Portalarium, the social and mobile game company founded by game pioneer Richard Garriott, has raised a second round of funding. Altogether, the Austin, Texas-based startup has raised $3.6 million to date.

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 Globe & Mail’s Paul Waldie and Body Erman posted a video this morning asking if Research in Motion’s (RIMM) co-CEO Mike Lazaridis should go. (A video preceded, I would note, by an add for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer!)

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

via guestofaguest.com: We all secretly think that our taste in music is some magic map of our hidden depths, but when we actually have the opportunity to show someone what’s on our iPod, it’s Bon Jovi or a podcast on how to get gum out of your beard. That’s why the honesty displayed by the New Yorkers in this video is both delightful and refreshing. MORE>>

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GigaOm already stands out as one of the most heavily-funded sites in the tech news world — and today it nearly doubled that funding, announcing that it has raised another $6 million.

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

Shares of video game maker Take-Two Interactive (TTWO) are up 3 cents at $16.13 down 35 cents, or 2%, at $15.75, after the stock was briefly halted in advance of its fiscal Q4 report, which easily beat estimates.

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

Shares of video game maker Take-Two Interactive (TTWO) are up 3 cents at $16.13 down 35 cents, or 2%, at $15.75, after the stock was briefly halted in advance of its fiscal Q4 report, which easily beat estimates.

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

Following a revision in Sony’s (SNE) fully-year results this morning and drop in the stock, Macquarie Equities Research analyst Jeff Loff this afternoon writes that the stock has “overcompensated” for the disappointment, and that there’s 5% upside in the shares.

However, he maintains a Neutral rating on the shares, writing that he’s waiting for a cut in Street estimates for the current fiscal year ending next March, and looking to gain greater confidence in how the company may do in 2013.

Loff notes a 23% decline in Sony’s stock since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and a loss of $8.1 billion in market capitalization, the stock has an “undemanding” valuation of 2.8 times projected 2013 Ebitda, and trades at just 0.7 times book value, again using 2013 estimates.

Loff thinks the total cost to Sony of the break-in to its online entertainment systems will probably be about 117 billion yen, using as a model for his estimate the 2006 break-in suffered by TJ Max (TJX). Of that, 75 billion yen is expected to be the amount for lost video game revenue due to the system outage sparked by the break-in.

Sony may end up taking a charge for the break-in costs in the June quarter, he thinks.

Loff cut his 2012 revenue and operating profit estimates to 7 trillion yen and 204 billion yen, from a prior 7.1 trillion and 237 billion, based on an expectation of 10% lower video game hardware and software sales than he previously estimated, though that might be too conservative, he concedes.

Sony shares today are down 32 cents, or 1%, at $26.73, having recouped much of its losses today.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Shares of Apple (AAPL) are down $2.34, or 0.7%,a t $338.19 after Blooomberg’s Michael Wei in Beijing reported there has been an explosion at a plant in Chengdu owned by Foxconn, the Taiwanese firm that manufactures many of Apple’s products.

The story appears not to be posted to Bloomberg’s Web site yet; On the terminal, it is under Foxconn news, not Apple news.

The brief item on the Bloomberg terminal only says that seven people have been hospitalized.

Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal writes that the Chengdu plant is a “major builder of Apple’s iPads,” and writes that the factory has been sealed off by police while the matter is investigated.

Update: Dow Jones’s James Areddy reports the explosion has killed “at least two people,” according to Chengdu authorities. 16 people are now reported to be injured, including three “seriously,” he writes, citing municipal government statements.

“Details of the explosion are sketchy but video posted to the Internet and broadcast by China Central Television shows black billowing smoke from the massive facility,” writes Areddy. Areddy’s report includes a reiteration of background on a series of suicides at Foxconn last year.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

In case you missed, Saudi prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal was on CNBC this morning — he’s 26th on the Forbes billionaire list with $19.6 billion in personal net worth, in case you’ve lost count — and he was talking about about Apple (AAPL), among other things.

“We got into Apple at $9 many years ago, and Steve Jobs is my friend, I always visit him in California,” said Al-Waleed. “We always believed in Apple. Apple is a very good company, and they are the leader right now in the technology industry. Clearly, there are lots of challenges, they are being attacked from all fronts, but Apple is a big force to be reckoned with in the technology industry.”

(In the video clip below, the discussion of Apple comes in at about 7:40 into the set.)

Asked about growth, Al-Waleed said that the tablet and phone markets have “not yet peaked” for the company. Al-Waleed was also asked about the fate of the company given CEO Steve Jobs’s leave from day-to-day operations.

“Steve Jobs is a unique person, and he has good people with him. You know, he’s not managing the company on a day-to-day basis, but still the company is on a good track and doing good.”

On the general economic outlook, Al-Waleed said that the global economies went through “intensive care,” and “you don’t expect someone to go walking and jogging right away. Hopefully some jogging will take place soon.”

Remarking on the impending end of the Fed Reserve’s “QE2″ program of bond purchases, he likened it to a “scaffolding” of a building, arguing that when a scaffolding is taken away, the “building has to stand.” He doesn’t believe, in other words, that when QE2 ends in June, it will have a major impact on markets. Of greater concern is what is done with the U.S. budget deficit and “brinksmanship” over the U.S. debt ceiling, which he called a “time bomb.”

As long as the U.S. issue can be taken care of, there will be low growth for several years to come, he avers, but not a return to recession, despite European debt issues.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

ThinkEquity’s Mark McKechnie this morning initiated coverage of Research In Motion (RIMM) with a Hold rating and a $48 target, threading a path between what he sees as the bull and bear cases.

The bear case is that RIM’s BlackBerry service offering will see subscribers decline in coming years, but McKechnie actually thinks the company can add 16 million and 13 million subscribers in the next two years, for $4.25 per share in earnings, on top of what else it can generate. (He models $6.40 per share this fiscal year ending next February, and $6.55 in fiscal 2013.) The network service is the “core asset,” he writes.

But McKechnie also wonders why the company has talked about new handsets based on its “QNX” operating system, while not actually offering them for another year, essentially offering “vaporware,” as he sees it.

While the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9300 that were recently introduced, and that don’t run QNX, will see purchases this summer from loyal BB fans, he thinks the company may prompt IT shops to hold off on purchases until they see the next generation BlackBerry with QNX next year.

But actually the key issue for RIM, McKechnie, asserts, is how the company adjusts to rich media. RIM rose to prominence when phone companies wanted to keep bandwidth usage down in an era of low-bit-rate messaging traffic. That was back when they banned video from their wireless networks. But Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone’s support for video, etc. has up-ended that equation. “Thus, RIM’s advantage — a light footprint for email and messaging — becomes less important.”

As for tablets, McKechnie thinks this will be a two-horse race between Apple and Google’s (GOOG) Android, but he’s not altogether giving up on RIM’s “PlayBook” tablet — because of its support for Adobe’s (ADBE) “Flash” media technology, which could prove appealing to some corporate users: “We do see a market, particularly in the corporate space, which requires Flash support and thus gives RIMM an opening, in our view.”

RIMM shares this morning are down 62 cents, or 1.4%, at $43.61.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily