Creator of iChat returns to his roots with Banter, an anonymous chat app
Move over Snapchat or Secret, there’s a new social app that wants to combine ephemeral chat with anonymity. Banter is a new app from the creator of iChat.
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Move over Snapchat or Secret, there’s a new social app that wants to combine ephemeral chat with anonymity. Banter is a new app from the creator of iChat.
After spending the summer at the top of both the iTunes (s aapl) and Android (s goog) app stores, UK games company…
There seems to be no end to the C-suite jettisoning at Zynga, as three more hit the chopping block.
Less than a year after launching it, a team including former Zynga employees and a longtime geneticist have sold their startup Arpeggi to genetic testing company Gene by Gene.
Zynga’s real gambling games may be a reality soon in the UK, and they’re making an appearance on Facebook.
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.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced Tuesday that the company will be cutting five percent of its workforce and closing studios in Boston, as well as reducing investments in its popular series of game in The Ville franchise. Zynga will hold its earnings call Wednesday.
ShoeDazzle had a great thing going with its shoes-as-a-subscription service, and then it decided to switch business models. Now it’s flailing, and people are pointing fingers at new CEO Bill Strauss, but it’s not quite that simple.
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.
Tech companies have become increasingly adept at manufacturing desire, but to what end? Behavior designer Jason Hreha argues that the industry needs to seriously consider the impact of its products. Are we helping our users lead better lives, or are we making them compulsive, impatient and distractible?
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.
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.
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.
User engagement can be a very slippery statistic. Although sites and apps like to talk about how fast their unique visitors are growing, it’s more important to know how many of those users are actually using the site regularly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zynga’s move to create its own social gaming network outside Facebook is a positive shift to reduce its dependence on someone else’s social network. But being a platform provider and aggregator of entertainment options is a hard business and not one to be taken lightly.
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.
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…
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…
Now that it’s a public company, Zynga can start throwing more cash around. The online gaming company has recently acquired four small mobile…
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.
Some research out from Xyologic today on app store download trends in 2011 indicates that while games have remained a popular category acros…
Zynga, the social gaming company behind Farmville, Words With Friends and other online games, is preparing to go public on Friday in what co…
Mobile ads today make up less than one percent of all money spent on media advertising, and a poll just out from Harris Interactive, commiss…
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.
Pushing regulatory rules has become de rigeur when American internet firms prepare to go public. The infamous Playboy interview with Larry P…
Zynga wants to be seeing as a gaming destination in its own right, but it’s not quite ready to explain how it intends to achieve independenc…
Pre-IPO Zynga continues to lure execs from competitors. The latest, paidContent has learned: Adam Sussman, who is leaving Disney (NYSE: DIS)…
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.
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.
Zynga has been trying to broaden its gaming strategy over the past year, trying to bring as many of its Facebook-oriented social games over…
» James and Rupert Murdoch Have Lunch At Parliament: A Grilling And Some Pie (paidContent)
» News International ‘Deli…
Zynga filed IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday stating its intention to raise $1 billion in an initial public…
Perhaps just hours away from revealing its finances in order to become a public company, Zynga has signed a major deal with AT&T (NYSE: T) t…
When Zynga, the booming online video game company, goes public over the next few months, it could find itself valued at $15 billion to $20 b…
Zynga may be next in line for the IPO rollercoaster, but for now it’s continuing methodically to build out valuable real estate in the mobil…
Your friend Zynga has shares of its company that it would like to share with you. The creator of Farmville, Cityville, Mafia Wars, and sever…
The California Legislature is very late-as usual-with its annual budget. But lawmakers’ inability to pass a budget probably won’t stop them…
Zynga has made its 14th acquisition in a year, picking up DNA Games, the two-year-old studio best known for Facebook game Casino City. Zynga…
Zynga has been on a tear recently, buying 12 smaller games studios in the past year. But its latest purchase, British mobile development outfit Wonderland, gives a strong indication of what the red-hot company intends all of its spending to achieve.
Russia’s biggest Internet company, Mail.ru, has made its financial results public for the first time — and in doing so has revealed that despite relatively slim profits, it holds as much as $2 billion of hot technology companies such as Facebook and Groupon
Another high-profile hire for Zynga representative of how fast the social games company has grown: John Schappert, the COO of video game gia…
Is Jay Walker jealous of Paul Allen? Allen got a lot of press when he sued 11 big internet companies last year, essentially saying he patent…
Zynga continues to add prominent executives to its ranks. Its latest hire: Neil Roseman, the former CEO and founder of semantic web startup…
Two years ago, anthropologist Sekai Farai was awarded a grant by Columbia University to study the technology startup community. Her timing c…
With Facebook now worth billions, there is concern that another damaging Internet bubble is in the works. But it is possible to prevent another boom and bust cycle from happening — as long as we keep looking for the bigger picture.
» Social gamer Zynga is looking to raise $250 million in new funding in a deal that could value the three-year-old start-up betwe…
If you were concerned that joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers would sap uber-analyst Mary Meeker of her ability to generate wonk-tasti…
What does Facebook have to do with Netflix? (NSDQ: NFLX) Everything, according to CNBC’s Mad Money anchor Jim Cramer (see video below), who…
— Zynga: Former Facebook exec Mike Murphy has joined Zynga as a senior advisor for its advertising strategy, AllThingsD reports. He’s also…
Zynga is purchasing game developer Area/Code, which developed popular Facebook game CSI:Crime City, along with Ubisoft, and iPhone game Drop…
Zynga has purchased browser developer Flock in its latest move to beef up its workforce. Six-year-old Flock is behind a so-called “social we…
Thanks to the feds and Sarbanes-Oxley, tech valuations on the secondary market are surging as retail investors pay huge premiums to buy a stake in Facebook, Twitter. The feds made the moribund IPO market even worse, and the result has made it harder for retail investors.
Three themes will drive NewNet technologies like social media and real-time feeds in 2011: advertising (and any other monetization strategies), communications integration and the interpretation, filtering and mining of information feeds and social graphs. Integrating NewNet tech with mobile and location-based services will be a given.
Zynga, the darling of online social games with 45 million daily active users, has been a relatively late entrant in the mobile space, with i…
Zynga is doubling down on mobile games, buying mobile game developer Newtoy, which is best known for the hit iOS game Words With Friends. Du…
We keep hearing about how developers are going to start focusing more on Android. But now in the last 24 hours, we’ve gotten some concrete signs that the platform is getting more attention from big time developers. Here’s what’s happened:
— Microsoft’s 2-D barcodes: Microsoft’s Tag product, which uses 2-D barcode technology in marketing campaigns, says 1 billion Tags have bee…
Some of the most popular Facebook apps — including games such as Zynga’s FarmVille, which has almost 60 million users — are transmitting information about users to third parties, including companies that are building profiles for sale to advertisers, according to a news report.
?Silicon Valley, like any other industry town, has its own rhythm: vacillating between boom and bust. The severity of the bust (or…
How much has mobile advertising taken off? Ask Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Mobile’s VP of Americas David Katz: “A year ago, we knew all of the advert…
Zynga is buying up Bonfire Studios, a game developer started two years ago by several former employees from Microsoft-owned video game devel…
David Ko, the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) SVP who left last week as part of an executive exodus, is joining Zynga as the social gaming giant’s head o…
Over the past five years, MocoSpace has built a community of 14 million users on its mobile social network, and is now planning a significan…
Two stories attempt to deepen the public images of the early days of Facebook and Zynga, but to different effects, with Zynga employees condemning the company for its anti-innovation ethos, and a former Harvard student cleaning up perceptions of the early days of Facebook.
» The month-long battle between Random House and literary agent Andrew Wylie seems to be over. The publisher is claiming victory,…
Social gaming giant Zynga has made yet another acquisition, buying up social game company Conduit Labs. Conduit Labs is behind several popul…
FrontierVille, the social game that Zynga launched just last month, has jumped to number three on its charts. Zynga tells us the game just p…
Google has invested $100 million or more in game developer Zynga, the company behind popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, according to a news report. The web giant is said to be planning to launch a gaming platform to be called Google Games.
Has Google (NSDQ: GOOG) invested $100 million or more in gaming start-up Zynga? That’s what TechCrunch is reporting, citing multiple unident…
Those crops need harvesting! Social phenomenon Farmville, originally announced early this month at Apple’s WWDC, is now available on the iPhone and iPod touch for free. Let the social farming begin!
Expect even more deal activity in the social gaming sector. DeNa, one of Japan’s biggest social gaming players, is launching a new $27.5 mil…
Zynga, after months of rumors about a strain in their relationship and a dalliance with non-Facebook platforms like Yahoo, is sticking close to the social network for the launch of its newest game, a Farmville-style offering called Frontierville.
When Zynga launched FarmVille, it hoped for 200,000 daily active users in the first two months. For each of the first 26 weeks FarmVille added 1 million new users. The story of Mark William’s last two years has been trying to support such unpredictable growth.
It isn’t matching rival Playdom’s acquisition pace — at least yet — but social game giant Zynga has made its second acquisition in two wee…
Social, Mobile and New Commerce — that doesn’t addup to the third wave of anything. It is the natural evolution of the Internet. It was obvious in 2002 that with more broadband, more devices and more people, the Internet revolution, which began in 1995 would continue.
Social gaming giant Zynga is making a major push into Asia, through the acquisition of Beijing-based social gaming developer XPD Media. In a…
Facebook and social games maker Zynga, which had been battling over their relationship, have settled their differences, ensuring that Zynga…
Facebook and Zynga, the social network and its most popular game developer, have settled some of their differences and agreed to work together for the next five years. The two companies realized they need each other, even if their objectives are not always aligned.
Zynga and Facebook have had an extremely symbiotic relationship to date, but after Facebook tried to use its weight to hold Zynga captive the social gaming company is mad as hell. Zynga is reportedly moving forward with efforts to launch its own social gaming network.
Former equity analysts at Second Shares estimate that social-gaming market leader Zynga would be worth as much as $5 billion if its shares were publicly traded. They say the company will likely have revenue of close to $500 million this year from games such as Farmville.
Social games — a subset of the gaming industry that offers simple games that run across various social networks — today received…
While everyone in the game industry was following the latest news from GDC last week, I happened to notice an MMO milestone…