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Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

Micropayments startup PlaySpan has another partnership to add to the list. The startup has signed deals with hi5, THQ and Nickelodeon, and most recently Adobe. Today, PlaySpan is partnering with Nonoba, which offers a Ning-like platform for game development.

Nonoba’s GameRise allows anyone to develop and manage customized gaming sites within a community. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. With the new partnership, PlaySpan will offer Nonoba’s 4,000 Flash games to marketplace customers. PlaySpan’s microtransactions will also be offered to Nonoba’s developers to allow Flash game developers to monetize their games.

With all of the partnerships PlaySpan is racking up, the startup is fast securing its place as a player in the micrpayments space. In December, PlaySpan revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts over the holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Micropayments startups PlaySpan is racking up the partnerships. The startup has signed deals with hi5, THQ and Nickelodeon, and today, with Adobe. PlaySpan the payments platform for Adobe’s developer service, codenamed Shibuya. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site.

In private beta, Shibuya allows Adobe developers to monetize their Adobe AIR applications through a try-and-buy mechanism, and allows developers to upload and sell their applications on the Adobe AIR Marketplace. To enable micro-payments via PlaySpan, developers can add a few lines of provisioning code, set the price and trial period, and then publish the application with the payments technology. Developers will also receive reports, analytics, and automatic settlements on a monthly basis.

The Adobe Air Marketplace allows consumers to try paid applications on for free. If they like the application they can purchase it using a credit card, PayPal, an Ultimate Game Card or over 85 other global payment methods provided by PlaySpan.

The micropayments startup has been securing key partnerships, and a deal with Adobe only validates its place as a player in the micropayments space. In December, PlaySpan revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts over the holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

This is more interesting than I had originally thought. Sony filed a patent last year (it was only unearthed today or yesterday) describing a universal video game controller. You know how there’s universal remote controls (like this one I used), smart devices that can control a TV, cable box, DVD player, etc.

Read the original:
Sony’s mysterious universal video game controller patent portends PS3 Virtual Console (or maybe it doesn’t, who knows?)

JamLegend, the LaunchBox-backed ‘Guitar Hero For The Web’, has just reached a fairly major milestone: it’s now signed up over 1 million users. Co-founder Andrew Lee says that the site is up to around 60 million total song plays, of which 45 million have come from registered members. He says the site has seen especially good growth since it integrated Facebook Connect.

For those that haven’t used it before, JamLegend takes the music-as-a-game formula popularized by games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and brings it to your web browser. Gameplay is pretty simple: a series of colorful dots scroll down the screen, each representing a note or chord in a song, and you rhythmically tap the proper keys on your keyboard to “play” each note.

To play a song on JamLegend, it needs to have a note chart. The site offers 300 professionally crafted note charts (and their corresponding songs), and last summer it added support for an automated system that can generate a note chart for any song. In practice the system isn’t perfect, but it’s probably good enough for casual gamers. JamLegend monetizes these songs by restricting how many you can upload at a time — if you’d like to store more than a handful at once, you have to sign up for a premium subscription. Lee says that users have uploaded over 600,000 songs to their virtual lockers.

Lee says that JamLegend’s community is playing a strong role in helping it get traction. He says that indie musicians often come to the site and upload their own songs, and then members of JamLegend’s community task themselves with converting those songs into quality note charts. In effect, it’s giving these bands another outlet to get new fans, and Lee says that some of the bands have managed to get more fans on JamLegend than they have on MySpace.

One other thing worth noting: while Compete shows JamLegend’s traffic taking a dive over the winter, Lee says that their data is off. Instead, he says that traffic has largely been flat recently, but that it hasn’t dipped. Still, the company is going to have to come up with some innovative features to get to critical mass, especially as options like the Rock Band Network become increasingly enticing to indie bands.

Seeing the success of Farmville and other social games, Break Media is getting into gaming across its roster of men-oriented video sites. The first game, MMA FightPicker, is launching today on Break’s martial-arts video site, CagePotato. It is a pretty basic fantasy sports game where you pick a line-up of fighters and get points, in the form of potato chips, every time your fighters win. The potato chips also act as a virtual currency, which can be used to advance within the game. Every time you play, you get some potato chips, but you can also buy them.

MMA FightPicker is Break’s first game, unless you count the Tiger Woods game where he is chased by his wife. It is just the first of many games the company plans to roll out across its eight sites, including its flagship Break.com. The games are being developed by a new game studio in Shanghai, China that already employs more than three dozen developers who are ready to churn out a variety of games. “We started this studio so we could knock out social games across our properties,” says CEO Keith Richman.

Break will also be selling ads next to the games on its sites, and bundling those sals in with its existing video and banner ads. With 30 million unique visitors a month across its properties, Break has enough built-in distribution to sell ads on its own. And then there is the virtual currency. “I think other publishers will realize that gaming can add legitimate revenue,” says Richman. Beyond Break’s own sites, the games will live on Facebook as well, where they will live as standalone Facebook apps.

Mimecast, a startup that offers a email archiving, continuity, and security software has raised $21 million in Series B financing from Index Ventures and Dawn Capital.

Founded in the UK in 2003 by Peter Bauer and Neil Murray, Mimecast’s cloud based platform extends the capabilities of most in-house email systems by integrating additional storage, archiving, and spam/virus protection. For example, the software could exchange the value of Microsoft Outlook’s email platforms. Mimecast currently has close to 2,500 customers across a range of of industries including financial services, legal, manufacturing and the public sector. The startup claims to have seen triple digit revenue growth in each of the last three years.

Last week, we wrote about MyTown, an iPhone application created by Booyah already had 500,000 users. That was significant because the app, which is a location-based game, was already well ahead of rivals Foursquare and Gowalla in terms of users — and it gained all those in just one month. Today, brings an entirely new version of the app to the App Store, MyTown 2.0.

With this new release, MyTown is further differentiating itself from the Foursquares and Gowallas of the world. While those are about check-ins that revolve around social aspects, MyTown is much more of a straight-up game. In fact, the best way to think about it may be Monopoly for the real world.

While the core idea is still to check-in to venues you happen to be at, the driving force behind doing that is to be able to “buy” those properties rather than tell your friends where you are. For example, if you check-in at a cafe, you can buy it, and then others who check-in there will pay you rent. The goal is to accumulate as many properties and as much money as possible. And version 2.0 makes all of that much more involved as the amount of gameplay has been raised from 5 or 6 hours all the way up to about 75 hours, Booyah CEO Keith Lee tells us.

Also with the 2.0 release, the entire look and feel of the app has been updated. On your main screen, you now get an ever-evolving view of all the properties you’ve collected. You also will see better stats for venues (how many people have checked-in, etc). And the number of building upgrades you can do has been taken from 5 to 10. You can also see what venues are trending, as well as their popularity rating based on elements such as number of check-ins.

But most significantly, MyTown now has an in-app purchase element. This allows users to buy power-ups within the game that will make it easier for them to play. For example, one power-up allows you to automatically collect rent from your buildings. This is a key part of the game, but without this power-up, it has to be done manually, which is time consuming. You can also buy more property slots to allow you to expand your venue empire, among other things. Prices range from $0.99 all the way up to $9.99 for these in-app purchases.

Lee sees this as being a way for MyTown to good amount of money — certainly more than what in-game ads will bring in. He, along with some of his co-founders, come from a gaming background where they worked at places like Blizzard working on World of Warcraft, among other titles. That world has a robust virtual good ecosystem around it, and Lee expects that iPhone games will see the same.

There is also a virtual store built-in to MyTown 2.0. Here, users will be able to spend the virtual (fake) currency they collect in the game to buy various collectables. Lee recognizes that only a small percentage (something like 5%) of users will be willing to pay actual money for goods, so this virtual store is an important part of the game as well.

Something else that MyTown is doing that is more closely aligned with Foursquare and Gowalla is real-world promotions. When you check-in to a venue or near one, you’ll be alerted if a special deal is nearby. For example, MyTown already has a deal in place with Quiznos for certain rotating specials. While these deals aren’t making MyTown any money yet (just as they’re not yet for Foursquare or Gowalla), Lee says that they’re continuing to sign up companies interested in this, and expect to turn on the money-making switch for this soon.

This heavy focus on the gaming aspect of location is certainly an interesting thing to watch, especially if virtual goods take off. Gowalla also places an emphasis on virtual goods, but is much less of a straight-up game than MyTown. Foursquare, meanwhile, is much more of a game you play for the social element with your friends (though you could certainly argue that badges are a virtual good).

Find MyTown 2.0 in the App Store here, as a free download.

Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

Nicira - Virtual Data Center Control Software
TopTenREVIEWS - Product Research and Reviews
Tangerine Solar - Community Solar Power Project
Powered - Social Media and Marketing

Remember when virtual reality was all the rage? It had a good run, especially during the 1990s, and perhaps culminating with Second Life in the decade which just closed. But virtual reality is old in the tooth. People are a lot more interested these days in “augmented reality,” or at least they are on Google where it surpassed “virtual reality” as a search term sometime last summer (see chart).

Maybe people are searching for it more just because they are not sure what it means, but it definitely is entering the collective consciousness. If virtual reality is a complete immersion in a digital world, augmented reality (AR) is more a digital overlay onto the real world. It enhances the real world with digital data, and therefore it is much more interesting than a completely fabricated environment. There is an element of magic to AR apps because they juxtapose data and graphics where they have no business showing up.

The advent of touchscreen mobile phones with GPS and cameras such as the iPhone and Android phones is giving rise to an array of AR apps from Sekai Camera, Layar, and more. Generally, these apps show the world around you as seen through your phone’s camera, but in addition to functioning as a viewfinder, your screen also functions as a regular computer screen. With help from the GPS and on-board compass, it can place information or graphics on top of buildings or objects seen through the viewfinder.

But that is just the start. Universityresearch labs are springing up to explore augmented realty as a new computing interface. The latest AR app is the Parrot AR.Drone, and combines a flying remote controlled toy with an iPhone app. The app turns the iPhone into a remote control (a concept we’ve seen applied to video games), but there is also a camera on the drone, which let’s you see from its point of view and play virtual shoot ‘em up games with other drones. The shooting happens on the screen, while the toys fly through the air in real life. There is also a solo mode where you can shoot enemy jets on the screen juxtaposed into your living room or wherever you happen to be flying the drone. (Watch the video below to see what I mean).

You can take your virtual reality and get lost on Second Life. I’ll take augmented reality any day. It’s just more real.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The hundreds of web and desktop clients built for sharing, backup or on-the-fly synchronization of digital files that have sprung up in the past ten years have made the whole concept of having the cloud at least partly remove your computer hard drive’s reason for being largely a commodity.

It’s the reason why we don’t exactly jump up and down out of sheer excitement when another such service launches and asks for a TechCrunch review.

It’s what I keep telling my friend Filip Tack, CEO of Nomadesk, one of the many players in this field: that in order to make waves in this space it’s far from enough to build a great product, and that it’s at least as important to have a better-than-average distribution model and a PR and marketing strategy that allows you to get noticed almost on a daily basis by people who can spread the word. And then some.

For what it’s worth: Nomadesk really has an awesome desktop client (Windows and Mac) that goes far beyond most of what competitors have to offer, and the distribution part of the equation is slowly coming to fruition as well (the company recently signed a deal with Bell Canada for the company to use Nomadesk’s solution as a white-label service they can offer directly to their customers, and has similar agreements in place and in the pipeline).

But while the company has been consistently growing after its inception a couple of years ago, albeit slowly, the startup has received very little attention from tech press and industry pundits so far. I genuinely think that Nomadesk deserves more of it, as its service stacks up against most proponents in this space, particularly in the way you can control your virtual fileserver(s) from your mobile phone.

Maybe a new feature being launched today will raise some eyebrows: Nomadesk is today introducing a welcome feature that allows users to share an entire folder – regardless of its size – with anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. Simply use the desktop client to right-click any folder you’d like to share, and you can relay the link to whoever you would like to share it with, and they don’t need to have the software installed let alone be a registered Nomadesk user to access all the files in the folder.

As you can tell from the video below, it’s pretty easy to do and it ‘just works’, and the fact that there’s no folder size limit is very appealing. The only thing it really lacks at this point is the ability to preview documents and videos from the Nomadesk interface, but I’m told that’s coming shortly.

For your background: Nomadesk (formerly Aventiv) was founded in 2004 and is based in Belgium (which, whether you like it or not, doesn’t exactly help with getting on influencers’ radars). The company has raised about €3.3 million euro (roughly $4.75 million) from GIMV, one of the largest investment firms in these parts, and while it has a direct sales channel through its website its strategy is to offer the service as a white-label plug and play solution to as many OEMs as possible.

You can sign up for Nomadesk and enjoy a one-month free trial with no restrictions on their website, so I suggest you try out both the desktop client and the mobile website (nomadesk.mobi) to see how the service stacks up to its competitors.

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