Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools. Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million?to launch its own satellites into outer space to capture detailed imagery of our streets and buildings, is working with MapBox, an OpenStreetMap contributor, on some pretty sweet analysis and publishing tools. Two Skybox satellites will be launched this summer, so the tools are coming at the perfect time. One of the examples of analyzing all of the images that Skybox captures, is a “change detection” system that focuses on one area and builds a playlist of photos that you can go through to detect changes in the area. Why would something like this be useful? Well, say you’re a company that has a fleet of ships and wants to know when they dock and leave. This tool could help track that: Additionally, MapBox provides tools that allow anyone to annotate imagery. In the example above, you could easily add notes to each coming and going ship that you’ve detected, with important context that will help you go back in time to make sense of all of the imagery you’ve collected: When I spoke with MapBox’s founder, Eric Gundersen, about the project, he pointed out that what you can do with maps is very limited right now, which is what makes this partnership important: You can’t annotate images, you can’t zoom in, can’t interact on your tablet. This is our first experiment of “how do you package up information along with data,” that would usually be a PDF. As Gundersen pointed out, the information that the tools above allow you to surface and track would normally be passed around in a huge Word document or PDF, which is a pretty rough and manual process for people who?are analyzing thousands of images a day. MapBox, which is fully bootstrapped, is working on some other really neat tools on their own, which should be available in the coming weeks. Think Google Map Maker, but easier to use and more available to the community that is already participating on the OpenStreetMap project.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RLXimV1WoM8/
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Inzen Studio, a small game startup in Singapore has just released an ambitious project called Game Show Warriors. The launch kicks off with the release of an iOS game called Amazing Studly Strikes, but the studio has quietly released the first two episodes of a Web comic, and episode three just dropped to accompany the release of the mobile game. The game app will also include the Web comic, according to Inzen’s co-founder, Gerald Tock. Inzen was started in October last year, and is made of six developers, with the founders and writers in Singapore, and relies on some development work from China. Its Web comic was created by artists in Uruguay. The comic and its first game center on a character they created, G-man Studly. The game appears to be a tapping frenzy, with waves of enemies attacking G-man Studly from different corners of the screen, requiring you to tap on them furiously as your character scales a skyscraper. Tock said the team is hoping to make the rest of its project happen. It has enough material for another “larger” game and four mini games to be produced under the Game Show Warriors banner. It plans to wait for the response to the first episode to decide whether to continue, however. Besides having people download and play their games, Inzen is hoping that the investment into the online manga will get fans making derivative works such as fan fiction, videos or cosplaying as the characters. Inzen is angel-funded in the “low six figures”, said Tock. The five founding developers in Singapore are graduates from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. Prior to creating this project, some of them produced apps that enjoyed some success on the mobile scene. Dark Dot was a shooter they produced in 2011 that climbed to the top of the action charts in 48 countries including China, the US and Singapore, and was the top free iOS app in several Southeast Asian countries. Check out the trailer for Amazing Studly Strikes here:
Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre and her husband Pepe Agell used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what they heard, they picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney. Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of the fastest-growing mobile ad networks in Silicon Valley (one that we’ve heard from three separate sources grossed about $50 million last year). Her company Chartboost is quietly sucking in talent from an older generation of mobile ad networks and gaming studios like Google’s AdMob, DeNA’s Ngmoco and EA’s Popcap. They also picked up $19 million in funding led by storied VC firm Sequoia earlier this year. “It’s kind of crazy. This all happened in four years,” she said. “Anyone can do it. People running these companies are not super humans. They are just people like you and me.” Today Chartboost is opening its first office abroad in Europe, led by Ilja Goossens, who founded Gamundo and Virtual Fairground. The new location in Amsterdam is meant to strengthen the company’s relationships with the biggest game developers across the continent. Europe is having something of a Renaissance in mobile gaming right now with players like Finland’s Supercell (which made $104 million in profit with just 100 people last quarter), Berlin’s Wooga and London’s King. While other newer mobile ad networks were less focused, Chartboost wedged itself into the gaming world where it built an early platform for developers to trade advertising inventory. Because games are the biggest category for apps in terms of time spent on iOS and Android, it was the ideal place to build a focused business. Chartboost earns revenue through excess inventory, which can be sold in an exchange. Chartboost now has 16,000 games in its network and 8 billion ad impressions per month and has grown 30 percent since January. Instead of the old banner ads, which had poor clickthrough rates, Chartboost instead focused on creating interstitials that looked and felt like they belonged in a game. At first, it wasn’t easy, however. Alegre said that when she and her co-founder Sean Fannan were starting out, they did 30 phone pitches to potential investors in a week. In late 2011, they picked up a small round from