Zynga’s Pincus fights back against copycat accusations
Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, isn’t pleased with reports that Zynga is ripping off games from small developers so he is doing something about it–wielding his pen to write passionate manifestos to employees invoking Silicon Valley greats like Apple.
After a game developer accused Zynga of copying a game called “Tiny Tower”, Pincus sent a 60-line memo to employees to make sure his flock knows Zynga has done nothing wrong, (the memo was leaked to the blog VentureBeat and later obtained by Reuters).
“Google didn’t create the first search engine. Apple didn’t create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn’t create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways.”
And just like tech heavyweights did not reinvent the wheel, neither does Zynga need to with its simple but addicting games.
“We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market … Zynga Poker, FarmVille, CityVille and Words with Friends, none of these games were the first to market in their category but we made them the most fun and social,” he said.
Pincus also shows reverence to video game history involving games where players build towers-”it’s important to note that this category has existed since 1994 with games like Sim Tower.”
His arguments are perfectly valid. It is just amusing that he is getting so worked up about claims his company is stealing ideas from a game called ”Tiny Tower,” and then later defending the authenticity of Zynga’s new Bingo game to VentureBeat.
Tech wrap: Earnings hit as Apple reigns
Quarterly earnings suffered at major technology and telecoms companies in part because of demand for gadgets made by Apple, one day after core suppliers to Apple savored strong earnings results posted by the iPhone and iPad maker on Tuesday.
AT&T posted a $6.7 billion quarterly loss as it was weighed down by a hefty break-up fee for its failed T-Mobile USA merger and other big charges on top of costly subsidies for smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone. While the wireless provider beat analysts’ expectations for subscriber additions, the growth came at a massive cost as its wireless service margins plummeted. On top of the $4 billion break-up package charge, AT&T also took a big impairment charge for its telephone directory business, which it said it was considering selling.
Nokia reported a 73 percent fall in fourth-quarter earnings as sales of its new Windows Phones failed to dent the dominance of Apple’s iPhone or compensate for diving sales of its own old smartphones. Apple reported earlier this week sales of 37 million iPhones for the December quarter. Nokia has sold over 1 million Windows “Lumia” smartphones since its launch in mid-November. Nokia said it expected its phone business’ underlying earnings to be around breakeven in the first quarter, well below analysts’ forecasts, with sales falling more than usual in the seasonally weaker quarter.
Motorola Mobility posted a quarterly loss after it warned earlier this month that it was having a tough time competing in the smartphone market amid intense competition from rivals such as the Apple iPhone. The company, which is seeking approval to be bought by Google, reported a net loss of $80 million or 27 cents per share compared with a profit of $80 million or 27 cents per share in the same quarter the year before. Revenue rose slightly to $3.436 billion from $3.425 billion in the year ago quarter.
Nintendo posted a sharp drop in quarterly profit and forecast a bigger-than-expected full-year loss, as it battles a strong yen and its games devices lose ground to gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone. Nintendo now expects an annual operating loss of 45 billion yen ($575 million), dwarfing expectations of a 4.2 billion yen loss, based on the average of 21 analyst forecasts.
“To say that (the days of consoles) are over is likely an overstatement, but social network and Internet delivered games are growing and structurally changing the future of the industry, which is a strong wind against Nintendo,” said Shigeo Sugawara, at Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Asset Management.
Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google to provide answers about recent changes to the search engine’s privacy policy. On Tuesday, Google announced that it was unifying its privacy policy across 60 of its Web services, which allows the company to share data between any of those services. In a letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, the lawmakers said the company’s announcement “raises questions about whether consumers can opt-out of the new data sharing system either globally or on a product-by-product basis.”
Tech wrap: New RIM CEO says no drastic change needed
RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007 and previously served as a chief operating officer, said during a conference call that he would hone the current strategy rather than abandon it. “I don’t think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving … but this is not a seismic change,” Heins said. RIM’s U.S.-traded shares tumbled as investors wondered whether Heins could reverse the BlackBerry maker’s decline, closing the day down 8.5 percent.
The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload was ordered to be held in custody by a New Zealand court, as he denied charges of Internet piracy and money laundering and said authorities were trying to portray the blackest picture of him. U.S. authorities want to extradite Kim Dotcom, a German national also known as Kim Schmitz, on charges he masterminded a scheme that made more than $175 million in a few short years by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization. Megaupload’s lawyer has said the company simply offered online storage.
The Supreme Court ruled that police cannot put a GPS device on a suspect’s car to track his movements without a warrant. The high court ruled that placement of a device on a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements was covered by U.S. constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of evidence. “A majority of the court acknowledged that advancing technology, like cellphone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives,” Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
YouTube is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company. Roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute in May, Google said. The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.
The number of Americans owning a tablet computer or e-reader nearly doubled over the holiday period as Kindles, Nooks and iPads proved to be popular gifts, a new study found. In early January, 19 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew owned an e-reader, up from 10 percent in December, with identical results for tablets, according to a report released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Windows L8?
Microsoft’s next operating system — provisionally known as Windows 8 — may not hit the shelves until early 2013, one respected company-watcher thinks, giving Apple, Google and Amazon more time to fine-tune their tablet offerings.
That’s later than most people expect for the new OS, which represents Microsoft’s first real foray into the touch-friendly, tablet-optimized world. The feeling is that Microsoft really needs to make its move before Apple’s iPad and tablets running Google’s Android march off with the whole market.
“I think it’s about a year away,” said Michael Cherry at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft, asked when Windows 8 code would be completed.
Then you have to factor in the delay between releasing the code to PC manufacturers to install on new machines — known as RTM — and general availability, said Cherry, a former Windows program manager.
“I believe there will be a RTM somewhere in the last quarter of 2012. Traditionally there’s been a 90-day gap between RTM and general availability,” he said. “To me, that means machine availability in 2013.”
In other words, don’t expect to get a Windows 8 tablet in your gift pile this Christmas or next.
Microsoft likes to keep a gap between releasing the code and allowing machines to go on sale as it gives all PC makers equal time to install the system and get machines on sale on the same day, for extra marketing buzz.
I stongly beleive in few things:
- First public beta will come in January 2012, probably during 2012 CES.
- Public beta means a that a feature set is closed. Work after that is a bugfixing and code optimisation
- RTM / OEM is end of August 2012
- Global availability is therefore October 2012
- First devices are on shelves / at provider in November 2012
So, I strongly beleive thatn Microsoft won’t miss a holiday season – it would represent a significant profit loss. Of course, Microsoft is always silent and very careful about release dates but look at the last 3 Windows versions – see a pattern? 
Aleks
The good news & bad news about news consumption on tablets
There is some heartening data and some other data that should strike fear in the hearts of publishing executives about how people consume news on tablet devices, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism and the Economist Group.
Let’s get to the rosy stuff first. The survey polled about 1,200 tablet users and 900 people who use them to read the news. It turns out that consuming news — defined as skimming headlines to hunkering down and reading long-form articles – is one of the most popular tablet activities (at 53%) nearly edging out sending emails (at 54%) but definitely whopping social media activity (39%), gaming (17%), reading books (17%) and watching videos (13%).
But the apps aren’t pulling in the most readers. Interestingly, while two-thirds of those surveyed have news apps, about 40% of those polled said they get their news through web browsers compared to only 21% who get their news through apps. For newspapers this piece of information should be a wake up call to keep pricing consistent. (Magazines would fit in this category though most don’t have a decent websites.)
If a publisher is going to charge for an application — and why not? — they should also have some sort of pay strategy in place for the website. Otherwise people are going to circumvent the app and just go straight to the browser for free news. Thus the publication once again misses another potential revenue opportunity.
Now for the bad news. The study found that “revenue potential for news on the tablet may be limited.” Here’s why: Just 14 percent of tablet news users have paid to access the news. Those who have news apps said that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision to download the app in the first place.
It could simply be that not enough news organization are charging for apps in the first place — once again getting people who are using these new devices in the mindset that news should be free.
Read the full study here.
EA: We love Wii U
Back in June, everyone was talking about the Wii U, Nintendo’s first video game console with high-definition graphics unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles.
Since then, no one’s heard much more about Wii U, which has a tablet screen for a controller and can be used in conjunction with Wii remotes. Nintendo must be hunkering down to put the finishing touches on it before it hits stores sometime next year.
But Peter Moore, the video game industry veteran who was promoted to be Electronic Arts’ chief operating officer in August, told Reuters this week that everything appears to be on track with the Wii U, at least from his perspective working for a publisher making games for it.
“There are no indications that there’s anything that feels like it’s off target,” Moore said. Nintendo’s stock has taken a beating in recent months and its share price is approaching its low for the year.
Moore said he will be visiting Nintendo’s hometown of Kyoto next week to check on how the console is shaping up.
“From our perspective right now, specs are a big deal,” he said, adding that during his trip, he will looking to find out more about the gadget’s graphic and computer processing units, its price and when it might be shipped.
Moore, who has experience launching consoles from his days at Microsoft, says Nintendo was smart to incorporate a tablet into the console with the Wii U.
Windows 8: Worth the wait, but is it too late?
The release of Windows 8 is now in the home stretch, and the vast majority of the world’s computers are about to begin getting the digital equivalent of a complete makeover.
The newest form of Windows — which, despite all the attention Apple gets, still operates more than 90 percent of computers — has a couple of things going for it. It supposedly will run anything that runs on Windows 7 so there won’t be that awful, elongated period when software is suddenly no longer compatible with your machine.
More importantly, Windows 8 borrows heavily from the relatively new user interface metaphors for tablets, which will make it much more palatable for tablet makers to offer Microsoft what could be a third strong contender (along with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android) on this surging device vertical.
If there is a heaven, this version of Windows will no longer be what has been seen by many as cavalier attempts to force a bad variation of full-blown Windows on mobile devices, tablets and smartphones. Instead, Microsoft seems to be walking away from the Golden Goose that has been its OSstrategy. In a way, there is no clearer acknowledgement of the direction the computing world is going.
It’s sort of make or break for Microsoft in a long-term sense. The company that first touted the tablet as the wave of the 21st Century but couldn’t close the deal is now going all-in based on momentum which eluded them a few short years ago but was brilliantly exploited by Apple.
Microsoft is a sort of widows and orphans company in tech: They pay a dividend, take in lots of money from software sales, leases and support, and have an overwhelming lead in the installed base sweepstakes. But in the hearts and minds of the self-anointed technorati, Microsoft has not been synonymous with cool for a long time.
“We will only know when the PC era has ended in retrospect”
The future is either quantum computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_co mputer) or DNA computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_comput ing).
The present PC is the intermediate phase.
Inkling launches digital textbooks 2.0 for iPads
Apple dominates the tablet market — its iOS tablet software accounted for more than 60 percent of the tablet market in the second quarter, while Google’s Android made up about 30 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. So it’s no surprise that more than 40 educational institutions in the United States either require or recommend in-coming freshman or first-years come equipped with an iPad.
For example, that list includes the medical schools at Brown, UC Irvine, Cornell and UCF; undergrads at Boston University, Abilene Christian University and Georgia Perimeter College; business students at Hult Business School, Lamar Business School and Seton Hill. Even prep schools are in on the act including South Kent, Princeton Day School and Madison Academy.
Certainly it’s appealing to slip an iPad into a backpack rather than massive tomes that students need to lug around campus.
One e-book company based in San Francisco is betting that more educational institutions adopt this line of thinking. Launched a year ago and backed by venture capital such as Sequoia Partners and text book publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, the e-text book company Inkling recently released its 2.0 version of textbooks for iPad. Some key features let co-eds make notes, ask questions and add comments anywhere in the book to be shared among classmates or the wider community using the same material across other campuses.
The e-books can save a student as much as 40 percent off the dead tree version and Inkling allows students to purchase the book by the chapter for a few bucks each should they choose to do so.
“I think this fall is a turning point,” said Matt MacInnis, Inkling founder and CEO, about iPad adoption. ”Enough people are going to know someone else using an iPad (for content) that it will reach a tipping point.”
Inkling really is leading the way in digital textbook platforms. I can’t wait to see what they come out with next. I don’t have an iPad yet but I do plan to purchase online textbooks this next semester, so I need to get one.
Tech wrap: HP’s TouchPad sell-off
Hewlett-Packard has finally discovered the magic price point for its TouchPad tablet: $99. The tech giant announced the new low price for the 16 GB model of the recently discontinued device over the weekend, also dropping the price for its 32 GB version to $149. Retailers such as Best Buy, Staples and Walmart followed HP’s lead by offering TouchPad fire sales of their own.
The response: overwhelming. According to PC World, many retailers had sold out of the devices by mid-day on Saturday. By Monday morning, the TouchPad had climbed to the No.1 spot on the Amazon best-seller list for electronics. Expect the selling frenzy to continue this week: HP said on Monday it intends to deliver more of the tablets until the supply runs out. HP originally launched the smaller model with a $500 price tag, but reduced it to $400 soon after its July 1 release in an attempt to spur demand.
Separately, HP launched a new desktop on Monday, days after the technology company revealed that it might spin off the world’s largest PC business — part of a wrenching series of moves away from the consumer market, including killing the TouchPad. HP billed the new computer — the HP Compaq 8200 Elite All-in-One Business Desktop — as the “first all-in-one PC” aimed at corporate and public sector customers.
Is the patent arms race over in the mobile phone sector now that Google has announced it’s buying Motorola Mobility Holdings? Reuters correspondents Poornima Gupta and Bill Rigby take a closer look in a new analysis: “The bubble in mobile phone technology patent values may just have popped. Now that Google has agreed to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings — scooping up a trove of 17,000 phone-related patents to give itself some ground to defend its Android operating system — the most motivated buyer looks to be off the market.”
Skype is beefing up its mobile communications services. The Internet calling company said on Sunday it was buying GroupMe, a New York-based startup that lets people communicate in private groups over cellphones. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
I just overclocked my Touchpad to 1.5Ghz and I installed the Hulu fix so I can watch Hulu on my Touchpad! Here is the step by step instructions:
http://www.fatdeals.net/forumdisplay.php ?f=10
Very easy to follow instructions!
Sony: Our tablets are coming… eventually
Sony teased out a few more details about its new Android tablets — codenamed S1 and S2 — and let reporters briefly handle prototypes.
AT&T will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the S2, a double-screened device that bears a close resemblance to Nintendo’s DS handheld gaming device. Sony showed off how users could turn it into a book.
Executives stressed that the tablets can connect to other Sony products, such as Blu-Ray players, TVs and PlayStation content, something Apple can’t offer. Like the Sony Ericsson Experia Play AKA, “the PlayStation phone,” the Adobe-Flash enabled tablets will come pre-loaded with the retro game“Crash Bandicoot”.
Sony once again vowed to take the No. 2 tablet spot behind Apple despite still not revealing when its new tablets would come out or how much they would cost. That news could be more than a month away but the tablets should be released this year, the company said.
Why would a customer choose a Sony tablet over an iPad? Phil Molyneux, Sony Electronics president and COO, said customers looking for a faster, smaller device that can fit in your pocket will turn to Sony’s dual-screen S2 tablet.
“You can’t do that with other devices unless you have bigger pockets,” he said.
