Flush With $10 Million In Fresh Cash, Yammer Strengthens Executive Team
Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.
The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.
Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).
David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.
Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.
Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.
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GDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now
about 3 hours ago - No comments
Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store
Before you go press buy, though, I’ll also tell you that I got a chance to play the game, and while it is about as faithful a Street Fighter IV game as you can get on the iPhone, playing a fighting game without actual buttons is not really an ideal experience. While I was able to pull off a Hadoken and almost all of the other old moves after a few tries, the highest levels of competition in a fighting game require precision and subtlety, and this control scheme has neither of those. If you just want to play Street Fighter on an iPhone, sure — be an early adopter, pick up the game, and enjoy a few rounds of Guile vs. Ryu. But if you’re looking for the kind of in-depth fighting experience that Street Fighter IV on consoles and in the arcades offered, you probably won’t find it here — the controls are a little too inconsistent to really dig into the deep counter and powerup systems on display.
The game does have a lot of extras and addons, including a dojo mode for training and Bluetooth multiplayer. And while the game’s eight characters offers up a pretty slim selection compared to the current console titles, these are definitely classic Capcom characters, and all of the old moves you’ll remember still work. Save for the controls, nothing about this game is half-done — it’s definitely a premium port of a premium game. But as a true fighting game experience, this one comes up short. Buy it if you want, to see the spectacle of Street Fighter squeezed into Apple’s touchscreen, an achievement in and of itself. But don’t buy it expecting an ideal Capcom-style showdown that you’ll be able to pull up time and time again — for that, save your quarters for the arcades.
Stay tuned — we did get to talk with the Japanese producer of the game about what he thinks of the iPhone, the iPad, and the challenges he had to overcome by squeezing this one on to Apple’s handheld. That interview is coming up later today right here on TUAW.
TUAWGDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – Street Fighter IV – App Store – Capcom – Street Fighter
More Talent Walks Out The Door At MySpace: Three Key Employees Go To Gravity
about 3 hours ago - No comments
More bad news for an already bullet-riddled MySpace: three key employees have left the company to join Gravity, a cross-town startup founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto.
We covered Gravity’s launch in December 2009.
The three MySpacer’s are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we previously reported Bissell’s resignation), Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino and Development Manager Robbie Coleman.
Comscore Study: Social Gamers Want Marketing Offers For Currency
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A new study by Comscore will be released on Wednesday that may give hope to social gaming startups trying to monetize users. 35% of the survey respondents said that they engage in “marketing actions” to earn virtual currency (such as watching a video, filling out a survey, etc.), and 53% said they be willing to consider marketing action for currency if given the choice.
The study was conducted by Comscore, sponsored by Offerpal, and included responses from 799 Comscore panelists who play games on social networks at least once per month. 54% of panelists play games at least daily.
This is good news for game developers who’ve had their monetization choices somewhat fenced in over the last few months. Gamers 25-34 are the most likely to earn virtual currency for marketing actions, according to the study – 71% of panelists in that age group said they are “very likely” to consider this.
Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Finds A Place In The Google Apps Marketplace
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Zoho, a web-based productivity suite that was called a “fake Office” by a Microsoft VP, is announcing a significant partnership with Google today. The startup will be a launch partner for Google’s recently launched Google Apps Marketplace, which allows vendors to sell applications that compliment Google Apps. Here are our notes from the announcement. Zoho will be integrating two of its over 20 business applications – Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects with Google Apps.
So starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add on-demand CRM app Zoho CRM and project management software Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While Zoho has previously rolled out the ability log-in to its applications via your Google Apps IDs, the two applications have been specially formatted for further immersion into Google Apps with App’s extended APIs. IT admins will now have an option to add Zoho Apps to their domains through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the IT admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. main will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. 
Socialwok Takes A Stroll In The Google Apps Marketplace
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Tonight, Google launched its Google Apps Marketplace, an online storefront for Apps products and services. Here are our notes from the announcement. And of course, the marketplace is launching with a number of pilot partners (50 to be exact). One of those partners happens to be recently launched Socialwok, a product that ads a social layer to Gmail and other Google products. At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. And the startup just launched a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.
Socialwok in the the Google Apps Marketplace allows organizations to use their existing Google Apps accounts to login into Socialwok and create a social network for their domains to share within Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Spreadsheets and other Google objects in feeds. For example, with the Socialwok Gmail gadget, users can view, post and comment on various feeds in their organization right from Gmail.
SXSW Interactive: Because hell doesn’t have enough promotional stickers
about 9 hours ago - No comments
Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.
At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.
“Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Always use a condom!”. Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace ’shoes’ with ’sandals’ and ‘condom’ with ’sprig of silphium’).
This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi’s to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year’s event. And here it is…
Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.
SV Angel Partner Brian Pokorny Now CEO Of Dailybooth
about 12 hours ago - No comments
SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth.
Dailybooth, the runner up in the “best social app” and winner of the “time sink” categories at this year’s Crunchies Awards, is “your life in pictures.” Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. “It’s a community for self expression,” says Pokorny.
A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they’re eating, what they’re feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here’s an example.
GDC 2010: Ngmoco explains how Eliminate was built
about 13 hours ago - No comments
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Other Events, Developer, iPhone
The 2010 Game Developers Conference kicks off today in San Francisco, and TUAW is in attendance to check out the latest and greatest in iPhone game development. The conference boasts a whole track dedicated to iPhone gaming this year, and all week long, we’ll be bringing you panels, news, and interviews straight from the conference floor. This morning, panel number one was from Stephen Detwiler and James Marr, two engineers at Ngmoco, to talk to developers about how they put the server software together for Eliminate, the “freemium” first person shooter that’s serving as their flagship app lately.
As they explained during the presentation, they had a heck of a goal with this project: they wanted to put together “the definitive FPS for iPhone,” complete with all of the functions of a standard console deathmatch-style FPS, in just five months with just three engineers. And they started with the toughest nut of all: the networking code.
They looked first at commercial solutions for game networking, and it turns out that the Quake 3 engine that they eventually used fit their ideas well. The toughest obstacle was of course the lag — in a fast-paced game like Eliminate, even a delay of 200 milliseconds is too much. But it turns out that the way the Quake 3 engine handled dialup Internet back in the day is very similar to the way many developers are handling the slower speeds of mobile 3G. As the devs said, “a dialup connection from 1999 looks a lot like a 3G connection today.”
In addition to the networking code, the Quake engine also gave them lots of other benefits during development, including graphics and lighting engines, a map editor, and an easy way to model animations in the game. The engineers said that using a commercial engine like Quake 3 allowed them to spend much more time on the out-of-game experience (the lobbies, the in-app purchases, and so on), and they really appreciated that.
The next big hurdles were player management and matchmaking. After considering a few different options, they went with an open-source messaging server called ejabberd — while it’s written in Erlang, a language that they said had some “crazy syntax” (they showed an inexplicable piece of code on the projection screen to make their point), it scaled very well and clustered the way they wanted it to.
Matchmaking was a little tougher — they used console games by companies like Microsoft, Infinity Ward, and Blizzard as a model, and decided that they wanted to have players wait a max of about 10% of the time they spent playing. For console games, that turns out to be about a minute of waiting to make a game versus ten minutes of actual gameplay, but for Eliminate’s shorter three minute games, Ngmoco decided they only had about fifteen seconds to make a match. Still, they were able to put a pretty robust system in the game even in that short time — they assign players a number of various qualities (character skill, level, ping time, and so on), and then the matchmaking system searches for other game players, slowly expanding the limits on the search criteria.
In other words, when players first start searching, they’ll be matched up with players of approximately the same skill, but as time goes on, that skill window grows. Fifteen seconds in, the skill differential could be up to ten times what it was when the search first started. Not all qualities “degrade” the same — party size, for example, degrades much slower, so someone looking for four players won’t get hooked up with just two or three for a while. And while the devs originally didn’t include character level in matchmaking at all (they figured skill was a better match for players than actual level), a “HUGE outcry” by players made them include level in the process. Players really didn’t like being connected with opponents who were at a much higher character level, even if the skill level was the same.
Ngmoco runs 16 different servers for each implementation of Eliminate: four for messaging with the clients, two for matchmaking, eight for what they call “game managers” (which are servers that run multiple game instances), and two management consoles that oversee the actual Ubuntu-based servers they’re running, and update the 24 apt-get packages that make up the actual game software. Messaging servers are based in San Francisco with the company, but game servers are co-located around the world, in Chicago, Virginia, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Unfortunately, they didn’t mention how many people are actually playing, but the servers were tested for up to 30,000 users just for messaging and 50,000 for matchmaking — Ngmoco actually made a headless version of the game for OS X, installed it on “all of the hardware” in their offices, and ran it like crazy to load-test their software.
It was a pretty interesting talk — very much on the technical side, but Ngmoco set out to create a competitive online FPS on the iPhone and that’s what they did. It was cool to hear some behind-the-scenes details on how a very complicated iPhone gaming network is designed and run.
We’ll have more from GDC 2010 all this week, including hands-on of the latest games from Ngmoco and lots of other game developers. Stay tuned!
TUAWGDC 2010: Ngmoco explains how Eliminate was built originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – Ngmoco – San Francisco – Microsoft – Apple
News: WaterField unveils Smart Case, Slip Case for iPad
about 16 hours ago - No comments
WaterField Designs has introduced its new Smart Case and Slip Case accessories for the Apple iPad. Joining the company’s previously announced Ultimate SleeveCase and iPad Suede Jacket, the Smart Case is a top-loading case featuring an impact-resistant plastic inner shell with light padding, leather accents on the sides, Ultrasuede lining for protection against scratches, a color fabric exterior, and a “powermesh” back pocket for…
Allmyapps Updates Its iTunes-for-apps, Get Some Beta Invites
about 16 hours ago - No comments
I first learned of Allmyapps at Le Web ‘09 when the company’s CEO Thibauld Favre, and co-Founder Aranaud Coulondre, grabbed my attention and enticed me into a demo. I nearly missed my flight. Allmyapps, a small but ambitious startup based in France, aims to become the “iTunes for software applications” as Thibauld puts it, bringing simple 1 click multi-application install to end-users.
