Tag Archives: Tapulous
News Roundup: Google’s $1 Billion Display Ad Biz and Translator Phone, AOL Is Close To Selling ICQ, Loopt’s Local Ads, Verizon Bans 4Chan, HTC Incredible, Riddim Ribbon, Nokia Class Action Lawsuit, TweetDeck Adds Flickr
Today is Monday February 8 and Super Bowl is now over with the Saints taking the win. Congratulations to everyone in New Orleans. It is a sad day for Peyton Manning and friends, but there’s always next year. Here is your Pulse2.com technology news round up.
Google’s $1 Billion Display Ad Biz and Translator Phone

This year, Google is expecting their display ads business to generate more than $1 billion. This is about 4% of their total sales this year. If $1 billion is achieved this year, this would be an increase of about 40% from the year before. [BusinessWeek]
Google is also rumored to be making software for a phone that would be capable of translating foreign languages on-the-fly. The software covers about 52 languages so far. [Times UK]
AOL Is Close To Selling ICQ

According to sources with AllThingsD, AOL is close to selling off ICQ for a price that is near $200 million. ICQ has about 40-50 million active users across the world with a major penetration in Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel. There is rumored to be about seven bids, four which are very serious. ICQ is based in Israel and has about 100 employees. ICQ is slightly profitable. [AllThingsD]
Loopt’s Local Ads

Loopt and Mobile Spinach have partnered to provide special offers and discounts for local businesses. As of right now the service is available in San Francisco and the company expects to roll out the service to other major cities in the near future. Loopt has about 3 million users. [MediaPost]
Verizon Bans 4Chan

4chan announced on Twitter that they have been “explicitly blocked” from Verizon. 4chan founder Christopher Poole attempted to reach Verizon to find out why they have been blocked, but Verizon was not able to give him a definitive answer as of yet. [ReadWriteWeb]
HTC Incredible

Above is a photo that was sent to PocketNow.com and it is believed to be the Verizon HTC Incredible. The phone uses Android 2.1 with HTC Sense and there is a Snapdragon CPU inside. The phone would come with 256MB of RAM and there is a 3.5-3.7″ WVGA screen. [PocketNow]
Riddim Ribbon

Tapulous has launched a new game called Riddim Ribbon. Tapulous decided that they wanted to move on beyond Tap Tap Revenge. The Riddim Ribbon game costs $2.99 and comes with several songs by The Black Eyed Peas. [Tapulous]
Nokia Class Action Lawsuit

A class action complaint has been made against Nokia alleging that the phone company had committed securities fraud. The complaint was filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. [PCWorld]
TweetDeck Adds Flickr

TweetDeck has created a new version of their desktop Adobe AIR-based software that allows you to view YouTube videos and add Flickr support within the software. The company has also increased the Twitter API requests for up to 350 API calls per hour. Posterous is also now supported. [Mashable]
Tap Tap Revenge 3 Hits 2 Million Downloads In One Week After Going Free
Tap Tap Revenge 3 was a very popular game when it was a paid application on the iTunes App Store. However Tapulous decided to make Tap Tap Revenge 3 [iTunes link] even more popular by offering it for free, but still make money from in-app purchases in the form of song downloads. As a result of making the application available for free, Tap Tap Revenge 3 was downloaded 2 million times. On Christmas day, Tap Tap Revenge 3 was downloaded 700,000 times.
Tapulous Earns About $1 Million Per Month From App Store
Tapulous hit a rough patch in September 2008 when the company lost their whole development team, but they were able to quickly recover. Today the company has about 20 employees and makes about $1 million per month. This further proves that game developer companies can make some solid revenues from the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store.
Tapulous’ game Tap Tap Revenge has been installed about 20 million times and has been played by gamers around 600 million times. comScore even predicted that Tap Tap Revenge has been installed by about one-third of all Apple application users. Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem believes that mobile app commerce is going to see tremendous growth over the next two years.
“It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?’” stated Decrem in an interview with Reuters. Tapulous raised a total of $2.8 million from venture capitalists. Khosla Ventures and Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO) are two major investors in Tapulous. Tapulous earns revenue through the game purchase prices and in-app song downloads.
Bad News For Tapulous, Rock Band Is Coming To The iPhone

The Tap Tap Revenge franchise was started by Nate True and is published by Tapulous. Tap Tap Revenge was the most downloaded game on the Apple App Store in 2008. The game features tapping on different colored balls before moving from the top of the screen to the bottom. The colored balls are in sync with the song playing with the game. This concept is similar to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchise.
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) has already been successful on the App Store and now they are bringing their Rock Band franchise from gaming consoles to the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch. The game announcement was made at the CTIA conference.
The Rock Band iPhone application will have 15 songs and 5 more that can be unlocked as you progress in the World Tour. There will also be an option to buy additional tracks. The game will have single player, multiplayer over Bluetooth, and Facebook Connect integration.
All the instruments will work too. That means you can select the guitar, drums, bass, and vocals. No word yet on the release date, but it is expected to arrive within the next few weeks.
Tapulous Loses Their Development Team; CEO Bart Decrem Attempting To Revamp A New One

Tapulous builds games for the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and the Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android. The company is best known for creating applications: Tap Tap Revenge, Twinkle (a Twitter app), and Collage (photo sharing). After the company raised $1.8 million in funding and the new CEO Bart Decrem stepped in, several of the key employees have left.
The four key employees that left include:
- Sean Heber, the company’s first employee
- Tristan O’Tierney, a senior engineer and
- Louie Mantia, designer
- Mike Lee, Co-founder and Chief Architect
When Tapulous started, the company wanted to keep their applications fun with a sleek interface. But Decrem is going for more of a quantity over quality approach. With most of Tapulous’ employees gone, Decrem plans on making the Tapulous game studio go from indie to an application assembly line. The problem with doing so is risky because owners of Apple products prefer applications to be high-quality and aesthetic.
It’s unfortunate to see this happening after seeing the success of the original Tap Tap. TechCrunch noticed that Tap Tap is featured on a screen shot on Apple.com with the heading: “iPod touch. The funnest iPod ever.” Chris Ainsworth even made a video of his pet pigeon attempting to play Tap Tap.
Decrem will have to learn this the hard way in order to find out what Apple users like. He may release an application and it may or may not do well. If it doesn’t do well, then he will face a lot of pressure from the VCs that funded the company based on the quality of Tap Tap. Tapulous is funded by Andy Bechtolsheim, Marc Benioff, Jeff Clavier, Katrina Garnett, and Rajeev Motwani.


