The San Mateo, Calif.-based game publisher has struggled to keep its stock price up in the age of the iPhone. But its press release says Ballard’s departure doesn’t have to do with the company’s financial performance. The company also said that its second quarter results are within previous guidance.Ballard will stay on the board of directors until a replacement is named.

The company retained Egon Zehnder, an executive recruiting firm, to find CEO candidates.

In December, the company reorganized and said it would cut costs. Ballard also shifted the company’s resources so 30 percent of its efforts would focus on smart phone games for the iPhone and other platforms. Ballard has run the company for six years and said he is looking for a new challenge.

Over the years, Ballard has focused on making games by taking brands from other media, such as video game consoles, and adapting them for mobile gaming. But on the iPhone, many brands are falling flat while small, innovative titles from indie developers are the big winners.

Business Week has an inkling of this as well. In the June 24 cover story on Steve Ballmer and Office 2010 by Peter Burrows, the magazine noted that Microsoft would offer details about its plans related to Office 2010, which will have many web-based functions similar to Google Docs, on July 13. Office 2010 will also have a free, ad-supported version that competes head-on with Google Docs. Microsoft is also said to be working on Gazelle, a Chrome-like web browser. That combination of things means that Microsoft may also be able to do its own stripped-down operating system, if there is demand for it on netbooks. By the time the Chrome OS is ready in the second half of 2010, Microsoft may be there with its own competing software.

Microsoft has a conference in New Orleans next week where the announcement will take place.

The reality, of course, is that these documents are a necessity for any company. And, to be honest, they’re not as hard to put together as you might think. (There are plenty of good books on the subject and some really great software packages, such as Business Plan Pro.)

Still, there are some common errors entrepreneurs face when writing a business plan.

Procrastination. It’s easy to find distractions (such as your busy schedule) to prevent you from creating a plan. Resist them. And realize that without a document detailing plans for the future, your company is likely to become a rudderless ship at some point.

Financial focus. Think in terms of cash rather than profits. Initially, your profit and loss statement should be secondary to your cash flow statement. You’ll need to initially ensure you have enough cash on hand on a day-by-day basis to survive.

Cover your bases. Don’t focus too much on your grand idea, but make sure that you have all the fundamentals covered. Bold ideas are hard to sell. Rather, stress that you have the available time, common sense and business smarts to succeed. If you are looking for investors, they will be more interested in you and your people than the idea.

Forget the hype. Using colorful language and preconceived notions is an easy trap to fall into, but both are ultimately superfluous. People looking at your business plan want to see hard, solid facts, backed up by very reasonable assumptions. Set milestones, show which tasks you’ve established and apply sound logic to your reasoning.

Be realistic. Priorities are important, but you don’t want to set too many. Potential investors are interested in your focus and will shy away if you try and cast too wide a net.

Don’t overreach. While you’ll need to project growth, make sure those estimates are realistic and that any growth spurts are tied and referenced to understandable and realistic events. Your projections need to be conservative and you must be able to defend them.

Know the playing field. It’s critical to be thoroughly aware of your business competition. If your business plan is too inwardly focused, you lose sight of the big picture, which can be perilous to a small business.

A business plan is based, first and foremost, on common sense. Ultimately, you need to believe in all the assertions and assumptions that you’re making. (If you don’t, investors never will.) Solid preparation will position you well for the future.

While others see lots of business in making games, Munich, Germany-based Scoreloop is trying to make money from game developers. The last time we wrote about them, I compared their strategy to selling shovels to miners during the Gold Rush.

The company is releasing a software developer kit for game developers to make their iPhone games stickier, through a combination of a web site and a social community on the iPhone. Once the game developers integrate Scoreloop’s software into their game, they can create a community for fans of the game. That community also becomes a subset of a larger Scoreloop community where game companies can cross-sell games to fans.

Mark Pincus, the chief executive of Zynga, pointed out in a recent interview that, as hundreds of new games appear every day, iPhone gamers can be a fickle bunch. And it’s hard to make games stand out on the iPhone, which has more than 13,000 games available.

Gamers are trying out a lot of games, but social features such as multiplayer play, scoreboards, and cross-selling could make the games last longer. Game developers can use Scoreloop to add features such as push notifications, which prompt someone when they should take a turn in a multiplayer game.

The Scoreloop Community includes a web site where gamers can make friends, create their own avatars, manage their games, and extend challenges for multiplayer games. It can find friends in Facebook and invite them into the Scoreloop Community, said Marc Gumpinger, chief executive of Scoreloop, in an interview. Players can also use the Scoreloop Community to discover new games.

Scoreloop is also launching an app on the Apple App Store that lets players engage in social games on the iPhone. They can use that app to get access to all sorts of games in the broader Scoreloop community.

The company competes with Aurora Feint, which is providing its own socialization features for game developers, as well as Ngmoco, which has its own social gaming features. Viximo also launched its own social gaming tool for iPhone developers. Another rival is Geocade, which makes it easy to set up global high score leaderboards.

Gumpinger says his company doesn’t compete with its partners, who may be leary of handing over customer data to rival game publishers.

Scoreloop’s system builds loyalty through “coins.” You win coins in game matches, by adding friends to your community or by downloading games. You can spend them on multiplayer games or other features. If you buy coins, Scoreloop gets a cut, as does the game developer.

Scoreloop can provide analytics information to the game developers. If many gamers drop out of a game at the same point, Scoreloop can tell the game developers that. Then the developers can fix the problem.

Scoreloop launched its platform earlier this year. The Scoreloop Community adds the dimension of the web to the platform.

Scoreloop’s partners’ games include 8bit Games, Flying, Aeio, Apollo XI, Bug Landing, GeoRain, inTENSity, Monster Mash, Orb, Sorty, Submarine, Tornado Alley, Zombie Pub Crawl and others. Developers are working on 50 more Scoreloop-enabled titles, Gumpinger said.

Scoreloop raised an undisclosed amount of money last fall from Target Partners. It has 16 employees.

[Are you an entrepreneur or executive active in mobile? Join us at MobileBeat 2009, our mobile conference for industry leaders. Sign up soon.]

Tivo is developing a version of its set-top box, which records TV shows and lets consumers skip commercials, to be sold in 1,100 Best Buy stores. Those digital video recorders will allow Best Buy products and services to be advertised to Tivo subscribers on their home TVs.

Best Buy is making a multi-year commitment to market Tivo. Best Buy is also financing a project to bring Tivo’s software and video search tools to Best Buy’s own brand of electronics, including its Insignia TVs.

The benefits for Best Buy include extending its relationship to customers outside of its stores. Best Buy moved down that path when it bought the music service Napster in September. Tivo is going to make Napster music available to its subscribers on their TVs. Tivo also wants customers to stop thinking of its as just a DVR box company.

If these guys get really cozy, don’t be surprised if Best Buy acquires Tivo one of these days.

GPS receivers threatened by smartphones — Remember the PDA? The New York Times says the GPS may be next to be absorbed by the ever-smarter smartphone. The popular TomTom line shipped 29 percent fewer units in the first quarter of 2009 compared to 2008.

I for one welcome our new Chrome overlords — PC World columnist David Coursey has a sane, small-business-friendly critique of the whole concept of the Google Chrome OS.

Fake Steve vs Chrome  – Humorist Dan Lyons puts on his Steve Job persona and drives the car into the swimming pool, literarily speaking.

Steve Sinofsky was named head of a big Microsoft division. You can call him the king of Windows.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer dismisses chatter that he needs to cut the price of the PlayStation 3, the most expensive game console.

Gartner says IT spending to drop 6 percent in 2009.

Kids are spending more time online. Nielsen says kids 2 to 11 are spending 63 percent more time online than they did five years ago.

EMC to buy Data Domain for $2.4 billion. The storage giant gets even bigger.

Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate, says that iPhone owners seem to be upgrading fast to the newest version of the iPhone’s 3.0 operating system since it was released on June 16. That may mean that iPhone developers may want to adopt the iPhone 3.0 software sooner rather than later. Of course, reports suggest that iPod Touch fans may lag behind the crowd because of fees associated with upgrading.

More than 60 percent of Digital Chocolate’s iPhone customers have upgraded to the new OS, Hawkins said in a blog post. The company sells mobile games and has a number of hits on the iPhone. Its tracking software can detect which version of the OS is on the customer’s phone.

Google released a FAQ today that gave some more details. First, the company says the new operating system will be free.

Its allies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Google will release the project as open source code later this year. And it said it is hiring software engineers in 10 different locations for Chrome OS work.

We’ve also heard the following details from background sources.

If you’re wondering exactly what a browser operating system is, it’s one that is slimmed down for the sole purpose of running web applications. It is built around the core of a Linux kernel, meaning it uses Linux to handle all of the cooperation that has to take place between software and hardware when you want to make images appear on the screen or print a document.

All of the interaction takes place within the browser. But the exact balance between the computing that happens on the client machine and the computing that happens on the server isn’t strictly known. That is, different applications will make different use of computing resources, wherever they are. And different types of computers will also vary in terms of how much they tap the Internet cloud for resources or how much they need a solid hardware client to do the processing tasks.

One of the big questions is whether games will be able to run on Chrome OS machines. Right now, running a game on a Linux netbook requires that the game be modified by the game publisher to run on Linux. That’s no trivial task, and game companies will do that only if there is hope of large sales. The Chrome OS can tap Native Client, a Google technology that gives apps running in the browser the power to tap the “native” resources, or the client hardware. O3D, meanwhile, is an applications programming interface (API — meaning a software layer that lets technologies talk to each other) that lets complex 3-D graphics run in a browser. The question is really whether Google is going to do the work required to motivate game companies to adapt their applications for the Chrome OS.

Because the Chrome OS project is open source, others will be able to tailor it to their needs. That’s why there isn’t a 100 percent-clear demarcation between where Chrome OS ends and Google’s smartphone-focused Android begins. Customers are going to have a choice when it comes to operating systems from Google. Android will run on many devices. The Chrome OS is browser-focused and is targeted at netbooks. Android and Chrome were born from two different sets of code. There is overlap between the two, but Google thinks customers will sort it out.

The project is relatively fresh. In other words, it would be wrong to suggest (as we did in our earlier story) that Google chief executive Eric Schmidt got started on this the day he became CEO in 2001. Rather, the team for the Chrome OS is the same team that worked on the Chrome browser, which debuted in September. It is not a giant team that has been toiling for years and years in an attempt to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft.

There are some big questions. Intel’s Moblin is a version of Linux with a user interface layer that makes netbooks more user friendly. It isn’t clear whether the Chrome OS and Moblin will be complementary or competitive.

We’ll try to squeeze more details out of the Google speakers at our MobileBeat 2009 event next week.

Marcus Ogawa from Quest has joined Qik’s board of directors. CampVentures’ Justin Camp has become a board observer.

The company had previously raised $4 million in funding through angel investors including Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff and Internet poster boy Mark Andreessen. Qik is located in Redwood City. Competitors besides YouTube include Kyte and Bambuser.

(*) I’m not sure if it’s really an exponential function or not. But thank God for cloud computing to hold all this stuff.

Cc:Betty

The Palo Alto, Calif., company rolled out some basic Twitter integration today. It’s still built around the company’s concept of a “mailspace” — basically, when someone sends a copy of an email to “betty@ccbetty.com” (Betty’s supposed to be your a virtual assistant), it creates a page on the Cc:Betty site that tracks the conversation, along with related files, images, events, and other elements. Now people who prefer to communicate via Twitter can contribute to the conversation too. They just send a direct message to “ccbetty” along with the conversation number assigned by the site, and the message gets added to the mailspace. Also, when you look at profiles of other users in the conversation, you can see their latest tweets (assuming they’ve added their Twitter account info).

There’s still a lot of work to do here — remembering/copying the conversation number is a lot less convenient than just cc’ing Betty, and there’s no way to see the flow of the conversation in Twitter, the way you can in email. But it’s the first step in a direction that Cc:Betty needs to move in, away from just organizing email (where it’s less essential for people who are happy with their existing email programs) and more towards a broader service that centralizes a conversation, no matter whether people participate via email, Twitter, Facebook, or another communication medium of their choice.

“Bottomline, this is Betty’s first step in expanding her range out of just email,” chief executive Michael Cerda says. “We’ll go very wide on this, very quickly. As for the Twitter functionality, it too will get more seamless, more comprehensive. We’re just scratching the service.”

Cc:Betty has raised a $1.5 million seed round from Venrock and assorted angel investors. It launched the beta test of the service at the DEMO conference in March.

(By the way, if you want to see Cerda play with the band featured in the screenshot below, you should come to VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference on July 16.)

The National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration (NTIA) and the Rural Utilities Service have issued their rules for those seeking funds from a $4 billion pool of stimulus funding for broadband projects. DLA Piper, a law firm following the giveaway, has more details.

These funds to improve deployment of broadband communications were included in the government’s $787 billion stimulus package. The first deadline for applications is set for Aug. 14 and you can start submitting applications as early as July 14.

The federal agencies will announce awards on Nov. 7 and then distribute the money within 30 days. The RUS has $2.4 billion to give out in $400 million chunks for projects serving remote or unserved regions of the country. It can give out up to $800 million per project in low-cost loans.

The NTIA can give out up to $1.6 billion in this round for projects such as public computing centers, sustainable broadband adoption, and other projects. There will be up to $3.2 billion available in future rounds, once the $4 billion initial amount has been given out.

[photo: ccsleeds]

Control4

These initiatives are far-flung, encompassing advanced metering, energy management displays showing consumers how much power they are using and how much it is costing, and a program aimed at teaching these consumers how to alter their behaviors and ultimately conserve more energy.

Specifically, the new money will be used to expand the number of devices and appliances that can be integrated into Control4’s so-called “Home Area Network.” By offering in-home displays, the company will come in direct competition with the likes of Google PowerMeter, Microsoft Hohm and smaller players like EnergyHub and Onzo. There are a lot of companies working on similar projects, but not so many that the space is saturated.

Just like its competitors — which also include Trilliant, SmartSynch and Ambient when it comes to smart metering — Control4 says that it will capitalize on the two-way communication between consumers and utilities enabled by smart meters to encourage the public, whether they be homeowners or business owners, to cut down on their energy consumption during peak periods.

Once consumers have more information about their power use, transmitted via ZigBee metering technology and broadband, they can then use Control4’s core technology to turn off any number of appliances and see how each decision impacts their energy use in real time.

For a while now, Control4 has had the technology to receive signals from utilities regarding peak times and grid disturbances, automatically turning down the air conditioner, switching off the dryer and adjusting the many other energy-hog appliances most people own. It is simply becoming more central to the company’s mission as cleantech, and especially smart grid innovation, holds the spotlight.

The recent round of funding came from Best Buy Capital, Mercato Partners, Foundation Capital, Frazier Technology Ventures, Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, vSpring Capital and University Venture Fund. It last raised capital in June 2008, bringing in $20 million to continue development of its remote control, sharpening its edge over competitors in that space, like iControl and 4HomeMedia.

The app is the first free all-in-one IM client to notify users of incoming chats, even when the program window is closed. eBuddy works with AIM, Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, Yahoo and MSN Windows Live Messenger, pulling all the services into one interface. An icon next to each of the buddies you’re chatting with helps you remember what program they’re on, while chat windows remain uniform across all services.

Nimbuzz and Fring, two similar services that also support VoIP, would be wise to follow suit with push notification, as it’s the strongest feature eBuddy has that they don’t.

Paid all-in-one messaging services were quick to support the feature. There’s Beejive ($10), Agile ($10) and and IM+ ($5). The last example offers a free version that doesn’t include push notification.

Apple introduced push notification, which pings users with updates even when they’re not using a given program, with the iPhone’s 3.0 OS. For up to 30 minutes after closing eBuddy, users are notified when a new message comes in. This is a clever use of the service because pop-up messages are a natural extension of the program rather than an intrusion.

Other perks to eBuddy include automatic reconnection if the iPhone’s signal drops and the ability to buzz buddies by shaking the smartphone, but it lacks some of the features of its paid competitors, such as Twitter support.

So far, eBuddy is faring well on the App Store, ranking as the top free social networking application in 21 countries, according to Distimo. Before launch eBuddy’s Lite version for PC users netted 2 million downloads. I’ve reached out to eBuddy for details on monetization efforts and post-launch plans and will update when I get a response.

eBuddy, formerly called e-Messenger, is based in Amsterdam with offices in London and San Francisco. It’s privately held and backed by Prime Technology Ventures and Lowland Capital Partners.

In that respect, Chrome OS is competing with the Crunchpad for the Most Popular Unavailable Internet Product of 2009. Both gadgets are aiming at what seems to be a consumer sweet spot for form factors: Bigger than an iPhone, smaller than a laptop, not on sale until next year.

There are plenty of Top 10 Chrome Whatever lists being drawn up right now. Here’s the shortlist for complainers:

1. Chrome evangelists are over-optimistic — Google’s Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson, plus whichever PR manager stayed up late to edit you, all of you get a VentureBeat high-five for your clearly-written post on the Official Google Blog. But my brain tripped and fell when I hit these words:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.

I worked in IT long enough to know that nothing “automatically works.” Many web-based applications will fail on Chrome, even though they shouldn’t.

2. No Chrome for your phone — Chrome OS is not Android, Google’s operating system for phones. The two are separate projects. Android is being developed to work on the smaller screens and keyboards of phones and for small devices up to netbook size. Chrome is meant to be used on the larger-than-a-phone screen of a netbook, laptop or desktop computer. Both Android and Chrome are open-source, so at least we can hope that someone, somewhere will connect the two.

Also, will my BlackBerry and my iPhone sync both ways through my Chrome OS netbook? Right now I get errors on both my Mac and my PC, so I might actually buy a $300 netbook that fixes sync.

3. Google is turning into Microsoft — Google’s engineer/bloggers say they’re going to open-source the code for Chrome, really soon. Back in the old days, they would’ve posted the source first and blogged about it later.

The premise of the site is simple: local consumers log in, search for a service they’re interested in like buying a TV or a pizza, request some perks like free delivery or 15 percent off, and wait for nearby businesses to respond with offers. Local merchants who are part of Spreezio make counter-offers and then the buyer picks the best one.

“Even before the recession reared its ugly head, I started to notice many for-lease signs around my neighborhood,” said founder Todd Chipman. “That got me thinking about solutions on how local businesses could compete in a more effective way.”

Launched two weeks ago in Willow Glen, a neighborhood of San Jose, Calif., the service has signed up 41 merchants looking to retain shoppers amid the downturn. Chipman says the company will also roll out nationally through partnerships with big-box retailers and plans to launch an iPhone application in the next two to three months.

Spreezio will earn money by charging for premium services to local businesses, which may include opportunities to market to consumers just at the moment when they’re deciding between offers.

“We have a real-time shopping solution. Shoppers have the ability to look at the deal, say that it’s a fantastic deal and accept it. Businesses can sweeten their offer or counter with something that makes sense for their business,” Chipman said. “The early bird catches the worm, so merchants are keeping the application open and walking by to see what deals have come into their bucket.”

Spreezio is self-funded and employs nine people. The company has a more intensive approach to comparison shopping than its competition, but it will take aggressive community building to execute it successfully. So far, after its first two weeks in beta testing in just the Willow Glen neighborhood, it’s only seen 52 customers join up. So it’s certainly got its work cut out for it. To entice local shoppers to make return visits to the site, Spreezio needs to have more than a single business make an offer on a consumer’s query, and that requires a critical mass of participating merchants. That’s easier to do when focused on a tightly-knit neighborhood but much harder to replicate on a national scale.

The company will also face competition from several other comparison shopping sites out there like Pricegrabber, Bizrate, NexTag, Shopzilla and Become along with offerings from AOL and Yahoo.