Zynga’s Mark Pincus: I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Pincus is the CEO of social gaming company Zynga . If these notes are a bit scattered, it’s because it’s paraphrased and Pincus is doing a stream-of-consciousness style talk.)
So Pincus starts his talk by outlining his pretty conventional career right out of college — he went into banking. Then to business school. Then he said he hadn’t really succeeded at any… Continue Reading
Zynga’s Mark Pincus: Social gaming is not a fad
Social gaming took some hits during the venture capital panel at our GamesBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco — when asked about the future of social games, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners said that’s not even a real category; at best, it’s a distribution model, and not a very effective one. Predictably, many at the speakers who took the stage later in the day for the social gaming panel disagreed. Mark Pincus of social… Continue Reading
Zynga launches Facebook game developer platform, which might prove valuable
Zynga, an emerging empire of third party gaming applications on Facebook, announced a new ad network for developers a couple of weeks ago — and crossed swords with rival gaming company Social Gaming Network (our coverage).
Tonight, Zynga is launching this ad network, with more details on how it can work for developers. The subtext here is: Zynga’s goal is to work better than SGN.
San Francisco-based Zynga has grown large and even profitable through developing Facebook… Continue Reading
Cisco’s love affair for Web 2.0 continues, buys Tribe assets
(Updated with comment from Cisco)
Cisco Systems, the giant supplier of Internet equipment which is falling hard consumer Internet, has bought the assets of Tribe.net, an early social networking player.
The New York Times reported the story first here.
Cisco’s acquisition of the small San Francisco-based Tribe’s technology is the third purchase within a month — and is significant because it reveals a great ambition by the giant router company to move into new areas of the Internet… Continue Reading