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What began last March with Warbook, a no-frills Facebook fantasy strategy game first conceived by an intern, has lead to today’s announcement: Social Gaming Network, a startup still based in a Palo Alto garage, is getting $15 million in Series A funding from a VC team comprised of Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Partners Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Originally incubated at the Novak Biddle and Columbia-backed Freewebs, where Warbook was first developed during a hackathon session, SGN now boasts a small library of casual game titles which claim an aggregate of one million daily players and 50 million installs in Facebook.

This influx of cash comes at a moment of fierce consolidation and competition in the social gaming space, with SGN and rivals like Zynga and Rock You jostling for dominance. Last week I had a chance to chat with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, and got a glimpse at some of the company’s future battle plans.
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Updated: With the Microsoft-Yahoo battle fading from the dynamic random memories of our over stimulated brains, it is time to turn our attention to Hewlett-Packard’s $12 billion $13.9 billion deal to acquire EDS, a services giant in its own right. The news was announced this morning. HP will purchase EDS at a price of $25 per share. Continue Reading

As noted earlier, wireless industry experts believe that mobile backhaul networks represent a big opportunity, mostly because of the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks and the easy availablity of iPhone-type devices is going to boost mobile data and video use.

Infonetics Research has issued a report that forecasts 4.4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2011, and estimates that their needs will push the demand for wireless backhaul equipment to over $10 billion by that year. Infonetics predicts that the big spending is going to happen on the IP/Ethernet portion of worldwide mobile backhaul equipment with triple-digit growth rates predicted from 2007 to 2011. No surprise: T-Mobile, Swisscom Mobile and Telecom Italia are all building IP/Ethernet based backhaul networks. Ironically, given the amount of money being spent on this sector there isn’t much startup activity in this space.

Love it or hate it, one has to admit that Apple’s iPhone has been quite a game changer forcing the wireless industry to get off its duff and start innovating. I think a lot of people forget that iPhone is not just a pretty face and sleek curves. Instead it is a device that is changing our behavior and the expectations we have of mobile devices. Most observations about iPhone have been personal and anecdotal.

Today, however, I got a chance to skim through a report put together by San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile advertising startup AdMob, about iPhone user behavior — both in the United States and worldwide — that provides metrics to match some of the theories around iPhone. Clearly, these numbers are not an absolute reflection of iPhone usage, but they do seem to indicative of broader iPhone trends. (Full report embedded below the fold.) Continue Reading

Technology buzzwords come and go…virtualization, green, SaaS…and after sitting through the Google Friend Connect announcement, reading about Facebook’s Connect service and writing about last week’s MySpace Data Availability launch, “open” appears to be just the latest. But open is one of those words whose definition can be spun into a variety of meanings.

While Facebook isn’t yet releasing much detail on its efforts and may completely surprise me, Google’s Friend Connect program today highlights how open standards such as OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial can be used to create a platform that’s pretty closed. The service, which will launch tonight and only expects to have between 12 and 24 sites participating while it’s in preview mode over the next few months, will allow site publishers to put some code on their sites. If a user visits a site with the appropriate code, she can get access, via an IFrame, to applications built in OpenSocial. A user can also share her activities on a participating site with her contacts, as well as through her news feeds on participating social networking sites.

Last week, I pointed out that MySpace’s Data Availability efforts were welcome in that they expand the number of sites on which a user can use her MySpace data, but that MySpace still had a lock on the user data since it hosted and determined who could display that data by approving site partners. If MySpace’s efforts were three steps forward in opening up user profiles, then Google’s Friend Connect represents two steps back.

The use of the IFrame means that site owners have no way to change or work with user data, they can only display it. MySpace doesn’t allow sites to store user data on anyone’s servers other than its own, but it does allow that data to be used directly in the outside site. For more differences among the three services, please check out the chart below.

While none of these services are entirely open yet — and may never be, given security and data abuse problems — the trend toward a more social web is clear. With broadband more prevalent than ever and voice fading as the primary means of communicating with people who aren’t in the room, enabling a truly open social web is the next big step in communication. But in order for that to happen, the user needs to be able to reach across walled gardens and gain granular control as to what he or she shares and with whom.

There’s open source (really open in that anyone with knowledge can participate in how the code evolves), open standards (open only in that anyone can participate using a pre-defined version of the standard), and open APIs (open in that anyone can take the pre-defined standard and build something for a closed platform such as Facebook). Knowing this, the efforts to open up a user’s data on a social network (their social graph, if you will) by these three companies falls somewhere between an open platform and an open standard.

Controversy around RealID is nothing new. When Congress passed an act in 2005 that required a set of machine-readable information on government-issued identity cards, plenty of opposition pointed out the expense, the unnecessary amounts of data and the bureaucratic nightmare of issuing all-new cards to citizens. So far not a single state has actually made the May 2008 deadline to implement the IDs.

But an article from Jim Harper at the CATO Institute points out that L-1, a prominent maker of driver’s licenses and biometric security products, plans to buy the identity card business of DigiMarc, the No. 1 maker of state driver’s licenses. The combined entity will have a lock on the identification market and a reason to push for RealID, argues Harper.

As anyone whose income tax data or social security numbers have been posted to the web can attest, the government isn’t exactly a lockbox for personal information. Having so much data on such an accessible state document is an invitation to privacy violations that would have far more repercussions than your girlfiend realizing you bought her a diamond ring on Overstock.com. Just something to to think about this election year.