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Thursday, January 30, 2014
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Paired with the news of a big half-billion dollar acquisition, Zynga is also laying off about 15 percent of its workforce, or about 314 employees.


This is part of a cost-reduction plan that is supposed to generate $33 million to $35 million in savings this year, excluding a $15 million to 17 million restructuring charge.


In an interview today, CEO Don Mattrick said these jobs would mostly come out of “infrastructure” areas and wouldn’t involve shutting down any individual studios.


Zynga has roughly 2,000 employees at a time when better-performing competitors lack anywhere near the same kind of headcount. Supercell, which sold half of itself for $1.53 billion last fall to Japanese carrier Softbank, currently has about 130 employees and was producing just shy of $200 million a quarter in revenue in the beginning of last year.


Since Mattrick took over the company from founding CEO Mark Pincus, the company has engaged in a series of layoffs, cut out middle layers of management and shut down poorly-performing games. Last summer, they let go of about 520 people, or 18 percent of their workforce.





2:10 PM

Paired with the news of a big half-billion dollar acquisition , Zynga is also laying off about 15 percent of its workforce, or about 314 emp...

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GoDaddy reportedly has admitted one of its employees handed out customer information to a scammer who carried out a scheme to obtain a prime Twitter account. Naoki Hiroshima this week detailed how the scammer was able to force him to hand over his prime Twitter account, @N. The scammer used social engineering to accomplish his goal, obtaining Hiroshima's personal information to impersonate him. The scammer apparently was able to provide enough information to convince customer service representatives at PayPal and GoDaddy that he was Hiroshima.


1:38 PM

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Torsten

Zynga has long been famous (or infamous?) for its data-driven approach to game design. The company never focused on building strong character IP, or intellectual property, in favor of releasing games that had been thoroughly funnel-tested.


But now that founding CEO Mark Pincus has stepped aside and let Xbox executive Don Mattrick take the reins, perhaps the company is going in a totally new direction.


Mattrick is sending a big signal on that front today with a $527 million deal to acquire NaturalMotion, the Oxford, U.K.-based gaming company behind franchises like CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja. The deal involves $391 million in cash and about 39.8 million shares of Zynga stock at yesterday’s price, leaving Zynga with about $1.2 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand.


Torsten Reil, who runs NaturalMotion, doesn’t come from a cookie cutter gaming background.


He had actually been working on Ph.D. in Complex Systems in Oxford’s zoology department when he decided to go in a totally different direction. He used his biology background to design software that could realistically animate 3D movement. Those products went on to become a middleware business that helped animate games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise and films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.


Then a few years ago, Reil and NaturalMotion pivoted to building their own games, using their proprietary animation software to make freemium titles like My Horse and most recently, Clumsy Ninja.


Reil is a perfectionist, and he’ll delay games for months until the details are just right. That attention and care has attracted support from key partners like Apple, which let the company demo Clumsy Ninja and CSR Racing on-stage at the WWDC and iPhone 5 keynotes.


When he launched Clumsy Ninja last fall (a whole year after the company teased it on-stage at the iPhone 5 launch), Reil told me,



“We want to get the game right. We want to make people laugh and smile. We don’t want to design it to be a hard-core monetizing game. It has to be a delightful, wholesome experience.”



It doesn’t sound like stereotypical Zynga, does it?


Well, times have changed on the iOS platform. It used to be comparatively cheap to launch lots of casual, social games on the platform. But if you look at the top-grossing charts today, they’re almost the same as a year ago with companies like King, Supercell and MachineZone at the top.


That’s because it’s so expensive now to market and acquire users on mobile platforms. So if you’re going to launch a game, it takes much more time and investment than it did a year ago. So that’s why a new and even more deliberate approach is necessary. It’s not enough to fast-follow on proven gaming categories, which was Zynga’s strategy on the Facebook platform.


As for NaturalMotion and its investors, the company was backed with $11 million from Benchmark Capital and had former EA executive Mitch Lasky on the board.





1:09 PM

Zynga has long been famous (or infamous?) for its data-driven approach to game design. The company never focused on building strong characte...

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It was once a rare practice, but employees are now finding more ways to unload vested shares in their startups along the way.


While employers have typically tried to control these sales, a new marketplace called Equidate is opening up that will let employees sell equity with or without the startup’s consent (although Equidate would prefer to collaborate with employers).


Over the past decade, many companies like Facebook have elected to wait longer before going public. That meant that longtime employees wound up with their wealth mostly tied up in the stock of their companies with few options to diversify their holdings. At the same time, certain investors wanted access to a growing pool of pre-IPO tech companies.


So companies like New York-based SecondMarket cropped up. They have helped facilitate employee share sales for privately-held companies like SurveyMonkey, which raised about $800 million in January of last year.


Equidate’s critique of SecondMarket’s model is that if you are an employee that wants to sell shares, you have to do it through your company.


“It’s difficult if you want to sell shares as an individual,” said co-founder Sohail Prasad, who was previously a product manager at Zynga and an early employee at Chartboost. (But these restrictions also exist because as secondary sales have become more popular, companies have also wanted control. They want to manage the flow of private information of their financial performance and they want to know who their shareholders are.)


So what Equidate has done is that they’ve created contracts tied to the value of an employee’s shares, which have to be vested and owned by them. (Employees can’t participate if they just have options or if they have restricted stock units.)


“It’s similar to a collateralized loan. No shares are trading hands,” Prasad said. Prasad said that an Equidate contract allows an investor to buy rights to the economic upside of a share, while avoiding the legal hoops a company has to go through when it’s adding extra shareholders to its cap table.


Gil Silberman, Equidate’s other co-founder, created the contracts after working as a lawyer with companies like LinkedIn, Craigslist and OpenTable.


They’re launching with four companies on the market including Dropbox, BitTorrent, Chartboost and Buzzfeed. They would like to bring more Series B stage companies or so onto the platform, which means they’d sit in between early-stage solutions like Funders Club and then big late-stage rounds.


For now, Equidate will only allow accredited investors, who either have a net worth of more than $1 million or make at least $200,000 a year, to participate.


The four-person company hasn’t shared any details on how much it has raised to date or who its investors are.





12:39 PM

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A group of Norwegian lawmakers nominated former NSA contactor Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize. Saying that his bottomless pit of surveillance revelations contributes to stability and transparency, the lawmakers submitted the nomination to the Nobel Foundation. President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, meaning Obama and his secret-leaking foil could soon have at least one thing in common. Snowden, currently holed up in Russia, is one of 259 nominees for this year's award.


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Seamless and GrubHub have partnered with location-based check-in service Foursquare to help you retain your precious pear-shaped physique and avoid exerting even the bare minimum of effort: You can now order delivery from restaurants near you right from within the app, on the Android, iOS and web-based versions of the Foursquare app.


Over 20,000 restaurants that fall under the combined GrubHub Seamless umbrella are available to U.S. Foursquare users as a result of the new partnership, covering hundreds of cities across the country, according to Foursquare’s official blog post announcing the news.


foursquare-deliveryParticipating restaurants will show an “Order Delivery” menu item alongside links to view the restaurant on a map, call or see its menu in the in-app listings. The best way to find restaurants that feature this integration is to search for the type of cuisine followed by “delivery” within Foursquare, the company notes.


Previously, you could check-in to restaurants where you’d ordered food with Delivery.com, as Engadget notes, but you still had to go somewhere else to get the job done. Now, you can virtually go somewhere you never actually were, and also stuff your face with its consumables, all while only partly clothed. Nirvana, I am in you.


Photo courtesy flickr user Mark Turnauckas.





11:54 AM

Seamless and GrubHub have partnered with location-based check-in service Foursquare to help you retain your precious pear-shaped physique an...

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Indie music? Pffft. Indie music is way too main stream, man. All the cool kids are into music that no one has ever heard.


Meet Forgotify. Forgotify tears through Spotify in search of songs with zero plays, playing only the songs that no one else has ever listened to.


Certainly, there can’t be many of those, right?


Wrong. According to data that Spotify released in October of last year, 80% of the 20-million-or-so songs on Spotify have been listened to at least once. That means 20% of the songs have not. That’s 4 million songs with zero plays.


Of course, there’s… probably a reason that most of these tracks have zero plays. Spotify isn’t necessarily known for setting the bar to entry very high, so a number of these tunes sound like amateur covers of a KidzBop cover that was, itself, based on a rough recollection of a song given by someone who’d heard it once, years ago. That is to say, most are not very good.


Some, though, are perfectly fine. When you find the (increasingly rare) gem, it’s like a teeny, tiny victory over the universe. You’ve found the signal drowning in the noise.


One crazy thought: when you listen to a song on Forgotify, it increases that song’s play count… meaning that, if this thing is working correctly, no one will ever hear it again. Each experience becomes ephemeral.


A crazier thought: Forgotify itself is, in a way, ephemeral. If the rate at which people are using Forgotify exceeds the rate at which Spotify adds new tracks, Forgotify is theoretically eating itself with each new listen.


You can find Forgotify here. If you actually want to listen to a track, you’ll have to be signed in to Spotify.


[Meanwhile, the radio in my room is playing "Royals" by Lorde for the 87th time this morning.]





11:54 AM

Indie music? Pffft. Indie music is way too main stream, man. All the cool kids are into music that no one has ever heard. Meet Forgotify...

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