Citing “a source close to Gowalla”, CNN Money says Facebook has purchased the company for an undislosed amount.

The Gowalla team, including founder Josh Williams, will move from their Austin, Texas headquarters to Facebook’s in Palo Alto, California. It’s rumored the team will be working on Facebook’s timeline feature, which is still being rolled out to Facebook members.

“It’s a perfect match,” said the unnamed source to CNN Money. “As far as the big picture, Gowalla’s vision is about people telling stories, and Facebook’s vision for Timeline is about stories about important moments in life.”

It’s not clear at this time if the Gowalla service will remain active. Facebook is kind of known for acquiring startups just for the engineers and developers behind them. (Beluga, anyone?)

If you’re looking to delete your Gowalla account, here is a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

What do you think of this news? Tell us in the comment area below.

Now, Peter Vesterbacka, business developer lead for Rovio (of Angry Birds fame), has come out to make the bold statement that mobile gaming is causing console gaming to die. He made the statement during the SXSW Conference. Do the numbers back up his statement? Is the 100 million downloads Vesterbacka claims Angry Birds drew in enough to send console gaming the way of the dinosaurs?

Let’s take a look at the cold hard data. For our two samples we’ll look at the immensely popular Angry Birds, and Call of Duty: Black Ops to represent console gaming. Black Ops was the top selling console game of 2010.

We’re going to take the 100 million downloads Rovio is boasting with their title and match it up against the console sales for Black Ops. According to VGChartz, Black Ops sold 11.95 millions copies on the Xbox 360, and 9.6 million copies on the PS3.

According to my handy computer calculator, here’s how the numbers stand against one another (Black Ops sells for $59.99).

Angry Birds revenue – $100 million

Call of Duty: Black Ops revenue – $1.29 billion

Of course the real tell-of-the-tape is with their profit, but unfortunately we don’t have production and publishing costs for both games. However, I would be extremely surprised to learn that Black Op’s production cost so much it earned less than $100 million.

As a gamer for going on two decades, I would have to call Vesterbacka’s words at the very least, reaching, at the most, hyperbole. There’s a good chance Vesterbacka was simply posturing to the crowd, and wanted to create some controversy to attract attention to his game. If so, it worked, I am writing about what he said.

Mobile gaming has definitely changed the landscape of not only gaming but the way we value media. However, the mobile gaming platform isn’t going to cause anything to “die“. It has simply provided us with another way in which to enjoy gaming, and to allow more people to join in on the action.

Different forms of technology will be around as long as they’re useful; after all, I can still go out to my car and listen to the radio.

He left Microsoft to become vice president of development for search for the auction site and, judging by Williams’ LinkedIn profile, eBay gains the guy that helped created Bing:

I was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. I’m proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team.

I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco.

He also played a key role in Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer 8.

So, two questions. What damage does this do to Bing, if any? And, what the heck does eBay have up its sleeve?

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Once Call Out has been integrated via the Open Voices APIs, users of the application will have access to international rates of a few pennies per minute. Anyone who has ever paid the going rate to telcos for international calls should find Call Out a pleasant change of pace.

Users have to pay for Call Out blocks of time, with the lowest bundle of call credits going for $5.  IN a few examples, callers can reach London for 2 cents/minute, Moscow for 1.5 cents/minute, and Sydney for 1.8 cents/minute.

Features for the Open Voices API appeared at AOL’s developer site:

This API allows any client application which supports the following industry standards to ‘just work’ with AOL Voice Services:

• RFC 3261 – Session Initiation Protocol
• RFC 2833 – RTP Payload for DTFM Digits, Telephony Tones and Telephony Signals
• RFC 4028 – Session Timers in SIP
• ITU-T E.164 – Formatted Telephone Numbers
• RFC 2617 – Basic and Digest Access Authentication

Though email and instant messaging help people accomplish a lot through communication, sometimes the best option for contacting a remote person and resolving an issue needs to happen by phone. At a low cost point, even modest reliability of developer applications for devices will be a significant gain for callers who have to foot the bill.

Google Android, that search company’s open mobile development platform, has a rival for the attentions of application developers. Yahoo will unveil a set of plans at CES 2008 for their mobile services that include opening up its platform.

An early look at Yahoo’s Mobile Developer Platform comes to Las Vegas today. The mobile space has been hotter than the all you can eat buffets seeing hundreds of tech geeks this week on the Strip.

Yahoo sees the platform as one that will provide a one-stop solution for developers who want to build an app and make it available as a Yahoo Mobile Widget quickly. A revamped Yahoo Mobile homepage will feature the mobile widgets; Yahoo Go 3.0 and Yahoo oneSearch makes these Widgets accessible as well.

"We are setting the stage for dramatic growth in the number of third party widgets and creating an innovative new experience that we believe will ultimately drive further adoption of mobile services," Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo Connected Life, said in a statement.

The first Widgets available will include ones for eBay, MySpace, and MTV. Ebay’s offering allows mobile bidding, and searching and browsing its items and categories, while MTV brings in music news and MySpace provides mobile access to its email and friend requests.

At the Google Code Blog, Fox details the problem of planning a trip and unsuccessfully searching for upcoming conferences. She says that though Google’s Developer Events Calendar has been around for a while, it only listed events Google sponsored or attended.

The new calendar allows others to post upcoming events – conferences, user groups, or parties – for the developer community. It can be viewed in calendar or map views.

A few have already added their events, like the "Jurisdictionary club" in Oklahoma City, the Bossa Conference in Brazil, and JavaOne in San Francisco. 
 

The move comes in response to criticism that developers wouldn’t create applications for Facebook because the website is too “closed” to be an effective market, and sets up a potential clash between Facebook’s now open platform and OpenSocial, the open development platform initiative Google Inc. launched in November. Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora first posted the news in a blog entry on Wednesday.

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information. We look forward to supporting other social sites as they release their own platforms, and look forward most of all to the added benefit for developers and users.

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Preuss isn’t quite as prominent as some of the other departing people; as the product manager for local advertising, he may, for example, be less missed than a key AdSense developer or the vice president of corporate development.  Still, it’s a good bet that Google didn’t want to lose him to Meetup.

Meetup describes itself as the “world’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs and groups.”  Preuss will begin there as the vice president of marketplace.  And in the event that you’re getting even slightly lost in all of this jargon, Peter Kafka interpreted the move.

“In English, that means Dominic is going to try to create a new revenue stream for Meetup by matching sponsors with Meetups, and taking a small cut for itself,” he wrote.  “Smart idea: Right now Meetup sponsorships (Wilson Sonsoni and DFJ Gotham sponsor NY Tech, for example) are done ad hoc, and Meetup doesn’t see a penny of this revenue.”

Given his background at Google, Preuss should definitely know a thing or two about making money.  Hopefully that’ll serve him well at his new job.

He writes, "To make things a bit easier, we decided to start this Hadoop and Distributed Computing blog on the Yahoo! Developer Network as a place to write about Hadoop and our distributed computing work on a more regular basis. There’s a lot going on (we already have a backlog of posts!) and we’re anxious to get the word out."

Currently featured on the new blog is a video interview Zawodny does with Eric Baldeschwieler about Hadoop and Yahoo.

Google Flashes $10M At Android Developers

The time-honored motivator, money, comes into play for application developers intrigued by the possibilities of the Android mobile platform. Android’s opening came as part of the Open Handset Alliance announcement from earlier in November.

“We’ve built some interesting applications for Android but the best applications are not here yet and that’s because they’re going to be written by developers,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a statement. “We’d like to reward these developers and recognize them as much as possible.”

Those rewards come in the form of the Android Developer Challenge. Prizes from $25,000 to $275,000 await those developers whose work grabs the attention of the judges overseeing the entries in the Challenge.

Developers will first need the Android SDK, which became available for download today. The first round of entries will be accepted between January 2 and March 3, 2008.

Fifty of these will be picked for awards, and invited to apply for the next round of the Challenge. Google said ten awards of $275,000 and ten awards of $100,000 will be up for grabs in that second round. Those winners will be announced at the end of May 2008.

Google also noted the first handsets built on the Android platform will become available in the second half of 2008. Once that takes place, Challenge II will be announced for mobile application developers.

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