July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon is the king of fast cellular networks in America, or so it says. And it’s hard to argue with the company’s numbers.

Verizon reported its fourth-quarter 2012 earnings today, revealing that 63 percent of its smartphone sales were Apple iPhones. But chief financial officer Fran Shammo made a special point of stressing the carrier’s fast 4G LTE network.

“Customer adoption of 4G LTE is really gaining momentum,” Shammo said on the company’s earnings call. “Our total 4G LTE devices sales reached 7.3 million [units] … up 60 percent from last quarter.”

Almost all of the Android phones Verizon sold were 4G LTE capable, and 65 percent of the entire 9.8 million smartphones sold were 4G LTE. (The non-Android numbers are down slight due to sales of Apple’s older iPhone models, which do not support LTE.)

Source: Verizon

Verizon devices/4G LTE coverage

But it’s not just the devices, of course. It’s the network that matters.

“Almost half of our data traffic is on the 4G LTE network,” Shammo said, adding that Verizon believes its 4G network is five times more efficient than 3G. “We are by far the market leader, with 476 markets covering 89% of the US population.”

The company will no long be adding any capacity to its 3G network; instead it is continuing to expand 4G coverage. Verizon expects to have full coverage of the U.S. by mid-year 2013.

Chief competitor AT&T’s LTE ambitions had a slow start and have generally not compared favorably with Verizon. However, late last year AT&T did manage to acquire some additional spectrum that should help it expand LTE more rapidly.

photo credit: Robert Scoble via photopin cc

Tech incubator and seed fund 500 Startups is building its presence in the Big Apple with a new coworking space for entrepreneurs and  portfolio companies.

The news was announced today on Twitter by Shai Goldman, a New York-based venture partner at 500 Startups. An application form is already available for entrepreneurs, although the desks are not available until next month. To apply, you’ll need to be bootstrapped, seed or angel funded, or have raised a first round of institutional funding.

According to 500 Startups, spots are reserved for portfolio companies, but the office also has space for startups in the community. This coworking space is in the Flatiron district, where many startups and tech companies are settling. As TheNextWeb’s Harrison Weber points out, it’s a stone’s throw from coworking space and startup hub, General Assembly.

Interested in renting out a desk? It will set you back $500 per person for the month, and the place has room for a total of 40 people. Rent is reasonable, considering that it’s in the heart of Manhattan, but the real benefit is access to a network of fellow entrepreneurs and potential advisers. 500 Startups was launched in 2010 by prolific and outspoken investor Dave McClure (pictured above).

To check out the space, watch the video below.

At first, he and co-founder Steve Huffman planned to make the world suck less by inventing a phone-based sub sandwich ordering app … in 2005. But after a spring break meeting with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham — before Y Combinator existed — and an initial rejection from Y Combinator, Huffman and Ohanian decided to create “the front page of the web.”

And Reddit, the site that had 47 million visitors last month, was born.

“Content was being created — even back in 2005 — by such a broad array of sources that no one source could really lay claim to that,” Ohanian said. “Unless it aggregated everything.”

So the pair took the ideas behind two popular sites of the day– Delicious, an early social-bookmarking site, and Slashdot, the first truly large geek community focused on news and ideas — and combined them. When they joined YC, the two worked day and night on the first version of Reddit.

“The only outdoor experiences we had,” Ohanian says, “were in Azeroth, the fictional world of Warcraft.”

The site launched accidentally after three weeks of work, after Paul Graham criticized the pair for not launching earlier. They got a beta version live, and Graham — unbeknownst to Ohanian and Huffman — linked to it in a blog post, giving Reddit its first thousand visitors.

Here’s the whole story:

As is well-known, Huffman and Ohanian created fake users and much of the early site’s content. But not for long.

“The day I woke up and Reddit was working on its own was just the most incredible feeling,” Huffman says. “It was, like, holy shit … we’ve got a thing that’s making a difference in people’s lives!”

“The acquisition of Meraki enables Cisco to make simple, secure, cloud managed networks available to our global customer base of mid-sized businesses and enterprises,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group. “These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions.”

Meraki was founded by participants in MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science in 2006 and has raised $60 million in venture capital, with Sequoia Capital as the primary investor. It is based in San Francisco. With this acquisition, Meraki will form Cisco’s new Cloud Networking Group.

Read the FAQ and letter to employees from CEO Sanjit Biswas.

Tom Paseka works for CloudFlare, the content delivery network that handles more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined, delivering more than two billion pageviews per employee. The company knows a few things about the Internet.

What Paseka knew last night, apparently before any Google employees noticed, was that Google’s services appeared to be offline. Tracing the problem, he noticed an Indonesian Internet service provider in the path to Google — odd by any standard.

Particularly when CloudFlare is just a few miles from Google, not an ocean away.

It turns out, Paseka learned, that the Indonesian ISP Moratel was giving its users an incorrect route to Google. And because Moratel was trusted by other networks upstream, the incorrect route was propagating around the globe. As Paseka writes:

And, quickly, the bad routes spread. It is unlikely this was malicious, but rather a misconfiguration or an error evidencing some of the failings in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Trust model.

The fix was simply notifying Moratel about the issue, which Paseka did. Three minutes later, the problem was fixed and Google’s services were back online. Of course … they had never gone down. But they had been inaccessible.

You may not have noticed unless you were in Hong Kong. Paseka estimated that the entire outage affected only about 3-5 percent of the Internet population.

No word on whether Google engineers sent their CloudFlare colleagues a box of donuts or a Google hoodie in thanks.

photo credit: GustavoG via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

DETROIT — If Facebook is about what you did yesterday, and Twitter is about what you’re doing right now, UpTo is about what you’re planning to do tomorrow — and sharing with those you actually know.

UpTo is a social network based on your calendar. Alternatively, it’s a social replacement for your calendar. Or it’s just a way of seeing what is happening in your neighborhood and for those you care about, in the near future.

Or possibly, all four — in the form of an iPhone app.

I had a chance to sit down with UpTo’s chief executive, Greg Schwartz, on my current tour of Detroit-based startups. He gave me a tour of the updated app — and some insider info on what’s coming soon.

“The calendar has not evolved,” he said, for decades. “It’s still the same singular view of your own life.”

And while Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing, by the time you share and others read … they have missed out on the event. Or you have missed out on a great event that, if only you had known, you would have liked to attend. So while Facebook owns the social graph and Twitter the interest graph, UpTo is focusing on the intent graph: what you will be doing in the future.

The app proved its worth when Schwartz connected with one of the investors in UpTo on the app and saw that he was meeting Jason Calacanis. Schwartz immediately asked him to rep UpTo to Calacanis, and within a few weeks he found himself onstage at LAUNCH conference.

The timing of my visit to Detroit was unexpectedly excellent, as UpTo just released a new version into the app store yesterday, which the official @AppStore account tweeted out last night and Apple promoted as a featured app in the app store today.

That’s as good as it gets for a mobile startup, and the team was celebrating with high fives, hugs, and a special cake with a message I promised not to reveal (although I will say: One word rhymed with “witches”).

I asked Schwartz to walk me through the app:

“It’s very similar to Instagram being a layer on top of your existing camera,” Schwartz said. “UpTo doesn’t replace your calendar … it adds to it.”

It seamlessly integrates with the native calendar on your iPhone. Any events you add on the standard Calendar app are automatically synced to UpTo (and are set as private by default). And any events you add on UpTo are synced to the native iPhone calendar.

When you’re using the app with friends, family, and coworkers, the result is amazing insight into what’s happening in the next days and weeks for those you care about. It’s simple just to browse what’s upcoming. And it may be even more powerful to view groups and individuals to see both what they’re doing — and how busy they are, or when they’re available.

“We spent about a year really trying to figure out the calendar piece,” Schwartz says, and the effort shows. “There are a lot of calendaring apps out there, and there’s a lot of challenges in making a great one.”

The app is a free download. UpTo is focusing on user acquisition right now, adding 55,000 in the last three months (that number will rise dramatically as a featured app.) Eventually, with scale, Shwartz sees monetization opportunities in intent-based advertising, affiliate revenue from ticket purchases, and such, and a software-as-a-service models with organizations.

And the news?

The new version of UpTo now supports calendar streams from sports teams or other organizations you care about, events in your industry, and more. It’s part of the onboarding experience — UpTo wants to make sure that new users have more than just their own personal events in their calendars — and it’s an acknowledgement that your important events aren’t just to-do’s or meetings.

In addition, UpTo just completed a $500,000 seed round with participation from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

And, probably the biggest news is that UpTo is launching a fully native Android app next month with deep calendar integration.

“On those big-screen Android phones, UpTo just looks amazing,” Schwartz said.

Next on the agenda for Schwartz, in true founder fashion, is a Series A funding round. But if the team’s execution continues at this pace, and the Android launch is as successful as the iOS version is becoming, that doesn’t look like it will be a problem.

Meritful is a platform where high school students aged 13-18 can create a professional online identity while hooking into mentorship opportunities in education and the workforce. The company launches into public beta on Monday.

A sample page on Meritful

“College admissions officers look for you online,” says chief executive and newly-minted comp-sci PhD Azarias Reda, who used to work for LinkedIn. “So it’s really important to have a great polished profile on the web.”

LinkedIn itself is not an option: Kids are not welcome, and due to LinkedIn’s work history orientation, it’s not suitable either. And the existing portfolio sites, Reda argues, lack the mentorship opportunities Meritful provides.

In addition, they lack connection to schools.

For the past six months, Reda and his team have been working with four Michigan high schools in a private beta. Next week, the platform will be open to the world. Schools can join, bringing their students with them. But Reda is most excited about individual students sharing the network with their friends and growing virally.

“We want it to be something that students do because it’s cool,” he says.

Students have school pages, and can see the hottest and most exciting projects and portfolio items their friends are sharing.

The company is funded with $25,000 in friends and family money and support from an accelerator, Ann Arbor’s SPARK.

Image credit: Thomas Photography/ShutterStock

Mark Zuckerberg, the man who some believe has done more to erode privacy than anyone else, has been awarded his first ever patent … for privacy. Patent #8,225,376 limits what users reveal online by implementing a privacy policy on their status updates and profile information.

We know patents are important to Facebook. The company recently spent $550 million on a bundle of AOL patents, via Microsoft. And the social network bought another 750 patents from IBM this year, all part of an aggressive strategy to build up a portfolio that earlier this year included only 56 patents, with 503 filed and pending. Part of its effort to stock up on patents might be motivated by the fact that Yahoo in March sued Facebook for patent infringement, although the two companies settled that dispute earlier in July.

Patents are one of the weapons of modern corporate warfare, and Facebook is just one participant in the arms race.

This particular patent was rejected a number of times, says ReadWriteWeb, for obviousness and overly-broad language in some of its claims.

According to the abstract, the patent is for dynamically generating a view of a user’s profile page that is compliant with the user’s stated privacy preferences:

A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary. A profile for a user is generated. One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections.

The technology could be used to show different information (phone numbers, email address, photos, and so on) to different people, depending on their relationship. My friend gets all my information; my business contact only gets some.

This is the first patent Zuckerberg has ever applied for, and the first to be awarded to him. More, apparently, are in the works.

Image credit: Jennifer Van Grove

If you have funding news to share, send it to tips@venturebeat.com.

Plexxi raises $20.1 million to build hard-to-understand-but-seemingly-useful network solution 

Plexxi, a startup that builds software-defined networks, announced the close of a $20.1 million third funding round. Plexxi’s technology combines software and hardware in what the company calls “Affinity-Driven Networking”. When asked to describe the product in plain English, unfortunately, the company wasn’t much clearer: “Plexxi offers the first and only affinity-driven networking solution, specifically built for the fluid and dynamic nature of today’s data center computing needs.”

What that means is that the product facilitates data flow through networks, making them run smoother and faster. The financing was led by existing investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and Northbridge Venture Partners, reaching $48.48 in total. Read more on Plexxi’s blog, if you brain feels up for it.

Zao’s $1.3 million supports lackluster HR reps everywhere

Employee referral startup Zao secured $1.3 million in its first round of funding, led by non-institutional venture capitalist Oren Zeev. Zao is a platform that helps companies fill job openings with quality referrals. The service enables companies to publicize job openings, set rewards, and forward postings to their social networks. It also makes it easier for referrers (say that three times fast) to search their social networks for qualified candidates. Additionally, Zao offers tracking and organizational tools to help manage potential hires. Read the press release.

Summit Partners gains majority stake in 360T’s online trading platform

360T, provider of web-based trading technology, today announced the final closing of a growth equity investment made by Summit Partners. 360T offers a trading platform that is independent of banks and has more than 100 global and regional clients. With this deal, Summit Partners has acquired a major stake in 360T from various shareholders. Read the press release.

Google’s claim is that typical event-management tools online are simplistic and partial: They basically boil down to invitations and RSVPs. I’m a dues-paying member of Meetup, and there’s some truth to that assertion:

During and after the event, Google complains, there’s little else that typical event services offer. Again, there’s something to what Google is saying — here’s a sample Facebook event that happened a few weeks ago:

Google wants to change that by making an event management tool that is useful before, during, and after an event. And it’s trying to bridge the online and offline experiences of everyday events:

“It’s how we connect with others, honor friends and family, or simply unwind after a long week. Unfortunately, the subtlety and substance of real-world events is lost online.

“Today’s online event tools are really just web forms that ask, “Are you going?” Worse yet, they bail [on] when you need them the most: during the actual event, and after everyone leaves.”

Google+ Events is designed to fill that gap. It starts, of course, with creating an event:

Note that you can change the theme: A quick look reveals themes for sports, fashion, party, birthday, wedding, dinner, and kids events. The Location functionality seems to fully integrate into Google+ Local, which means that you can simply start typing, and local landmarks start appearing.

Adding invitees is simple if they are on Google+ … simply start typing their names, and the people will appear. Regular Event users would be better served to create a Google+ Circle for their attendees, so that all the members of a group can be added with a single click.

After creating your first event, a new tab appears in Google+ with your event visible on it. You won’t be able to tell from this screenshot, but the image is dynamic: There’s HTML5 magic in the image that, in this case, is causing the bubbly to actually be … bubbly:

Users can then add photos, share the event, or start a hangout right on the event page. And when they accept, the event is automatically added to their Google Calendar.

But it’s when the event starts that the real magic begins.

Google calls it Party Mode, and it’s only available on Android phones with the Google+ app. Party mode will share any photos or videos taken while you’re at the party automatically to the event, streaming updates to others who are at the event or following it online. Additionally, if you schedule a hangout, anyone who can’t make it to your event but still wants to be included will get an automatic invite to the hangout, so they can at least watch the event and participate that way.

The question in my mind: How does this compete with Meetup, Facebook, Evite, or any of the other players in event scheduling and management? When I spoke to a Google representative, she said that competing with other services was not the company’s priority:

“It’s more about giving our users one beautiful Google experience,” she said. “Events are such a huge part of life … it’s a natural step within Google+.”

That said, there’s no doubt that this is direct competition to other events sites.

Meetup is the gorilla in the room, with almost 11 million monthly visitors and 340,000 events scheduled and attended each and very month in 45,000 cities. That’s a lot of traction, and, one would assume, a significant proportion of those who are looking for an event-management service.

And Facebook is no small competitor. Despite the fact that its event solution is limited, Facebook has the tremendous advantage of built-in supply: the 900+ million Facebook user base.

But Google+ has what at first look seems to be a better, more comprehensive solution than either of them. Google has done its homework on this one and created a full-circle event experience.

VentureBeat has reached out to both Facebook and Meetup for comment, and this story will be updated as necessary.

Image credit: ShutterStock

VentureBeat talked to George Zachary of Charles River Ventures about how the deal happened and what the future might hold for Yammer. Charles Rivers is the venture capital firm that led Yammer’s original $5 million funding in January 2009 and participated in three of the following four investment rounds.

“Microsoft approached Yammer in the first quarter of this year,” Zachary told VentureBeat while taking a brief break from his vacation in the Caribbean. ”They saw the growth rate of the user base and that Yammer had gotten a lot of love from users.”

After initial contact earlier in the year, nothing significant happened for several months, until May. Then negotiations got serious very quickly, said Zachary, who is also on Yammer’s board of directors.

“We didn’t talk to anyone else,” Zachary said. “They put down an offer and we accepted it.”

The founders of Yammer, chief executive David Sacks and chief technical officer Adam Pisoni, were both in favor of selling.

“We asked the founders what they wanted to do, and they wanted to do the deal. So we did it.”

Zachary was both cautious and bold when speculating where Yammer might end up within Microsoft’s offerings. “I’m not privy to Microsoft’s plans, and I’m sure they’d prefer I didn’t talk about it, but if I had to speculate, I would guess that Yammer will supersede SharePoint.”

That fits with the company’s original vision, Zachary said, since Yammer’s goal was always to build the world’s best intranet. And it fits with the corporate oversight that Microsoft is at least initially instituting: Yammer will report to the SharePoint group.

Zachary said the acquisition will help Microsoft solidify and grow its $18 billion annual revenue stream from the enterprise market:

“Microsoft learned from both Facebook and Twitter that they need to be more social. Outlook and SharePoint are both a little dated. The future of messaging is not going to be Outlook.”

Having Yammer sets Microsoft up well to compete in the enterprise social market with the likes of Jive and Chatter, said Zachary. When asked about IBM Connections, which IDC recently highlighted in the enterprise social market as having over $100 million in revenue, he was blunt.

“When IBM says they’re the biggest enterprise social network provider, I think they’re lying, and I’m happy to be quoted on that. It’s like Nokia saying they’re leading the smartphone market. Really, they’re so far behind in product and architecture.”

(See IBM’s response below.)

The reason that Microsoft was a great fit? ”The end destination for Yammer is integration with email. The world’s biggest enterprise email company is Microsoft.”

Zachary wanted to publicly thank the founders of Yammer, Sacks, and Pisoni, for their key role in growing the company.

“There’s a world of investors out there trying to differentiate themselves and the value they bring, but it always comes down to the founders.”

VentureBeat reached out to IBM for a response on Zachary’s comment about the enterprise social market. Here’s the answer we received from Karen Lilla, manager external relations:

Look at what the leading analysts are saying. Last week, leading analyst firm IDC unveiled its analysis of the top enterprise social software vendors in the market: IBM was #1, Yammer was #8. IBM grew faster than its competitors and nearly two times faster than the overall market. For three consecutive years (2009, 2010, 2011), IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software.

IBM is the only vendor that can deliver the breadth of social business solutions that include social analytics and content management; across private and public clouds, and on a wide range of mobile devices, giving customers the maximum flexibility based on their preference.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Investors in Cable & Wireless Worldwide have finally given the thumbs-up to an acquisition offer from Vodafone. The deal values the 152-year-old telecom company at $1.6 billion.

Vodafone is currently the second largest mobile company globally, and the CWW acquisition will only add to its stature among the telecommunications giants of the world.

According to Reuters, one institutional investor in particular had been holding back a vote on the deal. When that party was in favor of the acquisition, that gave Vodafone 99 percent of the votes from voting shareholders to proceed with the acquisition.

CWW controls more than 12,000 miles of optical fiber, which means Vodafone will no longer have to rent landline from competing telecoms such as BT. In addition to its fixed line capacity, CWW provides managed voice and data services as well as IP-based services and applications. CWW targets large enterprises, governments, and carriers.

The $1.6 billion acquisition offer was first agreed to by both parties back in April 2012.

The company’s history hasn’t been without controversy. Since 2009, a series of strategic product missteps, scandals over lavish executive compensation, and a breakup into two separate entities have caused the company’s stock price to plummet, making it an obvious acquisition target for a hungry up-and-comer such as Vodafone.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

And it rocks.

VentureBeat spoke with DoubleDutch CEO Lawrence Coburn about the new product last week. The company builds and markets two products: Flock, a top app for events (full disclosure: VentureBeat is using Flock for our upcoming Mobile Beat conference), and Hive, a customer relationship management app. But the team had a problem.

Designed for tapping, not typing

“The DoubleDutch team is very distributed. Pride is an app we built for our own use, to stay connected,” Coburn said. “It provides what we call ambient awareness of what’s going on in the company.”

Pride lets team members share what they’re doing, where they are, exchange messages and information, and give each other virtual pats on the back. Using it has helped the DoubleDutch team stay on the same track, while reducing its internal email use by 34 percent.

The best comparison, surprisingly enough, is Yammer — the company that was in the news this week for a rumoured but not-yet-confirmed acquisition by Microsoft. Yammer provides internal social networks for businesses.

Pride is built for the same purposes, but it’s designed entirely for mobile, and has three key differences: contextual data, structured data, and gamified social engagement.

“Because we’re mobile only, we depend very heavily on context,” Coburn told VentureBeat. For example, “All our customers are tagged with latitude and longitude data.” That means that the app knows when you’re at a client’s workplace, and a checkin can be accomplished in about seven seconds, according to Coburn.

“The second difference is that we depend very heavily on structured data, like a Foursquare checkin, for example,” said Coburn. Whereas Yammer is largely unstructured text-based data, much like the Facebook-stye experience it is emulating, DoubleDutch tried to translate work updates to structural data that can be entered by tapping rather than typing: with a customer, prepping a release, making a brochure.

Personal productivity breakdown in Pride

And finally, the company has added gamification to the app. Obviously, this depends heavily on the structural data Pride enforces: it’s hard to award points for a text update that a software app doesn’t really understand.

The benefits are enormous: An administrator for a company can set up behavior the company wants to encourage. Think structured data for a sales force: calling a prospect, completing a customer visit, and so on.

“Now you can set up badges and awards based on what the company wants to reward,” Corburn says.

Which, in turn, enables excellent feedback for users on how they’re doing, with built-in charts and graphs detailing how you’ve spent your time through the days and weeks. And company-wide analytics can be accessed via a web-based portal. That’s a powerful tool for both individuals and companies to monitor and improve personal productivity.

Pride may be more suitable for smaller companies than large enterprises: DoubleDutch is an 18-person team, and most of the beta testing has been with small- to medium-sized companies. In addition, Pride is totally transparent: Everyone at DoubleDutch can see what the CEO is spending his time on, and vice-versa.

“We didn’t want to be a big brother app,” Coburn said.  That’s understandable, and probably even commendable, but it may not sit well with older, traditional companies.

The Pride app is available now and is absolutely free in both iOS and Android versions.

“We have no plans to charge for it,”Coburn told VentureBeat. “Eventually we may roll out some more sophisticated data and analytics that will be paid.”

DoubleDutch is based in San Francisco and has 18 employees. In 2011 the company raised $1.2 million in seed capital from a group of investors including Lightbank, Charles River Ventures, Launch Capital, Venture 51, Accelerator Ventures, and more.

Gamification

Gamification in Pride

Analytics

Pride analytics

Image credit: ShutterStock

While Netflix can still get HBO DVDs and Bluray discs from other sources, it will no longer be able to get them directly from HBO at a discount.

HBO shows are not available on Netflix’s instant streaming service, either. In fact, while HBO subscribers can use mobile and over-the-top devices or web browsers to watch some HBO shows via the network’s HBO Go service, executives at the network have taken a strong position about streaming media and cable-cutting in general.

Back in November, HBO co-president Eric Kessler stated to industry leaders that HBO shows would not ever be available to non-HBO subscribers on digital platforms.

At that time, Kessler also said his company sees cable-cutting as no more than a temporary austerity measure that will cease as soon as the economy takes a turn for the better.

Kessler thinks HBO’s current model will succeed in the long run.

While there’s no question that HBO brings amazing content to the table, Kessler and the other HBO chiefs would do well to grant the digerati a bit more leeway. If they continue to make legally accessing streaming content difficult, users will continue to access it illegally.

While HBO’s cessation of its deal with Netflix is, as Cnet‘s Greg Sandoval points out, a largely symbolic one, the symbol is that of a stodgy, dictatorial approach to media and an unwillingness to compromise, innovate and adapt. HBO sees Netflix as a competitor, but Netflix’s edge lies not in where it gets its DVDs but how it allows consumers to access content.

In the past several years, HBO has taken individual torrenters to task for their illegal activities and has even released “poisoned” files for popular shows. But that hasn’t stopped HBO shows from being among the most widely torrented content on the web.

“It’s inevitable that HBO will transform into a streaming-only network,” VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar predicted late last year.

“Right now, the company is getting a good stream of revenue through its partnerships with cable and satellite TV providers. But as costs rise and people cancel their service, HBO will have to revisit the cord-cutting business model.”

Waging war against Netflix might simply be prolonging the inevitable.

This sets the stage for DeWalt’s likely hiring as the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a network security company, as VentureBeat reported earlier.

“Dave has decided to leave McAfee to pursue a non-competitive CEO role,” a McAfee spokeswoman told VentureBeat.

DeWalt will be replaced by Michael DeCesare and Todd Gebhart, who are currently executive vice presidents with the company. DeCesare and Gebhart will share responsibilities as co-presidents beginning in August or September. The dual president role will be a permanent post, the spokeswoman said, not an interim arrangement.

Palo Alto Networks did not reply to our request for comment, and DeWalt was not available for comment.

Palo Alto Networks provides high-speed, network-level security systems that can identify and stop threats by examining the data flowing through a company’s routers. That’s in contrast to the approach taken by McAfee and other traditional security companies, like Symantec and Trend Micro, which focus security measures on the end points, stopping viruses and other threats by using software that runs on PCs or servers.

Palo Alto Networks has been looking for a new CEO since December, 2010. The hunt has taken longer than expected, and in the interim, CEO duties have been shared between three people in the “office of the CEO:” Cofounders Nir Zuk and Rajiv Batra, plus CFO Michael Lehman.

Intel acquired McAfee for $7.68 billion in a transaction that closed in February, making the security company a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Photo: McAfee publicity photo of David DeWalt

Sony first focused on bringing its PSN online in the United States, and then Hong Kong and South Korea. The company first brought the service back online in California and New York before turning the service back on in the rest of the United States. It then began bringing the PSN back online in other countries. The company began phased restoration of its PSN service in Japan at the end of May.

The network was offline for 24 days in the United States, and longer in other countries. The company took the PSN down after hackers were able to break in and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million customers. Sony laid indirect blame for the PSN’s downtime on hacktivist group Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners.

PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners were unable to download new content for their games and play online with other players. The downtime came at a critical time for two major releases — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat, both of which prominently featured online play and had received a good deal of critical acclaim.

Sony offered PSN users free games and a whole batch of other welcome-back goodies — like free subscriptions to the company’s premium PlayStation Plus version of the PSN — to entice players to continue using the PSN. The packages will probably appease a large number of console and handheld gaming device owners. But a lot of gamers — myself included — already own those Triple-A titles, and find they aren’t really worth as much as they used to be.

Sony’s online network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service among others. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. VentureBeat previously published a timeline for the PlayStation Network outage. You can view the full video of Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai (pictured above) detailing the return of the PSN at the PlayStation blog.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

---

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 tally included all Internet sites owned by Google, namely its main Google.com search engine, YouTube, GMail, Google Maps, Google’s office suite of products like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and others. One expects a major contributor to the statistic to be its juggernaut video-sharing site YouTube, which transmits an average of 24 hours of video every minute according to an estimate by Website Monitoring.

Since January, Google’s site-wide traffic has gained a whole percentage in Internet traffic share, the firm estimated, adding that it would be the second largest Internet Service Provider in the world if it were to operate as one.

The company has said in the past that long-term increases in Internet and mobile users ultimately help its traffic at a large scale, claiming that this is one of the factors that has led to its decision to enter the mobile market with Android. It has also shown initiative in building its own gigabit fibre network, which, were it to transpire, would also interestingly crystallize the company as an official Internet Service Provider.

The tally, which was obtained through more than 110 ISPs in 17 countries, comes after Google announced a record 2010 third-quarter revenue of $7.29 billion earlier in the month, up 23% from last year.