blizzard

Electronic Arts is not alone in its interest in buying Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required to read entire article).

SEC filings show that Take-Two says it has received other offers, but has spurned those as well as the original $2 billion offer EA made last Friday and announced last Sunday, the Journal reports.

EA issued a public statement on Sunday saying it had made an earlier offer to Take-Two that was rejected and that it was boosting the per-share price it was willing to pay to make the deal … Read more

Imagine the game industry dominated by two giants.

That's what could happen if Electronic Arts succeeds in its $2 billion attempt to grab Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive and Activision's planned merger with Blizzard goes through.

As in so many other industries, an EA/Take-Two merger would indicate massive consolidation, especially in the wake of the December announcement that media giant Vivendi was buying Activision to become Activision Blizzard. But gamers probably shouldn't worry that an industry pyramid dominated by EA and Activision will mean less innovation.

After all, even with a wide gap between the … Read more

I'm not usually one to get up for something happening at 5 a.m. PT, but in the case of this morning's Electronic Arts conference call to discuss its proposed $2 billion takeover bid of Take-Two Interactive Software, I made an exception.

That's because I assumed that EA might provide some new piece of information that would materially enhance details of the game maker's Sunday bid announcement.

My mistake.

In reality, the EA conference call, which lasted nearly an hour, was largely a rehashing of the information the company published in its Sunday press release, accentuated … Read more

In a startling bit of news, Electronic Arts announced Sunday morning that it has launched an uninvited bid to buy Grand Theft Auto video game franchise publisher Take-Two Interactive Software for $26 a share, or what could be a $2 billion deal.

And while EA, in its press release, did not make any reference to Vivendi's December agreement to purchase Activision, there can be no doubt that this is the response EA had to make to keep its spot as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the video games business.

The announcement comes on the heels of what appears to … Read more

Mozilla's Firefox browser is a true community effort. Though Mozilla itself employs 45 full-time developers, there are an additional 1,000 community code contributors to the Firefox project with over 20,000 nightly testers and 500,000 beta testers to ensure the core developers can offload much of the test load so that they can spend more time on core development. With over 50 million daily users and 125 million total users, Firefox has a huge presence on the web.

With so many users Mozilla feels it has a huge responsibility as a guardian of the web for the 21st Century, suggested Chris Blizzard in a presentation he gave at the SCALE conference this week. Chris' slides are online and tell the story of an organization that takes its role as a community platform - with the aspiration to be an essential facility - very seriously.

I've been critical of Mozilla's muted voice in the community, but reading through a report on Chris' comments, I wonder if I've just been listening for the wrong voice:… Read more

I woke up this morning to news that France's Vivendi has agreed to buy a controlling interest in Activision, perhaps creating the world's-largest independent video game company.

The new entity will be known as Activision Blizzard--a suitable name based on the fact that Activision has the best-known video game brand in the new company, but that Vivendi's Blizzard Entertainment unit also produces World of Warcraft, one of the most successful massively multiplayer online games of all time.

But what is not clear is whether the new company will be able to achieve something that is clearly part … Read more

I'm a smidgen skeptical of this rumor, if only because it seems so darn obvious: TechCrunch reported on Tuesday morning that Time Warner's AOL may have found a use for its Wow.com domain, which it acquired in 1998 as part of the offal of what had once been CompuServe.

The source's big scoop? Wow.com has been transferred to the AOL Games division and will become a World of Warcraft social network. If this turns out to be true, expect plenty of level-28 half-elf mages to be typing "Wow.com" into their browsers soon.… Read more

Pageflakes has just updated their service this morning with a handful of new features. The company is calling this latest release "Blizzard." Users now get their own profile page and can link up with other Pageflakes users as friends. They can also browse through users by interest, based on items they've put together on their customized Pagecasts. The goal is to make the service feel like less of a solitary experience and make it easier to share user-created Pagecasts.

Also new is the option to completely customize a page. There are themes and simple color arrangements for users to pick from, and a tool to create your own. In the same vein, there are now media pages from third-party content providers and sponsors, nearly identical to what competitor Netvibes rolled out with their Universes feature in mid-April. Pageflakes is launching this feature with themed content pages from CNN, AOL, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, among others.

To help users find content to add to their pages, Pageflakes has also redone their widget gallery, which they call "flakes." There are about a quarter of a million widgets, which is about twice that of Netvibes.

The Blizzard release also opens up the door to users of Apple's Safari browser, who up until now have been unable to access the site. However, there's no news on whether an iPhone-friendly version of the start page service is in the works. To see more shots of the new features, click the read more link below.

Previous Pageflakes coverage: Pageflakes community gets traction Roundup: single page aggregators Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo Start here: Pageflakes meets the metagators

… Read more