The Business of Play

First, note that even RIM is reluctant to frame the device as a direct iPad competitor. The press release for the PlayBook emphasizes its business appeal, citing “advanced security features, out-of-the-box enterprise support” and a brand new development platform aimed at IT departments. BlackBerry knows where its real strength lies, and it seems to know to avoid Apple’s, too.

RIM didn’t create the PlayBook to storm the consumer market. It did it because it had to, or face losing enterprise customers to iOS. Since a tablet is definitely useful in a business setting, people are already buying iPads for enterprise purposes, basically because they don’t have a choice. It’s probably true that most would prefer a BlackBerry option, so that’s what RIM’s providing. That also accounts for the timing of the announcement. RIM showed its hand early, but it’ll stop some businesses from making an IT buying decision until it can bring a device to market.

Early to Rise, Early to Bed

RIM may be retaining some customers on the enterprise side by announcing early, but it definitely isn’t doing itself any favors in the consumer market. First, Apple and other competitors know exactly what’s coming in six or so months, making it very easy to plan product updates that surpass the PlayBook’s hardware specs. Second, savvy consumers can tell that the PlayBook’s specs are on par with the iPad now, and perhaps beat it in some areas, but they also know Apple updates its devices at least yearly.

That means consumers are expecting an iPad with Retina Display and probably at least a front-facing camera with FaceTime at around the time the PlayBook arrives. The iPad revision’s upgrades will probably make the BlackBerry look decidedly last-gen.

The App Lead

Even if the BlackBerry PlayBook launches with a terrific development framework, and App World gets a significant update that makes it much more appealing to users, Apple’s lead in the app game is basically insurmountable at this point. That’s bad news for RIM’s hopes in both the consumer and the enterprise arena.

Forced to Follow

So is the PlayBook revolutionary? No, it’s a bitter pill RIM CEO Lazardis and Co. were forced to swallow, and it’s being rushed to market to defend a market segment that’s traditionally belonged to the BlackBerry maker. But RIM will continue to succeed in business, for the same reasons that it always has.

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After being asked the question, “How did you get first introduced to The Guild?,” more than 2,750 fans have responded with their stories of finding the show through friends, blogs and other services. And while there’s a wide variety of responses, Jeff Koenig, digital media producer at CJP Digital, was the first to notice one of the most popular answers: People discovering the show via the Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? music video, produced last year to promote the premiere of Season 3.

In a breakdown of early Facebook comments posted to his personal blog, Koenig found that of the first 249 respondents to the survey, 17 percent of fans cited Date My Avatar as what led them to the show, making it the second-most popular response behind “Referral from friend/relative.” It also well exceeds discovery through Xbox, the Dr. Horrible DVD and Netflix (though one commenter noted that at least in the case of Netflix, that might not be accurate).

Koenig’s results have not been updated since the initial 249 comments, but a casual scan of more recent responses supports the fact that Date My Avatar was a key gateway for fans — whether they found it through a friend, MSN.com (where the video was at one point featured) or by searching for “world of warcraft songs.”

It’s no wonder they created the Bollywood-inspired followup video Game On, which — since debuting a month ago — has racked up more than 500,000 views on Bing and more than 600,000 views on YouTube. Not only that, but when released on iTunes, the song beat Katy Perry’s California Gurls.

It makes sense, if you think about it: Date My Avatar‘s slick production values combine nicely with a strong nerd sensibility to make it the best conceivable calling card for the show. Also, if you’re familiar with the song and you’ve read this far, be honest — is it stuck in your head again? Because it sure is stuck in mine.

UPDATE: A Guild rep writes in to say:

The Facebook wall post was simply a matter of engaging our fans, as we always try to do with our supporting web and social media sites. It’s clearly not a statistically significant ‘survey,’just a discussion we started with our fans.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Should You Super-Syndicate Your Web Series?

Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Zynga, the leading social gaming company behind Facebook hits such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, would likely be worth as much as $5 billion if it were publicly traded instead of privately held, according to SecondShares.com, a group of former equity analysts who spend their time researching the value of private online companies such as Zynga, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. SecondShares based its estimate of Zynga’s value on the number of outstanding shares, estimated revenue per user, growth rate and other metrics, and projected that by 2015 the game maker could have a theoretical market value as high as $10 billion.

Given the pent-up demand that such private companies represent, there’s a lot of interest in valuing them — since there is a chance they could go public someday — and also in trading their shares through secondary markets, although Facebook recently barred its employees from selling their stock through such vehicles.

The authors of the Zynga report — former Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs equity analyst Lou Kerner, former Sanford Bernstein research analyst Eli Halliwell and Gamers Media CEO Jay Gould — say Zynga is the leader in the social gaming market with 237 million monthly active users and six of the top seven social games. That gives the company more than four times as many monthly active users as Playfish, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $400 million. China’s Tencent Holdings is the only online game company that is larger than Zynga, the report says, with 400 million monthly active users.

Based on an estimate of what Zynga likely makes in revenue from the average user, Second Shares projects that the company will pull in about $500 million in revenue this year, and could be making as much as $1.6 billion per year in five years. The analysts say that shares of the company are currently trading in private, illiquid markets at about $9 a share, but would likely be worth almost twice as much if Zynga were to go public, and that Zynga has a number of strengths that justify a premium valuation, including the fact that it can cross-market games to users of other Zynga games, and that it’s quickly able to duplicate other successful games that competitors come up with. From the report:

As with Facebook, Twitter, and other high profile private companies, you can buy Zynga shares in the (illiquid) private market, where about $6 million worth of shares traded hands last year through marketplaces like SecondMarket.com. Only accredited investors are allowed to participate. Currently, the ask price is about $9/share, implying a market cap for Zynga of $2.8 billion.

Toward the end of its research report, however, Second Shares mentions a number of potential risks for Zynga and its valuation, including:

• Farmville currently accounts for an estimated 50 percent of the company’s revenue, and “appears to have peaked in terms of popularity.”
• Facebook blocked applications from providing notifications in newsfeeds last month, removing “a major source of free advertising.”
• Four of Zynga’s six major game hits “appear to have peaked or to be in decline.”
• Zynga is dependent on Facebook, and growth at the social network could slow, or the network could harm Zynga somehow.
• Online gaming is a risky, hit-driven business, and there are a lot of competitors.

In February, a research firm called Next Up estimated that Zynga was worth as much as $3 billion, in a report it did for private share-trading site SharesPost.com, where Zynga is currently valued at $2.6 billion. Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $180 million in Zynga in December.

In November, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities said Zynga could be worth as much as $1 billion, given the $400 million that Electronic Arts paid for Playfish. At that point, Inside Social Games estimated that Zynga would have revenue of $210 million for 2009 and $355 million this year, and a statement from the company said that 1 million of its 200 million active monthly users were buying virtual goods.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Bake It Pretty

The fact that many people love games isn’t really that new. Retailers and even our own governments have used our love of games to sell us products and hook us on lotteries and whatever else they can think of to boost revenue. But the rise of online games such as World of Warcraft and the social and “casual” games popularized by Zynga and other companies on Facebook, such as Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium, has arguably made gaming a far bigger part of our culture than it has ever been — not to mention location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which have explicit game-like features built in. Online payment giant PayPal says that Zynga was its second-largest merchant last year, and PayPal does business with some of the largest companies in the world. And get ready for even more games: Flurry Analytics says that its research shows almost half of the apps that are being developed for the upcoming Apple iPad are games.

What is the impact of all that gaming on our society? One academic, Lee Sheldon of Indiana University, says the generation that has grown up with ubiquitous online gaming is bringing that culture with it into the educational system — and ultimately, into the workforce. “As the gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce, they are willing and eager to apply the culture and learning techniques they bring with them from games,” Sheldon, an assistant professor at the university’s department of telecommunications, told ITNews. He said older managers will have to “figure out how to educate themselves to the gamer culture, and how to speak to it most effectively.”

It’s something with which Sheldon himself is already experimenting. Over the last year, he started grading two of his classes (both involved with game design) using a system based on “experience points,” or XP, similar to the way gamers in World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer games award points for various tasks. Students started the year at level one, with zero XP, and then gained points — and higher grades — by completing “quests” and “crafting,” which corresponded to giving presentations and doing exams and quizzes. Students also formed “guilds” similar to the gaming groups that rule WoW and other multiplayer games. Sheldon says that his students seemed far more engaged than they had been before.

A similar phenomenon was the topic of a panel at the recent SXSW conference in Austin, where Christopher Poole, founder of the controversial discussion forum known as 4chan, and web historian Jason Scott discussed the site and its culture — which in some cases consists of offensive material, but also involves public advocacy through offshoots such as the Anonymous group. According to a description from Austin360, Scott compared the behavior at 4chan to a game, but one in which the objective was to come up with something more shocking and/or hilarious than your competitors.

Scott noted that another site behaves in almost the exact same way: Wikipedia. And he’s got a point — the “crowdsourced” encyclopedia relies in many cases on unknown and unpaid editors and writers to produce and structure and verify its content, people who to some extent compete for the recognition of their peers on the site, and in some cases wind up “levelling up” to become senior editors and members of the internal Wikipedia “cabal” of site managers. Although Wikipedia doesn’t explicitly award experience points, the concept is the same, and it motivates people in similar ways.

The moderation of comments at Slashdot is based on a very similar system. Users are able to gain “karma points” through positive actions such as posting sensible comments, voting on other comments and flagging abusive comments. When they get enough points, they are selected by the site’s algorithm to be official moderators, and can then “spend” the points they have removing comments. In such a system, it doesn’t ultimately matter whether someone is anonymous or not, because there is an incentive for them to follow the rules and behave properly (although there are always users who don’t care about the rewards and try to “troll” or disrupt any site).

The bottom line is that good games take advantage of people’s innate desire to compete with each other, but balance that with their need to receive rewards, including the approval of their peers — rewards that in some cases can be used to modify their behavior in certain ways. Those are principles that don’t just apply to games. Jesse Schell, a former creative director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, had a great presentation at the DICE 2010 conference last month in which he talked about the rise of social gaming and what we can learn from it, which is embedded below.

http://g4tv.com/lv3/44277

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Stock Xchange and Flickr user chanchan222

With a platform that lets developers build lightweight, online 3-D games — perfectly suited for the iPhone OS-based devices — Unity became a disruptor in the games business virtually overnight. And it’s been on a bit of a roll over the past year, with a client roster that includes big names like Electronic Arts, the Cartoon Network and Disney. Mobile developers love the company, which secured a $5.5 million Series A round led by Sequoia in October of 2009. But it wasn’t always salad days for the company, which was originally based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is now headquartered in the Bay Area, as is made clear in my chat with Unity CEO David Helgason.

Helgason recounts how the company made it through some some of the darker days during its eight-year history. Some highlights from our talk include:

• The co-founders would live off bread that was supposed to be thrown out from the cafe in which Helgason worked.
• Since the company had no money, the three co-founders could focus on development and customer support, building a loyal fanbase.
• When Apple included Unity at a developers conference, the company didn’t have the infrastructure to support the publicity, so that opportunity was wasted.

Perhaps the best (or grimmest, depending on your point of view) advice Helgason has for entrepreneurs is that when you find your idea, devote your whole life to it, almost like a religious movement.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Unity

If you want to see a Twitter mob in its larval stage, just do a search on Zynga or Farmville and Haiti and you will see one emerging over a report that the social-gaming company kept 50 percent of the money that it raised in donations for the country in the wake of a devastating earthquake. The report originally appeared in a Brazilian magazine called Superinteressante, which did a feature on Zynga and Farmville and mentioned in the piece that it had only given 50 percent of what it raised to Haiti. That was in turn picked up by a leading Brazilian newspaper called Folha de Sao Paulo , which said that Zynga had admitted to only sending 50 percent of the money it raised for Haiti to that country.

That story got written about in several places around the Web, including at Social Media Today (in a post that has since been removed and replaced with a different one featuring an altered headline) as well as at the opinion site True/Slant, where Marcelo Ballve — a former Associated Press reporter in Brazil — summarized the Falho story about how Zynga had misled Farmville players into thinking 100 percent of their donations would be going to Haiti for earthquake relief (he has since posted an update). The story was also written up at Gawker, which also repeated the allegations.

The Folha story, however, blurs together two Farmville campaigns to raise money for Haiti: One was set up before the earthquake, and specifically said that only 50 percent of the money raised would be sent to Haiti (a screenshot is embedded below). The second, which involved the purchase within the game of special “white corn” for a user’s farm, said that 100 percent of the proceeds would be sent to earthquake relief. According to an emailed statement from a Zynga spokesperson that I’ve embedded below, this is exactly what happened (a similar statement has been posted at the bottom of both the True/Slant post and the Folha story, and referred to by Gawker, but not by Social Media Today, although the latter has since posted an update and apology). The initial campaign for Haiti raised $1.2-million for the country, and the subsequent “white corn” campaign raised an additional $1.5-million.

Meanwhile, dozens of Twitter messages are still being posted every minute (based on a recent survey of the social network) saying that Zynga “admits to keeping half the money it raised for Haiti,” despite the repeated efforts by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus to rebut such claims through his own Twitter account. The eagerness with which people seem to believe such claims could have something to do with the language barrier between the initial reports and those who have repeated them — but it could also be a result of some negative press that Zynga has received in the past, alleging “scammy” behavior related to lead-generation offers within its games.

If nothing else, Zynga’s current woes are just another example of social media’s ability to spread both information and misinformation at lightning-fast speeds. For another recent example, see our report about the “death” of folk legend Gordon Lightfoot.

http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=27839271&access_key=key-zqvuv9o693cxpolgbn4&page=1&viewMode=list

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rusty Boxcars.

eBay CEO John Donahoe told a Goldman Sachs technology conference today that the company’s PayPal subsidiary wants to become the de facto payment engine for social media, the Wall Street Journal reports. “We want to be the platform on which some of these social-media applications get built,” he told the attendees, referring to Twitpay — a service that allows users to send payments via Twitter and was recently acquired (after failing to gain much traction) — as an example. PayPal has been trying to open itself up to developers in order to allow them to build payment more easily into their services and software, to that end launching a developers conference to talk about its open platform several months ago. And it has had some success attracting social networks, including Facebook, which said last week that it will use PayPal for transactions for virtual goods on the site.

Donahoe effectively pitched his service as the only game in town for large-scale social payments, saying:

The risk and fraud capabilities you need, the anti-money laundering…the ability to do it cross-border are very different things than just providing a virtual currency.

Facebook confirmed when it announced the PayPal deal that it was the complications of multiple currencies and international transactions that led it to choose the eBay unit as a partner, since 70 percent of its users live outside the U.S. It’s worth noting, however, that PayPal has had its own difficulties with international payments, as a recent ban on transfers to India illustrates. Donahoe also told the conference that he sees a growing demand for payments involving digital goods, and that PayPal has been talking to companies including Zynga, the leading maker of Facebook-based social games.

I see that trend, particularly in virtual goods, continuing. PayPal is well positioned to be the foundation for many of these digital goods.

The Facebook arrangement makes PayPal the engine behind Facebook Credits, an in-network payment scheme that the social network is pushing game makers and others to use, which gives Facebook 30 percent of the proceeds from each transaction. According to one analyst, such payments could become a $100 million business.

PayPal still has a lot of work to do before it can become the engine behind every social network and social media service, however. As Kevin Kelleher pointed out recently, the service is barely even present on mobile devices, despite the fact that the iPhone and other smartphones have been a dominant market force in social networking for well over a year now. Instead, much of the recent buzz has been around Square, the hot new mobile payment gizmo created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. As entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel noted in a blog post about Donahoe’s pitch to Goldman Sachs, PayPal has to start doing some innovating of its own, instead of just hoping to hitch its wagon to everyone else’s innovations.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user cindy47452

More than 24 percent of those who responded to the survey (full results in PDF form here) said they regularly play social games, a category that includes Facebook games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium. According to survey company Info Solutions Group, that level of response suggests a total social gaming population of approximately 100 million. Social gamers were defined as those who said they play games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a week. The market for social games has been growing so quickly that companies that make them, such as Zynga and Crowdstar, have become investment and acquisition targets.

Social gaming seems to appeal to a much older demographic than traditional video games, perhaps in part because social games are easier to play for short periods of time, are largely free, and don’t involve sophisticated equipment or gratuitous violence. According to a recent survey by Royal Pingdom, the average age of social networking site users in general is also older — the largest single group is between 35 and 44 years of age. More than 60 percent of Facebook users are over 35.

The PopCap study showed that 55 percent of all social gamers in the U.S. are women, as are almost 60 percent of those in the UK. The average age in the U.S. is 48, which is substantially older than the 38-year-old average in the UK, and 46 percent of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared with just 23 percent in the UK. Only 6 percent of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

According to the survey, women make up the majority of avid social gamers, with 38 percent of female social gamers saying they play social games several times a day, vs. just 29 percent of males. Women are also more likely to play social games with their real-world friends than men are (68 percent vs. 56 percent) and are nearly twice as likely as men to play social games with relatives (46 percent vs. 29 percent). The vast majority (95 percent) of social gamers play multiple times per week, and nearly two-thirds play at least once a day.

The largest single group of social gamers — 41 per cent of those surveyed — work full time, while 13 percent are retired and 11 percent are homemakers. In terms of educational background, less than half of those who play social games in the U.S. are college graduates. One-third of those in the U.S. earn less than $35,000 a year while 17 percent earn between $35,000 and $49,000; 21 percent make between $50,000 and 75,000 and 21 percent earn more than $75,000 a year.

Other points of interest from the study include:

• More than 60 percent of social gamers say their average session lasts more than half an hour, and 10 percent say it lasts 3 hours or more. About a third (35 percent) say their consumption has increased over the past three months, compared to 10 percent who said it has decreased.
• Facebook is by far the most popular destination for social gamers, with 83 percent of those surveyed saying they play games there, compared with 24 percent who play on MySpace, 7 percent on Bebo and 5 percent on Friendster.
• Social gamers spend 39 percent of their time on social networking sites/services playing games, compared with chatting with/messaging friends (17 percent) and playing solo games (15 percent). Nearly half (49 percent) said that when they connect to social networks, they do so specifically to play social games.
• The most popular games are Farmville (69 percent of those who play it say they play once a week or more), Bejeweled (65 percent say once a week or more), Texas Hold’em Poker (63 percent) and Cafe World (61 percent).
• A little over half (53 percent) of social gamers say they’ve earned and/or spent virtual currency in a game, but only 28 percent have purchased virtual currency with real-world money and only 32 percent have purchased a virtual gift.

“This study establishes social games as a fast-growing and quickly maturing pastime for an enormous portion of the population,” Robin Boyar of Thinktank Research said in a statement. “With more than 80 percent of social gamers stating that playing social games strengthens their relationship with friends, family and colleagues, social gaming reinforces the core appeal of social networks.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Olivander

Of course, the exact details of YouTube’s beginnings have been disputed. Hurley and co-founder Steve Chen originally claimed they came up with the idea for the video sharing site during a dinner party due to their frustration over the lack of options to share videos online. However, the third co-founder Jawed Karim, who left the company early on, has long disputed the story, and Hurley eventually told Time Magazine that the dinner party founding myth was “strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story.” Turns out, this hasn’t been the only case of selective memory.

Let’s face it: There’s nothing better than a company founded with a huge goal in mind that eventually becomes true. Take Google for example, and the idea to organize the world’s information. Or Apple, and its quest to revolutionize the world of personal computing — a goal that can every so often be invoked again, most recently with the introduction of the iPad.

Hurley wrote in his blog post that the “core beliefs and principles that guided YouTube’s creation” were shared success, quick evolution and the idea that “video gives people a voice,” something he illustrated by referencing the uprising in Iran, the earthquake in Haiti and the U.S. President. Of course, one could wonder whether the Obama really needs to be given a voice, but that’s beside the point. Rather, it would be interesting to ask: Was YouTube’s founding really about empowering people all around the world?

Not if we can believe numerous articles that have been written about the company in the past. The original idea apparently was to do something like a Hot or Not for videos and have lots of pretty girls on the site to drive traffic. Videos as an asset for Ebay and similar auction sites was another early scenario for the company, according to the aforementioned Time Magazine piece. It wasn’t until people actually started to use the site that its real direction became clear.

Of course, there would be no shame in admitting this. After all, isn’t the whole Silicon Valley comprised of accidental empires? Maybe it’s time for YouTube to get real and stop with the spin about its history.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Is Facebook Video Chat the Future of Social Media?

Things seem to be humming along in the Facebook game market: Zynga, the leading Facebook game company, with popular apps such as Mafia Wars and Farmville (whose users recently sent half a billion valentines to each other in 48 hours), has agreed to acquire fellow game maker Serious Business, whose apps include Friends For Sale. And Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Crowdstar, another leading maker of Facebook games, whose apps include Happy Aquarium. The report notes, however, that a deal is not final, and that informed sources said Crowdstar may “choose to stay independent with investment from a private equity firm.”

The value of the Zynga deal hasn’t been disclosed, but Serious Business has about 6 million total registered users of its Facebook games — including Friends For Sale, Happy Hour and Rock Legends — according to analytics provider AppData. That puts it at No. 36 on the Facebook developer leaderboard. The company was founded by several former employees of search engine technology company Powerset, and got $4 million in financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2008.

Zynga, which got an investment of $180 million from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies in December, has a total of about 232 million registered users for its games and apps, including Texas Hold ‘Em, Farmville and Mafia Wars. According to the Bloomberg report, a deal between Crowdstar and Microsoft could be worth as much as $200 million. If the software maker does wind up buying Crowdstar, it will be interesting to see how (or if) that changes Microsoft’s relationship with Facebook, since it owns a stake in the social network (Digital Sky also owns a stake).

AppData says that Crowdstar has about 50 million registered users for its 11 Facebook apps and games, which include Happy Aquarium, Happy Pets and Know-It-All Trivia — although Happy Aquarium is by far the largest with more than half of the total. AppData has Crowdstar at No. 4 on the Facebook developer leaderboard, just below Facebook itself. Second place is held by RockYou, which has 90 million registered users of games and apps such as its Horoscopes service. RockYou raised a $50 million funding round in November from SoftBank.

The Facebook and “social gaming” market got a huge boost last fall, when Electronic Arts — whose PC and console game business has reportedly been suffering from lower sales that have hit the game maker hard — bought Facebook game company Playfish in November for $400 million. Playfish has about 60 million registered users for its games, including Pet Society.

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Still running a PowerPC Mac and hurting for some serious browser speed, up-to-date security and web standards compatibility? Being open-source applications, Mozilla’s web browsers and Thunderbird email client are open to being breathed on by third-party developers, several of whom specialize in optimization of particular versions of the Mac OS — such as Chris Latko’s Mac Intel-optimized variants of Firefox.

Terrific Results

However, for us PowerPC holdouts, a reader recently tipped me to some PowerPC-optimized Mozilla web browsers plus Thunderbird by R.P. Mozely, noting that he’s been getting terrific results and highly recommends these tweaked apps.

That sounded promising, as I’m still using two G4-upgraded Pismo PowerBooks for production work, and haven’t found the latest Mozilla gecko-based browsers to be particularly happy campers on the old laptops running OS 10.4 .11. So I keep reverting to old Netscape Navigator 9, which works nicely, but is getting long in the tooth, beginning to encounter some limitations content-compatibility wise. Of course it hasn’t had any security updates for nearly two years, since development was terminated.

Squeezing Every Bit of Speed Potential Out

Now this R.P. Mozely cat doesn’t just provide a one-size-fits-all PowerPC generic optimization, but discrete dedicated versions for G3 PowerPC 750, G4 PowerPC 7400, G4 PowerPC 7450, and G5 PowerPC 970, presumably all the better to squeeze every bit of potential speed out of each respective processor. My hot-rodder Pismos have 550 MHz G4 7400 CPUs, so last weekend I proceeded to download the G4 7400 optimized builds of Firefox 3.5.6, Camino 2.0.1, and the SeaMonkey 2.0.1 Internet suite application.

Worth the Effort?

So was it worth the effort? I think so. These browsers are definitely faster than the stock builds, performing remarkably well on the old Pismo, even when it really needed a restart to clear the memory heap, dipping into virtual memory swapfiles on the hard drive routinely.

I had been especially hopeful that the PPC-optimized Camino would work well, and it does. My seat-of-the-pants assessment is that it’s the fastest browser I’ve used on the Pismo — livelier even than Opera 10, which is no slouch speed-wise itself.

Sluggishness Banished

I’ve found recent versions of Firefox, Camino and SeaMonkey a bit sluggish on the old G4 machines, which is a big part of why I keep using Navigator 9. But that complaint is pretty much eliminated with these PowerPC optimized builds of the current Gecko browsers, at least in their G4 7400 iterations. However, for what it’s worth, I think the Camino variant is the pick of the litter.

If you’re still hanging in with a PowerPC Mac, I think you’ll thank yourself for taking the trouble to download one or more of these PowerPC-optimized browser versions.

Last spring, after leaving Yahoo and taking some time off, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield started a company called Tiny Spark Speck with four other members of the original Flickr team, and started work on a browser-based, massively multiplayer game. The product of that effort was Glitch, which Tiny Spark Speck launched this week with a web site and a video highlight reel. The game is in invitation-only alpha, Butterfield said, and then this summer will be moved to open beta in preparation for a full-scale public launch later this year. In a phone interview on Tuesday, the Flickr co-founder talked about how he had always wanted to build a massively multiplayer fantasy game, about the benefits of building a 2-D game rather than a 3-D one, and about how he originally wanted to start a bank.

GigaOM: Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of Glitch?

Butterfield: It’s something I’ve wanted to work on since I was a little kid. When I played SimCity — the original one, I guess, in the mid-80s — I remember always being curious what it would be like to play a game like that, where you got to play from the perspective of one little ant driving around the freeway rather than from the god’s eye point of view. It was the collective or emergent action of all the players that determined the way the simulation unfolded.

GigaOM: Did you want to start a game company right after you left Yahoo?

Butterfield: I knew that I wanted to work with the same group of people again. I actually tried for awhile to convince them that we should make a bank instead, in late 2008. That would be incredibly boring, but I think there would have been some nice opportunities to change the world on that front. But a game is just as good, and everyone else was much more interested in building a game than building a bank. I guess if you’re an engineer, banks are phenomenally boring to work on.

GigaOM: What’s your view of where the gaming industry is now?

Butterfield: I’ve been watching everything that’s been happening over the last five years. The pace seems to be accelerating. We’ve seen a lot of increased uptake of what we’ve been calling casual games, and at the same time the iPhone’s done a lot for indie game development. With the Wii, tens of millions of people are buying their first console, and of course there is the rise of social games on Facebook. All these different avenues…it’s like, letting a thousand flowers bloom. There is all kinds of interesting stuff happening all over the place.

GigaOM: Flickr also started as a massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. How is this different from what you envisioned then?

Butterfield: Obviously in the last eight years, a huge number of things have changed. From the perspective of 1982, hardware is effectively free. But the biggest shift is that there are now hundreds of millions of people using Facebook, whereas back then Friendster was yet to launch and when it got to a million people that was a huge deal. So there’s just a lot more people online now, using the web in a social way, and that wasn’t really such a big thing before. So it’s a much better time to be working on this.

GigaOM: With all those different platforms out there, are you planning to extend Glitch into any of those other markets?

Butterfield: In the ideal future, we would like to have it be playable across all kinds of platforms. At first it will only work in a browser on a PC, but we will have companion applications for mobile — so iPhone and Android — that give you a more limited amount of gameplay but allow you to kind of interact with the game without having the whole client open. Because it’s massively multiplayer and you’re encountering other people, talking to friends or strangers, it’s tough to play without a keyboard in front of you, because that’s the way people talk. But if, for example, you’re participating in an auction, you should be able to use the iPhone app for that sort of thing; or if there’s a local election happening or some other asynchronous social interactions, that kind of stuff can happen in a mobile app.

GigaOM: Tell us a bit about the game. What are players trying to accomplish?

Butterfield: The 30-second version of the backstory is that it’s a billion years in the future and everything worked out perfectly — everyone’s enlightened and it’s peaceful and and just perfect. And of course, that’s a very unlikely future. One day scientists discover that and determine that the solution is to go back to the past and fix it so the future actually happens. Now, as everyone knows, the world was originally spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants, wandering sacred paths on a barren asteroid, and singing and thinking and humming the whole world into existence. So we have to go back into the past, into the minds of the giants and grow the world — so that the future can actually come to pass.

GigaOM: You’ve mentioned Facebook games such as Farmville and World of Warcraft. Is Glitch anything like either of those?

Butterfield: When you compare it to Farmville or any of what we’re calling social games for Facebook, they’re all single-player games with a little bit of access from my single-player game experience to your single-player game experience. You can fertilize your friend’s crops but that’s about it. If someone’s better at growing corn, for example, in their farm in Farmville, I can’t just buy their corn. There’s no economy, no real interaction; what I do doesn’t really make any difference to you. So this is what people used to call a persistent world game, a massively multiplayer game — but it’s different from most massively multiplayer games because the focus isn’t on fighting. And the reason for that is just that once you have fighting in a game, then the game becomes about fighting, and it’s really hard to fit in any other kind of significant human interaction. When it’s about getting better weapons and better armor so you can kill more impressive foes, then that ends up being what the game’s about, and we didn’t want it to be about just that.

GigaOM: Is it the type of game that takes hundreds of hours to play, like some other massively multiplayer games?

Butterfield: People can sit down and have a multi-hour game session, but they should be able to get some satisfaction out of short bursts as well — 10 minutes snuck in at work, stuff like that. It is definitely possible to wander around the world by yourself, and go exploring and — to use the game industry word, to grind — to do the repetitive tasks and level yourself up by yourself. But there are other people always there. There’s plenty of opportunities to work with people so that for example, a lot of the larger, more expensive things that you can build or develop in a new area require a group of people who have different skills and pool their resources. But there can be competition as well — economic is the most obvious, but I think we’ll see a lot of sort of tongue-in-cheek politics and even religions. Someone started the Church of Emergent Complexity back in the Game Neverending days.

GigaOM: Glitch is a bit of a throwback design-wise to the early days of 2-D, side-scrolling PC games. Why did you decide to do that?

Butterfield: It was partly a technology decision, because it’s much easier to develop in that way, and the tolerance for latency is a lot higher. But also 3-D, while it often looks beautiful, is a lot more complicated for people to deal with. Just physically moving a 3-D avatar around in a virtual world is a lot more challenging than in 2-D. If you look at something like Second Life, there are many differences, and just moving around in Second Life is a challenge for a lot of people. But everyone can sort of immediately grok the 2-D, side-scrolling, platformer method of moving and that kind of gameplay.

GigaOM: What kind of funding does Tiny Spark Speck have?

Butterfield: We did a small angel round of $1.5 million last spring, and the bulk of that was Accel Partners, plus there were about a half a dozen angels including Marc Andreessen; Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn; Rob Solomon from Technology Crossover Ventures and the former CEO of Sidestep; as well as Brad Horowitz, who is VP of products at Google. So there has been a pretty big group of people. We’re going to be doing a Series A round sometime soon.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Apple’s original implementation of “smart” file management isn’t just limited to the Finder, and in fact, you’ve probably seen it more often in other applications like Address Book and Mail.

Here are some ideas of how you can harness the power of these two applications using the same idea as Smart Folders.

Smart Groups

Address Book provides support for smart groups which allow for dynamic content, just like a smart folder. As new content is added that meet your guidelines, the group will automatically update.

Creating a Smart Group is as simple as going to File and selecting “New Smart Group…” or by clicking the plus icon (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. Then give your group a name and set of criteria. As you add your second criterion, you’ll have the choice for your group to consist of any of your rules or all of your rules.

Here’s some ideas for useful smart groups.

Upcoming Birthdays

Interested in who might have a birthday this month? Set the birthday criterion to include entries that occur within the next month. (This will include all birthdays within a month of the current date or when you click to view the group.)

Missing Email Addresses

To see a list of people who you do not have an email address for, set the email criterion to include entries that are not set.

My Coworkers

Most companies offer their employees an email address that uses the corporate domain. If you created a smart group for “email” that contains “yourdomain.com” then you will have a group that is always updated with all of your coworkers. An extra bonus, these Smart Groups also show up and autocomplete in Mail.

Or Anything You Want

Since the Address Book allows for a “notes” section on each card, you can use this region to “tag” cards and then use a smart group to show results based on that information. (You could also repurpose one of the other standard fields for this use.) For example, throwing the word “family” into the appropriate contacts’ card would allow for you to create a smart group that just showed your family members.

Currently, Smart Groups cannot be synced to iPods or iPhones. While they also cannot be synced through MobileMe to me.com or Windows computers, they can still sync through MobileMe to other Macs.

Smart Mailboxes

Mail has its own flavor of smart file management too with the implementation of smart mailboxes. To create one, use the Mailbox menu or the plus (+) icon in the lower left of the message viewer and select “New Smart Mailbox.”

Give your smart mailbox a name and choose the appropriate criteria for your mailbox. With the ability to create criteria based on recipient, subject, mailbox, date, message, attachment and more, you can create some pretty powerful mailboxes to help organize your workflow. Here’s a few suggestions.

Recently Viewed

Most people process tons of email on a daily basis and frequently people have multiple email addresses for different purposes. With all of these messages, is there an easy way to find that email you were looking at last night?

Sure! Create a new smart mailbox and select “date last viewed” and choose “is in the last” and specify a number of days.

Recently Sent

If I wanted to quickly find an email that I had sent recently, I could create a Smart Group that showed me messages in the mailbox “Sent” that were “date received” in the past 2 days. Also make sure you tick the “Include messages from Sent” checkbox.

Emails from My Family

Remember the family smart group we made in our Address Book earlier? We can create a smart mailbox to show us all the messages from those family members.

Select “Sender is Member of Group” and then choose the appropriate group from the drop down menu.

Similar to Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes do not sync to iPods or iPhones nor to me.com or Windows computers through MobileMe. They will only sync via MobileMe to other Macs.

Do you use Smart Groups or Smart Mailboxes? Have any tips you’d like to share? Share them in the comments.

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Once a tool employed mainly by hardcore users, GeekTool seemed to begin exploding across OS X desktops in 2009. But despite its widening usage, many still are unfamiliar with this fantastic utility (you’ve probably seen it, and not even realized) or just don’t know how to leverage it. If you fit either of the above stereotypes, then today is your lucky day, because I’m going to point out some great examples of GeekTool, and just how to put it to good use for yourself.

Simply put, GeekTool displays information at the desktop level (meaning it’s not clickable), right on top of your wallpaper image, in a ‘Heads-up-display’fashion. It’s interesting (to me at least) to see how the use of a simple yet powerful tool evolves. For those of us who began playing with GeekTool long ago, it was used in a very utilitarian fashion — the output was simple lines of text displayed on the Mac’s desktop (three year old screencast here shows what I mean). And while the content that we’re seeing displayed with GeekTool hasn’t changed much, some designer-types out there have taken the display of that information to the next level. The great part is that it’s super easy to do with GeekTool — but more on that in a bit.

Inspiration

To get some inspiration — and a great feel for what we’re talking about — check out Flickr for photos tagged with ‘geektool’, or LifeHacker’s Featured [Mac] Desktops. I’ll be here, so take your time. Or if you’re ADHD, here are a couple quick examples:

So some good stuff, eh? It’s pretty neat to see the way that GeekTool can be used to morph meaningful data into specific wallpaper images, or going that extra yard, to coordinate with a custom GUI theme. Clearly some people have a solid eye for design, and the time to monkey around and put in some extra awesome. Not so much for me, which is why I pointed you in the direction of some great examples. I however, threw in some extra Geeklets on my desktop to show you what you can do.

Getting Started

So now you’re probably primed and ready to put GeekTool to work for you. It’s not very difficult, so let’s get started. I’ll assume you’ve already installed it. Since it’s a Preference Pane, it lives in the System Preferences (found under the Apple menu or in your Applications folder).

There are three types of information you can display using GeekTool:

• File – Originally intended for viewing Console type log files. Point it at any text file you choose — those with text-based todo lists will love this feature.
• Image – GeekTool’s developer identifies this as useful for viewing the images generated by monitoring tools. While Analytics and whatnot may be just what the doctor ordered, you can display any image, or image URL with this.
• Shell – This is where the real power lies with GeekTool. Run either a Shell Command, or point at a Shell Script file to run. If your bash-fu is strong, you’ll be running wild. But fear not, there are a multitude of examples out there to lean on if you need some help with this geekier part.

To begin using a Geeklet (as they’ve been deemed in the 3.0 version), select the File, Image, or Shell that you want to use, and drag it to your desktop. Once there, the Geeklet properties window will populate, which is where all the magic (configuration) happens.

Drag & Drop

The great thing about the latest version of GeekTool is that you can drag and drop your Geeklet wherever you want it on screen. In earlier versions, there was a lot of trial and error involved as you had to enter the coordinates and dimensions of a Geektlet. It was time consuming to say the least — but you can still tweak these settings in the Properties window if you need to fine tune . Once it’s where you want it, define the image or file location of the data you want displayed, or drop a shell command in there. If it’s necessary, there’s space to set a refresh time in seconds.

Bling

Now we come to the part that the designers like. Click the aptly named button, “Click here to set font & color…” Up pops an OS X window that should be familiar for selecting font, font color, font size, and so on. Your Geeklet updates in real time, so you can adjust your settings on the fly. Suddenly those log files don’t seem so bland anymore…well, maybe not.

Organization

The crazier you get with GeekTool, the more Geeklets you may find yourself creating. You can group them into categories, and turn them on and off as desired. The uses for this obviously vary from person to person based on their workflows. But I could easily see having a set of Geeklets in a group for work information, and a set for home use. A GeekTool menubar item can be turned on so you can quickly maintain these Geeklet groups without having to launch the Preference Pane.

Shells

The spot that gives most people trouble is coming up with the shell commands or scripts to run. I have some limited background using Unix, so have come up with a few simple commands in the past. Luckily, there are lots of people out there who are smarter than I, and are happy to share their work with others via blog posts. Yay! Here are several of the more helpful posts I’ve come across.

GeekTool is such a free-form utility that it’s difficult to outline all of the settings and uses. It’s one of those situations where it’s great to let your imagination run wild, if only your knowledge and expertise can keep up. If you find yourself lacking the latter, post your questions below, and if I can’t help, I’m certain some of our brainiac readers will be able to chime in as well. And if you just want to show off your GeekTool-fu, we’d love for you to share some links here as well.

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It’s called vaporware, and that would include the long-rumored Apple tablet. That tablet, like other Apple products that actually exist, has been getting all the attention as of late, and that’s a shame. There are a number of other existentially-challenged tablets not out there right now. Here are my top five, ranked by the likelihood they will remain in the ether for all time.

#5 CrunchPad/JooJoo

Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad was supposed to be “a dead simple tablet for $200,” but has ended up as a combo $500 webpad and Silicon Valley legal drama. Arrington’s partners, FusionGarage, dumped him and claimed ownership of the renamed JooJoo, which means “magical device” in “African.” Note to FusionGarage: “African” is not a language.

Overhyped by Popular Mechanics as one of the “most brilliant” products of 2009, there’s really nothing magical about JooJoo’s specs: 2.4 pounds, 12” display, 4GB SSD, Wi-Fi, camera, up to five hours of battery life. The OS runs a customized Ubuntu and WebKit browser. It’s the ‘browser as the OS’ concept, similar to what Google’s doing with Chromium/Chrome, but without the backing of a company worth $200 billion.

Despite perpetually shipping in “8 to 10 weeks” since early December, and the uncertainty of litigation, JooJoo probably will ship in early 2010. That earns it fifth place among vaporware tablets today.

#4 Freescale Smartbook

Nothing says vaporware like “reference design,” and that’s the Freescale Smartbook. The former Mac PowerPC fabricator showed off a tablet prototype—another vaporware synonym—at CES. Freescale claimed the tablet could be made for $200 and reach market by summer, easy to say when you’re not doing the making.

The Smartbook is built around a 7” display and weighs less than a pound. Internal specifications include a 1 GHz ARM CPU, 512MB RAM, 4 to 64GB storage, microSD slot, Wi-Fi, 3G modem option, and camera. All-day battery life is promised. There’s also an optional keyboard and docking station that when combined with the giant bezel makes the screen look minuscule. The operating system demonstrated at CES is custom Linux, but doesn’t appear much customized for touch.

Unlike the CrunchPad, the Smartbook probably won’t even make it to the perpetually shipping phase of the vaporware life cycle, but at least one has been built.

#3 OLPC XO-3

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has provided the world’s poorest children more than a million computers and counting, and the XO-3 will never be one of them, but then it doesn’t have to. “We don’t necessarily need to build it,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told Forbes. “We just need to threaten to build it.” With a design goal like that, how can you fail?

Hypothetically available in 2012 for $75, the XO-3 “will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it.” The page-sized display, 8.5 by 11 inches, will have “both reflective and LCD capabilities,” making it viewable in the sun and as an e-reader. Internally, the XO-3 supposedly will have an ARM CPU running at 8 GHz, though Negroponte admits that’s a “provocative” target. You think? People in the Star Trek reboot don’t have kit like this, so yeah, provocative works as well as vaporware.

#2 Microsoft Courier

In 2001, Bill Gates introduced the Tablet PC to the world, and nearly a decade later Steve Ballmer did it again, but not with this device. Instead, a wildly gesticulating Ballmer claimed the “Slate PC” moniker at CES, showing off a nameless, nothing-new tablet from HP that will be available sometime this year, not that anyone cared. People wanted Courier.

That’s the name of this device, as first reported by Gizmodo in September. The booklet—so much for Slate PC—has two 7” displays connected by a hinge, multi-touch and stylus input, camera on back, maybe inductive charging for power. The OS appears to be designed for the device, so it’s not a Windows 7 tablet, and there are plenty of applications designed for it, so it’s not Windows 7 tablet. No word on battery life, price, or availability, except that it’s supposed to be in the “late prototype” stage of development, which makes one wonder why Courier wasn’t at CES.

Just watching the concept video for Courier, how could one not declare Microsoft the winner in the Battle of the Vaporware Tablets? Because once again Apple has been there and done that.

#1 Apple Knowledge Navigator

Even twenty years later, the Apple Knowledge Navigator concept reigns supreme among vaporware tablets. Opening the booklet reveals a pair of magical panels that appear to merge into a single display, that display having speakers on the sides, web camera and data card slot on the top. Nice touch how it tilts upward for typing, but touch is almost an afterthought.

Most of the machine-human interaction is done via a bow-tie wearing “agent,” or AI, through voice. This is vaporware at its finest, not just a demo, but like living in alternate reality, just like Apple in the late ‘80s under John Sculley. We will see whether Apple under Steve Jobs, who killed Apple’s first tablet, the Newton, can do better. Don’t expect talking heads in mock-turtlenecks, but it would be unwise to bet against the real Apple tablet in 2010.

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