With Microsoft becoming increasingly marginalized in areas like mobile media, DirectX is becoming less of a must-use toolset and more of a gaming-specific one. The other side of the coin is, of course, the increasing relevance of standards like OpenGL, OpenAL, and OpenCL: powerful cross-platform systems for graphics, audio, and parallel processing. You may remember OpenCL from its debut on the Mac in Snow Leopard, and OpenGL ES of course powers the UI on the iPad. OpenAL is still a ways from being brought under the public eye, but it’s getting there. In the meantime, OpenGL 4.0 was announced today at GDC, and clearly it has DirectX in its sights.

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It looks like TiVo’s freshly minted Premiere hardware will soon be setting sail eastwards as The Daily Telegraph is reporting Virgin Media’s next generation set-top box will be built around it. Loyal readers of Engadget HD will already be aware that TiVo and Virgin hooked up last November and this latest news relates to the first hardware to be spawned from that relationship. According to TiVo CEO Tom Rogers, the Premiere will “heavily inspire the development work” going into Virgin’s next TV appendage, which may or may not mean that the cable company will simply rebadge the well-received new boxes. What’s assured though is much greater integration with online content, with search linking you out to Amazon, BBC’s iPlayer, YouTube or good old standard broadcast channels. The whole thing’s about unlimited choice, apparently, and should be showing up on the Queen’s isles by the end of this year. We can wait, but we’d rather we didn’t have to.

TiVo returning to the UK thanks to partnership with Virgin Media originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The company has also acquired the domain Chomp.com and relaunched its website with new features — including vanity web addresses for users, and the ability for developers to link to their application’s review page.

Chomp’s iPhone application allows you  to review apps with a simple “like” or “dislike” option (via heart and broken heart icons) and an optional 60-character review. It then builds a list of recommended apps based upon your reviews. The company believes this is a better method than wading through the iTunes App Store’s some 150,000 apps trying to find something worthwhile.

Co-founder and CEO Ben Keighran tells me that Chomp is also building a more useful collection of app review data than what Apple offers. He says that that the App Store’s native review process promotes a negative bias — since users are only ever prompted to review apps when deleting them, and many users rate apps with one star (out of five) without thinking. Those one-star reviews add up, and end up skewing application review totals more than they should.

You can always review an app from within the app store, but there’s no real incentive to do so. This leads to lower scores than many apps deserve, which inevitably causes users to skip over them when browsing the App Store. Chomp’s review scores, on the other hand, trend more positively since users aren’t just rating them at the point of deletion.

Take for example Evernote’s iPhone application, which has a 3-star rating on the App Store — including 119 1-star reviews, more than any other rating. On Chomp, favorable reviews for Evernote are much stronger (see screenshot) with 1,895 users liking it, and 529 disliking it. Keighran tells me that ratings matter a lot to iPhone users. His extensive user testing for Chomp showed that if an app is below three stars, they likely won’t even download it.

With its new website, Keighran believes that developers will find it useful to link to Chomp reviews of their apps. The addition of vanity URLs will also allow users to share their app likes and dislikes with others more easily. The vanity address takes the form of chomp.com/username. Users still need to sign up for a Chomp account via the iPhone app, but the company is working on bringing account creation to the site.

Chomp also recently launched Chomp Connect, which will allow developers to integrate a Chomp review option into their apps. This way, users don’t even have to leave their app to leave a review. Keighran tells me that Chomp Connect is very easy to implement, and can take the form of a button sitting somewhere in an app, or as a pop-up that appears after you launch an app a certain amount of times. Currently 104 developers are signed up to use Chomp Connect, with Booyah being one of the first major apps to do so.

Based in San Francisco, Chomp’s latest funding injection comes from Bluerun Ventures, Brian Pokomy, and David Lee. The company previously raised $565,000 in angel funding from Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut and  Auren Hoffman.

Tags: iPhone, mobile apps

Companies: Chomp

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague about the challenges he was having with his company’s leads pipeline. He had the contacts, but the opportunities weren’t growing fast enough.

I’ve actually seen this many times. The assumption is that once an initial outreach has been done to new contacts, the conversion has to happen fast. If it doesn’t, they’re considered a dead lead and the general thinking is that spending too much time on them is wasted effort. This can also apply to leads that convert to opportunities but get stuck in an early stage in the pipeline.

While a strong contact database can be a real asset to the company, tapping into its value depends upon having a good strategy for lead nurturing. The best way to do that is to think like an editor, not a marketer.

The key to success isn’t abandoning these highly valuable contacts, but rather spending time organizing them and building a relationship based on relevant, interesting content.

Think of your job as the publisher of a niche magazine of news, commentary and insights into your company’s technology domain and prospects industry. This allows you to connect to your audience and become their trusted source of information and solutions to address their problems.

Here are some good strategies for publishing your niche magazine and implementing a successful lead nurturing program.

•    Understand and group your audience – Don’t treat your audience all the same. Identify the most common characteristics among the companies in your leads database and group them accordingly. These groupings can be by industry, size of company, key problem they are solving and many other characteristics.

•    Identify an editorial content strategy - Don’t just send e-mail blasts with marketing promotional offers. Report and comment on relevant industry news and events. Understand what industry news is interesting to your audience. Some news merits an immediate, personal campaign vs. waiting to include it in a newsletter.

•    Blog to your content strategy - Blog about relevant news and topics that map to your content strategy. Most companies should be posting a minimum of 1-2 times per week (and, as you grow, even more). The trap companies often fall into with blogging is that they think every post has to be a deep thought leadership piece. If you have this attitude, your blog will die on the vine. Creating this content regularly with variety is too difficult. Blog about anything and everything that may be interesting to your audience. Blog about a new government regulation. Blog about the tradeshow you are attending. Blog about a customer problem that you discussed in a sales call (no names have to be mentioned). All of these things are interesting to your audience and they can learn from them.

•    Promote your content with social media - Use social media to connect in a variety of ways to your prospect list. Use Twitter to promote new blog postings and publish your corporate twitter accounts on your site, in your email and business cards. Create and use LinkedIn groups and have your employees update their status to reflect interesting posts. Whatever social media you are investing in should promote your content.

•    Your newsletter is your magazine – Highlight your top tracking blogs from the month and send a custom newsletter to each contact group. Make sure the content is relevant to them and coordinate any calls to action in the email appropriately. If you have blogged regularly, then your newsletter content is already written – meaning the hardest part of the job is already done.

•    Use marketing automation tools for distribution, lead scoring and follow up – Using marketing automation tools is an absolute must to get the most out of your lead nurturing programs. There are a number of tools that meet a wide variety of budgets and have a range of features. The key is that whether you use Eloqua, Loopfuse or another tool, you need to have the capability to easily manage your contact lists, publish regular targeted content to those contacts, and score and follow up with them appropriately based on their subsequent actions.

Too many companies have valid contact lists that go untapped. Today’s sales process takes time and relationship building. Thinking like an editor and delivering interesting, relevant content to your audience will establish a connection with them, create thought leadership and keep you at the top of mind when it comes to solving the problems you address and they are ready to buy.

Tags: sales generation

As mobile gaming takes off, developers will need in-depth analysis to determine consumer behavior with their games and adjust their games accordingly. Motally, which provides user-action tracking services for the mobile web and apps, is expanding its product base today offering a targeted analytics service aimed towards mobile games on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms. The service is currently in private beta, but developers will be able to sign up to use the service.

Motally’s game-oriented analytics platform allows publishers to track in-game data including where users drop out in-play and which levels users interact with most. Motally also allows for the dynamic changing of the game’s design, allowing developers to measure the impact of changes immediately. As a result, publishers can tweak their games including design, performance, and ad placement by pinpointing areas of the game with the most traffic and identifying trouble areas.

Motally’s game analytics allows publishers to analyze what level players are reaching and then dropping off, determine the top players and their high scores within a game, and to reach out to those on the leaderboard and present them with special offers or advertisements. The data also includes which virtual goods on an application are most popular, which games are most popular in a developer’s portfolio of games, and the conversion rates of players opting into paid premium game offerings.

Game developer Portable Zoo has already been using Motally’s analytics, and claims that data collected from the platform allowed the developer to adjust games to increase average engagement time, and the overall appeal of games.

Motally’s venture in gaming is smart considering the rapid growth of mobile gaming, especially on smartphones. Motally, which recently launched an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple’s iPad and rolled out a flexible API, support analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. Motally offers more advanced features that allows developers to troubleshoot and debug their products from anywhere in the world, without having to re-deploy apps and games to the Apple iPhone store. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally’s clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.

I handle a lot of mice in this job (right now I’m using the Mionix Naos 5000) and I have to say that if a mouse were, like the Magic Mouse, shaped completely wrong for human hands, I would throw it away and never speak of it again. Others, while perhaps more crafty, are far less principled, and will go so far as to fabricate a silicone crutch to rest their hand on. There, I fixed it!

Unless they’re incredibly quiet or potentially explosive, you won’t find us waxing poetic (or even prosaic) about leaf blowers. But if a company that produced leaf blowers made a motorized calendar that tore off its own pages? We’d tell you about that in a heartbeat — even if the wonderfully wasteful contraption turned out to be a viral ad by agency Euro RSCG rather than an actual household organizer, and even if its pages aren’t nearly as saucy as Stihl’s usual NSFW fare. Believe it or not, there’s no blade inside that brushed aluminum shell; the process works by ripping out the bookbinding thread along the calendar’s spine using a motorized reel. Join us in celebrating the wonder of pressed dead wood floating to earth all by its lonesome with a short video after the break.

Continue reading Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow

Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company will use the money to expand its software and services businesses such as Faceware, which is a suite of facial animation tools to create believable human faces for game characters. The company raised the money by completing an exchange offer with shell company International Cellular Accessories, an over-the-counter stock which is acquiring Image Metrics and then will allow Image Metrics to operate as a public company. Upon the completion of the reverse merger ICA will change its name to Image Metrics.

It’s not the ideal way to go public, but it’s a way for companies that need cash to get it. Image Metrics was founded in 2000 and has invested more than $14 million and 60-man-years into its technology. Its clients include a who’s who of games: Activision-Blizzard, Bethesda, Electronic Arts, Sega, Sony Computer Entertainment, Take Two Interactive, Ubisoft, and Warner Brothers.  A sampling of projects includes: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Feature Film (2008 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects); Grand Theft Auto IV; Assassin’s Creed II; NBA2K10; Rock Band 2; and the music video for the Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow song.

Image Metrics said it reported $4 million in revenues for its fiscal year ended Sept. 30 and a net loss of $6.8 million. For this year, it has a backlog of $5 million. In the first fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, revenues were $2.5 million and its loss was $1 million.

Companies: Image Metrics

If I were a spit takin’ man, I’d do a spit take right now. Motorola, stalwart of freedom, will work with Chinese carriers to add Bing to Chinese Android-based phones, ousting Google Search and Maps from the scene. Now this isn’t meanness on Motorola’s part although Reuters notes that this move could have something to do with that whole Great Chinese Google Hacking Incident a few weeks ago.

Remember the HarmoNESica? A brief refresher, then: it’s what happens when you’ve got a copy of Super Tecmo Bowl, a Pocket Pal harmonica, and the desire to create a unique musical instrument. But if you don’t have any of the aforementioned ingredients and just want the end result, eBay’s got you covered as usual — three HarmoNESicas have been gathering bids at the online auction house this week. Whether your pleasure be Dick Tracy, Super Mario Bros. 3 or The Legend of Zelda, there’s a harmonica to match; and if (for some reason) you want to actually play one of the games, you’ll find the ROM guts tastefully included. But before you make your bid, remember: there’s more than one way to skin an NES cartridge.

NES harmonicas hit eBay, three lucky gamers cheer originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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