The financing includes money from m8 Capital in the United Kingdom and Founders Fund (the investment fund which includes PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel) in San Francisco.

Garriott has vowed to create the same kind of fun games on Facebook as he did at earlier stages in his career. Earlier this year, Garriott said in an interview that Portalarium is aimed at exploiting the business opportunities in the “third age of video games.”

For those of you who didn’t grow up playing games, it may help to know that Garriott was present for the first age of video games, with the debut of great single-player games such as  Ultima, which was followed by many sequels. In 1997, under his alter ego Lord British, Garriott extended his role-playing fantasy world to the online multiplayer game Ultima Online. Garriott considers the rise of Internet-connected games to be the second age of video games. Garriott tried to exploit that age with Tabula Rasa, one of the most ambitious sci-fi online games, but that title met with an untimely death after six years of effort.

The third age began with the explosive growth of simple, quickly played social games like Zynga’s FarmVille on Facebook. In an interview at the Dice Summit game conference in Las Vegas, Garriott said he knows he is late and the gold rush into social games has happened without him so far. Portalarium launched two simple casino games on Facebook so far in order to test the company’s theories about player engagement, or the trick of getting gamers to play games for a long time.

“We are delighted to join Richard Garriott and the Portalarium team in creating the next great gaming company,” said Joseph Kim, general partner at London-based m8 Capital. “Richard is one of the giants of the industry. He’s a proven entrepreneur and has been a driving force at each of the industry’s major turning points.”

Kim said he liked Garriott’s vision for the future of mobile and social games. Ditto for Brian Singerman of the Founders Fund.

In the past year, Portalarium has released two games — Port Casino Poker and Port Casino Blackjack –  on Facebook and the hi5 social network. According to AppData, those games have just a small number of users. But Portalarium says that those are evergreen products that were created to quickly build out the company’s backend server technology and start interconnecting a player network across platforms and social networks. Port Casino Poker recently launched Apple’s iPad and both iPhone and Android versions are coming later this year.

Fred Schmidt, chief executive of Portalarium, said that the connection with m8 Capital will help the company shape its European strategy while the Founders Fund (which backed Facebook) connection is helping the company connect to the social media scene in Silicon Valley. Portalarium was founded in 2009 and has 12 employees.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

Tags: Port Casino Blackjack, Port Casino Poker

Companies: Apple, Facebook, Founders Fund, M8 Capital, Portalarium

People: Richard Garriott

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The question, as framed in the video, is whether the top “nerd,” Lazaridis, must go because he’s not “putting out the product.”

Lazaridis shares the CEO role with Jim Balsillie, regarded more as the marketing/financial person. One question was whether Balsillie has been distracted by his attempts to purchase hockey teams. Balsillie’s sometimes obscure language on company conference calls was contrasted with the smooth style of Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs.

Some of the guests on the video asked whether the problem is not so much either gentleman but rather the co-CEO structure itself, and whether the two CEOs still get along, as there have been rumors of a cooling in their relationship.

And then, too, it could just be more of the Street’s short-term obsession and its recent fixation on regime change.

RIM shares today are down 83 cents, or 2%, at $42.77.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

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Maloney is expected to say that Intel will accelerate its efforts to make chips that are more appropriate for tablet computers, smartphones, laptops, and low-power desktops. Intel has been doing that for some time. But Maloney, a well-respected executive who recovered from a stroke that kept him sidelined last year, is expected to push that even farther, according to a source familiar with the matter.

This shift within Intel is similar to the shift that occurred when it launched its Centrino laptop processors in 2003 — which Intel referred to as a right-hand turn. This is another right-hand turn, since the current roadmap isn’t as ambitious when it comes to low power consumption.

Most of Intel’s mainstream desktop chips target power consumption of about 40 watts or so. That allows for very fast microprocessor performance, but such a chip generates enough heat that it can’t be so easily used in a laptop and has no chance of making it into a tablet or smartphone. Now, Intel plans to target mainstream chips that consume about 15 watts.

That’s a big difference, but it doesn’t mean Intel will cancel a bunch of chips in development. Rather, the company will modify the roadmap over the next couple of years so that the center of its efforts focuses on 15 watt or lower wattage chips.

The company has already been moving in this direction for a number of years. Intel recently announced a new manufacturing innovation dubbed Tri-Gate transistors that will allow it to use lower power and smaller circuits in its 22 nanometer microprocessors. (Intel’s current Sandy Bridge chips use 32-nanometer manufacturing; the smaller the number, the faster, lower power, and lower cost.)  At its recent annual investor meeting, Intel showed a working 22-nanometer microprocessor code-named Ivy Bridge that is one of the flagship chips for this new low-power strategy. The Tri-Gate transistors take advantage of three dimensions and allow for a 50 percent power reduction at a given level of performance with only a 2 to 3 percent increase in costs. Ivy Bridge will be followed by a chip code-named Haswell that will represent the fruition of Intel’s efforts to reduce the average wattage of its mainstream chips.

Intel is also accelerating development of its lowest-power Atom microprocessors, which are targeted at smartphones, tablets and ultrathin laptops. The Atom chips have been shipping for a number of years, but Intel will turn up the treadmill now. It will shift from 45 nanometer Atom chips this year to 32 nanometer chips and then 22-nanometer chips in 2012. With every manufacturing shift, Intel can make its chips cheaper, faster, smaller and lower power. That pace of innovation is faster than the pace of Moore’s Law (observed in 1965 by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore), which says the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

Intel is also designing a brand new Atom single-chip computer architecture, code-named Silvermont, from the ground up. Those chips are also going to be designed for low power, and the cadence for introducing new chips will become increasingly faster. The 22-nanometer Silvermont chips are expected to be introduced around 2013.

“Intel will completely focus a huge percentage of consumer microprocessors toward mainstream, low-power, ultra-thin, no-compromise computers,” said the source. “The center point of the roadmap will be all about ultra-mobility.”

By the end of 2012, a large percentage of consumer laptops will be in the ultrathin category — think MacBook Air laptops that cost a lot less than they do today and have a lot more performance and all-day battery life. That’s the kind of machine that will use the chips that Intel is placing at the center of its efforts.

Asia is a good place to make the announcement since China is expected to be the largest PC market in the world starting next year. Maloney’s assignment to that region is significant. Maloney was considered the heir apparent to Intel chief executive Paul Otellini. But a stroke threw him off that path. He returned to work in January and is regaining control of his motor skills.

Intel’s Atom processors are beginning to appear in tablet computers and about 10 of them will be shown off at the Computex show in Taiwan.

Tags: Atom, chips, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, low power consumption, microprocessors, Sandy Bridge

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini, Sean Maloney

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

It’s as good a sign of disruption in games as any. Based on the funding from such heavy-duty backers, Kabam is now one of the most valuable independent companies making games on Facebook. In terms of users, it is far outgunned by market leader Zynga (poised for a possible initial public offering), which has 247 million monthly active users on Facebook. Kabam has just 7.2 million monthly active users. Zynga has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but Kabam is holding its own, raising $125 million to date.

People will shake their heads at the amount of money here and what it says about the likely valuation. But as we noted in a review of Kabam’s games, the investors here aren’t crazy. Kabam clearly has users who are far more valuable than the standard social game player, because Kabam’s users are willing to pay Kabam a lot of money for a hardcore game experience on Facebook. Kabam’s four active games include Dragons of Atlantis, Kingdoms of Camelot, Glory of Rome and Global Warfare (below).

They’re all hardcore role-playing games where users play for four hours at a session, compared to maybe 10 minutes for a Zynga game. About 90 percent of Kabam’s players log into their games six or seven times a week. That’s what Kevin Chou, chief executive of Kabam, calls engagement. Those gamers are running the game in the background while they’re multitasking. That allows them to have lots of time to play all day long, even as they do other work. Such gamers would never have a four-hour stretch to play a console game.

Chou says that about 80 percent of the company’s players say they play hardcore games on the consoles or the PC. And now they are spending less time with those games and more time with Kabam games. This had to happen. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook has become a mirror of society. And society includes a lot of hardcore games. Kabam is one of the few companies to realize this and to target those gamers, who are accustomed to spending a lot of money on games. Kabam blends the immersive game play of massively multiplayer online games with the social satisfaction of social networking games.

Kabam was founded in 2007 as Watercooler and funded by Betfair and Canaan Partners. It had around 20 employees for quite a while as it experimented on Facebook, making sports fan pages and sports games. It had a big hit with its first major role-playing game, Kingdoms of Camelot, which quickly pulled in millions of users. The game still has 1.5 million monthly active users 19 months after its launch. Kabam also acquired WonderHill, a San Francisco game company that developed Dragons of Atlantis, which has become Kabam’s most successful game to date.

Kabam’s games are free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as more Centurions for the Imperial Roman Army in Glory of Rome. While many users play for free. There is a sizable percentage of users who pay money for the time-saving aspects of the game. And the funny thing about hardcore gamers is that they’re willing to pay more than $60 to get their fix. Whenever Microsoft launches a new $60 version of Halo, it often creates a $125 “legendary” version for the biggest fans.

Ken Pelowski, managing director of Pinnacle Ventures, said Kabam’s typical user numbers are similar to the number of hardcore fans for each console game hit.

“Those console fans are migrating online to free-to-play games, and that is what Kabam is seeing,” Pelowski said. “But here, you don’t have to pay $250 for a box and $50 for each game. Here, you could play the game for free. You could pay hundreds of dollars. You could pay thousands of dollars. The high growth and high value of the user base justifies a higher valuation for the company.”

Kabam’s users are as dedicated as console gamers. They’re willing to spend more than $60 sometimes, just to get a much-needed advantage that will make them look good in front of their fellow alliance members (as many as 100 players can band together in alliances). Chou has said that Kabam isn’t really going after Zynga. It’s the anti-Zynga. It’s going after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts instead, with the aim of disrupting their traditional business, Chou said.

This is the place in the story where traditional game company executives cackle at the audaciousness of Chou. But there are a lot of former game industry veterans working for him.

Kabam doesn’t disclose its financial results. But the tea leaves are there. With just four games and $125 million in funding, Kabam has been able to grow from 25 employees to more than 400 in the past 16 months. Chou said the team will be shipping more impressive games, including five later this year.

Console gamers may laugh at the low interactivity of Kabam’s games now, but Chou says there’s a full pipeline of games coming, and each one will reflect learnings from Kabam’s direct observation of millions of gamers. Traditional video game executives would kill to get that kind of feedback. Global Warfare, Kabam’s newest game, has minimalist, cinematic-style cut scenes (as much as Facebook can handle) and it takes the game play from Glory of Rome to a higher level. The game forces players in an alliance to be more social by requiring them to coordinate assaults on strategic resources in the game. I’ve been playing it since it debuted on May 3, and I’ve spent most of that time getting ready to do real battle. That might bore other players, but I consider it to be a fun investment of my time.

There is some precedent for Kabam’s funding. The game industry took notice of the Kabam-style model of getting more dollars out of hardcore gamers when China’s Tencent bought the majority of Riot Games for nearly $400 million in February. Riot Games had only 1 million users playing one game, but those dedicated gamers spent a lot of money. In January, Kabam raised eyebrows and fears of a “bubble” in social gaming when it raised $30 million.

EA, for its part, has its own online role-playing game Lord of Ultima online on Bigpoint.com. But there’s an opening for Kabam to get big in this niche because many of the big traditional game publishers have left the PC game market to focus on the consoles. And the traditional game publishers who have entered the Facebook market are focusing on competing with Zynga for the new demographic of casual gamers on Facebook. No one is really competing directly with Kabam, except other startups such as Kixeye.

But Kabam has to walk a delicate balance with its users. It can get the games to monetize better by making ordinary tasks take longer and longer to do, like sending scouts on a recon mission. The users may get fed up and pay Kabam some money so that it can eliminate the wait. But if the users feel like Kabam is holding them up at every turn and deliberately trying to frustrate them, then they will move on to another free-to-play game that doesn’t treat them that way.

There are some risks for Kabam. The company can stage some massive battles where users send reinforcements to stop attackers from looting a city. But it takes a lot of computing power to make sure that the game doesn’t crash or make the wrong calculation in this kind of scenario. And overall, Kabam needs more servers because its users are online so much. Kabam has to make sure that it doesn’t hit a wall with Facebook’s infrastructure, which wasn’t really built for real-time engagement.

Over time, the social network platform will become better at running online games. And then Kabam will likely try to create games that include the animations and 3D graphics that hardcore gamers want. Chou says the company will also expand into new markets such as Asia, where there is a lot of potential among hardcore gamers. Pelowski acknowledges that there is still a gap where the best console games have a higher quality bar, but Kabam is starting to close that gap. And in the meantime, the company is still monetizing its current games very well.

All of that adds up to a lot of  value, says Pelowski. As to whether Kabam is part of a giant social gaming and social networking bubble, Pelowski says the underlying metrics of the business justify the investment.

Existing investors Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Canaan Partners also participated in the deal.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Tags: Dragons of Atlantis, Global Warfare, Glory of Rome, hardcore games, Kingdoms of Camelot, video games

Companies: Activision Blizzard, Canaan Partners, Electronic Arts, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Kabam, Performance Equity, Pinnacle Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, SK Telecom Ventures

People: Ken Pelowski, Kevin Chou

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Back when the San Francisco-based company had “only” raised around $8 million, I already found the funding “kind of remarkable”. The new total, $14 million, isn’t a huge amount for a tech startup, but it certainly dwarfs the amount raised by most competing sites. (VentureBeat, for example, has raised less than $1 million, while Business Insider has raised more than $6 million.)

When I asked GigaOm chief executive Paul Walborsky about the decision to raise more money, he responded, “We are big believers in building out a big company.”

GigaOm is certainly one of the most-respected names in the field, but thus far, tech blogs haven’t been acquired for enough money to justify a higher level of funding — the biggest deal has probably been AOL buying TechCrunch for $40 million. Walborsky said that he and founder Om Malik (pictured above) are confident that they’ve figured out a model that works and can continue grow. Rather than limiting its monetization efforts on GigaOm sites (which include GigaOm itself, as well as sites like video-focused NewTeeVee and cleantech-focused Earth2Tech), it sounds like the company sees the blogs as a way to build its brand. The sites also draw in potential new customers for its conferences and the research and reports sold through GigaOm Pro. The new money will mostly go towards building out the technology infrastructure behind Pro, Walborsky added.

“We believe that the growth of GigaOm is going to be driven by our research platform and GigaOm Pro,” he said. “That does not minimize the importance of our online audience. What we write about on the blog is what brings people to read GigaOm on a daily basis.”

GigaOm now claims more than 4 million unique monthly visitors across its sites, a number that’s growing 30 percent annually. According to Walborsky, the company doubled its revenue in 2010, thanks largely to GigaOm Pro. It’s on-track to double that revenue yet again this year, and to become cash-flow positive by the end of 2011.

Tags: tech blogs

Companies: Alloy Partners, Gigaom, Reed Elsevier Ventures, True Ventures

People: Om Malik, Paul Walborsky

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The outlook for this quarter and the year, however, fell short of expectations. The company’s conference call with analysts started at 4:30 pm, Eastern.

Q4 revenue was down 22%, year over year, at $182.2 million, beating the average $148 million estimate. A net loss of 18 cents per share was far bettern than the 39-cent loss analysts had been expecting.

Results were boosted by titles such as NBA 2K11, Top Spin 4, and Major League Baseball 2K11, the company said.

For the current quarter, the company projected revenue of $325 million to $375 million, and profit of breakeven to 10 cents per share. Analysts had been modeling $298.7 million and 14 cents per share.

Reviewing the company’s lineup, some titles have slipped in their release schedule as described back in February. For example, Duke Nukem Forever, originally scheduled for May 3rd, was pushed out (of course!) to June 10th, while Spec Ops: The Line, originally scheduled for “fiscal year 2012,” was pushed out to “first half fiscal 2013.”

For the full year ending in March of 2012, the company projects $1 billion to $1.1 billion in revenue, and EPS of 10 cents to 35 cents. That is below the $1.3 billion and $1.12 per share analysts have been modeling.

Take-Two said three key members of its Rockstart Games development team, Sam Houser, Dan Houser, and Leslie Benzies, had renewed their long-term employment agreements with Take-Two.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

The outlook for this quarter and the year, however, fell short of expectations. The company’s conference call with analysts started at 4:30 pm, Eastern.

Q4 revenue was down 22%, year over year, at $182.2 million, beating the average $148 million estimate. A net loss of 18 cents per share was far bettern than the 39-cent loss analysts had been expecting.

Results were boosted by titles such as NBA 2K11, Top Spin 4, and Major League Baseball 2K11, the company said.

For the current quarter, the company projected revenue of $325 million to $375 million, and profit of breakeven to 10 cents per share. Analysts had been modeling $298.7 million and 14 cents per share.

Reviewing the company’s lineup, some titles have slipped in their release schedule as described back in February. For example, Duke Nukem Forever, originally scheduled for May 3rd, was pushed out (of course!) to June 10th, while Spec Ops: The Line, originally scheduled for “fiscal year 2012,” was pushed out to “first half fiscal 2013.”

For the full year ending in March of 2012, the company projects $1 billion to $1.1 billion in revenue, and EPS of 10 cents to 35 cents. That is below the $1.3 billion and $1.12 per share analysts have been modeling.

Take-Two said three key members of its Rockstart Games development team, Sam Houser, Dan Houser, and Leslie Benzies, had renewed their long-term employment agreements with Take-Two.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

The outlook for this quarter and the year, however, fell short of expectations. The company’s conference call with analysts started at 4:30 pm, Eastern.

Q4 revenue was down 22%, year over year, at $182.2 million, beating the average $148 million estimate. A net loss of 18 cents per share was far bettern than the 39-cent loss analysts had been expecting.

Results were boosted by titles such as NBA 2K11, Top Spin 4, and Major League Baseball 2K11, the company said.

For the current quarter, the company projected revenue of $325 million to $375 million, and profit of breakeven to 10 cents per share. Analysts had been modeling $298.7 million and 14 cents per share.

Reviewing the company’s lineup, some titles have slipped in their release schedule as described back in February. For example, Duke Nukem Forever, originally scheduled for May 3rd, was pushed out (of course!) to June 10th, while Spec Ops: The Line, originally scheduled for “fiscal year 2012,” was pushed out to “first half fiscal 2013.”

For the full year ending in March of 2012, the company projects $1 billion to $1.1 billion in revenue, and EPS of 10 cents to 35 cents. That is below the $1.3 billion and $1.12 per share analysts have been modeling.

Take-Two said three key members of its Rockstart Games development team, Sam Houser, Dan Houser, and Leslie Benzies, had renewed their long-term employment agreements with Take-Two.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

The software is expected to be available this fall, Microsoft said.

Engadget’s Tim Stevens, among others, is dutifully chronicling the debut event this morning.

Some of the initial points Microsoft is hammering on: It’s about people you connect with, not about “apps.” The “live tiles” — little squares that appear on the home page of the screen — have updates of developments surfacing on Twitter, LinkedIn (LNKD), and other information sources. Things like seeing people’s “profile pictures” as soon as they’re updated. A “groups” features automatically pulls together photos and other info for individuals you choose to associate together.

Microsoft is also demonstrating a smarter keyboard, with phrase completion. Different threads of conversation, such as Facebook and text messages, can be grouped together, the company said.

Microsoft said the software will be the first code it puts on the first phone developed in partnership with Nokia (NOK).

Microsoft shares are up 6 cents at $24.23.

Update: Business Insider’s Ellis Hamburger offers a video from the event that shows how Mango will perform multi-tasking functions. It is curiously similar to the “card view” used by Palm OS to jump between applications.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily