Category: Tech news

Zynga has made yet another ‘acqhire’ today. The company is announcing that Ricardo Quesada and Rolando Abarca, key contributors to the cocos2d for iPhone open source project, are joining the gaming giant. This is Zynga’s 13th announced acquisition in 12 months

The cocos2d for iPhone open source project is widely used by developers globally, including large players like Atari, ngmoco, Gamevil and Zynga, in the development of leading mobile games for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Mac. Abarca and Quesada, who will be working on Zynga’s mobile products, will continue to support and contribute to cocos2d for iPhone while in their new roles at Zynga.

Zynga has also acquired certain assets of Sapus Media, a platform developed by Abarca and Quesada that provide professional tools for mobile game developers.

The company says that games and applications will continue to operate on cocos2d for iPhone and it is not acquiring the community site, cocos2d-iphone.org, which will continue to be managed separately by Ricardo and the other cocos2d administrators.

Zynga’s past acquisitions this year include Wonderland, JamLegend, MarketZero, Floodgate, social browser Flock, and New York’s Area/Code.

Ze Frank thinks that the future of play is a “hot thing.” That’s why he founded Star.me, his soon-to-be fully public startup. And that’s why he’s shifted his focus from stand-up entertainment to stand-up entrepreneurialism.

But why has he gone from being one of the web’s top entertainment stars to yet another star-struck startup guy? As he told me last week when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio, it’s because the future of play is a “hot thing” which is going to change both business and play. In Ze’s Star.me world, we are all going back to kindergarten, giving each other stars, learning how to be kids again.

But Ze wouldn’t be Ze without a few jokes. And the humor, of course, is self-referential, especially when (ha ha) it comes to imagining a business model for Star.me.

This is the final part of my conversation with Ze. Check out the first part, when Ze explains why we all need to go back to kindergarten.

Ze on Star.me’s business model(s)

Ze on why the future of play is a “hot thing.”

If smartphone app sales (namely iPhone app sales) have taught manufacturers anything it’s that there’s ready money to be made in the parting of the people from their pennies. For the past few years we’ve seen very little uptake in the general, non-mobile app sales market as Apple – and now, to a lesser degree – Android had that world sewn up.

Now, however, I fear that appization – meaning the creation of cloud-based stores that sell small widgets, pieces of content, or streams and that eschew physical media entirely – is coming to just about everything including desktops (Mac App Store and the Windows App Store), publishing (Conde Nast et al), and now TVs. Books will be appized. Magazines will be appized. Cable TV will be appized. Heck, even OSes are appized.

Read more…

If you’ve ever done an image search on Google, you’ve probably gotten back a page filled with the same or similar images as the top result. If that is what you are looking for, then that’s great. If it’s not, then you have to keep clicking through until you find a decent image, and it can be a real chore.

Google already lets you sort by image size, type (face, photo, clip art, drawing), and color, which helps, but is still not perfect. Today, Google announced a new way to sort photos by subject that will roll out during this week, and it’s better than any of the previous sorting mechanisms. If you search for “dog,” it will sort the pictures by different breeds. If you search for “coffee,” it will sort by pictures of coffee in cups, coffee beans, people drinking coffee, and so on.

All of this is done algorithmically of course. The effect is to finally clean up image search, and help you drill down to exactly the type of photo you are looking for. One sorting filter it is still missing in the left-hand menu, however, is to be able to search only for Creative Commons images. (You can do that with advanced search, but it would be better if it were a sorting option in the main UI).

Of course, Bing has long done the same thing with visual search for certain categories and topics. Whether this is a catch-up move or leapfrog move will be hard to tell until the feature rolls out on Google, but it certainly is an overdue feature.

Exclusive – Ustream is today launching a new and improved Facebook application that it says will take live streaming within the hugely popular social networking site “to another level”.

The app, which is currently available to anyone with a Facebook fan page, be they businesses, artists or general user communities, enables users to opt-in for reminders for upcoming streaming events using Facebook Oauth and receive notifications whenever a certain broadcaster turns on a live stream (the ‘Join Crowd’ feature).

Facebook page administrators can now also customize their application’s look and feel, require users to ‘like’ their Facebook page prior to viewing, and more.

One of the first to give the new Ustream for Facebook app a whirl is Black Eyed Peas front man Will.I.Am, who will be broadcasting live on Facebook today at 2PM Pacific time.

You’ll also be able to catch it on BEP’s Facebook page.µ

For more background on Ustream, read these recent articles:

Ustream 2.0 For iPhone Lets You Broadcast And View Live Video, All In One App
Ustream Hits 10M Broadcasters, 60M Monthly Unique Viewers

Finally, a tutorial video for the new app:

As we wrote last week, Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, filed for a public offering on NASDAQ under the symbol “YNDX”. Today, the company is announcing price range of the offering, which will be $20.00 to $22.00 per share. The company aims to raise as much as $1.2 billion from the sales of its shares, according to the filing.

Yandex proposes to sell 15,400,000 shares in the offering and certain of its shareholders propose to sell an aggregate of 36,774,088 shares. In addition, Yandex and the selling shareholders have granted the underwriters an option to purchase, in aggregate, up to an additional 5,217,405 shares to cover over-allotments, if any. The total amount of shares offered in the filing is 52,174,088 shares.

Basically what this means is that $1.3 billion worth of shares will be sold, with as much as $338 million (at $22 per share) from the IPO going to Yandex and the rest going to the shareholders who sold stock.

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google. In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million. The company says that in the past three years, Yandex generated more than 97% of its revenues from advertising.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion.

Row Sham Bow, a new game development studio founded by gaming industry veterans and focused on creating games for social networks and direct-to-consumer platforms, has raised $3 million in funding from early-stage VC firm Intersouth Partners.

John Glushik of Intersouth Partners will join the company’s board of directors.

Founded earlier this year by president & CEO Philip Holt (former VP and GM of EA Tiburon) and CTO Nick Gonzalez (former Chief Software Architect at EA Tiburon and former CTO of video game technology company Massive), Row Sham Bow is based in Orlando, Florida.

EA Sports Madden 12 Creative Director Ian Cummings and CTO Richard Wifall have also joined Row Sham Bow in similar roles, we’ve gathered.

Also involved are Christopher Staymates, former software engineer at Livewire and EA Tiburon, and Jeremy Paulding, former Technical Director at Electronic Arts.

Row Sham Bow is certainly ambitious – the startup plans to create 60 “high-wage” jobs in Central Florida according to a Orlando Business Journal report.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name of the new venture, click here.

Like some geekier version of the Cold War, the mobile phone arms race of 2011 has manufacturers stockpiling as much brawn as possible into the limited space of a handset.

And with its G2x Android smartphone, LG has outed itself as a superpower.

LG’s flagship phone is running on Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core 1-GHz processor. Are two cores really better than one? After playing with the G2x, I sure think so.

Right off the bat, the power of this chip is noticeable. Switching back and forth between different menu screens is seamless, and speedier than ever. Scroll downward through the pre-loaded catalog of apps, and the icons cascade like a waterfall. When I played the Halo-esque game that comes with the phone — a taxing first-person shooter in HD — it ran with minimal choppiness while handling some fairly intense animations.

With such a powerful processor at work, it’s a bit surprising the phone only comes with 512 MB of RAM installed. That might not prove to be enough for any especially resource-hungry apps and games that will arrive in the future. But for now, the phone ran the apps I threw at it like a charm.

One downside to all that power is that the back of the handset tends to get toasty after extended periods of use. So, unless you frequently suffer from cold ears, this is probably not a desirable attribute.

The phone’s 4-inch capacitive touchscreen displays color brilliantly, though I couldn’t help but wish for a larger screen for gaming. HDMI-out is always an option, and full HD mirroring lets you use the phone as a gyroscopically sensitive controller while playing on your big screen. But an extra half-inch or so of pixel real estate would have sated my thirst just the same.

The 8-megapixel rear-facing camera takes some of the clearest, crispest photos I’ve seen on a smartphone, while the 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera worked well enough for chats. My biggest camera gripe: The delay between hitting the photo button and the “shutter” closing is far too long to accurately capture that spur-of-the-moment goofy face your friend is making.

LG went with a stock version of Android 2.2 Froyo for the G2x. Frankly, not having to deal with another manufacturer’s skin is a big plus: Interfaces like HTC’s Sense or Motoblur just feel chunky compared to the bare-bones version of the OS (and to Android purists, they’re practically a sin). Although it’s not running the latest version of Android (Gingerbread) quite yet, this phone is slated to receive the OS update sometime this summer.

T-Mobile’s network performance on the phone was adequate, but left me wanting. T-Mobile markets its HSPA+ as “4G” — a term which has grown quite murky — with “theoretical peak download speeds reaching 21 Mbps and peak upload speeds of up to 5.7 Mbps.”

But you probably won’t be seeing those speeds. Over the course of two weeks of testing in the San Francisco Bay Area, I averaged download speeds ranging between 2.5 and 5.5 Mbps, and upload speeds anywhere from 0.2 Mbps to 2.2 Mbps.

My only major quibble with the hardware design is the phone’s backbone: It’s got too damn much of it. A thin metal strip tapers up the back of the handset into the edge of the camera. In theory, the edge works perfectly as a rest for your index finger while taking a call. In practice, it just feels freaking weird.

But my minor complaints about the G2x are far outweighed by its superior under-the-hood firepower. If this is the direction that LG is taking its phones — stock operating system, beefy hardware specs, peripheral-friendly — we’re eager to see more.

WIRED HDMI-out and DLNA compatibility make for cozy communication with peripherals and HDTVs. Expandable micro SD to 32 GB leaves room for tons of tunes.

TIRED Non-skinned interface without the latest version of Android (Froyo, not Gingerbread) makes us sad. Screen forebodingly froze up on us twice during testing, requiring reboot.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Notable mobile developer Joe Hewitt has left Facebook to pursue independent projects related to HTML 5 development.

From his blog:

“Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing I had left much sooner. In the case of Facebook, I sent heartfelt emails to all of my managers thanking them for the privilege of letting me work there, and I genuinely meant it. Facebook was the longest I ever worked at one company, and the best employer I’ve ever had.”

We had heard that he was working on deeply integrating Facebook into Android after he quit the iPhone team over disagreement with Apple’s policies. Hewitt was responsible for creating Facebook’s iPhone app, which is currently the most downloaded iPhone app of all time, and before the existence of the App Store he created an iPhone website that was also widely admired among the developer community.

Hewitt has been with Facebook for four years, so why leave now? Maybe he thinks it’s the right time to help the web move towards HTML 5? Or maybe the terms of his Parakey deal (Facebook’s first acquisition) have fully vested?

Here’s Mike’s interview with Hewitt from when he first joined Facebook in 2007.

Update: When I asked him both these questions on the phone after this post went up, Hewitt said, “Yes, to the former.” He also tells me that his Parakey co-founder Blake Ross is still at the company, and on a leave of absence, despite reports to the contrary.

Whoa there tipsters, slow down. We’ve just been bombarded with tips coming our way that Google has rolled out a new-look search results page. Scanning Twitter, it looks like there are in fact a lot of people seeing this. And boy is it ugly.

I mean, it’s great that Google appears to be trying to clean up the look of the results page, which has gotten pretty cluttered over the years as they add more and more types of information and snippets. But the new design is too sparse. And the colors are too soft. It looks like Bing on a bad day.

The weirdest thing about the test is that it actually gives you much less information on the screen. This will require users to do more scrolling and paging through results to find what they’re looking for.

You’ll also notice that main result links are no longer underlined. And each result is separated by dotted lines (though there appears to be a version without the lines too).

Undoubtedly, this is just a bucket test (which Google likes to do quite often), as not all users are seeing this. But this is clearly a big test judging from the number of tips we’re getting and the tweets.

We knew Google was really interested in white space — just not this much.

Who needs another social network? Maybe you, friend. Admittedly, the social networking space is packed with so many players, it makes the mind reel. Across the Web, it seems like a new social network is born (and dies) every day. There are niche social networking sites for everything you can imagine. The knitting and crochet community has one, as do gamers, pet-lovers, and bowlers.

Some of these specialized networks have significant traffic, and while Facebook Groups continues to evolve, it seems that there may still be room for social networks that revolve around shared interests, and specific groups and activities. It’s also true that more and more companies are becoming interested in leveraging online activity and interaction to create meaningful connections, relationships, and services offline. The examples are endless.

It’s for these reasons that Zenergo, an activity-based social network that launches today, still believes there’s room to succeed. Founder and CEO Patrick Ferrell co-founded SocialNet.com (a dating website) with Reid Hoffman, who, as you may know, went on to join PayPal’s founding board of directors and co-found LinkedIn. After SocialNet, Ferrell went on to found GamePro Magazine, which became GamePro Media and was later sold to IDG — as well as several others.

Based on his experience as an entrepreneur, Ferrell told TechCrunch that he continues to come back to the idea that people naturally gravitate toward — and get more value out of — social circles that involve those who share similar activities and interests, and that, at the same time, people are spending more time in their virtual worlds but wish they could take that value into the real world. And that the perfect solution hasn’t yet been found.

So, for the last 2 years, Ferrell and his team have been building an activities-focused social platform that enables people to engage more deeply with their real world hobbies and friends. Their target is wide, as Zenergo hopes to cater not only to those already involved in a sport, hobby, or interest who want to connect with new or existing like-minded people based on location and by experience-level, but busy parents looking for an online organization system — and single people looking for new friends, groups and events that specifically match their lifestyle and social interests.

Zenergo may be over-extending itself by casting its net wide, but the startup hopes to combat this by giving its users access to all the social tools that other networks provide, like photos, invitations, calendars, groups, contact managers and friend finders. All on one website. Yeeha!

One thing that came as music to my ears: Let’s say you’re an avid golfer, and you create a golf group where you’re connecting with new friends over your favorite course, planning tee times and so on, while right next store the bass fishing and Sudoku groups are doing the same thing. You might assume that with all these disparate interest groups in one place, you’d find chaos. And if you’re like me, you want to keep the various circles you create around your hobbies separate and distinct. Zenergo enables this kind of focused interaction — or, if you want to integrate your various interests, you can overlap them as well. And what’s more, Ferrell assures me, Zenergo intends to be a resource for people who want to go out and actually play golf, rather than sit around and yap about Tiger Woods.

So, you can use Zenergo local runner’s group, for example, to post an invitation to a Saturday trail run, or find a tennis partner. Wine aficionados can publicize, organize and expand events. You get the idea.

As for how the site will make money, Ferrell tells me its approach is similar to that of LinkedIn. Initially, it will be ad-supported, but will likely soon begin offering premium benefits and features.

Zenergo also announced a partnership with the Silicon Valley & Monterey Bay Area Chapter of Team In Training, which is using Zenergo to recruit and organize team members. Having raised $1 billon to support blood cancer research and patient services, Team In Training is The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s endurance sports charity training program for marathons, half marathons, triathlons, and hiking adventures.

The social network hopes to leverage partnerships with charities and non-profits to attract activists and do-gooders as well, giving them a place to organize events and fundraisers. Obviously, there is plenty of competition in the activist networking space, as there is for each niche category, but by bringing them all together in one place, Zenergo may be onto something big. Or not. You be the judge.

Check ‘em out.

LAGOS, NIGERIA– I’m in Lagos to speak at an event and decided to come a week early to check out the country’s tech and entrepreneurship scene.

Apparently Arrington thought I was kidding when I told him this. But he should know by now, I don’t need a lot of arm twisting to visit a country of 150 million people chaotically surging into modernity. Where there’s that much opportunity, there’s always entrepreneurship.

Nigeria has fascinated me for the last few years: It has the largest population of any country in Africa. It has abundant natural resources, most notably oil. And it has a ton of potential outside of oil. According to the World Bank the non-oil economy has grown at 8% per year for most of the last decade.

The problem is employment hasn’t budged and the country has fifty million unemployed young people. Those are the official figures, but people in the country tell me it’s actually much higher than that. That helps explain why Nigeria is more known in the West for 419 email scams than its vast economic potential.

Simply put: Nigeria is a nation desperate for more entrepreneurship, but there are some significant challenges for local entrepreneurs and foreign investors. More on the good and the bad in a future post. A lot more. One story includes guys with machetes. But let’s talk about Nigeria’s tech appetite first. Like anyone else they lust for that new, new thing, and many of them go to a place called “Computer Village” to find it.

It’s the Nigerian answer to Shenzhen’s SEG Electronics Market, a crammed, multistory building that holds booths and booths of nearly any component and hardware knock-off you can imagine. SEG is simultaneously thrilling and horrifying for techies, summing up why China is so central to the Valley’s modern gadget boom and why its low-cost, copy-cat goods are such a threat at the same time. You know you are getting close to SEG, because the street hawkers stop pitching you massages and start offering up illicit copies of Windows.

In Lagos, we could tell we were getting close to Computer Village because of the rows of parked trucks of busted out boom-boxes, televisions and other has-been electronics being fixed and rehabed for parts. Hawkers try to get your attention with a sound that’s a combination of a kissing-noise and a hissing noise. It surrounds you as you walk through Computer Village, making you feel like you’re either walking past a rowdy construction site or a den of snake charmers. That’s a good way to describe the sales tactics too.

Nigerian tech entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with this week have complained that many of the developers who apply for jobs are too book-trained; that they lack that raw creative problem solving or “jugaad” as the Indians call it. Jugaad is core to what makes startups able to thrive within constraints and outperform giants. And as you’ll see from the photos below, it’s on full-display in Computer Village.

They’ve got hardware:

Software:

Nigerian Geek Squad:

Printer cartridge refills:

And the app store: