“We hope to simplify the way people collectively spend money with friends, neighbors, and colleagues,” Crowdtilt chief executive and co-founder James Beshara said in a statement.

Crowdtilt’s focus is on smaller groups of people who are pooling their money for a common goal, such as friends who want to rent a beach house. The process is what you’d expect if you’ve ever used Kickstarter, popular crowdfunding site. The person who creates the campaign sets a “tilt” point at which the campaign will get its funding and creates an expiration date. Right now the service is completely free, but that could change as the site grows.

Crowdtilt, while similar to Kickstarter, has a different set up and caters to a different market. With Kickstarter, you are often investing a new product, company, or project and you reap some tangible benefit, be it a new gadget, a piece of art, or a screening of film. Kickstarter also has an application process, to weed out certain projects. Crowdtilt lets you fund campaigns for whatever reason and at whatever amount your choose, no limits.

Group funding for charitable causes was Crowdtilt’s original purpose, but Beshara pivoted the company to what it is now. People have responded well and flocked to the site for their group funding needs. The site now has more than 3,000 users.

Crowdtilt originally started in Austin and launched a beta version of the service several months ago. The site is now available to the public and the company has moved its offices to Palo Alto, California.

Skyrim is awesome; Pinterest users need to calm the hell down; and Facebook users need to stay away from the gun cabinet.

In this week’s episode of VB Weekly, the VentureBeat writing staff takes a front seat, with a range of our editors and reporter spouting off about the stories they found most interesting.

This week, we’re talking about:

• Steve Jobs’ FBI file
• the crazy coming features for hit game Skyrim
• Facebook’s all-new lightbox for photos
• Pinterest’s semi-skeevy affiliate marketing play

All our loud-mouthedness is in the video, and we welcome yours in the comments section below. Have a great weekend!

Anonymous bullhorn, @YourAnonNews, is claiming that the Central Intelligence Agency‘s website has been taken down by the hacktivist group.

“CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” a person behind @YourAnonNews tweeted.

The attack took place roughly around 12:10pm pacific time on Friday, the website is still down an hour later. Anonymous traditionally has “F*ck FBI Friday,” in which it attempts to take down or release information about the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Last week, the group released a phone call regarding Anonymous that took place between the FBI and Scotland Yard.

The group recently took down the US Department of Justice website as well as a number of a record label website in response to the shut down of file sharing website MegaUpload. Low-orbit-ion-cannons (LOIC) were used to issue denial of service attacks to the many website it was targeting at the time. Denial of service attacks send multiple data requests to a website, in the hopes of overloading its servers, resulting in the website becoming inaccessible. These requests are also called “packets,” thousands of which can be quickly sent using LOIC.

Anonymous was also accused of providing links on Twitter, which would install LOIC on any computer that clicked the link. These links helped Anonymous recruit innocent bystanders to their their cause, launching denial of service attacks from any of the computers that accessed the link.

A similar attack may have been used to take down the CIA website, though it doesn’t look like the group distributed any of the same links that helped take down the DOJ.

hat tip RT

Anonymous image via Shutterstock

After sticking with a fairly consistent unibody MacBook Pro design for some time, Apple may be gearing up to bring design elements from its popular MacBook Air line into its more powerful models later this year.

The company is preparing a “top-to-bottom revamp” of the MacBook Pro lineup that will bring thinner unibody cases, solid-state hard drives, and forgo optical disk drives, sources tell AppleInsider.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard such talk, as rumors of a MacBook Air-inspired redesign for the MacBook Pro first started last year.  There’s also word that Apple is working on a 15-inch MacBook Air model, which could be related to this report.

That Apple will finally redesign the MacBook Pro this year doesn’t come as a surprise—the real question is to what extent. I have a hard time believing that Apple will completely remove the choice of larger traditional hard drives (SSDs are much faster, but hold much less) from the MacBook Pro. And while the optical disk drive is easy to forgo on an ultraportable laptop, consumers who rely on the MacBook Pro as their only computer would certainly miss the ability to throw in a DVD.

There are benefits to completely dropping older hardware on the MacBook Pro. It would allow Apple to bring the quick boot and instant-on capabilities of the MacBook Air to its wider notebook lineup, and it would also significantly improve battery life. And of course, such a move would help Apple one-up Intel and the many Ultrabook manufacturers who are trying to ape the style of the MacBook Air.

AppleInsider says that Apple is prioritizing the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s redesign over the 17-inch model, but that’s par for the course for Apple.

It’ll be interesting to see how Apple juggles its MacBook Pro and Air lines as they begin to more closely resemble each other. Most companies would be terrified about cannibalizing a successful new product, but Apple has already shown in the past it isn’t afraid to make sweeping changes if it will lead to better products.

For the scope of this article, I am leaving all of the commentary on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and such aside for others much more well-versed than I to discuss.

A lot of people have been asking me the same question lately: Just how do file-sharing sites like MegaUpload — recently taken down by an international collection of law enforcement — make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fund lottery-winner style lifestyles that include mansions and private jets?

It’s actually pretty straightforward. These sites use the same techniques as legitimate Web sites: search, social media, ad networks, and online payment processors.

Sites that feature links to illegal videos optimize for the keyword “links,” and users that seek such videos have learned to search for “links.” Generally, providers of legal content are not trying to land in searches for links; they are trying to land in searches for the word “videos.” So searching Google for a popular TV show such as NCIS followed by the words “free links” returns sites that feature links to pirated copies of the TV show.
Clicking on one of these Google links, such as TV-Links.com, returns a well-designed Web page featuring advertising from the likes of American Express and Hertz via retargeting ad networks such as Chango.

The page also features links to the latest NCIS episodes that are illegally hosted on download sites. Each link has a rating so that visitors will know when a file is no longer available due to a DCMA takedown. As there are numerous links available on numerous download sites, there is generally always an illegal copy available for viewing. It’s technically legal to link to illegally hosted copyrighted content, so these types of sites are seemingly doing nothing wrong.

Like many profit-oriented Web sites, clicking on one of these links actually takes you to a secondary page so that the site can generate an additional page view.
Clicking on a link sends the user to file-sharing sites such as VideoWeed.com that allow streaming video of hosted files, including retargeted ad networks ads from advertisers such as Virgin America.

After watching a set amount of video, users are incentivized to pay to watch more using their credit cards, processed by payment networks such as Skrill. You’re also offered the option to earn points towards viewing videos by accepting “offers,” such as a Netflix trial subscription.

If this all looks familiar and resembles so many media sites you come across, they’ve succeeded. That’s the intention.

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can follow him at@peteryared.

With TaskRabbit, you can hire someone local (called “Rabbits”) to run errands or do small bits of random work for you, including grocery shopping, data entry, and running all variety of objects hither and yon. The new open API is set up to be used in two ways. One is by companies that look for short-term workers on a regular basis, say for user tests or focus groups. The other is with to-do list apps and other tools that individuals use to say organized. Now these busy people will be able to find someone to tackle the tasks they can’t from within those apps.

Two to-do management apps have already taken advantage of the API, Astrid and Producteev. People who use those apps can outsource anything on their to-do lists without making a separate trip to TaskRabbit. User-testing company YouEye has integrated TaskRabbit into its site and is using it to hire test subjects.

The service is currently available in nine U.S. cities: Boston, New York, LA, Portland, San Antonio, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, and Seattle. It’s headed to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston next.

The San Francisco-based startup has raised $24.7 million in funding so far, the latest round of $17.8 million was closed in December 2011. In January, TaskRabbit acquired SkillSlate, a New York-based service for people auctioning off their skills and time.

via AllThingsD

Baby bunnies image via ShutterStock

Social daily deals and shopping website Sneakpeeq announced Friday is has raised $2.67 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have if you were shopping in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, pick up an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. That’s what Sneakpeeq wants to recreate. Instead of blatantly displaying prices on Sneakpeeq’s site, it plays coy by making you click a “Peeq” button. The Peeq button brings to mind Amazon’s “add to cart to see the price” practice, which can be irritating. Sneakpeeq isn’t trying it to be annoying; every time you click the button, you can get a discount on your purchase. It still adds an extra step to the buying process, but at least it doesn’t feel like extra work. You get a specific amount of “peeqs” per day and can earn more by interacting with the site.

It wouldn’t be a social shopping site without some Facebook integration and the company encourages you to share items you want to buy to your Facebook friends. Buy sharing, you get “badges” which can be redeemed for discounts and more peeqs. Sneakpeeq also has a Facebook integration that can post to your timeline every time you “peeq” at a price.

Sneakpeeq joins the ranks of many other discount social shopping sites, such as Fab.com and LuxeYard. Most of these sites, Sneakpeeq included, focus on action-driven buying, which encourages shoppers to share products and interact with other shoppers to get better prices.

The funding will be used for new site features, including gift buying, mobile apps, and video features.

Sneakpeeq is based in San Francisco, California.

Women peeking through blinds thumbnail (not pictured here) via Shutterstock

In an admission that surprised many, Facebook revealed that while its monthly usage figures on mobile were of course jaw-droppingly huge, the company still hadn’t figured out a way to make real money from those mobile users. As the S-1 states: “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”

Recent reports now state that Facebook is readying its first foray into mobile ads, with the launch of “sponsored stories” – a well-timed move if so, knowing that its mobile vulnerabilities would be revealed in the S-1.

So, now that Facebook is finally ready to commit to mobile revenues, how can it reap the rewards of having such a huge mobile user base (a stunning achievement of 425 million monthly active users)? What are the secrets behind encouraging high grossing user behavior across the mobile platform?

In my role as VP of Mobile at Badoo, I’ve experienced first hand the challenges and the rewards of scaling mobile users and revenues on a global scale. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

Mobile ads aren’t Always the easy answer

To allow ads or not to allow ads – that’s the philosophical question that founders like Zuckerberg have long wrestled with. Facebook famously delayed advertising on its primary site until it had a critical mass of users that were already hooked into the experience, had willingly given up mounds of personal data, and who wouldn’t desert the addictive platform if ads came along.

So when it came to mobile, they took the same approach. “Users first, revenues later.” Of course, in the case of Facebook’s mobile strategy, it turned out to be revenues “much later.” But, many companies struggle to even get scale in terms of mobile users, and Facebook has managed that better than anyone – nearly half a billion monthly users.

And while we’re on the topic of mobile ads, let’s be clear, turning on an integrated ad platform is no simple task. And while the mobile advertising market is now projected to grow to $17.6 billion by 2015, for a long time, it’s been the runt of the litter in terms of overall digital ad revenues. So while Facebook has been slow on the uptake, it’s hard to fault them for prioritizing other revenue streams that speak to its Internet roots, while quietly building an unparalleled mobile user base.

The challenge for Facebook now is to “turn on” mobile ads effectively, without sacrificing users. At Badoo, we chose not to go the ad route and embraced a freemium model that enhanced the user experience and paid dividends across both web and mobile platforms.

Make the right decisions on what to mobilize

The features that have attracted millions of users and developers to the Facebook Web platform are not just the widely emulated social functions, but the FB “app” platform, messaging and credits, to name but a few. What differentiates mobile at this stage, compared to say, the Web four years ago, is that so much of what makes Facebook special on the Web has already been executed brilliantly on mobile.

Messaging? You’ve got that out of the box on mobile, or you can download apps that will talk to any one or all messaging platforms. Apps? As a mobile developer, I have loads to choose from and they are really rich. I can even get them to talk to Facebook and get access to the social gold mine they’ve built. Credits? Yes. (Although paying for anything on mobile globally is still a challenge.)

And in the latter case, the value chain is very long, from banks and card processors, through mobile carriers, aggregators, specialist payment providers and even Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. – none of whom will want to hand over this key part of their business to Facebook (although some might be too dumb to prevent it).

So Facebook’s challenge has a meta-layer – not how to “port” FB to mobile, but what to mobilize, and how to pull users from apps they might already be using. How they can offer people more than they’re already getting?

Build high grossing user behavior into the DNA of your mobile app

When it comes to mobile apps, analysts predict that in-app purchases and a freemium approach will become the dominant apps business model in the future, and that paid apps will decline as a main source of revenue.

So when considering how to make a freemium model work for your mobile app, you should think about the following:

• Are you making your users do the work? If you’re asking users to make purchases from within a free app, you need to make sure that purchase is a no-brainer and that it leads to some tangible and instant gratification.
• Is there a logical flow to the user experience, where purchases make sense? In Badoo’s case, we offer “Super Powers” which are micro-payments that help you stand out in an online crowd. If you want to meet new people using our app, Super Powers will help, so even though the core of our product is always free, there is real value from upgrading your account.
• Are you thinking beyond games? While Zynga regularly tops the chart of high grossing free apps, there is life beyond social games. So think about how to make your monetized features fun and engaging in different ways. And always link it back to the core user experience, and how an in-app purchase could deepen your relationship with your user.
• Location-based behavior can help encourage higher grossing user behavior, but remember users buy into products and services – not technologies. Your location-based services need to add to your product, rarely are they a product in themselves.

Think global, but respect local

There are many challenges inherent in scaling a mobile strategy globally. There is clearly huge diversity in terms of mobile user behavior, platforms and devices, as you look region by region, country by country and even sometimes city by city.

So, how can you build something that represents your global brand, but is local enough to appeal to every user and therefore unlock a high percentage of revenue-generating behavior?

It’s a lot of work. At Badoo, we’ve spent the last 18 months designing and deploying to acquire millions of users in 180+ countries onto our multiple mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry and WAP (for non-smartphones). And when you think about the hugely complex billing and carrier aspects of a global mobile deployment, which need to be carried out without a whiff of disruption to the user experience, it’s easy to see why mobile engineers are in such high demand. It’s a huge job, it isn’t easy and it takes time.

We built location-based behavior into the core of our product, guaranteeing local relevancy to every user, wherever they were in the world. But getting them there, keeping them there, and encouraging them to make purchases, was and still is, a mammoth undertaking.

There’s currently no good substitute for the hard work of identifying local partners for things like payment integration. In our case, our London location and hugely diverse team from over 25 countries gives us a great head start in building out our local services globally.

Interestingly, when it comes to our mobile revenues, we’ve found that our mobile web users are almost as likely to pay for additional features as our app users. This insight provides some useful cues for companies looking to build a mobile audience that goes beyond “early adopters” in highly developed countries and into the global mainstream.

While apps are clearly hugely successful, and we’ve talked about the potential for in-app monetization, there’s still plenty of room for the mobile web, particularly when building a global product. Don’t neglect core mobile web users at the expense of iPhone and Android users if you want to build a truly global path to mobile monetization.

Wrapping up

Facebook has consistently innovated and executed at a rate that has left most of us breathless over the last few years. While its mobile revenue strategy might have taken a back seat until now, the revelations in the S-1 have surely lit the fire. The path to mobile monetization still has many turns ahead, so it will be interesting to see how Facebook explores the global mobile opportunity.

Matt Woolf is VP of Mobile at Badoo, the largest social network for meeting new people, with more than 136 million users worldwide.

Facebook on Android phone photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tomonobu Itagaki was at the top of his game. The legendary Japanese game design leader of Team Ninja, known for his sunglasses and leather pants, was making top-selling games in the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fighting series.

Itagaki left Tecmo-Koei, the owner of Team Ninja, in mid-2008 and got into a bitter lawsuit with his former company over royalties. It was a wrenching separation, and Itagaki finally related his version of events yesterday at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking through a translator on stage, he talked about what happened during a dark episode in his career and how he bounced back to create a new game development company, Valhalla Game Studios.

Itagaki said he originally wanted to be a novelist when he was in high school. He wanted to know the techniques to move people. Books and movies, he believed, were tools to move the thoughts and hearts of people. But he also spent a lot of time in gambling halls. To win, he said, you needed to control your rivals heart and emotions.

He read books such as The Red and the Black by Stendahl, The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Old Man the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and the novels of Raymond Carver. When he was young, he didn’t quite grasp these books. But over time, they became relevant to his career in games.

In that career, he said he learned to focus on the “Happy Three.” This included the happiness of the audience, the happiness of creators, and the happiness of game publishers. Only two or three times in his game-making life did he achieve all three of these goals. For public companies, he said, the fourth requirement for happiness is shareholders.

“It is much more difficult to achieve the Happy Four than the Happy Three,” he said.

He managed to do that when he was creating the PlayStation 2 version of Dead or Alive. He created the game in part to help Tecmo go public. But the game production got started way too late to be a launch title for the PS 2. The game ran off schedule and a sales general manager came to him to borrow a copy of the game, which was still in development. Itagaki gave it to him. Then Itagaki said the disk was sent off to manufacturing for publication, even in its unfinished state. The company made huge profits and the IPO was a success.

“But I thought I would quit making games,” Itagaki said.”An incomplete game was released.”

Some coworkers didn’t mind that. But Itagaki became depressed. He stayed at home for several months. He drank alcohol from morning to night, “but no matter how much I drank I could never get drunk.” His wife suggested he watch movies and bought him a lot of DVDs.

“It was more like just looking at the screen than watching movies,” he said.

One DVD film touched his heart, the Armageddon action movie that starred Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Bay. Itagaki watched the movie over and over again. It had a song sung by Steven Tyler for his daughter Liv Tyler. Itagaki had a three-year-old daughter of his own. Finally, she told him she didn’t want to watch this movie anymore, because the father dies. The film brought tears to Itagaki’s eyes. He kept on drinking and crying. It was, Itagaki said, such as stupid life he was living.

“What a stupid decision I had made,” Itagaki said. “I died as a game developer without even making something for my daughter.”

He decided he had to stop hiding, fight for his family and friends, and returned to work.

“There were many people waiting for me,” he said.

Itagaki pushed to make a version of Dead or Alive for the Xbox, not Sony’s platform, because it was the most powerful platform. He used Steven Tyler songs in the games, because he thought that Aerosmith and Armageddon saved his life, family, and career.

He eventually left the job and became an independent game developer. There was a lawsuit and other controversy, and Itagaki did not directly address the details of his departure.

He is now making a game called The Devil’s Third for THQ. He only has to worry about the Happy Three for that game and is a stockholder himself. He urged game developers to make games that can personally inspire people to change their lives.

“Do whatever you want to do with all your passion, to make everyone happy,” he said. “Not just for your own satisfaction. Make something that can change the life of your audience. I believe video games have such power.”

Mark Cerny, a fellow game developer, said he was touched by Itagaki’s talk. He noted that while Itagaki looks tough on the outside, his talk in Japanese was genuine, polite and heartfelt.

Chitika measured the percentage of its ad impressions that were delivered to iOS devices and the percentage going to OS X devices. According to the firm, iOS has been steadily gaining ground since August, 2011, while OS X has lost 25 percent of its market share since September.

As of February, 2011, the iOS market share surpassed OS X for the first time, with both notching approximately 8 percent of overall web page views.

It’s worth noting that this study applies only to web pages within Chitika’s network, but the company says that the data set includes hundreds of millions of ad impressions. Because the web-based data applies to devices that people are actually using, not what they’re buying, it’s an interesting correlation to sales-based data. In the first quarter of 2012, for instance, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and just 5.2 million Macs.

It’s not quite the death of the desktop, but mobile devices are gaining ground on their traditional brethren, at least within the Apple-centric world.

Still, Apple CEO Tim Cook is unlikely to be worried about one of his products losing market share to another, as Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng noted.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there’s much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Cook said on Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, “and there’s much more left to cannibalize.”

Hat tip: BGR

Chart courtesy Chitika.

The new Google store, reported yesterday by Bloomberg, will be a relatively small affair outside its European headquarters in Dublin. Like Amazon, which has plans for a small Seattle shop, the search giant is trying to make it clear that it’s simply dipping its toes in the water. “We’ve not made any decisions, it’s simply a planning application,” Google told Bloomberg by email in its typical engineer speak.

When Apple launched its first retail stores back in 2001, as this MacWorld story notes, there were plenty of doubters. “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” quipped one executive in BusinessWeek. Arne Alsin of Alsin Capital Management said in an article for TheStreet.com, “It’s desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.,” and, “this move is fraught with problems.”

These days, of course, the retail stores are credited with helping to drive the rabid adoption of Apple’s smartphones and tablets, boosting its profits to historic highs. But for the first two years, the company posted a loss on its retail division. And this was during a time when Apple didn’t have the mountain of cash it does today to backstop losses.

But like many of the Apple projects led by Steve Jobs, Apple never doubted itself or made excuses for its foray into retail. And that’s the thing that stands out about the recent moves by Amazon and Google; they lack commitment and ambition. Instead of the flashy glass temples that Apple erected to woo luxury consumers, Amazon and Google are planning small, tentative outposts.

Microsoft is the one company with a big stake in the future of phones and tablets that seems willing to open stores. But it too is avoiding any flagships in major cities, preferring to roll out small efforts in regional malls.

As consumer electronic shops and bookstores (remember those?) become a thing of the past, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google should follow Apple into the retail business with a bold hand. Otherwise, their forays are doomed to fail.

With the launch of the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision Blizzard (the parent company) made some controversial moves. One of them was to create the Call of Duty Elite social networking service for game fans. The service offered things like networking with friends, videos, service enhancements. But the controversial idea was that Activision wanted to charge a subscription fee for the premium version of the service. When bloggers heard about that, they revolted, Hirshberg said, because they thought that Activision would charge for things that used to be free.

“It’s a douche move,” said Neils Hansen (pictured on big screen below), a blogger who runs the Gunn Shop report on YouTube. He said he couldn’t believe that the company would alienate its core gamer base by charging money. He organized a protest to boycott the Elite service, even before he fully knew what it was.

“We had a summer of criticism,” Hirshberg said, speaking at the DICE Summit game conference in Las Vegas.

But Hirshberg said he believed from his creative background as an artist and advertising executive that games are not products, they’re brands. While people buy products, Hirshberg said, they “buy into brands.” That means that brands are a cultural phenomenon built around products such as games that inspire people to buy those products over and over again. By treating Call of Duty as a brand, Hirshberg said, the company could get away from the traditions that held that a game was a product that sold for $60. After all, in 2011, Call of Duty was a top ten topic of conversation on Facebook; it was the only entertainment brand with a product you could buy on the list.

To convince game players that there was a core Call of Duty experience, Activision created a campaign with the tag line, “There’s a soldier in all of us,” showing people of all sorts engaging in faux combat, as the weekend warriors who play games like Call of Duty. The company also created a service that players could buy into on a year round basis, delivering them new map content, vidoeos, shows, contests, and community features that could make Call of Duty into an ongoing experience, not just a product.

The company had a chance to turn around attitudes by appealing to the hardcore fans and the culture of Call of Duty. Activision then announced Call of Duty XP, a live event in Los Angeles where it would announce Modern Warfare 3 and Elite as part of a gigantic fan appreciation event. The event involved everything from paintball on a real Call of Duty map to eating at a Burger Town restaurant, which is a fictional chain in the Call of Duty games. The event was a huge success, generating $21.5 million in media impressions, 175 million Facebook impressions, 10 mil Twitter conversations, 9.8 million YouTube views, and huge livestream traffic.

Finally, at the Call of Duty XP event, Hirshberg revealed the price. It was $4.99 a month and it included all of the map packs that would normally cost gamers about $60 a year. It was a price that generated annual subscription revenue for the company. And Hansen, the Gunn Shop blogger, came back and said that he would eat his words and subscribe. It wasn’t, after all, a douche move. Activision could only accomplish something like this by establishing Call of Duty as a brand, guaranteeing gamers a unique experience, and getting the gamers to buy into the value of what it offers, Hirshberg said.

Elite had a rocky launch and it is far from perfect, he said.

“This is not a victory lap and we had technology stumbles,” Hirshberg said.

But the company has 7 million sign-ups and 1.5 million paying subscribers so far. That’s a success, and one that forced Activision to look to what it could learn from creative concepts, not just business ideas. The new tagline for Elite, Hirshberg joked, is, “Call of Duty Elite. It’s not a douche move.”

If you live in Iran, however, the government celebrates by blocking access to all websites using the “HTTPS” protocol, which includes sites from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and basically any banking web service. Essentially, this means the internet is useless. Multiple sources reporting about the new internet restrictions, including Kabir News , believe that its related to the 33rd anniversary of the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s monarch leadership.

The restrictions are speculated to remain in place for the next few weeks at most. It also comes at a time where Iranian government authorities are enacting tougher web restrictions that drastically slow down connection speeds, require all local ISPs to keep records of all subscriber data, and force internet cafe owners to add video surveillance to record the faces of all patrons.

This isn’t this first time Iran has decided to clamp down on public decent by censoring the internet. The government routinely cut off internet access in response to the large amount of protest surrounding the country’s 2009 “elections”, which were believed by many to be little more than a puppet show. The government also recently sentenced U.S.-born Iranian citizen Amir Mizra Hekmati to death for developing games with a pro-westernization stance.

As for the current situation, plenty of code-savvy folks on Hacker News are already suggesting possible workarounds. (Obviously, the Iranian leadership hasn’t seen Serenity or they’d know you can’t stop the signal, Mal.)

[Internet censorship image via ShutterStock]

Electric car maker Tesla unveiled its latest electric vehicle last night, the Model X, a cross-over that offers more space than the company’s Model S sedan and original sporty Roadster.

For those waiting for a semi-affordable electric car that offers plenty of space, power, and versatility, the Model X looks to be the best option yet.

Like other cross-over vehicles, the Model X sits somewhere between a sedan and a SUV. But Tesla couldn’t help but add its own spin to the form: the Model X features funky rear doors, dubbed “Falcon Wings,” that flip up and allow you to easily step into the car.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the Falcon Wings are the largest rear door openings found in a passenger car, CNet reports.

Tesla expects the Model X to retail close to the Model S’ price, which starts at $49,000. The company will offer the same battery options as the Model S as well, which ranges from 160 mile to 300 mile configurations. The Model X will get around 10 to 12 percent less range than the Model S, due to its added weight.

The Model X features a full third-row of seating (accessible by sliding the middle row forward), allowing it to hold up to seven passengers and their cargo. Tesla will also offer an all-wheel drive option, a first for the company, in addition to the base rear-wheel model. Thanks to the Model X’s electric drivetrain, the car can intelligently tweak the torque of every wheel to easily adapt to changing driving situations.

Tesla plans to begin production of the Model X in late 2013, with deliveries starting in 2014.

Silicon Valley better watch out.

A few weeks ago I was invited to Helsinki as a guest of Finnish investment fund Vision+. Soon after landing, word spread that a scion of Sean “Diddy” Combs had arrived in town, and I was shown the red carpet. (I used to work with Diddy.) I spent seven whirlwind days taking meetings and partying hearty with some of the best and brightest tech companies and startups that Finland had to offer, including folks from leading game publisher Rovio.

One of my favorite finds was Hitlantis, which has one of the most unique graphical user interfaces I have seen from any music startup. With over 6,000 independent bands already using the platform, platforms like Myspace, Spotify, and Google Music could be bolstered by acquiring this unique startup. As a lover of music and games, I fell for Hitlantis’ unique Music Plasma-like GUI, which enables music discoverability that eludes most of us on Vevo, Pandora, and Spotify. Instead of a list of “Featured Artists”, Hitlantis allows for actual contextually relevant discovery.

Hitlantis' music-discovery interface

One of my other favorites, Kiosked, may end up changing the way online retailers operate. With its distributed content retail model, Kiosked lets consumers engage a retail transaction through any Kiosked-enabled image on the web. Imagine a politician using every image of himself online as a way to raise capital for his political ambitions. Imagine Lady Gaga selling her music through every image of herself on the web. This company looks like a game changer.

One of my favorite nights in Helsinki started with a dinner hosted by my hosts at Finpro. To put Finpro in context, the organization consists of 66 offices in 45 countries offering Finnish companies local market knowhow in all major global markets.They work closely with Tekes—the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation—and the other key actors in the Finnish innovation system to offer Finnish startups a kick start for their international growth. Their presence isn’t limited to tech, though, so I had the pleasure of meeting Jukka Hilden a partner at Rabbit Films at dinner that evening. Although I tend to stay away from physical comedy troops, Rabbit Films and their Dudesons content franchise have shown that with an aggressive and unique approach, a Finnish media company can reach a global audience. Their partnerships with US-based production companies and development deals with content aggregrators across the globe are a model for any fledgling production company.

As a gamer and mediaphile, I always find it a rush to discover the next generation Napsters, Spotifies, and Guitar Hero’s. Along those lines, SongHi is one startup I thought was particularly interesting.

SongHi is a social music game where you can earn fame by making your own songs, customizing your own virtual music character, decorating your personal home, and sharing all of this with your friends in a game-like environment. This game certainly engaged my creative juices. In SongHi you don’t need to know anything about playing musical instruments, composing, or notes. You can create music easily by ear with only a click of the mouse.

As in the more progressive virtual environments, consumers might even run into their favourite bands and artists in SongHi and join their music-making competitions!

In the non-music space I found two startups particularly interesting: Web of Trust and Fair Tourist.

Web of Trust, the first crowdsourced safe-web-browsing tool grades websites on their safety and lack of harmful spyware and virus’. With almost 30,000,000 users, this platform is creating a web within the web of safe sites.

Their safe surfing browser tool is easy-to-use, fast, and completely free.

Fair Tourist is the first platform that encourages sustainable travel across the globe.This platform empowers travelers, tourism businesses, as well as investors and non-profit organizations to create a community that takes action and changes the face of tourism. The community has a shared vision of a new era of tourism. In its vision, the interests of the local communities, tourists, businesses, and the environment intertwine creating a sustainable world for travelers to experience. Fairtourist aims to become the leading platform to fulfil this vision.

Destinations get the necessary funds for their development projects; the conservation of the environment, restoration of precious historic monuments and places, and capacity building projects to manage tourism in a sustainable way. The traveler gets an enhanced experience, and sustainability is improved.

My trip to Helsinki wouldn’t have been complete, of course, without the serendipity of staying in the same hotel as Pop Icons Maroon 5. After running into the band at dinner, I ended up at their concert at Helsinki’s “Cable Factory” along with thousands of screaming Finns. Quite an unexpected treat.

168 hours in Helsinki was slightly more expensive than a week in NYC or SF, but the quality of the restaurants combined with the high quality of the nightlife provided by groups like Night People Group and venues like Ari Cocktail Lounge created a perfect environment to engage the next generation of startups to follow Finnish success stories like Rovio and Nokia.

For the roving tech traveler, I give Helsinki an 8.8/10 on the business and play scale. Other aspiring Silicon Valley clones will have a hard time competing, so you better get started!

Kwasi Asare was the mastermind behind Sean “Diddy” Combs’ new media empire, overseeing the development and marketing for Diddy’s brands, including Ciroc, Sean John Fragrance, Sean John Clothing, and Bad Boy Entertainment.

He has executed global marketing campaigns for artists and brands such as Ice Cube, Prince, Pharrell Williams, Wu Tang Clan, LL Cool J, Outkast, Gnarls Barkley, John Legend, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige,The Roots,The Fugees, Ricky Martin, Funkadelic, Cypress Hill, Diageo, Sony Music, and Estee Lauder.

He is currently CEO of FIGHTER Interactive, Inc, which builds celebrity and brand-driven games and applications for the Facebook, iPhone, Android, and iPad platforms.

He began his career as an investment banker at Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney.

[Helsinki photo credit: Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock]

The DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is well under way this week, bringing some of the game industry’s best minds together in Las Vegas for a few days of networking, thinking, talking, back-slapping, and partying. Staged by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, it is a chance for the best of the business to shine, from an opening keynote by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game developer Todd Howard on why we create and play to the game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, complete with a red carpet show.

More than 700 game developers and other professionals will attend the event this year, according to Martin Rae (pictured below), president of the AIAS. He said in an interview that he believes that the industry is doing very well, with new platforms flowering and indie designers sprouting up all over the place.

“Some people call me crazy, but the game business is in a golden age,” Rae said. “Anytime the game industry goes through a transformation, some parts of the business won’t grow like they used to. But if you truly measure everything, games are growing like crazy. There are so many more demographic groups playing games, including my mother. It runs through the whole population, and you have to believe 2012 will be a great year.”

I’ve been to every one of the DICE Summits over the years, and I always find them fascinating and valuable for networking. By no means are they extravagant or elegant by Hollywood standards. Even though there are a few velvet ropes at this event, if they let me past some of them, well, it can’t be that exclusive. We will see more social and mobile game developers there, but the core game developers have decided that the new guys won’t bring down the party standards.

“We’ve got [Zynga chief game designer] Brian Reynolds and [Nexon America cofounder] Min Kim from the social and online industry, and that’s a recognition of how they represent the new industry,” Rae said.

This year, Rae hopes the audience will find the sessions to be more conversational, with speakers on a dais that extends into the audience so that they’re surrounded on three sides by the viewers.

To me, DICE is like the watering hole of the industry. Executives from rival publishing houses and enemy platforms laugh and party it up with each other as if they were the best of friends.

There are so many movers and shakers at the conference that I always wonder what kind of deals take place there. At one past summit, Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, lead designer at Epic Games, gave a pitch to Ed Fries, then the head of Microsoft Game Studios. And soon enough, the Gears of War franchise was announced, with Microsoft as the publisher. It makes me wonder what would have happened if Bleszinski had bumped into the Sony guys at the bar that night.

Another time, I saw a Microsoft chieftain chat in the corner with a prominent Sony game developer. Years later, that developer finally started making games for the Xbox 360. I can always tell there’s some wheeling and dealing going on because when I show up, people exchange furtive glances and stop talking. One of these days, I’ll catch them chatting about how Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are going to build the XboxStationWii 10,000 together, so they can gang up on Apple.

I fondly remember one summit where a developer took me out of the main room and showed me a web page on a laptop. It displayed the first known patent filings for the Cell microprocessor, the brains of a box that Sony would eventually call the PlayStation 3. After I wrote a story about it, hell broke loose. I learned many years later that IBM, which was co-producing the Cell chips, was pissed at Sony because the Japanese company put the names of its engineers on the patent filing but not the names of the IBM engineers. After threats of a lawsuit, Sony added the names of the IBM engineers to the filing.

On stage, the speakers aren’t always sensational, but they’re inspirational and memorable. In 2010, Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, gave a talk entitled “Beyond Facebook” where he envisioned everyone would copy the game industry’s success and offer achievements and rewards for things like brushing your teeth or riding the bus instead of taking a car. Two years later, the trend that Schell observed has turned into the “gamification” industry, where corporations try to get users to get more engaged with products via game-like rewards.

Among this year’s highlights: On Thursday, Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley talked about his new Innovative Leisure startup, followed by a discussion from the startup’s creative team: Rich Adam, Ed Logg, Ed Rotberg, and Owen Rubin — all former arcade game designers who worked at Atari during its golden years. They talked about how mobile games have become the new arcade, and 99 cents is the new quarter.

Today, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, will talk about his perspective coming into the game industry from the marketing and advertising side of the world. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, was inducted into the Academy’s Hall of Fame and give a speech about the next 20 years of technology and games. Transmedia (making game properties that spread across different media from comics to TV) is a topic for multiple speakers.

The Summit’s 15th Interactive Achievement Awards was once again emceed by comedian Jay Mohr (pictured top). Brian Crecente, news editor of Vox Games, referred to the ceremony as “the Other Academy Awards,” oft overshadowed by the movie and music equivalents. These, as well as the Game Developers Choice Awards coming in March, still aren’t televised. The lack of visibility is due to the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the video game business is still a young industry. As more and more entertainment becomes more interactive, Rae said, and as the game industry matures, then the recognition of developers will become more and more relevant to larger groups of people. The awards will be livestreamed on GameSpot.

Sebastian Haley, our GamesBeat reviews editor, is attending DICE for the first time along with me. Please check the GamesBeat section for our stories. A few of the sessions will be webcast on GameSpot, and post-show videos of the talks will be aired. And if you hear about any big deals happening in the hallways or the poker tables, let me know.

Here’s hoping that this DICE will be another memorable one.

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi and AIAS]

Following Netflix’s lead, Roku launched its line of streaming media set-top boxes in the UK and Ireland back in January with a fraction of the channels offered by its U.S. counterpart. The company’s set-top boxes allow people to stream over 40 channels of content on their televisions, including video, music, social and gaming services. Some of the channels offered include Netflix, Crackle MLB.tv, UFC, Classical TV, TuneIn, Facebook, Flickr, and others.

The BBC iPlayer, which offers public television programs on an on-demand basis, is one of the biggest streaming video services in the country, with people consuming over 187 million shows per month on average. While most people in the U.K. consume iPlayer content on a desktop via web browser, I’d imaging it will be a nice option to play it on the big screen with all the other streaming channel options.

Many are still speculating that Roku will eventually add another big channel to its lineup in the next few months—Netflix competitor LoveFlim, which is owned by Amazon.

The company says that it has surpassed 15 million connected users (it’s unclear how many of those are active) since its launch in 2006. Rebtel users have made over 500 million calls on the service and have chalked up over two billion minutes of international calls.

Rebtel offers mobile and desktop PC apps that let its users call each other for free, or make inexpensive calls to international numbers. The company’s service is also accessible through any landline or mobile phone without an app. Rebtel just recently released version 2.0 of its iPhone app, which added a first-ever feature to let you hop between voice and data networks during a call.

Not only is Rebtel growing quickly, the company boasts that its average revenue per user (ARPU) is triple Skype’s. Skype now sees a monthly ARPU of $8 per month, while Rebtel’s ARPU is $24. The company increased its revenue by more than 55 percent last year to reach $60 million, and it expects to earn $95 million in 2012.

The Swedish company has spent considerable funds and effort setting up the infrastructure for its service. CEO Andreas Bernstrom told us previously that it brought in $20 million worth of financing from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures in 2006 to build a system that could connect with operators around the world and terminate voice calls in any country. During 2011, the company put together the data side of its infrastructure, including codecs and stacks to carry voice over data connections.

VoIP call photo via Shutterstock

Much like the response to SOPA in the United States, online activists in Europe have been able to generate vigorous pushback through petitions and blackouts of certain sites. And while the movement against ACTA began on the internet, protests are being held in 60 Germany cities tomorrow.

While 22 out of 27 members of the EU have signed on to ACTA, many are now changing their tack in response to the public outcry. “I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention,” said the Slovenian ambassador to Japan, Helena Drnovsek Zorko, who had signed. “Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.”

Zynga’s rise to a social gaming juggernaut traded on the public markets—which now boasts a market cap roughly equal to long-established companies like Electronic Arts—highlights the rapid transformation of the gaming industry.

Boston’s Spark Capital, eager to tap the next wave of startups in that space, has added Nabeel Hyatt, a general manager who helped founded Zynga Boston, as their first venture partner.

Hyatt has a long history as a tech entrepreneur. He trained as a designer and engineer, and spent the early part of his career as vice president of product development for Ambient Devices, an MIT Media Lab startup creating glanceable technology, embedding Internet information in everyday objects such as light bulbs, mirrors, refrigerators and umbrellas to make the physical environment an interface to digital media.

Ambient was named in Ideas of the Year by The New York Times in 2002, and Hyatt was a nominee for the Top Innovators Under 30 by MIT Technology Review.

During the heady days of the dot-com boom, Nabeel was COO of Teamtalk, a publicly traded online sports content and technology company. He worked at the Cambridge based Conduit Labs, which started out making Flash based games for the web, and transitioned to building for the Facebook platform before being acquired by Zynga and becoming the centerpiece of their Boston operations.

“As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather carefully. I’ve been an entrepreneur as long as I’ve been anything, and I still have boundless energy to work in startups. For me it felt like time to see if I could shift my focus from building a single company to impacting the broader ecosystem,” Hyatt wrote on his blog. “Anyone who knows me knows I’m a deep believer in startup culture. Not the “startup scene” – who cares about that really – but the engine of learning, risk, and ownership culture that draws so many of us in. Thankfully that ecosystem feels really healthy right now, with more companies starting, and more angels supporting them, in those early days.”

Currently, Amazon offers its streaming video service as an added perk for members of its Prime membership, which costs $79 per year and includes free two-day shipping on lots of items sold on the online retail giant’s website. At its core, the Prime membership’s purpose is to make purchasing items through Amazon more attractive because people feel like they’re getting more of a deal since shipping fees aren’t factored into individual purchases.

“The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers. The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today—we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future,” Amazon Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition Brad Beale told Gigaom recently.

One reason people are speculating that Amazon will split off the Prime video portion into its own subscription service is that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said during the company’s fourth quarter earnings, “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours.”

Another reason people expect a standalone Prime video service Amazon’s aggressive pursuit of new streaming licensing agreements. In July, the company added streaming content from CBS and NBCUniversal. It added Fox Network content in September. And earlier this week, Amazon signed a deal to bring Viacom video content to Prime, which makes the Prime service’s streaming library more competitive with Netflix and Hulu.

Personally, I don’t expect Amazon to break its streaming video into a standalone service. And since the company’s main focus is to drive more sales to its retail business, it doesn’t make sense to provide ways for people to get only what they want without interacting with the main website. Right now Amazon doesn’t have to spend money promoting and marketing its Prime video for it to remain lucrative. That wouldn’t be true if it was a standalone service.

A source tells VentureBeat the buyer is Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm, which is paying between $200 and $250 million for the stake of the company. Globes describes the firm as a “large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars in assets under management.”

Yozma invested $1.5 million the company back in 2006 for a 9 percent stake. With this latest deal, Yozma will see a 200 percent return on investment. Ofer Holdings Group will reap the greatest beneft; it owns more than 30 percent of Yozma.

Conduit offers the following three services to increase publisher’s user engagement: a community toolbar that boosts traffic and grows website communities; a mobile service that creates apps; and the Wibaya Bar, which promotes social engagement.  The company says that more than 260,000 publishers and 250 million end users in 120 countries use its services, including Major League Baseball and Groupon.

The deal has not been finalized but a few unnamed sources revealed that Sequoia was responsible for $17 million of the funding. Lawyer Michael J. Patrick from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There must be something red hot here for Sequoia to invest at that valuation. This isn’t naïve money.”

He also makes a note of how remarkable the $100 million valuation is for such a small company.

Stripe gives online merchants the ability to accept credit card payments. The company lets anyone build custom forms and makes sure all sensitive data is safe and secure. Stripe also offers no monthly or setup fees and no hidden costs, just a transaction fee of 2.9 percent and 30 cents per successful charge.

The company is competing with PayPal, the online payment system giant, and several other payment startups. But what’s interesting is that three of PayPal’s co-founders have invested in the company. PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk participated in the company’s seed round, and co-founder Max Levchin contributed to this latest round. Perhaps the company wants to foster new growth in the payment processing space, or just doesn’t view Stripe as much of a competitor.

The company has previously raised $1.8 million from investors including Ron Conway and VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz.

Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.

Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.

As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.

But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.

Sketches of Double Fine's new game

“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”

The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.

Video game sales crashed 34 percent in January, with total industry sales falling 34 percent to $750.6 million from $1.14 billion a year ago, according to market researcher NPD Group.

The lousy performance of video game sales in physical retail stores masks what’s really happening as the industry transforms to digital sales, which aren’t captured in the retail numbers. Gamers are shifting their purchases to online, social, and mobile forms of gaming—dubbed digital gaming—while the retail side is shrinking fast. And the growth in digital isn’t quite big enough to offset the shrinking retail numbers.

In January, hardware sales were $199.5 million, down 38 percent from $324.0 million a year ago. Software was $355.9 million, down 38 percent from $576.0 million a year ago. Accessory sales were $195.2 million, down 18 percent from $237.1 million a year ago. In December, hardware sales were down 28 percent while software was down 14 percent.

Full told, the estimated total consumer spending on games includes physical video and retail games, used games, game rentals, subscriptions, full-game digital downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile games. Not counting hardware, sales were $379.6 million, down 37 percent from $603.2 million a year ago.

Liam Callahan, analyst at the NPD Group, said, “January retail performance experienced steep declines with a lack of software launches, and poor hardware and accessory performance partly related to bad comps from Kinect-related success in January 2011.” A year ago, there were a lot more releases of new video games in January.

He added, “Outside of new physical retail sales, we estimate that the consumer spend on other ways to acquire content including used games, full game and add-on content downloads, social network games, mobile games, rentals and subscriptions accounted for an additional $350 – $400 million in sales.  Our final quarterly estimate of the Q1 2012 consumer spend in these areas will be released in our Q1 Games Market Dynamics: U.S.”

David Dennis, spokesman for Microsoft, said that the Xbox 360 had another month as the leader in console sales. The Xbox 360 led U.S. hardware sales for the 13th month in a row, selling 270,000 units in January. Microsoft said it holds 49 percent share of console sales, with the total retail spend on Xbox hitting $301 million.

NPD is working with research company EEDAR to try to come up with more accurate numbers for global digital and physical game sales worldwide. The top-selling game of the month was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (pictured), which was launched in November and is the top-selling video game of all time.

LinkedIn announced its earnings today, with revenue making an impressive jump up 105 percent, beating street estimates.

The company is a business-centric social network that aims to connect people for networking, job opportunities, resources, and more. In May of 2011, the company completed its initial public offering, to a good reception, but then leveled out in the third quarter. LinkedIn’s revenue topped at $167.7 million in the fourth quarter, 67 percent of which was revenue generated by the United States.

Thirty-three percent of total revenue has actually come from LinkedIn’s Premium Subscriptions. These are pay-to-play subscriptions for heavy users and job seekers. Sales are predicted to total between $840 million and $860 million for the year. The website was the 36th most visited web property in December of 2011, according to a report by comScore.

The company’s stock is up 6 percent in after hours trading. Check out more stats from LinkedIn:

• Fourth quarter revenue was $167.7 million, up 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010
• Fourth quarter net income was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the same quarter last year
• GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter was $0.06; Non-GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter was $0.12
• For the full year 2011, revenue increased 115% to $522.2 million from $243.1 million. GAAP EPS increased to $0.11 from $0.07 and Non-GAAP EPS increased to $0.35 from $0.24. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $98.7 million from $48.0 million

LinkedIn image via TheSeafarer/Flickr

The information about the Google-branded device comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed people briefed on the project. If true, it would mark the Google’s first attempt at creating a hardware product without the aid of an electronics manufacturing partner. The search giant has historically concentrated its resources on developing web-based services, and more recently its open-source Android operating system software for mobile and streaming media devices.

The report indicates that the device is being developed by Google’s Android department, which has previously worked with consumer electronics companies HTC and Samsung on a Google-branded smartphone running a “pure” version of the Android OS. The report also states that the device would allow people to make purchases through the Android Market, which may not be restricted to just music—meaning video, podcasts, etc.

In addition to the word-of-mouth rumors, there are several reasons to believe Google is indeed developing its own streaming device. Last week, an FCC application from Google was unearthed requesting permission to use an undisclosed new “entertainment device” in four major cities over the next six months. As I previously theorized, the data transfer process for the device described in the application would probably allow people to grab video or audio content from the Internet and then distribute it to all their other mobile devices or set-top boxes using Bluetooth technology. The benefit of this would be that people aren’t exhausting their overall network or racking up expensive data charges from wireless carriers.

Also, The timing of the news coincides with Google nearing approval from federal regulators on its acquisition of prominent consumer electronics company Motorola Mobility.

Sweeney, a shy but brilliant programmer who helped create the backbone graphics engine for Epic’s blockbusters, predicted in his talk that games will look better and better, and upcoming advances will be so good, that console makers will be able to introduce next-generation machines that will blow us away with their visual quality. That point is up for discussion. Nintendo proved with the Wii that gamers may care more about innovations with the user interface—such as the motion-sensing Wii remote—than they do with graphical quality.

“How good is good enough, and how close are we to that now?” Sweeney asked.

Our eyes are equivalent to the quality of a 30-megapixel camera. You don’t perceive improvements in frame rate beyond 72 frames per second. Many games already run at a rate of 60 frames per second. The best resolution for humans, then, is 8000 x 4000 pixels, or several times better than today’s best displays. That is about 20 billion to 40 billion triangles per second in terms of graphics rendering.

“The limit really is within sight,” Sweeney said.

Graphics technology tries to calculate approximate renditions of reality. In Doom, the id Software first-person shooter from 1993, the developers were able to create a first-order approximation of reality. Now we’re getting enough computing power to get a third order of approximation of reality, as seen in Epic’s Samaritan demo (shown below). Doom’s rendering required 10 megaflops; Unreal in 1998 required 1 gigaflop; and now the Samaritan demo requires 2.5 teraflops, an order of magnitude higher.

Doing a human face with movie-level accuracy is still very hard to do, Sweeney said. He believes that chip makers could double computing power every two years (as predicted with Moore’s Law), and that could continue for quite some time (perhaps even a couple of centuries) with the vertical stacking of chip circuitry and other advances in leading-edge physics.

That’s a bold claim, but predictions about how fast technology will advance in the long term always tend to fall short of reality.

“Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney said he is equally inspired by non-graphical pushes in game technology. He is inspired by advances in 4G ubiquitous wireless networks, sensors, navigation systems, Kinect motion-sensing, and Apple’s Siri voice recognition.

“Kinect carried the technology for sensors to its amazing completion,” Sweeney said. “We are going to see some of the possibilities of what will happen over the next decade or two.”

He is also fascinated by cloud computing, which supplies the intelligent answers to Apple’s Siri via the Internet. He said that OnLive and Gaikai hold a lot of promise in creating cloud-based services where you can play high-end games without needing high-end hardware.

“Only question is whether a game runs in your living room or in a server,” he said. “It’s not going to change everything, but it will make things more convenient for gamers.”

In a wild prediction, Sweeney said that physical resources will become scarce, but virtual resources are unlimited, and we may see more of our economy shift from real-world to virtual goods. The worldwide real estate industry is worth $25 trillion, but a virtual economy could be a lot bigger than that.

Sweeney said he thought that Samsung’s transparent displays (shown at the recent Consumer Electronics Show) and augmented reality smart eyeglasses could be cool as well.

While the world is creating new game platforms now, such as smartphones and tablets, Sweeney thinks that will change, and we will see the industry converge on a smaller number of platforms. He is fascinated that tablet computers are stealing a march on the PC.

“We’ve just barely scratched the surface of the consumer applications of new technologies,” said Sweeney. “It’s going to lead to an entirely new world. I see a bright future for the future of computing and its implications for games. Our industry’s brightest days are yet to come.”

Indonesia’s Communications and Information Minister has declared that anyone tweeting illegal content, such as blasphemy, pornography, and threats, could spend up to 12 years in prison.

Indonesia has a strained history with free speech issues and open media, so a law that would punish Twitter users harshly for their words isn’t entirely surprising. The case of Prita Mulyasari is one big example of how uncomfortable the country is with online communication. Mulyasari was jailed and fined for sending e-mails to 20 of her friends that complained about a hospital’s service.

So now, with Twitter, another online service that makes it easy to complain or send lewd messages, users best be careful. Minister Tifatul Sembiring said Monday that the government is studying Twitter and that it would pursue all users found violating its strict laws, according to the Jakarta Globe.

“If they violate the laws, they will be punished,” Tifatul reportedly said. “Principally, every account user could be held responsible by tracing his position and device.” he said.

There are five offenses that could bring the government after you: pornography, gambling, threats, fraud, and blasphemy. And according to Indonesia’s Information and Electronic Transactions Law, users violating these rules can face between seven and 12 years in prison.

So, Indonesians, the next time you think about tweeting (or Facebooking for that matter) that Justin Bieber has a goofy haircut or that M.I.A. has an ugly middle finger, just hold off. Instead, write your government representatives that you want to make fun of celebrities and government officials without fear of prison time.

Twitter bird in jail illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Updated with comment from Google at 5:14pm PT.

A new vulnerability in Google Wallet gives thieves access to your funds, even if the application data has been erased.

Google Wallet lets you digitize your credit cards and pay for things using near-field communication (NFC). That is, all you have to do is touch your phone to an NFC device and the item you’re buying is automatically charged to your account. Google has touted that its wallet isn’t like the leather ones—it actually has a lock on it. This lock exists in the form of a PIN number that must be entered for access to the wallet. But a hack yesterday exposed an application that, when used on a rooted phone, can guess the PIN number used for Google Wallet.

Unfortunately, another vulnerability exposed an even easier way for criminals to get into your Google Wallet. The virtual wallet is set up to take three different kinds of payment, a Citi Mastercard, a gift card, or Google’s prepaid card. The last option allows you to set up any credit or debit card to allocate funds to the prepaid card. This prepaid card isn’t associated with a Google account, but rather, it’s associated with the phone itself. If someone has stolen your phone and gotten inside, all they have to do is go to your applications preferences and erase all of the data from Google Wallet. You would think this would erase your credit cards as well, but it doesn’t.

The thief will go through the motions of setting up the account, including setting a new PIN number. After accessing the wallet with the new PIN, the thief will be prompted to add a new card. He can choose to upload a prepaid card, and because the card is tethered to your phone, all the information will repopulate, including your remaining balance (see video below for a demonstration).

We asked Google about the vulnerability, and the company emailed saying, “We strongly encourage anyone who loses or wants to sell their phone to call Google Wallet support toll-free at 855-492-5538 to disable the prepaid card. We are currently working on an automated fix as well that will be available soon. We also advise all Wallet users to set up a screen lock as an additional layer of protection for their phone.”

The reality of this, however, is that while your phone being stolen also means your money is stolen, you’d be facing the same scenario if your actual wallet was stolen. Google does tout the wallet as being safer than a regular wallet, but where there’s money, there’s risk.

via 9to5 Google