Google TV 3.2 update enhances HLS video streaming support, Plex update takes advantage originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: Nike+ Fuelband External Images

Gallery: Nike+ Fuelband Internal Images

Nike+ FuelBand's internals get splayed at the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Netflix teams with eyeIO to lower bandwith use on movie night

Netflix teams with eyeIO to lower bandwith use on movie night originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Oops! Motorola sold refurbished Xooms without deleting previous owners' data

Oops! Motorola sold refurbished Xooms without deleting previous owners' data originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading ComScore: Android and iOS gallop ahead, US smartphone usage approaches 100 million

ComScore: Android and iOS gallop ahead, US smartphone usage approaches 100 million originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

webOS Enyo 1.0 now available to all, just requires patch and patience originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AT&T seeks to impose conditions on Dish LTE network, FCC to settle wireless squabble originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WiFi Kindle Touch gets its passport, now available internationally originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading FCC Fridays: February 3, 2012

FCC Fridays: February 3, 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Xbox co-creator brings together Atari 'dream team' for mobile gaming startup

Xbox co-creator brings together Atari 'dream team' for mobile gaming startup originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Galaxy Nexus and other CDMA devices removed from Google Support pages originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Verizon's ZTE Jetpack flies through FCC, arrival time still unknown originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading All PlayBooks go to heaven: Telus leak points to end-of-life status

All PlayBooks go to heaven: Telus leak points to end-of-life status originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron, dies in plane crash at 51

Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron, dies in plane crash at 51 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Listen to the Engadget Mobile Podcast, live at 5PM ET! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Anonymous defaced the website of law firm Puckett Faraj this morning and leaked e-mails concerning the sergeant accused of handling 2005′s Haditha Massacre in Iraq.

Sergeant Frank Wuterich was charged with a 2005 US Marine raid in Iraq, which killed 24 unarmed civilians. Wuterich was convicted of negligent dereliction, ending his wait for a homicide trial in a plea bargain. Anonymous released 3GB of e-mails regarding the case and the massacre itself. The group published these e-mails first on a Darknet website, or a site intended to be used when anonymity is desired, as well as to The Pirate Bay. The group also defaced the lawfirm’s website, which is still down for us.

The website deface read, “As part of our ongoing efforts to expose the corruption of the court systems and the brutality of US imperialism, we want to bring attention to USMC SSgt Frank Wuterich who along with his squad murdered dozens of unarmed civilians during the Iraqi Occupation. Can you believe this scumbag had his charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter and got away with only a pay cut?”

Earlier today, the group announced that they had hacked into an FBI conversation with Scotland Yard. The two organizations were discussing a pair of British suspects, accused of acting as a part of Anonymous, as well as how to make more arrests. After the news came out about the call, Sabu, a Twitter personality for Anonymous, tweeted that there was more to come.

“You think we’re done? Fuck no. Sit back and prepare for the next release coming in mere minutes my brothers and sisters,” Sabu said in regards to the Puckett hack.

Shortly after, another Anonymous Twitter bullhorn, @AnonymousIRC, tweeted that the defacement went live and linked to the website.

“Puckett-Faraj lawyers in case Haditha-Wuterich OWND HARD by #AntiSec http://www.puckettfaraj.com/ #Anonymous #OWS.”

According to Gawker, some of the e-mails contain congratulatory messages to Puckett for the settlement. In one of the e-mails Neal Puckett, Wuterich’s lawyer, tells a woman who congratulated him to “Google me!” Anonymous also promised detailed transcripts, donation records and case evidence in the 3GBs of e-mails.

via Gawker

Now that Facebook is fast on its way to becoming a public company, and its financials have been laid bare, there’s just one question that remains unanswered: What is Facebook actually worth?

A private market transaction completed Thursday may provide us with best the answer yet.

One hundred thousand Class B common stock shares were sold for $40 a pop on SharesPost, according to information obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by the private capital market. The sale, factoring in a fully diluted total share count of 2.35 billion, values the social network at $94 billion.

Facebook filed to become a public company Wednesday, and it hopes to raise $5 billion in its initial public offering later this year. The company, which touts 845 million monthly active users and an extremely profitable advertising business, could be valued between $75 and $100 billion on its stock market debut.

But the $100 billion figure is fairly optimistic, says one Internet IPO expert.

“The $100 billion number that has been circulated so widely ? is all based on 5 percent of the shares being worth potentially $5 billion,” Peter Adriaens, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan?s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, said in an interview with VentureBeat yesterday. “You can’t just apply a multiplier using 5 percent of the shares.”

Of course, speculation as to what the social networking company is actually worth will continue to run rampant leading up to and even following its IPO, especially considering that Facebook has veiled the important particulars behind its prized money-maker.

Google has asked the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) for permission to use an undisclosed new “entertainment device” in four major cities over the next six months.

The information came from a FCC application Google submitted in December, which was uncovered by Gigaom. The mystery device will connect to the Internet over a home Wi-Fi network and then sync up with other (probably mobile) devices via Bluetooth.

While details of what the actual device is aren’t included in the application, it almost certainly has something to do with Google TV. Using the data transfer process described in the application, the device could be a way for people to grab video content from the Internet and distribute it to all the other mobile devices. The benefit of transferring content in this way would be that people wouldn’t be exhausting their broadband Internet connections, meaning it wouldn’t slow down the connection for anyone else on the network. Also, people with wireless plans wouldn’t have to worry about hitting data caps just because they wanted to download a few episodes of a TV show once or twice a week.

The application indicates that over 250 devices will be used in Mountain View, Calif.; New York City; Los Angeles Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass.

We’ve pasted the full description from the FCC application below. Let us know your theories in the comments section.

Testing throughput and stability of home WiFi networks using an entertainment device. Testing will include functional testing of all subsystems, including WiFi and Bluetooth radio. Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks. The device utilizes a standard WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the module (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home WiFi networks that will support the device, as well as the basic functionality of the device. From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience. Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly. All devices will be used by and registered to specific individuals (all Google employees), and Google will maintain a record of each device, so that they can be easily recalled at any time during testing and when testing is complete. The devices will be tested at Google facilities and within employees residences in the following areas: Mountain View, CA: 37.421265 N, -122.085314 W; Los Angeles, CA: 33.995388 N, -118.477035 W; Cambridge, MA: 42.362754 N, -71.088023 W; and New York, NY: 40.741872 N, -74.004579 W.

Japanese electronics manufacturer Panasonic is projecting it will lose a record $10.2 billion (780 billion yen) in 2012 as it tries to fix its struggling TV business, the company said Friday.

Panasonic will join Japanese rivals Sony and Sharp in trying to revamp and restructure its business to achieve profitability again. Together, those three companies expect to lose around $17 billion. That loss highlights just how battered Japan’s electronics businesses have been by South Korea’s Samsung and LG.

One of the biggest issues exacerbating the loss is a 250 billion yen write-down from the 2009 acquisition of rival manufacturer Sanyo. The company also said it will spend 514 billion yen in restructuring costs related to the Sanyo buy.

Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo apologized for the expected loss, saying “I feel the responsibility for the huge amount,” according to Reuters. “We will accelerate our profit structure reform and make sure we achieve a V-shaped performance improvement in the next business year.”

Panasonic will continue to manufacture TVs, DVD players, cameras, camcorders, home telephones, and appliances, and it plans to create even more products that can attract a “global audience.”

Sony is also seriously struggling and the company reported a net loss of $2.09 billion for the final quarter of 2011, a far cry from the nearly billion in profit it managed to end 2010 with. The company officially appointed Kazuo Hirai as its new president and chief executive effective April 1, and he has vowed to get the company back in shape.

Money down the drain photo: James E. Knopf/Shutterstock

Intel will be a formidable competitor this year as it launches new processors and a huge marketing campaign aimed at driving the adoption of thin and powerful computers known as Ultrabooks.

Advanced Micro Devices will compete with the world’s biggest chip maker by coming out with high-performance laptop chips that are a lot less expensive for consumers.

“We like the idea of Ultrabooks as thin and powerful computers, but we think they should be for everybody,” said Rory Read, chief executive of AMD, in comments made to VentureBeat after Thursday’s analyst meeting.

Lisa Su, senior vice president for global products at AMD, said in an interview that a number of the Ultrabooks — some 7o to 75 models are coming out this year — are going to be priced at around $900.

But Su said that thin laptops based on AMD’s upcoming chips will likely hit the market priced as low as $599. AMD plans to introduce a series of chips code-named Trinity, which will be its second generation of accelerated processing units, or APUs. The APUs combine a microprocessor and graphics processor on a single chip, much like Intel does with its Sandy Bridge chips. But Su said AMD has loaded its combo chips with much more graphics capability than Intel does. So the AMD-based $599 laptops may actually perform as well as or better than many of the Ultrabooks.

Intel, of course, begs to differ. And it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars starting in the spring promoting all of the great things people will be able to do with its Ultrabooks, which are no more than 18 millimeters thick, can be turned on instantly, and have enough processing power to run full-fledged PC applications. There is no reason that these Ultrabooks have to carry a higher price, and Intel says it fully intends to get Ultrabooks in the hands of everyone.

When Intel last launched a major advertising campaign in 2003, it sold consumers on its Centrino chips, which made it easier for laptops to get on the Internet. Intel also designed low-power chips and captured a much larger market share in laptops than it had in the general market. Now it wants to steamroll the market again.

“We have to play our playbook,” Su said. “We think you’ll see $600, $700, $800 AMD-based laptops, and they will be under the comparable Intel prices.”

The Ultrabook campaign thus represents a big threat to AMD, even if AMD’s chips might be better. Su believes that computer makers will be able to discern the true performance of the upcoming chips and create superior, low-cost laptops for consumers that don’t have the Ultrabook prices.

“I’d expect AMD to message better graphics performance, better battery life, good enough general compute, at a lower price enabled by lower priced silicon,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, and a former AMD executive. “By leveraging Intel’s investment in thin chassis and Windows 8 fast start, they have a chance of getting some business. One element AMD has not addressed yet is advanced security, a feature that Intel has invested in heavily. This play is a reasonably simple one which AMD has run before with a twist.”

Su said that the timing of Trinity is good for the summer, since Microsoft will be launching the Windows 8 operating system later in the year and computer makers will be launching a huge number of new computers later this year.

“We’re going to a lot better on power and performance trade-offs,” Su said.

Phone credit: Dean Takahashi

2010?s Final Fantasy XIII may have sold well enough, but the perplexingly bad design decisions quickly made the title a bitter disappointment for many fans. Coupled with the disastrous launch of Final Fantasy XIV, and even publisher/developer Square Enix admitted that its legendary role-playing brand had been severely damaged.

Rather than develop an entirely new game that would typically release in 5-6 years, Square Enix sought to make use of their existing engine and team with a direct sequel. Final Fantasy XIII-2 was developed in just two years, and released in Japan in December of 2011, where it scored perfect reviews from major media outlets such as Famitsu. So far, sales have been lackluster, especially compared to XIII?s launch numbers.

With Square Enix looking to release a new Final Fantasy title every year, similar to the Call of Duty and Assassin?s Creed franchises, there?s a lot riding on XIII-2?s success. But is the game?s reputation already too far gone?

Perspective
It?s important you know from the onset that Final Fantasy XIII essentially killed the Final Fantasy series for me.

Like most gamers, my fondest memories of the franchise were shaped by the epic struggle between Cloud and Sephiroth, the angsty love story between Squall and Rinoa, and all the groundbreaking CG cinematics, monster-hunting, and mesmerizing music a kid could handle. I spent countless hours mastering materia, collecting all the Tetra Master cards, and maxing out my summons–and I still get goose bumps whenever I watch the opening of Final Fantasy VIII.

Final Fantasy releases were more than just games; they were life events. They were compelling, awe-inspiring, wholly imaginative worlds to get lost in for days, weeks, or even months on end. They weren?t always perfect, but nonetheless, there was something special about them that no other franchise managed to capture.

Then that all changed.

Publisher Square Enix shifted its release schedule from a painful-but-worthwhile trickle to a full-blown assault on fans? wallets, manufacturing poorly produced spin-offs, mobile side stories, prequels, and god-awful movies. The once-sacred Final Fantasy VII universe had been bankrupted of all integrity as if Bobby Kotick himself was at the helm, rolling in the money of confused gamers as the pristine reputation of the franchise was slowly but surely tarnished.

When Final Fantasy XIII was first revealed in 2006, it was instantly a PlayStation 3 system-seller due to the dynamic battle system, phenomenal visuals, and the fact that it was the one game you could almost be sure Square Enix wouldn?t find a way to work Sephiroth into. And three long years later, when it was finally released, it sold very well. But then people actually got home and started playing it. This was not the Final Fantasy we all knew and expected, which in a way I applauded. Square Enix was trying something new, and that worked very well for them with Final Fantasy XII, but not every experiment is a success, and Final Fantasy?s case, they tend to be spectacular failures.

So to say that Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a lot working against it is an understatement. It also doesn?t help that Final Fantasy X-2, the only other proper sequel in the history of the franchise, was half Saturday morning cartoon and half J-pop music video. And half all the ?talking scenes? from Charlie?s Angels.

A fresh beginning
The limited few willing to defend Final Fantasy XIII will inevitably say, ?You just have to play it for 20 hours and then it gets good,? as if that?s some kind of acceptable excuse. From the moment the game begins, Final Fantasy XIII-2 grabs a hold of you and assures you that you?re going to enjoy yourself, whether you planned on it or not. The opening sequence in XIII-2 is easily on par with the best cinematic of the original game, yet it?s all in-game and interactive, a new standard that continues until the end credits roll. The epic confrontation between Lightning, now a badass knight of Valhalla, and a mysterious antagonist, sets the stage for the controversial new story.

In a head-scratching private-market barter, illustrious venture firm Sequoia Capital has managed to secure an even larger chunk of up-and-coming Silicon Valley startup Evernote.

Russian firm Troika Ventures, Evernote’s first institutional investor, sold its stake in the note-taking and note-sharing company at more than ten times its investment.

Troika led a $4.5 million raise in Evernote in January 2009 (the round closed later in the year at $6.5 million), and quickly piled on with new investors in Evernote’s $10 million Series B offering.

Sequoia Capital was founded in 1972 and has invested in many companies including Apple, Google, PayPal, and LinkedIn. It’s estimated that 19 percent of the NASDAQ’s value is made up of companies Sequoia has funded. The firm is also already deeply rooted in Evernote; it led both Evernote’s $20 million Series C round and its $50 million Series D round.

The cash-for-more-land-grab exchange strikes us as a bit odd. Evernote, which purports to now have more than 20 million users, has seen substantial growth since Troika’s first investment, and has gone on to raise $95.5 million in total funding. Clearly, this is a startup that industry insiders think has a shot at a sizable exit, whether that be an acquisition or an IPO (and we know CEO Phil Libin is leaning toward the latter).

And therein lies the problem. The only obvious reason Troika would divest its stake now is because Evernote appears to be in no hurry to make its debut on the public market.

A statement from the company supports this reasoning. “The exit, at over ten times our original commitment, was a difficult decision for Troika and for me personally, but we ultimately decided to provide liquidity to our investors at a multiple return on their investment rather than await the next exit opportunity,” firm head Artyom Yukhin said.

Evernote did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Photo credit: micamica/Flickr

Tumblr founder David Karp has always dismissed the idea that Tumblr might put ads on its platform. See here, here, and just about every interview the young founder has ever given. But today, Tumblr rolled out highlighted posts, which allow people to pay Tumblr $1 to attach a digital sticker to their posts.

When pestered about a business model in the past, Karp has always said that Tumblr would find a way to generate revenue while staying true to its roots as a tool for creative expression. Talking recently with The Guardian, Karp’s hatred of advertising spilled over.

“The only real tools for expression these days are YouTube, which turns my stomach,” Karp said. “They take your creative works ? your film that you poured hours and hours of energy into ? and they put ads on top of it. They make it as gross an experience to watch your film as possible. I’m sure it will contribute to Google’s bottom line; I’m not sure it will inspire any creators.”

The new stickered posts are not advertising, they’re highlighting. Right…

The distinction wears pretty thin when you check out the section for Products, which includes $1 stickers for “Sale!” “On sale now” “Limited run!” “Last Chance!” “New Stuff!” and “Buy This!”

Just like Twitter has sponsored tweets and Facebook sponsored stories, Tumblr is trying to inject the potential for promotion on its site but avoid the temptation to just start slapping ad units across the banner.

Plenty of sites are already having fun subverting the PG rated choices Tumblr offer for highlight stickers.

VentureBeat is proud to announce our second annual Mobile Summit, where we are once again inviting 180 top mobile executives, investors, and policymakers to discuss five significant issues facing the mobile industry.

The event will be held at the beautiful Cavallo Point Resort (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) on April 2-3. The Mobile Summit is an invitation only event, but you can request an invite here.

We decided to host the Mobile Summit last year after realizing that there aren’t many places for mobile leaders to sit down and have a conversation. There are plenty of mobile conferences out there, including our own annual MobileBeat conference, but those events can often be crowded, and don’t allow for the same sort of intimate discussions that our Mobile Summit fosters.

This year we’re discussing five new issues facing the industry:

1. Platform Wars: Size matters, but what else will dictate who wins among iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft?
Four titans, iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft, are now duking it out on the global stage to become the biggest mobile ?platform? upon which users — and the mobile industry — will standardize. But what will really determine the winner?

2. The mobile shopping revolution: Where billions can be made with location, targeting, and the mobile web.
The adoption of mobile commerce is poised to create a massive, multi-billion dollar opportunity. With smartphones becoming smart wallets, as well as instant research tools that are able to communicate specific tastes anywhere people go, what technologies and what companies will help improve the way people discover and pay for items? Who will be the biggest winners from this trend?

3. Mobile disruption of the enterprise: What are the new types of apps and services that will spur productivity and competitiveness?
Employees are choosing to bring their own devices to work — iPhones, iPads, Android phones and more — and enterprises are using the cloud to adapt. Given the new enterprise cloud, what are the next disruptive apps or services that will dramatically improve productivity and competitiveness?

4. The media revolution: What forms of content will survive and thrive in mobile?
With mobile devices evolving in 2012, and millions of new consumers buying them, who are the most successful publishers of new mobile media, what are the factors driving their success, and what is the impact of that success on the mobile industry?

5. User Acquisition in 2012: What lessons will the mobile gaming industry show the rest of us?
In terms of models of user acquisition, the games industry has led the way. What are the next steps game companies must make to stay compelling and innovative on user acquisition strategies (advertising, offers, etc.) now that better broadband, better OS?s, better interfaces, and better devices (including tablets) have arrived. What can the rest of us learn from that?

Just as we did last year, we plan to take the results of conversations from the Mobile Summit and make them an integral part of our MobileBeat conference, which will be held together with our GamesBeat conference taking place July 10-11.

We already have some great participants lined up for this year’s Mobile Summit, including Jason Spero, Google’s head of mobile; Mihir Shah, President and CEO of TapJoy; Jim Goetz, General Partner at Sequoia Capital; and Simon Khalaf, President and CEO of Flurry.

Micron chief executive Steve Appleton has been killed in the crash of an experimental airplane. Appleton has long been a stunt plane pilot and has had close calls before.

The plane crashed at the Boise, Idaho airport. It was a single-engine fixed-wing experimental aircraft. The incident is sure to raise alarms about CEOs who engage in risky behavior.

Appleton, 51, built Micron from one of the also-ran memory chip makers into one of the world’s largest producers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which is used as main memory in PCs and stores data in a wide variety of electronic equipment.

Appleton started out as a production worker on the factory line and received a series of promotions. He became a statesman of the industry and an active leader as he advocated free trade in competition with Japanese rivals. Back in the 1980s, the Japanese all but took over the memory chip industry, partly due to a practice known as dumping, or selling chips below costs.

Appleton and other executives in the chip industry got the U.S. government to negotiate a fair trade agreement that put an end to the dumping and enabled the U.S. to hang on to the strategically important industry. But while other memory chip makers went out of business, Micron alone survived and became a huge employer in Idaho.

Micron’s board said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Appleton, Micron Chairman and CEO, passed away this morning in a small plane accident in Boise. He was 51. Our hearts go out to his wife, Dalynn, his children and his family during this tragic time. Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.”

Appleton was a stunt pilot for many years and he always talked about how he put safety first. I visited him in Boise once at the company’s headquarters and he talked about one incident when the engine of his plane cut out on him. He had a choice of either bailing out or going into a power dive in the hopes of restarting the engine. He chose to dive and the engine restarted.

He actually crashed a plane in 2004 and survived. But today that didn’t happen. It’s a sad day for the entire chip industry and for Appleton’s family. In November, Appleton won the industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce award, for his contributions to the semiconductor business.

?Steve was a visionary and a true leader in our industry. He will be deeply missed by the entire semiconductor community and our prayers and thoughts are with his family,” said Brian Toohey, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.

Xero, an online-accounting service for small businesses, announced today it has received $16.6 million in its latest round of funding. PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel participated in the round.

“Xero was started by a few entrepreneurs who struggled to get the right financial information to make business decisions. They set out to build accounting software that caters to small business and accountants,” said Jamie Sutherland (pictured right), Xero’s President of U.S. Operations in an interview with VentureBeat.

Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, Xero gives business and independent contractors an online dashboard that they can use to manage expenses, invoicing, and bank transactions. The service is for all types of businesses, including small retail stores, one-person operations, and larger companies. Xero also offers tools for professional accountants to run their businesses.

The service emphasizes ease of use and a clean design to help anyone manage their business expenses. Xero gives small businesses and their financial advisers the ability to view the same information at the same time so they can collectively make smart business plans. There are three pricing levels available starting at $19 per month for one-person businesses, and up to $39 per month for larger teams.

Peter Thiel has previously invested in the Xero, and this new round comes from Thiel’s New Zealand venture fund Valar Ventures. Thiel is a well-known tech investor and startup founder who co-founded PayPal and has invested in Facebook, Yelp, Yammer, and LinkedIn.

“This money will be used to accelerate our U.S. growth, and execute our business,” said Sutherland, “We have a team of six in San Francisco and [with the funding] we will be expanding our team.”

Xero was founded in New Zealand in 2006. Globally, Xero has more than 170 employees, including a team of six at its United States office in San Francisco. The company boasts more than 60,000 customers in more than 100 countries. This latest funding round was led by Peter Thiel, Sam Morgan of Fairfax Media, and Craig Winklerthe, former co-founder of MYOB. Since its founding, Xero has raised $70 million.

While sports fans eagerly await who will win the 2012 Super Bowl and look forward to diving into chips and a Frito Pie or two, marketers are eager to see who the winners (and losers) are on the social media front. Clearly big brands want to make sure their (estimated) $3.5 million investment for a 30-second spot pays off, but how do they go beyond the 100 million audience to cultivate new and engaged fans via social media after February 5th?

Here are a few suggestions on what marketers can learn from the success of sports engagement on social media.

Your fans have shifted to social…Refresh your playbook

Social media is changing how fans cheer on their teams. At the time of the 2006 World Cup, Facebook was still limited only to college and high school students. But then everything changed in 2010. At the South Africa World Cup, where viewing parties, mobile app badges, continual tweets from players, and live streams on social networks inspired a growing community of fans to share with socially-inspired sports fans around the world.

Games were watched worldwide in record numbers (19.4 million people watched the US vs. Ghana game). Twitter reported that the Women?s World Cup soccer final scored a new record with 7,196 ?tweets per second,? the most tweeted moment in Twitter history. And number 2? Brazil?s elimination from Copa America! Social vuvuzelas were heard all over the world (and not only on those incredibly annoying vuvuzela mobile apps).

How are you going to adapt your media buying and social strategies to better engage your brand?s audience?

Facebook gives you the home field advantage

We know you remember the stat that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated in the world. (That was initially shared when Facebook hit 500 million users. Now the site has more than 800 million users ? as many users as the entire Internet in 2004!) Facebook has fostered a community of like-minded friends and fans. So, cultivate, engage and keep your fans (and their friends) where they already are. Don?t redirect them to your Web site.

There?s vastly greater value in having your fans share your message with their friends on Facebook, versus engaging them alone on your site. What?s your game plan for engaging with fans on Facebook and building new audiences on this important ?hub? throughout the coming year?

Marketing needs to closely manage their ?Xs and Os?

For the first time ever NBC and the NFL have agreed to live stream the Super Bowl online and on mobile phones. Marketers have a vast list of social and mobile tools or ?plays? they can run, and they are tasked daily with the challenge of creating, managing, and maintaining these campaigns both offline and online. As a result, marketers have to think more broadly, and use social to connect online and offline more strategically.

For example, mobile campaigns are a perfect way to bridge online and offline ? contextually relevant campaigns bring people in the real world to an online social world. And, using simple QR codes on billboards, product labels, and print ads connect people to communities on Facebook. I?m personally a fan of using a TV ad ?jingle? recognition with apps like Shazam, Little Debbie?s Airstream, and the Volkswagen Peepster. Are you fully taking advantage of the uniqueness of social, mobile, etc. And, what steps will you be taking steps to better integrate your offline and online experiences?

Capturing Fans Before, During and After the Action

According to a 2011 study by Nielsen, roughly 40% of tablet and smartphone users in the US use their devices daily while watching TV. Technology offers brands a great opportunity to give fans something interesting to do before, during, and after the action. International soccer teams have totally figured this out.

FC Barcelona ? with over 25 million fans on Facebook ? runs quizzes that allow fans to predict when goals are scored and by whom, with prizes for winners. Manchester United, which has over 20 million fans, has a whole section of their Facebook page devoted to polls ? each one regularly getting 20,000 – 40,000 votes each ? creating a well of wall content that can be tapped. Real Madrid ? with over 23 million fans ? gets up to 100,000 comments on every post on their wall.

Major League Baseball is figuring it out too. They ran their ?Home Run Derby? in 2011, with athletes tweeting from the field, generating 4,995 tweets per second#. And despite the fact that Super Bowl XLV was the second-most mentioned topic in Facebook in 2011 (after the death of Osama Bin Laden), the official 2012 Super Bowl page has no Facebook connection and no official Facebook community. What a missed opportunity for fan engagement!

What can marketers learn from these highly engaged sports fans?

Social media lets people express an important part of themselves to their friends. It?s not just sports teams that reflect a fan?s personality. It?s also the car they drive, the clothes they wear, the movies they go to, the places they travel, the recipes they love, and the list goes on. We see that fans are perfectly willing to share their love of a brand just as passionately as they do their love of a sports team ? if the brand encourages them in just the right way.

After building thousands of campaigns for hundreds of leading international consumer brands, we?ve learned that socially successful brands don?t want another ?me too? sweepstakes or contest. They want something unique, interesting, personal and individualized to their brand, with the context appropriate to social, and that allows fans to share their message.

So, take a page out of the sports fan playbook. Go where your fans are having fun. Engage them in what makes them passionate. Build campaigns that involve what they?re doing socially ? on the sofa or on the sidewalk ? with their friends. And that reflects favorably on their personalities. Let fans use your brand to ?show off? their knowledge, beauty, and wit. And always, always make sure the campaign is inherently viral.

When you get a fan to tell friends about you, you?ll always win. It?s the best route to a Facebook page full of MVPs.

Roger Katz is CEO of Friend2Friend, which has hundreds of leading International consumer brands in its roster, including some iconic European soccer teams.

[Super Bowl image via Shutterstock]

The case of the “stolen” Twitter followers may or may not have merit, but its claims passed a second litmus test this week.

In the matter of PhoneDog versus Noah Kravitz, a U.S. district court judge ruled to allow the plaintiff, mobile review site PhoneDog, to move forward its suit against former employee Noah Kravitz with amended claims.

Kravitz, currently the editor-at-large at TechnoBuffalo, is being sued for allegedly misappropriating trade secrets by changing the password and name of a Twitter account he used while employed by PhoneDog. Kravitz accrued 17,000 followers while working for PhoneDog and the company believes those followers are “akin to a business customer list.” As such, PhoneDog is asking for $340,000, at a valuation of $2.50 per follower per month, in damages.

In November, a judge dismissed two of PhoneDog’s four claims, but the company responded by amending its claims. Kravitz then sought to have the claims dismissed again, but Monday a judge denied Kravitz’s motion to dismiss.

“I understand the judge’s ruling. It doesn’t change my perspective on the matter, and I’m still hoping for a swift and reasonable resolution of the dispute,” Kravitz said to VentureBeat in an interview by phone. “I hope to not take up very much more of the court’s, or anybody else’s, resources on this matter.”

Specially, the judge ruled that PhoneDog properly alleged that “intentional interference with prospective economic advantage” by Kravitz could have taken place. “The Court is able to draw the reasonable inference that PhoneDog had an economic relationship with at least one third-party advertiser that was disrupted by Kravitz?s alleged conduct, causing it economic harm,” judge Maria-Elena James stated in her ruling.

“It’s important to remember that there has been no determination about the merits of the case whatsoever,” Kravitz’s lawyer Cary Kletter told VentureBeat. “What this ruling means is ? that we attempted to get portions of the case thrown out, but the claims were not so bad that they should be thrown out.”

“No decision has been made on who owns this Twitter account ? no one has submitted any evidence,” Kletter added, calling PhoneDog’s valuation of the followers to the Twitter account “illogical.” “We remain confident that [PhoneDog] will not be able to prove that it has an economic relationship with each one of its Twitter followers ? we think that [PhoneDog] will not prevail on its claims.”

“We are pleased with the court’s ruling and look forward to proceeding with our case,” a PhoneDog representative said in a statement to VentureBeat. “PhoneDog will continue to take the steps necessary to protect its intellectual property rights.”

Following the latest ruling, parties will move forward to the meditation stage of the case. VentureBeat will be following developments closely.

Depending on the case’s outcome, the California federal court could be the first to set a significant legal precedent around Twitter account ownership and the monetary value assigned to a Twitter follower.

This post was updated with a statement from PhoneDog.

Photo credit: ilse/Flickr

Streaming video service Hulu is adding a huge collection of PBS television shows to its content library, the company announced Thursday.

The new content is available with commercials to all Hulu users, while premium subscribers of Hulu Plus can watch it commercial-free. Some of the shows now available include Ken Burns library, the first season of Downton Abbey, NOVA, and American Experience, as well as children’s series including Arthur, Dinosaur Train and Wild Kratts. More shows are expected to debut in the future, according to Hulu.

The funny part about the new Hulu content is that it’s actually available for free on the Public Broadcasting Station’s official website, PBS.org — meaning you don’t have to pay a $9 monthly fee or sit through periodic commercial breaks.

But while a free, uninterrupted service is typically preferred, I see why adding the content would be beneficial to Hulu. First of all Hulu Plus has a strong subscriber base of 1.5 million paying customers, due in large part to its library of current premium television content from ABC, NBC, CW, and Fox. Being able to integrate PBS shows into the service makes it more convenient for people who’ve dropped their cable subscriptions and rely solely on the web for video entertainment.

I’m betting that Hulu is also paying PBS for streaming access to this content, which is always a good thing considering that PBS is a non-profit government-run organization that is severely under funded. (The company did confirm to VentureBeat that it has a licensing agreement in place with PBS, but didn’t elaborate on the details.)

[Downtown Abby image via PBS]

It’s the sort of gamesmanship that keeps readers turning the pages in a spy novel. The FBI says that Anonymous, the loose-knit collective of global hackers, intercepted a highly sensitive call between American cybercrime experts and their counterparts at Scotland Yard discussing, what else, Anonymous.

“The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now,” Anonymous teased in a Twitter message.

The 15 minute recording was released on Pastebin and then posted to Youtube. “I’m not sure if we’re the only two on here right now,” says an American agent named Bruce.

“Don’t say anything too bad, I’m on here with Matt,” replied his counterpart from Scotland yard. The group has a chuckle, unaware of the irony.

Anonymous also released an email with the time and password for the conference call, so they may have simply dialed in, rather than using more sophisticated techniques to intercept the conversation.

During the call the investigators discuss how they might proceed against Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two British suspects who are set to appear in court as suspected members of Anonymous. Highly sensitive tactics are discussed for when Scotland Yard might move to make further arrests and the evidence they are planning to bring to the trial.