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Posts Tagged “

Zynga

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venture capital

Hyped widgetmaker explains the widgetmaker hype

Union Square Ventures funded Mark Pincus's casual games maker Zynga with $10 million not long after Max Levchin-founded widgetmaker Slide raised $50 million. Competitor RockYou wants a round of funding that would value it at $400 million. We like to scoff at these purveyors of online sheep-throwing tools, but that's serious scratch, people. In this excerpt from a longer interview with Kara Swisher, Zynga's Mark Pincus explains what widgetmakers see in our future — and shows us exactly what kind of pitch VCs are going for these days.

9:20 AM on Wed May 14 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
622 views, 4 comments

Latest by n/a: He's the guy who was smart enough to buy, with Reid Hoffman, the Six Degrees social networking patent. more »

developers

How widgetmakers hijacked Zuckerberg's Facebook redesign

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the original design, reflecting developer concerns." Below, screenshots of Zuckerberg's original plans for the redesign, annotated with the objections Facebook-application startups raised.
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Feature

1:20 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,750 views, 7 comments

developers, developers, developers

Widgetmakers successfully gut Zuckerberg's Facebook redesign

When we ran screenshots of Facebook's new profile pages back in late February, what you saw was a classic Mark Zuckerberg production. A source close to Facebook tells us the profile redesign was Zuckerberg's pet project, his baby. Well, that baby is dead. More »

12:20 PM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
3,085 views, 7 comments

social networks

MySpace platform less annoying, less effective than Facebook's

Looking after his investment in online gamemaker Zynga, VC blogger Fred Wilson reports that applications on MySpace's platform "are not taking off in quite the same velocity that Facebook apps did." He blames MySpace's lack of "viral channels" — code for spamming tools.
You can't invite via MySpace.You can't notify via MySpace. So these apps are spreading by less effective means than the Facebook apps did.
WIlson's screenshots of the top 10 apps and their stats in MySpace versus Facebook, below. More »

10:00 AM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
547 views, 3 comments

Latest by Fidel on the Roof: @tokenfemale: Don't forget the built-in vw bias on that comparison. more »

facebook

Mark Pincus licks, bites hand that feeds him

Failed social networking entrepreneur Mark Pincus, the force that brought the Internet both Tribe.net and Acebucks, now hopes to dominate the Facebook application market with his new casual games company Zynga. He claims he hasn't touched his $10 million in VC funding because he's in the lucrative business of selling application referrals within Zynga's Facebook games — a pyramid scheme if there ever was one. More »

4:00 PM on Tue Feb 19 2008
By Mary Jane Irwin
1,019 views, 2 comments

zynga

VCs sink big money into spammy Facebook games

The first gold-rush miners to make any money during the 1840s were the ones who stopped digging and started selling shovels, according to Timesman Brad Stone. Today a similar operation from Mark Pincus, Tribe.net founder and early Facebook investor, announced $10 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Bob Pittman.
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7:31 AM on Tue Jan 15 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,103 views, 5 comments