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 »
Hyperlocal mobile advertising is at a critical juncture: Leading analysts predict that mobile ad spending will increase by more than five times between 2011 and 2015. But what are the forces at play, and how effective are HyLoMo ads? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
OMGPOP can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat. 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 million 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 »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new patent troll last week fired a shot at Facebook, Zynga and others with a lawsuit that claims rights to in-game payments — the process… Read more at paidContent »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
A new patent troll announced its arrival this week by suing companies like Facebook, Zynga and Playfish. Its weapon is a patent that it clai… Read more at paidContent »
With close to a billion active users, Facebook is already the world’s largest social network, and it is already generating billions from advertising directed at those users. So the bottom line for investors and analysts is, Can this company really get any bigger? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Game giant Zynga is weaning itself from Amazon’s infrastructure as it moves the bulk of its workloads onto its internal Z Cloud infrastructure. Zynga’s CTO said the company has optimized Z Cloud for its games, so it is more efficient than the public cloud provider. Read more »
Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon’s public cloud than it has in the past: 80 percent of its daily average users now run on Z Cloud — not on that other cloud. 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 »
This report outlines the myriad issues at play in Facebook’s move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the company’s infrastructure dependency. But from every angle, it’s clear the effects will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing mass… Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Beneath all the Zynga games, likes, personal timelines and pokes, Facebook’s business relies on fast, reliable infrastructure. And concerns about that underlying figure heavily in the risks it faces as it goes public, according to its S-1 filing. 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 Silicon Valley. Read more »
Facebook’s much-anticipated IPO looks to be coming ever-closer, with a new report out with further details of what we will see come Wednesda… Read more at paidContent »
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
From SOPA to Microsoft’s expanded Xbox live platform to cloud-based content storage from Apple and Google, the fourth quarter in consumer electronics and media was all about the continued battle for digital living room dominance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Now that it’s a public company, Zynga can start throwing more cash around. The online gaming company has recently acquired four small mobile… Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This is the fifth in a series of posts this week that will highlight key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012 in the sectors we cov… Read more at paidContent »
Call it the year of lessons learned, if not quite bubbles burst. In 2011, several trends in the connected consumer space that appeared inexorable at the start of the year seemed disorganized by the end. What does that mean for the next 12 months? From cloud-based media storage to daily deals to the fight for the digital living room, 2012 will be a year of consolidation and integration. Both entrepreneurs and investors will figure out that many once-promising standalone business models need to be grounded on more solid, integrated platforms to create real value. Companies mentioned in this report include Hulu, LivingSocial, Netflix and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Some research out from Xyologic today on app store download trends in 2011 indicates that while games have remained a popular category acros… Read more at paidContent »
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 »
How do virtual currencies work today and where, outside of gaming, might they be effective? Right now, practical alternative payments systems like Facebook’s and PayPal’s are still based on cash, though consumers might like bartering and loyalty programs rolled into the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The long-awaited IPO of social games giant Zynga has finally arrived, but those hoping for quick, early flips of the stock may end up having… Read more at paidContent »
