Tech — GigaOM

Tech

Look out, below! Facebook stock marked the return from the long weekend by tumbling eight percent to an afternoon low of $29.25. Read More »

American Express is teaming with Zynga on a reward program that will link offline spending on its Serve pre-paid cards to in-game rewards in Farmville. It’s an ambitious attempt at boosting the reach of AmEx’s Serve product and tying real-world spending to online virtual rewards. Read More »

 
 

ISwifter is showing how it can create a full-fledged Facebook app that also includes Flash gaming. TheWorx iPad app, a Facebook application that is set to go live next month, will provide users with access to status updates, their news feed and photos and also gaming … Read More »

The new Forbes Midas List is out and it ranks the top 100 venture capitalists. The list ranks uber-VC Fred Wilson below those whose performance is average at best. I find the list confusing, thanks to an ambiguous and somewhat faulty methodology. Read More »

Venture capitalists greeted the new year with fewer overall deals and dollars invested during the first quarter, but in the rapid-fire world of investing in web startups this data is about as relevant as a day-old newspaper. In a post-Instagram world the tides have changed. Read More »

Past one month has been interesting, to put it mildly. Facebook snapped up Instagram for $1 billion and Zynga lookout OMGPop for $200 million However, here are three key lessons (and takeaways) between these two deals and what they say about both these companies. Read More »

Everyone may be wondering why Facebook paid $1 billion for what appears to be just a simple photo-sharing app, but the biggest lesson to learn from Instagram’s success is just how important it is to build network effects into the core of your service. Read More »

Draw Something has gotten a big boost from China, an unlikely market for a game that asks people to draw English words and phrases. But the game is a top 10 hit and it looks like users are finding creative ways to play the game. Read More »

What a strange story – a New York-based startup that began its life as a dating-gaming company, went through many incarnations has finally hit the jackpot. OMGPOP, the company behind Draw Something is being actively pursued by social gaming giant Zynga, which is considering offering $200 … Read More »

Zynga is reportely looking at picking off its newest rival in OMGPOP, maker of the new hit mobile app Draw Something. According to TechCrunch, Zynga is looking at acquiring the New York-based OMGPOP, which just hit 30 million downloads of Draw Something on Friday. Read More »

About two weeks ago, I sat down with Zygna founder and CEO Mark Pincus to discuss the importance of mobile gaming to his company and evolution from Mark the entrepreneur to Pincus the CEO of a company that is valued at billions by Wall Street. Read More »

Draw Something, the No. 1 paid and free app right now on iOS and Android, is listed as a game but it’s not really a game at all. OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter, who designed the app, explains how it succeeds using cooperation, rather than competition. Read More »

More Must Reads

By the end of 2010, about 50 percent of all Facebook monthly active users were gamers. But that fell to about 25 percent in 2011, as Facebook aggressively added new users. The result is that game makers need to work harder to find and retain users. Read More »

Could the app economy be the cure for United States’ employment doldrums? A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007. Read More »

Zynga has been trying its very best to diversify its business away from Facebook and it doesn’t have much of a choice. Ben Schachter, Internet analyst with Macquarie Securities went through the Facebook S-1. His take: Zynga’s fourth quarter 2011 isn’t going to be pretty. Read More »

Get ready for a blockbuster — and almost nuts — year of technology in 2012. Why? Because Facebook is doing the mother of all initial public offerings. And like Netscape and Google before, the Facebook IPO is going to change not only the company but also … Read More »

Social gaming company 6waves Lolapps (which is now going by the shortened moniker “6L”) is continuing its stated quest to take on industry leader Zynga. The company is announcing Wednesday the acquisition of Escalation Studios, a Dallas, Texas-based mobile game company. Read More »

Splunk’s IPO has been much anticipated with good reason. Splunk’s machine data search, analytics and visualization technologies address the gap between the reams of big data generated by the second and the ability to parse and display that data in a meaningful way. Read More »

Zynga, which recently went public, is a social gaming trailblazer and is one of the biggest game providers for the Facebook platform. However, the company has received a lukewarm reception on Wall Street and that trend continues. An analyst report reveals some facts that explain why. Read More »

Yahoo has appointed a new CEO — Scott Thompson, a veteran of PayPal, a division of eBay, and he has his work clearly cut out for him. Despite choosing a new CEO, the company’s problems, including a troubled and toxic board, have not gone away. Read More »

Social startup Allthis found itself under fire this week for a viral marketing approach many people found spammy and invasive. But heinous though it is, its behavior is just part of a trend among new services to appropriate our online identities to power themselves. Read More »

While most folks in tech and finance were focused on Groupon’s much-buzzed-about stock market debut, Zynga on Friday morning issued an update to its S-1 filing for an initial public offering. Read More »

Zynga has revealed more details about the upcoming initial public offering (IPO) of its stock. In a revised S-1 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the social gaming company said it will list its shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the four-letter ticker “ZNGA.” Read More »

What your mother told you still holds true, even online: First impressions matter. Zynga aspires to make all its games pass what the company calls the “three click” test with games that people can enjoy and get hooked on within the first three mouse clicks. Read More »

Zynga may be best known for its hit online and mobile games, but the company has its eye on a much bigger prize. On Tuesday, Zynga unveiled a major new “Zynga direct” platform — codenamed Project Z — showing that its ambition goes well beyond single … Read More »

Shares in Russian Internet group Mail.ru have fallen to their lowest point since the company went public last year. But since the company has been indirectly fueling Silicon Valley’s latest investment boom, a serious slump could have repercussions far beyond Moscow. Read More »

6waves Lolapps, the newly-merged company that develops and publishes games for Facebook and other social networks, has launched a $10 million fund to invest in independent game developers. The 6L Fund is part of 6waves Lolapps’ play to become the”clear number two” to Zynga. Read More »

Social gaming giant Zynga is the subject of a new patent infringement lawsuit, the latest in a string of such claims. Now that Zynga is under a microscope as it moves toward an IPO, will its legal troubles be too much for potential investors to handle? Read More »

Zynga is expanding its mobile ambitions by apparently picking up New York City-based developer Astro Ape Studios. The gaming powerhouse, which is preparing to go public, has been increasingly looking to shore up its mobile efforts, which has not be as successful as its Facebook business. Read More »

Google is upping the competition with Facebook by turning on games for its Google+ social network, the company announced today. The first titles include Angry Birds from Rovio, Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap and most notably Zynga Poker from longtime Facebook game developer Zynga. Read More »

A report examining the success rate of European venture capital compared to the U.S. sparked heated discussion. But some argue that even the best statistics ignore the real problems that face entrepreneurs and investors — no matter which side of the Atlantic they are on. Read More »

Zynga is bringing its popular Scrabble-esque mobile game Words With Friends to Facebook, the company announced Monday. This represents the first time that Zynga has extended a mobile-only game to Facebook — showing that despite its diversification efforts, Zynga’s dependence on the social network remains strong. Read More »

Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform. Read More »

Zynga, the social gaming company recently filed to go public and raise a whopping $1 billion in its initial public offering. The folks from Namesake have put together a graphic that tells the story of Zynga, the people behind the company and how it got here. Read More »

It looks like Zynga is polishing up the proverbial silver in the run-up to its planned IPO. The social gaming company has launched “PrivacyVille,” a new game-like tutorial that rewards users with zPoints, Zynga’s virtual currency, for learning more about the company’s privacy practices. Read More »

Zynga has shown a notable uptick in acquisitions in recent months. But although much has been made of the volume and frequency of Zynga’s M&A activity, the S-1 Zynga filed Friday for its planned IPO revealed exactly how savvy it has been in making those deals. Read More »

Zynga on Friday filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $1 billion. The IPO filing comes just one day later than many people expected — reports have been bubbling for weeks that Zynga was planning to file its S-1 sometime in June. Read More »

While iOS game developer Pocket Gems faces increasing competition from Facebook developers Zynga and Crowdstar, the company, with two titles in the top five grossing apps list, believes it can hold its own by being a purely mobile-focused player with an eye quality and user retention. Read More »

Bunchball, the social gaming software company, has raised $6.5 million in a new funding round. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has recently received “knocks on the door” from potential acquirers, but opted to raise money instead to bet on growing more, CEO Jim Scullion told me. Read More »

The summer of 2011 is shaping up to be the season of the tech IPO, and according to a report published today by Bloomberg, Zynga is next in line for a stock market debut. The company is reportedly looking to file its S-1 by month’s end. Read More »

Zynga continues to expand way beyond the farms that made it famous. The San Francisco-based social gaming company on Tuesday announced the launch of its first strategy combat game, Empires & Allies, the first title to debut out of its Los Angeles development studio. Read More »

When Cisco all but confirmed it had shut down an ambitiously named Entertainment Operating System, I suspect some folks at Facebook may have chuckled to themselves. After all, Facebook may have designs on becoming for real what the Cisco product was only in name. Read More »

LinkedIn is upping its expectations for its much-anticipated IPO, which it now believes can pull in as much as $274 million. The company this morning released the pricing for its IPO and is now prepared to offer 7.84 million shares at $32 to $35 each Read More »

For Silicon Valley startups, good timing can be just as crucial as good technology. Just ask Bunchball, the six-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based, social gaming, software startup. In 2005, when the company debuted its software platform, the current industry buzzword “gamification” hadn’t even been coined yet. Read More »

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