VentureBeat

Tap Tap Revenge held the mantle as the most downloaded application on Apple’s App Store for a while. It’s a solid Guitar Hero-like music game that utilizes the iPhone and iPod Touch’s touch screen with the right price: Free. A new update out today could push it back to the top.

Version 1.2 contains the option to download a brand new song by the popular artist Everlast. The song, available for free, shows how artists can utilize games such as this as promotional tools. We’ve already seen it with the hit console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, now we’re likely to start seeing it on the iPhone as well.

I’m playing the game with the new song right now. It’s the actual version of the song, not a cover. It’s great.

Alongside the new version and song, Tapulous, the parent company of Tap Tap Revenge, is launching a contest for players. A few rounds will take place this weekend, with the final round coming on Monday (Labor Day) with an event that will be streamed live on uStreamTV at noon PST. The winner will receive $1,000, and the finalist will get a signed Everlast CD. (A CD? What?)

This Everlast release is the first of what Tapulous is calling “Tap Tap Thursdays” (though yes, today is a Friday). “Each Thursday we will launch a hot new track by a major artist,” Tapulous owner Bart Decrem explained over email.

The other big news is that version 1.2 of Tap Tap Revenge brings with it advertisements. These ads are being served by the mobile advertising startup AdMob.

AdMob’s vice president of marketing Jason Spero told us recently that the iPhone will showcase how powerful mobile ads can be. Now comes a big test to prove if he’s right or not. When I talked to Decrem a few days ago, he was very excited about the prospects of monetizing the application with AdMob ads.

The ads are relatively unobtrusive, showing up on the bottom of the menu screens and, as far as I can tell, not during the actual gameplay itself.

Here’s more about the contest from Tapulous’ site:

Starting at midnight tonight, California time, so that’s 12AM PST, start playing to Stone In My Hand by Everlast, on Tap Revenge 1.2. Submit your score at the end of each game. For each game where you score at least 100,000, you’ll get one contest “entry”. Each time you submit a score of at least 200,000, you’ll get two contest entries. The more you play, and the better you play, the more entries you’ll have. This part of the contest ends Sunday evening at 5pm, California time, so you have almost two full days.

Shortly after 5pm on Sunday evening, we will randomly pick 20 semi-finalists from among all the entries and send email to those semi-finalists, using the email address associated with your Tapulous account. Make sure that you have access to a PC with a webcam, know how to use uStreamTV, and that you’re available at noon, Monday, California time, in case you’re one of the finalists. So if you don’t have a webcam, and you want to be able to participate in the finals, make sure to connect with a buddy who does have one! This may be the perfect excuse to finally buy that Mac you’ve been oogling.

Then, Monday at noon, PST we will do a live tournament, broadcast on uStreamTV. First, we will winnow the list down to 10 finalists, who will each receive an autographed copy of the new Everlast CD. Then, over multiple rounds, we will select a grand prize winner who will win the $1000 cash prize. Semi-finalists will need to show up on time, subject to a 5-minute grace period. Be there, or be square! We will also have some provisions for dealing with technical problems during the live contest.

Here’s the latest action:

The Internet is broken – This is starting to sound like a broken record. Didn’t we just write about the DNS flaw that could cripple the Internet? Now two security researchers demonstrate a new technique to intercept Internet traffic on a scale similar to the abilities of agencies such as the National Security Agency.

Android unveiled? — The Android Guys say a trusted source has given them the detailed specs of the first Google Android phone. We reported already the phone, built by HTC and running the Android operating system, will be released soon, likely in October or November. The latest blueprints of the phone, now dubbed the G1 (Google’s first phone), show it has a touchscreen, a slight tilt to the trackball mouse location, and a five-row QWERTY keyboard, reminiscent of recent Sidekick devices. There’s more here, including notes about its kicktail and arc slider screen. Just make sure you take this with a five-pound bag of salt, because there’s feverish speculation and false information flying around right now.

Technorati buys Blogcritics.org – Technorati shifted into content as it announced it is buying Blogcritics.org, a community of 2,000 bloggers and news sites.

Eye-Fi scores deal with Nikon — The maker of wireless memory cards for digital cameras, announced tonight that it has a deal with Nikon to integrate Eye-Fi’s Wi-Fi-enabled memory cards into Nikon’s newest digital SLR camera, the Nikon D90.

Food service workers protest Nvidia’s chip flaws – At the Nvision 08 conference in San Jose, attendees were asking the people handing out anti-Nvidia flyers who they worked for. Was it Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, trying to stir up trouble for a rival that had an unlucky product bug in notebook computer graphics chips? Nope. It was Unite Here, a labor group in a dispute with Aramark, Nvidia’s food service vendor. But judging from the thousands of folks who lined up to play games all night long, stare at the booth babes in the exhibit hall, and get green T-shirts signed by “Battlestar Galactica” actress Tricia Helfer, Nvidia seemed to be weathering it all just fine.

HP completes $13.9 billion acquistion of EDS — Hewlett-Packard will become a juggernaut in tech services as it finalizes the EDS deal and goes after Big Blue.

YouTube now sending updates to Twitter — This looks to be the first Google product to embrace the Twitter lifestyle.

Spore comes to iPods ahead of regular release – Electronic Arts releases cell version of upcoming Spore game for the iPods ahead of its PC release.


Google’s subsea ambitions expand — Why just take over the world when you can takeover everything under the sea as well? Google is working with a consortium of carriers to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), which would hook up Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to the previous subsea cable Google already invested in, the Unity trans-Pacific submarine cable, which serves Japan.

Tapulous co-founder booted from company — Mike Lee, co-founder of Tapulous, has been booted from the hot maker of iPhone applications, according to TechCrunch.

Life after the HP spying scandal – George “Jay” Keyworth figured prominently in the spying scandal that brought down HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn. Now he has been appointed chairman of Green Plug, the company that is trying to establish a new standard for low-power electronics plugs and chargers.

The old fashioned business-card exchange hasn’t kept up with the times. In an age of social networking, it ought to be easier to connect with someone electronically. That thought inspired Gabe Zichermann, chief executive of New York startup rmbr, to create rmbrME.

The new service automates the exchange of contact information between two people. Palm Treo users once “beamed” each other their contact information through infrared connections; now rmbeME uses text messages.

rmbrME lets you send out a bzCard, which includes a standard vCard data (phone number, address etc.) plus social networking links such as direct links to your Facebook or Linkedin pages. It works from most phones, including smart phones, and on any cell phone carrier. It’s a free service for now, but Zichermann says the company will introduce subscription versions and other monetization schemes later.

The service goes live today. The company has been testing it for a couple of months and has gotten good reviews, particularly from business users who want it to be integrated with other functions such as Salesforce.com for lead management.

The rmbrME service will also incorporate the concept of Funware, a term which Zichermann coined and an idea we highlighted in a popular feature story. The idea refers to introducing game-like concepts to motivate users of non-game applications. In this case, rmbrME will hold contests and have leader scoreboards for people who can exchange the most bzcards. Zichermann said he’s picked up a lot of interest from potential sponsors from trade shows. The thinking is that the organizers of the shows can hold contests where they give out awards to attendees who make the most of the show.

“The Funware part will make it easier to network with others in real life,” Zichermann said. “It’s obvious that people have a lot of social anxiety around meeting others, even though it’s almost always beneficial to do so. We’ll make it easier by turning it into a game.”

With rmbrME, you can register your business card at rmbr.com. Then you send a text message to 762763 with the mobile number or email of your exchange partner. That user receives a text message with a link on it that you can customize. The link takes the user to a rmbrME bz card. The user can then click to connect to you on social networking services such as Linkedin or Facebook. The user can also click to have your contact info inserted into the their contact directory on the phone. You don’t have to exchange paper at all.

Zichermann thinks the service will work particularly well for people who give speeches or meet a lot of contacts at trade shows. It bypasses the computer almost entirely (except for the initial contact set-up) and will help the industry move toward the idea of “real-time contact exchange,” which companies such as IBM have been exploring for years. Zichermann thinks it will work because it uses a lowest common denominator technology (most cell phones) and it is brand independent.

Earlier e-business cards failed because they required identical devices or deep knowledge of the way a particular phone worked. The original Palms worked only if you had two similar Palm devices.  In many cases, you can’t send a vCard from a Blackberry to an iPhone, even today. You can exchance data via a wireless Bluetooth radio connection; Bluetooth is present in most phones now, thanks to the popularity of Bluetooth head sets, but you have to go through the steps of turning on the Bluetooth function and authenticating it.

IBM’s Pensieve technology lets you take a constant photo record of your life and upload it to a “life feed” type experience. For example, it lets you photograph and upload each business card you get at a tradeshow, then parses it for information, and then makes it available for synchronization with your PC and devices. Of course, a CardScan business-card scanner is faster and more accurate at scanning in a card. But IBM’s technology is still in the lab.

Friend Book is a Tapulous’ application for the iPhone that lets you exchange contact information between devices if both of them are compatible iPhones, running the same software. All you do is put the two iphones together and shake ‘em. As long as there aren’t too many people in the same room doing the same thing, your contact information is exchanged. The limitations: iPhone only, physical proximity needed, software download required, and risk of errors and damage.

Zichermann said that the company experimented with making the service work for every phone, but he found that certain technologies needed to be present to facilitate the exchange. That narrowed the universe of phones down to smart phones and certain other models. It will be interesting to watch if the service, or others like it that are sure to follow from the carriers themselves, can get rid of the business card.

“Business cards are like bank checks,” said Zichermann. “Who needs them? They served an important purpose at one time. Better than carrying wads of cash. But now they’re obsolete.”

Today during MobileBeat 2008, Tapulous chief executive Bart Decrem got up to talk a little bit about Tap Tap Revenge, the top app in Apple’s App Store. After a week at the top of the mountain, he revealed that a new challenger was rising: Labyrinth Lite Edition. He predicted that it would soon overtake Tap Tap Revenge and now it has.

If you’ve ever played the board game version of Labyrinth, (the wooden box with the various maze overlays and a steel ball) you’ll know how to play Labyrinth Lite Edition for the iPhone. The game utilizes the iPhone’s (or the iPod Touch’s) accelerometer so that you tile your iPhone to navigate a ball around holes in a board to get to the end of the maze.

Decrem made it clear why he felt games like Tap Tap Revenge and Labyrinth were popular: They’re free — but perhaps most importantly, they’re simple. You don’t need to download the app and sign up for some service, you simple download and play.

The fact that a similar game to Labyrinth was popular on jailbroken iPhones before the App Store opened seems to be a testament to that as well.

Labyrinth also happens to be a great demonstration tool for the iPhone’s accelerometer. All the new iPhone 3G owners are perhaps downloading it to show off what their new device can do.

Decram didn’t seem too upset about the possibility of losing his top app crown, and he shouldn’t: He has  other promising apps in the pipeline, including the recently launched Twitter-client Twinkle.

Overall, games and entertainment apps continue to dominate App Store downloads.

Tapulous, a new Silicon Valley startup, embodies the craze that’s going on right now around the iPhone.

Tucked inside a ground-floor office on Hamilton Ave. in Palo Alto, Calif., a stone’s throw from social network comany Facebook, the company’s eight employees are feverishly building applications solely to work on the iPhone.

Never mind that the Apple has sold a mere six million iPhones to date, compared to Nokia’s 400 million handsets. Tapulous’ chief executive Bart Decrem believes the iPhone’s interface –featuring a multi-touch full screen and now 3G speed — is sparking a revolution akin to what Microsoft Windows did to DOS on the PC.

He’s pulled together a team of developers to build out a slew of applications designed to be social at their core, believing this will help “viral” distribution. He’s vague on the details, but says he wants applications to feature personal profiles that will allow for social networking across the applications.

Just as RockYou and Slide exploited the Facebook platform by producing scores of applications to see what would stick, Tapulous wants to be the equivalent for the iPhone. It has developed three applications to launch in time for the opening of the iPhone App Store, scheduled for tomorrow, and has scores more apps in waiting.

The iPhone App Store is where people can download applications for their phones — these apps will work on the new iPhones, old iPhones and iPod Touches. Tapulous aims to offer developers a home to help them build applications and monetize them, Decrem says. One intern asked for a room to sleep in as the only condition to build applications for Tapulous.

Decrem (pictured below, left) is a great salesman. Previously, he cofounded Flock, the browser, and he pitched it so well in the Valley that it became over hyped and never lived up to its promise. Flock is still alive and kicking, but Decrem has moved on. He’s trying to dampen his salesmanship this time around, he concedes, but it’s only minutes into the conversation before his enthusiasm picks up and he speaks in superlatives: “This will be bigger than the PC revolution,” he says of the iPhone, citing a statement made by John Doerr, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins. He also cites a Piper Jaffray analyst prediction that there will be 90 million Apple smartphones in use by the end of 2009. He cofounded the company with Andrew Lacy and Mike Lee. He’s hired developers like Sean Heber, who became a legend of sorts when he built 30 applications for the iPhone in 30 days.

On the surface, Twinkle (screenshot above, and more at bottom) is the most intriguing of Tapulous’ applications. It’s a Twitter client, meaning users access the popular micro-messaging product Twitter on the app, pulling and pushing in tweets (Twitter messages) just like they would on Twitter. But Twinkle will support photos, and it’s more flexible than rival Twitter client Twitteriffic because it lets people message with other services besides Twitter. Twinkle also lets people see which users are located close to them (by tapping into the iPhone’s location technology).

Since launching in March (for “jailbroken” iPhones — phones where users have bypassed carrier restrictions to downloaded applications), Twinkle has had 80,000 people download it, Decrem says. To be sure, a lot of other startups also aim to become the location-based social networking application of choice for the iPhone. These include Loopt Read the rest of this entry »