have been air-dropped into the city. You are in a rush to get the air drop before the “vultures,” or other humans, pick it clean. On the other hand, you could stay and help the girl.

In this demo, the player moved on to the air drop but found that a rival group was faster. You can fight them or back out and find another air drop. In this case, the player moves on to the second air drop. Along the way, you can take out the zombies with a machete. You can stop inside a shed and craft the tool into something better: a machete that delivers an electric shock.

The player goes to a second flare marking another air drop near the ocean. You can hop from roof to roof. Along the way, you have to take out more zombies and pick up a flashlight. Near the drop zone, you find a bunch of zombies and take them out with a firebomb.

But by that time, you are late. Dusk has fallen, and you are trapped at the second air-drop site. You collect your supplies and begin to run. As night falls, the tension grows. The music becomes haunting. And something starts to stalk you. You are partially infected with the zombie virus already, and you can detect the presence of the most dangerous zombies. One of them eats another human. You take off sprinting and go up a labyrinth of stairs. Then you make a run for it.

The creature that stalks you takes off after you. You can quickly glance back and, in slow motion, see something chasing you. You go over a bunch of barriers and run through corridors in an attempt to escape. At last, the monstrous sounds and the music slow down. It appears you have shaken the monster. You can relax. But then, of course, the creature comes out of nowhere and eats you.

Ending his presentation, Krakowiak says, “Good night; good luck. “

He said that the developers will have both fully scripted missions and missions where the player has to move from point A to point B, and the player can determine how to do that.

“We want to have some directed experiences like that, with drama,” he said. “The best open-world games are like that, with both scripted play and free roaming.”

The game is coming to current-generation consoles, next-generation consoles, and the PC. The company has been working on the title since early 2012, when the core team finished Dead Island. That title sold well, but, “That was not enough. We wanted to take the zombie experience to a new level.”

The company’s new game engine, Chrome Engine 6, was designed for next-generation consoles. That’s what will produce the gorgeous visuals that you see in the screenshots.

“Lighting is key because of the day-night cycle we have in the game,” he said. “We also wanted a lot of zombies on the screen at the same time without sacrificing performance.”

Here’s our video interview with Krakowiak of Techland below.

Dying Light developer describes the day-night duality of zombie game from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

---

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!

---

The new video game consoles are coming, and so are some brand-new big budget video games. One of them is Dying Light, the night-day zombie game that Dead Island developer Techland is making for Warner Bros. It’s a scary title where you prey on slow-moving zombies by day and then flee the fast-moving ones as they hunt you down at night. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment recently showed a preview that scared the heck out of me.

Gorgeous isn’t a word I would use to describe an extremely violent zombie-killing game. But the graphics look amazing, and it will look quite pretty on next-generation game consoles when it debuts either late this year or next year. One thing is clear from the preview we saw. Techland is ready for the triple-A stage for video games. Its work is first-rate, and I’ll be interested to play this when it comes out.

We caught up with Blazej Krakowiak, international brand manager at Techland, for an interview after the preview presentation. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. Check out the video at the end as well. Techland will be showing off the game at the upcoming E3 game trade show in Los Angeles in June.

GamesBeat: What background do you guys have? What have you done before?

Blazej Krakowiak: As a company, we were founded 21 years ago. We were the developers behind Dead Island and the Call of Juarez series. Some people might remember our science fiction shooter Chrome. That’s one of the games that started at all. We have a lot of faithful fans, but we’re always anxious when we bring out something this big. Dying Light is our most ambitious project to date.

GamesBeat: How recently did you move on to this? What were you finishing just as you started?

Krakowiak: Development on Dying Light started early in 2012 when the core team finished Dead Island. That sold very well – it was one of the milestones for our company – but it wasn’t enough. We wanted to take the zombie experience to another level. We started working on more advanced features for the next iteration of our Chrome engine technology. This will be the first engine powered by Chrome engine 6. It’s built for the next console generation and DirectX 11. We also started looking for a business partner that could do the game justice. We’re very happy to be working with Warner Bros. on that.

GamesBeat: What’s going to distinguish the visuals of this game? What’s the next step as far as what you can do now?

Krakowiak: For a long time we’ve been talking about needing more power to get the proper number of characters on screen, the right texture resolution, things like that. We wanted a more powerful PC, plus consoles that could keep up or ideally surpass that. We all know that we’re finally getting that power. This game is developed for the next generation and basically ported down to the current generation, although we’re still confident we’ll be able to deliver a good experience there.

As far as upgrades, obviously lighting will be key to the game, because of the day-night cycle. We want to introduce advanced animations for the free running. We want to have a lot of zombies and a lot of other characters on the screen without sacrificing performance. That’s especially important in co-op, which we’ll have for up to four players. We’ll also support a range of console features that we can’t discuss in detail at the moment. At E3 we’ll probably be able to tell you more about that. We’ll have some important dates behind us by then.

GamesBeat: You mentioned at the close of the demo that you’ll spend your day preparing for what happens at night. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Krakowiak: To start off, the game is quest-driven. You’ll complete missions – some of them mandatory, some optional. You’ll have specific objectives. But this is also an open-world game, even more so than any of our other games before it. It allows for exploration and roaming and finding new things to do. As far as preparation, that can include everything from gathering supplies to crafting better weapons to finding allies to completing missions that will get you access to new things you might need. You have to make sure that the hideout you’re in is intact and the group that you’re with can survive the night. Then, when the night falls, all hell breaks loose. The regular zombies that you have to deal with during the day — they become faster, more aggressive, and more dangerous. Also, special types of zombies appear to challenge you even more.

We have complete freedom in shaping the game world. We can have fully scripted missions, but we can also seed encounters around the game and tell players to go out and find them, or just have them go from A to B and count on them running into something along the way. We want to have some directed experiences like that. The drama and tension and thrills we can create that way are important. I think the best open world games out there do the same. They’re a mix of both scripted and free-roaming content.

GamesBeat: So you can have questions in there, like, “What would happen if I helped that little girl out?” or “What would happen if I got to my second flare faster and didn’t run out of time?” Maybe that might mean I wouldn’t have to face a scarier creature at night.

Krakowiak: There are two ways this could go. If it’s a story mission and we want it to go a specific way, you really can’t get to that first flare faster. But if we leave that up to the players, when you get there early, the bandits might be just arriving. Or they might not even be there yet, and then they’ll interrupt you. You can also fight them, definitely. You don’t have to back down. You can just kill them all if you’re able to.

GamesBeat: The time pressure can produce some really dramatic moments like that.

Krakowiak: Yeah, I think that’s a trick everyone uses, whether it’s TV shows or movies or games. We don’t want to get rid of that completely. We want to have a healthy mix of scripting and freedom in an open world.

GamesBeat: It seems a lot more frightening at night. The horror genre starts to creep in more at that point.

Krakowiak: Yes, a little bit. This isn’t mandatory in zombie movies these days, so much, but we believe a little bit of real terror isn’t a bad thing. We’re trying to introduce that in the night portion of the game.

GamesBeat: I know Epic has their Fortnite game going on as well, where the object is to fortify yourself and get ready for the night. Is that the same idea here, or are you trying to do something very different here?

Krakowiak: From what I know of that game, we’re going along a different route. We’re more about a first-person melee combat and shooter experience. You’re preparing for the night as a character, but the story also comes into play. This isn’t a simple mechanic of “do this and that before the night comes and you’ll get through.” Fortnite looks awesome, but I think we’re about something else.

GamesBeat: It looks like the problem you face at night is that you can be more easily trapped, whereas during the daytime you can take your time a little bit more. You could easily escape the zombies by jumping over a fence or going vertical.

Krakowiak: Yeah, that’s the idea. You have access to the same abilities both during the day and at night, but during the day you’re more free to engage in combat on your own terms. That’s where you hold the advantage, especially when it comes to the regular zombies. There are still some bigger, tougher enemies and situations that will test you during the day. But I think that’s fair. Humans aren’t nocturnal creatures, whereas the monsters created by this infection clearly are. That’s reflected in the way the odds shift as nighttime comes.

Here’s our video interview with Krakowiak.

Dying Light developer describes the day-night duality of zombie game from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

---

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!

---

Jawfish Games has launched what some very big rivals haven’t been able to do. The Seattle startup is announcing today it has released two of its own real-time multiplayer tournament games on multiple platforms.

The new social-mobile games Jawfish Poker and Jawfish Words allow players to compete against each other in real time for virtual currency and bragging rights. The games are built on a proprietary technology that enables players to chat and play 15 or 20 hands a minute with real friends. Since the poker title launched a week ago, players have already played a million hands.

Jawfish previously launched the technology in the market in a partnership with Big Fish Games. Those companies released an iOS game called Match-Up! by Big Fish. It enables up to 16 friends to compete against each other in live tournaments within the app’s Word, Match-3, or Mahjong minigames. Now Jawfish, headed by former poker star Phil Gordon, is launching games under its own brand name.

“We’re now showing our chops in real-time multiplayer tournaments,” Gordon told GamesBeat.

Gordon said that players will be able to compete against each other across platforms, including iOS, Android, and the web. Jawfish Poker, available now on Apple’s iTunes App Store, focuses on the most important decision at a poker table: “all-in or fold?” It rapidly cycles players through hundreds of opponents in a fast-action game that is meant to look like a game on television.

Gordon led the design of the game. He is known worldwide as one of the best professional poker players. His team includes the engineers who built the hit title Full Tilt Poker, which was a hugely popular online poker game until the federal government shut it down in a regulatory battle in April 2011. A big legal battle ensued, and eventually the government changed its attitude about real-money online gambling. The app finally reopened last November, after rival PokerStars bought Full Tilt Poker. The team, however, moved on.

Jawfish Words is a real-time word-search game. Players compete in three objectives per round, such as High Score, Corners, Longest Word, or Diagonals. The game launched on the Amazon Kindle in May, and it has generated nearly 500,000 tournament entries since its debut. In June, Jawfish Words will debut on iOS, Android, and Facebook. All players will be able to compete in the same field of play.

That’s important so that the game can reach “critical mass,” Gordon said.

“If there are no players, it’s not fun,” he said. “By going cross-platform, it opens it up more and makes critical mass easier to achieve.”

The poker game is a virtual-goods game, where players can purchase extra chips with real money but can’t cash their winnings out.

The company started in January 2012 with eight co-founders, including Gordon. He finished fourth in a worldwide tournament, the World Series Main Event, in 2001. He was also the lead commentator in Bravo’s TV show Celebrity Poker Showdown. And he was the poker analyst for ESPN.com for five years. Gordon has written four books on poker, and they’ve sold more than 500,000 copies. His earliest accomplishment was entering college at age 15.

Gordon said the technology wasn’t possible 18 months ago, but with faster 4G data networking speeds on smartphones, it is quite doable now. The platform sits upon Amazon Web Services. With more than a million tournaments, the entire bandwidth cost has been less than $20, Gordon said.

Jawfish has $3.59 million in funding from Right Side Capital and Founders Fund. The company has 25 employees and is in the midst of hiring 25 more engineers.

Zynga announced last year that it would release real-time multiplayer game tournaments. But it still hasn’t launched those just yet.

“Our job is to take the games you know and reinvent them as multiplayer tournament games,” Gordon said.

---

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!

---

You could wait for the Microsoft Xbox One or the Sony PlayStation 4 to arrive this fall, or you could play PC games with better graphics now. Nvidia is launching its GeForce GTX 780 graphics chip today that will be able to run outstanding visuals in the latest generation of computer games.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, the world’s biggest maker of stand-alone graphics chips, says that its new chip is primed to run this year’s batch of high-end PC games — such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Watch Dogs, and Battlefield 4. Numerous gamer-PC makers are launching new computers today based on the new 250-watt chip, which can execute 4.0 teraflops in single-precision mode.

It’s worth noting that game consoles always lag behind the PC in performance. That’s because console makers have to lock in on a design a couple of years ahead of the launch and then give that specification to game developers so they make launch titles. The custom chip takes a while to design, and it can be engineered better than a general-purpose PC to run games.

But PC makers have the advantage of just taking the fastest off-the-shelf graphics chip and marrying it with other state-of-the-art components. They can build a more modern machine that isn’t based on last year’s technology. So it’s no surprise that a new Nvidia graphics chip with expensive PC trappings will be able to run circles around game consoles that haven’t launched yet.

The Nvidia chip has a Kepler-based graphics processing unit (GPU) with 2,304 cores and 3GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory. Those specs are 50 percent more than its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 680. Rival Advanced Micro Devices says it has a faster graphics card, but it achieves that by putting two graphics chips in a single card.

The new cards based on Nvidia’s new chip will come with Nvidia GeForce Experience software, gaming drivers, and other advanced features. The card taps PhysX, which creates more realistic physics and motion in games. Players who really want a fast experience can gang multiple cards together using Nvidia’s SLI technology.

“The GeForce GTX 780 delivers the fastest framerate and smoothest animation at a value never before seen in PC gaming,” said Scott Herkelman, the general manager of the GeForce business unit at Nvidia. “This level of performance allows gamers to become fully immersed into a game the way the developers originally intended.”

Nvidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology will automatically increase the GPU speed for enhanced performance while maintaining temperature range and fan controls. The 780 GPU is available today from add-in card suppliers including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac. The chip is selling for $649. PC makers that will use the chip in gamer systems include AVADirect, Cyberpower, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Geekbox, iBuyPower, Maingear, Origin PC, Puget Systems, V3 Gaming, and Velocity Micro.

So yeah, you can run your games faster than the consoles. But you’re going to pay extra in order to do it.

Check out the Nvidia video about the new graphics card.

---

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!

---

Big Fish Games is expanding its casual cloud-gaming service across four major platforms today. The Big Fish Instant Games app is now available on smartphones, tablets, TVs, and the PC.

In doing so, the company is taking cloud gaming to the masses in a way that its rivals Gaikai and OnLive haven’t done.

Seattle-based Big Fish Games bills itself as the world’s largest producer of casual games. Its roots are as a maker of downloadable games on websites that primarily target older female gamers, who embrace titles that don’t involve guns and violence. It has published more than 3,000 games produced by its own developers and third-party gamemakers.

The company has been adapting to the growth of mobile gaming by launching a series of mobile titles, adapted from its casual web fare. But last year, the company also made a bold move by launching a cloud-based service, where games are stored and executed on web-connected data centers rather than on a player’s computer. The games are streamed to a user’s machine, which doesn’t have to process or store the game data.

That allows those games to be played on any device, and Big Fish Games is reaping the rewards of that investment today by launching its cloud service across all four major screens: PCs, smart TVs, tablets, and mobile phones. Big Fish Games is making the app for its cloud service available on the Google Play store today, and it is also releasing it on the Roku 3 set-top box, which will take the content to the television screen.

Customers can instantly play the entire Big Fish Instant Games catalog of more than 200 games. The idea is to give users maximum flexibility in where and how people want to play. The Big Fish Instant Games platform will come to more platforms throughout the year. Game progress is stored in the cloud, allowing players to play on one device and then log into the same game from another device.

Big Fish Games launched the service on the iPad last year. Since that launch, users have logged more than 200 years of gameplay from over 5 million game sessions.

“Adding Android smartphones and Roku to our supported devices has substantially increased the audience of users who can instantly play and enjoy games from Big Fish,” said Jina Heverley, the vice president and general manager of PC, Mac, and Cloud for Big Fish. ”Now
you can start a Big Fish game on your TV at home and pick it up later on the go on your smartphone without having to wait for the game to download.”

Big Fish charges $7.99 a month for subscriptions to the service. Big Fish also allows free access to a rotating catalog of games via an ad-supported service.

---

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!

---

PHP company Zend has just released the results of its annual developer survey. The exhaustive poll of 5,000 developers highlights a few interesting trends and one particularly heartening mobile web factoid.

Clearly, everyone and their dog is thinking mobile first these days. But what’s more interesting in the survey is that the majority of developers aren’t looking to iOS or Android to do so.

From a release on the report:

When asked how they intend to deliver content and services to their mobile audience, 79% of developers identified their intent to leverage web apps and open standards such as HTML5.

Of course, the devops trend marches onward with the increased need for efficiency in deployment. Zend’s results shows 87 percent of developers experience delays in moving their app from development to production, and a full 90 percent have worked weekends, vacations and holidays because of production emergencies.

Here are the results in a handy infographic form:

Image credit: Based on photo from ostill/Shutterstock

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

The newborn was diagnosed with tracheobronchomalacia, a condition in which the airways collapse, not allowing oxygen to enter the lungs. That, tragically, caused repeated heart attacks. As the doctors said when writing up the case study for the New England Journal of Medicine, “ventilation that was sufficient to prevent recurring cardiopulmonary arrests could not be maintained.”

Doctors then printed a splint that is completely customized to the baby’s tracheal tubes, based on a “computed tomographic image of the patient’s airway.” It’s bioresorbable, made out of a material called polycaprolactone, so it will never need to be withdrawn, and the baby’s body will just naturally absorb and discard the splint within three years.

By that time, doctors say, the baby’s lungs and airways will have developed enough strength to stay open by themselves.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

The 3-D printed tracheal insert being placed

According to LiveScience, prior to 3-D printing, lung splints were carved by hand. 3-D printed splints can be fabricated in a single day, however, and cost about a third as much.

After inserting the device, doctors kept the baby on a ventilator for 21 days, until the child was discharged from hospital. One year after the surgery, no “unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

Doctors’ conclusions?

“This case shows that high-resolution imaging, computer-aided design, and biomaterial three-dimensional printing together can facilitate the creation of implantable devices for conditions that are anatomically specific for a given patient.”

Hewlett-Packard is moving into the innovative new category of tabletop computing today with the announcement of its HP Envy Rove 20 all-in-one computer. The touchscreen device has a 20-inch screen that you can fix at a variety of angles. You can even lay it flat as a tabletop computer.

The machine is part of a growing category of tabletop computers coming from major computer makers. Sony launched its Sony Tap 20 computer last fall, while Lenovo is coming out soon with a 27-inch tabletop computer that you can play Air Hockey on. These models are pricier, as computer makers hope to entice PC buyers to upgrade to the more versatile machines.

The device also comes with a built-in battery that can last for three hours while unplugged. In that sense, you can use it as a giant touchscreen tablet. You can carry it around the house or play games on it on the kitchen table.

The machine uses Intel integrated graphics and Haswell processors. It has an in-plane switching (IPS) panel with wide viewing angles and 10-finger multitouch. It has Beats Audio and comes per-installed with software including EA Monopoly, Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars Puzzle, Fingertapps Musical Instruments, and Disney Fairies. It will debut in July for an undisclosed price.

Advanced Micro Devices is launching two new families of mobile chips today for faster and more power efficient laptops.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD wants to become more competitive with its larger rival Intel, and it is doing it by creating all-in-one chips dubbed accelerated processing units (APUs) that combine graphics and processing in the same piece of silicon. Those kinds of chips have been built into the newest game consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

These new chips will go into a wide range of computers, from traditional PCs to new kinds of designs. One chip, formerly code-named Temash, will be called the 2013 AMD Elite Memory APU, a quad-core chip built with a 28-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip is aimed at smaller notebook computers, tablets and hybrids, which combine a tablet and a laptop in one device. It is aimed at machines with 13-inch screens and below.

A second chip is the 2013 AMD Mainstream APU, formerly code-named Kabini. That quad-core chip is a quad-core system-on-chip for entry-level and small laptops. The third chip is a low-power version of the 2013 AMD Elite Performance APU, formerly code-named Richland. It is aimed at thin laptops with high performance.

“The worlds of the tablet and PC are colliding,” said John Taylor, vice president of corporate communications at AMD, in an interview with VentureBeat. “These chips will have high-performance and operate on low wattage. We are targeting both PCs and Android devices. With Windows 8 and touchscreens, there is more flexibility in the market.”

“AMD is in its best position in a while with Temash, Kabini and Richland to field a differentiated offering, and doing it in time to hit the back to school selling season,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “We won’t know how they do until we can see how they are assorted with OEMs and at retail, which is as vital as having a good product.”

AMD has scored customer deals with big computer makers including Acer and HP.

“The client market has evolved – with greater diversity in the types of mobile form factors and higher performance demands from the software – and AMD is uniquely positioned to deliver the best processors to meet the needs of mobile device users today,” said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of global business units at AMD. “As computing becomes more visual and the graphics processor can be leveraged to do other types of processing, our dedication to the software community and the APU architecture sets us apart from the competition and enables us to deliver the best user experience whether on a tablet, a hybrid device or a notebook.”

The 2013 AMD Elite Mobility APU will be available as the AMD A-Series APUs. It will come with dual-core and quad-core configurations. The core, or main computing brain, will be based on the Jaguar microarchitecture, which combines an x86 central processing unit (CPU) with a Graphics Core Next AMD Radeon 8000 series graphics chip. It will have 172 percent faster CPU performance per watt of power consumed and 212 percent better graphics performance per watt than its predecessor. Computers using it will have up to 12 hours of resting battery life. AMD says it will have 45 percent longer battery life and five times the graphics performance than the closest competing chip from Intel.

The 2013 AMD Mainstream APU will have either two or four Jaguar cores with the AMD Radeon 8000 series graphics. That chip will be 132 percent better in visual performance per watt and 127 percent better on productivity apps per watt, compared with previous generations. It will be 88 percent better at graphics and 33 percent better at gaming than the rival Intel chips.

And the 2013 AMD Elite Performance APU will be used in top-of-the-line chips dubbed the A8 and A10. It will have 12 percent better productivity performance and 20 percent to 40 percent better visual performance than prior chips. It will have 39 percent to 72 percent better gaming performance than rival Intel chips, AMD says.

AMD is packaging gesture-control software with the chips so that developers can use it to do non-traditional computing tasks such as controlling the user interface with hand gestures.

Hewlett-Packard is unveiling a small army of computers today that will use Intel’s next-generation microprocessors, code-named Haswell, for better processing without an increase in power consumption. The new products are HP’s latest bid to get its mojo back and to embrace the change wrought by tablets on the struggling PC industry.

Some of the devices are already shipping, but many are still waiting on Intel’s official release of the Haswell processors, which are due in early June. The Haswell processors are built in a 22-nanometer manufacturing process that enables both faster processor speeds and low power consumption, mainly by combining graphics and processor functions on a single chip. Haswell promises twice the graphics performance of last year’s Ivy Bridge processors.

Intel introduces major processors about once a year or so, and HP is using the occasion to launch a wholesale redesign of its computers. It is launching a new lineup of laptops, all-in-one computers, and desktops. All of the devices are thinner, stronger, and sleeker in design.

Among the new offerings are a bunch of thinner, lighter, and faster touchscreen laptop computers. They include the HP Envy TouchSmart 14 Ultrabook, with a 3,200-by-1,800 full high-definition touchscreen display, better battery life, Intel’s Haswell, and a 10-point multitouch screen. That model will ship on June 26 for $700. Such low prices mean that Intel-based Ultrabooks will finally reach a sweet spot of good battery life, good performance, and lower prices. The HP Envy TouchSmart 15 notebook (pictured right) also has a full touchscreen with Beats Audio. it will be available on June 5 for $530.

The HP Envy 17 notebook computer will come with a 17.3-inch screen, an Intel processor and Nvidia graphics. It has 2TBs of hard disk space, Beats audio, and a full-HD display. It will start selling on June 5 at $700.

HP is also launching new versions of its mainstream consumer Pavilion-branded computers. The HP Pavilion TouchSmart notebook is a thin laptop with a capacitive touchscreen and 10-finger gesture support. It will sell for $400 starting on June 26. The HP Pavilion 15 notebook will have a 15.6-inch display, a 1-terabyte hard drive, and an optical drive, and it will come in a variety of colors. It will sell on June 5 starting at $430.

As for desktops, HP is introducing a cool new all-in-one PC dubbed the HP Envy Rove 20. The device has a 20-inch touchscreen that you can fix at a variety of angles. You can also lay the device flat.

The device also comes with a built-in battery that can last for three hours while unplugged. In other words, it’s a giant touchscreen tablet running Windows 8. The machine uses Intel integrated graphics and Haswell processors. It has an in-plane switching (IPS) panel with wide viewing angles and 10-finger multitouch. It has Beats Audio and comes installed with software including EA Monopoly, Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars Puzzle, Fingertapps Musical Instruments, and Disney Fairies. It will debut in July for an undisclosed price.

HP is also launching the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 20 and 23 all-in-one PC models. These feature five-point optical touchscreens, widescreen displays, and new processors from both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The hard drives have up to 2TBs of storage. The machines have HP TrueVision WebCams and 25GBs of free Box cloud storage for U.S. users. The 20-inch model will sell for $620 starting June 23, and the 23-inch model will sell for $750 on June 5.

HP is also launching a series of new desktops. The HP Envy Phoenix 800 Desktop PC will have both Nvidia discrete graphics and Haswell processors. It will start selling on June 5 for $1,100. The HP Envy 700 Desktop PC will offer a choice of AMD processors or Haswell processors. It will be available on June 5 for $600.

The HP Pavilion 500 Desktop PC will have Haswell with a choice of discrete graphics from Nvidia or AMD. It will start selling on June 5 for $490. The HP Pavilion Slimline 400 Desktop PC will come with Haswell processors and Nvidia discrete graphics chips. It will start selling on June 30 exclusively at Best Buy starting at $400. And HP is launching the HP 110 Desktop PC. This low-cost machine has Intel processors or AMD processors, up to two terabytes of hard disk storage, and a 6-in-1 media card reader. It will be available on June 5 starting at $290.

HP is also extending the Envy brand name to its printers. The new products include the HP Envy 4500 e-All-in-One and the HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One printers. Those printers are able to print from both mobile devices and web pages. They’re packaged in compact enclosures and offer Instant Ink subscriptions, which make it easy for a home user to get ink refills. Pricing for the printers will be announced later this summer.

Last week, HP unveiled a couple of new consumer notebook computers. Those included the HP Split x2, a laptop that can be used as a clamshell device or converted into a tablet by detaching the keyboard. Such 2-in-1 designs are an example of wider innovation in the PC industry and an attempt to change with the times. The HP Split x2 has a 13.3-inch touchscreen and two batteries. The Split x2 will sell for $800. HP also unveiled its HP SlateBook x2, an Android tablet that can be used either as a tablet or a laptop. It features an Nvidia Tegra 4 mobile processor and a 10.1-inch diagonal screen. The HP SlateBook x2 will sell for $480.

In fact, social media referrals represents just 1.55 percent of all traffic to major e-commerce destinations. And when that tiny trickle of traffic arrived, only .71 percent of it actually resulted in any kind of sale. Email marketing, by contrast, generates twice as much traffic as social media, and has four times the conversion rate to sales.

Those are not good numbers for social.

Source: Monetate

Conversion rates by traffic-referring sources

The darling of the omnipresent social media gurus on Twitter, social commerce was supposed to totally disrupt e-commerce. And, because people trust other people’s recommendations and spend a lot of time on Facebook where they meet other people and read what they say, social commerce was supposed to be huge, turning social media influence and shares into sales and revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

“The challenge for social media — and for its big brother, word of mouth marketing — is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative,” Monetate’s new report states.

But Monetate says that the problem isn’t in the social. It’s in how companies are using it.

Loyalty isn’t about clicking on an offer, report author Mitch Joel says, it’s about building a relationship. And a relationship goes far beyond “do you want to buy this.” Which means that social is not short term, social is not transactional, and social is not the same as direct response.

In other words: shocker, social media is, well, social.

Taken in that context, social can still be very worthwhile for brands, as marketing firm Syncapse found just a few weeks ago, valuing some Facebook fans at over $1,600. But it’s the relationship that’s valuable, not the episodic communications per se.

And that relationship can be very precious indeed. When an actual sale is made from a social referral, it’s often a large one, with the average Pinterest-referred sale clocking in at over $80, and the average Facebook and Twitter sale at about $70.

Source: Monetate

Average order value by social-referred sale

photo credit: zoomar via photopin cc

Carl Esposti is CEO of crowdsourcing advisory firm massolution.

If you think that participating in crowdfunding simply means investing in smaller companies that launch games and devices on Kickstarter, think again. With crowdfunding volumes reaching $2.7 billion in 2012, it has emerged as a viable, scalable alternative to public and private finance across the globe.

After surveying more than 350 active crowdfunding platforms, including IndieGoGo, CrowdCube, Symbid, and Gambitious (full site directory at crowdsourcing.org), and completing an in-depth analysis of market trends, research firm Massolution has identified five major crowdfunding developments for 2013 and beyond.

1. Niche platforms

As crowdfunding platforms try to benefit from market differentiation, niche-, industry-, and sector-specific platforms are emerging.

Platforms offering reward-based crowdfunding see an especially high value in serving a common niche or industry. Examples include platforms focusing on video games, recording art, performing art, real estate, food and beverage, fashion, journalism, and more.

While it’s smart for a new platform to choose a specific niche simply to differentiate its service, there is another big reason why this trend is likely to prevail—it helps build a repeated crowd on the platform. Having crowdfunders visit a platform, not just because they have been invited onto a specific campaign, but because the campaigns appeal to their tastes, is extremely valuable.

#2. Locavesting

In her 2011 book, Locavesting, business and finance journalist Amy Cortese describes how “a revolution in local investing” is emerging and that crowfunding is boosting it. This year, we are going to see increased momentum in this revolution because many new crowdfunding platforms will actually specialize in locavesting.

It’s been over a year since President Obama signed the JOBS Act, but legislation is stymied in the hands of the SEC.

However, at least four states – Louisiana, North Carolina, Georgia and Kansas – have taken the initiative to allow crowdfunding for business loans. Crowdfunding platform Rebirth Financial is specializing in locavesting and offers intrastate, lending-based crowdfunding. Although Rebirth’s offerings are open to anyone within state borders, successful campaigns have so far been driven by very local support – all the way down to the customer-base level.

#3. Enterprise crowdfunding

Large enterprises and associations have begun to look into crowdfunding and how this tool carries new potential for their companies, including raising social profiles, market testing, and spin-ins of entrepreneurial ventures. The perceived benefit is not the additional funding itself, but the democratization of specific decisions that would otherwise be made internally in the company.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) represents the interests of more than 85,000 member architects across the U.S., a sector that has been hit particularly hard by the recent financial crisis. Recently, the AIA published a report examining crowdfunding’s potential as a new source of capital for residential, commercial, and industrial infrastructure projects.

Crowdfunding shows significant promise for attracting investors to smaller projects and getting them off the architect’s drawing board. In this case, crowdfunding will be used to spur community support and financing for an assortment of infrastructure ventures that would ordinarily have difficulty finding money due to their smaller size.

#4. Crowdfunding economic development

Major development banks and similar institutions — including The World Bank and The Inter-American Development Bank — are seeking to leverage crowdfunding for economic development. Crowdfunding’s social profile and its strong connection to micro-finance are the main drivers.

Crowdfunding has historically been embraced by philanthropic ventures, especially for donation-based crowdfunding and interest-free lending. The models naturally merge with micro-finance because the funding needs are very small, and individual donations or loans are likely triggers of funding success. The next step for crowdfunding in this particular space is the evolution and scaling up to economic development at the macro level.

The Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank is currently exploring the potential of crowdfunding in Latin America, and how crowdfunding can be used to improve small businesses and bring financing to entrepreneurs who have less access to it. In Latin America, crowdfunding is just gathering momentum with about 40 online platforms, including Crowdfunder.mx and Idea.me, established over the last couple of years.

Platforms in the areas of solar energy, education, and urban development are expected to be the most promising in this region.

5. LIVE crowdfunding

The final trend that we see emerging in the crowdfunding space are launch-party events at the initiation of campaigns or LIVE crowdfunding expos. Besides creating media attention and offering a great marketing opportunity, LIVE Crowdfunding taps into an investor need that is hard to come by through the web: exclusivity.

Exclusivity in access to new products or deal flow can be a triggering factor in itself, and LIVE crowdfunding augments online crowdfunding with exactly that.

This October, the CrowdfundingRoadmap is hosting its second Global Crowdfunding Convention and Bootcamp, this year with its first ever LIVE Crowdfunding Expo, where anyone will be able to participate in donations- and rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns right on the spot.

All attendees will need to do is simply walk up to the booth!

In addition, if entrepreneurs are unable to attend the event or are launching their projects after October, CrowdfundingRoadmap is offering them the opportunity to showcase their crowdfunding pitch videos on the big screen at the expo, with a designated QR code, to help them get in front of potential investors and industry influencers.

Crowdfunding represents a breakthrough in how businesses and local projects are funded and disrupts centuries-old financial flows. While 2012 was the year of acceleration for the crowdfunding markets, these new developments above will fuel its growth for years to come.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Hands with dollars

Twitter released its two-factor authentication option today, after major media organizations were tricked into giving out their login information to hackers.

Two-factor authentication is an extra form of security when logging into an account. It can come in a few different forms but generally involves some kind of code that users must input alongside their username and password. This code can be supplied through a mobile application such as Google’s Authenticator app, a text message, or a piece of hardware like RSA dongles. The code is often activated and deactivated within a short period of time, so if one code is leaked out, it can’t be used in the future to access an account.

Twitter is using a text-messaged code approach, according to its announcement today. Text messaging covers a much larger portion of the population, as opposed to an app, which requires users to have a smartphone. Twitter warns that some carriers may not support the technology.

You can turn two-factor authentication on by going to your account settings in Twitter and selecting “require a verification code.” You’ll then have to enter a phone number. After two-factor is set up, you will have to enter the code every time you log in to Twitter.

A number of big-name companies have rolled out two-factor authentication as a result of hackings, including Apple. Twitter recently experience a rash of “break ins” involving the accounts of major media publications CBS, NPR, the Associated Press, and more. The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-regime group of hackers that often attacks publications for their coverage of the conflict in Syria, has taken responsibility for the majority of these hacks. It says it usually gets access through phishing expeditions, where the group will send emails that look legitimate to employees of their target company asking for login credentials.

In the case of the AP, a tweet about an explosion at the White House caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop one percent in a minute. PhishMe chief executive Aaron Higmee explained that consumer-facing sites often leave these codes active for longer than usual because consumer sites don’t like having any barriers to entry. If a hacker phished a code and it still worked, then the two-factor authentication is useless. Jim Fenton, the chief security officer of OneID, also argues that two-factor authentication is breeding a false sense of security.

Twitter explains that now it has the two-factor technology in place, this opens the doors to future security elements to be introduced.

Image via Twitter

The world’s largest streaming music service, Pandora, is finally adding some deep integration with the world’s largest social network, Facebook, giving its users a much easier way to socialize their musical activity with friends.

Following on the heels of yesterday’s Pandora Premieres announcement, the new Facebook integration adds a helpful social layer to the streaming music service, and may help assure investors that Pandora is moving forward despite a grim business outlook ahead of tomorrow’s Q1 FY2014 earnings report. Previously, Pandora’s now former CEO Joe Kennedy testified at a congressional hearing that Pandora would be unable to sustain its business if music royalty rates weren’t lowered, (and it doesn’t appear the rates will drop). There’s also the matter of increased competition in smart radio services from giant tech companies with lots of money to burn. Google recently launched its own Google Play All Access streaming radio service, while Apple and Amazon are rumored to debut similar offerings later in the year.

As for the new Timeline app integration, Pandora isn’t following other media companies that have provided deep integration with Facebook’s Open Graph, which allows people to see all of your activity from both the Facebook news feed and from an activity ticker. Streaming services like Spotify allow friends on Facebook to see songs you’re currently listening to, which I’ve never found very compelling.

Pandora’s Facebook integration is a bit different because it focuses on adding things to your Timeline under a music section. When people are exploring your Timeline page, they’ll see a record of your songs played, favorite artists, and custom radio stations that others can then listen to. It also pops up in the Facebook news feed, but as a past event that behaves more like a news story than an activity. And determining exactly what listening activity you want people to see is pretty easy — meaning I can hide most of the random 90s slow jams that pop up. You can toggle the automatic sharing on and off as needed, which I can’t really say about the fire hose of activity offered by other music services that integrate with Facebook. Those sharing controls are also available on Pandora itself.

The new Facebook Timeline integration is available across all of Pandora’s applications and platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Pandora’s website, etc.) today. Obviously, the company is committed to a more social Pandora experience, but the more interesting observation is in how it’s not at all trying to promote an increase in listening (or consuming) activity.

Media companies like Spotify, Viddy, Vevo, Ustream, and others all saw a “Facebook bump” in new users and time spent on their respective services after integrating with Facebook’s open graph. But that sort of move could actually hinder Pandora’s overall business strategy. It’s already one of the largest streaming music service almost to a fault, with 200 million total registered users and over 1.49 billion hours of music listened to per month.

Despite record growth, the company said it’s unable to generate revenue and grow long-term profitability without the aid of any “Facebook Bump” due to what it sees as unreasonably high music licensing fees. Those fees have forced Pandora to implement a 40-hour monthly music listening cap on users of its free, ad-supported service. Therefore it would appear that a large growth spurt would end up hurting the company’s bottom line, since its advertising revenue isn’t able to keep pace with Pandora’s operational growth and increasing music licensing costs. But preventing the service from growing and attempting to lower the amount of interaction spent on it from its most loyal would be a very backwards strategy — not that I think Pandora’s Facebook Timeline integration is an attempt to do either of those things; still, the addition focuses more on keeping current users than grabbing new ones.

We’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s earnings call to find out if recent developments (Kennedy’s departure back in March, the Facebook Timeline integration, and new unreleased album station Pandora Premieres) are enough to keep the company’s stock from taking a dip.

Nothing can stop the next-gen hype train now that Microsoft and Sony have both unveiled their new home consoles. Sony showed off its PlayStation 4 in February, and Microsoft did the same yesterday with its Xbox One. We now know the basics about each device, and that gives us a chance to look at each system to decide which one is best prepared to win over gamers’ hearts this holiday and beyond.

First, let’s get some basics out of the way. We don’t know the price. We barely know about the games. Each company, and their partners, will certainly show more at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June. Until then, we’re simply working from the visions that Microsoft and Sony attempted to establish with their announcements.

Analyst Jesse Divinch, the vice president of insights at industry-analysis firm EEDAR, thinks it’s too early to tell.

“It’s always difficult to determine winners and losers off of highly choreographed presentations, but from other experiences, it is too close of a call to say one presentation was better than the other,” said Divinch. “From EEDAR’s view point, both were successful in demonstrating their platform’s core experience, and we believe that both Microsoft and Sony will realize market success at launch and through 2017. It’s too early to predict who will have a larger market share, but we are confident in saying that both will be profitable and viable platforms for third-party developers.”

Let’s look at the facts and then you can decide.

Hardware separated at birth

Microsoft has already lifted the curtain on the design for its new box. The PlayStation 4′s aesthetics are still under wraps. That doesn’t really matter, because gamers know that true beauty comes from within.

When it comes to internals, these two consoles are nearly identical. That’s because both are using the same AMD Jaguar accelerated processing unit that combines the computational and the graphical processing on to a single, streamlined chip.

The Xbox One collection.

Both systems have eight cores running at around 1.6GHz, with 4MB of L2 cache. Things don’t diverge significantly until we look at the system memory. Again, both systems have 8GB of RAM, but the PS4 uses the speedier GDDR5 memory that can stream data at 5,500MHz, while Xbox One’s DDR3 RAM tops out at 2,133MHz.

That translates into a huge difference in the amount of memory each system can move at any one time. That gives the PlayStation 4 a clear edge in raw computing power – but it’s not as simple as that. Microsoft specifically designed Xbox One to offload computation into the fabled cloud.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the [computational] loads onto,” Microsoft software expert Boyd Multerer said in during an Xbox One panel. “I think it’s an inflection point. So — over time — your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

The idea is that Microsoft will continually get better at handling certain kinds of computations (artificial intelligence, for example) on its servers. This will open up One’s local hardware so it can process more detailed visuals and other kinds of data.

That’s the plan, anyhow. It is up to game developers to follow through with that.

Meanwhile, Sony’s Gaikai cloud service might be able to do the same thing, but it looks like it is attempting to unload entire game demos into the cloud rather than piecemeal portions each title.

In the end, these two machines are a pair of powerful PC-based gaming rigs that should produce high-quality graphics.

Gaming or multimedia features

If PlayStation 4 is a slightly more powerful Xbox One — or Xbox One is a slightly slower PlayStation 4 — then what separates these devices?

The answer to that question is features: software, social capabilities, and more. These two companies presented varying takes on what a gaming console is. In fact, Microsoft made a big stride toward leaving behind the notion that Xbox is a gaming brand.

According to Microsoft, Xbox One is an all-in-one multimedia powerhouse. It will control your TV and your sports. It will connect you with your family with 1080p Skype calls. The software company is using its core competency, Windows, to flesh out Xbox One’s features. It wants to do everything you consider entertainment — and while that might include games, it also includes a whole slate of other things as well.

To power all of this, Xbox One uses a “touch of windows,” as VentureBeat gadget guy Devindra Hardawar puts it, to quickly switch between live TV, applications, and games. The result is a speedy operating system that didn’t hesitate to immediately gratify the onstage presenter’s every need during Microsoft’s event.

Sony, on the other hand, focused the PlayStation 4 on games. Likewise, nearly all of its features attempt to improve the playing experience. Right at the top of that list is a new Share button on the DualShock 4 controller.

This is the company’s one-step solution to broadcasting livestreams of gameplay to websites like Ustream. It also enables players to send brag clips to friends and to social media sites like Twitter.

All of that doesn’t mean Sony won’t have a vast multimedia strategy for PlayStation 4, but it’s clear it thinks the key to success — at least at first — is through the heart of its core gaming audience.

The many unknowns

Then we have the controversies. If one thing set apart the PlayStation 4 announcement from the Xbox One announcement, it was that Sony was able to avoid upsetting fans while Microsoft inadvertently threw some rocks at a monster closet full of angry gamers.

Right now, we don’t know how Microsoft’s new console will handle used games. We don’t know the details of its online requirement. The company says the Xbox One requires the Internet, but it won’t detail what that means. It says it is designing the system to allow trade-in games, but it won’t tell us what that means, either.

On all of these hot-button issues, Microsoft first gave a confusing swarm of contradictory answers before falling back on one company line: “All policy decisions are still being finalized.”

Sony is better off, but not by much. Following its February event, the company stated that PS4 doesn’t require a constant Internet connection. The used games issue is far more muddled.

Sony worldwide studio head Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that “used games can play on PS4.” When pressed on the issue, however, Sony told Game Informer: “We are just now announcing the basic vision and strategy for PS4, and we’ll have more information to share regarding used games later this year.”

That is a very ominous response. How hard is it to share a vision where all used games work all of the time? For Microsoft and Sony, apparently it is very difficult.

These unknowns are only a problem for now. It’s possible both companies will fully explain everything and we will happily greet the answers — or we’ll have something very specific to complain about.

So, who’s winning?

This is a pretty silly question. It depends on who you ask and what you want from a big box that sits alongside your television. Gamers are clearly excited with Sony’s laser-focused vision on core gaming experiences. Microsoft seems equally confident that it can conquer the world with nothing but Call of Duty: Ghosts (a multiplatform game) and some video functionality.

That might appeal to an audience outside of core gamer circles. But ask Nintendo how that strategy works out in the end.

---

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!

---

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Click. Click. Click. Click. That was the sound we heard as we went inside the previously secret lab where Microsoft is testing game controllers for the Xbox One game console. It’s the sound of a robot pushing a controller four to five times a second, which is probably faster than you’ll be doing if you get your hands on these controllers. At the Xbox One revelation yesterday, Microsoft took the press through the labs to show how thorough its research was in devising a controller that was just right for you.

Game controllers are a critical accessory that can make or break a system, particularly for hardcore gamers, who develop passionate feelings about the devices that they hold for hours at a time. If there are problems with the controller, it could cascade into a general dislike for the console, which is anticipated to be a multibillion-dollar platform. Fortunately for Microsoft, the feedback yesterday from people who held the controller is positive. It isn’t dramatically different from the current Xbox 360 game controller, and that’s a good thing.

Those with long memories will remember what an embarrassment Microsoft faced when its first game controller for the original Xbox in 2001 was too large, partly because it required two slots for bulky flash storage cards. Anyone with small hands couldn’t even wield the bulky thing well. Microsoft quickly redesigned the controller to be smaller. Since that time, the company has learned a thing or two about industrial design.

With the Xbox 360, Microsoft created a widely acclaimed console controller with the help of outside industrial design companies such as Astro Gaming in San Francisco. But this time, Microsoft was able to do a lot more of the process inside its own walls, said Carl Ledbetter, the senior principal creative director and a leader of the Xbox One industrial design. During our tour, Ledbetter said the team in one building could create a design and walk it over to the Model Shop in another, where Vince Jesus, the lab director, could print out a 3D prototype. That enabled Microsoft to preserve secrecy on the whole project more easily.

“We could bring people in-house and watch them play games in Studio B,” Ledbetter said. “We watched them, with their permission. We videotaped them.”

One of the big changes is a new magnetic trigger that feels different when you pull it. The haptic triggers give you immediate touch feedback. The device also has much more accurate and nuanced force feedback. Older controllers would simply shake when you were shooting a gun or during an intense part of a game. But the force feedback on this sends you different signals depending on what is happening. If you are driving a car, you can feel the bump of the wheels on the road, and you get a different sensation when you hit the brakes.

You can also get precise feedback that feels like a beating heart. Together with the fact that the new Kinect can actually detect your heartbeat, this feature could make for some very interesting effects in future games. The device can simulate a different kind of feedback when you fire a gun. You can feel the rumble of helicopter rotors in another demo.

The device does not have a touchpad or “share button” like Sony’s does with its new PlayStation 4 controller. But Microsoft’s device includes an infrared LED on the front of controller to enable seamless player pairing and identification. Using Kinect, Microsoft can clearly identify a person who is using a controller. The results — players easily jump in and out of games.

Ledbetter said that gamers didn’t really complain about the Xbox 360 controller. But there were things that annoyed them. People with bigger hands felt the battery case on the bottom of the controller get in their way. The screw holes on the bottom of the grip and a plastic seam were also things the gamers could feel. This new controller removed those problems. The seam no longer runs across the bottom of the grip, Ledbetter said. You can still change the batteries. Everything felt nice in my hands.

“People were sensitive to the holes, but we took close-up photos in tests and could tell,” Ledbetter said. “These are things that make it a better product. We wanted it to be more comfortable and we wanted a wider range of hand sizes that could fit it.”

The new controller weighs almost the same as the current Xbox 360 controller. But it feels different because its center of gravity has changed. The battery pack used to be perpindicular to the controller’s front, and it jutted down from the bottom of the controller. Now it has been turned sideways and it is embedded in the body. That was enough to shift that center of gravity so that it feels different in your hands. The AA battery case is still removable. The new controller feels lighter.

Pages: 1 2

There are two key problems that require immediate remediation in Congress, according to the coalition of companies, politicians, and nonprofits: jobs and fairness.

“Our outdated immigration system is costing our economy talent, jobs, and innovation, not to mention the toll it’s taking on families and potential immigrants,” the organization says. “America can’t afford to fall behind in the race for global talent — a race we’re already losing. Already, other countries have incentivized innovation and encouraged startups while we make it difficult for talented immigrants to even apply for a visa.”

That sounds like a reference to Canada, which recently created a “startup visa” that gives immigrants who are founding companies instant permanent residency and had its minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, visit Silicon Valley to drum up applicants who might be having trouble staying in the U.S.

The result could be a net drain on the American economy:

Holy crap! @alexisohanian ‘s mom was an illegal immigrant. If she had been deported? No #reddit for the USA. That’s why #iMarch #latism

— AnaRC (@AnaRC) May 22, 2013

When I chatted with Kenney last week, he called the U.S. immigration system “dysfunctional.”

The U.S. has made attempts to address the situation with a Startup Act of its own, but even that would only allow founders to stay for up to three years. The March for Innovation is looking for much more comprehensive reform that would include help for undocumented immigrants already in the country.

March for Immigration is supported by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Steve Case, Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, and numerous other business and technology leaders.

If you’re interested in participating, here are four things you can do to help:

1. Tweet or Facebook your senator
2. Spread the word on Twitter or Facebook
3. Change your Facebook profile picture to iMarch
4. Email your friends

The ultimate goal is immigration reform that supports innovation and delivers on the promise at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

photo credit: gerson721 via photopin cc

Neurotrack, the startup that won the health prize at this year’s SXSW, has pulled in a round of seed funding, according to a Form D filing.

The $90,000 boost from angel investors is the first outside capital for the company with a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease.

CEO Elli Kaplan is aiming her life’s work at Alzheimer’s and related disorders. “I watched two of my grandparents die ‘alone’ because they could no longer remember their family members who were sitting at their bedsides,” she said.

Neurotrack’s test is bolstered by 25 years of neuroscience research. Millions of dollars from foundations and grants have already been poured into the technology, which was developed by researchers at Emery University.

The company offers a computer-based cognitive test that can detect an impairment on the Hippocampus, the first structure in the brain to be impacted by Alzheimer’s. The program evaluates patients’ eye movement — and the time spent looking at familiar and new images.

Related: The founders launched the company at DEMO — read the full VentureBeat story here.

Kaplan was impressed by the technology, which she claims could predict patients with a high risk of Alzheimer’s up to six years prior to the onset of the disease. So Neurotrack licensed it and is beginning to commercialize the test by selling to pharmaceutical companies.

“The biggest issue that pharma companies have is populating clinical trials with people who are pre-symptomatic,” said Kaplan. To develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, they need access to patients before irreparable damage is done.

The Alzheimer’s Association reports that about 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s – and that number is expected to rise to 16 million by 2050. But Kaplan is convinced that we’ll someday develop a drug that can cure the disease.

For now, informed patients can make lifestyle changes (exercising more, adapting eating habits) and take medication to delay the onset of the disease. “We know that some of the symptom-treating drugs are more effective the earlier you can start them,” said Kaplan.

Results from the most recent research is very promising — according to Kaplan, the participants who scored below 50 percent on the test have all received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis within six years. None of those scoring above 67 on the test have converted to Alzheimer’s. Ninety-two people participated in the study.

Neurotrack isn’t ready for the public yet — but if and when it becomes available, Kaplan said, people in their 50s will get tested every year. Patients with a family history of Alzheimer’s may receive the test earlier.

Kaplan would not yet disclose pricing information for the test when it becomes available. The company is in the midst of fundraising for its next round and is still fleshing out its go-to-market strategy. It is a graduate of Rock Health Boston, which has a strong relationship with venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and first launched at DEMO.

Top image of the founders at DEMO via Flickr

There’s a hacker who’s sure
All that glitters is old
And he’s buying a stairway to funding.

In Toronto he knows
If the doors are all closed,
On Sand Hill he can get what
He came for.

Ooooh, ooo-ooh, and he’s buying a stairway to funding!

There’s a term sheet that sucks
But for some fewer bucks
He says he can keep more of his equity.
In a bank run by crooks, there’s an old dude who sings,
“Sometimes all of our thoughts are collusion.”

And it makes me wonder.

Zalora scores $100M

Zalora, the Zappos-like fashion and beauty store for Southeast Asia, announced this morning that it has closed a $100 million financing round. That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels. Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.” Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Urturn raises $10.7M

Urturn, a U.K.-based social networking startup for iOS and desktop, has just taken a whopping $10.7 million in its first round of institutional funding. First time at bat, Urturned knocked it outta the park. I believe the expression is, “Nailed it.” The remarkable Series A was led by European Union firm Balderton Capital, which previously invested in Bebo. “It’s an important vote of confidence from a well-recognized VC for the company,” said a Urturn rep. From what we can see so far, the vote of confidence is, to be blunt, badly needed. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Cloudscaling climbs to $10M

Elastic cloud infrastructure startup Cloudscaling has raised $10 million in its second round of funding so it can keep growing at a quick clip and innovating its cloud technology. The San Francisco-based startup ‘s core product is the Open Cloud System, which can deliver the same benefits as providers like AWS and Rackspace. But unlike those companies, Cloudscaling’s solution is deployable in a client’s data center under an IT team’s control. It can also run its solution on Amazon and Google’s public clouds if a customer wants to do so. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Remote Medical raises $8M

Seattle-based Remote Medical just scored $8 million to bring health care to virtually anyone in need, anywhere in the world. Remote Medical serves companies and individuals in remote places; it’s a good option for military personell, research teams, law enforcement groups, or those lucky billionaires living out their days on private islands. Remote Medical offers a variety of services, including telemedicine (physicians can securely chat with patients via video), medical training, drugs, and equipment. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Ex-Facebook/Dropbox product guy gets $1.2M for stealth startup

Mystery meat of the day is YesGraph, a stealthy recruiting startup. Founder Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox, has already secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. “The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

UpOut comes up with $850K

Bay Area find-stuff-to-do app UpOut has raised an $850,000 seed round. The app serves up quirky, hipstery, “interesting” personalized recommendations for local events — so basically, it’s Stefon in your pocket. That sounded weird. Moving forward, the funding came from leading Silicon Valley angels. The company claims “tens of thousands” of users in and around San Francisco and has desktop and mobile apps.

Video robotics company Swivl raises $500K

Swivl makes personal robots with a video twist, and the company has just raised a $500,000 round from Grishin Robotics. Swivl — well, think of it as a Roomba for Facetime or YouTube. It swivels (hence the name) to track a speaker and capture video without the need for a dedicated cameraman. It’s designed with iOS devices in mind, but it works with any smartphone or video camera. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Neurotrack gets $90 for its tech to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s

The $90,000 boost from angel investors is the first outside capital for the startup with a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease. Neurotrack offers a computer-based cognitive test that can detect an impairment on the Hippocampus, the first structure in the brain to be impacted by Alzheimer’s.
Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Worlds are shaking as the father of the Graphics Interchange Format, ye trusty old bitmap image standby for animated images on Cheezburger and Reddit and every where geeks wanna have fun, says it’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.

“It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” ~ Steve Wilhite, the father of GIFs. Well that’s settled. #Webbys

— Brian A. Hernandez (@BAHjournalist) May 22, 2013

Steve Wilhite invented the venerable image format in 1987 for CompuServe, the first commercial online service in the United States. It supports a not-very-staggering 8-bit color palette, although it can go higher, and uses a loss-less data compression algorithm to reduce file size without degrading quality.

And according to Wikipidia, the creator’s “intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand, Jif … although an “alternative pronunciation with a hard ‘G’ … is in widespread usage.”

Wilhite disappointed those who believe GIF is pronounced the one true and right way, with a hard G, when he accepted a lifetime achievement award yesterday at the Webbies.

Response has varying, but true believers on the side of right and justice and the American way — not to mention syntactical and elocutionary excellence — have bravely stepped up to the plate to correct this horrific wrong:

@bahjournalist i don’t want to hear these communist lies

— Trevor Harmon (@maelstrommusics) May 22, 2013

@bahjournalist totally still disagree…even if he did make it. Graphic. Not jraphic. If I made apple and called it ahpple…no dice.

— Jarred Rowe (@JarredRowe) May 22, 2013

Unfortunately, the forces of evil are strong, and they have music on their side. Jonathan Mann, who has been making a “song of the day” for an astonishing 1,602 days, has made a song about the controversy which is mildly amusing, even if completely wrong-headed:

Take it back, Wilhite … or give back the award!

Image credits: Shocked Kramer/GifBin, Baby cringing/Reaction GIFs