Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead
Lucky Sort, a Portland, Oregon-based startup behind a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helped to discover patterns in live data streams, has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the company has announced via its website that it will be shuttering its service in the coming months, and several members of the team will now be relocating to Twitter's San Francisco offices to join the company's "revenue engineering department."
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Want To See Pictures Of Twitter's Office Visitors? Meet @Twisitor
There are Twitter accounts for almost everything these days. Some people I know have accounts set up for their pets, then there are toasters, beds, drones and so on. The company itself has a fun account called @Twisitor, which was a project built during one of Twitter’s quarterly hackweeks. There’s a camera in the lobby of Twitter’s new San Francisco office and it will snap a photo of anyone who stands in front of it. Once it does that, guess what’s next? You guessed it, a tweet goes out from the Twisitor account. It’s a great representation of the culture at Twitter, where its employees eat its own dogfood, or in this case…birdfood. Its first tweet was from January 11th, so it’s still relatively new. I’ve been to quite a few tech startup offices and each has its own bit of style and flair. When you go to Facebook, there’s always a video of someone on the team talking about the company, at Google there’s usually some comfy couches to sit on with free WiFi to use but Twitter ...
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Singaporean-Finnish Startup Nonstop Games Raises $2.9M For Core Gaming On iOS, Android
Nonstop Games, a Singaporean-Finnish gaming company (yes, really), just picked up $2.9 million from two Scandinavian venture firms, Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, to build out core games for iOS and Android. The company’s team has an interesting backstory. Henric Suuronen was a head of studio at one of Europe’s biggest social gaming companies Wooga, and a director at Digital Chocolate Finland before that. The company’s CEO, Juha Paananen, doesn’t have a long gaming career, but he previously ran Asia-Pacific business development for Nokia out of Singapore so he has lots of experience working in the mobile industry. Random fact of note: Juha is also the brother of Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell, that Finnish gaming company that’s tearing up the charts with two top-grossing games in the top five. We’ve heard from multiple sources that the company is making more than $1 million a day on average, but they decline to talk about updated revenue figures since acknowledging a $500,000 ...
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The Top Mobile Games Are Grossing More Than 4X What They Were A Year Ago, GREE’s Dharni Says
After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. Initially set up after the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming network OpenFeint, the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games. It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built its business in astonishingly short eight years through being a major feature phone gaming platform. (Yes, eight years is short in Japan where the culture can be averse to risky, new entrepreneurial ventures.) They aimed to replicate that success as a dual game developer and platform in the West with a few big-ticket acquisitions. But now it appears that the U.S. arm is just doing games for now. “We’re pretty singularly focused on content,” said Anil Dharni, GREE’s senior vice president of studio operations, in an interview from the company’s Mission Bay offices. “The platform — whenever ...
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Dronegames In San Francisco Features Twitter Fists, Groupon Leashes, MiFi And Botnets
Today, I got to judge a really cool competition, the Dronegames. Basically, a bunch of teams that like to hack on helicopter-like Drones came together in Groupon's San Francisco office to come up with some really cool creations. I expected things to spin and go upside down, but these folks did things way more advanced. What's a Drone exactly? Let's ask Wikipedia: An unmanned combat air vehicle or combat drone or simply "drone" is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is armed and has no onboard pilot. Currently operational drones are under real-time human control of unknown precision.
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