Source: Mashable
-------------------
When Microsoft rolls out its Mango operating system for Windows Phone 7 this fall, the company will debut a new web-based version of its Windows Phone Marketplace at the same time, according to Microsoft’s Windows Phone Developer Blog.
The web-based Marketplace will let users select and buy any of the platform’s 17,000 apps on a web browser and then send them directly to their Windows phones over the air.
When clarifying the service to Engadget, Microsoft said it expects most customers to download apps to a Windows phone over the air, but that if the Marketplace service is not activated on a cellphone, it will use SMS to turn on the over-the-air app service before software is downloaded and installed.
Microsoft added that users will also have the capability of sending themselves an email with a link to the app, but the company expects most users will instead let the apps install in the background.
The Mango operating system aims to make cellphones “smarter and easier,” focusing on efficient multitasking, enhanced cloud integration and better platform tools for developers.
Related post: Windows Mango Phone
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Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
Monday, May 30, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Kabam raises $85M for hardcore social gaming business
Source: Gamesbeat
--------------------
Here’s a “kaboom” for all those social game skeptics out there. Kabam has raised $85 million in a fourth round of funding to fuel its business making hardcore games for social networks such as Facebook. The backers include Google Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, Performance Equity and SK Telecom Ventures, as well as earlier backers.
It’s as good a sign of disruption in games as any. Based on the funding from such heavy-duty backers, Kabam is now one of the most valuable independent companies making games on Facebook. In terms of users, it is far outgunned by market leader Zynga (poised for a possible initial public offering), which has 247 million monthly active users on Facebook. Kabam has just 7.2 million monthly active users. Zynga has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but Kabam is holding its own, raising $125 million to date.
People will shake their heads at the amount of money here and what it says about the likely valuation. But as we noted in a review of Kabam’s games, the investors here aren’t crazy. Kabam clearly has users who are far more valuable than the standard social game player, because Kabam’s users are willing to pay Kabam a lot of money for a hardcore game experience on Facebook. Kabam’s four active games include Dragons of Atlantis, Kingdoms of Camelot, Glory of Rome and Global Warfare (below).
They’re all hardcore role-playing games where users play for four hours at a session, compared to maybe 10 minutes for a Zynga game. About 90 percent of Kabam’s players log into their games six or seven times a week. That’s what Kevin Chou, chief executive of Kabam, calls engagement. Those gamers are running the game in the background while they’re multitasking. That allows them to have lots of time to play all day long, even as they do other work. Such gamers would never have a four-hour stretch to play a console game.
Chou says that about 80 percent of the company’s players say they play hardcore games on the consoles or the PC. And now they are spending less time with those games and more time with Kabam games. This had to happen. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook has become a mirror of society. And society includes a lot of hardcore games. Kabam is one of the few companies to realize this and to target those gamers, who are accustomed to spending a lot of money on games. Kabam blends the immersive game play of massively multiplayer online games with the social satisfaction of social networking games.
Kabam was founded in 2007 as Watercooler and funded by Betfair and Canaan Partners. It had around 20 employees for quite a while as it experimented on Facebook, making sports fan pages and sports games. It had a big hit with its first major role-playing game, Kingdoms of Camelot, which quickly pulled in millions of users. The game still has 1.5 million monthly active users 19 months after its launch. Kabam also acquired WonderHill, a San Francisco game company that developed Dragons of Atlantis, which has become Kabam’s most successful game to date.
Kabam’s games are free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as more Centurions for the Imperial Roman Army in Glory of Rome. While many users play for free. There is a sizable percentage of users who pay money for the time-saving aspects of the game. And the funny thing about hardcore gamers is that they’re willing to pay more than $60 to get their fix. Whenever Microsoft launches a new $60 version of Halo, it often creates a $125 “legendary” version for the biggest fans.
Ken Pelowski, managing director of Pinnacle Ventures, said Kabam’s typical user numbers are similar to the number of hardcore fans for each console game hit.
“Those console fans are migrating online to free-to-play games, and that is what Kabam is seeing,” Pelowski said. “But here, you don’t have to pay $250 for a box and $50 for each game. Here, you could play the game for free. You could pay hundreds of dollars. You could pay thousands of dollars. The high growth and high value of the user base justifies a higher valuation for the company.”
Kabam’s users are as dedicated as console gamers. They’re willing to spend more than $60 sometimes, just to get a much-needed advantage that will make them look good in front of their fellow alliance members (as many as 100 players can band together in alliances). Chou has said that Kabam isn’t really going after Zynga. It’s the anti-Zynga. It’s going after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts instead, with the aim of disrupting their traditional business, Chou said.
This is the place in the story where traditional game company executives cackle at the audaciousness of Chou. But there are a lot of former game industry veterans working for him.
Kabam doesn’t disclose its financial results. But the tea leaves are there. With just four games and $125 million in funding, Kabam has been able to grow from 25 employees to more than 400 in the past 16 months. Chou said the team will be shipping more impressive games, including five later this year.
Console gamers may laugh at the low interactivity of Kabam’s games now, but Chou says there’s a full pipeline of games coming, and each one will reflect learnings from Kabam’s direct observation of millions of gamers. Traditional video game executives would kill to get that kind of feedback. Global Warfare, Kabam’s newest game, has minimalist, cinematic-style cut scenes (as much as Facebook can handle) and it takes the game play from Glory of Rome to a higher level. The game forces players in an alliance to be more social by requiring them to coordinate assaults on strategic resources in the game. I’ve been playing it since it debuted on May 3, and I’ve spent most of that time getting ready to do real battle. That might bore other players, but I consider it to be a fun investment of my time.
There is some precedent for Kabam’s funding. The game industry took notice of the Kabam-style model of getting more dollars out of hardcore gamers when China’s Tencent bought the majority of Riot Games for nearly $400 million in February. Riot Games had only 1 million users playing one game, but those dedicated gamers spent a lot of money. In January, Kabam raised eyebrows and fears of a “bubble” in social gaming when it raised $30 million.
EA, for its part, has its own online role-playing game Lord of Ultima online on Bigpoint.com. But there’s an opening for Kabam to get big in this niche because many of the big traditional game publishers have left the PC game market to focus on the consoles. And the traditional game publishers who have entered the Facebook market are focusing on competing with Zynga for the new demographic of casual gamers on Facebook. No one is really competing directly with Kabam, except other startups such as Kixeye.
But Kabam has to walk a delicate balance with its users. It can get the games to monetize better by making ordinary tasks take longer and longer to do, like sending scouts on a recon mission. The users may get fed up and pay Kabam some money so that it can eliminate the wait. But if the users feel like Kabam is holding them up at every turn and deliberately trying to frustrate them, then they will move on to another free-to-play game that doesn’t treat them that way.
There are some risks for Kabam. The company can stage some massive battles where users send reinforcements to stop attackers from looting a city. But it takes a lot of computing power to make sure that the game doesn’t crash or make the wrong calculation in this kind of scenario. And overall, Kabam needs more servers because its users are online so much. Kabam has to make sure that it doesn’t hit a wall with Facebook’s infrastructure, which wasn’t really built for real-time engagement.
Over time, the social network platform will become better at running online games. And then Kabam will likely try to create games that include the animations and 3D graphics that hardcore gamers want. Chou says the company will also expand into new markets such as Asia, where there is a lot of potential among hardcore gamers. Pelowski acknowledges that there is still a gap where the best console games have a higher quality bar, but Kabam is starting to close that gap. And in the meantime, the company is still monetizing its current games very well.
All of that adds up to a lot of value, says Pelowski. As to whether Kabam is part of a giant social gaming and social networking bubble, Pelowski says the underlying metrics of the business justify the investment.
Existing investors Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Canaan Partners also participated in the deal.
===============================
Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
--------------------
Here’s a “kaboom” for all those social game skeptics out there. Kabam has raised $85 million in a fourth round of funding to fuel its business making hardcore games for social networks such as Facebook. The backers include Google Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, Performance Equity and SK Telecom Ventures, as well as earlier backers.
It’s as good a sign of disruption in games as any. Based on the funding from such heavy-duty backers, Kabam is now one of the most valuable independent companies making games on Facebook. In terms of users, it is far outgunned by market leader Zynga (poised for a possible initial public offering), which has 247 million monthly active users on Facebook. Kabam has just 7.2 million monthly active users. Zynga has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but Kabam is holding its own, raising $125 million to date.
People will shake their heads at the amount of money here and what it says about the likely valuation. But as we noted in a review of Kabam’s games, the investors here aren’t crazy. Kabam clearly has users who are far more valuable than the standard social game player, because Kabam’s users are willing to pay Kabam a lot of money for a hardcore game experience on Facebook. Kabam’s four active games include Dragons of Atlantis, Kingdoms of Camelot, Glory of Rome and Global Warfare (below).
They’re all hardcore role-playing games where users play for four hours at a session, compared to maybe 10 minutes for a Zynga game. About 90 percent of Kabam’s players log into their games six or seven times a week. That’s what Kevin Chou, chief executive of Kabam, calls engagement. Those gamers are running the game in the background while they’re multitasking. That allows them to have lots of time to play all day long, even as they do other work. Such gamers would never have a four-hour stretch to play a console game.
Chou says that about 80 percent of the company’s players say they play hardcore games on the consoles or the PC. And now they are spending less time with those games and more time with Kabam games. This had to happen. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook has become a mirror of society. And society includes a lot of hardcore games. Kabam is one of the few companies to realize this and to target those gamers, who are accustomed to spending a lot of money on games. Kabam blends the immersive game play of massively multiplayer online games with the social satisfaction of social networking games.
Kabam was founded in 2007 as Watercooler and funded by Betfair and Canaan Partners. It had around 20 employees for quite a while as it experimented on Facebook, making sports fan pages and sports games. It had a big hit with its first major role-playing game, Kingdoms of Camelot, which quickly pulled in millions of users. The game still has 1.5 million monthly active users 19 months after its launch. Kabam also acquired WonderHill, a San Francisco game company that developed Dragons of Atlantis, which has become Kabam’s most successful game to date.
Kabam’s games are free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as more Centurions for the Imperial Roman Army in Glory of Rome. While many users play for free. There is a sizable percentage of users who pay money for the time-saving aspects of the game. And the funny thing about hardcore gamers is that they’re willing to pay more than $60 to get their fix. Whenever Microsoft launches a new $60 version of Halo, it often creates a $125 “legendary” version for the biggest fans.
Ken Pelowski, managing director of Pinnacle Ventures, said Kabam’s typical user numbers are similar to the number of hardcore fans for each console game hit.
“Those console fans are migrating online to free-to-play games, and that is what Kabam is seeing,” Pelowski said. “But here, you don’t have to pay $250 for a box and $50 for each game. Here, you could play the game for free. You could pay hundreds of dollars. You could pay thousands of dollars. The high growth and high value of the user base justifies a higher valuation for the company.”
Kabam’s users are as dedicated as console gamers. They’re willing to spend more than $60 sometimes, just to get a much-needed advantage that will make them look good in front of their fellow alliance members (as many as 100 players can band together in alliances). Chou has said that Kabam isn’t really going after Zynga. It’s the anti-Zynga. It’s going after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts instead, with the aim of disrupting their traditional business, Chou said.
This is the place in the story where traditional game company executives cackle at the audaciousness of Chou. But there are a lot of former game industry veterans working for him.
Kabam doesn’t disclose its financial results. But the tea leaves are there. With just four games and $125 million in funding, Kabam has been able to grow from 25 employees to more than 400 in the past 16 months. Chou said the team will be shipping more impressive games, including five later this year.
Console gamers may laugh at the low interactivity of Kabam’s games now, but Chou says there’s a full pipeline of games coming, and each one will reflect learnings from Kabam’s direct observation of millions of gamers. Traditional video game executives would kill to get that kind of feedback. Global Warfare, Kabam’s newest game, has minimalist, cinematic-style cut scenes (as much as Facebook can handle) and it takes the game play from Glory of Rome to a higher level. The game forces players in an alliance to be more social by requiring them to coordinate assaults on strategic resources in the game. I’ve been playing it since it debuted on May 3, and I’ve spent most of that time getting ready to do real battle. That might bore other players, but I consider it to be a fun investment of my time.
There is some precedent for Kabam’s funding. The game industry took notice of the Kabam-style model of getting more dollars out of hardcore gamers when China’s Tencent bought the majority of Riot Games for nearly $400 million in February. Riot Games had only 1 million users playing one game, but those dedicated gamers spent a lot of money. In January, Kabam raised eyebrows and fears of a “bubble” in social gaming when it raised $30 million.
EA, for its part, has its own online role-playing game Lord of Ultima online on Bigpoint.com. But there’s an opening for Kabam to get big in this niche because many of the big traditional game publishers have left the PC game market to focus on the consoles. And the traditional game publishers who have entered the Facebook market are focusing on competing with Zynga for the new demographic of casual gamers on Facebook. No one is really competing directly with Kabam, except other startups such as Kixeye.
But Kabam has to walk a delicate balance with its users. It can get the games to monetize better by making ordinary tasks take longer and longer to do, like sending scouts on a recon mission. The users may get fed up and pay Kabam some money so that it can eliminate the wait. But if the users feel like Kabam is holding them up at every turn and deliberately trying to frustrate them, then they will move on to another free-to-play game that doesn’t treat them that way.
There are some risks for Kabam. The company can stage some massive battles where users send reinforcements to stop attackers from looting a city. But it takes a lot of computing power to make sure that the game doesn’t crash or make the wrong calculation in this kind of scenario. And overall, Kabam needs more servers because its users are online so much. Kabam has to make sure that it doesn’t hit a wall with Facebook’s infrastructure, which wasn’t really built for real-time engagement.
Over time, the social network platform will become better at running online games. And then Kabam will likely try to create games that include the animations and 3D graphics that hardcore gamers want. Chou says the company will also expand into new markets such as Asia, where there is a lot of potential among hardcore gamers. Pelowski acknowledges that there is still a gap where the best console games have a higher quality bar, but Kabam is starting to close that gap. And in the meantime, the company is still monetizing its current games very well.
All of that adds up to a lot of value, says Pelowski. As to whether Kabam is part of a giant social gaming and social networking bubble, Pelowski says the underlying metrics of the business justify the investment.
Existing investors Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Canaan Partners also participated in the deal.
===============================
Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
Way Cool!: Windows Mango Phone with Internet Explorer 9
The Windows Mango Phone is way too cool with the IE9 as its main feature.
Though it still doesn't have a Flash Player (they've got Silverlight, that's why) and Thethering, it's worth a second look. It highlights smart communication, apps and the web. Watch the video here for a spin:
===============================
Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
Though it still doesn't have a Flash Player (they've got Silverlight, that's why) and Thethering, it's worth a second look. It highlights smart communication, apps and the web. Watch the video here for a spin:
===============================
Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Microsoft soon to buy Skype for $8.5 Billion?
This is one for the digital books. When Microsoft buys, Skype for $8.5 billion, I'd say this news can rival a Linkedin or even a Facebook IPO. Read the Yahoo! News article here.
Or read the copy-pasted version below:
(Source: Yahoo! News)
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Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
Or read the copy-pasted version below:
(Source: Yahoo! News)
-----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is close to buying Web video conferencing service Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion including debt, a source familiar with the situation said, underscoring the technology giant's growing ambition to plug a hole in its mobile offerings.
Buying money-losing Skype would have no immediate impact on Microsoft's finances, but would make clear its intention to compete with rivals such as Apple Inc and Google Inc.
Microsoft is putting more energy and resources into the mobile and Internet arenas as the importance of the personal computers underpinning its Windows and Office franchise appears to be under threat.
Microsoft's deal with Skype is expected to be announced as early as Tuesday morning, the source said. The source declined to be named because the talks are not public. Microsoft and Skype declined comment.
The deal would be the biggest in the 36-year history of the world's largest software company.
Despite doubling sales and profit in the last eight years, Microsoft's stock has largely languished at the same level, as investors worry about its ability to counter new rivals such as Google or adapt to new ways of computing.
Facebook and Google Inc were separately considering a tie-up with Skype, two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions previously told Reuters. Google had held early talks for a joint venture with Skype, the second source said.
A source said at the time such a deal could value Skype at $3 billion to $4 billion -- far less than the value put on it by Microsoft's interest.
Skype's planned IPO had been expected to raise about $1 billion, several other sources said at the time.
Microsoft already has video chat as a function in its Windows Live Messenger service, but it is not available on its Windows Phone 7 software.
Skype also makes versions of its own service which can be used as an app on the iPhone and iPad, Research in Motion's BlackBerry and Android phones. It cannot be used on Microsoft phones.
Apple's FaceTime video calling service -- available on its latest iPhone and Mac computers -- has been a big hit with consumers. Google recently followed suit by adding video to its popular Google Talk application for smartphones running on its Android system.
CASH PILE
The deal is relatively small for Microsoft, which has $50 billion in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet. The $8.5 billion purchase price would likely include the $686 million in long-term debt on Skype's balance sheet.
"I think the price is quite reasonable," said Sean Lee, a Taipei-based manager of the Global Top Dividend Fund at Shinkong Investment Trust, which owns Microsoft shares.
Luxembourg-based Skype, which had delayed plans for an initial public offering, had recently been looking at other options.
Skype was formed in 2003. Ebay Inc bought it in 2005 for $3.1 billion. Last year it took in $860 million in revenue but made a net loss of $7 million, according to data in its initial public offering filing.
In 2009, eBay sold a majority stake in Skype to an investor group that included Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz for $1.9 billion in cash and a $125 million note. EBay retained about a third of the company.
Last year, Skype had about 124 million connected users every month by the end of June. But 8.1 million were paying customers, using Skype to make calls to traditional phones at discounted rates.
A deal would be Microsoft's biggest acquisition since its formation in 1975 if it goes ahead, exceeding the $6 billion it paid for online ad agency aQuantive in 2007, which was not a success.
Microsoft shareholders are generally relieved that its $47.5 billion offer for Yahoo Inc in 2008 was rebuffed, paving the way for a web-search agreement which gives Microsoft most of what it wanted anyway, while Yahoo shares have halved in value.
Microsoft's most high profile Internet purchase was the $240 million it paid for a 1.6 percent share in Facebook in 2007. However, it is also plowing money into its MSN Internet portal and Bing search engine, racking up $7 billion in losses in the last four years.
Technology sector mergers and acquisitions have spiked since last summer, driven by increased confidence in the economy and companies facing pressure to spend mountains of cash stockpiled on their balance sheets.
Global deal volume year to date is up 55 percent when compared with the same period in 2010, recent figures from Thomson Reuters show.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are advising Skype, the source said. Microsoft is not using advisers, the source said.
Earlier, tech blog GigaOM reported news of the potential deal.
(Additional reporting and writing by Megan Davies and Bill Rigby; Additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore and Clare Jim in TAIPEI; Editing by Anshuman Daga)
===============================
Homer Nievera
Business Development. Digital Marketing. Social Media.
http://homernievera.net
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