Category: Tech news

Tomorrow morning comes the moment Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s been waiting for seven years. According to the NYT, Yelp will drop on the NYSE under the YELP ticker tomorrow morning.

Yelp will be offering 7.15 million shares at $15 dollars a share, wanting to raise about $107.25 million in its IPO. The deal is said to be heavily over subscribed, and I’ve heard that some Yelpers were disappointed by the low price — despite the fact that the company is still not profitable and trading at a valuation of more than ten times its revenues.

While Yelp generated $83.3 million in 2011, it also operated at a $16.9 million loss.

Yelp will be the fourth in a series of high profile tech IPOs, with Groupon, LinkedIn, and Zynga all debuting before it to mixed results. Industry giant Facebook is set to wreak havoc IPO in the spring.

Say the Mayans are right, and a meteor or some other catastrophe strikes the Earth sometime later this year. Assuming we’re not all wiped out by the impact, emergency services worldwide are going to need to do some serious canvassing to assess damage, resources, and form a picture of the disaster.

DARPA is running a little game, called CLIQRQuest, to look into how such a network of people might do such a task. But instead of asking people to snap pictures of reservoirs and hospitals, they’re giving cash prizes for finding QR codes.

Not just any QR codes, of course; the agency has distributed codes like the one at right throughout the continental U.S. “to represent the dispersion of resource concentrations throughout the country.” So there won’t be many pasted to signposts in the great plains, but presumably there will be lots in population- and resource-rich areas like larger cities and ports. How many are there? DARPA isn’t saying, though they helpfully note that the number is “finite.”

Yet it’s not just a scavenger hunt. After all, it would be difficult for an individual or even a good-sized team to physically scan however many tags are out there. And DARPA has already conducted experiments that have proven the efficacy of crowdsourcing a task like that.

So, as DARPA puts it, this is more a test of exchanging information via social media. You’ve got people all over the place scanning these codes, which are supposed to represent water, food, generators, and so on. You advertise what you’ve got, leverage your social connections, start a website, make an app — however you want to do it. The winner is either the person who collects all the codes or the person with the most when the contest ends on the 12th.

You’re not going to rank even if you scanned every code for a hundred miles. You need the others to volunteer their information, and they need you to do the same, with the shared goal of getting all that info in one place as fast as possible. It’s a fairly good representation of the problem they are investigating.

The contest is going on right now and you can join in if you like — just register at the spartan contest webpage and start submitting codes you’ve gotten by whatever means you have available.

There are few terms more overused these days than “social media expert.” Now Unified wants to actually certify those experts, through a new program called Unified University.

Unified calls itself “the first social operating platform” — it offers tools for planning, purchasing, and analyzing social media advertising campaigns. Even though CEO Sheldon Owen says he wants to build a big enterprise technology company, Unified sometimes finds itself working as a social media consultant, of sorts for the agencies and brands that it works with, helping to train them in the best practices of social advertising. With Unified University, the startup can get its customers up-to-speed more efficiently.

Despite the “university” name, this isn’t actually something people need to commit to for weeks or months. Instead, it’s a series of online tutorials that can be completed in about a day, and at the end, the “students” get certified in different subject areas. The curriculum focuses on three broad topics — Metrics & Reporting, Tactical, and Strategies for Success.

In the short-term, people need that certification in order to unlock certain Unified features. For example, Owen says there are lots of unique challenges to promoting content on StumbleUpon. Rather than allowing customers to waste their time and money, Unified’s StumbleUpon feature only turns on after they’ve completed the relevant tutorial in the University. In the long-term, Owen is hoping that the certification will become a generally recognized way to recognize social media knowledge, say within large organizations, or when you’re moving between jobs.

You can read more about Unified University here.

By the way, Unified’s co-founders Josh Backer and Jason Beckerman were actually part of the inaugural class of TechCrunch 40 companies with their startup Teach the People.

Boxee has slowly but surely been building out the adult content offered through its streaming service, and now there is one more in the mix: Pornhub (NSFW link) — which informally calls itself the YouTube for porn, offering a mix of user-generated and more professional content — is now also coming to the service.

But although adult material has long been one of the dead-certs in the world of paid content, it’s still a competitive business and therefore ripe for disruption. So unlike other recent adult additions to Boxee like Fyre, Pornhub is making its debut ad-free and free to watch. It claims that it is the first, official free adult app on Boxee to do so.

This is also Pornhub’s first move to making its content available on TVs, Corey Price, VP of new business development, tells me.

This is not to say that Pornhub’s content will remain free forever. Price says that its mobile web site also started in a similar vein; after it built up its audience, it began to incorporate ads. The Boxee service will likely follow a similar pattern. “The money always comes later,” Price says.

The bulk of Pornhub’s viewing at the moment is on its own web site. That brings in 100 million page views per day, with around 25 million visitors and 3 billion page views per month.

But Price says that they have started to see a gradual migration to watching Pornhub away from a computer. That comes partly from its mobile presence (60 million views per month) as well as the fact that you can already watch Pornhub on TVs via any console with a browser.

The move to TV screens via a dedicated app will mean improved user experience for those watching on those bigger screens, plus more functionality: the remote and keyboard from the Boxee system, he says, “work perfectly” with this app — unlike the browsing experiences.

Similar to other adult apps on Boxee, this content will be filtered and hidden behind a wall to ensure that children — and anyone else a Boxee owner chooses — will not be able to access it.

And as for next steps, Price says that Pornhub is eyeing up Roku and Google TV as its next two TV platforms, as well as building dedicated apps for some of its other brands such as Youporn. In other words, a big move for Pornhub to the TV hub.

Vocre was one of the more popular battlefield companies at Disrupt SF 2011; the automagical quality of the app and their excellent on-stage presentation made them one of the frontrunners. They haven’t been idle since then, though, and they’ve taken the advice of some critics who suggested their pay-per-use model was going to turn off users.

They’re releasing a new version of the app today with a few significant improvements, most notably that the app is now free.

The announcement described it as “freemium,” but TechCrunch confirmed with Vocre that it is indeed “free as in beer” and should be from now on for consumers. They are planning an enterprise solution down the road that will have tiered pricing — could be useful for cross-country conference calls, and it will probably be cheaper than a full-time translator.

They also now support 23 languages, inclusive of dialects/regional differences, i.e. Canadian French and French French both count as languages. You may think that’s cheating, but try telling that to the Quebecois.

There’s also a new “tabletop” mode that lets you have a conversation without handing the phone back and forth, and some improvements to the UI. No ads or anything have been added to support the free model; presumably they have monetization ideas

You can download the app here.

Users are tuning out of Google Music, the search engine’s foray into music cloud storage, streaming and sales. A high-ranking digital music executive told The Music Void that Google Music is losing users week after week, despite its preferred access to over 200 million Android installs. Seems its lack of marketing, the missing Warner deal, and competition from iTunes Match and Spotify are taking their toll.

If Google needs music to win mobile, it should put its weight behind this product. Otherwise, it’s time to unplug.

Google Music still just seems to be another experiment for the search giant. It has plenty of ways to promote it but doesn’t. It released a mobile web app but nothing native for iOS. Perhaps Google should have branded its music offering with YouTube. At least that’s service people actually associate with fun content.

Google loves to dip its toes in, test the water, and then decide if its worth steamrolling the existing players. Shipping a minimum viable product works with software and platforms, but big-name content is another story. You’ve either got all the artists (sans stingy holdouts like The Black Keys), or you’re missing a big chunk and don’t really work.

Google needs loyal Music users if it’s ever going to succeed with its own home entertainment system hardware. Though they’re still only rumors, manufacturing hardware that runs a service no one uses is a quick way to find yourself in a quagmire.

It may be time for Google Music to get serious or ride into the sunset. The choice should come down whether there are deep strategic synergies between music and its other products. If owning a music service is crucial to the future of Android, it should pay off Warner, get their catalogue, and market the hell out of Google Music. Do it while Spotify is still small and while people still perceive iTunes as an old-school MP3 store.

If it’s not essential, Google should feel free to euthanize the service with no shame — it has plenty of other things to focus on, and content’s a crappy business to be in. If Google Music ever took off, you know that every time their contracts need renegotiating, the labels would reach deep into those deep, search ad-lined pockets.

Zynga is now officially launching its own web site for social games, and the move has got investors buying its stock. Shares are up nearly 10 percent as of market closing today towards $15 — or 50 percent of the $10 price it went public at back in December. Why? The obvious reason is that the move is a way for Zynga to lessen its reliance on Facebook.

But Zynga is still using Facebook exclusively as its identity service and payments system, so it’s not true to say that it’s lessening anything right now. That is, except for two things: publisher payments and ads.

The new site, Zynga.com, will include a range of social communication channels and friend suggestions based on what games people play and how they play them. It is opening up all of this to third party developers, too, plus access to Zynga’s hundreds of millions of users. But, they’ll have to pay. Facebook is already taking a 30 percent cut of all virtual goods payments in the platform, because Zynga is using Facebook Credits to power payments.

Zynga is still able to make money here, however. Chief operating officer John Schappert tells me that the company is also working out publisher deals with developers come on board. That is, it appears to be negotiating an additional cut from them, on top of the Credits fee.

But let’s back up to Credits — Zynga has to use them because of an exclusive five-year deal that Facebook made it sign back in 2009. Part of the terms required that Zynga use Credits in anything it did on the web outside of Facebook. This basically turns Zynga into an early evangelist for Facebook Credits, in the event that the social network wants to expand the currency off of Facebook.com

The terms provided something else, too. They allowed Zynga to run its own canvas ads on its properties, as I detailed on Inside Social Games last July. On Facebook, Facebook owns all the ad inventory.

You don’t see ads on Zynga.com right now, but Zynga could plug all of its advertisers — the people who are running branded virtual goods campaigns and offers in its existing games — on these sites as well. Or any other ad content for that matter, like ads that other developers could pay for within Zynga.com in order to reach users. And that could turn into a quality new revenue stream.

There are a number of companies that offer carrier billing for companies in the mobile space — that is, services that let people buy content on their devices and charge it right to their carrier — but there is only one that has secured deals with Facebook, Amazon and RIM to do it: an unassuming U.K. billing and analytics company by the name of Bango.

And while you may not know who they are, chances are that the folks at Bango probably know you.

Bango, established in 2002, is providing the back-end billing that Facebook will offer to developers who want to put any kind of premium content around apps that are built for Facebook’s mobile web platform.

That service was announced earlier this week. Before that, Bango was already providing billing in RIM’s Appworld: RIM claims that this easy billing option, combined with considerably fewer apps in its store, has made its developers more money than competing app stores such as the Android Market. Bango also works with Opera on its app storefront; with a number of app publishers including EA, Gameloft and Fox; and operators like AT&T, Sprint and Vodafone.

Bango’s service will also used by Amazon “in due course”, as a result of a deal Amazon and Bango announced in December 2011.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, will not talk about the financial details of any of these services — except to note that while the company publishes a list of rates (first picked up on by Kim-Mai at Inside Mobile Apps), the bigger the customer is, the more favorable the terms.

In the case of Amazon, he will not speak about any details at all: whether it would be used to incorporate carrier billing into its existing Android appstore, or to work with a new product altogether. For example, it is currently running an in-app billing beta for its appstore.

Given that there are a number of ways of charging to a carrier’s bill — there is Boku, and Zong, Netsize and the operators themselves, among others — what is it that has attracted these companies to Bango?

Anderson says it’s a couple of things: there is the fact that billing is automatic and doesn’t require SMS confirmations as some competitors do. But Bango also has possibly one of the most extensive databases of people’s numbers, spanning “forty or fifty countries,” all aggregated into one platform. Anderson says Bango uses this database to help make those transactions, and especially repeat transactions, smoother and easier.

On Bango’s platform, he says, “If we pick up information about a user, we make sure it is used again later.”

(Creepy sidenote: that platform has tagged me, too: we checked and Bango had a record of my very first mobile phone model, who the carrier was, and of course the number. It also had records of whenever that device touched their systems. Ditto for my newer phone. The thing is, that I’m not sure I’ve ever bought anything and charged it to my phone bill.)

Bango has been in operation for the last 10 years, but Anderson says that things have really switched up in the last two to three years, with the rise of smartphones and app usage.

This growth has meant even more data fed into the Bango platform. The Appworld alone he says covers 100 million users; the Opera business brings in another 200 million. And Facebook will add in another 850 million.

Anderson tells me Bango has “a number of other sources” for its data: carriers provide it with that information about who visits its portals; there are others Anderson wouldn’t spell out.

That translates into even more growth. “The reason Bango is seeing a sudden surge of customer interest is because the more information it gets, the more there is for everyone to use,” he says. In that sense, Bango’s customers are happy when would-be competitors join in the billing fun.

While that might sound like a minefield for privacy issues, Anderson claims it’s the opposite, because Bango has become a trusted, one-way repository for this information.

“A mobile carrier wouldn’t give the phone numbers of arbitrary people to arbitrary websites for billing,” he says. “But it is happy to provide us as long as we don’t pass on to anyone else, and only use it for billing transactions.”

Why carrier billing? Credit card-based services like Apple’s are catchy for markets where plastic is widely used, but Anderson says that the carrier billing facility really becomes more obvious when you are starting to target people who either don’t have credit cards, or don’t want to use them, especially for small transactions. Anderson cites one customer of theirs in South Africa: when the billing service was credit card based, the conversion was four in 10,000; he said the introduction of carrier billing turned that into 6,000 in 10,000.

“We call Apple the betamax of payments. And Bango is the VHS,” he said. “Both are okay, but it was VHS that became more popular because it was available to everyone.”

Who else might be joining the party? Anderson said the company is talking to everyone, including those who are already offering carrier billing through other routes. “If Google wants the best experience for payment they should probably start working with us,” he joked.

France-based Leetchi, a group payment application along the lines of US-based WePay, has raised a series B funding round of $5.5 million led by Idinvest. The round also includes Leetchi’s previous investors, 360 Capital Partners. The French company now aims to open in the UK and Germany and launch a new B2C service. Along with France, Leetchi will then be aiming at a combined Internet population of over 160 million users. Not quite as large as WePay’s North American market but getting there…

Founded in November 2009 with seed funds came from Kima Ventures and 360 Capital Partners, Leetchi is currently the French leader in social payments. The company claims it has experienced a 25% growth month on month with a 10x increase in the amount of money handled via the platform between 2010 and 2011. Leetchi’s API is also now being used by Ulule, skimm and octoo among others.

Founder Céline Lazorthes launched the company on in 2009 after a 40-person group trip that Lazorthes organized, where she realized a need for a reimbursement system between friends. Users then have the additional option to make a purchase or donation with Leetchi’s partner sites, including FNAC.com, Delamaison.fr and Acteurspourlasolidarite.com, without any additional costs – or to receive a transfer of the full amount of money collected with Leetchi taking a commission of 4%.

Kiip is making a big effort to recruit independent game developers today — it’s launching the self-serve version of its advertising platform, and it’s announcing a $100,000 fund to help developers build and market their Kiip-integrated games.

The startup has always pitched its rewards (such as free Pop Chips or Amazon Gift Cards) as a smart alternative to traditional mobile advertising, and going self-serve is a natural step for any advertising network trying to reach a larger number of publishers. Kiip CEO Brian Wong tells me that until now, the company only worked with a “hand-picked” developers because it had to make sure that the growth in developers didn’t outpace the growth in advertisers.

Now, however, Wong says he’s confident that there are enough advertisers for this “long-tail” approach to work. And he says that one of the big goals for the service was to make the on-boarding process as simple as possible, so that developers could integrate Kiip in just a few minutes.

To encourage developers to build games that have Kiip in mind from the beginning, the company has created what it’s calling the “Build” fund. Developers can submit their plans for a game, and 20 winners will be selected to receive $5,000 in cash.

“To a Zynga, $5,000 means nothing,” Wong says. “But to a small developer, a mom-and-pop shop, investing their own funds can be a financial burden. You should have the ability to leapfrog that obstacle.”

The winners of the Build fund will be announced on April 30.

Wong says Kiip is already showing a reward to someone every 4 seconds. The company also just recruited Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal to become its COO. Over the next few months, Wong’s goal is turn the company into more of a consumer brand, where players actively seek out Kiip games so that they can receive the rewards.

“It’s impossible to love an ad, but people love Kiip,” he says.

Developers can start the Kiip integration process here.

Tumblr is clarifying its sticky position regarding the new policy to ban certain blogs from its network. You may remember last week, when the company took the bold stance that blogs promoting self-harm, including anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation and suicide, would no longer be allowed on its network.

Today, the company is following up on the policy change to explain that it’s not banning blogs that are engaged in “discussion, support, encouragement, and documenting the experiences of those dealing with difficult conditions,” only those that are meant to trigger self-harm. But how will Tumblr know which is which?

Tumblr’s response: the policy is being applied on a blog-by-blog basis. In other words, there’s a manual review process. Explains the post:

There won’t be any wholesale suspension based on tags or text. We’re not under the illusion that it will be easy to draw the line between blogs that are intended to trigger self-harm and those that support sufferers and build community, but, thanks to the tireless efforts of our amazing Support team, we will do our best.

To that end, the company has updated the wording of the new policy, to better reflect its intentions. (You can read the full text of that change here). In addition, the company notes that it received some suggestions from the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) to improve the language Tumblr plans to begin showing alongside searches for tags associated with the promotion of self-harm, like “pro-ana”, “pro-mia”, “thinspiration” and “thinspo”.

Apparently, Tumblr had written its own PSA previously.

The old version (Tumblr’s suggestion):

Eating disorders can cause serious health problems, and at their most severe can even be life-threatening. Please contact the [resource organization] at [helpline number] or [website].

The new version (via the NEDA):

Eating disorders are not lifestyle choices, they are mental disorders that when left untreated, can cause serious health problems, and at their most severe can even be life-threatening. For treatment referrals, information and support, please contact the National Eating Disorders Association’s Helpline at 1-800-931-2237 or www.nationaleatingdisorders.org.

While the gut reaction here is “good for Tumblr,” the move has not been without its controversy. Yes, surprisingly, there are people out there who disagree with censorship, even when you’re saving lives. The question, of course, is are they really saving lives?, or is the content just going to be relocated elsewhere? It’s doubtful that the content is going away for good – it’s been online for years. What Tumblr’s policy shift means is that the bloggers and blog readers will have to retreat further underground – back to forums, message boards, and other web services with less restrictive policies. Back to places where it’s less likely a friend or family member will stumble upon their activity, and urge them to seek help.

And then there’s the question of censorship. Tumblr, of course, has the right to choose what content it hosts or not. It’s a private company providing a free service. But if it’s going to take a stance against self-harm, then what about taking a stance against harm in general? Rape? Violence against women? Hate crimes? Drugs? Alcohol? Pornography? (That link is seriously NSFW, by the way. I’m not even sure that all those photos are of legal adults, to be honest).

Censorship is a slippery slope. And while it’s hard to hold Tumblr at fault for wanting to clean up its network, it’s somewhat debatable if an outright ban was the best way to help the people who are suffering from these diseases.

Instead of banning these blogs, what if PSAs were interspersed with the posts themselves? Or were tucked in between the search results? Or if search results for “pro-ana” (etc.) were interspersed with posts from those on Tumblr blogging about recovery? Or what if Tumblr included PSAs with calls to action, like “click here if you think you’re suffering from X” which could then trigger a support organization to have hotline staff contact you?

Of course, all of that sounds like a lot more work than this far easier, “not-in-my-backyard” policy of banning blogs.

People who are fighting these illnesses are already very isolated, and often very young. The communities Tumblr provided them gave them support, but it was the wrong kind of support. I wish there was a better way to reach them and support them than taking down their blogs and showing them PSAs. Because if the blogs are gone, eventually, these sufferers will all just leave Tumblr, too. And then those PSAs won’t do anyone any good.

P.S. It appears to be #selfharmawarenessday on Twitter.

Image not via Tumblr, but some gossip site and credited to “everyjoe”

After filing for bankruptcy, Kodak is announcing that it will be selling off parts of its online photo services business Kodak Gallery for $23.8 million. The buyer? Online photo sharing platform Shutterfly.

Basically, the terms of the agreement include the transfer of all Gallery customer accounts and images in the U.S. and Canada to Shutterfly. Kodak Gallery allowed users to upload photos and create public or private albums that can be shared, as well as printed. According to the company, Kodak Gallery currently has 75 million users. Kodak says that it will give customers who do not want their photos transferred to Shutterfly the opportunity to opt out of the transition process.

Keep in mind, this is still a proposed sale and is not a done deal. Under the agreement, Kodak will seek U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval of sale and auction procedures by late March. Earlier this year, Kodak announced that they are putting all of their digital cameras, camcorders, and picture frames out to pasture as well.

The company said that it will be focusing its consumer business on retail and destination photo solutions as well as home printing products.

Shutterfly acquired TinyPrints last year for over $300 million.

In September, social game developer Idle Games launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, declaring that they were on a mission to become “the Pixar of casual games.” In other words, they want to make games that not only look good, but have an interesting narrative. The startup’s first title, Idle Worship, is a throw-back to Peter Molyneux and EA’s Black & White, except, instead of finding it on a PC, Idle Worship will make its home on that social network everyone’s talking about.

Like Black & White, gamers get to play the role of a god, lording over villagers on an island in whatever way you choose — you can be a vengeful god, or a forgiving one. Both in its first title, and in the games it plans in the future, Idle Games is looking to provide a better alternative to the stale social games already out there produced by the bigs like Zynga.

Idle Games was founded by Co-founder of Playdom Rick Thompson and COG1 Founder Jeffrey Hyman, who bring their collective gaming experience to a space sorely in need of some re-focusing on quality design and actual entertainment value. As social games mature, there is increasingly plenty of room for social game developers to target not only the casual games fans, but the MMO audience as well.

Since launching at Disrupt, Idle Games has been testing and tweaking Idle Worship to get it into fighting shape, and we’ve learned today that the Disrupt alum will officially be launching its flagship game into the wild on March 14th, after giving a sneak-preview of the game next week at GDC. Idle Games CEO Jeff Hyman told us that early engagement for its beta has been better than expected, with players logging an average of 20 minutes per session, with nearly four sessions per day.

What sets Idle Worship apart from other social games is that it offers synchronous gameplay, in which players can interact in realtime, collaborating with millions of other players. The team has also done away with the “friends bar,” so that players can connect with people they actually want to play with, instead of spamming friends with requests.

In anticipation of the launch of Idle Worship, the startup is also announcing today that it has hired Michael McCormick as Director of Game Design. Idle Games was able to steal McCormick away from Zynga, where he was Lead Game Designer for CityVille, which currently ranks second among social games, with nearly 47 million monthly active users (according to AppData).

It’s a big score for the young startup, as McCormick has more than 20 years of experience in game design, having previously worked at EA, Backbone Entertainment, Playfirst, and HumaNature Studios (where he was Design Director on MMOs based on DreamWorks movies).

McCormick will take the lead ahead of Idle Worship’s launch in two weeks, overseeing further development of the game, which has created its own proprietary social mechanics to connect gamers with both friends and strangers, enabling them to battle swaths of opposing (or friendly) gods in realtime.

As the team puts it, they are trying to encourage others to wage a “holy war agains social games that suck and/or aren’t actually social,” basing that on their proprietary distributed simulation platform that endeavors to combine an “unsharded” game world with synchronous and asynchronous mechanics. (Idle Games already has five patents pending.)

For more, check out Idle Games at home here, and stay tuned for more on Idle Worship.

The new iPad, if rumors are to be believed, has an extremely high-resolution screen — better than most monitors and packed into a quarter of the display space. The result? iPhone 4-like Retina goodness. But it’s actually kind of hard to visualize this, since most pixel-dense displays are small, and we’re used to a certain level of aliasing on our bigger displays.

Game developer Pixels on Toast has done the work of preparing their upcoming game Food Run to the expected 2048×1536 resolution. The results may help you get into your head just how many pixels we’re talking about here.

They did what most devs will want to do: go back to the vector-based source and re-render from that. Upscaling and cleaning up the art with fancy filters is only a temporary solution. If you’re doing 2D art these days and aren’t specifically looking for a pixelated look, you likely do it in a scalable vector form. Because then you can easily migrate from the above left to the above right. And remember, these pixels are packed into a very small amount of space compared with how they are displayed on your monitor.

The devs also talk about some of the likely side effects of the resolution increase. The GPU must be updated, of course. And the size limit for games is going to have to be raised as well to accommodate the higher-fidelity assets.

As far as the actual look, it’s kind of a matter of taste. Having grown up in the era of big pixels and art that more insinuated what it was instead of actually resembling it, I have a healthy nostalgia for the old style. Arcade games like Metal Slug typified an entire era and are impressive to this day, while personally I find the clean, machined edges of the graphics above (and in many other modern 2D games) to be a little over-polished. There is such a thing as too much detail. But mine is a perspective that was born in hardware limitations and is probably on its way out.

3D games will see a similar improvement in quality, and this level of resolution essentially obsoletes antialiasing filters. Infinity Blade, here I come. And, as previously discussed, the implications of high pixel density for text and photos are pretty serious. We’ll find out just how serious on the 7th.

After a month long trial period, startup Graphicly is throwing the doors open to its digital publishing platform.

Since incubating at TechStars in 2009, Graphicly has shifted strategy. Co-founder and CEO Micah Baldwin says the company was first conceived as an “iTunes for comics” — the place where existing comics publishers could sell the digital versions of their titles. However, Baldin says he found that the marketplace strategy was too limiting. (It probably didn’t help that competitor ComiXology scored early deals with the two biggest publishers, DC and Marvel.)

Instead, Graphicly is offering creators the tools they need to publish their work on a broad swath of platforms, including the iBookstore, the Kindle store, the Android Market, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Graphicly also offers analytics to authors and publishers, so they can see exactly what content is engaging their readers. And the company is also placing a greater emphasis on helping authors self-publish, rather than just making deals for traditionally published properties.

Graphicly first announced this plan in January, and during the first week, it says 1,500 authors and publishers signed up, with an average deal size of $650. For this first month, Baldwin says the company has limited the number of titles it approved, but there are already 7,000 in the system — and now, anyone can publish through Graphicly.

Baldwin says the company has also seen interest from non-comics authors, particularly for picture books and other books where images play a big role. He estimates that 500 of the current titles aren’t comics. Now that Graphicly is shifting its branding away from being comics-only, that proportion will probably go up.

The new model already seems to be working from a business perspective. Baldwin says that in January, Graphicly matched its best month ever in terms of revenue — and then its revenue doubled in February.

And digital self-publishing doesn’t eliminate the possibility of traditional success. Ken Garing initially published his comic book miniseries Planetoid through Graphicly, and it was just picked up by Image Comics.

Graphicly’s investors include DFJ Mercury, 500 Startups, Dundee VC, and Ludlow Ventures.