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Hitachi Develops 4.5-Inch, Naked-Eye 3D LCD Screen With HD Resolution

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:59 AM PDT

Hitachi announced [JP] a new mobile 3D screen today: the IPS-based LCD is sized at a respectable 4.5 inches, doesn’t require glasses to view pictures in 3D and has 400 cd/m2 brightness in 2D mode and 470 cd/m2 brightness in 3D mode. But perhaps the biggest selling point is the fantastic resolution of 1,280×720.

By way of comparison: the previous model Hitachi showed last year was sized at just 3.1 inches and had 480×854 resolution.

For the 3D effect in the new model, Hitachi moved from a barrier approach to a lenticular lens approach (see graphic above) to boost the quality of the images displayed.

The company says their new screen can be used in portable TVs, cell phones or handheld game devices.

Exclusive: Dotcom Era Survivor Cvent Raises $136 Million Round

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:59 AM PDT

Cvent, a major event management software company, last raised funding around the time the previous century ended.

Today, the company will announce that it has raised funding for the second time in its – most fascinating – history, and it’s a whopper:

Cvent has secured $136 million in venture capital financing from New Enterprise Associates and Insight Venture Partners, with Greenspring Associates also participating.

According to data from Dow Jones VentureSource, this marks the largest investment in a private software company this year, and the seventh largest investment across all industry sectors.

It’s pretty amazing that we have seemingly never written about Cvent before. Happy to make an exception this time around. :-)

In all seriousness, Cvent’s journey as a company is a very interesting one (more on that later today in a guest post by Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal). Originally founded back in 1999, and backed by $17 million in capital that was burned almost as quickly as it was raised, Cvent turned around and today bills itself as the world's largest meetings management technology company.

To give you an idea: the company has over 800 employees worldwide.

The company offers cloud-based software services for meeting site selection, online event registration and management, e-mail marketing, and web surveys, currently helping more than 90,000 users in 40 countries manage hundreds of thousands of events, surveys and e-mail campaigns.

The most impressive service offered by Cvent, imho, is its Supplier Network, a free online marketplace that connects event planners with some 150,000 hotels, restaurants and other types venues worldwide. It is most easily described as the “Expedia for meeting and event planning”.

To illustrate its sheer scale: Cvent says its Supplier Network is poised to generate $4 billion in business for hotels alone in 2011 (up from $60 million three years ago).

No wonder Cvent has strong relationships with most of the leading hotel chains from across the globe, including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood, Intercontinental Hotels Group and Accor.

Companies like Wells Fargo, The Coca-Cola Company, MetLife, Deere & Company and Procter & Gamble use Cvent’s solution for event organization and management.

Aggarwal tells me the investment will enable Cvent to grow its headcount to 1,000 employees – mostly engineers – over the next 12 months, and to solidify its position for its next decade in business. The company will also invest in the development of its social media and mobile products.

Not that they really needed the money; Cvent has apparently been running at a profit for the past 32 straight quarters. It hasn’t always been that way, though, and we’ll soon publish Aggarwal’s riveting account of the past 12 years, and how he got to this point.

TripIt Owner Concur Invests $5 Million In Flight Price Tracker Yapta

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:25 AM PDT

Travel and expense management company Concur, which earlier this year acquired TripIt and GlobalExchange, has invested $5 million in Yapta, a provider of airfare and hotel rate tracking services. The investment brings the total of capital raised by Yapta to $14.5 million.

As part of the investment agreement, Concur and Yapta have entered into a partnership under which Concur will exclusively use Yapta’s airfare price tracking and price assurance services for its TripIt Pro users. The parties also plan to explore additional opportunities for integrating Yapta’s services with Concur’s travel and expense management solutions.

Last April, Concur struck a similar deal with Indian online travel site Cleartrip, in which the company invested $40 million.

According to the press release, Yapta’s technology has conducted more than a billion price checks on millions of flights, revealing more than $350 million in savings for travelers.

German Social Game Maker wooga Battles The Bosses, Prepares To Bring Top Title To Mobile

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:14 AM PDT

When it comes to social games, Zynga is the undisputed king. But, when it comes to second place, it’s not so easy to say — the competition is stiff. Yet, today German social game developer Wooga has (at least for the time being) overtaken EA as the new deputy in town. Wooga is now seeing over 35 million monthly active users engaging with its social games, compared to EA at just under 31 million, Playdom at 30 million, and CrowdStar at 22 million, which rounds out the top 5, according to Appdata.

Wooga doesn’t get nearly as much attention as Zynga or EA, with the former steaming towards its IPO and the latter an industry veteran that just so happened to acquire Popcap for nearly $1.3 billion last week.

But, seeing as 75 percent of Wooga’s 35 million monthly active users are playing outside of the U.S. (and that 70 percent are women), Wooga has plenty of qualities that set it apart from the pack. Not to mention that the startup pocketed $24 million back in May from Highland Capital Partners and a number of other VCs.

Of course, Appdata’s numbers have not yet taken into account the fact that Popcap is in the process of being integrated into the EA umbrella. Yes, the acquisition could take some time to finalize, but when the two are combined, it will surely put EA right back on top (as Popcap has 17 million+ users to its name). Wooga Founder and CEO Jens Begemann, however, sees EA’s move as one to gain new users by way of acquisition. And that it certainly has.

Yet, considering that wooga grew by 300 percent in the last month, Begemann has reason to feel confident that his company has plenty of growth ahead. It is also interesting to note that we may be at a point in which the Facebook social game market in the U.S. is closing in on saturation and that we could see game developers turning to international markets to expand and court more users. If this is the case, wooga already has a good start.

And while Zynga and Popcap both are already well-established in the mobile market, wooga has seemingly been in no rush to bring its games to mobile, in spite of the fact that this clearly offers a big potential growth area of the company. Today, however, that strategy has officially changed, as the game developer announced that it will be bringing its top game, Diamond Dash, to iOS later this summer. The gem-bashing Facebook game has already racked up 10 million users, and will be the first game available on iPads and iPhones. But the CEO said that it is planning an HTML5 app for Android and other platforms, which will be released shortly thereafter. Wooga also has plans to develop a new title solely in HTML5, which users can expect to drop around the same time.

The rest of its suite (which includes games like Happy Hospital and Monster World), he continued, will be soon to follow. The company has hired a different team to develop its mobile apps then the one that designed its Facebook game, as it wants to optimize its game for the mobile platform, not simply to port just because it’s a growth area. “We know that if we copy the Facebook game, we won’t be successful”, the CEO told Inside Social Apps.

Begemann was adamant about the fact that the company has, since the outset, focused on creating an engaging gameplay experience for the user, not on simply the retention of viral growth. It’s an interesting lesson for fledgling social game developers to learn, and seemingly a simple one: If you don’t make a good game, you simply can’t forge any staying power in the market. It will be interesting to see where wooga makes the transition to mobile; if it’s successful, EA may very well have a German foe nipping at its heels.

Dell To Buy Data Center Solutions Provider Force10 Networks

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:12 AM PDT

Dell this morning announced that it will be acquiring Force10 Networks, which specializes in data center networking solutions, to ramp up its enterprise offerings.

Terms of the transaction, which is subject to customary conditions, were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close in late summer.

Based on revenue from the past 12 months, Force10 Networks is a $200 million company, the press release reads, with operations in over 60 countries worldwide (but approximately 80 percent of its business in North America).

Force10's “Open Cloud Networking” technology essentially allows customers to transform their network infrastructures into an open datacenter and cloud computing fabric. The solution is said to be based on open standards, automation and virtualization.

Force10 was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Jose, California, with R&D operations based in Silicon Valley. In 2009, Force10 merged with Turin Networks.

Customers include Internet companies, carriers, research laboratories and government organizations.

The company boasts a very long list of investors, including Crosslink Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Motorola, US Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Meritech Capital Partners, but it’s unclear how much capital Force10 raised over the years.

Dell says it plans to keep Force10's existing operations in the United States and Chennai, India, and keep growing the business.

Sony Unveils Their First PC-Less Blu-ray/DVD Burner

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:04 AM PDT

Sony Japan announced [JP] the VBD-MA1 today, the company’s first Blu-ray/DVD burner that doesn’t necessarily require a computer to work. Users can plug in their video camera, for example, directly into the device to store their material on discs (via USB) or use its Memory Stick Duo or SD/SDHC/SDXC card slot.

All material can be viewed on the burner’s 2.7-inch LCD screen before recording (AVCHD is supported), with Sony saying users can copy video or pictures with the push of a button. Needless to say, the VBD-MA1 can be connected to a PC and used as a conventional external burner, too (see above).

Sony plans to start selling the 550g-device in Japan on August 5 (price: $380) – no word yet on a possible international release.

What Are You Trying To Say YouTube Ad?!?

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 03:44 AM PDT

I keep trying to watch this infamous video of Wendi Murdoch trying to defend her mogul husband Rupert Murdoch from a protestor’s pie attack at his testimony in front of British parliament yesterday but I keep getting distracted by this pesky YouTube ad (above).

Mind you I know nothing about how YouTube ads are targeted and even less about how exactly tagging these things works so I’m just hoping this specific juxtaposition is some kind of algorithm accident. Because, if otherwise, damn.

IDG Ventures Pumps $3 Million Into Indian Mobile Ad Network Vserv

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:59 AM PDT

IDG Ventures India has invested $3 million in Vserv, which operates a mobile in-app advertising network in India. The company has developed an “App Ad-Wrapper” solution for J2ME Apps and is now extending this solution to Android apps.

It essentially offers mobile app developers a solution to potentially increase ad earnings with in-app and WAP advertising campaigns.

Vserv says it focused squarely on emerging markets, and that it has delivered ads in over 200 countries to date.

Google+ Now The Top Free App In The Apple App Store

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:08 AM PDT

After less than 24 hours of being live, the Google+ iPhone app has hit the number one free spot in the Apple app store, beating out “Draw ‘n’ Go: Awesomeness!” for the top slot.

This is quite impressive considering that the app, which started out buggy and continued to be buggy after the “fastest update to an iPhone app” Erick has ever seen, is currently only pertinent to at the most an estimated 18 million people in the field test AND that Google has its own mobile operating system to focus on, Android.

What makes this milestone important is the fact that Google+ competitor Facebook currently has the top downloaded free iOS app of all time  — So Google+ is in good company. Of course Google does have a lot of marketing leverage for whatever it needs to push, namely its highly trafficked homepage.

You could put anything on there (Paul Carr’s book for example) and it would do well. But, at an average of three stars currently in its pretty substandard version, I’m pretty excited to see what the app will rate/rank when it actually works.

If I were Facebook my ears would be perking up right about now. Just sayin.’

Daily Deal Stats: The Big Players Still Control The Game, Mobile Is Up (Oh, And Animal Names Are In)

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 01:30 AM PDT

Today, at BIA/Kelsey’s “Deals 3D” conference in San Francisco, Dan Visnick, VP of Marketing at The Dealmap, shared some insights into the current landscape of daily deals. Dealmap, a repository of daily deals collected from over 350 sources, allows users to view local deals in map form, along with reviews and pertinent information — on the Web and on mobile. Both through its API and its DealExchange service, which allows businesses to easily distribute deals across various channels, The Dealmap is enabling new entrants to the space to quickly populate their applications with a bulk of deals.

Through the data the company has been collecting via DealExchange and beyond, Visnick said that it has become very clear that the industry is still very top heavy, as 80 percent of deals are offered by as few as 20 sources. Inventory, then, is still largely controlled by the top deal players, with nearly 70 percent of inventory controlled by 10 sources, and 40 percent controlled by the top two. I assume, though Visnick did not say specifically, that those two sites are none other than Groupon and Living Social.

Among the top sites, the average inventory for each market, Visnick said, is 6.25 per day — compared to the median inventory per day, which is 1.29. Thus, it seems that discrepancy in inventory between the bigs and the startups is still fairly significant, with half of the 350-plus deals sites only offering 1 to 2 deals per day.

And when it comes to national distribution, the majority of daily deals sites are in less than 10 big markets. Just under 20 percent of daily deals players are in a single market, while 69 percent of sites are in between 2 and 9 markets, meaning that nearly 90 percent of sites are in less than 10 markets. Of course, as Laura Hazard Owen of paidContent point out, this will likely change in the near future as the web giants like Facebook (which just partnered with AmEx to create a daily deals platform) and Google — those with established national networks — roll out their own versions.

In other notable trends, Visnick said that mobile is becoming a much bigger factor in the space, sneaking up to 32 percent of the deal space, compared to the web at 61 percent, and email at 2 percent. The mobile deals space has really started to heat up of late, with AT&T jumping into the daily deal game yesterday, offering daily deals through YP.com. Foursquare also announced last week that it would be distributing AT&T’s Deal of The Day to its 10 million+ users.

Also worth mentioning: BI noted that venture capital firms have invested $1.6 billion in capital in daily deals sites thus far in 2011. While the number of daily deals sites has quintupled in the last year, only 22 companies have received funding in the last year. And, of the 270-some companies tracked by Daily Deal Media, only 32 have received funding from “the investor community”. Again, the top ten deals sites are the ones growing fat on VC dollars (Groupon, Living Social), while the rest are fighting for table scraps.

Yet, the most interesting trend of all cited by Visnick would have to be that 5 percent of all daily deals sites are now using some form of animal name. DealChicken, Rhino Deals, TownHog, Deal Stork, Rabbit Pack, and Rumba Fish are among the animal-related sites that come to mind. It seems that there’s just something about an animal that says “discount”. I’ll leave it up to you, reader, to determine the significance — if any — of this juicy trend.