Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson continue a long tradition of a couple investors utterly dominating their sectors by betting on what they know, and getting in early before others even know there is an opportunity. Read more »
Casinos and social gaming sites have a lot riding on new laws and licenses that will turn on the taps to online gaming revenue. One company is set to finally open shop as soon as May — but its license strictly limits where it can operate and what it can play. Read more »
Following infrastructure leadership roles at Microsoft and Zynga, Debra Chrapaty will move from Zynga to enterprise cloud storage player Nirvanix. Despite the fierce competition facing Nirvanix, Chrapaty is optimistic about the company’s opportunities. Read more »
A social gaming site called Fanhood invites players to buy tokens and make sports wagers with their friends. While they may entertain sports fans, sites like this have little hope of being part of recent moves towards legal online gambling. Read more at paidContent »
Nevada became the first state in the country this week to legalize online gambling — but don’t expect this to change the fortunes of companies like Zynga anytime soon. Read more »
DerbyJackpot combines the feel of casual social gaming with real life betting on horse tracks across the country. Thanks to a legal exception bets on horse-racing, the company is one of the few that can offer online gambling in the US. Read more »
Zynga has deployed nearly 100 nodes of MemSQL, the hot new database from two former Facebook engineers. It might not be a magic pill for Zynga’s woes, but it could help the company boost revenue and even build new types of games. Read more »
The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent, publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines, with a shift toward those companies able to scale with little additional capital. Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
VCs would love to invest in your game, as long as you know how to answer their questions correctly. This excerpt is from Wagner James Au’s “Game Design Secrets” (Wiley) now available in paperback and ebook. Read more »
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Zynga which has been losing senior executives with an alarming rate lost another key member recently – its CTO of infrastructure. Earlier this summer, the company lost about seven executives including Mike Verdu, Zynga’s former chief creative officer and Bill Mooney, who spearheaded the Farmville franchise. Read more »
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Is it the end of an era for the former rock star venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and did greentech play a large part in that fall from grace? Read more »
Twitter seems to be at a crossroads, and according to a recent GigaOM survey, its prospects for the next five years are promising. Key challenges in the near future will be establishing a revenue model and survive the backlash from developers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Game-maker Zynga is on the ropes and some think online gambling will give it a means to survive. But given that it’s late to the game and the messy laws governing American gambling, Zynga may have to fold its cards instead. Read more »
San Francisco red-hot startup activity is not only inflating the commercial real estate market, but it is also having an impact on the residential rental market, data shows. Since January 2011 annual rents are up by $5000, but down in Peninsula, rents are up even higher. Read more »
Zynga like many of its big web counterparts is grappling with the shift of consumers to the mobile platforms. Lack of mobile monetization opportunities are only part of the problem for the company that is beholden to Facebook and desktop-web for its growth and revenues. Read more »
Welcome to life as a public company: Facebook stock has dropped to around $20 a share, almost half its IPO price. It’s a rough time out there for social-networking stocks, including game maker Zynga, but Facebook’s slide is eye-popping. Read more »
A lot of hopes were riding on Facebook having a superstar IPO, including the hopes of venture investors that it would help trigger a wave of interest in other social-web companies, which could then also go public. But now those rosy assumptions are in question. Read more »
Companies doing business on the web and in the cloud must spend a lot on infrastructure to stay running and to support new services. Here’s what Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Zynga spent in the recent quarter, and what it might mean. Read more »
When it comes to the new generation of internet companies, VCs are from Venus and public market investors are from Mars. So the big question is who is right? Answer is in the stock prices of Zynga, Groupon and Facebook. Read more »
Apple and Google still dominate the smartphone space, but look out for Microsoft, which finally has some muscle behind its mobile strategy. Meanwhile mobile-browser developers went head-to-head with native apps, and Facebook continued to buy mobile expertise via acquisition. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
AirBnB, a fast growing person-to-person real-estate rental company, will soon be moving into new digs. It has snagged 170,000 square feet in office space. Its new neighbors include Zynga and Pinterest. The cost of keeping this elite company: about $97 million over 10 years. Read more »
Game-focused startup accelerator GameFounders has decided to knock back its deadline for applications by three days, in what the founders say is an attempt to accommodate a surge in submissions. Applicants will now have until Friday to apply for the Estonian-based program. Read more »
Scale breaks everything. When you move from thinking 10,000 servers is a lot to buying hundreds of thousands a year your perspectives change. And that shift in perspective has changed the information technology industry. We cover some of the biggest takeaways from our Structure 2012 conference. Read more »
Switching its cloud computing infrastructure from Amazon to its own optimized data center has resulted in far greater efficiency and performance for the social gaming company, its CIO, Debra Chrapaty, told GigaOM Structure 2012 Wednesday. But the technologies needed to optimize power consumption still need improvement. Read more »
Social virtual goods revenues will grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $4.1 billion in 2016. Leading this growth are disruptive factors such as mobile, regulatory changes and alternatives to the traditional OS. But the most important disruption vector will be increasing the universality of virtual currencies. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Look out, below! Facebook stock marked the return from the long weekend by tumbling nearly ten percent to an afternoon low of $28.87. Read more »
As great as shared cloud infrastructure can be, online game workloads often demand dedicated physical servers in addition to heavily virtualized, shared cloud servers. That’s where SoftLayer says it differentiates itself from other big cloud players including market leader Amazon Web Services. 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 »
When will the floodgates open? It feels like an eternity that the casino industry and makers of games like Zynga Poker have been waiting for states to flip a legal switch that will let them turn virtual gaming into real gambling. Read more at paidContent »
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 via an App Hub. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Privacy is a bit like the weather — everyone talks about it but no one does a damn thing about it. Sure, it’s creepy that these companies track you and munch your personal information. But are you really going to ditch Facebook and every other online convenience of modern life? Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Less than a month after being acquired Zynga, OMGPOP is on its way to being integrated into the giant game maker’s technology roadmap, says Jason Pearlman, CTO of OMGPOP. Some of the new Draw Something features released today were made using Z Cloud resources. Read more »
