Research in Motion finally unveiled its much-rumored BlackBerry tablet yesterday, and it looks a lot more impressive at first glance than the company’s most recent handset, the Palm Pre-like Torch. But is this a game-changing device, or will it stumble out of the starting gate?
Getting seen is one of the toughest challenges for a web series, even a web series like the highly successful Guild. But looking at a survey conducted on The Guild‘s Facebook wall, making a music video seems to be a big help.
I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly.
Former equity analysts at Second Shares estimate that social-gaming market leader Zynga would be worth as much as $5 billion if its shares were publicly traded. They say the company will likely have revenue of close to $500 million this year from games such as Farmville.
Thanks to World of Warcraft and social games on Facebook, gaming is becoming a bigger part of our culture than it has ever been. Web sites like Wikipedia and Slashdot use game-style principles to control behavior, and some see these principles moving into education and the workforce.
Unity Technologies now boasts an A-list client roster and a recent Series A round led by Sequoia. But it wasn’t always wine and roses for the 8-year-old startup. Unity CEO David Helgason talks with Om about how his company survived its dark times.
Zynga, maker of the popular Facebook social game Farmville, has been hit with criticism on Twitter and elsewhere over allegations that it only sent half the money it raised for Haiti to that country. Zynga says this is based on a misunderstanding about its Farmville campaign.
eBay CEO John Donahoe says the company wants to make its PayPal unit the de facto payment system for Facebook games, Twitter money-sharing and every other kind of social game or service. But PayPal has some work to do before it deserves that position.
The typical picture of an online gamer may be a teen lacking in social skills, but players of “social games” on sites like Facebook are different. According to a recent survey of players in the U.S. and UK, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman.
None other than YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley dropped by the company’s blog yesterday to remind us that he and his two co-conspirators registered the domain YouTube.com exactly five years ago. It wasn’t until two months later that the first video actually appeared on YouTube, but Hurley used the domain birthday to remind us of the basic beliefs that drove the founding of the site.
Of course, the exact details of YouTube’s beginnings have been disputed. Hurley and co-founder Steve Chen originally claimed they came up with the idea for the video sharing site during a dinner party due to their frustration over the lack of options to share videos online. However, the third co-founder Jawed Karim, who left the company early on, has long disputed the story, and Hurley eventually told Time Magazine that the dinner party founding myth was “strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story.” Turns out, this hasn’t been the only case of selective memory.
