Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.

Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen.

Why Port?

“We see opportunity with the Mac App Store because it’s not as occupied as the mobile App Store. There are several quite nice games, but the competition is not as huge” said ZeptoLab’s twin brother founders Semyon and Efim Voinov. Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies are already available, but other staples like Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Where’s My Water are absent. Without these apps occupying the charts, there are places for other developers to swoop in and get discovered.

As expensive console and PC games like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic appear in the store as well, paid apps ported from mobile may be able to get away with charging higher prices. On a phone $5 may seem steep, but the bigger screen size and history of $50 disc-based games may make $5 appear cheap on the Mac App Store.

“We started quite a while ago doing this in-house. It took a bit longer than we expected, but from a technical standpoint the process of porting to Mac was pretty straightforward. The tools are pretty good. The majority of work was on the design and art side.”

From Touch To Trackpad

In Cut The Rope, users cut ropes attached to pieces of candy, working with gravity, momentum, and other forces to guide the sweets into the mouth of a hungry baby dinosaur named Om Nom.”It was challenging porting to Mac OS, because Cut The Rope was intended for touch controls” the Voinovs admit.

“It’s tricky to move from one point of the screen to another very quickly. It’s pretty natural with fingers, but different with the mouse.” When the game was ported to HTML5, some laptop users reported difficulty holding down the mouse click button while using another finger for precise movements.

To keep the original feel intact but give players an optimized control scheme for the track pad and mouse, the Voinovs added the option to hover near a rope to highlight it and click to cut it, rather than swiping. If it helps, users can leave it on, or disable it if they find it too different from the mobile version. During testing, the team noticed that levels where you had to make several quick cuts could leave users cursing the controls. To compensate, they made the physics of the Mac version work just a little slower.

Developers should determine which controls might be harder with a mouse and consider adding similar options, keyboard shortcuts, or on-screen buttons that make use of the extra real estate. If those aren’t enough, similar tweaks can be made to a game’s physics to reduce player frustration.

High Resolution Landscape Level Design

Meanwhile, many of Cut The Ropes levels were designed for a portrait orientation screen, while most Mac monitors stay fixed in the landscape position. The Voinovs took a methodical approach, playing each level of their mobile game and noting which were too tall and would need lay out adjustments. “We realized it was more half of the levels”, making level redesign a significant time-suck. Other devs should factor this into their decisions to port and release schedules.

Bigger screens also require higher resolution artwork. Rather than seeing this as busy work, ZeptoLab took the chance to differentiate the Mac OS experience. “We made sure it would look great, really crisp and sharp. It makes it special and give people who already played on mobile a reason [to buy the Mac OS version]. You can see all the little details of the graphics in the game.” Now as the team makes new level packs, they’re using the Mac OS resolution standards that are much easier to scale down than scale up.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

“This is our first experience releasing a Mac OS game. We believe it will develop into a bigger thing overtime” Semyon told me. ZeptoLab will be closely watching the success of the game, but is simultaneously seeking other revenue sources. Last week it released Cut The Rope for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader. Apple TV and Siri are two other big platforms that developers should have on their radars.

At the New York Toy Fair, ZeptoLab announced licensing deals with Mattel, Hasbro, JAKKS Pacific, and Li&Fung to create Om Nom plush dolls, a board game, and clothing line based on Cut The Rope. “We’re trying to keep the balance. Merchandise is important, but there’s no merchandise without a good product” the brothers say. Merch has been huge for Rovio‘s Angry Birds, and now Zynga has struck licensing deals, legitimizing offline revenue streams.

Finally, while Cut The Rope is in 4th on the all-time App Store paid app chart, ZeptoLab is eager to invent new intellectual property, ”We have this creative urge to do cool new things.”

Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to porting existing games. The Mac OS gaming platform comes with unique characteristics like the trackpad to be designed for, rather than around. “Cut the ropes to your imagination” a some hack writer might say. I’ll just leave you with, “Go make people happy, that’s your art.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Attachments.me, the startup that promises to take the pain out of searching through email attachments, is gradually ramping up the services it’s offering to users: from today, it is launching an option to automatically file your attachments to specific folders in the cloud; and it has also expanded support to include Box, which now joins Dropbox in its list of supported cloud storage partners.

The news caps off some significant developments we’ve seen at attachments.me since announcing a seed round of $500,000 from Foundry Group last year: others have included Dropbox support and Gmail extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

The addition of an automatic filtering feature underscores the growth of time-saving services that we’re seeing around cloud storage — in other words, it’s not just yet another set of dumb folders for filing things away. In this case, attachments.me will let users set up rules to decide how attachments get stored, and then when the attachments come in, they’ll automatically go to specified folders.

The service sounds promising, if somewhat limited in this first iteration: for starters, attachments can be filtered by sender and file type — but not subject or other keywords. Also, a user can only set up the rules in attachments.me’s Chrome extension.

However, it’s worth nothing that in a blog post announcing the new service, co-founder Jesse Miller says that this is just 1.0 of this service: “We have a ton more options we are going to add to automatic filing,” he writes.

One of these, apparently, will be letting users set up automating rules via the tools’ iPhone app as well. Another area that has room for expansion: the platforms that attachments.me supports overall. It has yet to add other email providers, apart from Google’s Gmail.

Meanwhile, the new support for Box is a logical next step for attachments.me as it looks to grow its customer base, which currently accounts for some 40 million Gmail attachments.

Specifically, it could see attachments.me make bigger inroads into the enterprise segment: Box.net last year signed a strategic deal with HP to offer its cloud services on selected HP desktops, and, on the back of an $81 million Series D round of funding in October 2011, Box could have other, more aggressive expansion plans on the cards, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Our phones can do all kinds of things these days. Hell, millions of people — people from all different OS persuasions — are walking around talking to their phone. But even some of the most basic features — like, oh I don’t know… connecting to the Internet — could stand a few upgrades.

That said, the Nokia Siemens Network and Qualcomm are putting together a new network technology called HSPA+ MultiFlow. It’ll basically allow for one person to use the connection from two different base stations to heighten network efficiency.

So, in other words, if you were near the very edge of a network base station’s cell coverage, your phone would automatically connect to the next closest cell along with the one it’s on to make sure that what would be a rather choppy connection (connected to just one of the stations) is nice and smooth (thanks to a connection to both stations).

The duo is set to show off the technology at Mobile World Congress in about a week.

According to the official release, MultiFlow HSPA+ can up to double data speeds for users at the edge of cell coverage. What’s even better, it doesn’t take billions of dollars in installation to set up. Carriers can use a simple software upgrade to their existing HSPA+ network to enable MultiFlow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast.

Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge you worked so hard to acquire in school.

But as pumped as I was when I started out, I also felt a lot of stress: the uncertainty of facing an interviewer; the big differences between companies; the difficulty of deciding which company would be best for me.

Companies, like people, have distinctive personalities. Just as you won’t get along with every person you meet, you aren’t going to get along with every company that offers you a job. And vice versa. To figure out your best fit, you’ll need to ask some meaningful questions to help you figure out what you value beyond the salary. What is the pace of work? What kind of bosses would you like to have? Will that fast-growing start-up be around a year from now? Will that big, established company be boring?

I would love to say that if you are a talented engineer, Facebook is the obvious place for you. But it wouldn’t be true, because the fit between a person and a company is more complicated than that. It’s not just about matching up technical skills and money. It’s also about whether a company’s culture and mindset resonates with you. In other words, you should be interviewing the company at the same time they are interviewing you.

But since you have to get an internship offer before worrying about which company to pick, let’s go over the nuts and bolts of that process.

What They Didn’t Teach You in School

When you solve problems for school, you’re usually writing on paper or using your keyboard. But if you’re given a problem to solve in an internship or job interview, you will be doing something more: you’ll be projecting the kind of person you are. Your words will indicate what you know, and your demeanor will indicate how you think and what kind of disposition you have. Are you calm and patient, or restless and energetic? Confident, cocky or humble? Can you communicate with those around you? There isn’t a “right” or “wrong” type, but the interviewer will be taking it all in.

To prepare yourself, I have three words for you – practice, practice, practice. Interviewing well is a skill they don’t teach you in school, but it’s crucial. Fortunately, you can gain the basic skills you need in a Saturday afternoon.

Start by picking a few fun programming problems, printing them out and taking them to a whiteboard. To simulate the stress you might feel in an interview, time yourself as you write the solutions and talk them out. Don’t worry if you get tripped up — interviewers are more interested in how you wrestle with the problem, and whether you keep working at it, than whether you come up with a perfect answer. Doing this a few times should make the format feel more comfortable so when you get to the interview, you’ll look less stressed because you will be less stressed. That’s important, and it will give your interviewer a better sense of who you are.

Sampling the Buffet

Assuming you passed your interviews, you may have several different internship options. This is when the fun begins. My advice is that you should never intern at the same place twice, even if it’s a huge company and you can try a different group. Why? Because internships are like appetizers — you get to try out different bite-sized morsels and see which ones you like best before diving in to the main course. Before starting my first real engineering job, I had internships at four great companies, from Sun Microsystems to Google, and each gave me a very different taste. Sure, you may like the company you were at last summer, but you might love the next company. Use internships to go to big companies, small companies, companies near home and companies in different states or even countries. Why not? What do you have to lose?

The Main Course

If you do well in your internship, you may very well get a job offer at the end of the summer. If so, great! But if not, don’t worry. You now have strong work experience and will know what to expect in the interview room.

But since even the most thorough practice can’t fully prepare you for interviewing at your dream job, my advice is to line up interviews for companies from least desirable to most desirable. By the time you are at that last interview, you’ll be a pro.

In that interview, it may help to act as if you already have the offer. You shouldn’t be arrogant, but it may be helpful to pretend that you have to decide by the end of the day if this is where you want to work. This is when it gets interesting, because now you’ll be interviewing the company instead of the other way around. It can be tough to get the answers you need, so ask questions that can reveal concrete details about how the company works. Here are some questions that worked for me. See which ones are important to you:

• How quickly does the company move on ideas (what is the typical time between releases)?
• What would it take for an engineer to test out an idea on the live site/product?
• Are groups very distinct or do they work in a more fluid manner?
• How often do people move around between teams?
• What is the rough ratio of managers to direct reports?
• Do they have some sort of formal or informal mentoring program?
• How much are you going to learn there?
• Do they offer opportunities to grow and try new things?

The Negotiation

Let’s assume that you got the offer (hopefully multiple offers). Before I get started with specifics, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: money. Most of us don’t like talking about money or acting as if it’s important. That’s fine, but you should be prepared for that conversation because the only time you can negotiate your compensation is before you start. Once you have signed on, your pay is entirely based on your performance and you won’t have much opportunity to re-negotiate (other than by being promoted).

Your offer will likely consist of a salary component and an equity component, and both parts are fair to negotiate. Each company will have its own range for new hires based on factors like the candidate’s school, degree, and interview strength. It’s hard to advise exactly how to
negotiate, but don’t be afraid. If you think you want more salary, ask for it and see what they come back with. You can negotiate until the recruiter says, “this is our final offer” or “this is the best we can do.” At that point, you have to decide whether to take the offer or politely decline.

Equity is a bit more nuanced. You can’t simply look at the number of shares a company is offering, or even their current value. The big question is how much you think the company will grow in the future. This is the classic risk/ reward calculation, and it’s a judgment you have to make for yourself. Big, established companies usually offer less equity than small startups because their futures are more secure. A startup has to offer you more stock because it may be gone in a few months. You face two questions. First, how bright do you think the company’s outlook is? Second, what’s your appetite for risk versus reward?

During this process, you will be talking to a recruiter who serves as the company’s ambassador to you. Even if he or she casually asks how much salary or equity you want, know that this isn’t a casual question, and it’s not wise to throw out a number in that kind of conversation. You haven’t had a full-time job, so you can’t be expected to have a reasonable sense of what’s fair. It’s better to tell the recruiter that you haven’t thought about exact numbers but are excited to see what your offers look like. The recruiters aren’t trying to cheat you, but you are both part of a negotiation and each side has its own interests.

Your First 100 Days

A new job can be rough because you are starting from scratch and have to prove yourself. Don’t worry, this phase will pass. With every task and project, you will learn something new and start to take on bigger tasks. It’s important to remember that the people around you are there to support you and help you get up to speed (if you’ve picked correctly). You are going to make mistakes and it’s going to suck, but you will learn from the mistakes and keep going.

When things get tough — and they will — don’t beat yourself up with thoughts like, “I’m not smart enough” and “everyone around me knows more.” The truth is that everybody was new at some point, and everybody has strengths and weaknesses. If you are having a hard time, ask your manager or mentor to tell you about their first jobs or internships and the issues they dealt with. A little perspective goes a long way. Instead of agonizing over your stumbles, focus on doing what you enjoy and give it your very best shot. Trust me, the rest will follow.

[image via Flickr/felixtsao]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Having built a socially-driven market research business on Facebook and across the web, Peanut Labs is launching a new iteration of its crowd-sampling tool today called CrowdVi.be. The goal is to let a brand or anyone else quickly ask questions and get meaningful answers back from random internet users.

Sure, you can use other social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, to instantly get feedback online. But the difference is that Peanut Labs has some 50 million users on 200 social networks around the world, who take its surveys in order to earn Facebook Credits or other forms of virtual currency in games and apps. In other words, it has a huge, fairly random pool of consumers who are easily to access and hear back from. During its private beta, Crowdvi.be has already been used by companies testing various versions of logos, video trailers, site redesigns, and other tests of words and images.

The new service costs a dollar or less per user, and takes less than a minute to start delivering results. Surveys are priced in a way that’ll be quite familiar to anyone who uses modern social networks — there’s a virtual currency called “Credits,” with 10 Credits costing a buck, that you spend to run your surveys. Each one requires a minimum of 100 users, with prices starting high for smaller ones and dropping with volume. Larger surveys will take longer than a few minutes, but will still conclude within 24 hours.

(The company is offering a special discount for TechCrunch readers, where it’ll match whatever you pay for your first survey. Click on this link to get it.)

Peanut Labs is able to target surveys to particular categories like retail, consumer electronics and banking, because all of its users are first required to provide demographic information about themselves. So, these surveys still have the inherent bias of only selecting for people who have chosen to participate in exchange for offers. But, as Peanut Labs chief executive Noman Ali tells me, its total population is so large, the cost is so much cheaper and the results so much faster than traditional reports that lots of companies are going to be able to get new value out of it.

After starting as a social network called Xuqa last decade, the company discovered that users were willing to take various offers to earn a virtual currency that it had built into the site. It turned this discovery into Peanut Labs right around the time that Facebook launched its developer platform, and began providing surveys from research firms and other organizations within offer walls for social games. It grew this business over the next few years, and in 2010 sold it to research panel provider e-Rewards.

Going forward, Alis says, the product will include more features for sampling, including income ranges, and will also include templates for specific types of industries.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You may have heard the buzz by now about a young startup that’s being fueled by some pretty impressive star power, including the likes of the one and only Lady Gaga. The project, called Backplane, was co-founded by Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, and raised an early (then hush hush) seed round from an impressive set of investors, including Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, i/o Ventures, and Tomorrow Ventures.

The startup is also being led by a group of former Facebook and Google employees, as well as other tech-heavy companies, including co-founders Joey Primiani, an ex-Googler and creator of Cortex, Alex Moore, former Director of Operations (and the first employee) at Palantir Technologies, along with Panantir cofounder, Joe Lonsdale, who has become the Chairman of Backplane’s Board of Directors.

The startup is using its star power and tech cache to, among other things, hold a music hackathon at SXSW — which will be judged by music industry veterans, like Scooter Braun, the guy who helped bring you The Bieber — in an effort to continue attracting top-flight engineers to its platform.

There’s a lot of tech development and strategy being applied to the platform to support the startup’s founding value proposition, which is, simply put, to change the way traditional intermediaries connect fans with artists. In other words, it’s a community platform that combines features from Pinterest, Tumblr, Canvas, and Ning to bring together the most effective parts of social and visual design in the name of seriously upping the engagement level on community-centered platforms.

Backplane started with LittleMonsters.com, the first portal to be powered by Backplane, and the new online community for Lady Gaga and her army of fans. Of course, that’s just the beginning, the startup wants to create a bullpen of community sites not only for brands and celebrities, but for virtually any interest group.

But what does “community” mean in the Backplane context? In the case of LittleMonsters, Backplane provides site-wide “like” icons, social commenting, photo capturing and editing, along with integration with Google Calendar and Gmail, and more.

But the real key to Backplane’s community play, says Head of Marketing Sarah Ross (and early TechCruncher), is an i/o Ventures incubated sharing platform and browser extension called Cortex. Cortex was developed by developers, Eric Wolf and Joey Primiani, to be a simple way to integrate social functionality into how we surf the Web. As MG wrote at the time, instead of reworking the UI elements of Chrome, for example, Cortex adds a sharing overlay to any site. All you do is click you mouse and hold it down.

Up pops a prompt to share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. It automatically finds the right image and title, allows you to add a message, and blast it out over social networks. The key is simplicity and speed. When Primiani hooked up with future Backplane co-founders Moore and now CEO Matt Michelsen, they were blown away by the technology and immediately set about acquiring it. Backplane officially announced the completion of its Cortex acquisition today, as well as the fact that the technology is powering all social syndication across Backplane.

Not only that, but on top of the $1.8 million the startup raised in seed funding (mentioned previously), Backplane has today closed a series A round of financing that adds to its already impressive array of Silicon Valley investors, including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, and Advanced Publications Inc. While the startup is not sharing exact numbers, we have confirmed that the round is between $4 and $5 million, as the Wall Street Journal initially reported. That brings the startup’s total funding to over $6 million in just over a year.

The round came in a convertible note to give the startup more flexibility when raising its series B, as the WSJ reported. The LittleMonsters community is in controlled public beta, and by controlled, we mean that there were hundreds of thousands of signups for early testing. TechCrunch got an early look at Gaga’s Backplane community, which you can check out here.

Among other things, the community offers some nifty chat features, as users can instant message each other in any language and have it translated in realtime into the recipient’s language of choice. The CEO told us that about half of the site’s early testers hail from Brazil, with interest from China, and others. No doubt this will help make Backplane sites into international hubs of conversation about Lady Gaga, and soon many more groups and brands. In these bits of tech genius alone, one starts to see why there’s been so much early interest from Silicon Valley executives. Though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the backing of Gaga Nation.

LittleMonsters.com is slated to go live this spring, with further communities going live over the course of the year.

For more, check out Backplane at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we mentioned in our coverage of Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, mobile has been one of the fast-growing parts of Zynga’s business. On the company’s earnings call, CEO and founder Marc Pincus revealed that mobile users have grown five-fold to 15 million daily active users in 2011. That’s up from 13 million in December.

That’s an addition of 2 million users in the past month, and an addition of over 5 million users over the course of the quarter. In the third quarter, Zynga had 9.9 million daily active users for its mobile games.

The company launched five mobile games in the fourth quarter, including Mafia Wars and ForestVille. The company’s mobile game titles Dream Zoo, Words with Friends and Zynga Poker were all among the top 10 grossing games on the iOS platform during the quarter (Zynga launched 8 mobile games over the course of the entire year). On average, Zynga’s mobile apps have an average of 4.3 stars in App Store, says the company. Zynga says that the company saw a record amount of mobile bookings (revenue) in the quarter as well and mobile payers (those who are paying during games) are growing.

Zynga CFO Dave Wehner says that while the company is gaining more revenue from advertising online, there has also been healthy growth in ad revenue from mobile as well. In terms of monetization, some mobile games are being monetized at a higher rate than even web games. “As devices become more powerful, this is yet another canvas to grow,” said COO John Schappert on the call. “We’re seeing mobile as a big opportunity…we’re going to see more games coming.”

Considering the growth Zynga is seeing from mobile, it’s a good bet that mobile will be a key focus for Zynga in 2012.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Social gaming giant Zynga just released its fourth quarter earnings, the company’s first earnings release as a public company. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $302 million. Zynga beat the street, with revenue coming in at $311.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 59% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. In terms of Diluted EPS, Zynga took s a loss ($1.22) for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.09 for the fourth quarter of 2010.

CEO and Founder Mark Pincus said in a release, “2011 was another milestone year for Zynga’s mission of connecting the world through games. We are seeing social games and more broadly play become one of the most popular pastimes on web and mobile. Zynga set new records in the year in terms of audience size, revenues and bookings. We saw great momentum in mobile and advertising and ended the year with a strong pipeline of new games. We are excited about the opportunities in front of us to continue delighting our current players and to bring play to millions of new people.”

In terms of income, the company took a net loss of $435 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, which included $510 million of stock-based compensation expense for restricted stock units issued to employees that, in accordance with GAAP, was previously unrecognized until triggered by our initial public offering.

Zynga says bookings, which are its non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) measure, were at a record level of $306.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 and an increase of 7% compared to the third quarter of 2011. Online game revenue was $283.9 million, an increase of 51% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Advertising revenue was $27.3 million, an increase of 230% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

In terms of traffic and user stats, Daily active users increased from 48 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 54 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 13%. Monthly active users increased from 195 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 240 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 23%.

Monthly unique users increased from 111 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 153 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 38%. And average daily bookings per average DAU increased from $0.055 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to $0.061 in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 11%. Monthly unique payers, which is a key stat for revenue, increased marginally from 2.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 to 2.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 13%.

The company also reported a growth in usage of mobile games in Q4 primarily from titles Dream Zoo, Words with Friends and Zynga Poker, which were among the top 10 grossing games on the iOS platform during the quarter.

For the full year, Zynga says bookings were at a record level of $1.16 billion in 2011, an increase of 38% on a year-over-year basis. Revenue came in at $1.14 billion in 2011, an increase of 91% on a year-over-year basis. Online game revenue was $1.07 billion, an increase of 85% on a year-over-year basis. Advertising revenue was $74.5 million, an increase of 226% on a year-over-year basis.

Non-GAAP net income was $182.5 million in 2011, a decrease of 24% year-over-year, which was due to the increased investment in developing new games.

In terms of projections for the full year, bookings are projected to be in the range of $1.35 billion to $1.45 billion. Zynga also warns that growth will be weighted towards the back-half of the year with slower sequential growth in the first half of the year.

As we’ve reported in the past, Zynga has had a bit of a rough start on the public markets, as investors are a little unsure what to make of the company considering it’s the first Facebook-oriented virtual goods business to be publicly traded. The stock has fluctuated below its $10 initial share price since the company went public in the middle of December amid concerns over a heavy reliance on Facebook for traffic, over the small number of paying users for most of its revenue, as well as its mostly flat traffic.

But in late January, Zynga’s stock rating got a boost, and traffic numbers are up. New game launches such as Hidden Chronicles and Scramble With Friends, as well as a resurgence in usage of older games like Zynga Poker have helped boost traffic numbers for Zynga.

Additionally, the news that Zynga will be introducing legal gambling to its games portfolio also helped drive the stock value up.

And with the release of Facebook’s S-1, we learned that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of the social network’s revenue in 2011, through a combination of virtual goods payments and advertising (you can see more information on Zynga and Facebook’s agreement here). And clearly, Facebook’s payments business is growing. Investors are more bullish on Zynga and these earnings should help.

It’s clear Zynga is looking for other revenue streams and recently struck a big licensing deal with Hasbro to turn games like FarmVille, CityVille, and its other hit titles into real world products and toys.

You can follow the earnings call, which is set to take place at 2 pm PT, below.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A little less than a month ago, Apple held an education-focused event in which it announced the launch of iBooks 2, a move the company said it was making in an effort to “reinvent the textbook” by allowing users to purchase and download textbooks to their iPads. The new app enables the transformation of those expensive, heavy textbooks into lightweight interactive, digital textbooks, at $15 a pop. The accompanying iBooks Author allows teachers and amateur publishers to create interactive textbooks themselves.

As Apple pointed out at the event, education has long been in its DNA. Steve Jobs himself had long wanted to disrupt the textbook industry, but the problem is that it’s hard to convince schools to adopt $500 Apple devices without a slew of affordable content to go along with it. The process of creating textbooks, from writing to editing to publishing is slow; it can take years for textbooks (and updates) to be approved by publishers. By enabling anyone to create their own textbooks, Apple attempted to cut the buearacracy at the knees; it may not be a perfect solution, but it was a savvy end-around maneuver to create a workable solution.

In the end, the move certainly has the potential to upset the way textbooks are adopted. And, while some said that this was another example of Apple’s “Walled Garden,” it’s much more likely that Apple doesn’t actually care about whose content it’s serving, as long as it can sell more iPads. It doesn’t want to make or sell textbooks, it wants to create indispensable use-cases for its iPads.

If anyone has insight into Apple’s educational efforts, it would be Inkling Co-founder and CEO, Matthew MacInnis, who was responsible for Apple’s expansion into educational markets in Asia and later a senior manager of all Apple’s international education efforts. In late 2009, MacInnis left Apple to co-found Inkling with the mission to help textbook publishers convert their content into digitized, interactive versions, going beyond static rehashing of text, thanks to the opportunities created by new, mobile means of consumption, like the iPad.

MacInnis tells us that the team set out to build a publishing platform that would redefine digital media, starting with reinventing the textbook. But in doing so, they’ve discovered that to reinvent books, they’ve had to go back to ground zero and re-imagine the entire printing process itself. Desktop publishing has been around for decades, but to do it right, MacInnis said that they quickly became acutely aware that this required them to reset the type, so to speak.

Adobe’s InDesign has long been the de facto standard for formatting and laying out publications, magazines, newspapers, textbooks, and so on. While the process that goes into producing publications and textbooks is innately collaborative, it remains a complicated, convoluted, and time consuming process. The author writes the manuscript, the illustrators create images separately, everything has to be scanned, upped to the server, whereupon it’s outsourced to India, aggregated into PDFs, sent back to publishers for a read-over, back to India for changes, and so on and so forth. A year later, they have a finished product.

While iBooks looked to solve this problem, really the main use case for its Author tool is for teachers who want to publish books for their classrooms — those who aren’t looking to even sell it in the first place. In a sense, it’s like GarageBand or Keynote for quick textbook publishing, not so much a scalable model that works for the entire industry.

At least this is the motivation behind the “software environment” Inkling is officially unveiling today, called Inkling Habitat. The startup’s new platform targets the other end of the spectrum from iBooks: Professional publishers, giving them an industrial, or enterprise, platform that includes everything they need to create and publish interactive content for both the iPad and HTML5-based web content. No desktop software, and no constraints of the printed page.

In other words, Habitat enables publishers to “deploy standards-based content,” which includes guided tours, 3-D exhibits, interactive quizzes, and high def video. The coolest part? Habitat allows everything to be instantly published (and updated!) in a few clicks. With its new infrastructure, Inkling wants to change how interactive content is built, giving textbook publishers the tools to scale interactive publishing. (And perhaps make it into a viable, yet more affordable business?)

Inkling claims that Habitat is the “first integrated publishing environment” built for professional publishers. It allows publishers to push updates to every target platform once, while automatically customizing layouts for each device. Everything lives in the cloud, so that teams of editors, authors, and production partners can collaborate on textbook (or digital publishing) projects from around the world. Using the collaborative cloud, team members can see the same thing as their counterparts in India, staying in sync throughout the process.

Habitat also boasts an object-oriented content structure, in other words, the platform is semantic, and “content is treated like software, shifting the industry from a page-based model to a software-based model.” Among the platform’s other features, Habitat includes automated error reporting, as it scans the content every time it’s published to make sure it all works, automatically finding broken links, missing files, etc. Habitat also automatically saves every version of the entire project, every time, from start to finish, which means that editors can rollback changes at any point during the process — all the way back to the beginning. This is huge.

Inkling has, to date, published over 100 eTexts, and it is today announcing that two of the companies that have helped Inkling create these texts, Aptara and Innodata, will be expanding production on the startup’s platform. This means that, for example, Aptara will be extending its full-service “Design & Production Center” to all publishers, and its creative designers, media specialists, etc. will be working as an extension of publishers’ in-house teams — helping to increase the speed at which books are digitized.

Open Air Publishing, a New York-based startup that creates digital-first books has created three books on Inkling using Habitat. At the outset, Habitat will only be available to select publishing partners, and the platform will be opened more broadly this spring. (Interested readers can register for the Early Adopter Program here.)

Inkling has raised upwards of $17 million to date, from investors like Sequoia, Kapor Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, and Felicis Ventures.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How do you clean up a plutonium stain?

Well, according to the Nuclear Decomissioning Authority Team in the UK use Cillit Bang (the popular household cleaner from  consumer products manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser (Easy-Off BAM in the US)).  Apparently it works wondrously.

So it’s good news for all nuclear waste cleaners that a brand new multi-use version – that also washes dishes and surfaces, as well as plutonium – of Cillit Bang has just gone on sale exclusively on a popup fan-store in Facebook.

For some, selling in Facebook popup shops remains as unbelievable as using household cleaners to clean nuclear power plants – but both are happening.  And, Stefan Gaa, marketing director at RB UK, gets f-commerce – adopting a “Facebook-first strategy” by launching the new product exclusively on Facebook before it’s available elsewhere – in order to activate advocacy and drive loyalty of brand users.

“We are very excited about the launch of Cillit Bang All in 1 Dish and Surface through Facebook. The F-commerce DTC model allows us to interact intimately with our target market, getting almost instant feedback and means that we can tailor the facebook page and our offers and competitions quickly and precisely. This is a first and we will be monitoring it very closely. It is a serious pilot with a strong brand and we have taken extraordinary care to ensure the fastest and most hassle free service for consumers. Cillit Bang All in 1 Dish & Surface is a very new concept – the combination of hand dishwash and surface cleaner is unique, and the Cillit Bang persona – that of a bold, no-nonsense brand, makes it the perfect product to test this particular retail model. Cillit Bang Dish & Surface is a totally 100% online launch, available only via Facebook supported with significant marketing commitment, with advertising via social media, competitions and games – all in the digital space”

“RB prides itself on trying new stuff and this Facebook activity is another example of the company trying to push boundaries and try things out. In the end a business is about sales so to make it viable, you need to make sales but the beauty of social commerce is you’re putting commerce into people’s homes and bringing products to an environment consumers are already spending a lot of time.”

The appeal of Facebook commerce for big consumer brand manufacturers such as Reckitt Benckiser, Unilever and P&G, is clear.  Understanding consumers means understanding consumers as shoppers – at the ultimate moment of truth – when they actually buy the product.  Unfortunately, brands often have their hands tied because  selling direct to consumers is politically sensitive – it risks upsetting traditional retail channels.  Popup shops in Facebook offers these brands an elegant solution –  they activate brand advocacy and drive shoppers into stores (good for retailers), drive brand loyalty among fans (good for the brand) and improve consumer understanding (good for retailers and the brand).  In other words, no traditional retailer gets harmed in the making of a popup Facebook fan-store.

Sure, for success, the Cillit Bang pre-launch pop-up fan store will need marketing support (the FB page has only 12K fans – but the line will be promoted by the twin brother of celebrity brand spokesperson Barry Scott (Harry (below)) to deliver on advocacy, loyalty and learning, but Reckitt Benckiser’s fan-first f-commerce move is smart.

Celebrity brand spokespersons for Cillit Bang – twin brothers – Barry and Harry Scott