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Archive for the 'Aliso Viejo' Tag

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Ex-World of Warcraft crew at Red 5 Studios gets $20 million

March 22nd, 2010, 2:54 pm by

Blog interruptus (at least for regular TV readers): Irvine game developer Red 5 Studios, which has been struggling to put out a game at the same level of the founders’ former employer Blizzard Entertainment, has received $20 million from a new investor, The9 Limited in China.

According to a company statement, The9′s $20 million gives the Chinese company a majority interest in the local game studio.

UPDATE: Mark Kern, Red 5′s CEO who previously was lead developer for World of Warcraft, responded to a request for comment about the new investor:

“I’d like to say that this investment has been a great validation of the work we’ve been doing here. It’s also an interesting comment on the rise of Asian game development and increasing desire to expand into western markets. We’ve spoken to many publishers in the region, and all seem more eager and more able to tackle online gaming in the West than most US companies.” (added March 23, 2010)

It’s an interesting mix, considering Red 5′s founders hail from the almighty Blizzard Entertainment, the Irvine company behind the massively popular World of Warcraft. Last year, Blizzard cut ties with The9, which had been handling Blizzard’s China operation. Gamers in China lost access to WoW until Blizzard hired NetEase to handle the game’s operation there.

Red 5 launched in Aliso Viejo in late 2006 with a $18.5 million investment from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Adventures. The company was founded by Mark Kern, who led the development of World of Warcraft; Bill Petras, art director for the game; and Taewon Yun, who co-founded Blizzard’s Korea office and was responsible for launching the game in Asia. But beyond the founders’ heritage, Red 5 appeared to have no game plan or deadline. Their goal was to build another massively multiplayer venture.

The company has been pretty quiet ever since. But earlier this year, reports from the game industry said Red 5 was down to a skeleton crew after substantial layoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Blizzard • • • • • • • • | 8 Comments »

‘Cyber Monday’ starts as online stores recover from Black Friday

November 30th, 2009, 8:08 am by

Cyber Monday 2009The Monday after Thanksgiving has become another day for online retailers to pitch sales to customers. But it looks like some retailers won’t need to rely as heavily on the so-called “Cyber Monday” sales.

Black Friday was fab, according to many reports.

Aliso Viejo’s Buy.com said today that Friday was its “Best Black Friday in Company History.” The company surpassed last year’s record Black Friday sales. In a statement, the company also mentioned that its Marketplace of third-party sellers had its biggest day as well, making up 30 percent of the site’s total orders that day, or 120 percent more orders than last year.

Cyber Monday
deal sites
Cybermonday.net
Deal Taker’s Cyber Monday
Dealio Cyber Monday page
FatWallet Cyber Monday forum
Retail Me Not Cyber Monday
BFAds Cyber Monday
Shop.org’s Cyber Monday

Amazon.com had several “lightning deals” throughout the day as a way to keep customers checking back with the site. The company is taking the same tactic for today’s deals in order to keep customers checking back on the site. No word on how sales went but Amazon just announced that its e-book reader Kindle had its best-ever sales month in November.

But even as shoppers apparently purchased more than last year, they didn’t necessarily spend more. Marketwatch is reporting that key retail stocks are down because average holiday spending fell 7 percent to $343.

So, maybe the deals are better this year? I, personally, couldn’t help but stock up on Blu-ray Discs on Black Friday as many dropped to $10. And, as many readers know, this is the year of the $99 Blu-ray player and in some cases, players were even much less.

Gadgetress tip:
CamelCamelCamel.comCamelCamelCamel tracks how prices on individual products have changed over time at Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, Overstock and others.

Analysts are saying that Cyber Monday, a made-up holiday for web retailers, doesn’t have the momentum it once did. As a day online stores would attract customers as they head back at work, Cyber Monday has been hurt by retailers who start their promotions earlier.

Still, the idea of losing out on a $99 Beatles Rock Band at Amazon or the $280 Acer netbook at Buy.com today will be distracting for workers everywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Internet • • • • • • • • • | 7 Comments »

AT&T improves wireless service in 5 O.C. cities

October 29th, 2009, 2:10 pm by

AT&TJust learned that AT&T added five new cell sites throughout Orange County. All 3G, of course. That should mean better Internet and voice reception with all those iPhones out there (does it? Share your experience in comments).

The upgrade is part of AT&T’s goal to add 200 cell sites and upgrade 320 others to 3G this year just in California.

The new locations are near these intersections:

  1. Aliso Viejo: Near the intersection of Aliso Creek Road and Pacific Park Drive
  2. San Juan Capistrano: Near the intersection of Stonehill Drive and Camino Capistrano
  3. Santa Ana: Near the intersection of S. Main Street and E. Edinger Ave.
  4. Buena Park: Near the intersection of Western Ave. and La Palma Ave.
  5. Garden Grove: Near the intersection of Brookhurst St. and W. Chapman Ave.

More on cellular reception:

Posted in: Cell phones • • • • • • • • • | 21 Comments »

SleeSpot: New netbook spotted for $5 less than a used one

August 25th, 2009, 4:00 pm by

SLEEspot: Gadgetress intern Sandra Lee spots a tech deal daily.This month, Gadgetress’ summer intern Sandra Lee is posting a tech bargain, tip or fun fact every day at 4 p.m. Short, sweet and simple: It’s the SleeSpot!

Tired of those bulky laptops that are tiresome to carry around all day? Aliso Viejo-based Buy.com is offering an Asus EEE PC 900-W073 Netbook with an 8.9 inch screen in white for only $174.99. That’s a savings of $245 (hopefully no one paid full price for this). This nearly bare-bones model has no web cam, no Bluetooth and has a mere 512 MB RAM memory. But at least it does include Wi-Fi (G), 4 GB storage, and built-in memory card reader and right now, Buy.com is offering it brand new for just $5 more than a used model. ~ Sandra Lee

Got a tip for the SLEEspot? Tell me about it at slee@ocregister.com or Tweet me @sleespot.
Past SleeSpots:

Posted in: news • • • • • • | Comments Off

AT&T’s official list of Orange County cities getting U-verse TV

July 21st, 2009, 8:13 am by

Where is AT&T's U-verse service?

Readers, I’m heading to my second day of jury duty so posts will be on hold. But here’s something for Orange County readers who are hoping to get AT&T’s alternative TV service, U-verse, in their city.

To supplement an ongoing series of updates as to what happened to the AT&T U-verse rollout in Orange County, the company gave me this updated list of cities where it is building U-verse.

Keep in mind, service may not be available in all the cities yet, but AT&T is working on building the service there. 

Is your city listed? Or is it listed but you still can’t order TV service? Comment below or send me an e-mail and I will try to verify. If you have more information yourself, please share!

More on the U-verse impasse
  1. Aliso Viejo
  2. Anaheim
  3. Brea
  4. Buena Park
  5. Costa Mesa
  6. Fountain Valley
  7. Fullerton
  8. Garden Grove
  9. La Habra
  10. La Palma
  11. Laguna Hills
  12. Laguna Niguel
  13. Mission Viejo
  14. Orange 
  15. Placentia
  16. Rancho Santa Margarita
  17. San Juan Capistrano
  18. Santa Ana
  19. Stanton
  20. Villa Park
  21. Westminster
  22. Yorba Linda

Posted in: news • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • | 23 Comments »

Little O.C. firm gets tapped to offer mobile GPS in Europe

February 13th, 2009, 2:27 pm by

Networks in Motion, the Aliso Viejo mobile navigation company, just scored a major deal to get its technology into mobile phones around the globe. 

Ericsson, the massive Swedish mobile telecom company, picked Networks In Motion’s AtlasBook Global so wireless companies that use Ericsson can rebrand the software for their own customers. Here in the U.S., Networks In Motion powers Verizon Wireless’ VZ Navigator and Alltel Navigation. 

It’s a major deal for Networks In Motion, which launched in 2000 and now has 192 employees (140 are in Aliso Viejo). Steve Andler, the company’s vice president of marketing, didn’t reveal how financially significant this could be but offered perspective.

“Long term, this is a big deal,” Andler said. “In the (European Union) alone there are 50+ carriers, so you could see one or two deals that rival the big three in America (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) for the number of navigation users. It took time to get to millions of subscribers here, so that type of rollout will happen with this deal too as we work with Ericsson and the carriers to build private labeled services based on our AtlasBook Global release.”

GPS phones are one of the high-points in an otherwise depressing future for the mobile phone industry, according to market researcher In-Stat. While the number of cell phones is still growing, rates are plummeting. Allen Nogee, an In-Stat principal analyst, expects cell phone chips to grow at just 3.3 percent a year for the next five years. GPS, meanwhile, still hasn’t made it into a lot of phones so that’s a much larger growth area in the mobile industry.

For the most part, though, Networks In Motion’s news won’t help Verizon customers who travel to Europe. Verizon is a completely different entity. Verizon customers who want to use navigation overseas need a global device, like the BlackBerry 8830 or the BlackBerry Storm, which have access to the Vodafone network in Europe.

“However,” added Andler, “there have been rumors about global support for VZ Navigator.”

Recent stories on GPS:

Posted in: Cell phones • • • • • • • | Comments Off

Buy.com says it had biggest Black Friday. Ever.

December 1st, 2008, 6:18 pm by

Buy.com is based in Aliso Viejo, Calif.Recession-schushmession. Buy.com just reported that it had its biggest Black Friday sales day in company history, with over 40 percent growth in both revenue and customer orders compared to last year. 

The Aliso Viejo company didn’t offer us any actual numbers so we could check them out. However, back in May, Buy.com CEO Neel Grover spoke to me and offered some details. At the time, it was expecting to post its sixth straight profitable quarter, which it then did a week later, with $1.4 million in profit. It previously reported income of $411,000 for the third quarter of 2007, an improvement of the prior year’s loss of $5.6 million.

“We make money on every product we sell — we make a little less money than our competitors,” he told me.

Buy.com did make a big fuss over the holiday weekend. Going into Thanksgiving, it had a pre-turkey day sale subsidized by PayPal. Then over the weekend, it continued to post new deals. And of course, there were today’s Cyber Monday deals.

Maybe the news shouldn’t be too unexpected. Retailers, apparently, fared much better on Black Friday than they had anticipated, according to a report on the Register’s Retail blog.

The company has been around since the mid 1990s, although many had written it off after the dot-com bubble burst. Under the radar, Buy.com has continued to attract customers. According to its latest release, it has 12 million customer accounts, up from 10 million a year ago.

Related retail news:

Posted in: news • • • • • • | 7 Comments »

Paypal ‘sponsoring’ Buy.com’s pre-Black Friday sale

November 24th, 2008, 12:01 am by

Buy.com will have its usual Black Friday sale on the day after Thanksgiving. But the Aliso Viejo Internet retailer is also prepping for what it expects to be its biggest day of the quarter so far: the day before Thanksgiving. It’s teamed up with online payment company PayPal to provide additional discounts.

Are the dot-com deals coming back? 

“To get to those prices at 85 percent off, we’re having partners come in and help,” said Jeff Wisot, Buy.com’s vice president of marketing.  ”On the day before Thanksgiving, PayPal is sponsoring that sale.”

Now… don’t get too excited. The only PayPal-sponsored deal Wisot shared with me was a $20 MP3 player that will include a $10 instant rebate if you use PayPal’s online payment service. Fifty percent is a nice discount, but I can’t imagine how good a $20 MP3 player can be in the first place. Let’s hope the PayPal savings goes beyond cheap electronic trinkets.

But back up. The Wednesday before Black Friday is a big shopping day?

“It’s an enormous day for us,” Wisot said. “It’s the biggest day of the quarter to date.”

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That is, it’s the biggest day of the quarter before Black Friday. Because of competitive reasons, Wisot won’t say if Wednesday sales have trumped Black Friday’s or the following Monday’s in prior years. And he’s not completely sure why people shop before Black Friday sales are available. But he has a few theories. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: news • • • • • • • • | 1 Comment »

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