Draw Something, the mobile game sensation that put OMGPOP on the map, is getting new perks this week, including an easy undo feature, two-click posting of drawings to Facebook and Twitter, and messaging that lets users annotate their drawings before sharing them. And some of that work is already being done on Zynga’s internal Z cloud, Pearlman, who is now CTO of  Zynga’s new Mobile NY group, said in an interview Tuesday.

Z cloud is Zynga’s internally developed cloud that now runs the bulk of its computing workload. When Zynga started out, 80 percent of its game launch workloads ran on Amazon Web Services, now 20 percent of them do.

Moving fast is nothing new to OMGPOP. When Draw Something debuted in February, there were 30,000 initial downloads. Nine days later, downloads topped a million. To date, there have been 50 million.

“We thought we knew how to scale our backend systems, then Draw Something happened,” Pearlman said. “When we started with it, it was just another game to us. We make as many games as possible as fast as we can. We thought it had potential but had no idea how big it would get.”

It wasn’t as if OMGPOP went all out promoting the game. There was a small media buy, he said, but then people started tweeting about it. “Celebrities started tweeting and atop all that, the people who were signing up and playing weren’t leaving. Our DAUs [daily average users] kept growing and growing.”

Even engineers used to building to scale will tell you it’s hard to tell under these unanticipated loads “when things will start to fall over,” he said.

The OMGPOP back-end guys — Pearlman and two others — met the challenge with brute force. “We started bringing up tons and tons of servers, we ported over all our key value code to a new [non-blocking Ruby-based Goliath] framework and we worked around the clock,” he said. There were other hair-raising tales, about having to rewrite the app and deploy it on a new Couchbase NoSQL cluster and then hitting more issues.

Now Draw Something is up to 3,000 drawings per second. For that reason, Pearlman is really happy to be working with Zynga CTO of infrastructure Allan Leinwand on the strategy for moving more of OMGPOP over to Z cloud.

While there are benefits to working in small, tight-knit groups, there are also advantages to having lots of resources.  ”Having Zynga acquire us helps us — instead of spending all night just keeping things up and running,  we can work on new features,” he said.

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But this isn’t strictly a content play. The division, IPC Play, will create “advergames” – marketing game-candy designed as digital adjuncts to the space sold to magazine advertisers.

Making the games will be Mousebreaker, the minigame developer IPC acquired back in 2008, and Feelgood Games, the female-focused casual games brand IPC launched in 2011.

To promote the division itself, IPC is inviting media agency staff themselves to play its own game – Planner, Buyer, Fire – to win an office pool table and other prizes.

IPC has previously built game campaigns for Land Rover, Barbour, Disney, Pepsi Max and P&G, but is now formally offering it as part of its advertising line-up.

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Among other things, Jun Group is hoping to capitalize on a large — and growing — market for virtual goods. Founder and CEO Mitchell Reichgut said the virtual currency market is worth about $2 billion in the U.S. and $7 billion internationally. Jun Group’s platform offers incentivized video views for advertisers, targeting audiences that play social games. Instead of purchasing virtual gifts, those users can instead watch a video to redeem credits and level up within games.

The end result is a very high completion rate among those who opt in to viewing those ads: upwards of 70-90 percent, according to Reichgut. More importantly, the company is seeing high levels of engagement with viewers clicking through to advertiser websites and store locators after viewing ads.

Jun Group has grown pretty quickly over the last year. Reichgut says the company has 23 employees now, which is up from less than 10 a year ago. And thanks to the new funding, it’s looking to add even more headcount over the next 12 months. Reichgut expects to be in the high 30s by the end of 2012.

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PlayJam got its start by providing casual games to pay TV operators as a value-added, interactive TV experience for their customers. Over the past several years, it has seen more than 6 billion game downloads on those platforms. But with the growth of new connected TV platforms from major consumer electronics manufacturers, as well as the massive increase in broadband connectivity, PlayJam no longer needs to strike deals with operators for distribution.

Instead, PlayJam can distribute games on connected TVs and reach consumers directly instead. So far, it has games on TV app stores from major manufacturers like Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Sony. Together, those TV makers account for more than half of all connected TVs sold. And the market is growing: IHS iSupply, for instance, estimates the number of connected TVs, game consoles and Blu-ray players will top 500 million units in 2013, outpacing PC shipments in that year.

That’s a huge potential market for PlayJam, which typically distributes free-to-play games with virtual goods or paid upgrades available in-game. The microtransaction model seems to be working, as PlayJam CEO Jasper Smith told me in an earlier interview that it sees conversion rates above 40 percent, with average transaction of about $1.50 each. And unlike pay TV customers, of which only about 5 percent find or play games through their cable system’s set-top box, Smith said about 40 percent of connected TV owners download games.

As more people buy connected TVs, and actually hook them up, there’s a big opportunity for companies like PlayJam to introduce new experiences on those devices. While it’s not the only company going after this opportunity, there’s surely plenty of money to go around.

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The games are as follows:

• Dracula’s Coffin
• Texas Hold ‘em
• Sudoku
• Rockswap Adventures
• Patience
• Kaboom
• Mahjong Fruits

The new casual games, which just appeared in the Roku Channel Store, all cost $0.99 and many are similar to games available on other platforms. Unlike Angry Birds, there’s little action, as they are mostly puzzle games. Texas Hold ‘em and Sudoku should be familiar to most users; meanwhile, Rockswap Adventures appears to be a Bejeweled knockoff, Patience is a version of solitaire and Kaboom is very similar to Minesweeper.

Roku’s new casual games come with the release of the latest version of products, which add smoother graphics capabilities and a gaming controller that contains an accelerometer. The Roku 2 XS system launched with Angry Birds, and new games from developers like Rovio and Namco are expected soon.

Update: We’ve heard back from Roku and the games were developed by Accedo.

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The company has not nailed down a specific launch date, but we understand Words With Friends should be live on Facebook sometime within the next week or two.

Zynga acquired Words With Friends when it bought Texas-based mobile games developer Newtoy in December 2010. At that time, it seemed as if Zynga was keen to diversify beyond its established business of developing Facebook games. Words With Friends has been a major hit for Zynga as a standalone mobile app, but Monday’s news shows that Zynga is not looking to quit Facebook just yet.

It makes sense that Zynga would want to get as much value as possible out of Words With Friends — it was revealed in the company’s S-1 initial public offering filing last month that it paid a cool $53.3 million to acquire Newtoy, $44.3 million of which was in cash. And while mobile apps are key to Zynga’s future, Facebook is still a major part of its current revenue strategy: Zynga noted in its S-1 that it has “derived substantially all of our revenue and acquired substantially all of our players through Facebook.” Diversification is important, but now that Zynga is looking to go public the more revenue-generating irons it has in the fire, the better.

Overall, Words With Friends for Facebook looks pretty cool (a screenshot is embedded below.) Zynga says the Facebook version of the game will have all of the mobile app’s functionality with added social features such as the ability to “publicly call out your friend on their wall” after a particularly good move. Additionally, players on Android and iOS devices will be able to port their games seamlessly between their mobile devices and Facebook.

Words With Friends seems nearly ubiquitous as it is, but the move to Facebook could bring the game to a whole new level of viral popularity.

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The two companies have entered into a strategic partnership to sell the Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio video games through Roku devices. In addition, Rovio will launch an Angry Birds video channel that will include animated shorts, and the companies will sell Angry Birds merchandise through the Roku Channel Store. The sale of casual games and merchandise will help boost Roku’s potential revenues, as it will take a cut of all sales that happen on its platform.

By striking a partnership with Rovio, Roku CEO Anthony Wood said it was following the same blueprint it took when it first launched its streaming video products. Roku came to market with Netflix as its launch partner, which has helped it rapidly grow the number of customers over the last several years. Since the introduction of its Channel Store in 2009, Roku partners have developed more than 250 different entertainment channels, including video apps like Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Crackle and Revision3.

The hardware maker hopes to replicate that success in the casual game sector. Although it will launch with Rovio, Roku is reaching out to other game developers to get them on board as well. It also has an open software development kit (SDK) that it is enhancing for casual game developers to create their own channels to run on the platform.

But how will it work? Anyone who has used a Roku remote control or user interface recognizes the inherent limitations that come with the Roku platform. The up-down-left-right-select functionality on the remote control, while sufficient for navigating between channels and lists of content, for instance, is unlikely to get the job done with the precision necessary for launching birds from a slingshot at opposing pigs. Apparently the casual gaming channels will become available on new Roku devices, which will be launched this summer.

New products could help accelerate the company’s growth, especially as it expands retail distribution. Roku announced at the end of 2010 that it had more than a million devices on the market, but that number is expected to grow dramatically. Driven by retail availability in stores like Best Buy and Fry’s, it has forecast more than 3 million devices in the market by year-end. Revenues are also expected to ramp up, from $47 million in 2010 to more than $150 million this year, according to Wood.

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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.

Liew recently stopped by GigaOM HQ for a quick chat about the explosive growth of that market and where it’s headed. Liew believes:

• There is still a lot of growth left in the virtual goods space as mechanisms come online that allow people to trade time for money (for more on this, see Om’s interview with CrowdFlower’s CEO).

• The iPad won’t be a game-changer in the virtual goods space at first, but could be, depending on adoption of the device.

• Buying virtual goods in games is not cheating, but rather is akin to a golfer purchasing a better putter.

• Companies looking to his firm for funding should realize that games are a hits-driven business. Creating one really expensive game is less appealing than the ability to affordably take “multiple shots on goal.”

For more in-depth analysis on MMOs, check out the report Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

According to the survey of roughly 5,000 gamers, 60 percent of respondents said that “they had purchased an in-game good that was not a full game.” (It should be noted that Live Gamer provides a product to conduct microtransactions in places like games, so factor that into the overall assessment of the data.) Last July, a Magid study commissioned by PlaySpan found that roughly 12 percent of Americans had purchased a virtual item.

Additionally, DFC Intelligence says that many of the games that use a virtual item model fall under a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) Lite category. These are games that have a persistent environment and allow you to build characters, but don’t have the monthly fees associated with large MMOGs. DFC predicts the so-called MMOG Lite market will grow to $3 billion by 2015 from roughly $800 million in 2009.

Riding that wave of virtual goods growth is Kongregate, a free online gaming site that aggregates independent games from across the web (including its new MMOG Lite game, Remnants of Skystone. Kongregate says that it’s seen its virtual goods sales rise 30 percent per month and that they represent a third of its total revenue now (the company wouldn’t provide any more specific numbers).

Kongregate CEO Jim Greer came by GigaOM HQ last week for a quick video chat where he talked up such topics as the role of virtual goods in Kongregate’s business, the issue of chargebacks with virtual goods, and how he plans to keep Kongregate as a destination site and not shift to a more Facebook-centric model.

For more in-depth analysis on MMOs, check out the report Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.