Game developers offered Real deal

Excerpts from the blog

To capture a bigger piece of the mobile-games business, RealNetworks is courting game developers by offering to distribute, test and adapt their games for multiple mobile platforms.

The Seattle company hopes to attract iPhone, mobile and PC game developers to its new "Federation of Studios" publishing system, based on the company's internal game-development tools. It's announcing the program today.

Real would receive a bigger variety of games in return for handling the complexity of developing titles for multiple platforms. The company would also share revenues.

Real's internal tools, which it acquired in 2005 from a Finnish development studio, port games to more than 1,700 handsets. Real also distributes games to most major wireless carriers and direct to consumers.

But the doors aren't being thrown fully open. The company will select which game developers may participate.

"We will review all comers," said Charles Harper, general manager of business development for Real's game unit. "We're going to be fairly selective about who we choose."

Harper said it will take about five weeks to port, test and submit games to various mobile outlets.

The company isn't disclosing revenue share because terms will vary, he said.

More 'Halo' effects

Expect a traffic jam Monday evening around Seattle Center: Microsoft and Bungie are hosting a wild "Halo" fest at Experience Music Project to celebrate the release of "Halo 3: ODST" at midnight.

Organizers expect at least 1,000 fans will show up. A spokesman said the event is also intended to mark the launch and celebrate the "Halo" culture, similar to the BlizzCon event for "World of Warcraft" fans.

It's first-come, so lines will surely form before the doors open at 6 p.m. The event is open to people 17 or older (younger, if accompanied by a parent or guardian), and attendees will also get free admission to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

There will be Xboxes to play "ODST," presentations by Bungie, a "Halo" costume contest and special T-shirts for the first 200 in the door. The event ends at 11, an hour before the game goes on sale.

"ODST," a prequel to the "Halo" saga, is one of the most anticipated games of the year.

Cats before homes

Pet Holdings — the parent company of cute kitties site icanhazcheeseburger.com — bumped Zillow off the top of the Seattle Startup Index maintained by entrepreneur Marcelo Calbucci.

Eleven new companies were added to the list of Web-oriented ventures, which now totals 345 companies in the Seattle area.

Calbucci said he also removed iLike, which was sold to MySpace, and Others Online, an "audience optimization" company sold to ad venture The Rubicon Project.

Here are the top 10 from August:

• Pet Holdings

• Zillow

• BuddyTV

• Picnik

• CarDomain

• Wetpaint

• Robot Co-Op

• PayScale

• SEOmoz

• ActiveRain

City views

Researchers at the University of Washington are taking photo-stitching — the "photo tourism" technology behind Microsoft's cool Photosynth service — to the next level, using it to scour public photos and build 3-D models of entire cities.

Photosynth does the same thing for buildings or landmarks — assembling Flickr images of Trevi Fountain to build a 3-D rendering that can be explored from different angles. It was developed at the UW and licensed to Microsoft in 2006.

The UW this week called out the work, by Sameer Agarwal, an acting professor of computer science, and Noah Snavely, who worked on photo tourism as a UW doctoral student and now teaches at Cornell University.

In one example, they used all 58,000 images of Dubrovnik, Croatia, on Flickr to build a model.

"With Photosynth and Photo Tourism, we basically reconstruct individual landmarks. Here we're trying to reconstruct entire cities," Snavely said in a news release.

Agarwal was lead author of a paper on the project, to be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan, next month.

This material has been edited for print publication.

Brier Dudley's blog excerpts appear Thursdays. Reach him at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.