Category: News

LoyalBlocks said on Thursday that it has received $9 million in Series A funding. The lead investor was General Catalyst Partners. Founder Collective and existing investor Gemini Israel Ventures also participated in the round. According to LoyalBlocks, the funding will be used to expand the company’s loyalty marketing platform and for scaling the U.S. operations. General Catalyst Managing Director Adam Valkin will join the company’s board of directors along with Yossi Sela, managing partner at Gemini, and Allon Bloch, CEO at mySupermarket. LoyalBlocks, a provider of loyalty marketing solutions for small businesses, is headquartered in New York City with its research and development team based in Israel.

PRESS RELEASE

LoyalBlocks, a loyalty marketing solution for small businesses, today announced a $9M Series A investment led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from Founder Collective and existing investor Gemini Israel Ventures. Following the investment, which will be used for further development of the company’s loyalty marketing platform and for scaling the US operations, General Catalyst Managing Director Adam Valkin will join the company’s board of directors along with Yossi Sela, managing partner at Gemini, and Allon Bloch, CEO at mySupermarket.
LoyalBlocks is a loyalty marketing solution for SMBs which enables automatic interaction with their customers via mobile phones. LoyalBlocks builds loyalty between brick and mortar merchants and their customers by sending offers and promotions to customers’ mobile devices as soon as they walk through the door.
“Business owners are currently lacking a mobile-based marketing solution that enhances customer loyalty and generates real value,” said Ido Gaver, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “LoyalBlocks is a simple and efficient way for business owners to give their customers a better in-store experience by providing tailored incentives and instant rewards every time they visit.”
With LoyalBlocks, merchants are able to create a branded and customized loyalty app for their business. Their venue is instantly turned into an “automated zone” which triggers their app as soon as a customer walks in.
“We have taken mobile loyalty to the next level by making it easy for merchants to give their clients more, automatically. From a business perspective, it is an incremental layer of marketing that leverages their day-to-day activities. It is a simple, innovative and effortless way of generating more business and establishing long term customer loyalty,” continued Gaver.
“The fact that two billion people will soon carry smartphones fundamentally changes the game for businesses trying to attract and retain customers. What we’re seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg,” said General Catalyst’s Adam Valkin. “LoyalBlocks is the first company to introduce an automated loyalty application. Combined with its rich product suite and impressive momentum in the market, it has the potential to become a market leader in loyalty management solutions.”
With hundreds of merchants joining every month, LoyalBlocks is on a rapid growth trajectory. Businesses looking to create a loyalty club and a customized LoyalBlocks app can do so quickly and easily by visiting www.LoyalBlocks.com.
About LoyalBlocks
LoyalBlocks provides business owners with a customized loyalty platform. With its user-friendly online dashboard, merchants easily set up and manage their automated business app to increase foot traffic, drive sales, pick up slow hours and increase social media exposure. LoyalBlocks is a privately-held company headquartered in New York City with research & development in Israel. For more information, visit www.LoyalBlocks.com or follow @LoyalBlocks.
About General Catalyst
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that makes early stage and growth equity investments. General Catalyst Partners invests in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building the technology-based companies that will lead innovation and transform industries. Founded in 2000, General Catalyst Partners leverages its principals’ extensive operational, business development and technological expertise to provide portfolio companies with a catalyst for success through business-building and partnership development assistance. General Catalyst has offices in Cambridge, MA and Palo Alto, CA. For more information, visit: www.generalcatalyst.com or https://twitter.com/gcvp.
About Gemini Israel Ventures
Since 1993, Gemini Israel Ventures has helped many of Israel’s most talented entrepreneurs to build innovative and world-changing companies. With over $700M under management, Gemini invests in early stage and growth-stage companies across a range of industries including communications, consumer electronics, enterprise software, Internet software and services, and semiconductors. More about Gemini: http://www.gemini.co.il.

The post LoyalBlocks Receives $9 Mln in Series A Funding appeared first on peHUB.

Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina is the location of the nation’s largest end-user-owned solar photovoltaic array, and the array produces onsite renewable energy to the iDataCenter. This 100-acre, 20-megawatt (MW) facility has an annual production capacity of 42 million kWh of clean, low-carbon, renewable energy. The 1:20-minute video has no sound, but the images provide a dazzling view of the acres of photovoltaics. The solar facility is part of Apple’s approach to environmental responsibility.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Steve Forrest, who played Lt. Dan “Hondo” Harrelson on the popular ’70s television show “S.W.A.T.”, has died of natural causes in California. He was 87 years old.

Forrest began his career in the ’50s and made a name for himself almost immediately, winning “New Star Of The Year” at the 1953 Golden Globes for the film “So Big”. He went on to build a name for himself on television, starring in roles for “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanaza”, and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. He also starred in “The Baron”, which was Britain’s first color television series, and hit Broadway in a 1958 production of “The Body Beautiful” as a trained vocalist.

But it was his role as “Hondo” that gained a wider audience; as a military man, he brought his experiences to the character, endearing him to fans with his signature life, “Let’s roll!”

Forrest is survived by his wife Christine, their three sons, and four grandchildren.

Brooklyn mobile app design and development shop Thumb Labs has been acquired — or acqui-hired — by Adobe. Thumb Labs is the group behind the mobile apps for Behance, the design community startup that was bought by Adobe late last year, and Thumb Labs says it specializes in stylish and hip apps for iOS.

Details about the price of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Adobe acquired Behance for close to $150 million, we reported last year. Thumb Labs says in a release:

At the end of this month, the Thumb Labs team will begin focusing our mobile talents on a united mission to empower the creative world.

Thumb Labs has worked on apps like Bondsy, an iPhone app for buying, selling and trading stuff with your friends. Fast.co.design described it recently as eBay for the Instagram set.

The mobile app design purchase is part of Adobe’s vision of using the cloud to empower designers and the design tech community. Adobe has been integrating Behance into its own Creative Cloud community and tool-sharing site that it launched for designers and developers early last year.

Designers are officially the rockstars of the tech industry. We’ll be featuring the tech industry’s most innovative and forward-thinking experience designers at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco (tickets will go on sale this Summer, and sign up here to get first access to them).

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Bing announced the launch of a new feature in Bing News called the News Carousel. When a user searches for a person of note (i.e. a celebrity or politician), they will see a visual carousel with current topics related to that person. On the right-hand side of the page, they will also see related people.

A Bing spokesperson explains, “Say you’re searching for Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, you’ll see in the News Carousel images of stories related to them, such as Bieber losing custody of his Capuchin monkey to the German government. On the right-hand side of the page you’ll also see related people that might be of interest because they have some sort of relationship to your query.

“To do this Bing is leveraging the Satori technology that brings a deep understanding of the relationships between people, places and things to power the visual carousel that makes it easy to explore current events and other people related to the person you are searching for,” he adds.

Satori, which means “Understanding” in Japanese, is basically Bing’s version of Google’s Knowledge Graph, and powers Bing’s Snapshot experience, as described here.

“And that’s not the only progress we’ve made over at Bing News. We recently extended our news articles index beyond two weeks,” says Bing’s Tim Leung on the Bing blog. “This means when there’s no fresh news related to a given query, we can look back over several years to bring you any relevant articles. This is a pretty significant update and is just the start as we work to make Bing News even more comprehensive. While there’s still more to do, we believe these updates provide you with a deeper understanding of the world and an opportunity to explore the connections we’re able to make over here at Bing.”

More on the blog.

Apple is well known for not putting a whole lot of effort into its D.C. lobbying game. But after a week that saw it unwittingly become the poster child for tax-dodging multinational corporations, it might need to step it up — if only to get some politicians off its back. But according to a report on Thursday, Apple is already on pace to spread more money around Washington this year than ever before.

Apple may spend almost $4 million on lobbying this year as in 2012, reports Reuters. That’s low of course, but for Apple it’s a pretty hefty increase:

The company spent about $2 million on lobbying last year, up from $180,000 in 1999, records show. This year it is on pace to nearly double last year’s figure.

As the report notes, what Apple is spending on policy efforts is tiny compared to its peers Google and Microsoft, which spent $16.5 million and $8.1 million, respectively, on lobbying efforts last year.

But having a larger presence in the nation’s capital and making friends with the policymakers that can wield great power over its reputation and fortunes may just be something Apple has to do. (One political reporter described Apple’s tax hearing as simply a “shakedown” by politicians angered by Apple’s proud D.C. outsider stance.)

CEO Tim Cook fared very well under questioning from senators on Tuesday, deflecting questions patiently about his company’s legal tax practices. He said he wanted people to hear Apple’s story directly from him, which is why he appeared before a Senate subcommittee this week. But it’s probably not something he wants to do on a regular basis. And making suggestions about corporate tax policy changes, as he did, may not be enough. What money Apple decides to spend on lobbying in the future will probably need to support his policy proposals if he wants to see any of them taken seriously — and keep Apple out of the spotlight.

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Amazon hasn’t been able to effectively compete with Apple just yet as its Kindle Fire devices are only available in a select few countries. That’s all going to change next month.

Amazon announced today that the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ will start shipping to over 170 countries in June. If you don’t believe them, pre-orders are open now in all those countries.

“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Not only does Kindle Fire feature advanced hardware, it’s also a service. When combined with our content ecosystem, great email and browsing and top-rated customer service, we hope people around the world will agree that Kindle Fire HD is the best tablet for an incredible price.”

Coinciding with the announcement, Amazon also announced that its Appstore for Android is now open for business in over 200 countries. Those getting a Kindle Fire next month can start downloading the very best Kindle has to offer while those who already own Android devices can start taking advantage of Amazon’s free app of the day, among other promotions.

Speaking of which, Amazon will be making Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope: Experiments available as free downloads on its Appstore on May 23 and May 24 respectively to celebrate the launch. The offer is available to everybody who has access to Amazon’s Appstore for Android.

“We are thrilled to be expanding the reach of our global app distribution to nearly 200 countries. We think our customers will love the app selection we have to offer and also find features such as Free App of the Day and personalized recommendations very helpful as they discover and explore new apps and games,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon. “By further expanding the distribution of apps to millions of customers around the world, we are continuing to make it easy for customers to enjoy their Amazon apps on Kindle Fire and any Android device.”

This is a pretty big deal for Amazon. It can now compete on a global level with other device manufacturers, like Apple, who have been selling tablets for years now. The cheap price of the Kindle Fire HD has the potential to undercut Apple, Samsung and more around the world.

Needless to say, it will be very interesting to see how the global tablet market reacts to this news.

Now you’ve really done it. Your big, dumb hands have fumbled your iPhone and it falls, in slow-motion, straight into the pool, toilet, puddle – whatever. Panic turns to helplessness. Your phone is waterlogged.

What do you do? Surround the device with silica gel packets? Throw it in a bag with some rice? HALP.

DryBox says they have the solution. Their patent-pending hyper-drying chamber can completely dry your soaked device in less than thirty minutes, and apparently there’s an 80% success rate in restoring phones to their former glory – as long as the wet phones get inside the DryBox within 36 hours of initial exposure.

“The DryBox Rescue system utilizes a patent-pending drying chamber as part of a process that rapidly removes moisture at the molecular level from small electronic devices…DryBox saves time, money, and frustration.”

As of now, there are only a few DryBox locations where you can take your device – one in Austin, Texas and two in San Antonio. But DryBox wants to rent their devices to stores across the country, in a profit-sharing deal.

[Drybox via Engadget]

Actress Eva Longoria is best-known for her roles in The Young and the Restless and Desperate Housewives, as well as for her good looks. What her fans might not know, however, is that the star has been attending graduate school at Cal State Northridge.

The 38-year-old Longoria graduated this week with a Master’s degree in Chicano Studies. She attended the graduation in full cap and gown, flaunting the costume for the paparazzi. Longoria also uploaded her own photos to Twitter, depicting her with everyone from her mother and father to her fellow classmates. She started out the day with encouraging words to those who might think about going back to school:

Big day today!!! Very excited to graduate for my Master’s degree in Chicano Studies! You’re never too old or too busy to continue your education!

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Eva Longoria
@EvaLongoria

In my cap and gown with mom and dad! I look like Harry Potter! http://t.co/ggqB8ynM12

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Eva Longoria
@EvaLongoria

Me and my boys @Ben_Patton and @ernestoarguello in my cap and gown! http://t.co/Apg6I060hF

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Eva Longoria
@EvaLongoria

Another cap and gown pic with my cousin Sonya and Marcella and Tia Lupita! Thank u for being here! http://t.co/Vl6ZGMEBOS

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At the ceremony! http://t.co/UKh9i9OXeq

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My Chicano Studies cohort at CSUN! Graduation day! http://t.co/Jh6eLOon4E

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Aaand here it is! Me and my diploma! http://t.co/kV1OwhahgR

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Google has partnered with the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate to collect panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker. As a result, Google will be adding the “stunning” images to Google Maps later this year.

Here’s an early preview of what to expect:

“The Galapagos Islands are some of the most biologically unique ecosystems in the world. Explorers and scientists alike have long studied and marveled at these islands—made famous by Charles Darwin,” says Google Maps Project Lead Raleigh Seamster. “The Ecuadorean Government, local conservation groups and scientists are working to protect the Galapagos from threats posed by invasive species, climate change and other human impacts.”

“It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity,” Seamster adds.

The imagery should make a fine complement to Google’s other underwater “Street View” imagery. In fact, Google once again teamed up with the Catlin Seaview Survey (who it teamed up with last time) to capture the new underwater imagery.

This should all also go well with the new, more visual Google Maps experience.

Following Samsung’s announcement that it has sold 10 million units of the Galaxy S 4 in less than a month’s time, HTC has some news to share as well— they have sold 5 million units of the HTC One in almost the same time-frame.

This surprisingly high showing comes in a time where HTC is suffering from a shortage of components and manufacturing supplies, as well as a dramatic reshuffling of execs.

“Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply. This is partly due to the shortage of components. When the issue is resolved next month, we will have a better idea if it’s doing really well or not,” an anonymous HTC executive said.

This is all pretty encouraging news for the company which had been recently slipping in the minds of consumers— they should be just fine if sales figures can keep this pace in the coming months. (And of course if they can resolve their issues with manufacturing and disgruntled employees.)

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Come comment on this article: HTC One sales strong at 5 million despite supply issues and reshuffling execs

The steel framework is already going up for a new data center being built by Russo Development and Sentinel Data Centers. Bloomberg L.P. will be the tenant for the facility in Orangetown, N.Y. (Photo: Russo Development)

Sentinel Data Centers and Russo Development will team up on a new data center for Bloomberg L.P. in Orangetown, New York, the companies confirmed today. The Orangetown data center is being developed by a joint venture between Russo and Sentinel, which will retain ownership of the property.

Bloomberg L.P. today confirmed that it has signed a lease for the entire 131,805 square foot build-to-suit data center facility in Orangetown. On Wednesday the Rockland County Industrial Development Agency endorsed Orangetown’s resolution to provide the project with a partial tax abatement package. Bloomberg’s lease agreement is conditional upon final authorization by the Rockland county executive.

“Bloomberg conducted a long and extensive search to find a location that meets all requirements for our latest data center, and this site in Orangetown checks all the boxes for us,” said Vladimir Kliatchko, Global Head of Research and Development at Bloomberg. “We have partnered with an experienced data center developer in Russo/Sentinel and we are confident they will deliver a first-class facility.”

Second Collaboration for Russo, Sentinel

The project is the second collaboration between Russo and Sentinel, who worked together on a multi-tenant facility operated by Sentinel in Somerset, N.J.

“We are thrilled to be again working with our friends at Russo Development on this fantastic project,” adds Josh Rabina, Co-President of Sentinel Data Centers. “The Bloomberg critical facilities team is truly top notch, and we look forward to delivering them a world class turn-key facility in Orangetown.”

The facility, which will consist of a single-story raised floor environment and infrastructure to provide in excess of 7MW of critical capacity, is planned to come online in the middle of 2014. The property was purchased by Russo Development in 2009 and was pad-ready for construction prior to lease signing.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to provide an optimal environment for Bloomberg’s innovative technologies,” said Edward Russo, President and COO of Russo Development. “This site provides ideal access to Manhattan, robust power sources, multiple telecommunication carriers, and opportunities for state and local tax incentives.”

The project is big news for Orangetown and Rockland County, and local officials hope it will help attract additional mission-critical facilities to the area.

“Bloomberg L.P. looked at over 100 sites in New York and New Jersey before choosing this one,” said Harriet Cornell, Chairwoman of the Rockland County Legislature and board member of the Rockland Economic Development Corporation. “That tells you loud and clear that Orangetown is a prime location for data center development. This is wonderful news for our County and exactly the kind of global firm which is perfect for Orangetown.”

In a surprising move, Pope Francis has come out in defense of atheists.

Reuters reports that the Pope recently spoke on atheists and said that those who do good, regardless of their beliefs, are redeemed. Here are his remarks via Vatican Radio:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

The new Pope’s comments are a stark contrast to a lot of religious leaders that equate atheism with a lack of morals. In this case, the pope is stating that morality is not mutually exclusive to Christianity, or religion, at large. He argues that everybody has the potential for good and that people of all beliefs should come together under the common goal of doing good.

Pope Francis may elaborate on his comments in the coming days via his official Twitter account. It will be interesting to see if he responds to the criticism from some evangelicals who say he went too far.

Air quality in the United States is getting cleaner, but sadly many Americans believe the opposite. In order to explain the reality of America’s improving environmental quality, Steven Heyward has spent years compiling environmental data with his Almanac of Environmental …

Intel has been angling to get its processors into the mobile network for years. Now thanks to partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks it’s finally getting its chance.

At CTIA Wireless Thursday, NSN and Intel said they have begun jointly building a mobile edge computing architecture that would put applications servers at every cell site. The partnership is an extension of NSN’s Liquid Applications strategy, which it unveiled at Mobile World Congress with IBM.

The idea is to transform the radio access network from a mere delivery network to one that hosts content and services. Such an architecture would not only put video and content closer to mobile subscribers, but it would make such Liquid Apps much more network-aware apps. Here’s how I described when NSN first partnered with IBM:

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

At the heart of Liquid Apps is an application server utilizing Intel’s Crystal Forest platform for network infrastructure and a boatload of Xeon silicon. Those servers would perform the localized processing and content storage as well as maintain a constant collaborative link with the radio base station.

This is some pretty cool technology, but there’s a scary aspect to it, too. Technically the Liquid Apps architecture could be used to optimize all content traversing the network by acting as a traffic cop that dictates the flow of different types of data before they enter the airwaves. But Intel and NSN are also proposing that carriers sell Liquid Apps as a service to developers and content providers.

In such a scenario, a YouTube or a Netflix could pay to have their content not just hosted at then cell site but also prioritized as it leaves the tower. It’s a pay to play model that doesn’t exactly sit well with net neutrality principles — content providers that choose not to participate might see their customers’ experience suffer.

U.S. carriers like Verizon and AT&T are already talking up two-sided revenue models in which content providers subsidize their customers’ data usage on the mobile internet. Liquid Apps could become another tool in that pay-to-play arsenal.

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To be a successful entrepreneur – or really, a successful anything – you need to be able to recognize an opportunity when you see one. Specifically, you need to be able to identify a problem or gap, and come up with an innovative solution. (Of course you also need to be able to execute that solution, but without spotting the opportunity in the first place, you aren’t going anywhere.)

So how, exactly, does one become good at spotting opportunities?

It’s probably innate — you’re either good at that sort of thing or you’re not, you say.

Wrong. Try again.

Well, then it’s probably a matter of practice — of getting experience.

Probably not. (Hang on and I’ll explain why.)

The suspense is no doubt killing you, so I’ll go ahead and tell you the secret to recognizing opportunities: promotion focus.

As I’ve written about with Tory Higgins in HBR and in our new book, Focus, when you see your entrepreneurial venture (or your career, or your goals in general) as being about the potential for advancement, achievement and rewards, you have a promotion focus. You are promotion-focused when you think about what you might gain if you are successful — how you might end up better off.

Alternatively, if you approach your venture focused on not losing everything you’ve worked so hard for, on avoiding danger and keeping things running smoothly, you have a prevention focus. Prevention focus is good for many things — careful planning, accuracy, reliability, and thoroughness, just to name a few. But it doesn’t lead to creativity, open-mindedness, and the confidence to take chances the way promotion focus does. And as new research by Andranik Tumasjan and Reiner Braun from Germany’s TUM School of Management shows, that’s the combination you need to be an opportunity-spotter.

Tumasjan and Braun asked 254 U.K. entrepreneurs from a variety of industries to take an assessment to determine their dominant focus, and to then demonstrate their opportunity-recognition skills. They were provided with comments from real focus groups that dealt with five kinds of problems associated with footwear (durability, comfort, performance, style, and price.) After looking them over, the entrepreneurs were told to make a list of the underlying problems revealed by the comments, and to provide solutions for those problems.

The results painted a very clear picture: Promotion-focused entrepreneurs were better able to detect opportunities — i.e., they generated more solutions to identified problems. In addition, those solutions were judged by independent raters to be more innovative than prevention-focused solutions.

That’s not all. Being promotion-focused even compensated for low levels of creative and entrepreneurial confidence, which are usually considered to be essential ingredients for success. Equipped with the right focus, even low-confidence entrepreneurs were among the top performers.

If you don’t have enough of it at the moment, there are many research-based techniques you can use to strengthen your promotion focus. Here are a few that work well:

• Write down several goals you have for your venture (or for your career). For each goal, make a list of ways in which you will gain something if you are successful. Read through these goals and potential gains on a daily basis, or before undertaking any important task.
• Picture yourself five or ten years down the road as you would ideally like to be. What are your aspirations? Your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish? Thinking about your ideal future self will put you in a promotion focus.
• Reflect on your past. Think about a recent big win or accomplishment — a time when you felt really pumped up about what you were able to achieve. A time when you felt on top of the world. Thinking about our past gains puts us in a promotion focus.

The more often you use any or all of these techniques, the more automatic the shift to promotion focus will become.

WASHINGTON D.C. — IER President Thomas Pyle sent two letters today to Obama administration officials requesting more time for public comment on new regulations that potentially threaten the development of America’s energy resources, raise consumer costs and run afoul of …

While we don’t expect it to attract as much attention as the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo announced that it has acquired gaming platform PlayerScale. That’s not to say it isn’t a big one.

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide,” a Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews. “We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

PlayerScale’s Jesper Jensen had the following to say to customers, partners and friends (on its homepage):

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

This would be, I believe, the twelfth acquisition (or announcement) for Yahoo since October. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

So, is Yahoo cool yet?