Ray Muzyka, chief executive of popular video game-maker BioWare, spoke at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco about building game franchises. While onstage, Muzyka talked about his Electronic Arts-owned company’s upcoming games in the Star Wars, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age franchises — all across BioWare’s “future portfolio,” he said it’s shifting toward selling games as an ongoing service rather than a standalone product.

Afterwards, I did a brief video interview with Muzyka, during which he elaborated on how his BioWare’s business model is changing, described the company’s new games and downloadable content (DLC), and offered his advice for up-and-coming game entrepreneurs.

See all our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC.

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: Bioware

People: Ray Muzyka

Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

Sonos wouldn’t comment on this story. But we believe the deal will close and be announced in the next week or two.

FirstRain, a service that scrapes the web to deliver relevant research to investors, has brought in $7.3 million of an anticipated $8.8 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company has raised $20.9 million to date and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, DiamondHead Ventures and Ampersand Ventures.

Companies: Ampersand Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures, Firstrain, Oak INvestment Partners

We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public's attention. The interface just wasn't designed for finger input. Like it or not, that's the truth. Windows was designed to be used with a mouse, and to a lesser extent, a pen or stylus. That's fine. Windows 7 works great. I'm writing this on a Win7 machine. But I hate Windows on my tablet computers for the aforementioned reason. It's also the reason I'm very apprehensive of the upcoming onslaught of slate computers. I'm afraid that wonderful hardware will be passed up in favor of the disappointing iPad because of the interface. But Adobe gave me hope today in its demo of Flash and Air on the HP slate device.

A new Google Labs project merges two breakthroughs into one. Public Data Explorer brings together a set of databases — health statistics, crime stats, oil prices, economic metrics — with a browser-based technology that lets researchers and presenters create charts that move. The motion  show trends in a way not possible with motionless plots.

Google’s motion charts are familiar to a small set of people, many of whom first saw them in a video of a presentation at the 2006 TED conference by researcher Hans Rosling, who dazzled jaded TED attendees with an 18-minute presentation of animated charts on global life expectancies and their correlations with global wealth. Roslings moving graphs debunked, he said, the presumption that there is a gap between rich and poor nations today. Instead, Rosling showed how most of the world’s population has gravitated into a middle ground over the past 40 years.

Google Public Data Explorer now makes it possible for anyone to chart public data from TK HOW MANY databases, correlate information from multiple databases, and create moving charts that can be embedded in a Web page just like a YouTube video.

EMBEDDED EXAMPLES GO HERE

The chart technology was conceived by Rosling’s son, Ola, and his wife Anna Ronnlund. The two had studied the arts rather than science in college. After Ola’s father complained over dinner in 1998 that his students at Sweden’s Sweden’s Karolinska Institute didn’t have a fact-based worldview, Ola and Anna eventually brainstormed the idea of making the elder Rosling’s bubble charts of global wealth versus child mortality into a single animation — a chart that would play over time to show emerging and evolving trends.

Eventually, Ola and Anna dubbed their tech and formed a company to develop their motion-chart idea with funding from the Swedish international aid agency Sida. Over the next couple of years they learned of the heavy demand for this kind of visual exploration tool among public agencies around the world.

At the same time they began to ve invited to tech conferences in American, where they met early personal computer visionary Alan Kay. They asked if he could help find someone who could take over this idea and develop it further. Kay gave them the ugly truth: It very unlikely, he said. They would probably have to develop it themselves. That’s how it works with most innovations.

In 2005, Anna and Ola founded the Gapminder foundation together with Hans. With his ever-more-powerful visualizations, using the technology now named Trendalyzer, Dr. Rosling was invited to more and more prestigious conferences. Eventually, he met the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Hans was also invited to TED in 2006. His presentation, widely viewed online, got him invited to give an internal presentation at Google’s Tech Talk series. He insisted that the inventors, Anna and Ola and software engineer Johan Nystrand, give the preso instead.

You can guess how the story ends: Google acquired the Trendalyzer software from the Gapminder foundation, which still operates in parallel. Anna, Ola and three others from Gapminder were hired by Google in early 2007.  Google’s motion charts have been available in Google Docs since TK WHEN. But now, by pairing the Trendalyzer software with public databases, and letting Google’s super-scalable servers handle the work, Google hopes to empower researchers and just-plain-nosy people worldwide to make new discoveries akin to Rosling’s wealth-and-health correlations.

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

">In favor of software patents — Patents are getting a lot of criticism these days, but Fair Software’s Alain Reynaud argues that they are worth preserving, just a little flawed.

Wind is generally considered the front-runner when it comes to renewable sources of energy — both cheaper and more reliable than solar. The government certainly prioritized it last year when it doled out millions in grants, mostly to wind firms. Now news of record-setting wind generation out of Texas confirms that turbines are probably the best bet.

Apparently, early this morning, about 19 percent of the power on the major Texan grid came from wind installations (about 6,272 megawatts) — that’s an incredible amount considering that green-minded states like California are hoping to hit 33 percent from renewable power in general ten years from now. This is also significant given that not all of Texas’ turbines participated — the state’s Panhandle is actually on a different grid.

On a regular basis, Texas derives about 6 percent of its electricity on the grid from wind, reports the New York Times. That’s not very much for a state that is far and away the leader in wind development. Interestingly, however, not all of the wind power generated in Texas is actually transmitted. The necessary infrastructure doesn’t yet exist to deliver it all to consumers. So who knows what could be achieved if this missing link were fixed?

Not that the problem has been neglected. The state is already investing $5 billion in transmission repairs and expansions. The goal is to string many more cables between the wind-heavy western region of Texas and the biggest cities, Houston, Austin and Dallas.

If Texas can successfully (and affordably) build the necessary infrastructure to up the amount of wind-generated power on the grid, it could provide a great best-practice case for states looking to boost their own wind power, like California, Michigan, and other states in the Midwest.

A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan on Thursday morning. Electronics market research firm iSuppli reports that Taiwanese firms Chi Mei Optoelectronics and HannStar Display Corporation to temporarily stop making large LCD panels in the Tainan Science Park area, for safety reasons.

According to iSuppli, CMO and HannStar produce a total of 16.3 percent large-size LCD panels.

“After a shutdown, it typically takes 12 to 24 hours before production can be restarted at an LCD manufacturing fab.” said iSuppli researcher Sweta Dash in a press release. “However, if there is damage to the equipment, the shutdown will last for a longer period of time.”

There have been no reports yet of deaths due the quake, but thousands of people are reportedly without electrical power.

[Photo: Tsao/Getty]

Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said today that the federal government is stepping up its efforts to protect Americans from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. It will do so by preparing to prevent and preempt attacks, without compromising privacy, she said.

She said she met hockey star Wayne Gretzky during the recent final game for the Gold Medal in hockey at the Olympics, and she recalled how he said that he doesn’t skate to where the puck is, but where it will be. The same applies for anticipating cyber attacks.

Under President Obama, protection of the nation’s cyber infrastructure is viewed as both an issue of national and economic security, Napolitano said in a speech at the RSA security conference in San Francisco today. Her speech follows one yesterday by Howard Schmidt, the new White House national cybersecurity coordinator.

“We don’t live in a static world,” she said. “We have to evolve to deal with the threats.”

The federal government’s goal is to protect cyberspace, making it safe and secure and encouraging cyber security knowledge and innovation. It is working with private industries to protect infrastructure of the Internet that is owned by both federal and private parties.

One project is Einstein, an effort to protect federal agencies. Basic protection has been added under Einstein, but now the government is moving on to the idea of preventing attacks before they can happen. The effort mirrors attempts to anticipate terrorist attacks to head off the cyber equivalent of 9/11.

Napolitano said that the government is also reviewing the resiliency of networks to make sure that, if there are attacks, they can’t take down all of the network and that recovery can be quick. She said the collaborative work is happening, but was short on the details.

“We want to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security has the legal authority and financial resources to act and retain the top talent that it needs,” she said. “We have to make the system writ large, safe and secure.”

She asked the conference attendees to redouble efforts to increase security and improve their products so that the security is automatic and the reaction to attacks can happen at Internet speed. She wants the industry to make interoperable products and privacy-enhancing authentication. And she called for the industry to increase public awareness and set up a competition to do so. The DHS National Cyber Challenge contest closes on April 30 and details are on the DHS web site. The investment in this educational campaign will be big; Napolitano compared it to the scale of campaigns to stop smoking and prevent forest fires via Smoky the Bear.

People: Janet Napolitano

Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said today that the federal government is stepping up its efforts to protect Americans from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. It will do so by preparing to prevent and preempt attacks, without compromising privacy, she said.

She said she met hockey star Wayne Gretzky during the recent final game for the Gold Medal in hockey at the Olympics, and she recalled how he said that he doesn’t skate to where the puck is, but where it will be. The same applies for anticipating cyber attacks.

Under President Obama, protection of the nation’s cyber infrastructure is viewed as both an issue of national and economic security, Napolitano said in a speech at the RSA security conference in San Francisco today. Her speech follows one yesterday by Howard Schmidt, the new White House national cybersecurity coordinator.

“We don’t live in a static world,” she said. “We have to evolve to deal with the threats.”

The federal government’s goal is to protect cyberspace, making it safe and secure and encouraging cyber security knowledge and innovation. It is working with private industries to protect infrastructure of the Internet that is owned by both federal and private parties.

One project is Einstein, an effort to protect federal agencies. Basic protection has been added under Einstein, but now the government is moving on to the idea of preventing attacks before they can happen. The effort mirrors attempts to anticipate terrorist attacks to head off the cyber equivalent of 9/11.

Napolitano said that the government is also reviewing the resiliency of networks to make sure that, if there are attacks, they can’t take down all of the network and that recovery can be quick. She said the collaborative work is happening, but was short on the details.

“We want to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security has the legal authority and financial resources to act and retain the top talent that it needs,” she said. “We have to make the system writ large, safe and secure.”

She asked the conference attendees to redouble efforts to increase security and improve their products so that the security is automatic and the reaction to attacks can happen at Internet speed. She wants the industry to make interoperable products and privacy-enhancing authentication. And she called for the industry to increase public awareness and set up a competition to do so. The DHS National Cyber Challenge contest closes on April 30 and details are on the DHS web site. The investment in this educational campaign will be big; Napolitano compared it to the scale of campaigns to stop smoking and prevent forest fires via Smoky the Bear.

People: Janet Napolitano