In spite of the recent layoffs, Zynga is still picking up talent in strategic areas like social casino gaming.

The company bought a roughly 40-person team called Spooky Cool Labs full of real-money gaming talent. Based in Chicago, the Spooky Cool Labs team is made up of social and real money gaming veterans from companies such as Aristocrat, and slot machine makers like IGT (International Game Technology) and WMS Gaming. The company’s founder, Joe Kaminkow, was ranked as one of the 10 most influential people in the history of slots by Strictly Slots Magazine.

But from Spooky Cool’s website, the company looks like it had been working on non-casino titles like a Wizard of Oz city-building social game. Zynga says that access to this Wizard of Oz brand is part of the deal.

The team will stay in Chicago and work with Zynga’s San Francisco-based social casino gaming team. In another interesting twist to this deal, Kaminkow will apparently also still lead game design at Aristocrat Leisure Limited, an Australian company that’s one of the biggest slots makers in the world. He told VentureBeat back in March that he had taken a job as a senior vice president of game development at Aristocrat Leisure. Spooky Cool also had backing from the Hearst Corporation, but they didn’t disclose the amount of funding.

As Zynga grapples with how to approach mobile platforms, it has relied on one of its old standbys: Zynga Poker. At the same time, the company has made steps toward exploring how to incorporate real money into its betting games.

The company made its first real-money games live in the U.K. in April, just after the first-quarter closed. But it has yet to bring these real-money efforts to the Facebook platform or mobile in that market. In December, the company also applied for a “preliminary finding of suitability” from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, starting a process that could take more than a year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tired of your friends texting on their phones while they should be getting schnockered? This clever hack is called the Offline Glass and it’s designed to ensure that you and your friends don’t sit at the bar checking Wikipedia for who starred in The Greatest American Hero and whether Tabitha will totally come out tonight oh my god she won’t she and Christian just broke up oh god she’s with Raul and Paula and maybe she’ll come in an hour! In fact, you can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom.

The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone (an iPhone works best) and you can only use your phone if you’re also holding your beer. Knowing the average drunk person I suspect a) this will destroy hundreds of iPhones a night and b) this will result in lots of spilled beer, but by gosh if it isn’t a clever idea.

The glass is being used in the Salve Jorge Bar in Sao Paolo and was created by the Fischer & Friends ad agency in Brazil. You can’t buy one but, with the right tools, you could probably make a few. I’d like to see someone 3D print a few of these for house parties.

Whenever I go out with the TC team I make everyone play the phone game which consists of piling up all the phones in one place so no one can reach them. It helps encourage conversation and, unless they’re wearing Google Glass, the pained expression after the first few minutes of the game is mesmerizing. Here’s to anything that helps recreate that experience.

The Offline Glass from Mauricio Perussi on Vimeo.

via PSFK

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I don’t know what to believe about the world anymore. First of all, how does an NSA contractor have the ability to wiretap anyone, ANYONE, from an infrastructure level to a legal level? Is the legal part that “terrorism” is important enough to bypass a court? Is the infrastructure part that the data is available on the NSA’s servers somewhere, and this guy who worked at Booz Allen for three months was given clearance for it? How did this happen?

This part isn’t clear for me, though Michael Arrington has some plausible theories.

Still, I and the rest of the world, six days after the first story broke, have little idea whether this AIM, Facebook Messenger, Paltalk conversation you and I are having is directly accessible to the U.S. government, which, at anytime — and whether or not anyone has clearance — can look at it (Hi guys?!). What we do know for a fact though is that the NSA sucks at PowerPoint. 

Whistleblower Edward Snowden says you can wiretap Obama if need be, but the NSA has done a poor job of expressing that impact through its PRISM PowerPoint presentation. Exactly how much access the government has to company data is completely belied by its shitty graphic design skills.

“The top banner with the logos, it’s horrible, you cannot avoid it,” French PowerPoint designer Emiland De Cubber, who turned the government’s laughable deck into something more design-friendly (above), tells me. “You cannot say it’s bad — for someone who is not a designer to not know design at all. But you can say you didn’t think very much about what you wanted to say. It’s sad. Because people did not think about those slides.”

And their eventual audience of, I dunno, 2 billion or so people.

De Cubber is, yes, a PowerPoint slide designer who believes the U.S. government could have conveyed its message more effectively through visual design: “Half of the people don’t care about design, but the other half do care about it. It’s like a PowerPoint cliché, and not as threatening as it actually is.”

And his opinion on the guy who leaked the terrible slides in the first place? “He’s in a good place to be TIME Man Of The Year.”

Stop spying on us, American government.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Robert Weber is co-founder and senior vice president of new products at W3i. Follow him on Twitter @robertjweber.

In the mobile world, companies often live and die by metrics: “How are your monthly active users doing? What’s going on with your user retention? How many total downloads do you have?”

These kinds of metrics, which can have widely different implications, can make or break developers. Especially with the Silicon Valley mindset, driven by success stories like Instagram and Socialcam, that says “get users today, make money off them tomorrow.” With this mentality, user metrics often play a larger role than financial figures for some companies.

But what do they all mean? In mobile, daily active users (DAUs) is frequently the standard by which game and app developers are judged. However, the industry doesn’t really have a concrete definition of what a DAU is. Some analytics providers, such as Flurry, use a rolling average, where a user is considered active if they’ve opened the app at least once in the past seven days. Another part of the mobile market considers someone an active user if they’ve used the app on a particular day. To truly define success, the industry needs to settle on what an active user actually is.

Understanding Daily Habits

Before we can really understand the best way to measure and report on mobile metrics, it helps to understand the general habits of mobile users. W3i, which works with hundreds of mobile developers, sees a lot of data on how people interact with mobile apps.

The first thing to consider is that mobile developers can expect to lose about two-thirds of their users on day one. Our data shows that on average, most apps have a retention rate of 31 percent after the first day. In any other business, losing such a significant chunk of your audience so early would spell disaster, but that’s not the case on mobile.

After the first day, developers can expect their user retention to even off slightly but still decline steadily. After seven days, the average user retention for an app drops by about half to 14 percent. By the end of the first month, an average of 6 percent of users will still be interacting with the app.

With such fickle mobile users, it comes as no surprise that mobile developers would want to judge an app’s performance by its DAUs. Who knows what your users will like in a day much less a month?

This brings up the issue of determining what kind of user you actually want. Although it may look better on paper, just because someone plays a game in a seven-day period, it doesn’t necessarily make him or her an active user. However, this DAU measurement is widely used and is artificially inflating the user bases of a lot of apps.

A user can only execute an in-app purchase or view advertisements if they open your app, so it makes sense to count active users as those who have started a session that day. In short, we should be classifying DAUs in the most obvious way possible: the number of people who actually used the app on that particular day. This figure most accurately represents the revenue potential of an app and is a better indicator of how it’s performing.

Once developers effectively understand what to look for in an ideal user, they need to understand how to design their app in a way that attracts those users and keeps their attention. Developers should iterate a few times and make sure their retention is stable. Once they are comfortable, they should pursue more aggressive forms of user acquisition. When acquiring users, developers should benchmark their sources and how each performs to determine where most of their revenue is coming from.

This model is especially effective in mobile gaming.

Mobile gaming has always been a world apart from console and PC gaming. While PC gamers may chug away playing World of Warcraft for hours in their living rooms, and console gamers will spend entire days cooped up slaughtering Covenant in Halo 4, mobile gamers have different playing schedules and usage habits. They’re more likely to clock in their playtime on buses, waiting in lines, and upsetting flight attendants before takeoff.

It comes as no surprise then that the shelf life of a mobile game differs significantly from that of a console game. While AAA console games can keep users engaged for months on end, mobile games almost always see a significant drop in users after day one.

There are also some best practices developers can use to make sure the DAUs they’re seeing are being monetized to their fullest potential in their game or app:

• Give users some in-app currency off the bat to help them learn about the app or game and how it’s played.
• Don’t give too much currency away during level-ups or random situations, but still give some away so that users feel they’re getting a valuable game experience.
• Drive users through points in the app where they can use them often. This includes storefronts or speed-up moments in games.
• Update your app often, even with small changes. An update can get a dormant or non-active user back to the app by checking out the new content.
• It’s also important that developers understand that not all active users will be equally valuable. Adding an engagement metric counting the number of sessions per user is also a great idea. This way, you can tell the active users from the super users. 

As the mobile market continues to mature, what metrics are and aren’t important will continue to become apparent. In the meantime, developers need to consider which numbers they really want to focus on.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Updated. Amazon.com’s main website appeared to be down for many visitors for a 45-minute-long period today, with the site returning a mostly blank page that reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

Here is a screenshot of what some visitors saw when visiting Amazon.com:

A look at a cURL of the site at the time of the outage showed that Amazon’s homepage is returning a 503 Error, which indicates that the server powering the site is temporarily down due to maintenance or overloading. Internal links were still working, but at what seemed like a slower pace. Meanwhile, AWS, Amazon’s cloud hosting service for other websites, is up and running just fine.

503 Errors can be the result of a denial-of-service attack, although it’s impossible to say right now whether that is the case here.

The outage was noticed by Hacker News contributor Nathan Bashaw at around 11:40am PT. Needless to say, a more than 40 minute-long outage for a site as massive as Amazon.com is very unusual.

We’ve reached out to Amazon and will update this with anything we hear.

Update: The last 503 Error we pulled up on the Amazon.com homepage was at about 12:25pm PT, some 45 minutes after the first user reports of the outage began. At the moment, however (12:30pm PT) the site appears to be back up, and this article has been amended to reflect that. We are still waiting for word from Amazon on what happened.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Playsurface, a spin-off project from Templeman Automation that aims to provide a low-cost alternative to interactive touch table devices like Microsoft’s PixelSense (formerly known as the surface), was at CES showing off their functioning units in action, which the company will be shipping out to 40 or so Kickstarter backers this month. The Playsurface made headlines when it launched on Kickstarter back in May, reaching almost double its $40,000 funding goal.

Playsurface’s goal, unlike a lot of the large-sized shared touchscreen surfaces we’ve seen, is to be as affordable  open and hackable as possible, with the aim of being a legitimate option for use in education even in situations where budget might otherwise prohibit the use of such technologies. Templeman Automation teamed up with Tufts University to help boost its education mission, and target applications for schools and students more effectively. To help with that goal, they’re looking into just what kind of “smart tangible” accessories  like the one that replicates an X-ray/microscope device seen in the video, would be most useful to K-12 educators. These accessories could be what turns the Playsurface from a great tech demo into a genuinely useful and widely used way for schools all around the world to replace not just computing devices, but a variety of expensive and hard to source teaching objects that might not otherwise be an option.

Just under $3,000, goal is to get it under $1,000 and TA believes that’s entirely possible, thanks to improvements in manufacturing efficiencies and materials. The Playsurface is available for general pre-order now, with shipments to retail customers ready to begin after the first devices roll out to the company’s Kickstarter supporters.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Imagine it’s Thanksgiving morning and your with the family. You creep down the stairs, Sheriff in hand, and creep in on dear old dad as he makes bacon pancakes. You set your weapon on “shotgun” and pull the trigger. A volley of hot rubber whangs him in the legs, his old frame buckling as he takes the shot. Another kill. All this can be yours with the Bandit, an automatic rubber band gun built for speed and (mild) pain infliction. The project, created by Bob Coulston, is a DIY, easy-to-assemble rubber band gun that can fire single bands, multiple bands in rapid succession, or all the bands at once, creating a hellstorm of flying bands.

The Outlaw model supports only single shots at a time while the Sheriff can be put into shotgun mode. The kit comes with all the laser-cut parts you need to assemble the gun and it’s held together with a few bolts.

Coulston describes the genesis of the gun thusly:

He is way over his goal of $5,000 and there are only 16 more days to pledge. I’d personally recommend buying the $300 package that gets you 10 Sheriff guns so you and your extended family can spend the next year giving each other (mild) welts as you go about your daily business.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wasn’t it just a few days ago that I said that Europe had gone a little incubator crazy? Well, more news on that front, this time coming out of Sofia, Bulgaria, of all places: Eleven, backed by €12 million of European taxpayers’ money, gets its official unveiling today, along with announcing the first eleven startups to be accepted into the program. It also boasts some impressive partners, including Google and Springboard.

Targeting teams in Central and Eastern Europe (although, interestingly, the accelerator will accept applications from anywhere), Eleven is offering startups €50,000 in funding for 10-15% of equity with a remit to help them go from discovery to validation, taking them past an initial MVP to be seed and series A investment ready. To that end, a follow on seed investment of €150,000 will be on offer to around one third of the graduating startups for up to an additional 15% equity — so the opportunity really is their’s to lose.

There’s one caveat, of course. Applying startups must be willing to relocate to Bulgaria for 3-6 months, where they’ll be based out of Eleven’s co-working space. I’m told it’s an impressive building, however — dubbed the “roof” and currently undergoing renovation, it’s the former Bulgarian Telephone Chamber building, which was the headquarters of the communist-era state telephone company. The is new Europe after all.

Overall, Eleven has a mandate to spend its investment budget in 3.5 years and to fund between 100 and 200 startups. It’s being run by a team with a mostly financial (and some VC) background, while it also counts Springboard’s Jon Bradford as a co-founder. Its partner, advisory and mentor network extends much further, however, and includes “serial entrepreneurs, leading VCs, and many others”. In fact, Google’s London Campus is to play host to the team demo days in six month’s time after the first cohort are ready to present their wares.

Talking of which, here are the first twelve:

Eventyard – event platform where the events find you
Farmhopping – Farmville meets real farms
Filement – platform for data access and management on any device
GrabaLanguage – learning foreign languages in a fun and effortless way
KeenSkim – automatic highlight summaries of web pages, articles and news
La Koketa – solving every girl’s problem: what to wear on which occasion
Maistorplus – find the best handymen in town / region-flavouredMyBuilder
Playground Energy – kids’ playgrounds that generate electricity
Sensika – an in-house corporate information intelligence tool
Soccer Scout – a professional network for managers, players, coaches and teams
Ulympix – create competitions and challenge the world

For those who’d like to get in on the action next time round, applications will be opened in September 2012 for the December-March acceleration period.

Oh, and here’s that wonderful-looking building.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been over three months since Facebook announced it would buy mobile photo sharing application and social network Instagram for a combination of cash and shares worth up to $1 billion, but nothing has come of it yet. When asked about the status of the deal during today’s second quarter earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s answer was short and to the point, saying as the deal hasn’t closed and there has been no integration between the two companies at all.

Although the transaction was originally pegged to close during Q2, Facebook later changed its estimates to sometime in 2012. It’s likely that a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the deal — a standard procedure for acquisitions over $66 million  — has slowed down the proceedings.

The majority of deals reviewed by the FTC go through after the first, preliminary review, but until the deal is approved, the companies have to operate independently. According to the S-1 Facebook filed in advance of its initial public offering, the company has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million termination fee if the acquisition doesn’t close.

What we found interesting about Zuckerberg’s comments on the deal were the lack of positive forward-looking statements. He did not say anything about working with the company in the future, or allude to any possible integration. He also declined to provide any additional information about when the deal is expected to close, simply saying that Facebook would issue an update.

The entire deal was reportedly made over a weekend, mostly between Zuckerberg and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom alone. Surprisingly, Facebook launched its own photo filtering and sharing iOS app called Camera just over a month later.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Of all the disappointing details heard during RIM’s most recent earnings call, the company’s decision to push back the launch of its first BlackBerry 10 devices was among the most devastating to the company’s loyal legion of fans.

Bummer though it may be, we may now have a clearer view of RIM’s hardware plans for the next year thanks to a newly-leaked roadmap obtained by BlackBerryOS. You know the drill folks — have those grains of salt at the ready.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins confirmed earlier this year that the first BlackBerry 10 device to launch would be a full touch device (the BlackBerry London/L-series), which would be followed shortly by a QWERTY handset (the Nevada/N-series). What Heins never disclosed was how quickly that second smartphone would launch after the first, but the slide confirms that both of them will be available at some point during Q1 2013.

Perhaps more interesting is the inclusion of a new tablet into the mix that’s apparently being prepared for release in the third quarter of next year. The slide is awfully light on details but the so-called Blackforest may sport 128GB of internal storage and appears significantly larger than the revamped 7-inch PlayBook 4G that’s slated to launch by the end of this year. It’s possible that the Blackforest could be the long-rumored 10-inch PlayBook, and if so, it seems as though the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated.

The slide is also peppered with a few other, less-detailed launches — something called the Nashville is expected to launch between Q2 and Q3, while RIM aims for a Q3/Q4 launch date for the Naples. Those names have popped up in the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha build so it’s pretty clear that they’re devices in the works, but there’s still no detail on what they’ll bring to the table.

If RIM’s plans for 2013 look a little sparse, it’s likely because RIM is looking to put more wood behind fewer arrows — as Heins stated during the earnings call, the company will have “fewer devices in a market at any given time.” It’s an approach that plenty of other smartphone players are running with these days, though only time will tell if they can survive this nasty transition period.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch