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RIM to hand out BlackBerry 10 prototype smartphones in May

Research In Motion will give prototype BlackBerry 10 smartphones to as many as 2,000 developers who attend the BlackBerry 10 Jam conference that runs alongside the annual BlackBerry World expo in early May. The handsets will be prototypes that are running “a modified version of the PlayBook OS which will help developers design their apps for the BlackBerry 10 smartphone form factor,” a RIM spokesperson told BGR. The device will not be an early version of a device intended for release, RIM clarified. Instead, it is a reference platform intended to allow developers to test applications on a smartphone running the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha operating system. BlackBerry 10 Jam takes place from May 1st through May 3rd in Orlando, Florida.

Source: BGR

Angry Birds Space launches amid planet-wide marketing blitz

Angry Birds Space launched today amid some of the largest marketing hoopla ever for a mobile game.

The title from Finland’s Rovio Entertainment is the sequel to Angry Birds, the game where you slingshot cute angry bird characters at mean green pigs who have stolen the birds eggs. If you didn’t know that, you’re clearly not among the 700 million people who have downloaded the mobile game in the last couple of years. Angry Birds has been the most successful mobile game to date, and the launch of the new game is aimed at extending the momentum of the franchise.

To commemorate the launch of the space game, Rovio partnered with T-Mobile USA create a 300-foot-tall slingshot and Angry Bird mounted on the Seattle Space Needle. Rovio also cut a deal to embed codes in Angry Birds Space store merchandise at 2,000 Walmart locations, starting on March 25. The deals are all aimed at taking awareness of Angry Birds Space into the stratosphere.

While the original Angry Birds launched with little fanfare on the Apple App Store in December, 2009, today’s title is available simultaneously on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), Android, the PC, and the Mac. It’s even on the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook reader.

“We are proud to finally make Angry Birds Space available to all our fans worldwide, and it has been simply thrilling to work with T-Mobile on another larger
than life Angry Birds installation,” said Peter Vesterbacka, chief marketing officer and Mighty Eagle of Rovio.

At Walmart, fans can get access to “Golden Eggsteroid” clues that unlock four bonus levels in the game. The clues are embedded in limited-edition Angry Birds merchandise such as apparel, plush toys, mobile phones, snacks and more. Walmart is also offering the first of four special clues today to its 12 million Facebook fans. Samsung also has an Angry Birds promotion going on with its Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone.

Source: V.B

Digital game sales reach $3.3B in U.S. and Europe in Q4

 

Digital game sales reached a total of $3.33 billion in the fourth quarter in the U.S. and Europe, according to the NPD Group. The U.S. number is up 9 percent from a year ago, though comparison data isn’t available for Europe.

The numbers show that digital games — excluding those sold at physical retail stores — are a growing part of the business, while console games have been shrinking for the past couple of years.

Digital game sales include used games, game rentals, subscriptions, digital full-game downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile games. The U.S. captured the lion’s share of fourth-quarter sales at $2.04 billion. The United Kingdom, Germany, and France generated about $1.29 billion, while the rest of Europe wasn’t counted in the data. The United Kingdom generated $508 million, followed by Germany at $461 million and France at $320 million.

“It’s fascinating to see the nuances in consumer behavior across geographies,” said Anita Frazier, analyst at the NPD Group. “Clearly these other forms of content acquisition do not follow as consistent of a trend as we see with the established box product business in the U.S.”

In the U.S., fourth-quarter physical retail game software sales were $4.5 billion, down 3 percent from a year earlier. That means that digital games are about a third of the size of the physical retail game software business.

Source: V.B

Path may have just sealed a new $20M funding deal

We’re hearing loud rumors this morning that hot-as-molten-lava startup Path may have just closed a $20 million round of funding.

The round was reportedly led by Redpoint Ventures and pegged Path at a $250 million valuation.

While Business Insider is saying the funding is confirmed by anonymous sources close to the matter, we’re still waiting for official confirmation from our sources at Path.

UPDATE: Our Path source replies, “It’s just rumors and speculation.” So for now, the startup has nothing to confirm; still, we’re keeping our ears to the ground.

Path has been through the ringer in recent weeks due to a privacy fiasco — one that even had Apple CEO Tim Cook calling Path founder Dave Morin for copying personal data from people’s iPhones.

The app was caught grabbing contact information, including names, phone numbers, and email addresses, from users’ iPhone address books. The startup issued a formal apology in which Morin stated, “Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.”

More to the point, we recently sat down with Morin for a one-on-one chat at South By Southwest. While the CEO didn’t have anything to say about the startup’s possible funding at that time, we did talk in detail about where Path will go in the near future, the philosophies that drive the application, and how Path’s friends-and-family-first approach to social networking has shaped our expectations for privacy and audience.

To date, Path has taken a total of $11.2 million in venture capital funding, including an $8.65 million Series A around this time last year.

Source: V.B

Google wants to punish “overly optimized” sites

Head of Google’s Web Spam team Matt Cutts spoke on a panel at SXSW about search engine optimization and revealed a new strategy from Google that could send fear into the heart of any website manager. Google’s planning to punish any website that is “overly optimized,” according to Cutts. An audio clip of the discussion was posted by Search Engine Land on Saturday.

Search engine optimization is often a moving target. Search engines change their standards and practices for how they crawl sites, and most website content managers struggle to find the perfect balance of keywords and internal linking to help their sites get picked up by Google, Yahoo, and others. Now, Google’s throwing a wrench into the machine with plans to penalize websites that go too far to optimize their content.

Cutts had this to say about how Google handles well-optimized websites versus those developed without much SEO:

Normally we don’t pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

Cutts makes no mention of what sort of punishment would befall an overly optimized site, though in Google’s world, not showing up in the first three pages of search results could be punishment enough.

This may coincide with Google’s plans to revamp its search engine, which includes more direct answers and facts on its results pages, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. The company plans to introduce ”semantic search,” which will better understand the meaning of words to provide more relevant search results.

Source: V.B

Apple’s plans for $100B cash reserve

 

Apple Announces Plans to Initiate Dividend and Share Repurchase Program

Expects to Spend $45 Billion Over Three Years

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apple® today announced plans to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program commencing later this year.

“Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”

Subject to declaration by the Board of Directors, the Company plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.

Additionally, the Company’s Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Company’s fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012. The repurchase program is expected to be executed over three years, with the primary objective of neutralizing the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.

“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You’ll see more of all of these in the future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”

“Combining dividends, share repurchases, and cash used to net-share-settle vesting RSUs, we anticipate utilizing approximately $45 billion of domestic cash in the first three years of our programs,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “We are extremely confident in our future and see tremendous opportunities ahead.”

Apple will provide live streaming of a conference call to discuss its plans beginning at 6:00 a.m. PDT on Monday, March 19, 2012 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/call31912. The Company will not be providing an update on the current quarter nor will any topics be discussed other than cash. This webcast will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

Source: BGR

Apple to announce plan for $98B cash balance Monday morning

Apple is holding a conference call bright and early Monday morning to announce plans for its large cash balance. The company is sitting on around $98 billion in cash, and investors are getting increasingly antsy and clamoring for a dividend or share buyout.

Tim Cook and Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer will be hosting the call, which will take place at 9am Eastern time. They will discuss the cash balance only, nothing else. In addition to the call-in number, a live audio stream of the call will be available on all computers or mobile devices running QuickTime 6 or later.

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in February, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the very expensive elephant in the room, saying “I only ask for a bit of patience so we can do this in a deliberate way and do it in a way that’s best for shareholders.”

“We’re judicious, we’re deliberate, we spend our money like it’s our last penny … We’re not going to go have a toga party or do something outlandish,” he said at the time.

When a company is sitting on a huge pile of cash, as Apple is, it is expected to shell out a dividend to investors, issue a stock buyback, or spend the money on things that will make it even more money. Cook said that, so far, the company has spent billions of dollars on its supply chain, intellectual property, acquisitions, retail, and the Apple infrastructure.

Apple’s share price hit $600 for the first time on March 15 and has since fallen back a bit to $585 a share.

What do you think Apple will do with the cash? What do you think Apple should do with it?

 

Source: V.B

One third of all smartphones sold in Q4 had 4G connectivity

Smartphones with 4G connectivity grew from 6% in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 35% in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a report from The NPD Group. HSPA+ “4G” accounted for 22% sales, however, leaving LTE and WiMAX technologies with a much less impressive share of the smartphone market. Older HSPA+ technology was the only 4G offered by AT&T up until recently, and it is still the only 4G technology offered by T-Mobile. The firm also counts AT&T’s iPhone 4S among the 4G phones sold last quarter, giving the category a significant boost. LTE-enabled handsets, on the other hand, accounted for just 7% of the smartphone market, while WiMAX made up only 6%, dropping from its third-quarter high of 10%. Verizon’s HTC Thunderbolt was the most popular LTE handset in the fourth quarter last year, while Sprint’s HTC EVO was the most popular WiMAX device. Read on for NPD’s press release.

Source: BGR

The iPad could be the future of gaming

 

With Friday’s release of the new iPad, Epic Games president Mike Capps has offered a huge amount of praise for Apple’s new tablet in the context of video games. “Apple is definitely building their devices as if they care a lot about ‘triple-A’ games,” said Capps, in an interview with Reuters. Only the highest-quality games are considered “triple-A” titles, most of which cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and are usually found on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Capps is trying to push console manufacturers to release more powerful devices in the hopes that they won’t be left behind. Read on for more.

With the simple addition of a Bluetooth controller for the iPad, Capps believes that Apple could challenge the Xbox and PlayStation platforms in the home console gaming market. “It is quite easy to imagine a world where an iPad is more powerful than a home console, where it wirelessly talks to your TV and wirelessly talks to your controller and becomes your new console,” he said.

The president of Electronic Arts’ Labels, Frank Gibeau, who oversees games such as “Battlefield 3″ and “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” echoed Capps’s comments and said the company is eyeing Apple’s moves closely. “When the iPad gets to the processing power that’s equal to an Xbox 360 and it connects to a television, that’s no big deal to us. We’ll put the game through the iPad and have it display through the television.” Gibeau said. EA has already released franchise titles such as “Dead Space” and “Mass Effect,” for the iPad. For publishers, “it used to be, oh hey, it’s just the Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft show, but that’s not the case anymore,” Gibeau said.

Crytek, the company behind the graphic intensive “Crysis 2″ for the PC and consoles, is also working on its first game for the iPad, which is due out in the spring. While the game is set to be puzzle-based, Crytek said it could one day bring more complex games to the device as well. “As more people come to these platforms, we have to follow our fans,” said Kristoffer Waardahl, a Crytek studio manager.

Source: BGR

Apple forced to cut profit margins with new iPad

 

In an effort to keep the iPad’s price the same, Apple may have had to cut profit margins compared to previous models, The Wall Street Journal reported. UBM TechInsights on Thursday estimated the company’s newest iPad cost about $310 to manufacture the 16GB, 4G LTE model, which retails for $629. Based on those estimates, Apple’s gross profit margin is 51%, 5 points less than the iPad 2′s 56% margin at the tablet’s launch. The cost increase is largely due to the new iPad’s Retina display, which UBM estimates to cost Apple about $70 compared to the $49.50 display found on the iPad 2. The 4G LTE chips also add $21 compared to $10 for 3G chips, and the A5X processor chip is estimated to costs $28, compared to $22 for the previous-generation A5.

Source: BGR

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