Posts Tagged ‘GamesBeat’
After big departures, Microsoft promotes three new presidents
Microsoft today that it’s promoting three executives to serve as the presidents of its Office, mobile, and interactive entertainment divisions.
Several Microsoft veterans departed this year. , and last month, business division chief .
The promotions include:
- Kurt DelBene, who recently led engineering and development on Office 2010, is now president of the Microsoft Office division.
- Andy Lees, who led marketing and product development of Windows Phone 7, is now president of the mobile communications division.
- Don Mattrick, who had a leadership role on Microsoft’s Xbox products, is now president of the interactive entertainment business.
If it sounds like not much is changing, well, that’s also the analysis of Cnet’s Microsoft reporter Ina Fried: “The moves essentially leave all of Microsoft’s businesses in largely the same shoes.”
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Japanese augmented reality gaming company Tonchidot lands $12M
, a mobile augmented reality (AR) platform provider, just landed $12 million in second round funding. Several Japanese companies and venture capitalists participated in the round, including mobile operator KDDI Corporation, media conglomerate Recruit Co. Ltd., and mobile advertising company SPiRE.
Augmented reality refers to the use of computer-generated imagery over a live feed of a real-world environment — something usually achieved with a cellphone camera.
According to Osuke Honda from VC fund DCM, a previous investor, the investment will be used to build a larger, more diverse team and reach out to an international audience — as well as extending the company’s SoLAR gaming platform.
Social gaming is already a multi-billion dollar market in Japan. Leading mobile games portal DeNA, for example,$576 million in revenue in the six month period from April through September of this year and is on track to generate over a billion dollars this year. Japan’s other social gaming giant Gree already has 20 million users and an extremely high ARPU. Zynga recently in Japan with SoftBank.
In July this year Tonchidot launched a social, AR gaming platform for developers called SoLAR which combines location, augmented reality and social play features. Tools to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and payment features for iPhone and Android will be provided in the upcoming October product release.
Tonchidot’s flagship product, an AR app called Sekai Camera, has been downloaded 1 million times and is installed on an estimated 30 percent of all iPhones in Japan. Sekai Camera is available for iPhone in 90 countries and for Android in more than 20 countries. A lightweight version for feature phones just launched.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To purchase tickets, .
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DiscoveryBeat 2010 speakers: More top thinkers to delve into art of discovery
We’re pleased to announce some more big thinkers slated to speak at , the conference addressing the evolving problem of discovery in an era full of app stores and content. Our newest speakers represent vital parts of the ecosystem for getting content noticed.
DiscoveryBeat 2010 is an event focused on the “secret recipe” for application discovery and monetization. Due to its success in 2009, the conference has expanded to a full day event and will be held on October 18th at in San Francisco. .
For publishers or app developers, the promise of the mobile and social revolution is compelling. However, new players like Google’s Android are throwing out the early rules and creating new challenges in the ecosystem. How do you get discovered when there are 250,000 other publishers and applications fighting for users across diverse devices and interfaces, such as the PC, social networks, mobile phones, and tablets?
Here are our latest speakers:
Dave Castelnuovo is a veteran flash developer, entrepreneur and consultant and is half the team behind the iPhone sensation. With just a three-person company behind it, Pocket God has sold more than 3 million units on the iPhone. Castelnuovo founded Bolt Creative in 2001 as a flash development company and game studio, and helped to lead the indie charge onto the iPhone in 2008 and 2009. Castelnuovo has worked with a variety of internet technology companies throughout his career as well as leading game publishers such as Electronic Arts.
Julian Farrior is an alumnus from last year’s inaugural DiscoveryBeat event, where he set himself apart from the crowd in getting its iPhone games to the top of the Apple App Store. In a case study of discovery, we are going to try to get Farrior to spill all the beans again for the benefit of the audience. Farrior is founder and CEO of Backflip Studios, a mobile game company focused on bringing innovative and thoughtful titles to an expanding group of casual gamers on the iPhone. Backflip has had 10 top-five overall apps and seen more than 50 million downloads in its first 18 months of operation. Its games include popular titles such as Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster, Strike Knight and NinJump. Prior to Backflip, Farrior was an angel investor and vice president of business development and operations at Earthscape, a company that also had early success in the app store. Previously, he spent seven years at Yahoo in various management roles, the most recent of which included heading up emerging markets search. He is a lifelong video and board gamer who hopes to see Ultima III soon delivered to the iPad.
Ben Keighran is CEO & co-founder of , a mobile app discovery service. He launched Chomp with co-founder Cathy Edwards in January 2010. The and funding since its launch. Keighran is also currently serving as an advisor to Clixtr and was previously the lead advisor for mobile products at social search company Aardvark up until it was acquired by Google in early 2010. In 2006, Keighran launched Bluepulse, a mobile social messaging application. Bluepulse was one of the most downloaded mobile java applications ever, reaching almost 2mm downloads per month at its peak. At Bluepulse, Keighran raised $6.5 million to build the company, and after growing the business to a point where users were exchanging 300 million messages per month, he was nominated by BusinessWeek as one of America’s Top Entrepreneurs under the age of 25.
Peter Farago is vice president of marketing at Flurry. He is responsible for corporate and product marketing at Flurry, a leader in iPhone and Android application analytics, promotion and monetization solutions . Prior to Flurry, Peter led product marketing at mobile game maker Digital Chocolate, helping build the company into a top-10 publisher world-wide. He joined Digital Chocolate from Electronic Arts, where he managed The Sims franchise, the #1 PC game of all time. Peter began his career in consumer packaged goods at Pacific Sun, where he was head of marketing and sales. Farago will run a breakout session on “Turning virtual currency into the real thing.” He also spoke at last year’s DiscoveryBeat.
Vijay Chattha is founder and Chief Talker of VSC Consulting & AppLaunchPR. Vijay has led strategy and public relations efforts for over 35 mobile and gaming companies, resulting in over $1B in exits and transactions. The company has earned 40 PR awards for its creative and results-driven publicity campaigns. VSC’s AppLaunchPR clients have experienced over 350 million downloads on and off deck since 2002. Chattha is also an alumnus of our first event.
Alan Warms is founder and CEO of Appolicious.com and AndroidApps.com, which constitutes the first true cross-platform discovery service for mobile applications. The service combines social networking, original journalism (as part of a co-branding partnership with Yahoo) and search technology to help consumers discover the best of the hundreds of thousands of iPhone, iPad and Android apps that are available today. A serial entrepreneur, Warms previously founded and ran Participate.com (sold in 2004 to OutStart) and Buzz Tracker. After selling Buzz Tracker to Yahoo in 2007, Warms served as vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, Technology and Education.
Our previously announced speakers include Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga; Norman Winarsky, head of SRI ventures; Tim O’Brien, vice president of business development for Disney Mobile; Arjun Sethi, chief executive of LOLapps. Sebastien DeHalleux, co-founder of Playfish and vice president of business development & strategic partnerships of EA Interactive; Si Shen, chief executive of Papaya Mobile; Marc Gumpinger, chief executive of Scoreloop; and Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our . VentureBeat would like to thank the industry leaders thank those supporting DiscoveryBeat 2010, including Flurry, Adobe, Offermobi, Appolicious, Appbakr, AppLaunchPR & Herakles Data Center. Unique sponsorships are still available. For more information contact sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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SGN readies its first social game for the iPhone (video)
Gaming startup on the iPhone, but despite the company’s name (the letters stand for Social Games Network), those games have mostly been in the action genre until now, with minimal social capabilities. Today SGN founder and chairman Shervin Pishevar demonstrated the company’s first social game for the iPhone, Mini Tycoon Casino.
Pishevar said the company has spent an unusually long time developing the game — about a year — to ensure that it really “raised the bar” for social gaming on your phone. Pishevar said social games could reach an even bigger audience on phones than what they’ve found on Facebook and other social networks.
You can judge the results for yourself in the video below, which shows some of the basic interactions in the game. It follows the basic social games model — players build their own casino, “planting” items like slot machines and craps tables, then trying to top their friends’ casinos, which they can visit in the game. The real work was building the rich graphics, as well as the infrastructure for a massive user base, Pishevar said.
The game will be submitted to Apple’s App Store today. It will be free, but users can pay to buy virtual items for their casinos. SGN estimates the game could bring in $1 million a month in revenue, Pishevar said. There are plans to release other Mini Tycoon games, too.
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Japan’s DeNA invests in U.S. social game firm Astro Ape
Japan’s big mobile social game company, DeNA, is announcing today it has made an investment in U.S. social game company Astro Ape.
DeNA , another social game company. The investment in Astro Ape, which has had success as a social game developer, is part of DeNA’s “X-device, X-border” strategy. That means the company plans to be on any device in all parts of the world.
Astro Ape is based in Edison, N.J., and has created games such as Office Heroes for Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. Now it will develop games for DeNA’s MiniNation mobile game platform.
DeNA, headed by Tomoko Namba, has also acquired IceBreak and made a strategic investment in Aurora Feint. That means that the company is one of the most aggressive buyers in the North American mobile game market. DeNA created a $27.5 million incubation fund for social games this summer. Namba said her company is just getting started in the U.S. Thanks to revenues from its Mobage-town social gaming community, DeNA’s 2010. It certainly looks like DeNA is in a race with Zynga to be the dominant player in social games.
Astro Ape was founded by Christopher Cheung, Chieh Huang, and William Fong in March, 2009. The studio has five employees and is adding a couple more in the next two weeks. The company is self-funded.
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Atari launches platform for mobile and casual online games
Game maker is launching a new initiative today that has created a platform to host mobile and online games created by third-party developers.
The Atari Go initiative will take games created by others and publish them using the company’s existing online games infrastructure. Thom Kozik, head of the business-to-business initative, said in an interview that the company is tapping the infrastructure it inherited when it bought Cryptic Studios at the end of 2008. Cryptic makes and publishes massively multiplayer online games such as and Champions Online.
Over the years, Cryptic has built infrastructure such as billing systems and customer service. The team of experts in that part of Cryptic’s business amounts to more than 100 people. Now the company can leverage that expertise as it publishes games through Atari Go. Atari is the legendary brand that created games such as Breakout and Pong. But it has gone through ownership changes over the years and is now a relatively small company surrounding by a bunch of larger game companies such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard.
But with the Cryptic talent, Atari figures it has assets that give it an advantage.
“We already know how to take a game online and scale it up,” Kozik (pictured) said.
One of the first new games that Atari has published is Fairies vs. Darklings, a social casual online game. Kozik said Atari is talking to more than a dozen parties about publishing online games. Some of those will be original works, such as Faeries vs. Darklings, and others will use Atari’s classic brands.
There are already a lot of imitation Atari games posted around the web, and those games draw audiences by the tens of millions. Kozik said his company will work on “re-imagined” classic titles and try to lure those gamers away from imitations to the real thing. Atari’s platform will help developers reach new audiences via various friend networks, since the discovery of content is a key problem in the mobile world, Kozik said. Atari will also provide analytics information in addition to marketing and distribution.
Kozik, who joined Atari as executive vice president of online and mobile in March, has more than 25 years of experience in games. He has played leadership roles at Microsoft, Yahoo, Bigpoint and K2 Network. His goal is to work with talented independent developers to build games that can reach a wider audience through Atari. You can imagine the sales pitch: We know you like Asteroids, so you should try this new game.
Getting noticed is a challenge for everyone building apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010, and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. for conference details, or to apply to the “Needle in the Haystack” business contest. .
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PapayaMobile makes it a snap to add location to social mobile games
is making it simple for developers to add location-based features to their Android mobile games.
The Beijing-based company, which makes a social game platform for Android developers, has updated its software development kit to enable the addition of location features. It adds functions that resemble the check-in games on Foursquare, giving players the ability to earn medals and badges or directly challenge their friends in location-based competitions. With location added to the SDK, developers can simply include PapayaMobile’s service on their own apps, rather than build up their own database of locations for user check-ins.
Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile, said that the location feature on the company’s own games has been so popular that it decided to make it broadly available.
PapayaMobile started as an app maker. It has since created a platform that can be used to add social features such as sharing, leaderboards or challenges to games, in the hopes that those will make users more likely to tell friends about the app. The company competes with such rivals as Aurora Feint and Scoreloop.
Shen recently announced , which promotes quality Android games to the company’s audience of 4 million Android users.
Shen, a former mobile product manager for Google in China, started PapayaMobile in 2008 with Wenjie Qian. The company has 30 employees and raised .
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our . Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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