Related: Top game publishers drop out of their own trade association — Activision, Vivendi and other top publishers have been quitting the Entertainment Software Association, in part — it seems — out of displeasure with the ESA’s new president failing to respond appropriately to critics of games like GTA IV. Kotaku has the story.
Verbal war continues between Craigslist and eBay — Online marketplace eBay is suing online classifieds site Craigslist, which it partially owns, for allegedly attempting to water down eBay’s control of the company. In a post titled “Kettles and Pots,” Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster responds that “eBay is suing us for implementing protections for Craigslist that it clearly believes are perfectly appropriate for protecting itself” — then dives into some messy eBay history.
Forbes release list of top-paid tech CEOs — And Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is number one. More here.
This is what you call a serial entrepreneur — Gurbaksch Chahal, founder of Blue Lithium, the online ad company that sold to Yahoo for around $300 million last year, is back. He’s starting another company, according to a report in VentureWire, called gWallet. While it’s still in stealth (and closing a $10 million round), it apparently wants to be an online platform that helps shoppers find the best deals on the web.
Is this news? Many, many Facebook apps in the “just for fun” category — See graph put together by FlowingData, below. A number of pundits saw this graph and made the logical error of assuming that since most applications are pointless, they must be worthless. In fact, companies like Watercooler are making money from applications that tap into passionate fan bases of sports teams and TV shows. Also, the metric that should matter here, as one commenter on AllFacebook points out, is how many active users there are in each category. Still, as one Facebook application developer notes, it’s very hard for more complex, less “fun” applications to grow significantly large these days: “It’s not that users or application developers don’t want to use or build useful apps. It’s that Facebook’s current structure is heavily biased against them.” More on that here.
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