There is life beyond Pac-Man. Namco Bandai Games is famous for the quintessential video game of the 1980s. And that game has helped the Japanese game publisher break into new mobile and social game markets. But the core belief at Namco Networks, the U.S. arm of the company in San Jose, Calif., is that it can create new kinds of games that will help accelerate its growth in the hot parts of the video game market.
One example is The Wolfman Mobile Game, which Namco Networks launched this week in anticipation of a new movie coming from Universal Studios on Feb. 12. The movie, starring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins, is the first in a series of revivals of Universal’s classic monster franchises, and it represents Namco’s first attempt at making a game based on a movie. The game is available on feature phones, the BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile platforms and will soon be on Android and Sidekick phones.
“This is the start of something good for us,” said Chris Lucero, manager of business development and licensing at Namco Networks. “We are going to establish a presence in games based on licenses from sports, film, and TV.”
By itself, the Wolfman game is not a big deal. But it could lead to bigger and better branded games for Namco Bandai, and it’s a sign that the competition is only going to grow as bigger companies get serious about the mobile and social games space.
Namco Bandai is as traditional as they come. The company was founded in 1955 and launched Pac-Man as an arcade game in 1980. It merged with Bandai in 2006 and is still rolling out lots of console games, such as the recent Tekken 6 console game. In its last fiscal year, Namco posted $4.7 billion in revenues. In the U.S., it diversified into PC games such as Flagship Studios’ Hellgate: London, but that game didn’t sell that well.
So far, the new stuff is just a blip in the company’s overall revenue picture. But the mother ship has to move into new markets because traditional gaming is changing. New audiences are developing on a variety of new platforms, from Facebook to the iPhone. And Namco has to be there. Namco is already a big player in mobile games. Like Electronic Arts, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate and Gameloft, Namco is one of the leaders in mobile games, thanks in no small part to popular mobile versions of its Pac-Man franchise. It uses Pac-Man to promote the other games that it is launching.
“We are just as big as those other companies are, and it’s about time we showed that,” said Rob Schoeppe, senior director of production and deployment.
The mission is reflected in the latest people hired at the company. Lucero was an agent at United Talent Agency in Hollywood. His job was to read every script in town and figure out how to exploit them as properties. At Namco, he helped secure the rights to make mobile games based on the upcoming movie The Wolfman.
And back in August, Namco Networks hired Jonathan Kromrey, who formerly worked in the iPhone division at Apple. His job as general manager of Apple games is to create iPhone games based on both existing Namco properties and new games as well. David Schwartz, meanwhile, heads the PC division that is making games for Facebook, web sites and other social networks. They’re among the couple of hundred or so employees based in San Jose, and there are hundreds more in locations such as Japan and Romania. (Schwartz is pictured left; Kromrey right).
These new folks are focusing on making games for broader markets, not just hardcore gamers. They’re creating games with more appeal to women and are casual affairs that don’t take a lot of time to play. There have been no giant original hits so far, but it’s still early.
mandag 1. februar 2010
JooJoo CEO pledges to ship this month, claims deal with leading phone maker
During last week’s Apple iPad mania, one company was notably silent: Fusion Garage, the 13-person Singapore company that makes the JooJoo tablet, which began life as TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad.
The runup to JooJoo’s launch in December got ugly. Arrington, who conceived the CrunchPad idea and brought Fusion Garage in to manufacture it, claimed that Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan had backstabbed him, cutting him out of his role as leader and arranging with investors for Fusion Garage to sell the tablet themselves.
On JooJoo’s launch day, ex-lawyer Arrington published the full text of a lawsuit he’d filed over the rift. Rathakrishnan, in return, did a video presentation a week later in which he called some of Arrington’s claims untrue.
I’m bored with the lawsuit. Here’s what I want to know: Is the JooJoo going to ship in the next 1-3 weeks as promised, or no? Fusion Garage started taking pre-orders at $499 in mid-December, and pledged to ship within 8-10 weeks.
And how does Fusion Garage view the iPad, the undeniable threat to JooJoo’s existence?
I got Chandra on the phone from Singapore on Sunday. Here’s an edit of our conversation.
VentureBeat: When will the first JooJoos reach customers’ hands?
Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan : The JooJoos will be in consumer hands by the end of February. That’s within the 8 to 10 week window we promised.
VB: How many pre-orders do you have?
CR: I can’t give you the number. I can definitely say that our pre-orders have exceeded our expectations. Since the iPad’s launch, we have had an increase in inquiries.
VB: What can you tell me about your funding?
CR: We have $3 million that we have raised so far. We will be announcing a new round of funding shortly. More important, we have innovated a new business model by a relationship with an OEM that removes all of the high up-front costs of manufacturing for us. We are just waiting for the final approval for the announcement. But our OEM is a mobile phone maker in southeast Asia, and their market share here is right behind Nokia, double digits. They will eliminate all of our up-front manufacturing costs in return for a royalty on every JooJoo unit that is sold.
VB: OK, geek time. What’s the JooJoo’s biggest advantage over the iPad?
CR: It has a much larger screen, 12.1 inches instead of 9.7 inches. The resolution is 1368 by 768 pixels instead of 1024 by 768. There are an extra 300 pixels of length, so it’s 16:9 widescreen resolution instead of 4:3. Watching video on it is a joy. And the Web browsing experience is even better than the iPad, because of the size of the screen.
VB: What browser does it use?
CR: We use a WebKit-based browser, to which we’ve added our own branding. [WebKit is an open-source version of the same core software Apple uses for its Safari browsers on the Mac, iPhone and iPad.]
VB: Does it support Flash?
CR: Yes.
VB: What about wireless networking?
CR: The first units will be Wi-Fi only. We are not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future.
VB: Will there be JooJoo apps?
CR: No. Most of the apps in Apple’s store are a reflection of things that are already on the Internet. And now you have to build them twice — once for the iPhone, and once for the much larger, higher resolution iPad screen. Our app store will be the entire Internet, completely open and completely uncompromised.
The runup to JooJoo’s launch in December got ugly. Arrington, who conceived the CrunchPad idea and brought Fusion Garage in to manufacture it, claimed that Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan had backstabbed him, cutting him out of his role as leader and arranging with investors for Fusion Garage to sell the tablet themselves.
On JooJoo’s launch day, ex-lawyer Arrington published the full text of a lawsuit he’d filed over the rift. Rathakrishnan, in return, did a video presentation a week later in which he called some of Arrington’s claims untrue.
I’m bored with the lawsuit. Here’s what I want to know: Is the JooJoo going to ship in the next 1-3 weeks as promised, or no? Fusion Garage started taking pre-orders at $499 in mid-December, and pledged to ship within 8-10 weeks.
And how does Fusion Garage view the iPad, the undeniable threat to JooJoo’s existence?
I got Chandra on the phone from Singapore on Sunday. Here’s an edit of our conversation.
VentureBeat: When will the first JooJoos reach customers’ hands?
Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan : The JooJoos will be in consumer hands by the end of February. That’s within the 8 to 10 week window we promised.
VB: How many pre-orders do you have?
CR: I can’t give you the number. I can definitely say that our pre-orders have exceeded our expectations. Since the iPad’s launch, we have had an increase in inquiries.
VB: What can you tell me about your funding?
CR: We have $3 million that we have raised so far. We will be announcing a new round of funding shortly. More important, we have innovated a new business model by a relationship with an OEM that removes all of the high up-front costs of manufacturing for us. We are just waiting for the final approval for the announcement. But our OEM is a mobile phone maker in southeast Asia, and their market share here is right behind Nokia, double digits. They will eliminate all of our up-front manufacturing costs in return for a royalty on every JooJoo unit that is sold.
VB: OK, geek time. What’s the JooJoo’s biggest advantage over the iPad?
CR: It has a much larger screen, 12.1 inches instead of 9.7 inches. The resolution is 1368 by 768 pixels instead of 1024 by 768. There are an extra 300 pixels of length, so it’s 16:9 widescreen resolution instead of 4:3. Watching video on it is a joy. And the Web browsing experience is even better than the iPad, because of the size of the screen.
VB: What browser does it use?
CR: We use a WebKit-based browser, to which we’ve added our own branding. [WebKit is an open-source version of the same core software Apple uses for its Safari browsers on the Mac, iPhone and iPad.]
VB: Does it support Flash?
CR: Yes.
VB: What about wireless networking?
CR: The first units will be Wi-Fi only. We are not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future.
VB: Will there be JooJoo apps?
CR: No. Most of the apps in Apple’s store are a reflection of things that are already on the Internet. And now you have to build them twice — once for the iPhone, and once for the much larger, higher resolution iPad screen. Our app store will be the entire Internet, completely open and completely uncompromised.
Nokia Pearson Set Up Digital Education Joint Venture i Kina
Nokia og utdanning selskapet Pearson har dannet et joint venture i Kina kalt Beijing Mobiledu Technologies å vokse MobilEdu, det trådløse utdanning tjenesten som den finske giganten mobil lansert i Kina tilbake i 2007. Mobiledu er en mobil tjeneste som i hovedsak gir engelskspråklige læremidler og andre pedagogiske innhold, fra en rekke innholdsleverandører, direkte på mobilen. Kunder kan få tilgang til innhold via et program forhåndsinstallert på nye Nokia-telefoner, eller ved å besøke etatens mobilnettsted og de fleste andre WAP-portaler i Kina.
Sosial Shopping Site ThisNext Bekrefter Funding, kjøper Stylehive
Sosial e-handelsvirksomheter ThisNext nylig reist en Serie C runde med $ 1.2 millioner, som vi rapporterte basert på en SEC-filing. Santa Monica, har CA oppstart nå bekreftet finansiering runde og også annonsert at de har fått mindre rivaliserende Stylehive for et ukjent beløp. ThisNext sette opp et helt nytt morselskap, Curatemedia, som vil være bedriftens merkevare som vil operere både ThisNext og Stylehive heretter.
Interview With Senate Candidate Carly Fiorina: “The Nation With The Best Brain Power Wins”
On Friday, I caught up with Carly Fiorina by phone for 30 minutes while she was in between stump speeches in her campaign for U.S. Senate for the state of California. We covered a lot of ground, including the new competition in the Republican primary from Tom Campbell who recently bowed out of the governor's race, the need to cut spending, grow the economy, rethink government contracting, China, H1B visas, the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley on small companies, and how technology can help women in the workforce. "In this day and age where it's all about brain power," says Fiorina, "the nation with the best brain power wins."
The last time we interviewed her, she was John McCain's "Victory Chairman" (a prematurely presumptuous title). Even though she is behind in the polls right now, she is very confident she can win the primary and ultimately knock Democrat Barbara Boxer out of the Senate. She talks a lot about cutting government spending. One good idea she proposes: "Let's put every agency budget up on the internet for everybody to see. People would be outraged at how their money is being spent."
Fiorina also thinks the Sarbanes-Oxley financial rules for publicly traded companies need to be revisited: "I think Sarbanes-Oxley is an example of the dangers of a rush to legislation in an emotional moment. . . . I absolutely believe that new businesses, smaller businesses shouldn't have to comply with the full scope of Sarbanes-Oxley, and I think there's no question that Sarbanes-Oxley has had a chilling effect on companies' decisions to list here as opposed to perhaps listing on other exchanges around the world
You can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript below:
The last time we interviewed her, she was John McCain's "Victory Chairman" (a prematurely presumptuous title). Even though she is behind in the polls right now, she is very confident she can win the primary and ultimately knock Democrat Barbara Boxer out of the Senate. She talks a lot about cutting government spending. One good idea she proposes: "Let's put every agency budget up on the internet for everybody to see. People would be outraged at how their money is being spent."
Fiorina also thinks the Sarbanes-Oxley financial rules for publicly traded companies need to be revisited: "I think Sarbanes-Oxley is an example of the dangers of a rush to legislation in an emotional moment. . . . I absolutely believe that new businesses, smaller businesses shouldn't have to comply with the full scope of Sarbanes-Oxley, and I think there's no question that Sarbanes-Oxley has had a chilling effect on companies' decisions to list here as opposed to perhaps listing on other exchanges around the world
You can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript below:
ThisNext kjøper Stylehive å dominere sosiale shopping
Sosial shopping oppstart kalt ThisNext ekspanderer - det nettopp annonsert oppkjøpet av annen sosial handel, Stylehive, og har skapt et nytt morselskap kalt Curatemedia å håndtere begge områdene. På ThisNext, kan du anbefale produktene du liker, kan du følge anbefalinger av andre shoppere, og også "shopcast" din ThisNext anbefalinger på andre nettsteder. Stylehive bruker noen av de samme prinsipper, men i motsetning til variert, generalist samling av produkter diskutert på ThisNext, fokuserer den på stil og mote, og har også anbefalinger fra redaktører og bloggere. Under paraplyen Curatemedia, Santa Monica, Calif Selskapet sier det vil kjøre ThisNext, Stylehive, og snart andre sosiale nettbutikker som faller mot bestemte målgrupper og shopping cateogries .. Selskapet har ikke avsløre de økonomiske vilkårene i oppkjøpet. ThisNext bekreftet også at det har hevet en tredje runde med finansiering, som ble avslørt i forrige uke i en regulerende arkivering, og som kommer fra Clearstone Venture Partners, Anthem Venture Partners og Lightspeed Venture Partners. Selskapet har ikke spesifisere størrelsen på runden, men ifølge innlevering var $ 1.2 millioner.
Jackson vevstoler stor over Grammys
Den mest minneverdige øyeblikk av 52dre årlige Grammy Awards kan være på scenen utseendet til Michael Jackson to eldste barn.
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