Zynga Getting Hammered

Its IPO has not been good for Zynga, nor for Facebook. They have been hammered. Not long back Fred Wilson on the East Coast and John Doerr on the West Coast talked of Zynga as the fastest growing company they ever had in their portfolios. I guess there are ups and downs. Right now happens to be a down time. It is not that Zynga's user base has shrunk dramatically. This is more a case of Wall Street looking at cold, hard cash. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

Just like Facebook Zynga is also struggling with mobile.

Zynga COO Said To Lose Product Oversight As Growth Slows

Pincus embarked on the overhaul in early July, at the close of a quarter marked by slowing sales growth and a drop in demand for virtual goods. Schappert, lured away last year from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) with a pay package worth $42.8 million, has lost support within the company and taken some of the blame for its underperformance ..... “The place is in utter meltdown mode” .... The stock has dropped 72 percent since the market debut. The decline accelerated last week after Zynga reported sales and profit that missed analysts’ predictions. ..... The reorganization was aimed in part at making mobile- software development more of a priority across Zynga

Related articles

• Zynga COO Said to Lose Product Oversight as Growth Slows - Bloomberg
• Here Are The Zynga Insiders Who Cashed Out Just Before The Stock Crashed... (ZNGA)
• First insider trading lawsuit filed against Zynga after executives cash out
• Zynga Insiders Who Cashed Out Before The Stock Crashed
• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, Other Execs Accused Of Insider Trading
• Zynga faces a pair of lawsuits from irate investors
• Lawsuit Says Zynga Insiders Knew Stock Would Tank When They Cashed Out [Zynga]
• Report: Zynga Insiders Dumped Lots of Stock Before It Tanked [Zynga]
• Zynga Gets Hit With Insider Trading Lawsuits (ZNGA)
• The Ville moves in on Zynga Poker as the top game on Facebook

Google Fiber To Google Wireless

Google Australia’s Engineering Director Explains Why We Don’t Need Google Fiber

Alan Noble is the engineering director of Google Australia, and he says that there’s absolutely no need for Google Fiber Down Under. .... Noble said that there was just no need for Google to become an ISP in Australia because eventually, everyone would have Gigabit speeds .... In theory, the NBN should fulfill that need in Australia. Restricting the NBN to 100Mbps speeds is purely a commercial decision, not a technical one. There is no technical reason the NBN could not run at Gbps speeds

When I read the headline I thought the guy might say there is no need for fiber, wireless is the better option. But he did not say that.

Related articles

• Google Australia's Engineering Director Explains Why We Don't Need Google Fiber
• Google Fiber Promises Greater Regularity for All
• How Google Fiber will work
• Google: Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Fiber
• Google Fiber early review: Download speeds approach 200Mbps; not perfect but still 'outstanding'
• Why Google Fiber Doesn't Scare Your ISP
• Is Google Fiber Key to Cloud Happiness?
• Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps Internet Speed
• Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps for Just $70, €57

A Google Fiber Impact

Image via CrunchBase

It is fair to say gigabit broadband will spawn new companies and industries.

Entrepreneurs Dream of Jumping on Super-Fast Network

the area's entrepreneurs are plotting how to capitalize on the one-gigabit communications network in creative ways. ..... "Google Fiber has gotten the whole city thinking about technology." ..... Google Fiber is so powerful that it will improve education technology and transform how businesses operate. .... enabling one-gigabit Internet speeds across the country .... the cost would eventually be tens of billions of dollars ..... some elderly patients aren't facile with computers and a TV set is thus a better way to monitor them at home. ..... He now pays $1,400 a month for a network that supports a fraction of the bandwidth Google will offer. ...... Some of the entrepreneurs building products and businesses that will capitalize on Google Fiber may have a tough time drawing major backing from venture capitalists. The Kansas City region is still considered fly-over country by investors

The Great Recession's outcome should have been gigabit broadband for every American. That is where at least half a trillion should have gone. But that perhaps was not meant to be.

Related articles

• Google Fiber: Not So Revolutionary
• Google Fiber Promises Greater Regularity for All
• Google Australia's Engineering Director Explains Why We Don't Need Google Fiber
• Google's Fiber "Proof of Concept" Is Anything But
• Google Fiber demo in KC a success
• Google Fiber offers 7 years of free internet
• How Google Fiber Could Kill The Competition
• Google's Lightning-fast Fiber Network Now Live in Kansas City
• Meet the three boxes that will transform your apartment into a swinging Google Fiber pad

RIM's Options

"Getting it" is not enough. It is said the top people at Sony all "get it." They all know exactly what needs to be done. But the dysfunctional corporate culture gets in the way. When a company is on a downswing much damage gets done to its corporate culture. A turnaround is not just about "getting it."

I don't have any particular insight into where RIM's corporate culture stands today. But as for vision, there seem to be a few options.

The obvious one is to claw back into the smartphone space. How do you do that? Do you get rid of the physical keyboard? What do you do? How do you compete with the iPhone? Do you ditch the keyboard a-n-d jump onto the Android bandwagon? And become a hardware company? I don't think that is in the cards. RIM wants to continue doing both hardware and software. Well, first, it wants to survive.

Is there room? Is there room in the smartphone space for a Nokia? A Microsoft? A RIM? How do you differentiate? Those are hard questions I don't have answers for.

Another option would be to take RIM's resources and go into something else. Do a fundamental rethink and become a company that produces something else. Or break the company into a hundred different startups.

When Steve Jobs went back to Apple he did not try to win the PC war. He instead created the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. There is always that next big thing.

Related articles

• RIM Planning to License BB10 to Other Manufacturers [Rim]
• RIM looking to cut 3,000 more jobs: report
• RIM and Nokia: On Borrowed Time
• Can RIM follow Apple's Footsteps On The Comeback Trail?
• How to save RIM: 'Pull a reverse Apple'
• RIM denies handing encryption keys to India
• RIM Is Hurting, But It's Not Dead Just Yet
• RIM Looking to License BB10 to Hardware Manufacturers
• RIM to Send Home 3,000 More Employees in August
• What is RIM worth?

RIM's Waterloo

This below is another commentary on a city's tech ecosystem. (Come Early)

There is a hint that a patent battle seriously marred the culture, and the downswing began. There is a lesson there for the big names in tech in the valley.

Will Yahoo turn around? Will RIM?

High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo

Redmond. Cupertino. Mountain View. ... Microsoft, Apple, Google .... Waterloo, Ontario, is another city stamped by the accomplishments of a tech giant. Research in Motion began there in 1984, and with its era-defining success came an influx of talent and a growing community. But RIM has stumbled ...... Coming from Detroit, the route to Waterloo is flat and grassy, a gently undulating expanse of land much like Ohio but with less obvious signs of industrialization. ..... Waterloo, population just shy of 100,000 ..... The University of Waterloo, alma mater of RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis .... RIM itself lies just off the UW campus — indeed, there’s no real physical boundary between the two. .... About half of RIM’s workforce is located here, some 8,000 or so people ..... Their new CEO has been on a PR offensive, telling the press that the company’s not “in a death spiral.” RIM stock sits mired in the single digits, having lost 90 per cent of its value in the last three years. ..... the “worst corporate culture in the world.” After RIM lost a long and brutal patent battle with NTP in early 2006, he says, lawyers came to dominate the culture. The company’s earlier rapid growth had meant hiring a layer of lifelong managers, many of them risk-averse. Fiefdoms were carved out and protected; a degree of complacency settled in. After NTP, that complacency — especially about creating new products — was joined by an obsession with secrecy and legalistic wrangling. The environment inhibited new ideas; instead of daring to be bold, he says, employees worked in fear because, “if something goes wrong, someone has to get fired.” ....... the BlackBerry sips data compared to its competitors, it’s secure and reliable, it conveys a professional image (all of those belt holsters), and it has a physical keyboard. He thinks the layoffs could be good for the company; having grown too big too fast ........ The local tech industry has matured: Silicon Valley companies (including Intel, Google, and Facebook) have opened local offices and there’s a flourishing startup community. If RIM goes, he says, it’ll free up talent for other companies. ....... OpenText, the content management provider and Canada’s largest software company, for example, was spun out of the university in 1991, allowing several faculty members to found a company. The university values entrepreneurship. Mike Lazaridis, for one, received early encouragement to found RIM from a UW economics professor. He dropped out to start Research in Motion. ...... Iain Klugman .. “The American dream is to make it big, to build a big company, to become a rock star,” he says. “I think for many years the Canadian dream was to win the lottery.” ...... Waterloo and the surrounding area has the right combination of ingredients to enable tech entrepreneurs: strong academic brands, including UW and several other schools; a culture that accepts deviance (risking your future by going into business for yourself rather than someone else), and a network of capital comfortable with risk. He’s long been working to build on that foundation, and where the area had maybe 50 tech companies 15 years ago, today there are 1000 by his count. He says on average one local startup is founded every day. ........ I come from Kitchener-Waterloo, and yes, RIM has made it known on the world’s radar.” RIM is like a family member that’s done well ...... Co-founder Mike Lazaridis has donated $250 million to create the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, while Jim Balsillie spent $30 million to found the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Both men have donated generously to the University of Waterloo, with Lazaridis and his wife contributing over $100 million to the school’s affiliated research center, the Institute for Quantum Computing ...... “As much as I’m rooting for RIM, I have an iPhone.”

What are RIM's options?

Nokia used to be a paper manufacturing company.

Related articles

• RIM's collapse to distress Waterloo community?
• RIM looking to cut 3,000 more jobs: report
• Canadian tech town feels BlackBerry's decline
• Ted Livingston: The Shape of Canadian Tech to Come
• RIM May Not Survive, but Its Founders' Non-Profit Side Projects Will
• BlackBerry's decline felt
• If RIM dies, what happens to BlackBerry's hometown?
• 4 Lessons Every Entrepreneur Can Learn from RIM's Downfall
• Blackberry faces its Waterloo
• Saving BlackBerry from its 'deathbed'