Even if you’ve got no idea what the Havok engine is, you’ve probably seen it in use before. Name a best-selling video game, and the odds that it’s using Havok in one way or another are pretty huge. Halo 4? Check. Assassins Creed? Check. Skyrim, Uncharted, or Call Of Duty? Check, check, check.

This morning at GDC, Havok announced Project Anarchy, a 3D engine for mobile games that they plan to release this spring. The twist? They don’t want your money.

If you’ve never dabbled with 3D gaming engines before, here’s all you’ve gotta know: the licensing can be… sticky. While most of them offer up evaluation licenses of some sort, they generally expect you to cough up a chunk of change once you start making any significant amount of money. There are definitely exceptions to this trend (see: the fantastic Unity3D, which has a free product but charges by developer seat for Pro features, and Irrlicht or Ogre3D, both of which are free and open-source), but most of the big-name engines (Source, Unreal, CryENGINE) have stuck to this licensing model for years.

So why would Havok just give away its new mobile engine? Out of the kindness of their hearts? Perhaps. But remember: Intel bought Havok in 2007. Intel is making a hard push into mobile. People love mobile games. If Intel can make sure Intel-powered phones run a few hugely popular games better than anyone else’s phones, it works out to more OEMs stuffing Intel chips in their handsets moving forward.

Interested developers can sign up for news on the project here, with initial availability expected sometime this Spring.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

DJs don’t write songs, they release mixtapes showing off their skills in music selection and blending. But since mixtapes often contain copyrighted material, they were illegal until now. Launching today Beatport Mixes lets DJs who’ve bought songs through Beatport sell them on the music store. It opens a new legal revenue stream and promotion medium for musicians who curate but don’t create.

Beatport Mixes has been in invite-only beta on the dance music store since July but today it opens to the public. It lets anyone upload and sell mixtapes. What’s special is that typically to do this, a DJ would have to get the rights to sell every song they play on the mixtape. This can be nearly impossible, between the difficulties of contacting the original artists, convincing them, and paying them off.

Beatport takes care of all of this for its DJs. As long as the DJ has purchased from Beatport a copy of each song on the tape, Beatport handles all the licensing and pays out the creators when mixtapes get purchased.

For now it only has deals with independent artists and label, but considering Beatport is the whole to serious dance music, not the pop on major labels, a significant portion of its catalogue is already mixtape-able. Its currently in negotiations with the major labels to make their content available for legal resale as well.

While the Internet is making access to music easier, getting discovered amongst the near infinite field of competing musicians is getting tougher. DJs have to get a little bit of fame before they can start making any real money performing. That’s why they release mixtapes. They simulate what its like to see a DJ live. You’d never imagine cops kicking in the door of the club and pulling the DJ off stage because they’re playing someone else’s records. Thanks to Beatport Mixes, bedroom DJs have the same protection.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft is targeting the growing mobile workforce with a 15 percent hike in license fees directed primarily at companies that have employees who use smartphones and other mobile devices in their work.

According to Mary Jo Foley, the new licensing agreement goes into effect December 1 for customers with the user option for its “client access licenses” (CAL). The User CAL is meant for companies that have employees who use iPhones, iPads, tablets and other devices. As more people bring their own devices to work, the User CAL has become increasingly popular. The other option is a Device CAL, which allows multiple people to access one device such as a PC at a nurse’s station.

Until now, the licensing costs have been the same for User and Device CALs. As of December 1, the following products will be affected by the licensing fee increase to the User CAL:

• Bing Maps Server CAL
• Core CAL Suite
• Enterprise CAL Suite
• Exchange Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
• Lync Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
• Project Server CAL
• SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
• System Center 2012 Client Management Suite
• System Center Configuration Manager
• System Center Endpoint Protection
• Visual Studio TFS CAL
• Windows Multipoint Server CAL
• Windows Server CAL
• Windows Server RDS, RMS, Terminal Services CAL

According to the SoftCat blog, “customers that operate the User CAL model with multi-year contract-based Microsoft volume licence agreements (such as an Enterprise Agreement [EA], Enterprise Subscription, Open Value Subscription and Open Value Perpetual) will retain their pre-negotiated pricing until the end of their current contract term.”

Under the new terms, pretty much any customer will face the increases when renewing or buying a new license.

How to deal with this licensing change? There are a number of options, but IT provider Shi says in a blog post that there are three things to consider. IT needs to think about the number of devices on the network, how many to expect that will go on in the future and how simple to make it for employees to just get their work done.

It’s clear that Microsoft sees a huge new revenue source with mobile devices entering the workforce. Other vendors are sure to follow suit with licensing. It all poses a vexing challenge and raises the question about what vendors to work with going forward. With licensing hikes like these, it will pay to shop around.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Earlier this month Apple and HTC agreed to settle their legal differences by agreeing to a 10-year licensing deal. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but following the settlement, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu suggested HTC could be paying Apple between $6 and $8 per handset. HTC CEO Peter Chou has now rebutted the estimate, describing it as “outrageous”, according to Reuters.

Speaking at a KDDI Corp product launch in Tokyo, Chou is reported to have said: “I think that these estimates are baseless and very, very wrong. It is a outrageous number, but I’m not going to comment anything on a specific number. I believe we have a very, very happy settlement and a good ending.”

Chou personally led the negotiations with Apple, according to HTC chairwoman Cher Wang — quoted in the FT, for a separate story denying HTC has any plans for a boardroom shakeup. The company is reportedly suing a Taiwanese magazine for defamation for suggesting there is tension among its top execs.

“Peter Chou has my total trust [and] support… There’s not any doubt about his accomplishment and ability,” Wang is quoted as saying by the FT in a statement issued by HTC.

HTC has been losing out in recent times to fellow Android OEM Samsung, which dominates the smartphone market. Last month HTC reported its Q3 financials, with revenues of $2.4 billion — a drop of almost half (48 percent) compared to the year-ago period, and down 23 percent from last quarter’s $3 billion.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has reached a new arrangement with European music publishing entities which will give it access to 5.5 million tracks spanning 35 countries, including artists like Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The arrangement was made with Armonia, one of the largest alliances of music publishers in the world, which includes French, Italian and Spanish licensing groups. This should help Google expand the availability of its music content offerings in Europe as it looks to compete with the media marketplaces of Apple and Amazon.

The Associated Press reports that the terms of the deal are “in line with industry standards involving Google rivals like Amazon and Apple’s iTunes,” according to SACEM representative Catherine Kerr-Vignale. Kerr-Vignale also noted that where Amazon and Apple have country-by-country licensing agreements in place for European distribution, Google’s deal is more broad, its reach applying to 35 countries. The deal also includes UK and American sections of Universal Music Publishing library and Sony’s Latin catalog.

Google’s deal means that more of its users in more places will be able to access a greater range of content, a key ingredient for Google if it wants to continue to build traction in markets where its media ecosystem lags behind those of its competitor, and Apple in particular. Google Play still has a fair amount of U.S.-only content, necessitating workarounds like the one described in this recent article. But Google has been vocal about trying to add more content for international Google Play customers, and licensing deals like this one are the way to make it happen.

This deal and ones like it are potentially the most important piece for Google going forward, in terms of competing with Apple abroad and making sure that upstarts like Amazon don’t end up using Android as essentially a content delivery system for their own competitive marketplace. It should help to address the spate of complaints that surfaced from international reviewers around the time of the Nexus 7′s release, so long as Google can continue to pull in agreements like this one across the various Google Play media sections.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Earlier this year, Deutsche Telekom took a step into mobile gaming with a €2 million investment in Flaregames. Today, it’s expanding its in-house online gaming business. The carrier, which owns  mobile operator T-Mobile, has announced that a worldwide license to create a browser-based game based on the popular Asterix Belgian comic books, as part of a larger expansion of its gaming activities.

The deal will see Deutsche Telekom work with SEE Games (a division of the licensing house SEE Global Entertainment); Asterix book publisher Les Éditions Albert René; and the games developers Sproing, to create an Asterix game that will become the “flagship” brand for the carrier in its new push into browser-based games. That push will also involve “significant” (but unspecified) investments into gaming software development and marketing, Deutsche Telekom says.

The announcement was being made in advance of the Gamescom gaming show that will take place later this week.

Rather than trying to create a whole new brand for the gaming market as, say, Rovio did with Angry Birds, DT has gone for an established, popular character. There have been some 350 million Asterix comics sold, and the stories have been made into eight animated and three live-action movies.

But there is a challenge, here too, apart from the fact that this is a new business area for Deutsche Telecom: there are already a number of online Asterix games on the market — you can see some of them here on Asterix’s own website — and given the advances in games engineering there will be a tall order to top what’s already out there.

“We are working hard so that we will soon be able to offer devoted fans a unique experience and breathe new ‘interactive’ life into Astérix,” noted Marko Hein, VP of Games at Deutsche Telekom.

Deutsche Telekom, like other carriers that have moved into areas like TV services, are committed to creating more online content and monetizing it as a way of offsetting declines in more traditional lines of business like voice services. “This game is definitely the flagship of a range of products which will get Deutsche Telekom started in the growing area of game publishing,” Hein noted. It also joins up with the ongoing push away from console-based gaming content into play-anywhere online versions.

The Asterix game will also be available in a free-to-play version on the Deutsche Telekom games platform Gamesload, Deutsche Telekom notes.

The deal also underscores how smaller and regional games publishers are teaming up with bigger companies to improve distribution. Deutsche Telekom to date has 130 million mobile customers, 33 million fixed-network lines and over 17 million broadband lines.

“Working with Deutsche Telekom as the publisher of the browser game is particularly groundbreaking for us. Their coverage and marketing skills at a global level will guarantee that this new Astérix adventure will be a huge success for fans around the world,” noted
Martin Biallas, CEO of SEE Games, in a statement. The Asterix games is also part of SEE’s effort to bring more “Hollywood” content into its portfolio, he added.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This morning Microsoft sent us a guide to the new Microsoft Office. It’s 53 pages. It reviews every feature imaginable.

Read though the document and it’s evident Microsoft did what it had to do. It integrated with Office 365. It developed an elegant touch user interface. It took the best of Metro to make Microsoft Office relevant.

But Microsoft has an issue with its licensing.  It’s complicated.  And that has the potential to hinder adoption.

Microsoft wants to make Office 365 accessible to consumers with more sophisticated features for enterprise users.  But the licensing is such a bear. It requires a deep study of what you already have to decide how to actually license the new Office and leverage its cloud offerings.

Computerworld detailed the licensing for Microsoft Office and what you need to consider. Here’s a bit to show you what the enterprise faces:

For example, Microsoft has announced cheaper, better BYOD support for the Windows client OS, but you might face significant extra costs for Microsoft Office if you enable it for BYOD unless you take care to avoid them.

It shows in Office 365 slow adoption. I asked one executive today wo has a service which integrates with the Microsoft Office desktop version but not Office 365. He said Office 365 does not have enough critical mass to integrate. Further, Microsoft has a closed architecture. It lacks the APIs that would make it possible for his company to integrate with the service.

Google Apps features are good enough for most people. Its licensing is simple. You start with free for up to 10 users. You pay $50 per user once you add more people to use it. It is open with its APIs.

I had a taste today of the Microsoft Office issue. The “new Office Reviewer’s Guide,” opened in my Chrome browser to a SharePoint file. It offered the option to edit the document in Microsoft Word and the Word Web App. But I can only use the web app if I am subscribed to the service. This will not be an issue when Office goes live but we’ll use it as an example to point out the issues that have been an issue with Microsoft Office in the past.

I do not have the Word web app so I am out of luck. Here’s what I see when I try to use it:

And here’s what happens when I try to open Microsoft Word:

I asked Krishnan Subramanian, who had this to say about the new Office:

With this announcement, Microsoft is trying to push the notion that modern office is doing everything the old way but on tablets. It is not the future of work we all expect to happen with BYOD trend. If Microsoft has to succeed in the cloud game, they need to come out of their ages old licensing schemes and disrupt their business models completely. By sticking to the licensing strategy of past, they are going to miss the future (of work) opportunity.

Microsoft Office has about 90% of the market share. Its strength is in its features. Constellation Research Founder Wang says the new Office keeps Microsoft in the game:

“I’d choose this over #google. and you can quote me on that,” he said.

He says Microsoft is offering license convergence credits so users may use both Office 365 and the installed software.

It may be worth the trouble for the power user but for most, Google Apps is just fine.  If Microsoft fixed its licensing I think it would be a much different story.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hot off of a AT&T Labs event held in New York City, AT&T has just announced they will be opening up their Watson speech recognition technology to developers this June.

Though Watson has been open to licensing for years now (Vlingo inked their licensing deal with AT&T in 2009, for instance), the release of the APIs means that developers of every stripe will soon be able to access AT&T’s voice transcription engine.

Tackling and interpreting voice input is no easy feat, and AT&T wants to help alleviate any potential headaches by tailoring multiple APIs for use in different specific contexts. Among the examples they list are APIs meant for interpreting web searches and questions respectively, as well as APIs for local business search, voicemail to text (a little Google Voice competition is nice to see), text messaging, and general dictation.

AT&T’s John Donovan is quick to reassure us that there’s much more to come — APIs meant for use in gaming and social media are also reportedly in the works, though they’ll actually be made available is another story entirely.

AT&T Labs has been working on Watson for over a decade now, and we’ve seen the service branch out into some familiar environments over the years. Perhaps as a shot across Ford and Nuance’s collective bow, AT&T (along with partners Panasonic and QNX) announced their plans to develop a car-centric voice command system at this year’s CES. Perhaps unsurprisingly, AT&T also made reference to an API geared toward their U-Verse television service that is specially tuned to handle voice inputs like movie title and actor names — not exactly the first time AT&T has made an overture for the living room.

That AT&T would eventually bring Watson into the mobile space may have been a given, especially considering the technology is prominently featured in existing apps like the AT&T Translator. Still, with the APIs nearly in place — not to mention forthcoming Speech Kit SDK that sends snippets of voice input to Watson servers for transcription — we could be on the verge of seeing the next big voice-powered apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Is Google Hard At Work On New Home Entertainment System?

Microsoft Explains Windows On ARM, The Latest Addition To The OS Family

Kodak Shutters Digital Camera Business In Favor Of Licensing, Photo Printing

You Can Buy Me Love, But Please Don’t Buy Me Gadgets

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Music apps using Facebook have seen their traffic double or even grow tenfold since f8, giving developers at companies like Spotify, and even Ticketmaster, more to love about Facebook’s big platform feature launches at its f8 developer conference in September.

According to a Facebook developer blog today, users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times using Facebook-integrated apps since f8. As we’ve been tracking in our AppData traffic tracking service, Spotify has been the biggest beneficiary, rapidly growing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million daily active users so far since f8. It has even seen some sharp spikes in recent days, although it’s not currently clear why.

The features driving the growth include the newly-introduced ability for apps to publish listeners activity to Facebook’s news feed and new home page Ticker, as we’ve been covering. Of course, so has the licensing agreements that Spotify and its partners have worked out — Facebook hadn’t been able to offer streaming music for years due to disagreements with record labels.

Timeline, the new version of user profiles, has yet to become available for most people, but Facebook says today in the post that it expects it to be ”one of the key channels for expression and discovery.”

Facebook also says it has helped stimulate the music industry’s ability to sell tickets for shows. Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Ticketfly have all seen between $2 and $6 in direct ticket sales for every link shared, according to today’s post. Global online revenue for the music industry is forecasted to increase 7 percent to $6.3 billion this year, reported technology research firm Gartner; Facebook could now be helping to drive that.

The developer blog includes some other numbers seen by music app partners since f8, noting a 1350 percentage increase in number of Facebook fans of the band users are listening to on Earbits, a 246 percent growth in business for MOG, and a 30x increase in new users from Facebook to Rdio. Of course, any growth equals a huge percentage when the starting number is small, and that’s the case for all of these other services. Still, we expect the tight integration of music, and the new features, to keep the music industry liking Facebook for a long time to come.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook