Content provider Booyah scores $4.5M from Kleiner Perkins
Mobile and web content producer Booyah announced today that it received $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. The two seem like a good match, considering the company’s job listings for iPhone engineers and the investor’s special iPhone developers fund.
The Silicon Valley-based startup remains in stealth mode, and KP is its only named backer so far. Still, there are reasons to believe they might come out with something special. Its founders — Sam Christiansen, Keith Lee and… Continue Reading
Q&A with Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief operating officer, on post-merger life
Paul Sams is the chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is a division of Activision Blizzard, the newly created gaming powerhouse created from the $18 billion merger of Activision and Vivendi Games. Sams is one of the top executives responsible for making sure that Blizzard keeps pumping out hits like “World of Warcraft,” which has 10-million-plus paying subscribers.
VB: How many people do you have in Blizzard?
PS: It’s around 3,000 globally.
VB: Will Blizzard… Continue Reading
Will Martian water discovery fuel interest in sci-fi Blue Mars world?
The discovery of water on Mars might spur a lot of interest in the science fiction dream of terraforming the Red Planet into a habitable place. That could be good for Avatar Reality, a virtual world company in Honolulu that is building “Blue Mars,” a 3-D world with ambitious graphics and a setting that takes place after the successful colonization of Mars.
It is the brainchild of Kazuo Hashimoto, chief executive officer, and his cofounder Li-Han… Continue Reading
Another day, another billion-dollar Blizzard franchise
Blizzard Entertainment had a lot of buzz about its newest game leading up to its European event at the Porte de Versailles event center in Paris. And fans weren’t disappointed with the announcement of its new Diablo III computer game.
That might make a lot of others snore. But with the pending merger of Activision and Vivendi Games (of which Blizzard is a division) about to close, the unveiling of another chapter in another huge franchise… Continue Reading
A Q&A with Mark Jacobs, EA’s chief warrior on Warhammer Online
“It’s time to go to war.” That’s how Mark Jacobs opened a recent meeting with analysts at Electronic Arts as he talked about his new online game, “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.” Jacobs started Mythic Entertainment 13 years ago to make online games. He has done 15 such games since founding the company. In 2001, the company launched “Dark Age of Camelot,” which introduced “realm versus realm” combat among thousands of players. Electronic Arts bought… Continue Reading