Seth Gilbert, 09-30-2009
Twitter is not the only company drawing massive investor speculation. Gaming startup OnLive announced Tuesday (9/29) that investors including Warner Brothers, Autodesk and AT&T Media Holdings had all jumped in to fund a substantial Series C financing.
Details weren’t disclosed but CEO Steve Perlman said on the company’s blog that the round was the company’s largest to date. It was "much larger than our previous rounds and gives us a serious jolt of rocket fuel as our beta progresses," he wrote.
Some speculation in the market is that the valuation may have been in excess of $500m. (via Venture Beat) No telling if that’s accurate.
OnLive is looking to deliver a “cloud computing” competitor to the traditional game console environment. More than seven years in the making, the company is currently beta testing its offering and looking to build out server farms necessary for their eventual commercial launch.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-28-2009
When you talk about the magnitude of a business, there’s scale and then there’s SCALE. Apple unequivocally reached the second plateau with its App Store Monday.
In a short press release, the company announced customers have downloaded more than 2 billion applications since the store’s debut. That’s a jump of 500 million downloads since July, or an even billion since April.
Steve Jobs has to be happy in Cupertino.
To add some color and put 2 billion downloads in context, we’ve hit the spreadsheets. Crunching the numbers:
• Average Downloads Per Day – The App Store has delivered approximately 4.5m downloads per day since its debut in July 2008. Since mid July of this year, when Apple triumphantly announced it had delivered 1.5 billion downloads, the rate’s jumped to somewhere near 6.5m per day. (Ed. Note: averages are approximate due to inexact information about the days on which Apple crossed each download milestone. See table).
• Available Titles – Back in March, the App store had about 30k applications to offer. Since July, the number of available titles has jumped from 65,000 to 85,000 and the number of developers has advanced from 100,000 to 125,000.
• Free or Paid – According to an App Store product survey maintained by 148Apps, the App Store had 83,618 titles available for download in the U.S. on September 28th (just under Apple’s report of 85k titles). Of these 83.6k downloads, approximately 23%, or 19,514 titles were free.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-8-2009
Mickey is looking for some new ideas and the talent to develop them. He’s not scared to pay to get either.
Just about a week after shelling out $4b to buy Marvel Entertainment, Disney’s dug into its acquisition coffers again, this time to snag little known game developer Wideload Games.
In a press release, the companies announced the deal Tuesday morning.
In contrast to the Marvel purchase, the Wideload buy seems almost singularly about the people. Wideload won’t be bringing a cache of known brands or readily saleable products to the Disney family. There won’t be any super heroes or arch villains to pepper story arcs or cross the media boundaries of Disney’s empire. Since being founded in 2003, Wideload has developed only a handful of games.
The real characters Wideload will bring to Disney are its staff, particularly, its founder, game industry veteran, Alex Seropian.
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Seth Gilbert, 08-17-2009
With internet traffic and usage, there are any of number of firms that track behavior. ComScore, Nielsen, Quantcast, and Pew, to name a handful. Each tries to provide insight into what’s popular, what’s growing – where the trends are. Each can be valuable but each can have its limitations too.
From one to the next, results can often differ in the detail. And even within the results of a single firm’s measurements, a pattern appearing in a short period of time often disappears across a broader swath.
Such is the nature of statistics. As an old saying aptly puts it: facts are stubborn but statistics pliable. Slice em up or sort ‘em the right way and you can tell a lot of different stories.
That said, disclaimers thrown front and center, comScore released its search engine marketshare measurements for July on Monday. (release)
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Seth Gilbert, 07-31-2009
If you were to define irony by example, a book seller going “Big Brother” and secretly deleting your previously purchased copy of 1984 is about as letter perfect as you can get. It’s the kind of thing you cannot script; the truth people deem stranger than fiction. But believe it or not, that’s exactly what happened in mid July.
On July 16th and 17th, Amazon, after recognizing it had sold eBooks it didn’t have proper rights clearances to sell, attempted to fix the problem by dropping a heavy hand on the delete button.
Using previously undisclosed remote access technology the company systematically deleted the books from customer’s Kindles. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Though rebates were provided, the uproar and backlash was fast and loud. And now the inevitable has happened: a lawsuit has been filed.
17 year old Michigan high school student Justin Gawronski filed papers Thursday seeking monetary and injunctive relief for the damage caused when the deleted files rendered linked notes on his Kindle obsolete. (court document follows below)
Reportedly, Gawronski’s primary interest is legal precedent. He’s not in it for money but he wants more than to be able to tell a teacher, “the Kindle really did eat my homework.”
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Seth Gilbert, 07-30-2009
Sony and Nintendo have generally been moving in different directions, one finding success while the other floundered and restructured. Heading into the current quarter, with consumer spending weak and a strong Yen threatening margins, there were hints that might be changing (at least for the very near term).
Earnings results in, it has. Both Sony and Nintendo reported Thursday and both struggled.
At Nintendo, revenue fell 40% to 253b Yen. Earnings plunged 61%. Unit sales of Nintendo’s otherwise infallible Wii fell 57% globally compared to the same period last year.
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Seth Gilbert, 07-29-2009
Micro-hoo, the nickname for Microsoft’s effort to buy Yahoo outright, was the deal that wasn’t. At the end of a long and winding road, Microsoft-Yahoo Search is finally the deal that is.
Nearly a year and half removed from Microsoft’s initial buyout offer, a crashed ad market and a new CEO later, the two rivals have joined together in a complex pact aimed at wrestling a greater share of the search market away from Google.
Combining interests, at June levels (ComScore), the newly announced deal would give the joint effort a 28% share of the U.S. search market compared to Google’s industry leading 65%. (Independently, Microsoft had 8% and Yahoo 20% in June).
The combination would still represent a minority stake but both companies believe the added scale will make a significant difference in their ability to compete.
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