Tech Roundup: EA Reorg, Brash Cash Dash, Facebook Flush, WAP Problems, More
EA loses exec, reorganizes -- Gaming company EA has seen some rough economic times of late. Now it has trouble brewing in its successful Casual Entertainment label â€" the departure of president Kathy Vrabeck, who is leaving after 18 months to seek a new opportunity outside the company. EA is reorganizing itself to eliminate the Casual Entertainment division and merge it along with the Sims Label and the Hasbro partnership into one group "where there is a deep compatibility in the product design, marketing and demographics." Does that mean there is now a reorg tool in Sims Corporate? [Source: BNET Industry Technology Blog, GameDaily]
Brash cash gone in flash -- Brash Entertainment, which adapts movies into video games, probably thought it was set when it raised $400 million last summer. Ah, but it forgot the second stage of wise fiscal management: collect. Only a portion of the money was available at once, with the rest kept aside for future uses. Now the bankroll has become a few bank crumbs, with the global financial crisis having eliminated the rest. Many titles it was working on are now up in the air and 20 staffers out the door. [Source: Variety's The Cut Scene Blog]
Nokia into micro-blogging -- Nokia has a new app called Friend View, which appears to be a combination of micro-blogging and location identification, using built-in GPS features to put avatars for you and your friends on a map and word balloons that offer "What's Up" communication. Sounds like something aimed at increasing sales among the teen and twenties set. [Source: TechCrunch]
Facebook: who needs the money? -- In an interview at the Web 2.0 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company isn't worried about revenue at the moment, having lots of cash on hand after a Microsoft transfusion. What he's trying to do is build audience, and given that Facebook's twin revenue streams are ads and ads, that probably makes a lot of sense. Of course, the chance that he'll get his wish of becoming the online identity standards is pretty farfetched. That would be like asking all search engines to standardize on Google's technology. [Source: InternetNews.com]
WAP security problems arise -- A group of British researchers say that they've cracked WAP security, which is really bad news given how much of wireless networking adopted the standard over the flawed WEP (which can reputedly be cracked in literally a few minutes). They only cracked the weaker of the two WAP security key structures, but still, it's got to be giving a lot of industry players some indigestion. [Source: InternetNews.com]