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.”
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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.
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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.
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