Farooq Yousuf

Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter
by Michael Arrington

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do.

Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed.

Update 2 (4/3/09): In a non-denial blog post entitled “Sometimes We Talk” Twitter co-Founder Biz Stone says: “It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.”

Source: TechCrunch

Popularity: 31% [?]

A new genre has been introduced into the gaming industry: zen - focusing on nature, peaceful, serene type games. It was discovered by a  John Hight of Sony PS3 at a student showcase and immediately knew this would be a big hit. I think this new genre will only appeal to a certain group and crowd, I doubt it would be appealing to all gamers initially but maybe I’m wrong, only time will tell. Overall I think the idea does seem pretty cool and it just might catch on. When playing the game it gives the player a zen feeling, you make ask what does that mean? Well, read the article below:

Video Game Grad Programs Open Up The Industry
by Heather Chaplin

Traditionally, video game designers learned their trade from other designers, a system that meant the people who made the games were often living in a monoculture. But that’s changed recently; for the past five or 10 years, universities have been offering degree programs in video game design.

The programs are not about coding; instead they look at games as a medium for artistic experimentation and collaboration. And as students emerge, they are gradually making their mark on the industry.

Take Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The two graduates of the University of Southern California’s interactive media MFA program exemplify the more diverse group of people entering the field.

Santiago grew up on Nintendo and spent some time doing experimental theater in New York before enrolling at USC. She says she played a lot of video games growing up, but never thought much about making them until she started classes.

“When I took the first game studies class we had, taught by Tracy Fullerton, that really opened my eyes up to, in a way, how video games were sort of the new interactive theater,” she says.

Those games studies classes were also where she met Chen, who had come to the U.S. from Shanghai with the intention of studying computer science. He’d made games as a hobby when he was a teenager, but by the time he got to USC, he was disenchanted with them.

“Even though we grew up with games, at the same time, the gamers are actually outgrowing the games,” he says. “Very few games have actually achieved those qualities that would be interesting to an adult.”

Santiago and Chen decided to collaborate on games that would feel different. Their first game together, Cloud, features a little boy who imagines flying out of his hospital room window and into the sky, where he make shapes out of the clouds, moving white clouds over dark ones to keep the sky from raining.

John Hight of Sony stumbled across Cloud at a student showcase while scouting games for the PlayStation 3.

Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen created the video game Cloud (above) while still in graduate school. Sony executive John Hight calls the game — which features a little boy who imagines flying out of his hospital room window and into the sky — a "Zen" experience.

Hight has been in the video game business for more than 20 years, and he knew he’d found something special. Cloud was nothing like the typical PlayStation 3 games, which include titles like Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5.

“One of the marketing people asked me, ‘So what genre is it?’ And I said completely straight-faced, ‘It’s Zen,’ ” says Hight. “They said, ‘Zen? What the heck is Zen?’ And I said, ‘It’s a new category.’ ”

By graduation day, Santiago and Chen had formed thatgamecompany with the goal of making video games that “communicate different emotional experiences” — and they had a three-game deal with Sony, for the PlayStation 3’s downloadable service.

Their first game out of school, Flower, makes the player a stream of petals on the wind. You soar past flowers that burst into bloom when you go by, and navigate around a landscape of fallen electrical towers. Inspired by Chen’s reaction to Southern California after growing up in the dense cityscape of Shanghai, the game is both serene and, at times, unsettling.

“It should feel like you have a backyard,” says Chen. “It’s a virtual backyard that leads you to the nature, even though you’re living in a forest of skyscrapers.”

In the game Flower, the user is a stream of petals on the wind — navigating around electrical towers and other flowers.

Santiago adds that she and Chen think of a video game as a version of a poem: “By that we mean that it presents ideas to the player, but it also asks players to bring their own experiences to the table as well.”

Poetry and experimental theater aren’t traditional starting points for video games — and they probably would not have come into the industry if it hadn’t been for the program at USC.

“The challenge when we started the game programs was to create the next generation of creative leaders,” says Fullerton, Santiago and Chen’s professor and mentor.

Fullerton says USC’s program provides its students with the precious time to study the creative process, learn how to collaborate and to experiment.

“Commercial games cost so much to make and take so long to make [that the game-makers are] not free to take risks,” Fullerton says. She adds that designers who work their way up in the industry are not free to “ask a question like, ‘What if we made a game just about an emotion?’ ”

With a new generation that has been trained to ask such questions entering the industry, big changes are sure to come.

Soucre: NPR

Popularity: 1% [?]

I came across a nifty little feature Google has released on Gmail: Undo Send. Basically the user is given a few seconds after they press the send button just in case they want to “undo” pressing the send button, its a great feature.

You have to activate it through the Google Labs tab on your Gmail dashboard. I give it two thumbs up!

New in Labs: Undo Send
Posted by Michael Leggett

Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or email the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.

An email to the wrong Larry pushed me over the edge. I could undo just about any other action in Gmail — why couldn’t I undo send? Many people agreed, including Yuzo Fujishima, an engineer in the Tokyo office. My theory (which others shared) was that even just five seconds would be enough time to catch most of those regrettable emails.

And now you can do just that. Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo,” and we’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose.

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

I’ve had Undo Send turned on for a while and it’s saved me several times. Let us know if it saves you too

Source: Gmail Blog

Popularity: 29% [?]

Google Executive Takes Over AOL - Outgoing Management Team Lasted Just Two Years

Armstrong has led Google’s advertising teams in North America and Latin America. “This guy has the perfect resume . . . I’m sure Google is perturbed at the prospect of him working for somebody else,” Kay said.

Some tech industry pundits were not as optimistic on whether AOL’s outlook would improve with a change of executives, however.

“When you get somebody from Google like this, it usually means that you’re paying them a ton of money and you’re hoping for a miracle,” said Rob Enderle, a tech industry forecaster. “I’m not sure AOL’s problem is something that you can fix with a body.”

AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and News Corp. have been engaged in on-again, off-again discussions of varying degree over the past two years, many of which have focused on AOL’s advertising business, where it would make the best fit and how much it’s worth.

As for AOL’s incoming chief executive, “it’s hard to say at this point what he’ll do,” said tech pundit Tim Bajarin. “AOL has had so many ups and downs. Google understands vision and direction. That can only be a plus for AOL.”

Falco joined AOL in 2006 after 30 years as an executive at NBC. At AOL, he took over an online business that was attempting to move away from its DNA — dial-up Internet access — and toward an online ad-serving model, aiming to compete with next-generation media products, such as Google.

In the months after he was hired, Falco purchased several advertising-related companies and moved AOL’s headquarters from its long-time location in Dulles to Manhattan — the heart of the U.S. advertising market.

He also executed waves of layoffs to cut costs as AOL has lost cash. He laid off 450 employees one month after he took over and 2,000 more in October 2007. On Tuesday, another round of cuts hit AOL. The company plans to have reduced its workforce by 10 percent, or 700 jobs, at the end of this round.

Source: Washington Post

Popularity: 1% [?]