Gaming is BIG Business and gets BIGGER

Entertainment Software Association has released a new report about video game usage in the U.S.

The report discusses a variety of items including purchase intent, demographic data, online gaming activity, and which games are most popular.

Some of the highlights from the report include:

• The average game player is 35 years old
• 40% of game players are women, 60% are men
• 26% of gamers are over 50
• Halo 3 is the most popular video game over the past year; World of Warcraft is the most popular computer game
• 47% of online gaming is in one of these categories: Puzzle/Board/Game Show/Trivia/Card
• 41% of Americans have purchased or plan to purchase one or more games in 2008.

(via ESA)

3D Printing a website away with Shapeways

Shapeways

• A spinoff of Dutch electronics giant Philips Electronics, has figured out a way for artists and ordinary consumers to print 3-D models of their creations for a mere $50 to $150.
• The tool allows budding artists, product designers and amateurs to use their own familiar tools to create 3-D models of their designs.
  
• Then they can order 3-D physical models of the designs.
  
• The company will deliver the molded plastic models in 10 days or less.
• It accepts formats such as STL, Collada and X3D.
  
• The designs can be “white, strong and flexible,” “cream robust,” “white detail” and “transparent detail.”

Questions :

• How do they work/judge the pricing ?
• How do I master using software which is associated with STL, Collada, X3D (Where do i get the software for this)?

I love this idea and think its very very cool but I still have to verify the designing aspect cause that could be a bottleneck to otherwise this extremely VIRAL concept (Can anyone send me an invite :D)

Check out the awesome video here

Mobile content sales in Japan cross $100Bn and counting

Martyn Williams has an interesting look at the Japanese mobile content market.

His notes for the calendar year 2007:

• More than $100 billion was spent on mobile content (the total was actually $107.5 billion)

• Sales includes items such as ring tones, Web site subscriptions and e-commerce purchases.

• E-commerce made up about 65% of the total amount spent (transactions include: movie and event ticket sales, travel reservations, air and rail ticket sales, stock trading and online auctions).

• The biggest percentage gain came from "high-fidelity music" which increased 42% thanks to more mobile devices handling better quality sound.
  

• Mobile gaming jumped 13% as well.

• E-book market expanded 220 %

(via Yahoo! News)
(Image Credits here and here)

Mixturtle: Deezer or Better ?

MixTurtle

• A new music search engine that will source for music from other networks so that you can stream them for free
• All you have to do is type in the artist you want and a long list of music you can stream will appear.
• To play back music, you click the artist/track label. Click again to pause. A slim submenu emerges directly below the chosen song, which displays the buffer bar, the number of sources discovered to hold said track, and an option to browse other sources.
• You can even create your own playlists, save them and listen to them at a later date.

Gone are the days when you had to tediously look for music online or stream music from MySpace–the Mixturtle makes it so easy!

Google Gets Richer: $1.10 for Each New Dollar Spent on Search, 77% of All Search Spending

• Google accounted for 77.4% of US search engine ad spend in the second quarter (increase of 2 percentage points over 2Q07)

• Yahoo lost 2% points of search engine share in the same period (accounting for 17.8% of total spend)
• Microsoft Live Search’s share remained stable at 4.8% of search engine spending

Efficient Frontier found :

For every new dollar spent on search ads in Q2 2008 (compared with Q2 2007)

• Google received $1.10
• Yahoo lost $0.09
  
• Microsoft Live Search lost $0.01

Other highlights:

• Cost-per-click (CPC) rates increased 13.8% for Google in Q2 compared with the year-earlier period, whereas average CPCs on Microsoft Live Search increased at the slower rate of 5.6% and Yahoo CPCs declined 7.3%.

• Return on investment (ROI) improved on all three search engines, with ROI leader Microsoft Live Search improving 25% from 2Q07; ROI on Yahoo Search increased 13%, and Google’s ROI increased 3%.

• Advertisers * Automotive increased search advertising spending 24% in Q2 versus 2Q07 * Retailers increased search spending a cautious 1% * Financial services advertisers, hit hard by the mortgage crisis, decreased search engine spending 7% * Travel advertisers decreased spend 17% as consumers pulled back on leisure spending.

• Google’s growth is positive, with the search giant capturing 75% or more of search engine spending in Q2 in the global markets(with the exception of Japan and China).

(via Efficient Frontier)

BCG on China’s Digital Generation

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) released a report on China’s digital generation, which has some finding on China’s Internet and users.

According to the report

• Online chatting is a very important Internet service in China
o 89% of Chinese Internet users using IM, versus 63% usage of email, while in US, 91% of them use email, only 39% use online chatting.
o BCG thinks that it is because Chinese users regard IM as a more advanced service, if they can communicate with contacts in IM, why bother to use email.

• E-commerce is still in its early stage in China.
o Only 28% of Chinese go shopping online, compared with 71% in the US.
o The lack of trust on Internet merchants is the biggest problem for e-commerce business in China. Concerns on product quality guarantee, the reliability of sellers and concerns on their personal financial information.

• The report found that Internet users in China are more social, because higher percentage of them are using BBS/forum and blogs than in US.

• Online gaming is very popular in China, with 85% of Chinese Internet users playing online games and 43% of China’s game players playing games on mobile phones.

Covalent Solar offers another window into concentrating solar technology

Covalent Solar, a startup being spun out by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has yet another idea for concentrating solar photovoltaics: Layered glass with organic dyes that let some wavelengths of light through, and trap others, channeling the light to solar cells at the perimeter of the “panel”.

The concentrators, which would look a bit like windows, could be used as cheaper alternatives to rooftop solar panel installations. And unlike other concentrating panels, they would not require cooling, because the solar cells used can be specially made to capture light of the wavelength being sent to them.

Oddly enough, a number of reports appearing today (for example, in the Associated Press) suggested that Covalent’s concentrators would be of use in actual windows, but cofounder John Mapel made no mention of that possibility when we talked last week. That’s no great surprise — it would be difficult to get high-intensity light into vertically-positioned windows, much less windows placed on the wrong side of a building.

In the northern hemisphere, that often means any side besides the southern wall — also a good criticism against Xtreme Energetics, which recently received a ton of attention from press for its supposed utility in architecture (our own coverage focuses on the technology). A final problem is that once Covalent’s concentrators were installed as windows, they would modify the light entering the building, turning it odd colors and diminishing its strength. Call it a replacement for stained glass, perhaps.

Those problems notwithstanding, windows or skylights (which have their own problems) are a potential use in the future, if Covalent’s technology proves cheap enough. How far away that point is, Mapel isn’t certain. The main costs for the concentrators come from the glass itself, which is dirt cheap at $5 to $10 per square meter, and the more costly dyes, which are about $50 per kilogram and are applied by a thermal evaporation technique. The end product may cost $100 to $400 per square meter, not including the solar cells around the edge.

At the moment, though, Covalent is still in its research stage, and most of its data is uncertain. The company will be showing off to potential investors at Copenmind, a cleantech event taking place this year in Denmark, and it is considering a venture round. Mapel says that will either be for $1-2 million, or a great deal more than that, if certain research goals are met.

A report on Covalent’s technology will also be published in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Science.

(via VentureBeat)

Next Gen Web 2.0 applications

(via Dion Hinchcliffe)

Microsoft: Every Dollar of Piracy Costs Small-Fries Five Bucks

Microsoft released a sponsored study this morning that aims to quantify the economic impact of piracy on related small businesses in the software ecosystem and identifies sales of software licenses to pirates as a key economic opportunity for small vendors.

Titled "The Impact of Software Piracy and License Misuse on the Channel," the paper was released in conjunction with the launch of a new Microsoft site for "proactive partners" interested in helping Microsoft fight piracy. We're generally skeptical of big company claims that piracy is a sin, but we can't deny that this study is quite interesting and raises some valid concerns.

How They Say it Works

The press release issued this morning spells out some of the ways that software piracy hurts players large and small:

The velocity of sales, the life cycle of a project and the ability to fulfill contracts as negotiated can all be affected. During the course of a deployment project, for instance, consultants and solution providers may have to stop work when illegal software is discovered, or may be unable to sell their product at all upon learning that the customer's underlying architecture is illegitimate. Worse, in many emerging markets where legally licensed software is difficult even to obtain, it can be next to impossible for a legitimate partner to operate.

All hope is not lost, however. Microsoft notes that rampant piracy also represents an opportunity for inconvenienced channel partners to sell licenses!

"The flip side of this is that within those hidden costs may lie hidden opportunities in helping these customers turn their licensing situation around," said John Gantz, senior vice president of IDC. "Much of the misuse, especially in developed countries, is inadvertent. A savvy vendor can realize an opportunity by helping customers to 'true up' their licensing, realizing that every dollar saved from software pirates can translate to over five times that amount for the channel."

Is Microsoft's new strategy for dealing with unlicensed software in developing countries to deputize the good customers to sell licenses for them to the "inadvertent" pirates? We assume that would-be customers in developing countries know exactly why they are using unlicensed Microsoft software.

How the Numbers Break Down

The company's study argues that "every dollar Microsoft loses to software piracy translates to $5.50 in lost opportunity for other companies in the partner ecosystem." Those numbers seem pretty shaky to us, including would-be sales and benefits from predicted market expansion.

...for every dollar Microsoft gains from a reduction in piracy in 2008, the ecosystem that sells, services and develops products on the Microsoft platform could gain $4.37 from faster delivery and sales cycles, enhanced cross-selling and upselling, and the natural market expansion of having more legally licensed customers. In addition, the ecosystem could also realize another $1.13 in efficiencies from each of those dollars, primarily from a lower cost of goods sold, as well as lower development and testing, sales and marketing, research and development, and training costs.

While this presumes, as the music industry often does, that the alternative to piracy is purchase (instead of, for example, open source alternatives), there is some undeniable logic here - especially when it comes to efficiency if all other things remain equal.

Legitimate Concerns

We asked micro-ISV consultant Bob Walsh how these claims played out on the ground and he confirmed that they had some validity.

While the numbers are more spin than science, desktop software piracy is a major issue for small developers because it adds something like 8% to development time, a good 15% of tech support effort and can catastrophically gut sales overnight.

Walsh didn't agree with Microsoft's proposed solutions, though. "If they're serious about this issue," Walsh asked, "why don't they sign on to Apple's open source password management system Keychain and do the channel a huge favor?"

We're not sure what the solutions are; we like to cheer for the little guy and for Open Source, but we recognize that there are big advantages to developing in the Microsoft environment as well. We're not excited about the "Proactive Partners" program turning small players into deputies and sales people, either.

We like Microsoft better when they are opening up documentation for interoperability more than when they're chasing around unlicensed software users.

None the less, we find the secondary economic and development consequences of software piracy to be an interesting problem to consider. Readers' perspectives are more than welcome in comments.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

Private Company Valuations: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Analysts at PEDC took a look at some of the deals of Q1 2008 that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participated in.

Below are the findings:

• The first company many of you must be familiar with, LifeLock, Inc. I am sure you have probably heard or seen some of their advertisements, but did you know that they raised an additional $25 MM in Q1 of 2008? Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers contributed approximately $6.25 MM to this Series C round. Also participating in this round were Bessemer Venture Partners and Goldman, Sachs and Company. The preferred stock was Participating Preferred with a 1.5x cap on the participation. The shares also had a Senior liquidation preference to the other series preferred. The Post-Money valuation following this round was $221,756,075.

  TherOX, Inc. based in Irvine, California, raised just under $30 MM. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participated in this Later Stage round with approximately $6 MM. Some of the other investors in this round were Integral Capital Partners, New Science Ventures, LLC, and Cross Creek Capital. The shares were Participating Preferred and included non-cumulative dividends of 8%. The team found the Post-Money valuation to be $124,912,408.

• Corventis, Inc. (formerly Amigo Therapy, Inc.) closed a series B round of $20 MM. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers helped out by contributing approximately $5 MM. The preferred shares were Conventional Convertible with Pari Passu liquidation preference to the other series preferred. Other participants in this round were Mohr Davidow Ventures and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich LLC. The Post-Money valuation was $52,654,125.

  
  

After inputting the data into the Cost of Capital Benchmark tool it is seen that Corventis, Inc. came out with more "company-friendly" capital than LifeLock, Inc. or TherOX, Inc.

Keeping in mind, the lower you are on the chart, the more company-friendly the money, the higher you go on the chart, the more investor-friendly the money. If you are a company raising money, you want be lower on the chart. This is a time when it is not best to be on top if you are the company raising money.

(via PEDC)

Torrents watch out : French Government Seeks To Disconnect Pirates From All Of EU

It was in late 2007 that the French government first signed a pact with ISPs and content owners to combat piracy. Now the Sarkozy administration has proposed a continental expansion of such a system. The idea is based on the president’s conviction that the Internet should not be a “lawless zone.”

As Jan Libbenga of The Register describes the effort, the powers that be in France have put forth a concept to amend the EU’s Telecoms Package to deter illegal downloads in a way similar to the three-strike legislation introduced for the French citizenry itself. Both the national and international laws would have offending parties incur technical repercussions after having transgressed a few times. ISPs would typically have to cut access for offenders for up to a year’s time.

It’s not likely that France’s proposition will be greeted particularly warmly by all union members. Bureaucratic wrangling in the EU is also somewhat notorious for impinging on smooth passage of controversial measures. And the French government has already encountered strong opposition to its France-specific penalty legislation by the French ISP Association AFA. A panoply of anti-monitoring and anti-filtration entities, among which include the Open Rights Group claim France’s proposal “Orwellian.”

(viaMashable)

YouTube Loses to Viacom : Is this fair play

Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA.B) has won a court case against Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Senior Judge, Louis L. Stanton ruled that Google must give Viacom private user data. This will include the IP addresses, the videos watched, and the videos uploaded by every YouTube user.

Viacom plans on using this data to prove that copyright infringement is more popular on YouTube than user-generated content. The lawsuit began in 2007 when Viacom decided to sue Google for $1 billion shortly after the search engine company acquired YouTube.

Viacom also requested for YouTube’s source code, but fortunately the judge said no to that request. The judge ruled that providing YouTube’s source code to Viacom could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”

“The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users,” stated Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ”The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.”

If Google decides to comply with this decision and not appeal to a higher court, then the privacy of all 80 million+ YouTube users are compromised. TechCrunch also pointed out that the decision made in the New York court could be in violation of federal law. What will happen next?

(via Pulse 2.0)

Firefox 3 Sets a Guinness World Record: What do you feel

I looove the Firefox. I have used it ever since its first version came out and believe strongly in its potential. I had participated in the Firefox Guiness Record to make it the highest downloaded software in a day and I have no regrets upgrading to the Firefox 3.

The browser is gr8 but i do feel the hick-up's once in while esp. when it comes to loading Gmail or some graphic sites (I guess with eventual patchups it will be THE perfect browser to use). But nevertheless, I am still fascinated to use the Firefox 3 and have only thing to say to the Firefox team "way to go guys..."

Mozilla has announced that they’ve officially been added to the Guinness World Records for most downloads in a 24-hour period. The final tally: 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 on June 18th.

From Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Guinness World Records:

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives. Mobilizing over 8 million internet users within 24 hours is an extremely impressive accomplishment and we would like to congratulate the Mozilla community for their hard work and dedication.”

After ONLY TWO WEEKS the total number of downloads tops 28 million. Mozilla has published this map showing penetration around the globe:

What Microsoft/Yahoo!'s breakdown means for Internet M&A

Throughout the current Web 2.0 boom, Microsoft and Yahoo! – joined by Google, TimeWarner’s AOL and News Corp - have driven the Internet M&A market and provided exits for numerous VCs and entrepreneurs. This weekend, however, Microsoft withdrew its largest-ever acquisition bid - for Yahoo! itself.

The saga may not yet be finished, since Microsoft could renew its bid after Yahoo!’s share price deteriorates and after disgruntled investors pressure the company’s management (Yahoo!’s top two institutional shareholders are already publicly fuming about the botched deal). Whether the Microsoft/Yahoo! merger is realised or not, one thing is clear: the discussion has sidelined two major acquirers of Internet startups.

Microsoft has been an extremely active acquirer on both sides of the Atlantic, purchasing European Internet startups such as Israel’s Kidaro, Norwegian enterprise search company FAST, The UK’s Multimap, and French mobile search company MotionBridge. Yahoo! has played an insignificant role in European Internet M&A to date, but is a key player in the US.

A platform business at heart

There is now press and analyst speculation that the nearly $50 billion (€32.2 billion) which Microsoft was prepared to pay for Yahoo! will go instead towards other acquisitions. The most commonly cited target is AOL, which TimeWarner appears willing to offload and which would provide the nearest approximation of the scale in the online advertising business that a merger with Yahoo! would have achieved. Yet smaller businesses have also seen their names thrown into the discussion: PaidContent suggests that online services like Facebook, Twitter or Digg are now possible acquisition targets for Microsoft.

These latter options are unlikely, because at its heart Microsoft is a platform business, not a content business. Like other technology platform businesses, from Oracle to Qualcomm, Microsoft’s business model is to ensure the dominance of its own software by making that software an essential part of other developers’ business models. This holds true not only for Microsoft’s Windows and Xbox platforms, but also for the company’s online advertising network, which is only as successful as the money publishers make using it.

Microsoft has clear ambitions to challenge Google as an online advertising network, and though Yahoo! would also have given Microsoft the US’s most popular web portal - Yahoo! web properties are more visited than Google’s in that country - the main driver for the proposed acquisition was for Microsoft to quickly build substantial scale in the online advertising business. Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date, the $6 billion (€3.9 billion) purchase of online advertising firm aQuantive in May 2007, provided Microsoft with a foothold but left the company with nowhere near the market share of Google, Yahoo! or AOL in either search or display advertising.

Furthermore, Microsoft has already tried smaller acquisitions in the space. Besides aQuantive, Microsoft acquired a slate of advertising companies over the past two years, including Israel’s YaData; the US’s AdECN, Massive and DeepMetrix; and France’s ScreenTonic. Yet what Microsoft needs now is scale, and Yahoo! and AOL are the only two players who can provide it.

Yahoo! preoccupied

As for Yahoo!, the potential merger has imperiled the company’s status as a major Internet acquirer. Firstly, Yahoo!’s engineering culture, reinvigorated 3 years ago through a series of critical acquisitions including del.icio.us and Flickr, has been crucial to the success of its more recent acquisitions. That culture is now at risk; as Om Malik points out, morale is undoubtedly low at Yahoo!, which will make retention of key employees a problem. Despite holding $2.61 billion (€1.68 billion) in the bank, Yahoo! will face inevitable challenges and potentially lawsuits from investors over the handling of the Microsoft offer, making immediate acquisitions difficult.

The silver lining is that neither a combined Microsoft/Yahoo!, a combined Microsoft/AOL or an independent Yahoo! are truly a match for Google’s online advertising business, particularly in search advertising. Any of those combinations would still necessitate the roll-up of additional online advertising networks, such as Germany’s Adconion Media Group, as well as the acquisition of innovative providers of advertising technology, such as Israel’s Kontera Technologies or Luxembourg’s wunderLOOP. Though neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! are likely to pursue smaller acquisitions in the short term, given time either could re-emerge as a buyer for European Internet startups.

(via Library House)