Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase.com have renewed their deal to publish World of Warcraft in mainland China. The deal will now last an additional three years.
That means millions of Chinese World of Warcraft fans can breathe a sigh of relief. World of Warcraft was down for months in China the last time Blizzard made a change. At that time, Blizzard ended its relationship with The9 and switched to NetEase.com, but Chinese regulators didn’t approve the change.
Regulations matter a lot in China. American game companies cannot publish their own titles but have to work with a Chinese partner. Blizzard used The9 to publish WoW in China until 2009 and then switched to NetEase.com, another Chinese firm. That has helped turn NetEase.com into a major Chinese online gaming company.
But NetEase.com is still behind in publishing add-on content for the game. So far, NetEase.com has published the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. It also publishes Warcraft III and StarCraft II in China. And now it will also publish Mists of Pandaria, an upcoming add-on for the game influenced by Asian culture.
World of Warcraft is the world’s largest subscription online game with more than 10 million users.
“We’re grateful for the tremendous enthusiasm Chinese gamers have shown for World of Warcraft over the years, and we’re pleased to be renewing our agreement for the game in China,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We look forward to working with NetEase to deliver all of the new features and content of Mists of Pandaria to Chinese players as soon as possible.”
IAC-owned video-sharing-site Vimeo has appointed former AOL and Yahoo executive Kerry Trainor to the position of CEO, the company announced Monday morning. Trainor will replace Dae Mellencamp, who will continue working at the company as President.
“Under Dae’s guidance, Vimeo has grown from a fledgling video sharing site to a business with over 70 million unique users a month and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers,” said IAC CEO Greg Blatt, in a statement. “By uniting Kerry’s understanding of monetization and scale content businesses with Dae’s keen product and community sensibility, I’m confident Vimeo’s growth will accelerate. We really have high ambitions for this business.”
Despite a strong portfolio of products, including an assortment of new mobile apps and a striking redesign, the company likely isn’t making much money. Its focus has mostly been on signing people up for premium memberships rather than to sell advertising on top of videos, which is where YouTube makes its bucks.
Bringing Trainor over from AOL signals that the company may finally set its sights on generating money through ads and ad products. At AOL, Trainor served as Senior Vice President of Entertainment for about two years. Before that, he was the CEO of FlipGloss Media and head of global media products at Yahoo Music, according to Trainor’s LinkedIn profile.
At South By Southwest Interactive, we caught up with three entrepreneurs who have chosen Singapore as the geographical launch pad for their startups.
The tech community stateside has been buzzing about this Asian tech hub, and VentureBeat wanted to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth: Just what is it that makes Singapore so special? With these entrepreneurs, we discussed community, culture, competition, the talent pool, and venture capital in Singapore, and the folks we met with were quite enthusiastic about their hometown.
Here’s the first of three interviews on that subject. Stay tuned for the rest, and be sure to check out the startup referenced here, Gametize.
On Friday, stores around the world will be opening their doors to crowds of Apple fans, eager to be the first to swipe their frozen, grimy fingers across the glorious new iPad Retina display. The lines aren’t necessary, you can buy the devices online, but they’re an admirable feat of branding and marketing, and a display of just how hungry Apple fans are to have the latest gadget before anyone else.
If you’re planning on getting a new iPad tomorrow, here’s a guide to help you navigate the madness. The Apple Store isn’t the only game in town. Certified Apple Resellers will also have some units in stock, but the selection and inventory aren’t as dependable. I’d suggest calling ahead to find out how many units your reseller has before getting in line, but all stores (Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Verizon, AT&T, and Radio Shack) say they’re not allowed to share that information. Some won’t even receive shipments until tomorrow, including many smaller outlets such as college campus stores.
Pick your model (and your second choice, maybe third)
Before lining up, decide which iPad you plan on buying. Then, consider what features you’re flexible on since there’s a high chance that your dream configuration will be sold-out.
Color: It’s available in black or white — like anyone is admiring the back of your Retina-display iPad.
Size: New iPads are available in three memory sizes, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.
Price tag: Prices start at $ 499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model and go all the way up to $ 829 for the 64GB with 4G model (data plan not included).
Connectivity: The new iPad with Wi-Fi + 4G LTE will be available on Verizon or AT&T. You don’t have to sign up for a data plan when you buy, but you do need to pick what company you’ll be using since each iPad is pre-configured to work with just one of them. If you know which carrier you want, you can go directly to one of its stores and avoid the longer Apple lines.
Trade-in: If you already have an old iPad, you can trade it in when you buy your new model at some sellers. Exact trade-in offers can vary a bit, but for the most part they seem to be competitive. Verizon, Target, and (as of Wednesday) Apple each have trade-in programs for iPads. eBay’s Instant Sale option is another way to sell your old iPad, and the site tells you how much the device is going for at auction. There are other reselling sites like Gazelle, or you can donate it to worthy organizations like Teach for America.
Location, location, location
Even though Apple Stores get all the attention, iPads are actually available at a variety of certified Apple Resellers in the U.S. Sure, the line outside of the Norman, Okla. Target won’t have the same exciting rock-concert feel, but it might be much shorter. On the other hand, small stores get shafted in the selection department — many don’t know what they’re getting or how many until the iPads arrive. Here are your options:
The Apple Store
Apple stores open at 8:00am local time, but people are already lined up. You can order online anytime, but there’s already a 2-3 week wait. Apple recently added iPads to its buy-back program, which pays with an Apple gift card. The estimated price for a 64GB iPad 2 with 3G is $ 320. You can calculate the price for your model on Apple’s site.
If you’re considering camping out overnight for an iPad instead of just buying it online, chances are you’re in it for the experience or are really hard-up for something to brag about. Apple Retail stores are the place to spend a few chilly hours stretching in place, drinking free coffee, being marketed to by clever companies who couldn’t pass up a captive crowd, and having sleepy conversations with interesting characters (pictured) and like-minded Apple fans.
If you want to be in line when the doors open but don’t want to do all that boring waiting, you can pay someone to wait in line for you. There are offers on eBay and Craigslist, like this person charging $ 100 for his spot in line at the Los Gatos Apple store (Steve Wozniak’s favorite location).
There are benefits to buying your new iPad in an Apple store. The lines are longest, but the stock is going to be much larger there than at other stores. The staff is also better trained on the product and will be extra knowledgeable and helpful. Apple says each in-store customer will receive a “personal setup” service — a nice addition for those who need extra assistance migrating from an old iPad or setting up their email and apps on an iPad for the first time.
The new iPad will be available at all Apple retail stores in 10 countries. From left to right: Canada, U.S., UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan.
Stores open at 8:00am local time, but online sales begin at 3:01am Eastern Time. Verizon only sells 4G LTE iPad models that work on the Verizon network, but you can buy an iPad without immediately signing up for a plan. Verizon accepts trade-ins, and offers $ 325 for a working iPad 2, 64GB with 3G.
Stores open at 8am local time. AT&T is only selling 4G LTE iPad models that work on the AT&T network. The wireless carrier is requiring customers to purchase the minimum data plan, which is $ 25, along with the iPad. AT&T is not accepting trade-ins.
Making the most of the excitement, some 24-hour Best Buy locations will start selling the iPad at midnight. The New York City, Union Square location will begin handing out tickets to people in line at 10pm.
Like the other stores, Best Buy would not divulge how many units it had in stock. However, at least one Florida location has 2,000 iPads, which an armed store employee and accomplice attempted to steal Thursday, along with other Apple products totaling $ 1.3 million. The pair’s plan was thwarted when they were caught in the parking lot by an off-duty deputy.
Also beating Apple Retail to the punch, Walmart is opening its doors at 12:01am local time at its 24-hour locations. Walmart does offer a trade-in program online through Gazelle, but you’d have to wait for the gift card in the mail. You might as well just buy your iPad online.
Stores open at 8am local time. Target may not be opening at midnight, but the company is rolling out the red carpet for iPad buyers. They’re offering a 5 percent discount to shoppers who use the Target credit card, and are accepting trade-ins on the spot. They’ve said a top-of-the-line iPad 2 can get as much as $ 350 towards a new iPad, which is about $ 20 more than most other locations. Exact inventory is, of course, unknown.
Stores open at 8:00am, but pre-sales have already been available for weeks at some locations (they weren’t advertised). The most overlooked of the iPad retailers, Radio Shacks are supposed to have iPads in stock, but some have already pre-sold all of their units. The lines will be shortest here, but keep in mind that most Radio Shacks typically have a very limited numbers of iPads to begin with. For example, all locations in San Francisco had one shipment of just 50 to share, according to one Radio Shack employee.
Let the squealing begin. Oink, the also-ran mobile ratings application from Internet celebrity Kevin Rose’s startup Milk, is heading to the slaughter house after just four months of existence.
Oink is being shut down as Milk shifts focus to other projects, the startup announced Wednesday. The application’s corresponding website Oink.com will be shuttered by the end of the month and members are being encouraged to download their ratings and pictures should they wish to salvage something of their Oink experience.
The item-ranking and mini reviews application launched as a hybrid of Yelp, Instagram, and Foursquare and set out to help iPhone users discover what to do when they’re out and about. It was a hodgepodge of ideas all mashed into one application, and it did find some early favor with users. The application saw more than 150,000 downloads in its first month.
“Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts,” Milk said in a statement posted to the Oink website.
The statement comes off as very nonchalant, and is similar to the way someone would shuck off a bad day — oh well, on to the next one. But in a past conversation with VentureBeat, Rose talked optimistically about Oink, even suggesting that it could prove popular enough to allow for a future business model. It also stands to reason that Milk, which invested five months of development into the Oink application prior to its release, never intended to spend more time developing the application than it did supporting its growth.
Director Morgan Spurlock and Hulu SVP Andy Forssell took a few minutes to chat with VentureBeat today at South By Southwest in Austin.
Topics of conversation included how the Supersize Me creator’s new series, A Day in the Life, is faring with Hulu’s web-connected audience, and how Hulu plans to bring ever more content to screens of all sizes.
Check out the clip, and brace yourself for more interviews from SXSW this week.
You might notice a sudden surge of inexplicable tweets from the digerati over the next few days, as the hippest kids in hipsterdom descend upon Austin, Texas for the annual nerd-fest known as South by Southwest, SXSW, or just “South-By” if you’re really cool.
It’s a festival of parties, schmoozing, drinking, looking for good barbecue, eating breakfast tacos, and, of course, searching for the next big thing, the way Twitter was at SXSW in 2007 and AT&T most definitely wasn’t in 2008. Somewhere in there everyone finds time to go to a hugely packed schedule full of panel discussions on social marketing, entrepreneurship, music, social networking, whether Twitter is burned out, or not. Along the way, everyone will be trying out otherwise-useless apps like Highlight, Nomenclature, and a host of other “stalker” apps.
Feel like you’re missing out? Here are some things you might consider doing for the next few days instead (with a hat tip to Alexis Madrigal).
Throw your own party. Tequilas and tacos seem like a good bet. Invite everyone you can think of who has cool eyeglasses or ironic T-shirts.
Go for bike rides. If you live in a tech-heavy town like San Francisco or Brooklyn, there’s bound to be less traffic than usual in the bike lane.
Tech/media company AOL might be cutting a number of employees that work on its communication products like its e-mail client and AIM instant messaging service.
The layoffs, which would include two top executives, are expected to be announced by AOL soon, according to an AllThingsD report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The report indicates that AOL will cut about 40 employees, which includes SVP of business operations Eric Van Miltenburg and VP of AIM Jason Shellen.
Under CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL is in the process of transitioning away from its roots in the communication products and dial-up ISP business. The company’s new strategy is to focus on becoming a major media and advertising powerhouse, which has resulted in major revenue declines for the company over the past few years. Despite AOL stopping the revenue bleeding in Q4 of 2011, the company is still trying to find ways to cut costs.
AOL has had several of its top executives depart the company over the last six months, including Chief Technology Officer Alex Gounares, Huffington Post Media Group head engineer Tim Dierks, former AOL senior exec Brad Garlinghouse, and a number of high-ranking editorial employees.
VentureBeat has reached out to AOL for confirmation about the layoffs and will update the post with any new information.
UGrokit launched today to let you tag the stuff you lose the most with thin radio-frequency identification (RFDI) tags so you can find them with a sensor.
Several years ago, object locating systems such as Click N’ Dig could be found in catalogues and specialty retailers such as Brookstone. These systems use radio frequency to find keys, remotes, and other items by attaching a plastic disk receiver that can respond to a signal. Products like these are still around, but one of their hurdles to wide adoption is the size and cost of the receivers. Click N’ Dig for example, which costs about $ 40, comes with four receivers, but no others can be added.
UGrokIt is making object locating systems a bit more scaleable, with unlimited RFDI tags that are thin, washable, and can stick or attach to basically anything.
Co-founder Carrie Requist hopes that its technology will reach more people than RFDIs have in the past, because the cost of each tag is much lower than others out there. She tells me that she wants to see how researchers and students use the technology when it becomes available.
UGrokIt’s system (picture above) comes with a Grok, an orange RFDI scanner that connects to a smartphone and sends out the radio signal, and RFDI tags that can either stick to an object or loop around a cable or keyring. The tags use a small chip and a flat antenna that don’t require any electricity and cost $ 1 each. The Grok is powered by an app that records each item that has a tag assigned to it.
The system, which is available to reserve now, won’t come cheap. Expect to pay about $ 159 for the entire UGrokIt system when it releases.
UGrokIt was founded by Carrie and Tony Requist and has been bootstrapped funded so far.
Sunnyvale Calif.-based AMD’s AMD Ventures division is investing in Nuvixa so that the startup can continue work on its StagePresence video presentation tool, which extracts a human presenter from any background and embeds him or her in a digital desktop or slide presentation. It’s as if the presenter has been pasted into a presentation when viewed via video.
AMD will be able to run the Nuvixa software better on its microprocessors because the software will be optimized to take advantage of the OpenCL standard and AMD’s accelerated processing units, which combine graphics and processing on a single chip.
Champaign, Ill.-based Nuvixa’s StagePresence technology is an example of taking something that was designed for motion-sensing video games and converting it so that it can spice up normally boring presentations, training sessions, educational videos or any other video communications. Nuvixa uses a 3D depth camera, such as that used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, to capture a 3D image of the speaker. Then it inserts the speaker’s image into the presentation.
The company has created a technology that it calls UserExtraction, which snips a person’s image out of any background in a kind of virtual “green screen” effect similar to film editing techniques.
Using Z-Definition Technology developed by Nuvixa, you can capture a video of someone speaking and then insert that video into the content or presentation. You can also use it to bring a video conference to life, placing participants in a shared virtual space.
The company was founded in 2009. The founders include Sanjay Patel, former chief technology officer of Ageia Technologies, a physics technology firm that was bought by Nvidia; Minh Do, chief technology officer; computer scientist Dennis Lin; and video expert Quang Nguyen. All are faculty or students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Nuvixa is on the cutting edge of video processing technology and exemplifies why we created AMD Ventures; to foster an ecosystem that enhances the consumer and commercial computing experience,” said Manju Hegde (former CEO of Ageia), corporate vice president of content, applications and solutions at AMD. “The uniquely powerful compute capabilities of AMD APUs coupled with software solutions from companies like Nuvixa are bringing gesture-based computing and immersive video experiences beyond the conference room and into today’s notebook and desktop PCs, tablets and other consumer electronic devices.”
By optimizing Nuvixa’s technology, the company can get 96 percent better performance.
Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase.com have renewed their deal to publish World of Warcraft in mainland China. The deal will now last an additional three years.
