Trent Brook

Zynga Looks To Keep ‘Startup Feeling’ After IPO

After announcing it’s plans to go public last week, and the company’s stock performance over the last few days, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus has told Bloomberg that he wants to keep ‘That Startup Feeling’ inside the social gaming juggernaut.

“I think we’ve kept that startup feeling for people,” said Pincus, a serial entrepreneur who founded Zynga in 2007. “Our values of being metric- and outcome-driven enables us to push down ownership and control and leadership to the team, and I think that they appreciate that.

We’re bigger believers in the future of play and social gaming than any other company, and we wanted to be in a position that we had the resources to invest more in that future than any other company,” Pincus said.

“I’m spending the rest of the day on our product,” he said. “I believe that that’s what serves investors the best, and I believe that that’s the way it will be rewarded by the market in the long term the best.”

Whether you participated in Zynga’s (ZNGA) IPO or not, it’s worth paying attention to the company’s performance over the next six months – leading up to Facebook’s IPO. Mark Pincus has managed to build a $9 billion company that “has turned the video game world upside down in its short five-year history,” inspite of the fact that he had “no experience in the game industry and had never managed a big company.”

Warrior – The Fight of a Lifetime

Despite being bagged by the Los Angeles Times, Warrior is a “must see” movie for anyone interested in a dramatic story about family love and personal pain. Starring Australian actor Joel Edgerton, and with terrific performances by Tom Hardy, and Nick Nolte, Warrior is a story about the damaged relationship between two brothers and their father.

While set in the world of mixed martial arts, the movie is more about mending past deeds, rising above the odds, and confronting limitations, than ground impounds, and tap-outs. The New York Times had a more glowing review of Warrior:

“In such conditions stripping down to your shorts and beating another guy senseless can seem not only logical, but also noble. The mock-gladiatorial theatrics of mixed martial arts may look tawdry and overblown, but the sport, perhaps even more than boxing, expresses a deep and authentic impulse to find meaning through the infliction and acceptance of pain.”

Warrior is a great movie, and while a contemporary variation on another more famous storyline, “the most disarming thing about “Warrior” is that, for all its mayhem, it is a movie about love.”

Nike – There’s no off season

Nike Football Commercial – “There’s no off season.” Make it count.

eBay Aquires NYC Start-Up Hunch

Mike Arrington broke the news that eBay aquired Hunch, a personalized recommendation service. eBay’s plans for Hunch involve helping improve the company’s shopping recommendations to users of the auction site.

Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch and a well respected angel investor, wrote on his blog about six months ago, something that really resonated with me, and is worth revisiting.

“There are two kinds of people in the world”

“You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. “Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office. It almost invariably means being dismissed by arrogant investors who show up a half hour late, totally unprepared and then instead of saying “no” give you non-committal rejections like “we invest at later stage companies.” It means looking prospective employees in the eyes and convincing them to leave safe jobs, quit everything and throw their lot in with you. It means having pundits in the press and blogs who’ve never built anything criticize you and armchair quarterback your every mistake. It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.

I don’t care if you succeed or fail, if you are Bill Gates or an unknown entrepreneur who gave everything to make it work but didn’t manage to pull through. The important distinction is whether you risked everything, put your life on the line, made commitments to investors, employees, customers and friends, and tried – against all the forces in the world that try to keep new ideas down – to make something new.” – Chris Dixon

Aloe Blacc – I Need a Dollar

Aloe Blacc – I Need a Dollar (Live in Studio).

Facebook’s “Seamless” Sharing Creating Friction

Facebook’s recently released Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) has been causing some unintended friction with a few technology journalists lately. It seems that all this automatic sharing is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Molly Wood wrote an interesting article on CNET where she claims:

“Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing–we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise.”

So how does this frictionless sharing actually work. Well, after a users grants permission to a publisher (via an app), Facebook shares a link to every story they read on the site or app with their friends, appearing in their news feeds and real-time updates.

Further claims that such seamless sharing is really Facebook acting like malware:

“Violation of reasonable user expectations is a big part of the problem. When you click on a link – you expect to be taken to where the link says it’s going to take you. There’s something about the way that Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is implemented that violates a fundamental contract between web publishers and their users.”

… leading all this sharing to amount to nothing more than legitimised spam:

“Either Seamless Sharing will just become legitimised spam (if it isn’t already that) in which a higher degree of content is auto-posted and human interactions become diminished or another layer of curation will need to be placed on top of it (which defeats the object for the user).”

Privacy campaigners have been warning that Facebook is not making users sufficiently aware of how it plans to use the mass of their information, including their reading and listening habits, that it collects from news, entertainment and media applications.

Facebook has obviously not ruled out harnessing data on its users’ activity from independent websites and services for marketing, and some inside the company indicated last month that this was its intention, but the company says it has not yet started work on this area.

Allen Stone – Unaware

Allen Stone – Unaware from his self-titled and independently released first album.

Groupon: Collective Buying Power

Groupon, the daily deal site that successfully went public last week has become the poster child for the new Internet start-up. CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason started Groupon in 2008, and has since created one of the biggest web sensations in only three short years.

While the Groupon IPO has it’s skeptics, there can be no doubt that:

“Groupon, is part of an elite cadre of start-ups that swiftly soared to multibillion-dollar valuations, capitalizing on the growth of online social networks. The group’s ascent over the last two years set off a broader buying frenzy in Silicon Valley. Investors of all sorts eager to own a piece of the next great thing plowed millions into the new generation of start-ups, flooding the markets with capital and bidding up prices across the board.” – New York Times.

Many investors seem unconcerned about the (un)profitability of Groupon’s business model, due in part, to the incredible revenue growth the company has had to date. While it remains to be seen whether such “irrational exuberance” is truly warranted, Groupon has certainly created immense wealth for the founders and financiers behind it’s IPO.

Johnnie Walker – The Important Man

A little cold, hard opinion from Johnnie Walker. Keep walking.

George Clooney Is The American

Directed by one the world’s best portrait photographers Anton Corbijn, “The American” follows Jack a professional assassin (played by George Clooney), on his last “job” in the Italian countryside where he settles into a small town. While in the town he becomes romantically involved, and develops a friendship with a local priest, all in an attempt to put his past behind him, and reconnect with himself.

The film is not really an action picture and upon second viewing, it’s not even really a thriller. “The American” is really a character study. It’s the story of one man searching for redemption amidst betrayal, loneliness, revenge and love. The film is beautifully filmed in Italy. The action is subdued. In short, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

If you want to see a great photographer ditching his style and going for an all-out action movie, avoid this. You’ll end up disappointed. But if you want to see a carefully paced, well-designed and beautifully shot redemption-movie, then you could do far worse than “The American.”

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Author bio

Trent Brook is the founder of Diget, a community edited financial news site. This is his blog, and part-time hobby.

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