But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine.

Wouldn’t you pay to have someone else deal with this stuff for you?

ZooLoo sells subscription blogging services for as little as $1.99 that includes a custom domain and backups, email for the site, plus a dashboard for managing your blog. ZooLoo’s Graffiti blog platform is a lot like Tumblr: Simple, attractive, easy to use because it’s not complicated.

For $4.99 a month you can remove the ads from your ZooLoo site and double your storage capacity to 2 gigabytes. (There’s no limit on image uploads, which aren’t stored on your personal space.) For $8.99 monthly, you can run your own ads and use ZooLoo’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

You can use ZooLoo for free, if you’re happy with just a blog, a dashboard, and the ability to check and update your status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin.

The company, founded in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2008 by CEO Jeff Herzog, is privately funded. The one-minute video below shows how ZooLoo works for beginners.

Lead411, founded in Santa Barbara in 2001 by entrepreneur Tom Blue, offers a curated directory of personal contacts and profiles that’s much more focused and efficient for salespeople, recruiters, and competitive analysts. You can use the service for free, or you can pay $30 per month or more for deeper info and Google News Alert-like updates.

Blue described the service levels to me in a phone call. “For free,” he said, “you can find out that Emilio Roman is the Director of Channel Marketing at Fortinet, and was hired on Sept 09, 2009. For a $1 a day though, you can find out Emilio’s email and work phone. Or, you could learn that cleantech startup, NexAmp, got a new $20 million contract today that’s the largest such deal in the state of Massachusetts.”

Amazingly, Blue has operated the 15-person company for nearly a decade on bootstrap funding. “We have a few investors, none of them over $10,000,” he said.

A few days ago, Lead411 added hundreds of thousands of new records, expanding to more than 1,400,000 listings. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep them up to date. But so far, Lead411 has a good rep, as proven by the quote from a Gartner director of business development: “Lead411 is my one-stop shop .. it is the most accurate source of data I’ve found to date.”

We caught on quickly, of course. But it was alien territory for a while. I bring this up because in some circles these days, gestural control of digital devices is being spoken of as the next big thing. At the same time, others have wondered about the feasibility of the concept. Will I accidentally erase my Word document by scratching my nose? Will I have to learn some weird new language of gestures? Is anyone really going to bother? (The image above is from a design Nokia patented in 2008, illustrating one of many proposed gesture vocabularies.)

Prognostication is a mug’s game, but it’s not too hard to imagine that what happened with the mouse could happen with today’s emerging gesture control technologies. The success of the Wii, which just officially became the best-selling Nintendo home console of all time, augurs well. Several companies are angling for dominance in a still very young market of Wii competitors, gesture applications for mobile, gesture-based home entertainment systems, and the like.

VentureBeat has covered many of these companies. The buzz around new products at the recent Consumer Electronics Show and the excitement about the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Project Natal — a gesture, voice and face recognition system for the Xbox 360 game console — suggest that this is the year when gesture control may finally arrive. So here’s a brief tour of what’s out there, what’s coming, and who seems likely to lead the way into a future when point and click may take on a whole new literal meaning.

I’ll profile a few developers first, followed by some commentary on the platform players.

Developers

Canesta
This Sunnyvale, Calif. company has been around since 1999. It makes low-cost CMOS 3-D imaging chips that enable webcam-like cameras to sense motion. Canesta has raised an impressive $74 million in financing and holds 40 patents. The company has been working with GestureTek and Hitachi to develop gesture controlled televisions and other devices. On Feb. 3, Canesta announced that Ed Fries, the former head of Microsoft Game Studios, would be joining its board of directors. The company has garnered excitement with its trade show demonstrations and seems likely to be a major player in the next couple of years, when its technology finally makes its way into consumer devices. Here’s a demo of Canesta’s television interface.

GestureTek
By far one of the earliest entrants in the field, Silicon Valley-based GestureTek was founded in 1986. The company holds patents on gesture and motion control technology for use in phones, games, PCs, toys, and other devices. GestureTek’s 3-D, multitouch, and gesture-controlled interactive displays are used in a wide variety of settings, including television weather reports, digital signage, tabletop consoles, and large interactive museum exhibits. Both Xbox 360’s webcam accessory and Sony’s EyeToy make use of GestureTek technology. GestureTek’s Eyemo software turns your phone into a kind of Wii controller. Users perform various motions such as shaking, rocking, and rolling in order to answer a call, play games, scroll through menus, or interact with browsers and maps. This video demonstrates GestureTek’s new Momo SDK, which debuted at CES 2010.

Softkinetic-Optrima
These two Belgian companies, both focused on device-free gesture technology, entered into a joint venture in November 2009 to market 3-D motion control hardware and software. The venture is co-managed by Optrima CEO André Miodezky and Softkinetic CEO Michel Tombroff. Optrima, founded in April 2009, makes 3-D CMOS sensors and 3-D cameras, and Softkinetic, founded in 2007, develops 3-D gesture recognition middleware and software tools for 3-D cameras. Softkinetic-Optrima has started up a new division called Softkinetic Studios that develops games and other applications for motion-sensitive 3-D cameras. Tombroff told me that the two companies see video games and television as the main areas where gesture control will remain focused and begin to gain traction. On the television front, Softkinetic-Optrima has just announced a partnership with the huge European-based engineering consultancy company Devoteam to “create a prototype for the next generation TV interface.” Here’s an interesting video showing physical rehabilitation games for the elderly that Softkinetic created in partnership with Silverfit.

Hillcrest Labs
The company’s cool Loop pointer, a circular wireless control device, went to market in mid-2009 amid positive reviews. Conceptually similar to a Wii remote, the Loop improves on Nintendo’s technology by cancelling out your hand’s natural tendency to shake, enabling more precise pointer movements onscreen. The Loop is sold for $99 at Amazon. Loop-like devices will likely compete with device-free gesture control for market share in the home media space. Hillcrest has licensed its technology to remote control maker Universal Electronics. Last year Hillcrest sued Nintendo, claiming the Wii remote infringed on four of its patents. Some have speculated that Nintendo signed a license deal with the company as part of the resulting settlement. Here’s GeekBrief’s video review of the Loop.

Kakai
Not much is known yet about this stealthy Santa Clara startup, though it has 40 employees and has raised over $9 million in funding over the last several months, giving rise to much curiosity and speculation. However, some clues such as a recent job posting suggest that it may be working on gesture control applications for consumer devices.

Mgestyk
Mgestyk combines a 3-D camera with “hand gesture language processing” to enable gesture control of Windows applications. The company claims its technology can perform well in low light conditions, is responsive to subtle gestures, and can be set up to control any existing Windows application without modification. Users learn a special language of gestures developed by Mgestyk. Mgestyk’s technology can be seen in action here.

PrimeSense
Based in Tel Aviv, 3-D camera maker PrimeSense is one of the vendors behind Microsoft’s Project Natal, the device-free gesture control system for Xbox 360 that is set to debut this year. Microsoft purchased 3DV Systems, another Israeli 3-D camera maker, back in February 2009, and then licensed technology from PrimeSense and GestureTek. The result is supposed to be fine-tuned gesture control coupled with face and voice recognition, a package that, if its promise becomes a reality, would go way beyond the Wii’s capabilities.

Sixense
Sixense, based in Los Gatos, Calif. and headed by Amir Rubin, has developed a tracking technology it calls TrueMotion, which enables gesture-controlled gaming using Wii-like wireless controllers. In contrast to inertial systems that rely on sensing the user’s motion and direction, Sixense claims its magnet-based technology (no cameras required) can pinpoint the user’s position in space and provide fine-tuned motion control down to the millimeter. The technology works with existing games, and Sixense recently announced a partnership with gaming hardware maker Razer to market a motion sensitive controller for the PC. Razer and Sixense have an SDK so developers can create new games with the technology. Sixense is a self-funded company with an A round “planned soon,” Rubin told me. This video from Chilla Frilla shows the Razer Sixense controller in action at CES 2010.

Omek InterActive
Like PrimeSense and 3DV Systems, Omek is based in Israel. The company makes software and develops games for use with 3-D cameras. Omek, which raised $3.3 million in 2009, offers an SDK called Shadow in addition to developing its own games. One interesting point about Omek is that its technology is not dependent on any particular 3-D camera, but will work with any depth-sensing camera on the market.

Ball-it
Privately funded Finnish company Ball-it is behind the Blobo game console, a small device shaped like a golf ball that went on the market in Europe in late 2009 and will soon launch in the U.S., according to an email from company CTO Johannes Väänänen. The Blobo console, in development since 2005, is a nifty little device that senses motion and proximity and can be thrown and squeezed for various kinds of game play. It’ll even count the calories you burn while playing games. VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall covered Ball-it back in 2008, and the core offering doesn’t appear to have changed much since then, but the company now has a market launch on its hands so it will be worth watching what develops. You can see a demonstration of the Blobo console here.

Platforms

Samsung
The electronics manufacturer is sitting on a patent for visual gesture control using the on-board camera in a cell phone along with specialized finger and hand motions. The patent diagrams show yet another specialized language of gestures. Samsung has done some work on gesture-controlled television, and back in July it made waves by exhibiting “gesture-sensing hologram” technology during the product launch of its new Jet phone.

Nokia
Aside from the 2008 patent mentioned above, the cell phone maker recently announced a new design for gesture control that employs radar in the phone. This technology is supposed to work even when the phone is covered by fabric — for instance, when it’s in your pocket.

Sony
Released back in 2003 for Playstation 2, Sony’s EyeToy is a specialized 2-D web camera made by Namtai and Logitech that provides game control using motion, sound, and color. Sales of the device have been fairly strong, but the technology is hampered by the fact that it isn’t very precise and doesn’t perform well in low-light conditions. Sony’s answer to these problems is a Wii-like motion control wand for Playstation 3 that was supposed to debut in the spring but was recently pushed back to fall 2010. A prototype looking like a “stunted light saber” was on display last June at the E3 show in Los Angeles. Here’s a video of that demonstration. The device will reportedly be named the PlayStation Arc.

Microsoft
Project Natal debuted at E3 last year as well, and has been the subject of near-incessant speculation before and since. Aside from promoting Natal for gaming, Microsoft would like to leverage its new gesture control system, now reportedly scheduled for release in time for Christmas 2010, as a way to make Xbox 360 the center of your home media universe. The idea is that you’d use gestures to control all of your media devices without the need for remote control. In addition, Natal is supposed to be able to do facial and voice recognition, meaning family members could have their own customized settings and features. The Natal hardware device is a narrow metal strip that rests near your television. The promo video, released last June, is quite cool and certainly worth a thousand words. There are some reports of gaming developers at work on Natal games, including recent news from Capcom.

Nintendo
Brandon Sheffield, editor in chief of Game Developer, opined in a recent editorial that Nintendo’s success with gesture control has more to do with marketing than with groundbreaking technology, and that Microsoft and Sony will be hard pressed to compete on those grounds. At the same time, cool technology counts for something, and some of the developers listed above seem to have a leg up on Wii when it comes to sensitivity and precision. Several companies, most notably Microsoft, are banking on the appeal of dropping the controller from the gaming experience entirely. In response to the sensitivity question, Wii released the MotionPlus add-on last year, but few games support it. In fact, development activity for Wii games appears to be stagnating. Wii may be the best-selling console in Nintendo history, but it remains to be seen how the console will perform in a market where it’s no longer the only game in town.

Apple
Apple recently secured a patent on proximity sensor technology, presumably for use with the iPad. The technology senses when a stylus, finger, or other object is near the display.

Finally, a couple of notes from the world of academia, where gesture control developments are occurring at something of a rapid pace. Back in December, I reported on an MIT research team’s debut of the BiDi screen, which tracks motion using a new type of LCD screen with embedded light sensors. Here’s the BiDi screen demo. In early January, researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory announced a new “in-air gesture input interface” that employs a special high-speed camera. You can see the prototype demonstrated here.

Both of these research projects, along with related developments like Nokia’s radar system, are targeted for use in cell phones, which would tend to suggest that the new wave of gesture control might soon converge with the rising tide of innovative mobile devices.

Google tapped its sleeping giant of a social network today with Buzz. The new product lets people follow Gmail contacts for status updates and shared articles, photos and videos.

While Google has fumbled on many of its other social efforts, Buzz holds more promise than earlier products like Orkut or Latitude. According to ComScore, Gmail had about 176 million unique visitors in December so there’s a very low cost of new user acquisition.

But there’s also another advantage — Gmail is intimate, while Facebook is semi-private and Twitter is public. E-mail takes more thought and effort and Gmail’s interface encourages constant interaction with a small number of people. It’s about depth over breadth.

That’s important. In social networking, there’s a theory that human beings have a cognitive upper limit to how many other people they can keep up with. Proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar and later dubbed the Dunbar number, it’s around 150 people.

People can have several times that number of friends on Facebook and Twitter. There’s a natural human tendency to want to collect more, whether that be Facebook friends or material objects. People are loss averse and don’t want to be rude, so it’s hard for them to de-friend, or even unfollow, others. Users accumulate more and more streams of information until at some point, it becomes noisy, unwieldy or too public.

That’s perfectly OK with Facebook. The company doesn’t want your social network to be limited to your Dunbar number. Its ambition is to map the world’s social graph. Facebook wants all of your relationships — who you knew in junior high, during college, at work, your family, your past relationships — maybe even your family dentist (if they have a Page).

Facebook wants you to rely on its smarts to sift through those hundreds of relationships and find the good stuff. Even if you have 1,000 friends, Facebook tries to infer who belongs in your so-called Dunbar community depending on how often you interact with other people’s status updates. Facebook’s in-house scientist Cameron Marlow told the Economist last year that users still only interact with a small number of people regularly even if they have several times as many “friends.”

Facebook tries to solve the filtering problem with news feed algorithms. They surface updates that attract lots of comments and “likes” or that are from people you interact with often. To be fair, the primary news feed is quite good.

But as people accumulate more friends, privacy controls become overwhelming, and Facebook loses its sense of intimacy.

Twitter has its own natural filtering system. Its asymmetric model of following, which doesn’t require both parties to request and accept each other as friends, lets people curate their own streams without offending others whose content they find boring. And of course, Twitter is public.

So a Gmail-based social network or another competitor can step in by offering the intimacy missing in these other networks. There should be an online space where people feel comfortable sharing with their very best friends.

Maybe it’s no Facebook- or Twitter-killer, but this is what Google Buzz could be.

A lot of rivals are looking for the hybrid-maker to mess up. The Prius made Toyota the green brand — the name everyone thinks of when they hear the word “hybrid” (and the Lexus line brought the concept to luxury cars). But now Nissan, Mitsubishi, BMW, and Ford all have their own eco-friendly cars in the works — not to mention Tesla Motors, Fisker Automotive and Th!nk Global. If Toyota makes too many missteps, its new plug-in Prius, expected in 2013, may not be the automatic winner it could be.

Already the Kelley Blue Book price for the 2010 Prius has dropped $1,500. Even the used car price for 2009 and older models has dropped 1.5 percent.

About 1,400 complaints have been received that the Prius and Lexus HS 250h have an inconsistent feel to their brakes on slick or rough roads. Ideally, anti-lock brake systems engage and disengage brakes many times per second so that this doesn’t happen. Toyota has already fixed the glitch in production of the Prius, but acknowledges the safety concerns presented by models already in the field — 40 accidents have already been attributed to the issue, though fortunately no fatalities.

Still, the media storm around the recalls is an ongoing PR nightmare for the company, which is struggling to handle an avalanche of angry calls, emails and press. Several drivers told the Christian Science Monitor that they don’t feel like Toyota is taking their concerns seriously — that it is dismissing their safety out of hand. The same article points out that a lot of people have reported problems completely unrelated to the recall issues, simply because it seems like a good time to dump on Toyota.

How the company handles this week could determine its success for the next year. If needs to appear as responsive as consumers expect — a nearly impossible task — or the brand could take a hit for a while. And it’s not out of the question that the Prius will lose its halo — boding poorly for Toyota’s future releases in the green sector as the competition piles on.

To participate in the raffle, entrepreneurs need to go to www.mayfield.com/raffle and fill out a short online application.  Raj Kapoor and Emily Melton of Mayfield and Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes of First Round will select 100 of the most promising applicants to attend the private event on Monday, March 1, 2010.  At that event, six winners will be announced and all the attendees will have the opportunity to network with fellow entrepreneurs.  Each winner will be matched with one mentor for one informal mentoring session. There is no cost associated with participating in the raffle.

“We are honored these proven founders were willing to donate their time to share learnings with aspiring entrepreneurs,” said Kapoor.  “We believe that the best way to inspire success is to learn from those who are making an impact on our industry.”

“Founders helping founders has always been a key component of our startup community,” said Hayes.  “We’re thrilled to see the tradition continue with this amazing set of entrepreneurs.”

Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said Google Buzz is being integrated into three of Google’s mobile websites and applications — Google.com, a new Buzz.google.com website, and the Google maps mobile application. If a user visits the main Google site from their smartphone, there will be a Buzz button, which allows you to make post updates to Buzz remotely. Using your phone’s GPS capabilities, Buzz guesses where you’re located and lets you post a status update that’s geotagged with your location information. Basically, it sounds like a “check in” on a location-based social service like Foursquare but without the gaming component, or like a geo-tagged tweet on Twitter.

You’ll find more location features when you go to the Buzz mobile website. In addition to posting an update, you can see a Google place profile of where you are, and you can click on a “nearby” button to see all the public updates from users near your location. This might be particularly useful if you’re at a big event like a conference, so you see all the conversation around that conference.

Lastly, location data from Google Buzz will show up in Google Maps for Mobile, so you can see all geotagged public updates and updates from friends when you look at part of a map.

None of these individual features are all that unique or innovative, but by tying them into a comprehensive product, which is itself integrated with a number of popular Google services like Gmail, Google might find location-based success in a way that it doesn’t seem to have done with its earlier location service, Latitude.

Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit growth” was at five percent in the December quarter, down sequentially from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent in the June quarter. And since iTunes sales make up the majority of Warner’s digital revenue, growth is contracting there, too. In the last quarter, digital revenue at the label was up eight percent compared with a year earlier, when that number was 20 percent.

On the call, Bronfman said:

“Digital growth has slowed following iTunes’ introduction of a variable pricing model in April 2009 … It couldn’t have come at a worse time. [Variable pricing was] agreed in summer of 2008 before the financial crisis even hit — Apple went through that price increase in April, but in the face of the worse recession since the Depression … It’s difficult to know, even today, if it is just consumer resistance to a higher price points or if [the cause was] taking a pricepoint of 30 percent more at such a fragile time.”

Don’t overreact to the news. iTunes sales are still creeping upward. And Michael Bublé’s “Crazy Love” album with its hit single “Haven’t Met You Yet” has helped Warner’s revenue stay pretty much flat. But it’s odd that while most spending has begun to recover from the panic of 2008-2009, music sales growth is slowing. Kafka thinks the prices are putting off would-be new buyers. I think it’s possible that the target market for iTunes music is spending its money on iPhone apps instead.

The credits will go toward purchasing clean power to neutralize the 127 kilograms of greenhouse gases each of the band’s fans, on average, generates to see the band play. Incidentally, the Dora-1 project could save as many as 30,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year.

A modest facility by most standards, the geothermal plant is designed to generate 7.9 megawatts of power. In Turkey, however, this represents more than one-fifth of the national geothermal capacity. And the country itself contains one-eighth of the world’s geothermal capacity — about 4,500 megawatts worth. Now with the new plant, completed last summer, Turkey is poised to become a major regional player in the energy business.

The credits U2 is selling are being brokered through Offset Options. The proceeds are invested in carbon emission reduction projects around the world, including Dora-1. When a U2 fan pays the optional $1.89 on top of the usual ticket price, it goes directly to one of these efforts. The goal is to raise as much as $450,000 for the geothermal project.

The band’s campaign demonstrates how carbon trading is still a hot concept. Even though the U.S. Congress has been lukewarm on the idea in legislative proposals, it has taken root elsewhere. There’s already a healthy and active marketplace for carbon offsets in Turkey, Australia, Spain and Ireland. U2’s influence could help popularize the same thing in the U.S.

During the presentation, Google was pretty vague about Buzz in a business context, both in terms of how it might be used and when it will launch (“soon” is all the company would say). During the question-and-answer session, Google co-founder Sergey Brin offered one example: When he was writing his New York Times op-ed about the legal battles over Google Book Search, he found sharing with one person at a time to be “frustrating,” so he solicited feedback from other Googlers using Buzz, starting a conversation thread with around 50 comments.

So document sharing and document collaboration are an obvious use. What’s telling about that example is that its also one of the main use cases for real-time collaboration tool Google Wave. Wave’s reception till now has been pretty lukewarm, so is Buzz supposed to be an improved version of Wave? It seems much more useful than Wave to me, since it’s built into Gmail rather than as a separate product.

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management, said there may be integration with Wave in the future, but that “they are thriving and on their own trajectory.”

Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, demonstrated the product on-stage at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. He highlighted five key features:

1. Auto-following — Buzz is built into Gmail, so instead of forcing you to reform connections on new sites, it takes advantage of existing social connections and groups in Gmail.
2. Rich, fast sharing experience — The Buzz content you share can be published manually or as a feed from your accounts on other services like Google Reader or Picasa. A lot of the Buzz experience seems optimized for sharing and viewing media such as photos and videos. For example, you can open a photo into a full-screen view, and flip through an entire photo album while in that full-screen view.
3. Public and private sharing — You can share all this content publicly, on your Google Profile (at last, that might actually be useful!). You can also share it privately, with groups created in Gmail.



4. Inbox integration — You don’t have to check into a separate site to see updates and shared content in Buzz. Instead, it shows up as another item in your email — users know it’s not just another email because the subject line will have a Buzz logo next to it. As you look at shared content, it will update in real-time with comments from other people it has been shared with, and you can also invite new people into a conversation using the “@” symbol, the same way you can in Twitter.
5. Just the good stuff — Buzz delivers personalized recommendations on the content that you’ll like. Items that you might like (determined by past preferences, as well as the items that have spurred conversations and recommendations from your friends) show up as full items in a profile, while less interesting items are hidden, showing up as collapsed items that you need to open up to read.

There’s also a mobile component to Google Buzz, which we’ll cover in a separate post.

Sales for the quarter were 495 million euros, down 2.7 percent from 508 million euros a year earlier. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, sales were down 22.5 percent. Ubisoft said it is refocusing its high-end game strategy by concentrating on more regular releases for its major franchises.

Ubisoft is also cutting back on new investments in games, allowing the company to rebalance its workforce among existing titles. That will help reduce volatility and increase visibility in its financial results. These measures resemble what Electronic Arts has focused on as well.

The company pre-announced lower expectations on Jan. 13.

Most of Ubisoft’s revenues come from traditional console games such as Assassin’s Creed II, which since its launch in November has sold an astounding 8 million copies. (Multiply by $60 retail price and you get $480 million in retail sales).  But the company is also investing heavily online, with launches coming up for Might & Magic Heroes Kingdoms, Trackmania 2, and Imagine Town. The latter is a virtual world that will be plugged into the UbiWorld portal to target girl gamers. Ubisoft’s overall online hub will be Uplay, a portal for gamers that launched with Assassin’s Creed II in November. Ubisoft is also creating a platform of online services for PC gamers that will also help reduce PC game piracy. More details on that will be released in the coming months.

Ubisoft is also continuing with big investments in casual games, including Just Dance for the Wii, various projects associated with the launch of Project Natal gesture controls on the Xbox 360, and several games for Facebook and the PlayStation 3 motion controller (coming this fall). Meanwhile, Ubisoft has significantly curtailed its investment in Nintendo DS games.

In the fourth quarter that ends March 31, Ubisoft is releasing Assassin’s Creed II: Director’s Cut Edition for the PC, Red Steel 2 for the Wii, The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom for the PC, and Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic for the PC. Those are relatively small releases, and the company’s big game, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction, has been pushed to later in the year. Fourth fiscal revenues are expected to come in at 200 million euros, about 3 percent below last year. Ubisoft reaffirmed previous estimates for its fiscal year, and the company expects to return to profitability in fiscal 2011.

This year, Ubisoft’s major titles, in addition to Splinter Cell, include Driver, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, a Raving Rabbids title, and a new Tom Clancy game: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. That game is being developed in Paris and will launch in the holiday season this year. A multiplayer beta will start on the Xbox 360 with the release of the Splinter Cell game on April 13.

The Education Research Group is hosting the Education and Technology Conference in warm and sunny Phoenix, Arizona, on February 27th and 28th. Showcase your technology and services to decision-makers in the explosive Education industry with a special reduced rate for all VentureBeat readers. Education administrators, directors, and media and advertising executives will all be on hand for the EduRG Conference, you won’t want to miss this!

In addition to the excellent showcase and networking opportunities in the Exhibit Hall, the expo will also feature an opening address from General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Education, Charlie Rose, and a keynote address by former Vice President and Nobel Laureate, Al Gore. Additional featured speakers include:

- Robert Sanchez CEO, Globaltel Media

- Jeffrey Hayzlett CMO and VP, Eastman Kodak Company

- David A. Steinberg CEO and Founder, CAIVIS Acquisition Corp. / Chairman, XL Education Corp.

- Brian Mueller CEO, Grand Canyon University

- Jeffrey Noordhoek President, Nelnet, Inc.

- Dr. Wallace Pond CEO, Colorado Technical University

The event will also present lively panel discussions covering an array of trends and hot topics in Education today, including:

o The Quality of Education in America

o Social Media in Education

o Education and Technology

Remaining exhibit space is very limited, but EduRG has special exhibitor pricing for VentureBeat readers, make sure to contact Kyle Gale at KGale@edurg.com or by calling 480-228-3264.

General Admission tickets are available at a reduced price online at http://vbedurg2010.eventbrite.com/

High-profile customers include the Democratic National Committee, which hands out advocacy apps that connect constituents to their elected officials’ phone lines. The Ground Zero Museum lets people call in and leave spoken remembrances that will be playable at the museum when it is completed. But of course the biggest target for Twilio is brand marketers. Fans of the band Lamb of God, for example, can order a pre-recorded phone call from drummer Chris Adler via the band’s website.

Today, Twilio announced that they now have an SMS interface to their API, too. It’s already been stress-tested at a recent Salesforce.com conference, where attendees could text in the booth number of their favorite exhibitor to a people’s-choice contest. Early-stage mobile payments service Venmo is using Twilio for payments via text: “Send $5 to Stupify.com.”

The company also announced that it has lowered its prices for all past, present and future customers. Phone numbers have been knocked down from $5 per month apiece — really, that’s practically free for a business-enabling Web-to-phone connection — to $2 for toll-free numbers and $1 per month for local numbers in the United States. Many clients buy only one number, but online retailers sometimes rent thousands of numbers. They place a different number in each Web ad they serve. That way, when a customer dials a call center to order a product, the vendor knows which ad reeled that buyer in.

Twilio, a San Francisco startup, has received several million dollars in funding in two rounds. The most recent, a Series A second round in December, totaled $3.7 million from Union Square Ventures, the Founders Fund, angel Mitch Kapor and several others.

Iterating off the Street View car and the Street View “tricycle”, Google has built another contraption to record the physical world for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

They’ll be driving a Street View Snowmobile around the Games for maps. Dan Ratner, the mechanical engineer behind the “trike”, also built this one.

It’s been able to capture everything from snow runs on the Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, the top of 7th Heaven chairlift, and a couple of peaks where alpine skiing events start.

You can check out this video on it below: