Daily news

You will find below daily news from other sources about Business 2.0 :

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VentureBeat

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WildTangent cuts ad deal with social game firm Playdom - Fri, 12 Mar 2010

WildTangent said today it has scored a significant new customer for its BrandBoost ad platform for social games. It is now teaming up with Playdom to integrate ads into Playdom’s popular Facebook game, Tiki Farm.

BrandBoost will give Playdom’s gamers rewards such as virtual items and premium social games whenever the gamer agrees to view a video ad from inside the game. This is a big deal is since most social games are free-to-play and are monetized through virtual goods sales. But this ad-based revenue model could help balance that virtual goods model. About 85 percent of gamers told Nielsen in a survey that they would prefer not to pay for digital games. By bringing in brand advertising, WildTangent can help get around hurdles with the stingiest of players.

Playdom is one of the fast-growing social gaming companies, with tons of assets to oversee.

A night at the video game awards: irreverence, strangeness and blockbusters - Fri, 12 Mar 2010

The awards night for the Game Developers Conference is always a hoot. It starts out with the Independent Games Festival, where the industry celebrates the students, amateurs, and one-person shops of the industry.

One of my favorite games of the year on the iPhone, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor by developer Tiger Style, won the award for best mobile game. But Monaco took home the Seumas McNally Grand Prize award for the best game of 2009.

The indie folks are always cute and touching when they go up on stage. They thank their parents and somebody somewhere who believed in their dreams of making games for a living. One of the winners went up on stage and acted like a robot, pausing and drinking water before finally saying thanks.

Each time someone went up, a roar of applause erupted. But, in a rarity for the show, no one flipped a bird tonight at the “evil game publishers” who publish games on behalf of developers and keep most of the money. This is the place where, surround by a thousand or two game developers, the creators of games get to vent and celebrate.  The wonderful thing for these indie game makers is that there are more ways than ever before where a budding young game creator can upload a game to an app store and make a pile of money doing it. From Facebook to the iPhone, there are a flood of new titles. But each one of them represents someone’s chance to strike it rich.

And, interestingly enough, the indie games these days are not so different from the games in the main awards show, the Game Developers Choice Award. The Game Developers Choice Awards  are the serious awards for the grown-up games, or the ones with big budgets and corporate publishers. But they’re still selected via a peer process, with game developers themselves voting on the awards.

The newest category this year is the Best Social Game category. Warren Spector, host of the evening and designer of Disney’s upcoming Epic Mickey game (pictured at top), said that social games give everyone a chance to make a game that will be played by millions upon millions. Of course, Zynga’s FarmVille, which has more than 83 million monthly active users on Facebook, won the first prize ever for the Best Social Game.

Bill Mooney, a general manager at Zynga, accepted the award for FarmVille.  “It’s funny,” he said. “Two years ago, there were 20 people sitting in a crappy little room.” His small team effort, he said, felt much more like an indie development team and he encouraged indies to keep going, grow the space, and have fun.

Flower, a creative title on the PlayStation Network, won for best downloadable game. The entire team, pictured right, went up on stage to accept the award. Jenova Chen, the co-creator of the game, said the power of games is like a nuclear bomb, and with that comes a responsibility. He said he was working on Flower on a Sunday because he wanted to do so. That was the day he lost his girlfriend, Chen said. But the game — where the gamer plays the wind in the dream of a flower in a dilapidated city  — made him feel better that day. Those comments will probably stick with me for a while, as Chen usually has something memorable to say.

Penny Arcade, the company that puts on the fan game conference of the same name, won the Ambassador Award. All the while, the crowd is entertained by the parody videos by Mega64.com. This year, they were joined in a video by Gabe Newell, recipient of the Pioneer award of the evening and the co-founder of Valve, maker of Half-Life and the Left 4 Dead games. As Newell went up on stage to get his award, he delivered an interesting speech about the game business.

His company took about six years to make their first game. Their publisher, Sierra, wanted them to publish it. They refused and funded it with their own money. It came out in 1998 and got 96 out of 100 average ratings from game critics. It sold more than 10 million copies and allowed Valve to change the industry with Stea, a digital game downloading service that has become extremely popular as an alternative to distribution at retail stores.

On stage, Newell predicted that biometrics such as motion control of games is the next big frontier. He also said Intel’s Larrabee graphics chips (if they ever come out) will change the industry, as will . Flat organizations will be the most innovative. Partnership and open platforms will matter. But the platforms are headed toward splintering and that is a bad idea for customers. He had more to say, but then his Powerpoint program, and his PC, gave him the Blue Screen of Death. (That turned out to be a joke).

After that, star game developer Will Wright, now at his own startup the Stupid Fun Club, came up on stage. He talked with his Powerpoint about “why John Carmack rocks.” He presented all of the reasons why Carmack, a graphics wizard and co-founder of id Software, deserved the lifetime achievement award in games. Carmack said he writes code every single day and “managed to avoid Peter principaling myself into management.” He’s been working on games since the early days of Apple. He said game graphics have gotten better by a factor of a million during his career. He said the best is yet to come and “I am more excited about being in the game industry than I ever have been.” A decade ago, he said, he was bored with graphics and started to make his own aerospace company on the side to create a rocket that can take off and land after going into space.

For game of the year, it was no surprise. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony on the PlayStation 3, took home the big title as well as a bunch of other awards. The surprise of the night was actually when Spector got up on stage and announced that the next game his team is making is Deus Ex Human Evolution, the third in his long-running series. Square Enix is the publisher.

Sequoia backs free mobile app company Snaptu - Fri, 12 Mar 2010

Snaptu, a startup bringing an iPhone-style application experience to thousands of mobile devices, just announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital.

Previously known as Moblica, Snaptu says it works on any phone that can run a Java application, adding up to more than 2,000 devices. (The first question in the “help” section of Snaptu’s website is “Does Snaptu work on my phone?” which gets answered with an unequivocal “Yes!”) Once you download the app, it opens up a catalogue of other apps.

Those include Twitter, Facebook, a news reader, a TechCrunch app. Snaptu is ad-supported, so all the apps are included for free as part of the Snaptu download. The company is based in Tel Aviv, Israel and said its app has been downloaded 4 million times.

Companies: Moblica, Sequoia Capital, Snaptu

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Zdnet Saas Blog

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Four pillars of the transition to SaaS - Tue, 09 Mar 2010
So many of the issues facing SaaS and cloud providers are due to a business model that's completely different from traditional software licensing and on-premise implementation. Here are four key elements of difference up for discussion at EuroCloud UK's next meeting.

RightNow promises an end to SaaS shelfware - Thu, 04 Mar 2010
SaaS CRM vendor RightNow today launched a new customer contract proposition that, to me, should always have been on the table from every reputable SaaS vendor. It gives customers a bit more of a break from the lock-in that SaaS represents.

Cloud, it's a web thing - Tue, 02 Mar 2010
OK, let me concede for a moment that there is a use case for private cloud, but only with heavy qualification and many caveats. That doesn't mean anything I'm going to say will please the proponents of private cloud.

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Webware

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Mozilla aggressively asks older Firefox users to update - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
Most Firefox users have upgraded to Firefox 3.6. The stragglers who haven't may have their reasons, but Mozilla is starting to pressure them.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Wearing your Stickybit on your sleeve, or elsewhere - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
One of the start-ups hoping to make a splash at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival is Stickybits, a set of bar code stickers that you can "tag" with anything.

Originally posted at The Social

Chasing Groupon, LivingSocial raises $25 million - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
Despite the fact that Groupon dominates all of its smaller competitors in the daily-deals market, rival LivingSocial is trying to draw some blood by expanding with the help of a new infusion of venture funding.

Originally posted at The Social