If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma.
Now you can relive those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes. It’s getting funded on Kickstarter as we speak.
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Diversification is the key to longevity. With that likely in mind, GameStop just announced widespread availability of Android tablets throughout its chain of retail stores. This comes after a 200 store trial that started last October.
These aren’t ordinary Android tablets, though. GameStop is pre-loading the Samsung, Asus, Acer, and Toshiba with extra gaming titles such as Sonic CD, Riptide, the Kongregate Arcade app and a free issue of GameStop’s gaming mag, Game Informer. Thanks to these extras and with prices that are inline with other stores, GameStop actually has a chance to capture a bit of the tablet market. → Read More
As the heat around the “Facebook Phone” story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, it transpired that Facebook was working with INQ Mobile on a smartphone. The phone duly emerged – the INQ1 – and did indeed have great Facebook integration. Even if it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit, it’s fared well enough.
Indeed, HTC has also released their own “Facebook” phone, such HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa respectively. INQ’s runs on Google’s Android operating system, but with deeper Facebook integration.
When asked about the INQ phone back in 2010, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t “some massive big thing”. But quite clearly, a phone is now firmly on the agenda. → Read More
It’s not clear if this is a one-off glitch, a signal of a bigger issue — or a way of pumping up/sabotaging Klout scores for those who care. But it’s not great news any way you spin it, if it’s true: a Klout user has gotten in touch to say that when he accesses the social influence ratings service, he is getting signed in to Klout not as himself but as someone else.
Using an HTC Sensation device running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, IT consultant Halil Kabaca,of Istanbul, Turkey-based Novarum Consulting, tells us that when he goes on to Klout via the phone’s mobile browser, he is being signed in automatically as someone completely different — someone he doesn’t know at all who happens to work for Adobe in business development (see screenshots of Kabaca’s and the other guy’s profiles after the break).
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As tempting as it might seem, please do not upload a picture of a bunch of cash and then upload it to a social network. That’s just dumb. But that’s also what one 17-year-old Australian girl did only to have two robbers armed with a knife and a club show up at her house.
The story goes that a 17-year-old girl was helping her grandma. Likely somewhere in between vacuuming and feather dusting, the two started counting money, and, as we all know, the elderly tend to keep a good sum of cash on hand. Apparently the 17-year-old snapped a picture of the pile which was likely fanned-out in the traditional gangster style. This girl then uploaded the picture to Facebook. → Read More
It’s not a given that a leader in search can successfully pivot into other areas like social media — just ask Google — but a new service launching in Russia today, from that country’s search leader Yandex, shows one route a company with a lot of smarts can take to make sure they remain a central player in the social game. Today sees the launch of SocialMart, a social shopping startup financed by Yandex (through its seed-funding program Yandex.Factory), and powered by Yandex (via Yandex.Market), but is not Yandex itself.
Both Yandex and SocialMart are banking on the fact that the rising popularity of ecommerce in Russia is inevitably going to cross over with the equally popular trend of social networking: up to now, those twains have not met, unlike in other markets, where services like Mertado (now part of Groupon), Sneakpeeq, and Fab have been running away with the “social shopping” banner, picking up users and funding in the process.
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Here we go again: Facebook is apparently trying for the third time to get its phone project off the ground — snatching up iOS design and engineering talent left and right Nick Bilton is hearing.
We’re hearing (and seeing) similar regarding iOS talent, but with one caveat: Word on the street is that few mobile design whizzes actually want to work at Facebook, but everyone has their price, and post-IPO Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay that price, whatever it is.
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In the last of our series of posts featuring daily videos from Disrupt NY, Day 3′s highlight was the final round of the Startup Battlefield presentations and the passing of the cup to the new winner UberConference. Wednesday also featured an entertaining hardware panel, an inspirational tech talk from the White House, and new beer that’s caught the interest of tech investors. → Read More
There are advantages and disadvantages of being one of the earlier companies in a very early market. While new companies get to watch, observe, and create their own insights based on product features incumbents develop, we get to constantly introspect on “what has worked” based on real data, real feedback, and being out in the market talking to partners.
The second screen space is going to be a multi-billion dollar market. Just last week, Tim Cook announced that 67M iPads were sold in less than two years. It took more than 24 years to sell that many Macs. With the growing trend of second screen activity (i.e. using tablets while you watch TV), there is bound to be major disruption in the TV industry. → Read More
In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the world’s population topped 7 billion in October 2011, the GSM Association announced that mobile SIM cards had reached 6 billion. A 2009 study in India illustrated that every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration leads to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP.
Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. This is a market underserved by technologists and startups. This is where the majority of future growth lies, and Silicon Valley has yet to realize the huge economic opportunities for network operators, handset developers, and mobile startups. Where are these opportunities? → Read More
Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. We also asked our Aol CEO Tim Armstrong some tough questions. Tuesday’s Battlefield competition included a startup trying to disrupt the dry cleaning business, a new way for musicians to collaborate and a neat 3D Modeling program in your browser. → Read More
Did you miss some of our NY Disrupt conference this week? Or want to watch it again? TechCrunch Disrupt and our Hackathon provided more than 30 hours of demos, interviews, panel discussions, and Battlefield competition. Sure, you can spend the holiday weekend watching all of it. But, we’ve also put together daily video highlights that we will be publishing in a trio of posts today.
The player below shows some of the favorite moments from Monday, Day 1 of the conference, including some surprises from VC Fred Wilson, Fab.com and Tumblr. Monday’s Battlefield presentations included the first public preview from the Disrupt Cup winner and runner-up. → Read More
If you feel there’s been too much hype about “big data” recently, check this out: the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America — Todd Park — wants developers and entrepreneurs to build new products, services, and companies using free data provided by the federal government. In this brief discussion backstage at Disrupt, Park emphasizes that he, his team, and the President of the United States have all fully endorsed the idea that key datasets be made available to the public, and there have even been examples of entrepreneurs forming companies around free datasets, one that’s even hired over 70 employees. (For entrepreneurs interested in health data specifically, Park’s group is helping organize an entire symposium on the topic in early June in Washington DC; click here for more details.) For developers interested in big data sets, this brief discussion with Park would be quite relevant. → Read More
Some significant changes afoot at social and mobile games company Digital Chocolate: founder Trip Hawkins has stepped down as the CEO of the company. And we have also heard a report — yet to be confirmed directly by the company — that president Marc Metis has stepped up as interim CEO; and that Digital Chocolate has laid off up to 180 people across offices in India, San Mateo, Russia and elsewhere.
Hawkins’ news was made public by Trip himself in his company blog, where he notes that he is “transitioning into a consulting and advisory relationship with Digital Chocolate.” Without giving away much about the state of affairs at the company, the move, he writes, is being made as the company is “narrowing its focus.”
“It made sense to get more streamlined,” he explains. Hawkins founded the company eight years ago.
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When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at PARC ….”
Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or — well, you get the idea — I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ….”
All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it’s not entirely new (which nothing can ever be). → Read More
Every day there is a new headline about mobile payments focused on using a mobile phone to pay at retail locations. Paypal, Google and other industry giants are racing to provide new in-store mobile payment solutions. Large merchants, such as Wal-mart and Target have contemplated their own mobile payment solutions. The debate about whether NFC will be the preferred technology to enable mobile payments rages. However, despite all this press and efforts by industry giants, there is stunningly little traction to use a mobile device to pay at retail locations. This is largely because the solutions offered by industry giants thus far don’t solve a meaningful problem in the daily lives of consumers or merchants. Few things in life are easier for consumers than swiping a credit card at checkout and in-store payment systems are as easy and ubiquitous as dial-tone for merchants.
However, There is a massive mobile commerce opportunity that is a severe pain point for both consumers and merchants, but large industry players are failing to meaningfully address it. That opportunity is e-commerce on the mobile device or m-commerce. M-commerce is ramping up, proving that consumers not only like to shop via their mobile device, but also will purchase. However, the numbers also show that there’s significant room for improvement in the mobile device purchasing experience – mainly through optimizing the shopping and payment processes for consumers. → Read More
If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong.
Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily.
As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year. → Read More
As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over known prior art (“prior art” being earlier publications that show a patent is obvious or not new). Courts are increasingly cognizant of these criticisms.
Though it is unlikely that software patents are going away any time soon, as the recent summary judgment in eBay v PartsRiver (PartsRiver is now known as Kelora) demonstrates, courts are beginning to do a more thorough job of applying the obviousness standard to software patents. → Read More
The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone.
It wasn’t that fun of a game anyway.
When I had a corporate job I would wake up depressed. I couldn’t move out of bed. The sun would be coming in. A cat on the fire escape staring at me through the window. Even it was more excited to be alive than me. And, by the way, I had the best job in the world. I interviewed prostitutes for a living at three in the morning.
But they were going to kill me in my cubicle. → Read More
The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s father would relentlessly hound him to “Get better”, so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won’t go through. But the legend? It’s a hoax.
Here’s the real story… → Read More
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