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OUYA Gets Its Official Retail Release, But The $99 Game Console Still Hasn't Reached Every Early Backer
The Android-powered OUYA gaming console is celebrating its official first day of general retail availability today, a major milestone to be sure for the Kickstarter-funded piece of hardware. Many thought it would never make it this far, and that it would be vaporware before anyone actually got a chance to go and purchase one, but founder Julie Uhrman and her team have made good on making sure it hit store shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, listed right alongside the marquee consoles by Sony, Xbox and Nintendo.
The $99 device offers over 170 games, all of which must have some kind of free-to-try component, along with media apps like Plex and TuneIn. OUYA also touts its large committed developer base, which has over 17,000 studios and game creators signed on to deliver content for the console, including Double Fine Productions. The console ships with one controller, and you can add another for $49.99. As of this writing, the launch seems to be going decently well, as Amazon.com is already showing the console as out of stock.
So far, OUYA hasn’t received the best of early reviews. Most have found its user experience lacking, and the pre-release version was definitely a “beta” release. Virtually everyone who got their hands on a backer edition expressed hope that the console would receive more polish, along with hardware fixes when it actually shipped. And now that it has, critics are going to go back to the well for a second drink, in the hopes that the OUYA team has made some considerable advances in the ensuing two month period.
Yet not all backers could even form an early opinion about the console. OUYA employed a staggered shipping strategy to reach all of its backers, with a timeline that was supposed to ensure everyone got a console before they become generally available. OUYA’s Uhrman sent out an update to backers this morning apologizing for not getting the console in backer hands before the public release, and shifting blame to their distribution partner, to DHL, and to backers with located internationally.
Delays for backer reward shipments on Kickstarter are nothing new, but it is very rare to see a product hit general market availability before getting out to the project’s first supporters. OUYA appears to be stumbling out of the gate in more ways than one, but at least now the product is out there in non-beta form, and ready to prove itself as a real consumer product, or, alternatively, to fail in the court of public opinion.
As Twitter nears its IPO, CEO Dick Costolo seemingly refuses to focus on the money. "We think of revenue like oxygen. Essential to life but not the first thing you think about in the morning," he told Katie Couric at The Atlantic's Aspen Ideas Festival. "I don't try to get caught up in short-term thinking about the company." Given the impending IPO, this is likely Costolo's last interview, so these quotes will haunt them 
Whatever happened to the slow and lazy summer news weeks of yore? This past week certainly wasn't one of them, as evidenced by all the fun stuff we had to talk about during this episode of 
Google Reader is dying come Monday, and the whole Internet is sad. I'm not sad. I won't miss it at all. I used to use Google Reader a lot, as in every day, and it was once a key component of my arsenal of work tools, too. Reader was the pulse of the Internet, my way of staying up to date with everything that happened while I was waking or sleeping. In tech news, having a resources like Google reader is important. Or wait no: was. Was important.
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It's been 
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The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — marvel at the mutually assured creation of a partnership between Larry Ellison's Oracle and Marc Benioff's Salesforce.com. Few would have predicted such a stunning partnership just a few years ago, but the crescendoing intersection of cloud, social, and mobile has borne sudden fruit. The only constant:
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The Pirate3D Buccaneer printer has been successfully funded on Kickstarter, reaching $1,438,765 in funds—more than 14 times its original $100,000 goal. The Singaporean startup burst onto the scene in May with news of its relatively inexpensive printer. The Buccaneer cost $347 on Kickstarter, far cheaper than the Makerbot Replicator 2.0 at $2,199. For reference, the Form One, which has just started to ship, set its Kickstarter pledge at $2,299. The printer is pitched as a consumer device, and Pirate3D makes a library of objects available through a drag-and-drop Web-based GUI (graphical user interface), for people unfamiliar with CAD (computer aided design) software to customize objects. You can download its Android app to test out the interface. Pirate3D is placing so much emphasis on this interface that it is resting its future survival on its software hopes, said co-founder Roger Chang. “I’m certain you’ll see a fake Buccaneer within the next six months,” he said. Hardware copying is inevitable in this business, and to stem the possibility of being edged out by a fake, the company is planning to outsource the brains of its device, he said. This will allow other hardware makers to produce similar machines, but still plug into Pirate3D’s software library. This will allow it to stay relevant in the industry, and ahead of the copies. The company is working on releasing an SDK (software development kit) for its Smart Objects library as well, to encourage the community to populate the pool of items in it. Over 3,000 machines have been ordered through Kickstarter, and Pirate3D is working with manufacturers in Singapore to get mass production going. The third-party manufacturers are headquartered here, but mass work will be done in China, where their factories are. With any luck, the first prototypes will come out in December, and proper models will start shipping in February next year, said Chang.
Everyone is worried about the wrong things. Since Edward Snowden exposed the incipient NSA 
Editor's note: Stephanie Singer practices law at WilmerHale, where she advises emerging companies in the technology and life sciences industries on formation, financings and ongoing corporate matters. Before quitting your job to launch a startup, read the documents you signed with your current employer carefully. They could contain provisions that put your new venture at risk.
Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth Google Reader is finally set to go dark next week, and more than a few companies (including 
In today's episode of my 
Dropbox founder and CEO 
Zynga co-founder and godfather of metrics-based game development Eric Schiermeyer quietly slipped out of the company, is working on a new startup, and today announced he's become an investor and advisor to Bee Cave Games. Bee Cave Games CEO Erik Bethke tells me Schiermeyer's advisor role is a weekly commitment and his investment is part of a forthcoming funding round in the low millions.
In this week's Ask A VC episode, General Atlantic Managing Director 
Yahoo under Marissa Mayer is taking a page from her old employer, Google, and 
Photo sharing just got a little better on Google+, as the social network has made it easier for users to move, download, and upload their pictures. Google+ engineering manager Jon Emerson wrote today that the new features came from user feedback. Users can more easily move batches of photos between albums, use a new download option to quickly save photos, and upload large sets of photos faster.
Peter Relan is best known for his gaming and mobile incubator 
BlackBerry is "
Google+ turned two today. To celebrate, Google's social network didn't just dress up Mr. Jingles, but it also launched a redesign of its Google+ plugins for websites, including its Follow, +1 and share buttons, as well as its badges for pages and profiles.
For James Governor and the 
Facebook just 
Educational games to make learning more engaging for students are nothing new, but Labster, a bio-tech education startup founded back in 2011 and just now coming out of stealth, has gone further than most by creating an entire virtualised laboratory for teaching bio-tech students without the need to purchase expensive lab equipment or conduct potentially hazardous experiments for real.
In the 
With the release of the 
Google Trekker just announced the expansion of its street view hiking map project to outside organizations, and today it's revealing another aspect of the program's broadening: Getting virtual tourists behind velvet ropes at completely unique, remote destinations. On the Google Maps blog today, the team showed off a virtual tour of the island of Hashima, in Japan's Nagasaki Prefecture, which providing the setting for Bond villain Raoul Silva's hideout in Skyfall.
In what looks to be a first for the technology, designer and engineer 
Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Stanford Law School, Director of Research at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and VP of Innovation and Research at Singularity University. The passage of immigration reform by the Senate was a big step forward. The bill is far from perfect, but goes a long way towards solving Silicon Valley's talent shortage -- and America's immigrant exodus. But big hurdles lie ahead as anti-immigrant groups regroup. Extreme elements of the right will be fighting to close the borders while their counterparts on the left -- Big Labor in particular -- work to undermine high-skilled immigration.
First Round Capital has been one of the few firms who started providing compelling services for startups before the agency model became popular. For example, the firm created a Yelp-like database of business providers for its startups, which includes 1,500 ratings and reviews for over 500 service providers, including those in payroll, phones and more. First Round 
Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder and namesake behind venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said that he’s skeptical that efforts globally to recreate the Silicon Valley ecosystem will succeed. Even the most promising city and rival to the U.S.’s Silicon Valley, Beijing, faces lots of potential complications because laws around contracts aren’t as straightforward as they could be, he said. Outside of the U.S., Beijing is one of the cities that is able to consistently produce tech giants like Baidu (although Alibaba’s headquarters are in Hangzhou and Tencent is based in Shenzhen). “China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley,” he said in an interview at 500 Startup’s Pre-Money conference today in San Francisco. “I think the early indicators have been promising. There are some amazing stories like Alibaba and Tencent.” Bet he went on, expressing some doubt in the country’s ability to set up a transparent system of contracts and law that make it easy for entrepreneurs to protect their work. “I worry about the system — the ability to sustain the process and have a system. A lot of it has to do with the same frustrations we’re hearing from Chinese entrepreneurs. There are still issues with the rule of law and basic contract law. There are still issues with IP integrity,” he said. “They have the idea that there can be a free economy without free speech, which I think is not true.” It’s a common complaint I’ve heard in the Beijing-based community myself. There isn’t the same practice or habit of ‘acq-hires’ in China. Instead, the major powers like Tencent may go in and directly copy small startups instead of trying to acquire or lure them in first. As controversial as the process of ‘talent acquisitions’ may be in the West, they also form a safety net for talent product managers or engineers to try new ideas. At the same time, the Chinese government has erected a massive ‘Great Firewall’ of surveillance and censorship over online discourse in the country. While Andreessen says this might not be sustainable over the long-term, the effort has actually helped domestic companies so far, with protections enabling products like Baidu’s search engine to succeed at Google’s loss or market share or monitored social networking platforms like Tencent’s WeChat or Sina Weibo to grow while U.S. products like Facebook and Twitter are unable to
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Mark Suster's venture firm just wrapped up a 
Facebook's on a quest to get you involved in real-time global conversations. Today it takes the next step towards challenging Twitter by adding hashtag support to its mobile site and launching related hashtags. Starting this evening, when you click or search for a hashtag, the results will page show other hashtags often posted at the same time. Search #equality and you'll see #lgbt and #pride.
The app that allows you to create your own native apps, 
When Vine 
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One developer feature Google is really stressing these days is Google+ Sign-in, the company’s recently launched authentication tool for third-party sites and mobile apps. While the company will continue to support its standard Google Sign-in tool as well, it’s pushing hard to get users to switch to its new system. The Google+ version has the advantage (or not, depending on your perspective) of being linked directly to Google’s social network and profiles and can therefore provide sites with easier registration system and more information about their users. A number of large companies have now integrated Google+ Sign-ins, and we are starting to get some data about how things are going. Mind you, these are somewhat self-selected Google partners, but the results are still pretty interesting. Most companies don’t want to go on the record with their numbers, but Google just published a case study with Snapette that’s pretty much in line what we’ve been hearing, too. Snapette Case Study: 44.2% Use Google+ Sign-ins, Registrations Up 16% The latest numbers come from mobile shopping app Snapette, which launched in 2011, and this marks the first time we’re seeing some of these stats for a service that uses Google+ Sign-in. Just over 44 percent of the service’s users now use Google+ to sign in to their accounts. That’s a bit higher than the 40 percent acceptance rate Google itself cited earlier this year. Snapette also says it’s been seeing an uptick in user registrations since integrating this feature. The company says it saw “an increase in registered users of 16% above average growth” since it started using this tool.
Startup incubator 
Immigration reform is half-way to its goal: The Senate passed a comprehensive bill this afternoon 68 to 32. 
Adobe today announced that it has acquired Neolane, a conversational marketing company with an annual revenue of just under $60 million, in a transaction that’s worth $600 million in cash. Neolane was founded in 2001 and is currently headquartered in Paris, France, with offices around Europe, North America and Asia. The company’s customers include the likes of Accor Hotels, Alcatel-Lucent, IKEA, Samsung, Sony and Dior. For Adobe, which is putting quite a few resources into its Marketing Cloud, this acquisition adds a new piece to its feature lineup. Adobe does offer Adobe Social, which provides a number of social media-tracking and analysis tools. Neolane’s feature lineup, however, is far larger and includes tools like handling leads, marketing resource management, high-volume email marketing campaigns and a real-time offer recommendation engine for personalized, one-to-one messages. Neolane, Adobe says, will become the sixth solution in the Marketing Cloud, joining its existing Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager and Media Optimizer offerings. Last year, Neolane raised a $27 million funding round led by Battery Ventures with participation by Auriga Partners and XAnge Private Equity. "The acquisition of Neolane brings critical cross-channel campaign managementcapabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud," said Brad Rencher, senior vice presidentand general manager of Adobe's Digital Marketing business in a canned statement today. "Adobe has long been the trusted partner to creative professionals and we are now extending our lead in the digital marketing space with the addition of Neolane. From campaign creation through planning, execution and optimization, Adobe technology is driving the entire marketing process."
Google is trying hard to build out its Street View-style imagery of locales off the beaten path with its Trekker program. The Trekker, a roughly 40-pound backpack that has a camera-ridden sphere poking out over its wearer's head, captures 360-degree fields of view which are then used to build interactive, first-person views of remote places like the Grand Canyon. Google is now looking for applicants to help it continue to expand its Trekker efforts.
Just in time for Wimbledon, Rolocule Games is releasing a new tennis game today. It’s not Rolocule’s first foray into virtual racquet sports, but it is the first that turns your iPhone into the controller and Apple TV into a gaming console. The Motion Tennis app, which costs $7.99, uses the iPhone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer to track the phone’s motion, so players can slice and slam shots across the court. All you need is an Apple TV and an iPhone: hook the two up, open the app, and you’re playing tennis. Rolocule is selling rolomotion — its name for the technology that powers Motion Tennis — on a few points, one being that it eliminates the necessity for a console system and lets people play on any Apple TV, anywhere. Rolocule will eventually be releasing Motion Badminton and Squash as well, and they’re working on a shooting game unofficially called “Die Zombies Die!” While Rolocule has only stepped into immediate competition with games like Wii Tennis today, it’s easy to see the implications of developing good console-free gaming. It’s a huge market to cut into, and rolomotion games are light, portable, and relatively cheap, excluding the $99 Apple TV. Rolocule raised an angel round in India last year with Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, though Gupta would not disclose how much they raised. He said that they might be looking to raise again, especially if they want to become leaders in this technology. I wouldn’t put it past them. It’s also a look into iPhone games that don’t involve tilting or swiping across the screen, which founder Rohit Gupta said has limited the creative breadth of games. That may be true, but it would seem that the first move for rolomotion would be to replicate every console game possible. Creativity can come after total game domination. Oh, and you might want to invest in one of those iPhone cases with an elastic strap on the back. You know, so you don’t end up ruining your TV and your phone. [Image from Rolocule]
Facebook's just lost some critical business talent. Today, ads product director Gokul Rajaram was poached by Square, and now Facebook Exchange director Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who left in April, has signed on with one of Facebook's top ad partners, Nanigans. Garcia-Martinez's formal title is "Advisor" and he could help Nanigans keep adapting to Facebook's ever-changing ad platform.
Sometimes I refer to Kickstarter as the "land of broken dreams," especially when I'm looking through my backer history and noting how few projects actually delivered, and how disappointing were most of the ones that did. The Boombot Rex does not fall into either of those categories, thanks to an experienced team that sent me a review unit of the shipping product a couple of weeks ago.
We already told you that 
Applifier, which runs a mobile-social gaming network where players can share video playbacks of their virtual feats, is pulling FaceCam, a product using the front-facing camera, out of beta. FaceCam records a person’s gameplay and their facial expressions while they’re playing from the front-facing camera. It sometimes can look a bit awkward (see here) or hilarious, but for some gamers, it’s the most vivid way to share how twitchy a game can be. The Helsinki and San Francisco-based startup incorporated FaceCam into games like NimbleBit’s Nimble Quest and Angry Birds-maker Rovio’s Bad Piggies in the beta. The company says it’s seeing about two minutes of gameplay video shared every minute, with the volume of time growing 750 percent compared to the first quarter of this year. Month-over-month, the company says, the number of minutes shared has grown by more than 25 percent. They didn’t disclose the raw number of videos shared, however. With improvement in data connections, we’re seeing mobile app makers — both in the general consumer space and in gaming — adopt more video features. On the general consumer side, Twitter’s Vine took off on the free charts and accumulated 13 million users as of a few weeks ago, while Instagram launched video last week. In gaming, both the major consoles, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, announced built-in video sharing while Twitch, which stream live match-ups for video gamers, reports 35 million unique viewers a month who watch about 1.5 hours of video play each day on average. Applifier, with its network Everyplay, is looking to replicate that video-sharing experience on mobile platforms. The company has a longstanding network for cross-promoting social games on Facebook, and pivoted (like much of the rest of the industry) to mobile platforms over the last year. Last year, they launched a beta for sharing mobile gaming replays. Then they added front-facing camera options after closing a $4 million second venture round led by Finland’s Lifeline Ventures. They are also backed by MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes and Webb Investment Network.
Today Facebook announced it will soon begin taking signups for its new Facebook For Android Beta Program that uses Google Play's new beta system to push pre-release versions of its apps to users so they can help it catch bugs and offer feedback.
