Gaming, sports in particular, is playing well for Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:EA). Double digits look good on their Wall Street game board. With more than 300 million registered players worldwide, Electronic Arts has its game on scoring a 12.8 surge in share price.

The Sims, Dragon Age, Plants vs. Zombies keep the numbers rising, but Madden NFL is in the spotlight now with the Super Bowl on tap for this weekend. Electronic Arts simulated the game, updating the rosters and showing the Seahawks vs. Patriots on Xbox One. It gives the game to MVP Tom Brady. How can you go against Madden’s impressive predictive record … 8-3 in the last decade, but did the prediction come before or after “deflate-gate”?

EA’s financial picture played out well in fiscal 2014 which pegged net revenue at $3.6 billion for the Redwood City California based gaming company. Quarterly non-GAAP revenues came in at $1,428 million. Mobile gaming scooped up $139 million of revenues overshadowing last year’s figures by 13 percent year over year, pulling in 160 million monthly active users for the quarter.

Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said: “Our ongoing digital transformation, including live services like EA SPORTS Ultimate Team, coupled with ongoing cost discipline, enables us to deliver consistent cash flow and earnings growth.”  You can add to their cash flow by buying Madden NFL 15 Xbox One at Target for $39.99 on sale.

EA’s GAAP earnings for fiscal year 2015 are expected to be $2.35 per share. Zack’s says EA’s game portfolio, new consoles and a large mobile segment form the basis of this positive outlook.

The post Electronic Arts Gets Its Game On appeared first on VR World.

Robinhood, a startup that offers $0 commission stock trading on smartphones and tablets, has raised a $13 million Series A funding round, which the company hopes will help it make stock trading more accessible. The startup competes directly with web- and mobile-trading platforms like E*trade, but with one clear marketing advantage: Robinhood does not charge commissions for stock trades.

With this funding round, Robinhood seeks to hire additional talent, with focus on ensuring the security of its platform, which is a key factor, given its finance-oriented nature. In terms of traction, Robinhood actually got 450,000 signups to its private beta wishlist even as the team was running on stealth mode. At this time, trading on the app is still limited to family and friends. Everyone else can still research and monitor stocks for free, but the team hopes to enable free trading for all soon.

Making Trading More Accessible

Reducing commissions to zero makes the platform more accessible to first-time investors, compared with the $7 to $10 that online brokerages like E*trade and Scottrade charge per trade. “We’re making investing accessible to young people,” says co-founder Vlad Tenev in an interview with TechCrunch.

The team’s focus is to make trading easier. “Most stock brokerages out there have been around for 30 years, their interfaces are clumsy, and they’re targeting older professionals and active traders,” says Teney. “They’re no place for first time investors and that’s one of the things we focus on.”

The mobile app is intended to make monitoring and trading while on the move easy. The app also offers smart notifications, including advance notification of scheduled events like dividends, stock splits and earning announcements, as well as pre-set notifications like stock movements and price alerts.

Lean Startup

Robinhood is able to offer cutthroat pricing by not relying on a brick-and-mortar establishment and on-premises staff, thereby reducing its overhead requirements. With its zero-commission scheme, the company is likely going the route of most startups that focus on traction first before profitability. However, Robinhood does charge fees for certain activities like account transfers, wires, paper statements, check processing, broker-assisted phone orders, and foreign securities, among others. Also, selling stocks will incur the usual tariffs and fees that the Securities and Exchange Commission charges.

Other possible business models include charging nominal interest for trading on margin (borrowing against earnings during the standard three-day waiting period before release), as well as licensing its API for other startups or businesses that wish to leverage lean trading.

The team was initially backed by Google Ventures, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Rothenberg Ventures and several angel investors with a $3 million seed funding in December 2013. The startup launched in private beta in February this year, promising commission-free trades for private beta users and free stock tracking for the public. This particular $13 million Series A round is led by Index Ventures and joined by a mix of institutional and private investors including Ribbit Capital, Slow Ventures,Queensbridge Venture Partners, Howard Lindzon (StockTweets), Aaron Levie (Box), and artists Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg.

Mobile-First Approach

With the Series A, Index Ventures partner Jan Hammer will join Robinhood’s board. Co-founder Baiju Bhatt cites Index’ prior investments in finance-oriented startups as one of the reasons it chose the venture fund to lead this Series A round. Meanwhile, Hammer cited the quality and synergy of the founding team, as well as the viability of the app as one of its reasons for gunning for the lead in this funding round. “Their pitch was as simple and elegant as the app they went on to build: a mobile-first brokerage that would offer generation Y the flexibility and convenience they demand in all aspects of financial management,” Hammer writes. “In addition, and most crucially, all trades would be free of commission.”

The question at this point is whether Robinhood will be a game-changer for Wall Street. $10 charges are certainly small change for traders who buy or sell stocks by the millions, but traders who earn from penny stocks and do small trades on speculative stocks might benefit from Robinhood’s fee structure. “Robinhood began with the notion that a lean and agile, technology-driven brokerage could strip out the fixed costs of incumbents to offer zero commission trades on smartphones and tablets,” writes Hammer. “Today, the team is close to delivering on their vision – and from the day we met, it was a conviction that we shared.”

Feature image credit: photo.ua / Shutterstock.com

The post Zero-Commission Stock Trading App Robinhood Raises $13M Series A appeared first on VR World.

When we look at the world of covering technology today, we see that (unfortunately) most of the media and worse, paid up blogs and forum shilling tactics, are smothering the information which the public should receive.

It is hard to get information when technology sites have to live off selling ads in exchange for a set number of awards per year (in all of its five and a half years, Bright Side of News* received plenty of those offers from Far East), or even worse, unmarked advertorials.

We all live in a period of time when the amount of respect for a profession of journalism is at an all-time low. To make the matters worse, everyone can state even the craziest conspiracy theory and hope for a “repeated truth” syndrome to take place. Quite often, false news will get even the most brilliant engineers go on a self-destructive tangent.

When looking to invest in an organization, you’re often met with shady business practices. In media, this typically means journalists and bloggers (based in foreign offices) are doing visa runs because the parent company often doesn’t even legally exist in a territory from where the content is created. Then, an investor will face off difficulties with due diligence when the contracts signed with off-shore authors are illegal in the countries where the parent companies are.

As you can read, with this type of structure it is almost impossible to pass due diligence check from any serious investor. And from my stand point, there are only two options: cry over spilled milk, or put the money where the mouth is and create a working framework where people are respected from both sides of the fence. Products, technologies and maintaining the integrity of the said individuals is of paramount importance.

Our New Framework

Starting today, we are executing a roadmap which will see us split into three directions. Bright Side of News*, which 1.67 million of you came to trust, is going to evolve to cover the financial aspect of the industry.

What does a technology or a product mean for you? Should you invest in companies that we report on – that advice is not something we can legally do – we can give you our honest opinion, and we will not hold stock in companies we report about. Especially not when it comes to shorting the stock to make a quick buck (something which AMD is especially fragile from, and Intel barely made an escape from that zone). For any potential investor looking to come to technology, we would advise you to read The Wolf of Wall Street first amongst others.

We are expanding our focus from United States to cover what is really going on in countries which you read on the sidelines, but no one actually goes there and reports how it will affect you. We live in a global economy and you deserve coverage from everywhere.

West (Coast) Meets (Far) East

As of this moment, we are setting up offices throughout the Asia-Pacific (including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Taiwan and Shenzhen). Coming on board to report from Taipei will be Sam Reynolds as well as Chris Low and Han-Wei Tsai for BSN*’s new Chinese section.  A roster of reputable technology journalists with bylines you will recognize will be complimenting their coverage from around the world.

Now is a time of transition, so Bright Side of News* will be a temporary home for two teams of journalists as we put the finishing touches on a new publication. As you might notice, content will be temporarily in both English and Chinese for the next couple of weeks.

Next, we are launching several new business units, including Special Industry Groups (SIGs), which will work hard with the key industry players to bring new technology to the market in the most compatible way. In order to stay true to our path of independence and unbiased views, any technology we deliver on the market will not be directly reviewed by us (as an actual product we will write about what makes the technology tick).

Instead, we will launch a program that puts the technology in the hands of people. We want to hear what you think about the products and technologies that are coming to market.

Over the past two years, BSN* hosted several dozen giveaways where we tried to remove the regional locks which were the bane of most readers, and I cannot express my gratitude to over 2000 people that wrote to us about having a fair approach and often paying hundreds of dollars in shipping cost to the winner. Come to that, I believe the craziest package we ever sent was to a Swedish doctor working in Botswana. How in the world he ran a 3D Mark Vantage benchmark of a diesel generator, we’ll leave that one for you.

Thus, let’s move on together. I wish to thank you for five and a half years of supporting our efforts to remain independent and unbiased, and let’s jointly work on many more years to come.

Thank You,

Theo Valich
Co-Founder and Publisher, Bright Side of News*

The post Editorial: New Era Ahead appeared first on VR World.