The latest from TechCrunch
- Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue
- Foodily Brings Social Goodness And Menu Sharing To Recipe Search Engine
- Bluefin Labs Reveals How It Is Tying Social Media To TV
- Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face Right In Front Of Us!
| Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue | Top |
| Japan’s leading social games company, DeNA (listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a $5.4 billion market cap), is running from one record to the other . The company, whose mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town boasts over 22 million users in Japan, issued its operating results reported [PDF] for the third financial quarter today. In this time frame, DeNA’s revenue reached $359 million, up 153% from the same quarter in fiscal 2009 and up 9% from Q2. The company’s operating profit grew 182% year-on-year to $181 million (up 8% from Q2). DeNA is projecting revenue for the entire fiscal year to reach $1.3 billion (up from $590 million last year) and operating profit to grow from $260 to $675 million. It’s tough to make comparisons with Zynga (which doesn’t publish financial data), but even big Z shouldn’t be able to match these numbers, at least not this year. In a nut shell, Mobage-town is like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one – exclusively available through mobile phones registered in Japan. The site currently boasts 764 games offered by over 300 companies. 90% of DeNA’s revenue and profits come from Mobage-town (sales of virtual items, avatar-related sales, ads etc.). In other words, the company is expecting over $1 billion in revenue to be generated by mobile phone users and in Japan only . These are mind-boggling numbers, especially when you consider that the company is sharing Japan’s mobile social gaming market with a big competitor that follows the same business model, GREE (which is also listed and boasts a market cap of $3.7 billion itself). DeNA is currently trying hard to diversify its product and business strategy, with a focus on bring Mobage-town to international markets this year. The latest moves include acquiring San Francisco-based mobile games maker ngmoco for up to $400 million , expanding its game platform to PCs (through a collaboration with Yahoo Japan) and inking a deal with Samsung to have Mobage-town pre-installed on every Samsung smartphone ships from spring this year. We will keep you posted. CrunchBase Information DeNA Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Foodily Brings Social Goodness And Menu Sharing To Recipe Search Engine | Top |
| There a plethora of recipe search sites on the web available to cooks, including AllRecipes, Epicurious, FoodTV and many others. Foodily is attempting to make recipe search more social today with an in-depth Facebook integration, menu planning, and more. Foodily aggregates recipes from big name chefs on sites like FoodTV to up and coming bloggers. Results are actually presented side-by-side, which makes comparing recipes and ingredients side by side. It also makes searching for a recipe more like browsing through your latest Food&Wine magazine. Through an integration with Facebook, recipes "liked" on Foodily will appear in your Facebook feed, and recipes your friends like will appear in your Foodily recipe search. Foodily also will allows anyone to create a Facebook event invitation that includes a menu, allowing friends to see what dishes are planned for events like dinner parties or pot lucks. Friends can comment on the menu, share their feedback and add additional dishes they want to bring. While the recipe search engine space is crowded, what could help Foodily stand out is its social features, especially the menu integration with Facebook. Founded by former Yahoo employees, Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell, Foodily has raised $5 million from Index Ventures. CrunchBase Information Foodily Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Bluefin Labs Reveals How It Is Tying Social Media To TV | Top |
| On the Web, we have links, which makes all media trackable. But on TV there are no links. So how do you track the audience response to a TV show or an ad? It’s all guesswork, panels, and surveys pretty much. But Deb Roy thinks he has a better answer: treat social media as a realtime “focus group in the wild” and tie that commentary back to TV. He wants to infer links from what people are talking about. In the video above, he explains his approach with Bluefin Labs. “Think about a switchboard that links realtime TV with social media,” he says. Roy is the founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs , a video and language analytics startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bluefin is creating a console for advertisers and TV programmers to measure the social resonance of their content. Using sophisticated semantic analysis, Bluefin can determine what peopel are saying about a particular TV show or commercial across various social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The console (see screenshot below) still spits out fairly raw data right now and is in the process of getting a cleaner UI, but essentially it shows what looks like a digital program guide with shows and ads being tracked on different channels. For each show or ad, the grey bars represent how much commentary was sparked across various social media, with an actual sampling of Tweets and Facebook comments, along with a tag cloud summarizing what people are saying about that show or ad. A brand introducing a new product could see how often the name of the product is mentioned by people talking about it versus the overall umbrella brand. Advertisers interested in actually measuring engagement could use this data to see how much buzz is created given the reach of a particular show. They could look at the response rate per airing and then rank order each TV network to see where their ad dollars are best spent. “For every mass media action there is some sort of audience response,” says Roy. “This has always been the case. Because of the low barrier to entry to social media there are feedback loops. Those roll up to a significant new force which shifts how audiences view the mass media.” Roy is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and he founded the company in 2008 with one of his Ph.D students, Michael Fleischmann. ver the past 15 years, Roy’s research explored the nexus between video and language. He taught a robot named Toko the names of objects using video and language as complimentary feedback loops, and put his own family under video surveillance to capture how his son learned language over a period of 36 months. Now with Bluefin, he is taking that deep machine learning and semantic analysis and applying it to TV. Last year, Bluefin raised a $6 million series A financing led by Redpoint Ventures. Other investors in that and a previous seed round include Lerer Ventures, Acadia Woods Ventures, Brian Bedol and Jonathan Kraft. The company has raised a total of $8.35 million, including a $1.15 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The company is piloting its console with nine large advertisers, brands, and media agencies including Pepsi. But getting back to how social media can create effective links to TV. What is a link? It is a reference to something else on the Web. When you talk about a TV show or ad that is also a reference, but you usually don’t use links. Your comments, however, are increasingly being captured by social media. “You don't need to interact with a piece of online media to create a response,” says Roy, “all you need is somebody to talk to.” Bluefin is “treating social media like clickstreams: It determines when somebody is talking about a particular show or ad on TV using its language learning and semantic analysis engine, and then creates an implicit link to that content in its database. It is taking social media and mass media and mixing them together. CrunchBase Information Bluefin Labs Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face Right In Front Of Us! | Top |
| By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the news. Google set up a sting operation (how cool is that?) in an attempt to catch Microsoft red-handed stealing their search results. And according to them, they did just that — and made it known. Microsoft has seemingly both sidestepped and denied the claim — and then has sent accusations back Google’s way. The whole thing is amazing, and to be honest, I’m still trying to parse it all. But you can get the whole gist by reading what’s on Techmeme , starting with Danny Sullivan’s original post on the topic. But what’s most interesting right now is that Google and Microsoft are engaged in a full-on war. Yes, they’ve more or less been at war for many years. But it’s mainly been a quiet war, that takes place behind the scenes and only occasionally includes quick jabs at the other one in public. But now they’re straight-up calling each other liars on Twitter, and their own very popular blogs! After the news and subsequent fight first broke out this morning. Microsoft immediately put up a rebuttal on their Bing blog, entitled: Thoughts on search quality . That article directly addresses Sullivan’s post but doesn’t directly call out Google for much. Then things started to get ugly . This prompted Microsoft communication head, Frank Shaw, to take to Twitter in an attempt to swing Microsoft into the offensive postion. Here were his three key tweets: @fxshaw Frank X. Shaw 1.Don’t be fooled. Google wants to change subject because they’re under investigation in the US and Europe for manipulating search results. about 11 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply @fxshaw Frank X. Shaw 2. Google collects customer data from Chrome and Android. Pot calling kettle black? http://bit.ly/eLQV70 about 11 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply @fxshaw Frank X. Shaw 3. Harry Shum very clear http://bit.ly/hYvCIM on 1k plus signals used in ranking algorithm…includes clickstream data. about 11 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply Google’s Matt Cutts fired back on Twitter: @mattcutts Matt Cutts So far Bing's response seems to be "We don't copy Google's results. Of course we do." http://goo.gl/8VoDJ vs. http://goo.gl/yW4Ia about 8 hours ago via web Retweet Reply Google then decided to escalate things further by using their official blog to very directly call Microsoft out with a post titled: Microsoft's Bing uses Google search results—and denies it . I mean, just think about that for a second. Then, about an hour ago, there was this great exchange on Twitter in response to Dave Winer posting a link to the original story: @davewiner Dave Winer Oooops looks like Google caught Microsoft cheating in search. http://r2.ly/853k about 7 hours ago via web Retweet Reply @fxshaw Frank X. Shaw @ davewiner no they didn't. about 7 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply @davewiner Dave Winer @ fxshaw The evidence is pretty convincing about 7 hours ago via web Retweet Reply | |
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