Toluu

Brier Dudley's blog

RealNetworks giving away casual gamesYesterday

RealNetwork is finally taking its casual games public, but not quite as expected.

The company is announcing today that it will give away a free game every day at its GameHouse.com portal.

It's also announcing a redesign of the site and new "value" pricing, including a club membership with $5.99 games and early access to the free games.

Amazon Web Services startup contest winner named: YieldexNovember 20

The winner of Amazon.com's second annual startup challenge, highlighting promising companies using its Amazon Web Services:

Yieldex, a service that helps online publishers do "accurate forecasting of overlapping online advertising inventory and optimal campaign allocation." The company's engineering office is in Boulder, Colo., and its sales office is in New York.

The company is trying to help large publishers (sites getting 1 billion to 10 billion impressions per month, such as CNN or the New York Times) get more sales from premium inventory attracting $10 to $30 CPM using its "proprietary yield index."

It's a nice enterprise showcase for the capabilities of Amazon: A single customer may send 20 gigabytes of data nightly for analysis, yet Yieldex uses one part-time system engineer to manage its services running on AWS.

Chief Executive Tom Shields -- who previously co-founded NetGravity, a company sold to DoubeClick in 1999 for more than $500 million -- said the cloud services gave Yieldex flexibility and scale on tap.

"We had no idea when we started this thing what kind of capacity we were going to need,'' he said.

The winner was announced tonight at an event at Bell Harbor after a year of Amazon traveling all over the place, pitching its Web services to developers.

Seven finalists were flown to Seattle to present their companies to a group of venture capitalists and Amazon managers who made the choice.

Th

Beware of infected "High School Musical" downloadsNovember 20

Apparently cyber bullies are crashing "High School Musical."

Panda Security today said it's finding all sorts of malware in downloadable HSM songs and videos that are being found through online searches. (As opposed to the material delivered by the Seattle-based Disney Internet Group.)

From the release:

When users run one of these fake files they may expect to hear songs from the film or see a video clip, yet all that will happen is that the computer will be infected by VB.ADQ, the Agent.KGR Trojan, the adware Koolbar, or another strain of malicious code. Some of these might display images related to the film when they are run, but this is just to avoid arousing suspicion.

The company advises people to "take care when downloading files, and in particular, to check the file extension, as many of the malicious files have the extension '.exe,,' which is rarely the case with a genuine music or video file."

Black Friday still appeals, but how about this week's Blu Thursday deals?November 20

Believe it or not, people are more willing to line up in wee hours to get a deal on Black Friday this year, according to a survey released by Consumer Reports.

It said 26 percent of consumers it polled plan to brave the frenzied crowds and go shopping the day after Thanksgiving. That's up 5 points from the 21 percent who shopped on B.F. last year.

Search for real estate flips gone bad, now at EstatelyNovember 20

Seattle real estate search service Estately added a nice new feature: The ability to see past sales prices of houses listed for sale.

Estately noted that you can use this to see if a house for sale is being flipped or hasn't changed hands for a long time.

That's public information available from entities like King County, but it's nice to have it on hand when searching house listings. Estately's contracting with Cyberhomes for the info.

Estately's also expanding its service to the Chicago area and Long Island (but not New York City, where it's trickier to get the MLS information Estately uses).

Co-founder Galen Ward said Estately's seeing annualized 300 percent growth, by the way.