Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last six days: Chinese entrepreneurs, investors on Google: ‘Just quit. We don’t care.‘ — What does the Chinese tech community think of Google’s controversial plan to uncensor search and possibly leave the country? We talked to several Chinese entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who were part of a delegation that coincidentally visited the Googleplex this week. Google’s Nexus One sells a mere 20,000 in its first week — Although Google’s [...]

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I experimented with a couple of ways of making donations for Haitian relief today. First, I visited the Red Cross web site and made a donation with a few clicks. It asked me for my credit card number and I entered it. Then it presented me with a thank-you note and a receipt, which I printed. It felt good, but it wasn’t necessarily a rewarding experience. Then I visited my FarmVille game on Facebook. I’ve been playing the free game for a while now. The game’s publisher, Zynga, makes money from the game when you buy virtual goods, such as farm animals or tractors. I had never purchased [...]

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Can you really play high-end games on your modest PC, with no downloads? That’s a multi-billion dollar question. Entrepreneur Steve Perlman wants to make money by giving you a way to do that. Last year, he announced OnLive, a service that lets you play high-end games “on demand,” that is, over the Internet from a conventional low-end PC, and with no download. He’s certainly stirred things up in the gaming world, and we couldn’t be happier that he will be the keynote speaker at our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC conference on March 10 in San Francisco. Perlman is one of those [...]

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Mitch Lasky sold his mobile entertainment business, Jamdat Mobile, to Electronic Arts for $680 million in late 2005. He left the company a year later and became partner at Benchmark Capital. But he’s since become a bit of a thorn in EA’s side and criticized its strategy in a recent blog post. On Monday, EA announced it would miss its December quarter targets for the second year in a row. It’s also in the midst of laying off 1,500 employees, and EA had a bleak outlook for the coming year as well. On his blog, Lasky castigated EA management, saying, “EA is in the wrong business, [...]

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VentureBeat and the Game Developers Conference are pleased to announce the GamesBeat@GDC conference on March 10. GamesBeat, the conference for leading executives in the game industry, will take place at the upcoming GDC 2010, which runs from March 9 to March 13. This year’s GamesBeat@GDC will feature a fireside chat with John Schappert, chief operating officer of Electronic Arts and a 17-year veteran of the video game industry (pictured below). EA made a big splash when it agreed to buy social game publisher Playfish for as much as $400 million, and Schappert is a big thinker on the transition [...]

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