Ajax Girl

I feel like today is Virtual World Day. We started off the morning covering the public beta launch of Vivaty, then Second Life and IBM announced that they bridged two virtual worlds, and Google launched its own version of virtual worlds with Lively.

If it seems like everybody is starting their own virtual world, it is because they are. A report put out today by Virtual Worlds Management tracks $161 million put into 14 virtual-world investments during the second quarter of 2008. In the first quarter there was even more activity, with $184 million put into 23 virtual worlds and supporting technology companies. That brings the total this year alone to $345 million across 37 deals. Some notable deals (you can see the full lists by clicking on the last two links above):

Second Quarter 2008

Grockit——————-MMO Learning Game——-$8 million——-Integral Capital and Benchmark

Nurien Software——–3D social networking——-$15 million——-Northern Light, Globespan, NEA

PrimeSense————-Gestural Interface———-$20.4 million—–Led by Canaan Partners

Realtime Worlds———-MMOG Developer———$50 million——–Maverick Capital, NEA

Stanford Parallel —-Parallel Processing————–$6 million——-Sun Microsystems, AMD, Nvidia, IBM,
Processing Lab for Virtual Worlds HP, and Intel

Turbine———————-MMOG——————-$40 million————–Time Warner and GGV Capital

First Quarter 2008

9You———–Virtual World/Casual Games——$100 million——–Temasek Holdings

Dizzywood —————Youth World————— $1 million——-Shelby Bonnie, Charles River Ventures

EveryScape————— Mirror World————–$7 million——–Dace, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Fix8 ———————- Avatar Content————$2 million ——–SK Telecom

Gizmoz ——————- Avatar Creation ———- $6.5 million——-DoCoMo Capital, ngi group

iOpener ——————–Mixed Reality ————-$6 million———Triangle Venture Capital

Sparkplay Media——Casual MMO with Games—–$4.25 million—–Redpoint, Prism Ventureworks

Unisfair ——————–Virtual Events Platform—–$10 million——-Norwest, Sequoia Capital

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330456047/

We have been tracking the exodus of employees from Yahoo and have counted 114 executive-level departures since January 2007. The news isn’t going to get any better as we have learnt that of the executives remaining at the company, a large number of them are biding their time and waiting for a large vesting period that finishes up in the first week of August, the same time as the critical annual shareholder meeting.

The options grant was part of a retention initiative at Yahoo! and involved almost every employee at the company - from top executives down to the engineering level. Employees were granted options and restricted stock units based on merit. Grants ranged from 10,000 to up to 40,000 options with a vesting period of two years. These options are potentially worth up to $200,000 for some employees - certainly enough incentive for some who intended to leave to wait around a few more months before taking that new job with a startup, or Google or Microsoft. We understand that there are dozens and possibly up to another 100 people in director, VP level or higher positions who are ready to leave once this vesting period has completed in a few weeks time.

Yahoo has long had a retention problem, and they are known to pay higher base salaries and ocassionaly write out bonus options in an effort to retain employees. They also ran a very visible recruitment campaign until recently when they initiated a hiring freeze. Our list of executives who have left the company could easily double in the next month - and another mass exodus would not bode well for the morale of the remaining employees and executives.

We understand that some of these remaining executives are only coming into the office a day or two a week, and openly searching for new jobs with competitors or other companies. The image gives a good idea of just how tough the situation inside Yahoo! is at the moment - and the challenges facing upper management with their attempts to turn the company around without the help of Microsoft.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330430244/

EventBee, an event management service, has rolled out a new version of its site that introduces a flat $1 fee for all tickets sold. The move may well prove to disrupt this space - most competitors traditionally charge a small percentage of the ticket price rather than a flat fee. While the difference is negligible for small events where tickets are only a few dollars, coordinators of large (and pricey) conferences may flock to the new pricing scheme.

EventBee, which we originally introduced as a “AdSense for Events”, allows users to create customized pages for their events from which they can sell tickets online (the site supports Google Checkout or Paypal). The site also allows users to distribute ads for their events through its Event Network Listing, which consists of blogs that have embedded AdSense-like code.

The site has a number of competitors, such as EventBrite, a similar service that we’ve used a number of times to distribute tickets to our own events. And while EventBee’s new pricing scheme may raise some eyebrows, the site’s relatively small userbase and basic interface probably won’t have EventBrite changing its policies any time soon.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330405110/

Mobile streaming service provider Flixwagon has added an array of new features in coincidence with its launch into public availability.

Among the new features, users can now register and download the client software through Nokia Symbian Series 60 mobile browsers. Before broadcasting, users can specify whether to increase video quality or decrease delay. With new two-way text chat, broadcasters can write back messages to the comments area that appears during a broadcast from their mobile device. They can also change title videos during broadcasts and enjoy digital zoom-in and zoom-out.

Post-broadcast features include a group-sharing option, where broadcasters can specify which groups they want to share videos with (friends, family, coworkers, etc.). They can also post to Twitter and YouTube with personalized messages.

Changes made to the Flixwagon site include the addition of RSS to users’ broadcast feeds, as well as an option to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, etc.

Flixwagon was the first streaming service to announce support for the iPhone (albeit, only by a few hours). It competes most directly with Qik and Kyte.tv (see Robert Scoble’s analysis of the mobile video broadcasting space here).

 

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330282986/

Michael once wrote that Twitter may not have to worry about uptime any more, explaining, “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” And, a few months and countless hours of downtime later, it looks like most of you feel the same way. The early adopters may have migrated to Friendfeed, but the masses appear to be content to stay and take their punishment at Twitter.

Hitwise has just released their latest Twitter usage data, and despite a reliability record that many would describe as an “epic fail”, the service is showing a surprising amount of resilience. Twitter’s share of returning visitors (users that return to the site more than once in thirty days) has held steady at around 55% since March. Twitter has seen near-constant downtime and disappearing features in that time, but nobody seems to mind. At least, not enough to try out one of the other microblogging services.

The site has also seen impressive growth, rising from around .0004% of all internet traffic in January to .0024% in July - the nearest competitor only sees about 1/10th of that traffic. These numbers also neglect to account for the many Twitter users who use the site through its API using 3rd party programs, so we can expect Twitter’s lead to be even more significant.

In effect, we’ve been telling Twitter that no matter how badly it screws up, we’ll stay loyal, simply because our friends are already on the service.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330253502/

Attention Flash game developers-

It’s hard making money in your field these days, right? Actually, making money in any field these days seems to be quite difficult. But if you are a Flash developer and you’re focused in on games then why not enter into the Meez Inside Avatar Games Contest? There’s $20,000 worth of cold, hard cash in prize money and who doesn’t like free money? Meez has partnered with FlashGameLicense to run this contest starting today through September 8, 2008.

How do you get started? Jump on over to CrunchGear to find out.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330257622/

Stock in virtualization provider VMWare today dropped almost 25%, as growth expectations were lowered and founding CEO Diane Greene was replaced by the board. Prior to today, VMWare was the fourth largest software company in the world, with a market cap of over $20B. They have slipped down the list and lost $5B in value as the company struggles to match high growth expectations places on it after its much-hyped IPO almost a year ago.

Greene, an original founder of the VMWare company, will be replaced by Paul Maritz as President and CEO, and he has also been assigned to the board of the company. Maritz was the founder of Pi Corporation, a cloud based storage and services provider that was acquired by EMC last year. Previously Maritz was the VP of Cloud Services at EMC, and prior to that he was a long-term executive at Microsoft.

The company faces a number of fresh challenges as the virtualization market heats up with the entry of Microsoft with their virtualization platform, now built into Windows Server, and their new Hyper-V product, which will retail for only $28, fractions of the cost of a VMWare solution.

VMWare: A missed opportunity for EMC? Continue reading at Techcrunch IT >>

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330215973/

Getty Images, one of the world’s largest media licensing companies, has partnered with Flickr to add a broader selection of pictures to its online catalog. Getty will hand-pick a number of Flickr members to participate in the program, with a goal of acquiring thousands of images in the next few months.

Getty editors will use a set of tools jointly developed by the two companies that will enable them to easily scan through Flickr photos to find the best of the crop. Each selected member will have their images licensed through a special Flickr-branded section of Getty’s site, and will receive portions of the licensing fees collected by Getty (there is no set payout structure - each selected participant in the program will need to negotiate their own deal with Getty).

Flickr members will likely try to do anything they can to become a part of the program, which stands to offer them both wide exposure and compensation for their work. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way for a Flickr member to apply to become a part of the program - they need to be “discovered” by Getty’s editors. It’s also hard to tell how lucrative the deals will be for photographers, as Getty has yet to form any partnerships.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330197969/

Fellow Yahoo Matt Hackett took a leaf out of Jacob Seidelin’s book and started converting old school arcade games to JavaScript. Instead of using Canvas his only “non JavaScript” solution is playing the music with Scott Schiller’s Sound Manager (which, as we know, uses Flash under the hood).

You can come down with 8 bit shoot-em-up fever by clicking the screenshot.

Matt also shows you what the score is and give some more game info on his blog.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/330205831/spacius-nintendo-meets-javascript-again

Well, this sucks for Second Life. Google is launching a new service today called Lively, a browser based virtual world add-on that lets users create and customize avatars and worlds, interact with other users, and generally have a richer social interaction than is offered by GTalk today.

Worlds can be embedded into web pages, although only Windows users on IE or Firefox can view them, after an add-on download and installation. Mac and Linux users will have to wait for now.

Google has created a number of sample rooms that can be copied and altered, or users can start from scratch and build their own world. Furniture and other items can be added and moved around. Avatars can talk to each other, do things like dance and shake hands, and manipulate objects (in a demo, my avatar was able to blow up drums of toxic waste by double clicking on them. Users can also, of course, chat with each other - GTalk is the underlying chat engine.

This isn’t yet a full Second Life competitor. There’s no single world, for example, where users can move around. But it’s easy to see Google evolving this into a single online world. And then, of course, selling advertising into it. More screen shots:

The virtual world’s “Google Room” is embedded below.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/330152519/