EA sticks with Tiger Woods, bails on PC
Electronic Arts is sticking with Tiger Woods during his current problems, but is bailing out of PC packaged goods for its latest golf video game, launched in a free open beta today.
EA is switching to an online version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour, withsales dwindling to almost nothing for PC disk-based sports games, due to rampant piracy and many players preferring the console versions. Read more
Firefox 3.6 offers more awesomeness
Nice timing from the folks over at the Mozilla Foundation. As calls to ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the wake of the Chinese hack attack on Google reverberate around the internet, the open source project has released a new version of its Firefox web browser.
Mozilla wisely stopped short of making any special security claims about the new Firefox 3.6, but it does claim that the new browser is 20 per cent faster than its predecessor and includes “extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more.” Read more
Palm Pre and Pixi Plus work as mobile hotspots
The Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus made their official debut today with Verizon Wireless, the largest US mobile carrier. While there are relatively few new features in the Plus models, one particular application – exclusive to Verizon – stands out.
The Palm mobile hotspot, which will be available from the App Catalog when the handsets go on sale later this month, is a webOS app that enables the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus to operate as mobile Wi-Fi routers turning the handsets into MiFi-style instant Wi-Fi hotspots. Read more
Seesmic Look adds new touch to Twitter
Just in time for the “Year of the Tablet”, Seesmic has launched atouch-optimised graphically rich version of Twitter for those who like to watch trending topics but not necessarily tweet.
Seesmic is best known in the Twitter ecosystem for its client software that lets users organise their tweets and “follows” better. Seesmic Look, its new product , would look good on a tablet or a big-screen TV and could change the way many people view Twitter. Read more
Amazon responds to Apple’s phantom tablet
Amazon is clearly concerned about the Apple tablet, judging today’s news.
Though it has yet to be unveiled, the impending arrival of the iPad, or iSlate, or whatever it may be called, is likely to shake up the market for digital books in a big way.
Apple is in talks with the major publishing houses in an effort to secure content deals for the tablet. If it succeeds in working out deals, integrating e-book sales into the iTunes store would be a cinch. Add to this that the tablet is expected to boast a large colour touchscreen, and you have an e-reader on steroids. Read more
Mythical or not, the iPad’s impact is already being felt
A week before its expected unveiling, the reverberations from Apple’s tablet are already spreading out through the media industry. From today alone:
Amazon raised the royalty rate it pays to publishers and authors of certain e-books to 70 per cent of the cover price – not coincidentally, the same split Apple has turned into an industry norm through its App Store.
YouTube said it would start a video rental service, reaching beyond advertising into a new payment stream (though a test with video downloads last year went nowhere and was later scrapped). It was described by one analyst as a salvo aimed directly at Apple, as Google and Apple race to become dominant “cloud” video platforms. Read more
Valley View: Vegas dazzles but CES leaves doubts
I peered through 3D glasses, read the eReaders, stroked the smartbooks and smartphones and touched the tablets. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is over for another year – and what a realm of the senses it was.
Instead of the usual vapourware, the future was close enough to touch, from smartphone screens to images that leapt out of TV sets. Read more
CrowdFlower sources $5m in VC funding
CrowdFlower, the crowdsourcing start-up that aggregates online labour for data-crunching tasks, has tapped venture capitalists for a $5m Series A funding round.
Lukas Biewald, chief executive of the San Francisco company, said the money would fund expansion.
“We are creating a new global market that will make it possible for everyone in the world to do real, productive work at anytime, from anywhere,” he said. Read more
Peter Marsh reports on the FT’s Analysis page on the challenge UK technology companies face in growing their innovations into successful international businesses.
“Realtime Worlds is among a clutch of small, aspiring UK technology companies, many of them clustered around high-tech centres such as Cambridge, that seem to hold promise in a world where a country’s economic success is seen as being closely linked to the exploitation of new ideas. Read more
Google’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm, writes Gideon Rachman. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.
The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China. Read more
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Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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