New Hologram Research

Two research scientists from University of Arizona have been working on hologram research for a while and they have discovered how to do it. Their research method can be applied to any field. This can be applied to cell phones too.

Check out the YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkA3y-QmatM

Places in Second Life

Organic Motion Taps $7.4 Million in Funding

October 23, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/5/

Motion capture tech start-up Organic Motion today said it has secured $7.4 million in a second round of funding. Foundry Group led the round. Organic Motion's software allows off-the-shelf chips and cameras to generate 3-D avatars; the technology uses the stock hardware to follow a person's every move, replicating that activity on-screen. It's avatar creation solution is already being used by clients Sony, Six Flags, Adidas, Disney, and Sony and has obvious avatar-creation applications for virtual world developers as well.

Unity Technologies, Sequoia Confirm Funding

October 26, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/5/

Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha confirmed earlier reports of a Sequoia-led $5.5 million funding round with multiplatform game development platform Unity Technologies with the following statement today: "We are very excited to be involved with Unity Technologies at a time when the demand for interactive content continues to grow exponentially," Botha said. "We are seeing interactive content everywhere from game consoles to online virtual worlds and social networking websites. Unity Technologies is pioneering breakthrough products to allow developers to best respond to this demand. They are well positioned to become the standard for high quality content development." The financing round also included David Gardner, the CEO of Atari, and Diane Greene, founder and former CEO of VMware. Botha and Greene will be joining the Unity board of directors. Companies currently using the game engine include Electronic Arts, in Tiger Woods Online, and Cartoon Network in its kid-friendly virtual world FusionFall.

Playfire Picks Up $2M Funding Round

November 10, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/2/

UK-based Playfire, a social network that links like-minded gamers, secured $2.1 million in Series A funding, says Tech Crunch. Reportedly, the round was led by Atomico Ventures (founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis), Bebo founder Michael Birch, Brent Hoberman, William Reeve and Alex Chesterman, and former EAUK COO David Gardner (currently CEO of Atari). The funding will be used to expand the company's development team and accelerate growth and follows a seed stage investment last year from former Sony Europe chair Chris Deering among others.

Playdom Funding Round Totals $43M

November 11, 2009

Social games developer Playdom has reportedly secured $43 million in venture financing, with an equity stake based on a pre-money valuation of $260 million. New Enterprise Associates, Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners reportedly invested in the company, the first outside round of funding Playdom has participated in. A certain amount of speculation has flowed from the news -- Tech Crunch, which reported the investment, speculates that the space's arguable leader (based on monthly average users), Zynga, is worth as much as $1 billion.

UPDATE: Playdom CEO John Pleasants said in a statement confirming the funding event: "We are focused on growing Playdom into a world-class gaming company. A number of compelling games are in development for 2010, and we’re bullish about our future and the potential to bring people together through social gaming. Social games appeal to everyone, everywhere. Our players range from ages 13 to 80 and come from more than 150 countries, so the opportunity for growth is tremendous."

Berlin-Based Wooga Secures $7.5M in Funding

November 12, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009/11/berlin-based-wooga-secures-75m-in-funding.html

Berlin-based social games developer Wooga today said it has secured an additional $7.5M in its latest round of funding. The round was led by Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s largest venture cap firms. Holtzbrinck Ventures, which provided funding earlier to Wooga, also participated in the round. This latest investment will allow Wooga to hire new talent, continue to develop games and grow the company further, the company said in a statement. Roberto Bonanzinga, a partner at Balderton, will join the board of Wooga. Founded in January 2009, Wooga's first game, Brain Buddies, was released on Facebook in July 2009; it is currently one of the top 20 games on the Facebook platform, with 6 million monthly users.

RockYou Raises Additional $50M from Softbank

November 17, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/

Social network app developer and ad platform RockYou says it has raised an additional $50 million in a Series D round of funding. The money comes from existing investor Softbank and caps a total of $119 millions raised since its 2005 launch. There are reportedly 213 million monthly users of RockYou apps or apps RockYou has advertising relationships with. "Softbank was looking for us to be a little more aggressive in our application releases, especially in the Asian market," RockYou vice president of sales Lisa Marino told VentureBeat. "They wanted us to fundamentally grow more quickly, and so that was the impetus for this deal."

Chinese Sports Gear Firm Peak Shoes Raises $60M

VENTURE CAPITAL - Monday, April 27, 2009

Chinese sports apparel maker Quanzhou Peak Shoes a has raised nearly $60M in new VC funding. Legend Capital and CCB International joined return backer Sequoia Capital China.

Spending some time with their goods, we can't understand why investors are hot on them. We wouldn't be caught dead wearing these sneakers and their front-man Shane Battier is a great player but has no marketing draw - the fact that Shane Battier wears Peak Shoes is more of a turn-off than a draw.

To be fair, the idea here is that China makes all the world clothes while brands like Nike and Addidas get the spoils. Peak is looking to both make the clothing and own the brand. That adds up if they can indeed turn the corner with the brand. But they need to work with cooler athletes or its no-go.

Dutch Startup Flogs Raises €2M for Event Synchronizing Tool

http://www.flogs.com/

Maintaining a full calendar is always a tough task for users, whether it involves sharing, scheduling, or simply showing up. Dutch startup Flogs raised a €2M ($2.9M) round of funding from a group of private investors and the Dutch Government. The software company has its sights on building an international presence with their digital organizing software. With this new round of funding Flogs will further develop its sharing and synchronizing features.

Founded in 2008 by Michiel Mol, Bram van Gestel and current CEO Toon Timmermans the software company has developed a flexible event aggregate tool. The tool allows users to share event schedules: sporting events, concerts, CD releases, films, and art shows (to name a few) over multiple calendars. Should the time or date change for an event it's automatically adjusted in an user's calendar via Flogs.

Nonetheless, are users more concerned with sharing events across platforms or scheduling them? Improving scheduling capabilities over multiple platforms has been the business focus for both Tungle and Timebridge. Each service caters to "business professionals." As this sector of service continues to develop overall, Flogs has an opportunity to demonstrate how well its solution meets user needs in both an entertainment and leisure space.

(The service is compatible with Outlook, iCal, Windows Live, Google Calendar, and works well on a PC, Mac, PDA, iPhone or smartphones.)

Fizzback Raises £1.6M in Series B Round

VENTURE CAPITAL - Thursday, October 15, 2009

London-based Fizzback raised £1.6M ($2.6M) in a second round of funding led by Nauta Capital and primary backer Advent Venture Partners.

Founded in 2004, the software company has since made its business developing customer engagement tools. Solutions allowing companies to entertain customer feedback in real-time. Responses are captured at point-of-experience, using an intelligence search engine, and sorted by relevance. Overall Fizzback's innovative tool extends customer relationship management, by bringing businesses closer to the voice of the customer.

Sezmi Gets Infusion of $25 Million to Fund Personalized TV

by Tim Ruiz on November 16, 2009

Sezmi announced today that the company has closed a new round of funding worth $25 million from new and existing investors. Those involved include Morgenthaler Ventures, Omni Capital, TD Fund, Index Ventures, and new strategic investor Legend Ventures. Sezmi combines traditional TV content, movies, and Internet in a single easy-to-use product and service.

Sezmi has a deep understanding of the changing needs of TV viewers and created a new end-to-end offering to meet those needs. The company uses a personalized on-demand viewing experience and works with partners from broadcast, broadband, content, and advertising industries to make a new TV choice for consumers. The service will be offered to consumers through broadband service providers and national retailers. Separately, the company also announced it has made its all-in-one personalized television service available in Los Angeles to the public.

Sezmi was founded with an ambitious goal: to redefine the television experience with the first-ever personal television system and is headquartered in the Belmont, California.

Dailymotion Secures $25M Round Led by French Government

Advent Venture Partners, AGF Private Equity,Atlas Venture, Partech International, each took part in a round led by the French Sovereign Fund (FSI). FSI, a joint entity owned by the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations and the French government, contributed $11M to the round.

After recently demonstrating a sustainable business model, investors are very excited about the potential that Paris-based Dailymotion offers. This new round of funding will support global growth with its current online platform as well as accelerate development in mobile and IPTV services.

According to comScore, August 2009 figures show that Dailymotion attracts 60 million unique visitors, and nearly a billion views per month. These figures provided in context with current revenue outpacing infrastructure costs may prove persuasive, yet there is still some work ahead for the firm. Before decidedly making its claim as "The World's Leading Independent Video Site" the company now has the task of demonstrating how well it can monetize user content. Profitability is a good start, sustainable profitability is even better.

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2009/10/dailymotion_sec_1.html

HP bought Tabblo: a Web 2.0 tool company

Tabblo: A place to make cool stuff with your photos

The Tabblo Company was started in 2005 and Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2007.

While there are plenty of online photo-sharing sites, and a host of options for writing (keeping a blog), doing both together requires a level of commitment not possessed by many.

What you can do with Tabblo

Outside of being the best place for using photos and words together for making "tabblos" (web pages), Tabblo lets you:

- have full control of who can view, comment, and share your tabblos

- pool your photos together with other Tabblo members for collaborative Tabblo creation

- participate in the Tabblo community with your Tabblos, photos, and commentary

- integrate open photo services such as Flickr to avoid having to upload to multiple sites

- publish tabblos to blogs, social networking sites, and other places online

With Tabblo, you can do all of the above entirely inside of your web browser (no downloads required) and with an unprecedented amount of control.

Tabblo lets you order printed versions of your creations in a variety of shapes and sizes for delivery to any US address (international shipping coming soon).

http://www.tabblo.com/studio/

Structured Design Process (SDP) approach in Front-End stage of any project

The impact of Front-End Work in rapid development of any new product is discussed here when Structured Design Process (SDP) is applied. Christakis states that much of the work in the Front-End stage involves planning and decision-making by a team created to work on the project (p. 94). The planning guides the activity from the point of discovery to product completion.

Product development in today’s business environment is carried out in very large and complex organizations and most of the time geographically distributed and involve many project partners. The Front-End Work includes new product concepts, definitions, and technical approach, and the design team must meet the constraints and multitude of requirements.

The SDP approach to Front-End Work creates collaboration among all the members of the project. Since most of the projects in current business atmosphere are done globally the collaboration plays an important role. The Front-End Work in collaboration environment where SDP approach is applied results in a master plan document where useful information regarding the project is presented and used during the life of the project. In creating master plan document the engagement of an interdisciplinary team is required. In the Christakis book, a XT234 compound developed by XYZ Pharmaceutical Company was used as an example how the Front-End Work was applied with SDP approach. The master plan document addresses all the requirements, technology needs, distinct options impacting the projects, and presenting a consensus action scenario graphically.

The principal benefits from the application of the SDP process are that it provides the capability to accomplish the planning in a shorter time, produce better Front-End Master Plans to reduce the project development life cycle. Applying SDP approach in any type of project such as engineering or medical could result in faster delivery of a product to market.

Reference:

Christakis, A. N., Bausch, K. C. (2006). How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power. Information Age Publishing, Connecticut.