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Investors Drive $ZNGA Up 26% In Two Days Following Facebook IPO Filing

Achilles — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:54:13 +0000

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues , or $445 million. In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening. This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10. This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below. Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network , had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year . Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million. There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users. The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results: Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats. Heavy trading volumes indicate high volatility among investors. Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

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Investors Drive $ZNGA Up 26% In Two Days Following Facebook IPO Filing

Pokki Gives Quick Access To Madden NFL Superstars, Just In Time For The Big Game

blogger — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:00:32 +0000

It’s the Super Bowl season, when a host of services and apps debut just in time for the biggest television event of the year. And, if you’re a fan of Madden’s NFL Superstars (a web app that’s available through Facebook), then you’ll like this launch: the game is now available as a Pokki right here . Pokki , for those that haven’t used it, is a platform that lets you install lightweight apps that live in your Windows Taskbar (a Mac version is on the way). Each app gets its own icon — click on it, and the app will pop open immediately, click away and it’ll hide itself, and when you click it again, it’ll pick up right where you left off. The point is to give you quick access to apps without having to deal with browser tabs or standalone windows, and it works well.There are other apps and services that do something similar (Mac users may want to check out Fluid ), but Pokki’s platform features apps that are specifically designed for its quick, pop-over design. Pokki has landed two major gaming companies so far: Kabam and, with this launch, EA, and it seems likely that more will follow suit (the platform is well-suited for quick sessions of gaming throughout the day). And there are other apps available as well, including Gmail and eBay. The company says that Pokki is still in beta and hasn’t yet focused on marketing, but that its early numbers are very promising — so far they’ve seen “hundreds of thousands” of app installs, with users who have used the apps “tens of millions of times”. The platform is also seeing strong traction with its built-in app market: 60% of users are browsing and installing two new apps per month. Pokki is one of two main products from SweetLabs — their other major product is OpenCandy , which lets developers include targeted ads within their application’s install flow.

Facebook Tests Photo Viewer That Encourages Comments, Google+ Comparisons

bestcbstore — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:25:32 +0000

Facebook is testing a new photo viewer layout that mounts engagement buttons and comments to the right rather than beneath images. See, Facebook doesn’t want you to just view comments, it wants you to start a conversation. Apparently the company doesn’t care about being accused of copying Google+, since the viewer’s layout is very similar to that of its competitor . The fact is that this is good design, though, so it makes sense for Facebook to integrate whether or not it has appeared elsewhere. Currently when Facebook users view photos, they see a big blank space on the right but can’t see the comments below with scrolling past the fold and away from the image. That makes users more likely to leave the photo viewer before engaging. The blank space is better filled with comments that lend context to a photo, as a small percentage of Facebook users are now seeing. Facebook hasn’t been shy about taking inspiration from other products. In the months since Google+ launched, Facebook has added features found in Google+, including an asymmetrical Subscribe option, video chat , enhanced friend lists , and near-infinite post length . Facebook’s goal is the best user experience, and Google got a lot of that right. Google+ certainly wasn’t shy about using Facebook’s design as a starting point. Facebook employees have repeatedly assured me that product teams aren’t thinking about ad revenue when they design products. Still, convenient repercussion of the tested photo viewer design may be an increase in ad clicks. Rather than displaying ads beneath photos, the tested design shows them more prominently in the comments sidebar. Finding these types of synergies between business and user experience will be key to Facebook honoring the interests of its future investors. So why does this small change matter? First, encouraging conversation aligns with Facebook’s goal of driving connections between people, such as friends of a photo’s owner who might interact in its comment reel for the first time. Second, these comments drive notifications for all other commenters, which inspire more return visits and time on site. I bet the test will show increased engagement, and Facebook will implement some version of side-mounted comments. [Thanks to our anonymous tipster for the screenshots]

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Facebook Tests Photo Viewer That Encourages Comments, Google+ Comparisons

The Revolution May Or May Not Be Branded

blogger — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:39:43 +0000

The Occupy movement, or rallying cry, or whatever you want to call it, is by its nature decentralized. By refusing to come together under one banner other than the word “Occupy,” they’ve both diluted their message and allowed it to spread more quickly. You don’t need an Occupy license to occupy a bank’s lobby in Kansas City, but at the same time there’s a natural question of whether one occupation is related to another. Political considerations aside, the point is that Occupy might benefit from a recognizable face. On this front, some faction of the movement has decided to do a little branding, but in keeping with the democratic, bottom-up nature of the organization (or rather dis organization), they’ve opted to run a contest and let the “official” logo be selected by popular vote. It’s a great application of web technology to an interesting problem, and will probably prove to be a memorable case study in an increasingly common phenomenon: the necessity of branding an emergent movement or pattern on the internet. It’s something that has already been faced by, for example, Anonymous. Like Occupy, Anonymous is necessarily decentralized and in a way leaderless — but there are obviously leaders and centers, like @anonops and a few other “official” sources. But then there’s the Guy Fawkes mask and the empty suit, both certainly symbols of Anonymous by common consent, though whether they emerged naturally or were simply in the right place at the right time (and whether there’s any difference between those two) isn’t clear. Or think about the SOPA/PIPA protests. While everyone seemed to figure out a good way to express the concept of censorship on their site or avatar, the lack of a single unifying phrase, graphic, or general “brand” (loosely speaking) was conspicuous, considering the extraordinary cross-cultural and cross-community agreement on the issue. Which brings us to Occupy. The logos being submitted are the usual mix of free fonts, corporate-looking nonsense, and the occasional good idea. For the record, I like the one at top left, and these: But I’m suspicious of the whole concept. The problem to me is not Occupy-specific. It’s simply that emergent phenomena don’t respond well to efforts to define them. The reason no single visual metaphor appeared for SOPA was because there was no naturally propagating icon around which people could gather. There was no burning monk, no Kent State photograph, no graphic or sketch or person that naturally expressed and associated itself with the movement. The closest thing was the censor bar or redacted text, which was sort of good enough but didn’t adequately encompass the ideas behind the opposition. With Occupy as well, I think that efforts to create an identity for it will fail, because identity only emerges from collective action. It happens naturally or it doesn’t happen at all. I think this will be demonstrated more frequently over the next few years as activism, social change, and more everyday things as well become memetic and emergent. A logo will be picked for @occupy and for use on “official” communiques, whatever that might mean to them. But what Occupy and Anonymous and STOP SOPA and all the rest need isn’t a logo, it’s a symbol . Those aren’t quite as easy to come by. [hat tip to GigaOm for setting me thinking]

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The Revolution May Or May Not Be Branded

Yammer Time: In 2011 “Pretty Much Everything Tripled”

kram412 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:57:50 +0000

Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.” Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch). We just can’t quit you (although we’ve tried). Some of these stats CEO David Sacks already shared with us earlier, and he also told us that sales tripled. But the 800,000 paid seats number is new.Yammer is in the process of raising a large $40 million round.

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Yammer Time: In 2011 “Pretty Much Everything Tripled”

AT&T Galaxy Nexus Gets Semi-Official Google Wallet Support

vertical8 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:44:06 +0000

The tale of Google Wallet’s life thus far is a bit of a weird one, but here’s the gist: Google launched it back in September, initially as an exclusive feature on Sprint’s Nexus S. We reviewed it here . Then came Google/Samsung’s new flagship Android phone, the Galaxy Nexus — and, for one reason or another, none of the Galaxy Nexuses on any of the US carriers supported Wallet. Android fans roared, and everyone involved pointed fingers everywhere else until everyone just kind of forgot about it. Flash forward to day: without much fanfare, AT&T Galaxy Nexus owners are reporting that Google Wallet now appears to support their devices. Word of the newfound support came from Droid-Life , who noticed that it could be downloaded to their device following a rather ambiguous “Small changes for device compatibility” update. Meanwhile, they’ve also figured out a somewhat hit-or-miss trick for getting the same package installed onto the Verizon Galaxy Nexus right through the market (as opposed to manually hacking the APK onto the device), though it’s still pretty unclear as to what’s enabling it for some and not for others. Anyway: if you’ve got a Galaxy Nexus on AT&T, go hop into the Android Market and see if you can nab Google Wallet. What do you have to lose? At worst, you’ll be back where you were before. At best, you’ll be paying for your Jack In The Box like a time traveler by the end of the evening.

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AT&T Galaxy Nexus Gets Semi-Official Google Wallet Support

Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:32:40 +0000

In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg , Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion. The company’s filing revealed some significant (or perhaps mind-melting) stats, including the fact that Facebook is seeing 845 million users every month, half of whom are daily users, and half of whom are mobile users. Zuck still owns 28 percent of the company , among other things; really that was just the beginning. In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing for themselves succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website . Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — coming in less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. Today, Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise shared some further stats , which provide a great follow-up to yesterday’s IPO madness. Yes, a $75 to $100 billion valuation is enough to marinate on, but just how much traffic — and what kind is — Facebook.com generating? While this data is from January, many readers may already be familiar with a lot of this, but it’s just further evidence of how colossal Facebook’s share of the market has become — both at home and abroad. For starters, Hitwise found that Facebook.com is now seeing one out of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five pageviews online in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Yep, 20 percent of pageviews in the U.S. happen on the Facebooks. [Insert Myspace dig here.] Furthermore, in terms of engagement, the average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes, and breakdown of male to female in Facebook’s visitors, shows that the social network is more popular among women, as 57 percent of its traffic for the last 3 months, ending January 28th, came from the ladies. Meanwhile, the ages of Facebook.com visitors shows that the breakdown of its its visit share by age compares favorably to the online population, as you can see in the graph to the right. As Erick said yesterday, Facebook managed to report $1 billion in profits for 2011, which is a fairly exact number, considering all of the variables at play. It could be that Zuckerberg managed accounting to come out at this round, even number, a sign to investors that the company has everything completely under control. Investors love predictability. And on that note, beyond the average of 20 minutes users are spending on the site, 96 percent of of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012. Hitwise’s numbers also show that, in terms of reaching affluent users, Facebook’s size allowed the site to win 499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group, ahead of YouTube at 223,732,591 visits and Twitter at 15,166,795 visits. Facebook makes billionaires and caters to them. Further adding to its accolades, when it comes to search, “Facebook” happens be the most searched term in the U.S., with Facebook-related terms accounting for 14 percent of the top search clicks. is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks. Internationally, Facebook.com remains in the top market in every country aside from China, due to the influence of China’s Facebook and Twitter competitors, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Renren, which are the largest generators of traffic. The social network’s largest web footprint is in Canada, where it captures 12 percent of all visits in the market. With all the excitement around Facebook yesterday, it really comes as no surprise that Facebook.com is, according to Hitwise, “the largest website in the U.S. and a top performer in numerous international markets.” The loyalty, engagement, and sheer number of monthly users proves that this company is, simply put, a freak of Internet nature. The social network has spread across the Web with its sharing functionalities, Facebook Connect, and is bringing social to just about every industry imaginable. Zuck’s proposed goal of making its social graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web has certainly been realized, as it played an integral role in the rise of Zynga, social gaming, is making eCommerce social, music, and on and on. For more on the Hitwise data, check out the post here . And here’s more of TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook IPO Day: Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO Yes, We Actually Changed Our Logo To Zuck (A Facebook IPO Round Up) Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

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Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

Surprise! Location App Highlight Actually Creates Serendipity

jos — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:02:40 +0000

The big promise of location-based mobile apps is that they can help you find something great in real life without you meaning to look for it. But that hasn’t usually been my experience. Instead, whether because of the friction of having to check in, the lack of adoption by friends outside of tech, or whatever else, I simply forget to use them. That has changed with Highlight , a new passive location app for iOS that shows you when Facebook users with friends and interests in common are nearby. Since it launched last week, I’ve gotten in touch with an old friend/source who’s now at a big new company, discovered a couple previous acquaintances who happen to live or work near me, and got the heads up about a fellow blogger creeping behind me at work. My experience is more or less on track with what founder Paul Davison is hearing from other users so far. But before I get into that, what’s different about Highlight from the million other location apps out there? At first, it doesn’t seem like much: you install it on your phone, sign in with Facebook, and continue your life as normal. But there is no check-in. Instead, you get notifications showing up whenever Facebook friends, friends-of-friends or just people with shared interests (that is, Liked Facebook pages) are close. If you click through any of the notifications, you can see their Facebook profile photos, the specific shared friends and interests you have, and the option to message with them or leave a comment. The combination of the Facebook social graph and the frictionless sharing experience makes discovery uniquely automatic. The closest app I’ve seen to it is Sonar , which lets you find Foursquare users with things in common, but still requires a check-in. Maybe everyone else doing location will evolve their products along Highlight’s lines, as Josh noted when he covered the launch , but for now the startup is off to a great start. Here’s what its users are doing so far, as related to me by Davison: Remembering names: Remembering names has been a pretty powerful use case. One of our users saw someone he knew at a coffee shop and initially avoided eye contact because he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Then Highlight popped up and told him who the man was and how he knew him, so he was able to go over and say hi. Remembering other details about friends: People have been using it at dinner parties to remember where their friends work. Discovering that friends are nearby: One user and her husband were eating dinner and Highlight notified them that their close friends were also at the restaurant, on the other side of the bar, so they joined up and ate together. People are getting notified that friends are nearby all the time – when they are shopping, out at bars, or getting coffee in the afternoon. Sometimes they’ll meet up with the friend, or other times they’ll just say a quick hi. They say it makes it more fun to go out in the city. Impromptu meetings (a quote from a user): ”I have been emailing with someone about meeting up for weeks and today he pinged me on Highlight when the app said we were nearby, and we just grabbed coffee then. It was so awesome.” Another example, from Davison: ”I was in a coffee shop this weekend and one of our users appeared in my Highlight feed right as I was working on a feature she had requested. I pinged her in the app and it turns out she was sitting at front of the coffee shop, so we met in person and I showed her the designs we were working on. It even turns out she works with a friend of mine from college. It was really nice to randomly meet her in person like that.” Getting to know coworkers: “We’ve had a lot of people use it in their offices to help people remember their coworkers’ names and learn more about them. It makes people friendlier and reduces the awkwardness. It’s tough to ask someone their name when you’ve been nodding hello to them in the hallways for three months.” Connections from the past: One user crossed paths with a woman who knew a boy he used to mentor in Texas 10 years ago, who had recently passed away. They did not meet up in person, but they talked in the app about how they missed him and how nice it was to connect with someone who was feeling the same thing. Seeing when visitors are nearby: When people are expecting a friend, they like getting notified when their friend is nearby. Conferences: A lot of people are saying they’d like to use it for conferences, so they know where people work and what friends they have in common with them. Asking questions: People have started using their Highlight status to ask questions to the people around them and get pinged throughout the day with replies.

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Surprise! Location App Highlight Actually Creates Serendipity

The Peek Bites The Dust

ACMAir — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:33:27 +0000

You may remember the Peek , a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data. In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep. Despite revising the hardware and switching up the pricing, the Peek couldn’t maintain relevance in the face of smartphones and tablets. There was always the question of whether it was a legitimate market at all, but I object to that objection. I think it’s a brilliant proposition, and one many people found useful. But you just can’t fight progress, and while phones and tablets got more capable, they also got easier to use. Ironically, it might have been trying to compete that made the Peek at last irrelevant. The people who liked it didn’t think of it as a less-capable smartphone, but as a single-purpose device, like a fork or a measuring tape. That value proposition, focus, is something we’re seeing in practice in single-purpose sites like Imgur and so on. But the philosophy of the mobile phone as Swiss army knife has taken over in the hardware field, so devices like the Peek got left behind. The Verge talked to the CEO , and he said that there are a few thousand devices lying around in warehouses, and he’d like to put them into the hands of interested hackers. The Peek 9 was a perfectly workable piece of hardware, though not particularly powerful, but perhaps it could be made into something interesting or useful by a little creative coding. Head over there for more info. Update : It should be noted that this isn’t the end for Peek the company , only Peek the service and line of devices. Peek Inc actually just closed a big funding round to fuel its work bringing smartphone-type software to low-cost mobile devices. We’ll report more on that as the story develops.

IPO Be Damned, Facebook Will Still Prioritize User Experience

blogger — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:49:51 +0000

For those not from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there’s only 1 thing you really need know about Facebook’s plan to become a publicly traded company : Your Facebook won’t be suddenly overrun with ads. Facebook bluntly warns greedy investors “Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results”, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” This is a huge win for the user base, which depends on Facebook as a communication utility. Facebook even put its conservative stance on monetization in its assessment of Risk Factors for investors: “we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions are consistent with our mission and benefit the aggregate user experience and will thereby improve our financial performance over the long term.” When rumors first emerged that Facebook was planning to IPO, I shuddered at the thought of enlarged ad sidebars, banner ads on mobile, and timid product development. I’m not worried anymore. Facebook seems determined not to let outside investors narrow its long-term vision. Just look at this photo Mark Zuckerberg posted of his desk yesterday. Check out our full coverage of Facebook’s filing to IPO , including its $1 billion in profit, 845 million monthly active users, and Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of “The Hacker Way”.

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IPO Be Damned, Facebook Will Still Prioritize User Experience