Jawfish Games Launches Its Real-Time, Multiplayer Platform For iOS, Android

Jawfish Games, a Seattle-based startup run by a former professional poker player and the engineering team that built the Fult Tilt Poker site, launched a gaming platform that can host more than 100,000 simultaneous players in real-time tournaments across iOS, Android and the web.

While asynchronous, turn-based games have done well on mobile platforms and Facebook over the last five years, pure, real-time multiplayer games haven’t caught on as quickly partially because data connections haven’t been fast enough and because a game developer would need a critical mass of players to match them synchronously.

But Jawfish, which has raised $3.65 million in funding from firms like Founders Fund’s angel fund, Right Side Capital and other angels, says it has built a platform to do just that. Their platform can support more than 100,000 simultaneous players and host 1 million tournaments for less than $10 in bandwidth.

They initially came out with a few games in partnership with Seattle’s Big Fish Games, but now they’re bringing out more of their own titles.

Because Jawfish’s CEO Phil Gordon is a championship professional poker career who has hosted The World Series of Poker and published five books on the game, the company is doing a poker game (of course). The poker game is designed to have the look and feel of a broadcasted game with Gordon’s running commentary throughout play.

They’ve also launched a basic word search game, called Jawfish Words, that lets players compete on the getting the highest scores, finding the longest words or the most diagonals. There more obscure goals too, like finding the most words with a single vowel. They launched that game last month through a partnership with Amazon. The company has pointed out some promising stats: the average player spends 21 minutes and plays 10.7 tournaments a day. Each tournament is about 60 to 90 seconds long.

They plan to building out a suite of classic games, from casual to casino titles that make use of the platform. “Basically what we’re looking to do is to take games that people know and love and reinvent them for multiplayer real-time tournaments,” Gordon said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do across a wide spectrum of games.”

While Jawfish hasn’t opened its platform up to third-party developers, there are other gaming networks that add multi-player mode to indie titles that are blowing up. Nextpeer, an Israeli startup, went from having just a few games in its network to well over 1,000 developers in the last several months.

“Barring a top 10-kind of franchise wanting to use our platform for multiplayer mode, it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re going to work with other studios,” Gordon said. “Certainly not for anything but the top tier. We know that our platform is the only one of its kind in the world and we think that it’s in our interest to keep the platform close to the vest and develop our own games.”

Credit - Tech Crunch

Smartphone App Wrap: Travel, TV, Google, and sports

As summer approaches and we start to think about getting out and about, I took a look at apps related to travel, sports, and the new Google I/O launches.

(Image: Google Hangouts)

As the pleasant weather finally approaches, we start to think about travel, baseball, golf, music, and enjoying time with family and friends. This collection of apps covers all these aspects of life while also including two new Google offerings from the I/O conference last week.

Google Hangouts

Platform: Android

Price: Free

Google has always had a piecemeal approach to communications so I was pleased to see them launch Hangouts as they attempt to consolidate these communications. Hangouts replaces Google Talk and gives you a quick and easy way to chat and connect via a video call.

Hangouts also lets you work across multiple platforms, including your desktop so communications flow better. I look forward to SMS integration like we see in Facebook Messenger.

Credit -ZDnet.

Smartphones: Google's Android trumps Apple, Microsoft's Windows edges up

WASHINGTON: Google's Android mobile system boosted its lead in the global smartphone market over Apple in early 2013, while Microsoft's Windows edged into third place, a survey showed on Thursday.

The IDC survey showed Android's commanding lead with a 75 per cent market share in the first quarter, to 17.3 per cent for Apple's iOS platform.

The other platforms remained far behind, but Windows Phone posted the largest year-over-year and moved past BlackBerry into third place, IDC said.

IDC said Windows phones accounted for 3.2 percent of the market, after a 133 percent rise in sales, to 2.9 per cent for Blackberry.

Nokia was largely responsible for driving Windows Phone sales, accounting for 79 per cent of the smartphones using the Microsoft platform.

"Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia," said IDC's Kevin Restivo.


"Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alternative to Android or iOS."

IDC's Ramon Llamas said the survey shows some interest in alternative platforms despite the dominance of Android and Apple.

"Android and iOS accounted for more than the lion's share of smartphones in the first quarter, but a closer examination of the other platforms reveals turnaround and demand for alternatives," Llamas said.

A survey by the research firm Gartner earlier this week had similar results, but showed Blackberry barely ahead of Windows.

-ET

Google debuts music service for Android gadgets, steals march on Apple

SAN FRANCISCO: Google Inc launched a music service on Wednesday that allows users to listen to unlimited songs for $9.99 a month, challenging smaller companies like Pandora and Spotify in the market for streaming music.

With its new service, announced at its annual developers' conference in San Francisco, Google has adopted the streaming music business model ahead of rival Apple Inc, which pioneered online music purchases with iTunes.

Google's "All Access" service lets users customize song selections from 22 genres, ranging from Jazz to Indie music, stream individual playlists, or listen to a curated, radio-like stream that can be tweaked. It will be launched for U.S. users first, before being rolled out to several other countries.

Google shares jumped $18.90, or more than 2 percent, to $906. Pandora shares slipped 0.4 percent to $16.68 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The entry of the world's largest Internet company amps up the competition as major technology giants jostle for position in the nascent market for subscription-based, streaming music.

Amazon.com Inc and Apple are among the Silicon Valley powerhouses sounding out top recording industry executives, according to sources with knowledge of talks and media reports.

Pandora is spending freely and racking up losses to expand globally. Even social media stalwarts Facebook and Twitter are jumping onto the streaming-music bandwagon.

All these companies see a viable music streaming and subscription service as crucial to growing their presence in an exploding mobile environment. For Google and Apple, it is critical in ensuring users remain loyal to their mobile products.

Music has been integral to the mobile experience since the early days of iTunes, which upended the old models with its 99-cent-per-song buying approach.

Now, as smartphones and tablets supplant PCs and virtual storage replaces songs on devices, mobile players from handset makers to social networks realize they must stake out a place or risk ceding control of one of the largest components of mobile device usage.

At $9.99 a month, the service is costlier than the $3.99 required for Pandora, but on par with Spotify.

Google executives argued their new service takes the work out of managing massive music libraries, in part because the streaming-model can be endlessly customized. The company will also have a hand in music selection, acting as a curator of personalized content.

It's unclear how large the library will be for streaming. Tech blog, The Verge, reported Tuesday that Google had signed deals with Universal Music and Sony Entertainment Group, two of the world's largest record labels.

TWEAKS BIG AND SMALL

The new music service was among the highlights of the company's annual developers' conference, a venue in the past for major hardware unveilings as well as important updates to Google's family of software. On Wednesday, various executives described updates to everything from Google+, the company's fledgling social network, to its gaming development platform.

Many of those updates are designed to enable Google's products to work better on Android and other mobile platforms, and help its crucial community of developers craft the applications that are the mobile operating system's lifeblood.

New features described on Wednesday ran the gamut from a new Google "Hangouts" video conferencing and messaging app, to better support for pictures and a redesign of the core "stream" that users first see on Google+.

Executives said Wednesday that some 900 million smartphones and tablets running Google Android software had been activated since the platform's inception in 2010.

Revenue from Android, the software used by Samsung

and other mobile device makers that competes with Apple, is also gaining momentum. Google executives said revenue per user for Android applications developers is now 2-1/2 times its year-earlier level.

Roughly 5,500 software developers are attending this year's "Google I/O" convention at San Francisco's Moscone Center from Wednesday through Friday.

-By ET