Zeemote, a Chelmsford, MA-based startup that developed a handheld game controller for use with games on mobile handsets, has closed its doors and is putting its assets up for sale, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. Founded in 2005 by Boston-area entrepreneur Beth Marcus, the company worked with handset manufacturers Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to make its Bluetooth-based device compatible with their phones. Mass High Tech spoke with a partner from Zeemote backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures who confirmed the closure but offered no further details.

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GamerDNA, the Cambridge, MA-based startup building an online community where avid gamers can find recommendations for new games, has cut its staff nearly in half, shrinking from 13 employees to seven, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. Jon Radoff, the company’s founder and CEO, confirmed the layoffs in an e-mail to Xconomy, but declined to discuss them further, saying he was “trying to focus more on the future than the tough decision we just had to make.” GamerDNA, formerly called GuildCafe, raised $3 million in Series A funding from Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners in April 2008.

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Microsoft’s latest reorganization, which involves labs in both the Seattle and Boston areas, has a new face. It’s Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoftie with experience in both research (social computing) and products (Windows Vista user experience). Cheng now officially leads three separate groups that are being rolled into one: her Creative Systems Group within Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Lab led by Kostas Mallios, also in Redmond; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, led by Reed Sturtevant.

Yesterday, chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced the creation of the new entity, called FUSE (Future Social Experience) Labs, which will focus on social computing as applied to Microsoft products in entertainment and business. Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs, is leaving the company, while Mallios will continue to report to Ozzie and is taking on business development duties involved with technology incubation.

But back to the lab’s new head, who spoke with me from Cambridge yesterday. Cheng, after inheriting about 70 staff members from Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab, now manages about 80 people in FUSE Labs, and says she will be splitting her time between the Seattle and Boston areas. She said the employees of Startup Labs (there are 30-some staff members) will be staying in Cambridge.

As Cheng explains, the goal of FUSE Labs is to “bridge the gap” between research and products—an oft-heard refrain at Microsoft (and most big companies)—by working on projects that are two to five years away from commercialization, and interacting closely with product teams.

The specific focus of the lab is social computing—applying social media (things like Twitter, Facebook, and other social-network technologies) to problems in business collaboration and entertainment. The high-level strategy here is to “embed social activity into business scenarios” for Microsoft, Cheng says. She didn’t say anything more specific about Microsoft’s plans for social media, or about how the employees in Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab will be integrated into the social theme. But she adds, “Interacting with other people is so personal and emotional to every single person out there. It’s important for every company out there.”

Cheng’s team has previously built applications like Kodu, which lets kids create games and stories using an Xbox controller and share them on a community games channel; and Salsa, a prototype that connects your e-mail inbox with social networks. (The latter sounds a lot like what the Seattle startup Gist, led by ex-Microsoftie T.A. McCann, has built and is actively testing.)

Asked what her greatest challenge is in the new job, Cheng said it’s addressing how to “take best advantage of this amazing opportunity.” Having been in the social computing space for many years, she says, now it’s time to “just go for it.”

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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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It’s always good to hear about another small Seattle startup that’s bootstrapped and already profitable. Yesterday it was Appature, today it’s AppBank. They may share the first three letters of their names (and bootstrapped profitability), but after that they’re about as different as two Internet software companies can be.

AppBank is a six-person company focused on developing software to help Facebook users create social entertainment applications—and get paid for them. The company is rolling out the public beta version of its site today. The world of Facebook apps is very crowded, of course, but what AppBank is trying to do is give average Facebook users easier ways to make simple apps like quizzes, surveys, and games in their spare time, and more effective ways to make money from them by providing targeted advertising. “It’s the first time a company has paired relevant ads with crowdsourced social entertainment,” says Fred Hsu, AppBank’s founder and CEO.

Hsu started the company in April of this year, together with chief operating officer Joyce Chang. Hsu is the co-founder of Oversee.net, a Los Angeles company that holds Internet domain names and does domain marketing for the search, display, and lead-generation industries. Oversee did $200 million in revenue last year, and Hsu sold a minority stake in the company to private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners for $150 million. Chang, for her part, came from Seattle-based Tracento, which implements Facebook applications like Friend Hugs, Kisses, and Send Flowers. Both UCLA computer science grads, Hsu and Chang are based in Seattle, and the rest of the company’s employees are in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

What AppBank offers is a quick way to create a Facebook quiz, for example—”What type of underwear are you?” or “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or some such—and then free tools to …Next Page »

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Boston is home to a huge cluster of hot game companies, from Harmonix to Turbine to 38 Studios. But you might be surprised to learn just how deep the region’s gaming history goes. If Xconomy had been around a century ago, we probably would have been writing about Parker Brothers, which got its start in Salem, MA, in 1883 and went on to create Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit, to name just a few of the company’s blockbuster board games.

As Parker Brothers’ star gradually dimmed—it was absorbed by General Mills in 1963, then Tonka in 1987, then Hasbro in 1991—Boston’s prominence in the game and toy business waned as well. But today the Parker Brothers gaming legacy is re-emerging—and fusing with another local industry, robotics. The link? Tom Dusenberry, a lifelong game industry insider who got his start working on the Parker Brothers loading dock and eventually rose to become the founder and CEO of Hasbro Interactive, the video game subsidiary of toy giant Hasbro (NYSE: HAS). This week the multinational startup Robonica, where Dusenberry is now president, will launch its first product: Robini-i, a novel wheeled robot packed with sensors, radios, and a fully programmable onboard brain.

Roboni-i is arguably the biggest thing to hit the robot-toy business since the uber-popular Lego Mindstorms. And the new robot is emerging just a few miles from Salem, in Beverly, MA, where Robonica is headquartered. But there’s also a South African side to the story: Robonica CEO Johan Poolman, an electrical engineer by training, is the founder of a series of technology companies in the Johannesburg area, and works from the company’s R&D and manufacturing facilities in Centurion, a suburb of Pretoria. The company has 45 employees in Centurion, and obtained 100 percent of its financing from a pair of technology investment funds run by the South African government, Dusenberry says.

Sometimes, all a smart startup needs to succeed is a lucky break, and Robonica has caught a huge one. Hammacher Schlemmer, the specialty gift merchandiser, decided to feature the Roboni-i on the cover of its Holiday 2009 catalog, which is being mailed out to millions of consumers starting today. (”How cool is that?” Dusenberry cracks.) The robots are also available starting today from Robonica’s website, and will be stocked by FAO Schwarz, the Fry’s Home Electronics chain on the West Coast, and some Toys R Us stores, as well as Amazon and other e-retailers.

Dusenberry says the primary target audience for the Roboni-i is 13- to 17-year-old boys, for whom the remote-controlled devices will provide, in his words, “a killer interactive entertainment experience.” But after watching a demonstration at last week’s MassTLC Tech Tuesday event at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge—and, I admit, after taking the Roboni-i for a spin myself—I think it’s safe to say that the nimble little machines will appeal to gadget lovers of all ages.

Roboni-i comes pre-programmed with six action games that, in the words of a company announcement, challenge players to “beat the odds, race against time, manage resources, neutralize threats, execute special effects and collect bonus points to improve score.” Using the remote control, players can maneuver the robots around pylons, saucers, balls, and other accessories; the units also have sensors that allow them to navigate autonomously or …Next Page »

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Regulatory documents filed September 15 show that Conduit Labs, the Cambridge, MA-based maker of music-driven online games such as Loudcrowd, has collected $3 million in new equity financing. Conduit founder and CEO Nabeel Hyatt told Mass High Tech that the funding came from Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, and Prism VentureWorks of Westwood, MA, who also provided Conduit’s $5.5 million Series A round in August 2007.

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that …Next Page »

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Even if you were a coach in the National Football League, you’d never get a chance to test your tactics on the field against famous coaches like Brian Billick, Bill Cowher, Jimmy Johnson, Tom Landry, or Dan Reeves—because they’re all retired (and Landry is deceased). But that’s exactly what players will be able to do online at Quick Hit, the football strategy game to be launched next month by the Foxborough, MA, startup of the same name.

As I explained in my profile of Quick Hit back in May, the company’s game is a free, advertising-supported football simulator where players act as coaches, assembling a team of athletes with a variety of skills and choosing plays for them to run against the opposing team—which might be coached by another player, or might be an AI (a software program or “artificial intelligence,” in gamer lingo). Quick Hit announced today that in single-player mode, players will have the option of playing against AIs customized to recreate the styles of Billick, Johnson, Landry, and Reeves. (The company had already signed Cowher, the former Pittsburgh Steelers coach who is now a CBS Sports analyst, as its “head coach.”)

The upgrade is meant to benefit players, but it’s also a kind of insurance policy, says Jeff Anderson, the startup’s CEO. Quick Hit will exit its private beta testing phase and open up to the public on September 9, one day before the Steelers face the Tennessee Titans on opening day of the real NFL season. Quick Hit has no way to predict whether the lobby area, where players meet up to start one-on-one games, will be empty or full. So having interesting AIs to play against will give visitors something to do right away.

“Frankly, too, there are times when a player doesn’t want to play another player and feel that competitive pressure, but just practice against an AI,” says Anderson. “That way you can train up your players and get some new skills.” A points system built into Quick Hit rewards players for various accomplishments. Defeating the NFL AIs, who are all part of the game’s highest difficulty setting, will bring “much larger bonuses,” Anderson says, meaning the player’s team will be in stronger shape for the next game.

The decision to add the new AIs came only a couple of months ago, despite the fact that the clock on the company’s beta testing was rapidly winding down. “We had Bill Cowher up at our offices doing some voice recording, and after the heavy lifting we sat him down and asked him if he wanted to play a game with us,” says Anderson. “Not only did he have fun, but what was fascinating to us was how he would look at the plays—more like an expert chess player, linking players to create a winning strategy. Clearly, this man has spent his life and his entire craft focused on this art. We realized how fun it was to …Next Page »

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PopCap Games today announced the launch of a new, social media aspect to its popular action/puzzle game Zuma.  Zuma Web Connect allows users to not only play the game but to compare scores with friends on Facebook.  Seattle-based Popcap has just finished a six-month trial of a similar program for Bejeweled, their most popular game.  According to the release, around five million monthly users were on Bejeweled Blitz for Facebook.   Since 2003, over 225 million copies of Zuma have been downloaded from the internet and about five billion hours have been spent playing it overall. Those interested in trying Zuma can find it here.

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If you’re watching a movie, a commercial, or a TV sports promo and you see a special effect with an especially stunning glow, glint, flash, flare, light ray, starburst, sparkle, explosion, or atmospheric wave, there’s a good chance it was created using software from Cambridge, MA-based GenArts. The venture-backed startup, launched in 1996 by MIT computer scientist Karl Sims, is one of the leading makers of visual-effects plug-ins for mainstream graphics packages such as Adobe’s After Effects and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, with tens of thousands of media customers around the world. Yet it’s a secretive and little-known presence around Boston that won’t reveal how much capital it’s raised or how many employees it has. (”Between 25 and 500″ is all I could get out of chief marketing officer Steve Bannerman.) Even the company’s white-on-white logo seems designed to be invisible.

The low profile is intended partly to keep competitors guessing. But it may get a little harder to maintain, thanks to a major partnership announced today with San Francisco-based Lucasfilm, whose Industrial Light & Magic division is probably the world’s most famous source of high-end special effects sequences for the movie and TV industries.

Lucasfilm has been using GenArts’ technology here and there since 1997’s Titanic. But under the new agreement, LucasFilm will license copies of GenArts’ software for every compositing system in the company, including machines at ILM, Lucasfilm Animation, and most significantly, LucasArts, the firm’s video game development house. In addition, Lucasfilm and GenArts plan to work together to develop advanced visual effects and compositing technologies, in an effort to put ever more intricate effects at digital artists’ fingertips.

Those effects aren’t always designed to blow viewers’ minds. Sometimes, in fact, the glows, reflections, or flares that artists can insert using GenArts’ plug-in packages (which go by the names Sapphire, Monsters, and Raptors) are there mainly to satisfy viewers’ expectations or tug at their emotions—as with the lens flares in computer-generated beauty shots of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise, for example. Visual effects plug-ins “are used to create reality almost as often as they are used to create things you would normally think of as ’special effects,’” says Katherine Hays, GenArts’ CEO.

So while it’s “fabulous” to have a customer like ILM, Hays says, “what’s really exciting about this is the validation around our vision of where the industry is going, in terms of how critical visual effects are becoming to storytelling, and the benefits our customers can gain by standardizing and having our technology available to all of their artists.”

Bannerman says getting GenArts’ software into LucasArts is an especially important coup; it will be the startup’s first major step into interactive media. “One of the primary focuses of the agreement is …Next Page »

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Boston-based Hangout Industries, which runs the teen social virtual world Hangout.net, has extended its Series A financing round by $4 million, CEO Pano Anthos confirmed today after documents on the financing surfaced online yesterday. Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners put up the funds, which bring the company’s total financing to $10 million, including a $1 million seed round and a $5 million first tranche in the Series A round. Hangout came out of stealth mode last September, and recently hired former Disney exec Mike Goslin and opened a West Coast office as part of an effort to focus the online property on entertainment, social interaction, and virtual goods sales.

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In a notice filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, NTN Buzztime (AMEX: NTN) of Carlsbad, CA, says it has raised $2.25 million in a private sale of stock and options. The deal was part of Buzztime’s recent acquisition of assets from Denver, CO-based Instant Access Media. Buzztime provides games distributed on cable TV, satellite TV and online to approximately 3,750 restaurants, sports bars and pubs throughout North America. Buzztime recently announced it was buying assets from Instant Access that includes 1,400 flat-panel television screens in 360 hospitality venues. As part of the deal, Buzztime said investors in Instant Access are buying shares of NTN common stock in a private placement raising $750,000 in additional working capital.

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I don’t care whether I’m good enough at Dance, one of the online games that’s part of the new music site Loudcrowd, to impress other users. What I want to know is whether I dance better than Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

As part of his January 30 tour of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the Govinnovator stopped by the offices of Conduit Labs, the software startup behind Loudcrowd. Co-founder and CEO Nabeel Hyatt sat Patrick down at a computer and invited him to try Dance, a simple video game where you try to click on directional arrows at the exact moment that a rotating marker passes over a symbol. Your performance determines whether your avatar dances more like Fred Astaire or Jerry Lewis in a little video that’s shown to your game partner.

I was in Patrick’s press entourage during the visit, but I couldn’t see how well he danced. Given that the tour was a bit rushed, he couldn’t have been too fleet-footed—nothing close to his impressive performance in a table-tennis match against Google’s Steve Vinter during a visit to the search giant’s Cambridge office last May.

I’ll probably never be a good dancer, but after playing about six games of Spin, another game on Loudcrowd, I can report that I’m the proud owner of one virtual goodie—the track “Underwater” by Mock & Toof. (Never heard of them before.) Alas, I haven’t earned enough decibels—i.e. credits—to play my track for other Loudcrowd users.

As you may have guessed by this point—or as you may have read, if you’ve been following the news from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which just wrapped up in Austin, TX—Loudcrowd is a music-driven casual gaming community, finally launched this week after about 18 months of behind-the-scenes labor at Conduit Labs. In technical terms, Loudcrowd is a Flash-based website with a continuous shared soundtrack, where registered users create social networking profiles and customized avatars and then play music-related games. Playing the games wins users points that they can eventually use to become DJs and choose the music other users hear.

At least, I think that’s the goal. But it may be that the competition is beside the point. In the language of Web marketing, Loudcrowd is designed to keep users entertained, engaged, and on-site, the better to sell them Loudcrowd points (the site’s virtual currency), iTunes and Amazon tracks, and other products that Conduit may have up its sleeve. In fact, the company boasts in a press release distributed yesterday that “user engagement on the site has…been over twice the average session length of leading online music sites such as Last.fm, Project Playlist, and Pandora.”

Back in August 2007, when Conduit announced that it had collected $5.5 million in venture funding from Prism VentureWorks and Charles River Ventures, Susan Wu, then a partner at CRV, told me she liked the market Conduit was entering, because “it marries the design philosophies of creating lightweight, zero barrier applications that are geared towards mass market audiences with very emotionally engaging, immersive environments.”

Wu wasn’t able to describe Conduit’s plans in greater detail at the time, but she did say the startup hoped to build on the growth of social networking sites like Facebook by making online socializing more shared and synchronous. “Like the Wii and Guitar Hero reinterpreted what it meant to experience social entertainment in a living room environment, there’s a new type of entertainment waiting to be invented using a Web-based form factor,” Wu said. (She has since left CRV to start her own company, a stealth-mode massively multiplayer online game company called Ohai.)

Now that Loudcrowd is out, it’s finally becoming clear what Wu was talking about. The site is obviously aimed at teenage and twenty-something music fans—a slightly more MySpacey crowd than a Facebooky one, from what I can see—and makes use of cartoonish avatars and line-drawn graphical settings reminiscent of the cover art for the Grand Theft Auto video game series. The artists Conduit has signed up to supply songs for the site’s music stream are on the indy side, meaning …Next Page »

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Spark Capital of Boston and Grandbanks Capital of Newton Center, MA, are among the investors in a $12 million Series D round announced today by SendMe Mobile, a San Francisco startup that sells ringtones, games, wallpaper, and other content to mobile phone users. Triangle Peak Partners led the round, which also involved True Ventures and Amicus Capital. Spark and Grandbanks were also part of a $15 million Series C round for SendMe that closed last March.

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Skyward Mobile, a Wakefield, MA, startup developing a platform that lets users play games and read e-books on their cell phones, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection yesterday, according to a report in the Boston Business Journal. Not to be confused with Stratham, NH-based Skyward Innovations, a company working on mobile travel-related applications, Skyward Mobile was founded by Jeremy De Bonet, the former CTO of mobile video company MobiTV. Skyward it reached a settlement with MobiTV last summer in trade-secrets lawsuit launched after De Bonet left the older company. It listed liabilities of $3.6 million in its bankruptcy claim, including $400,000 in settlement claims owned to MobiTV.

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Vivox, a Natick, MA-based company that makes voice communications software for online games and virtual worlds such as Second Life, said today that its technology will be integrated into Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3, the graphics engine behind blockbuster console-game titles such as Gears of War and Bioshock. The partnership will make it easier for developers of multiplayer games based on Unreal Engine to allow players in different locations to talk with each other in real time. Epic is based in Cary, NC.

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Mobui, a mobile applications company in Redmond, WA, has formed a partnership with Nickelodeon to deliver iPhone applications, including games based on the cartoon character SpongeBob. The newly released series of games, announced today, is Nickelodeon’s first full foray into iPhone apps.

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Play Hard Sports, the Foxborough, MA-based online gaming startup founded last April by former Turbine CEO Jeffrey Anderson, has closed an $8 million Series B round, according to a report today in Private Equity Hub. Play Hard is developing as-yet-unreleased multiplayer online games and an online fantasy sports network. Existing investor New Enterprise Associates of Menlo Park, CA, which put up Play Hard’s $5 million Series A round, was back for the B round, which also involved a new outside backer. PE Hub said its report was based on a regulatory filing.

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Seattle-based Movaya and PressOK Entertainment announced today they are joining forces to develop mobile games. Financial terms and impact of the deal were not disclosed. PressOK was formed by the merger of mobile-gaming companies Reaxion and Mobliss in September. Reaxion’s development teams are in Russia and Belarus, while Movaya’s team is in China.

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