MediaFile

Curt Schilling, the former pitcher and two-time World Series champ is more nervous about his new video game than he ever was about baseball.

He told a New York crowd at an event put on by Electronic Arts on Tuesday that he slept like a baby before World Series games in 2007 — but didn’t catch a wink on Monday night ahead of the release of his company’s first video game.

Schilling’s personal fortune is on the line with “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” a fantasy-action game that hit stores Tuesday. Schilling told Reuters last July he had invested between $30 million to $35 million of his own money into the 400-person company he founded that made the game.

“‘This is opening day of career 2.0,” he told the crowd . And it’s an opening day that’s seven years in the making–Schilling founded the company called 38 Studios (after his jersey number) in 2006.

Schilling has been a video fanboy for years. Peter Moore, EA’s chief operating officer said he first spoke with him in 2005. Schilling called Moore, who then worked at Microsoft, to see if he could get his hands on an advance copy of the Xbox 360.

Shelling out cash to small businesses that need it fast– or just don’t qualify for bank loans– has become a $600 million annual business for New York-based Capital Access Network. Now, Accel Partners is betting $30 million that the combination of risk-averse banks and cash-starved businesses will help CAN grow even bigger.

CAN offers small and medium businesses cash advances and loans based on its proprietary scoring system, where factors like how fast a business is growing count a lot more than collateral or the business owner’s credit score.

“The banks never were very good lending money to this segment,” said Kevin Efrusy, the partner at Accel who arranged the deal and who is taking a seat on CAN’s board. “Especially after 2008, it’s completely dried up.” A typical CAN transaction is in the $30,000-$1.5 million range.

It’s been nearly a decade since the tagline “don’t be evil” was attached to Google in a Wired magazine profile. Google, a little more than four years old, adopted the phrase as a code of conduct as it navigated through a growing list of hard questions, and as it increasingly shaped the Web itself. Since then, the term has been hurled back at its founders again and again — every time a saucy blogger or disgruntled user had a bone to pick with the company.

Google’s executives have long since stopped saying “don’t be evil” in public, and the company has been more willing to make bold moves that court controversy (as long as they lead to changes that will promote further growth). Case in point: Last month, Google altered its search results to favor pages from its Google+ social service over other social sites.

Facebook responded by designing a browser extension called “don’t be evil” that played up results from non-Google+ social sites, like Facebook and Twitter. It was an amusing potshot at Google — but for the wrong reasons. Facebook’s track record at focusing on its users’ needs and preferences is even worse than Google’s. Beyond the privacy snafus that flare up regularly, Facebook has designed its site not to make it easier for us to share content with our friends, but to weave corporate brands and ad campaigns into those friendships.

Teen boys with superpowers helped lift the movie box office to unexpected heights over Super Bowl weekend as thriller “Chronicle” edged “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe’s haunted house movie “The Woman in Black.”

“Chronicle” brought in an estimated $22.0 million from U.S. and Canadian theaters, studio estimates released on Sunday showed. The movie with largely unknown actors finished just ahead of Radcliffe’s “Woman in Black,” which took in an estimated $21.0 million.

Both performances surpassed projections from studio executives, who had expected weaker sales against competition from Sunday’s Super Bowl football championship. The tallies include actual ticket receipts for Friday and Saturday plus estimates for Sunday at North American (U.S. and Canadian) theaters.

We are compiling all the Super Bowl commercials here so you don’t have to. Once we’ve got most of them, we’ll ask you to vote which one you think was the best. In the meantime, post what you think about the ones we have here in the comments below.

Aliens star in an ad for the Chevrolet Volt electric car

Matthew Broderick returns to his Ferris Buehler roots in this Honda commercial

Jerry Seinfeld shows up in a number of Acura ads.

Regis Philbin appears in a commercial where a Coke salesman wins free Pepsi.

Kraft will debut a new breakfast food called “belVita”

A car shopper’s conscience unleashes his inner-Disco for Cars.com

Amy Sedaris stars in the remake of a classic Super Bowl ad for Downy

GoDaddy’s Super Bowl ad this year features an on-screen QR code

Adriana Lima prepares for Valentine’s Day in the Teleflora ad

The CareerBuilder.com chimpanzees are back

Move over, Darth Vader: Dogs take center stage in Volkswagen’s ad this year

For the first-time ever, Lexus will air a Super Bowl commercial

Audi’s new Super Bowl ad features a hip vampire party

It wouldn’t be a Super Bowl without an advertisement from Coca-Cola

From the minute they allowed us grown-ups to join Facebook in 2007 right up to the IPO filing, the same question has been posited again and again, first on technology blogs, then later in the mainstream press: Will Facebook kill the class reunion?

Alumni are interviewed, both for and against. Statistics are cited, showing a decline in reunion attendance over the past five years, often without noting that many of us, due to economic realities during this same time period, have sometimes been forced to choose between shaking our sagging booties on a faraway campus and eating. High school and college reunions get lumped together, presupposing a similar pull toward both, which rings false for those of us who saw high school as an unfortunate trial to be endured and college as the moment when, freed from nuclear families and provincial roots, we grew into ourselves in no small part through interactions with new friends.

The real fallacy of this line of questioning, however — that it’s either Facebook or the reunion — lies in its presumption of causality: Why take it as a given that knowing more about our fellow alumni would cause us to be less likely to want to see them in person? If anything, speaking purely subjectively, scrolling down an endless stream of status updates, family photos and videos of my college friends’ toddlers walking around with hampers on their heads (I’m talking to you, Nick Spooner) makes me want to see them in person more, not less.

Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.

Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.

One of the biggest surprises in Facebook’s IPO filing was that it depended on game-maker Zynga  for 12 percent of its sales last year.

In 2010, the online game company famous for “FarmVille” and “Words With Friends” nearly declared war with the social network over a change in Facebook’s policy involving credits — the currency Zynga players use to buy virtual goods. Facebook wanted to take a 30 percent cut of transactions.

Bing Gordon, a video game veteran, Zynga board member and partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, described the standoff during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in May as a Silicon Valley version of the Cuban Missile crisis, where Zynga was at one point prepared to walk away from Facebook.

In the world of Internet IPOs, it doesn’t get bigger than this: Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, files for the biggest ever Internet IPO! On first glance, everything about it seems outsize: The company’s raising $5 billion! It made $3.7 billion in revenue last year! And $1 billion in net income! Even the stated mission — “to make the world more open and connected” — is impossibly expansive. It’s all so expectedly huge it’s almost bland.

Here’s the thing about the big, honking 187-page prospectus Facebook filed late Wednesday. Once you dig past those headline numbers, the company itself ends up looking pretty unremarkable — kind of like the lives portrayed in the typical Facebook timeline. You end up wondering if its best years aren’t already behind it.

Facebook’s revenue grew 69 percent in 2010. That’s down from 154 percent in 2009, but still not bad at all. It’s much better than the 29 percent growth rate Google saw last year, and close to the 68 percent growth rate for Apple. But those companies are much larger (Facebook’s 2011 revenue was less than 3 percent of Apple’s). And for Facebook, there are signs that its growth rate is already starting to slow dramatically.

Today we launched Social Pulse, our new social media hub on Reuters.com designed to show you the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web.

The first thing you’ll see on the page is the news most popular in Reuters social network. Our journalists and official Twitter accounts follow everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne, and these are the stories being talked about by the newsmakers we follow. The technical detective work is done by Percolate, a social news service that powers Felix Salmon & Ryan McCarthy’s Counterparties.com.

Next you’ll see our stock sentiment module, featuring opinions from hundreds of thousands of sources captured and curated by WiseWindow. WiseWindow is not simply a keyword analysis tool, but a complex system that uses statistical techniques and natural language processing to deliver data that is not only real-time but predictive as well. The chart is populated by share-of-voice readings, so depending on which companies are being talked about most that day, it will adapt.