Zynga Decreases Staff
Things in Farmville have been difficult, in fact it’s looking a lot like Mafia Wars. Zynga, the developer of major social games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words with Friends and more have made the decision to decrease their staff starting with the close of their Boston studio. They are also considering the closure of their UK and Japan studios. A letter from the CEO was sent to the entire staff letting them know of the major decreases in staff as the company repositions itself for the future. Zynga, a huge partner of Facebook has seen financial troubles for the past few months including a 20% decrease in sales says Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg.
SXSW Vegas
South by Southwest (SXSW) the major Austin-based tech/music/movie festival is expanding to the Sin City. The announcement came yesterday from SXSW saying there will be a new focus for SXSW Vegas on entrepreneurship. The Vegas conference has already been planned for August 3013 which is interesting since many Silicon Valley investors tend to vacation during the month of August. This could either be a good or bad thing depending on how you view it. SXSW Vegas’ focus on entrepreneurship will have need activities like Pitch Competitions, Startup Showcases, Networking Events and more.
TOP 10 Passwords of 2012
Everyone likes passwords right? Here are the TOP 10 passwords of 2012!
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- abc123
- qwerty
- monkey
- letmein
- dragon
- 111111
- baseball
Facebook Stock is Up
Everyone thought that Facebook’s stock would never go up. After a disappointing IPO that started at $37/share, Facebook dropped to a low of under $17 before seeing a recent spike of over 20%. The new spike is in light of the recent success of Facebook’s new native mobile applications for iOS and Android. Investors were excited to see Facebook’s quarterly revenue was up 14% in mobile, which translates to over $150 million dollars from mobile advertising. Mobile traffic was up 61% last year but the HTML5 app was very slow and hard to work with. The new app’s responsive time is quicker and easier to navigate.
Apple Officially Launches New Product Line
For all the geeks that spent mid-afternoon yesterday watching the livestream from Apple’s product release event were either excited or disappointed in the direction of the company. There were no surprises as Apple released new products for the upcoming holiday season. The biggest “official” announcement was related to the iPad Mini that was expected by almost every analyst. The new iPad Mini will start at $329 for 16GB. Along with the Mini, a new iMac, iBooks 3, Macbook Pro with Retina display.