You can now add Microsoft to the list of companies that have recently been burned by hackers.

Microsoft’s online store in India was hacked this morning by Chinese hacker group EvilShadow team – 7z1&Ancker, reports WP Sauce. Even worse, it appears that the store’s database of usernames and passwords has been leaked as well, potentially exposing those users’ payment information.

At the time of this post, Microsoft’s India online store is still offline. We’ve dropped a word into Microsoft for more details on the situation.

While we can easily confirm that the site is offline,  it’s more difficult to prove if the store’s username database has been hacked. Screenshots potentially showing information from the database have been released by the Chinese site HackTeach, but Microsoft has yet to confirm that the data has been compromised. HackTeach is also reporting that the passwords were unsecured and saved in plain text, which if true, would be a shocking security blunder on Microsoft’s part.

The company is developing a huge 120,000 square foot “Google Experience Center,” which will serve as a sort of private museum and meeting center, as well as labs for secret projects and the company’s @Home automation endeavour, reports the Mercury News.

The new buildings are big part of Google’s $120 million constructions efforts at the Googleplex, and they show how the company is quickly transforming into something more than just a search giant.

The Experience Center, for example, will be a place for the company to share big ideas with important industry figures. It may host future entries of Google’s new Solve for X conference, given the description by one of the architects working on the building:

The Experience Center would not typically be open to the public — consisting of invited groups, and guests whose interests will be as vast as Google’s range of products, and often confidential… Therefore, the Experience Center must also operate somewhat like a museum, exhibit, or mercantile space allowing flexibility in the exhibits so that as Google’s products and needs change, the space can adapt.

Such a building would also give Google an easy way to demonstrate its products for future enterprise and government customers, technology analyst Rob Enderle tells the paper.

Not surprisingly, Google had little to say about the Experience Center, or about its secret lab space, dubbed Project X. It’ll likely be a larger area for Google X, the company’s lab for fantastical projects. According to the Mercury News, Project X could involve “precision optical technology.”

Google is also carving out a lab that can screen out wireless frequencies for its @Home automation service. Little is known about @Home at the moment,  but Google has hinted that it could do things like control your home lights, appliances, and will be powered by Android. The company’s recently rumored streaming music device could end up being a part of its @Home suite.

Photo Maria Ly/Flickr

The popular music streaming service has added support for extremely high quality 320 kbps music streaming and offline synchronizing — just about the best sound you can get from compressed music files.

Spotify originally offered low quality (96 kbps) and high quality (160 kbps) settings for streaming and syncing on its mobile apps, but an update over the weekend has added a new “extreme” quality setting for the iPhone. Spotify has already offered 320 kbps streaming on its desktop apps for premium subscribers.

The news is something that audiophiles, or anyone with a decent pair of headphones, should appreciate. 320 kbps music files sound virtually indistinguishable from audio CDs, and the increased level of quality on the iPhone makes the app even more versatile. If you’ve already synhronized music with the Spotify app, it’ll prompt you to resynchronize if you flip over to extreme quality.

Spotify’s apps are available to all of its users for free, but you’ll need to be a premium subscriber ($9.99 a month) to stream and synchronize music.

It’s unclear when the new setting will make its way over to Spotify’s other mobile apps, which include Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, but I suspect it won’t be too long.

Via The Next Web

The video comes from Michael Ringley, a graphic designer living in San Francisco. It tracks the life of an MMS message, 28,000 of which are sent every second, and shows how the average user will have 736 pieces of personal data collected every day. That includes details like your number, who you’re calling, the location, date and time, the duration, and the amount of data transmitted.

Different service providers retain this data for different durations. Verizon holds onto it for twelve months, for example, while AT&T keeps it for a staggering 84 months. Ringley points out that most people will have more than a million pieces of information stored by their providers spanning across an average of nearly four years.

Looking through the glass darkly, Ringley points out this makes customers unwitting participants in a vast case, with their data being sold to the highest bidder, most often to ad networks who can serve targeted ads. Check out the full video below.

h/t Brianpicker

Eric Hirshberg was an experiment when Activision Blizzard chief executive hired Hirshberg as CEO of the Activision Publishing division about 18 months ago. Hirshberg was an art school graduate who rose through the ranks of the creative side of advertising and eventually became CEO of billion-dollar ad agency Deutsch LA. Most video game CEOs rise through the ranks of finance or game development. But Hirshberg was a lot more comfortable with a paint brush in his hands than a spreadsheet. But under Hirshberg, Activision Publishing has launched some of its most successful games in history, including Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. At the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Hirshberg talked about the experiment of an advertising creative person rising to the top of one of the world’s biggest video game companies.

The marketing campaigns for those games helped them rise above hardcore gaming enthusiasts to mass audiences. Under the tag line, “there’s a soldier in all of us,” Black Ops commercials billed the game as one that any weekend warrior could play. The Modern Warfare 3 TV commercials promoted the  game as playable by both veterans and newcomers, or “noobs.” These ads showed that creative marketing could elevate a game to the level of a cultural phenomenon. Modern Warfare 3 generated more than $1 billion in revenue in its first 16 days on sale, and Call of Duty had 40 million monthly active users in 2011.

Hirshberg said that, based on his background, he believes that great video games are not products. They’re brands. While people buy products, they “buy into brands,” he said. That is what Activision was counting on when it decided to launch Call of Duty Elite, a social network for hardcore Call of Duty fans. It was an attempt to keep gamers engaged in the product year round, rather than just for a few weeks a year. The tough sell was that Activision wanted to offer a premium version of Elite for the hardcore fans. The hint of the subscription fee caused a fan revolt by bloggers such as Neils Hansen (pictured on screen), of the Gunn Shop report.

After a summer of criticism, Activision threw a fan appreciation event, Call of Duty XP, where it announced the fee for the premium version of Elite would be $4.99 a month, which was a bargain considering subscribers would get free access to content such as map packs that would ordinarily cost more than $60 a year. After that, bloggers such as Hansen decided that Elite wasn’t a “douche move” after all. Call of Duty Elite got more than 7 million subscribers, including 1.5 million who paid, making it one of the fastest-growing premium subscription services ever.

We sat down and talked with Hirshberg after his DICE talk. Here’s an edited transcript of our exclusive interview.

Gamesbeat: I didn’t quite connect all the dots in the talk. What turned around bloggers like Hansen in particular? The bloggers turned around on Elite because…?

Eric Hirshberg: What I described was, the first impression we made was during the beta. We told people who there was going to be a paid subscription part of the service, but we didn’t tell them about everything you were going to get, because we didn’t want to talk about things that we couldn’t yet show. It was a no-good-options situation. What turned them around was when we got to Call of Duty XP. We got the chance to finally show Elite and all of its features working in the game, and tell everybody what they were going to get. So once he heard the whole list, it turned him around.

GB: He seemed to latch on to the value proposition.

EH: Yeah.

GB: It was as if $60 for four different content drops, or $4.99 a month, and I get the maps for less money than I would otherwise spend during the year. So the value proposition is what sold him. Everybody’s going to come around to the value of that deal at some point, right? But is there also something more that you guys accomplished there, where you convinced them to go from, say, buying one product a year, to staying with it for the whole year?

EH: Well, if you rewatch the video, he did latch on to the value proposition, but he also talked about all the other services that we’re baking into Elite. It was way beyond just what other services were offering. So yeah, I think that the value of the product and the vision of the product won people over. The story was really about how we had to make this Sophie’s Choice between doing the beta and making the best possible first impression. We couldn’t do both.

GB: I guess the experience of creating the brand and promoting the experience seems to help with this message. The task you wanted to do was convert from product-only purchases to year-round engagement, I guess?

EH: As I said, I think both Call of Duty Elite and Call of Duty XP, if looked at through a certain lens, are sort of experiments with how willing people are to enter into a real relationship with a game that they like. To think of it differently than something you buy once a year, to think of it more as something you do all year round. Or do, in the case of XP, as a sort of lifestyle piece of entertainment. So I think that both of them show a greater potential than people might assume that games have, to become those kinds of brands in people’s lives.

GB: Is this a case of the games industry hasn’t come to truly realize this yet? That games are brands, that they’re not just products?

EH: I don’t know that it’s the games industry hasn’t come to realize it so much as, it’s almost very emblematic of how all entertainment industries promote their products. But as I said in my comments, games are different, because they’re not disposable, they’re not one-time. They really are relationships. The way you interact with a game has much more in common with the way you interact with a sport that you love, or a hobby that you love, that’s ongoing and long-lasting, than with how you watch a movie. Which you do for two hours and then you move on. So I think all we’re trying to do is look at that behavior and change the way we talk to people about games.

GB: It makes sense, that (game industry) people should start thinking this way, especially if they’ve figured out what their powerful properties are. That seems to explain all of Activision’s behavior for the last few years, focusing on the brands that are really the hottest.

EH: Well, not just the hottest properties. I got a lot of questions in the run-up to Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure about why we were choosing to enter the kids category when others were exiting it. When the strength of the Wii sales were slowing down. There were a lot of reasons that, if you just looked at them on a spreadsheet, you would think that might not be a great idea. But the magic of the idea doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. Where Activision has chosen to make the big investments and take the big risks are the places where we feel that we have something special to contribute and something that sets our game apart. In the case of Call of Duty, I think it’s the strength of the brand itself, and the strength of the developers behind it. In the case of Skylanders it was the idea of toys coming to life. In the case of Bungie, it’s the strength of that developer. In the case of Call of Duty Elite, it was the behavior of our gamers — the fact that they were sticking around all year and buying up every piece of downloadable content (DLC) we could release. We had the resources to make a really big investment, to try something new. So we definitely have a strategy not to just compete in every category, just because we don’t compete there, but to only compete where we feel like we have something special to bring to the party.

GB: And if people buy into a brand, that becomes just more valuable, and you can extract more value from it?

EH: It’s a matter of a shift in mindset. People don’t have any problem thinking about products in other sectors this way. I don’t think anyone would say that when you buy an Apple product, you’re just buying a piece of consumer electronics. You’re also buying a little bit of the Apple belief system, an emblem of your creativity, your design aesthetic. Same with Nike shoes or different soft drinks or beers. There are all kinds of brands that have meaning beyond the product in other categories. That hasn’t been historically true of games, but I think it can be, and some of the work we’ve done on Call of Duty and some of the approaches we took on Skylanders show that.

Instead of filling out a lot of forms and trying to remember a new password, you can just rely on the likes of Google and Facebook to handle everything and finish the authorization process in one or two clicks.

But this frictionless (Mark Zuckerberg’s new favorite word) world has serious risks. Baio uses the example of Unroll.me, a service that helps him avoid unwanted mailing lists and spam. He was about to sign up when he realized that, when he stopped to think about it, he actually knew nothing about the people behind this startup.

“For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?”

To use a real world example, it would be like walking past a billboard that offers to keep unwanted flyers and catalogs out of your mailbox. Without bothering to learn anything more, you drop a copy of your keys into a black box. Sounds risky when you put it that way.

For anyone who’s suddenly thinking, “oh man, I’ve given access to a ton of random apps”, there is a relatively simple solution. The best one we’ve come across so far is mypermissions.org, which gathers together the services like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Foursquare that power a lot of third party apps. You can also manage the services that have access to your accounts from within your Facebook or Google settings. We were a bit shocked to find close to one hundred apps had permission to access our Facebook data, nearly a dozen of which we didn’t recognize or remember signing up for.

It’s fun to try out new web apps, but these digital one night stands don’t mean you should be giving away your data to relative strangers from that point on.

It’s an empire state of mind. The world’s most famous musical couple has turned to New York’s Tumblr as the blogging platform of choice for showcasing the first photos of their new baby girl, Blue Ivy Carter.

Tumblr, founded by Manhattan’s David Karp, has defined itself as the best service for bloggers who want to showcase their creativity, especially through photos.

On their Tumblr, Jay-Z and Beyonce are clearly trying to nip the paparazzi in the bud. “Thank you for respecting our privacy during this beautiful time in our lives,” reads the header.

The couple had been encouraged by other celebs to sell the first photos of their baby, a move which earned Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a reported $14 million.

It’s the second time the couple has decided to strike out on their own with a digital homage to their daughter. Shortly after Blue Ivy was born the couple released Glory, which used a sample of the infant crying in the background. It made her the youngest person ever to hit the Billboard charts.

While other Tumblr users can follow Blue Ivy’s blog, the site’s standard options to “like” or “reblog” the posts have been removed, meaning there will be less chance for the masses to take the photos out of context or trolls to leave nasty comments.

In a release, Alabama Department of Homeland Security Director Spencer Collier said that his agency was conducting a forensic analysis to determine what information might have been obtained by the hackers.

The ties to Anonymous come from claims on the group’s Twitter and Tumblr feeds. As usual with the hacktivists, the attack was linked to a political protest. A page from the hacked site bore the tag line of the group and stated that this was a response to, “recent racist legislation in an attempt to punish immigrants as criminals.”

The Guy Fawkes masks worn by the group have become the symbol of their movement. They are a reference to the comic book series V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and first published in 1982. That story chronicles a masked man’s attempts to take down the British government.

Writing in The Guardian earlier this week, Moore said he approved of the movement which has borrowed his trademark mask. “Today’s response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane…As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying. In terms of a wildly uninformed guess at our political future, it feels something like V for validation.”

Then we flew back to SF on Thursday, where we invited some exciting new companies to pitch at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and found several we expect to invite to launch at DEMO this spring in Silicon Valley. That evening, we held a meet-up for some of the companies to pitch to a big crowd at the Dutch Goose. Entrepreneurs had no microphone, so they had to scream to make themselves heard.

In Boulder, we met with companies at Foundry, one of the most respected venture firms in Colorado. Afterward, we invited them and some other promising entrepreneurs to pitch at a party at Jill’s at the St. Julien Hotel (photos below).

Our executive editor Dylan Tweney will be back in Boulder in a couple of weeks for the VC conference, speaking alongside many other great minds from around the world.

We’re off to Boston, where the Atlas Venture team and others will host the 10-company pitch event on Tuesday, and soon after that we’ll be hitting Los Angeles (more about that meeting here), Chicago, Detroit, Singapore and Austin.

Much thanks again to the teams at Foundry and Kleiner!

Here are some photos from Boulder by Christina Kiffney:

Eric Darst (@teamflowh) from flowh.com with Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)

Steve Norman from DoubleScoop

Patrick Carter (@DigitalFolio) from Digital Folio

Carrie Requist (@UGrokIt_Carrie) from UGrokIt

Matt Marshall (@mmarshall) from VentureBeat

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group

Tim at the DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group with Jeff Makowka (@jmakowka) from AARP

Here’s some of the stories that appeared exclusively on GamesBeat:

Valve’s Gabe Newell offers update on Steam security breach

AIAS game of the year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim takes home the top honor

Bethesda reveals Skyrim dragon mounts, house-building, Kinect shouts, and more!

Gameloft Live enters the social mobile fray on Android, coming to iOS soon

Tips and tricks: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

The Skylanders financial bet gets a lot bigger with Giants sequel

Review: The Simpsons Arcade takes us back to the bowling alley

David Jaffe to leave Eat Sleep Play when Twisted Metal is complete

Microsoft Flight takes off on Feb. 29
And don’t miss some of our bigger stories in gaming this week, including coverage of the DICE Summit:

Call of Duty Elite: It’s not a douche move — Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg

The DeanBeat: DICE Summit entices the game industry’s insiders to Vegas

Ninja Gaiden’s creator Itagaki pleads for game designers to create titles that change lives

Epic’s Tim Sweeney predicts the next 20 years in gaming technology

How Google plans to avoid Facebook’s “games ghetto” with Google+

The makers of Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command: iPhone is like an ’80s arcade

Temple Run developer shares a behind the scenes look at making a runaway hit iOS game

Meteor Games to publish high-end online game Hawken in December (exclusive)

Instagram lets you take a photo with your iPhone and layer it with different filters for that extra hip look. You can then connect it to your social networks and share it with the Instagram community. Now, the company is introducing a new, sleeker interface that’s easier to navigate. The updates include a new header, as well as different menu buttons on the bottom of the screen. The company explained in a blog post that these were the “first steps towards making it easier to understand and interact with our app.”

Notifications have also gotten easier to use by taking you directly to the referenced comment, photo, or profile when clicked.

The company has also added a new filter called Sierra. Filters are really what give Instagram its charm. They allow anyone to be a photographer with their phones. Sierra makes the yellows pop on your photos. If your photos don’t have exactly the look you want, or if they’re too dark, you can use Instagram’s new Lux feature, which automatically brightens dark photos and brings out more details, again catering to the amateur who loves beautiful photos, but may not know how to take them.

These updates aren’t the only love the application has seen lately. Kaitlyn Trigger, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend, created an application that lets you turn your Instagram photos into virtual Valentine’s Day cards. She calls it Lovestagram.

hat tip The Next Web

“Essentially, we’ve taken our favorite elements of crowdfunding platforms and provided them for groups of friends instead” Crowdtilt chief executive and co-founder James Beshara told VentureBeat in an email.

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, a popular crowdfunding site. The person who creates the campaign sets a “tilt” point at which the campaign will hit its funding goal 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 setup and doesn’t cater to the same 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 hacktivist group has taken down the Central Intelligence Agency‘s website.

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

The attack took place roughly around 12:10 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, and 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 Investigation. 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 websites in response to the shutdown of file sharing website MegaUpload. Low-orbit-ion-cannons (LOIC) were used to issue denial of service attacks to the many websites 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 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, although 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 result in thinner unibody cases and solid-state hard drives and the loss of 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 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 that it isn’t afraid to make sweeping changes if the result is 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 a “Rabbit”) to run errands or do small bits of random work for you, including grocery shopping, data entry, and transporting all kinds 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 stay 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.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, picking an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. Sneakpeeq recreates that by, for example, making you click a “peeq” button to see a price rather than blatantly displaying them. 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 with your Facebook friends. Buy sharing, you get “badges” that you can redeem 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 new funding comes from Bain Capital Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta. It will be used for new site features, including gift buying, mobile apps, and video features.

Sneakpeeq is based in San Francisco, Calif.

[Title image (not pictured above) 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 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, which Bloomberg reported on yesterday, 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 MacWorld 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, Apple’s retail stores are credited with helping to drive the rabid adoption of its 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.”