News: July 26

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TechCrunch

Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone
Ron Conway And Paul Graham Kick Off the Social Currency CrunchUp On July 30
LearnBoost Raises $975K To Help Teachers Manage Grades And Classrooms Online
Now Legal In The U.S.: Jailbreaking Your iPhone, Ripping A DVD For Educational Purposes
Snapgoods: Like Zipcar for Gadgets
17 More Countries Get the iPhone 4 On Friday
The 2011 Ford Explorer Goes Green(er): No V8, Front-Wheel Drive, Unibody Platform, V6 Or I4 EcoBoost
Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again

Mashable

Inside the 2011 Ford Explorer Facebook Reveal
“Guy Walks Across America” in Viral YouTube Video
AT&T Expands Free Wi-Fi Program to Alleviate Data Congestion
7 Superb Podcasts for Summer Listening
HTC Desire and Nexus One Are Getting Super LCD Screens
10 Cool Crowdsourced Music Video Projects
WikiLeaks Releases Afghan War Reports in Unprecedented Leak
Antisocial Social Media: The British Monarchy Joins Flickr
Top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience

GigaOm

7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception
Swift River: Trying to Filter the Social Web Firehose
Lessons From Google: How Facebook Can Reach One Billion Users
The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
In China, Baidu Fights Google for Control of Android’s Search
Virtual Desktops Are Hot Again
What a T-Mobile iPhone Would Mean

VentureBeat

Google Apps makes new push for government customers
Intel rumored to be buying Infineon’s wireless division
Forget antennagate:Apple to launch iPhone 4 in 17 more countries on Friday
Skype founders place $6 million bet on MadBid.com
Ex-Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s second career in games
Convoke Systems raises $5.5 million to help creditors collect debt
Fashion is the new black online
WikiLeaks.org’s post of classified Afghan reports causes a furor
EC Roundup: Financial reform and the lost decade for entrepreneurs
Roundup: India eyes iPad rival, Firefox revamps tabs, and more
YouTube expands its embrace of HTML5 with new embedding style
Study shows Twitter lags other social networks in reliability, load time
Playdom CEO John Pleasants: why “social gaming” will die
Dell buys Ocarina Networks as it moves deeper into storage | VentureBeat

CNet

Feds say mobile-phone jailbreaking is OK
Plastic-bottle boat completes voyage across Pacific
Tipping cows down on the Farmville
Just say no to fake Net neutrality
New design unveiled for Terrafugia flying car
Google Apps gets a government version
New iMac, iLife coming soon?
Standard set for universal wireless charger
Web ad network: iOS 4 on half of iPhones
Chrome 6: What made the cut--and what missed it
'Tab Candy' to bring calm to Firefox's tab chaos
Android stencil kit makes your apps look sharp
Facebook says Ceglia contract was likely 'forged'
Mimicking Apple an imperative for PC makers

BusinessWeek

Markets Say Growth Trumps U.S. Deficits
Deficits Don't Matter
Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next 'Black Swan'
America's Worst Investment
Obama Cameron: The Chilly Relationship
Consumer Reports vs. Apple—Dull Beats Cool
Stockpicking Tips from Obama?
Mutual Funds' Stock Buying Hits Bull High
BP Casts Dudley as Its Rebuilder in Chief
BP Resumes Work in Preparation for Kill
Blagojevich Tried to ‘Shake Down’ Obama, Jury Told
Charlie Rose Talks to Timothy Geithner
British Wind Plans Face $15 Billion Gap
British Retail Sales Get World Cup Boost
Louisiana Has the Most Sedentary Lifestyle
GM's IPO May Require Hefty Incentives
EU Sets Sanctions on Iran in Bid to Halt Nuclear Work
Pakistan Dismisses, U.S. Condemns, War Papers Leak

AllThingsD

Certification Came Quickly After One-Click Access to Wikileaks Was Removed
EU Launches Formal Antitrust Probe Against IBM
An Emancipation Proclamation for the iPhone
New York Times: In Hollywood, Everybody's a Digital Revolutionary
Reuters: Telcos Are Winning The Cable TV Battle But Are They Losing The Broadband War?
CNet: Wasn't The Kindle Supposed to be Firewood?
New TV Tech Could Be Boon for Venture-Backed Chip Companies
Reinventing The News Room: Algorithms Aren't Evil
If Oracle Doesn’t Have an M&A Budget, Then Larry Ellison Doesn’t Have an Ego
The Boku Founders Talk About Mobile Payments, Competitors and More!
If You Tweet It, Japan Will Come
Viral Video: Song-a-Day Guy on How He Writes a Song a Day
Yelp’s Stoppelman Talks About Geo-Location, International Expansion (And Not Google)
Using Flickr Photos as a Travel Guide

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Seth Godin On Failure

I just read a whole bunch of blog posts by Seth Godin. He casually calls himself the best business blogger in the world and I believe him. I once emailed him (and he emailed me back; that does not make me special, he emails everyone back) about adding a comments section to his blog. He did not say it, but I think his attitude is, if you want to talk to me, email me directly. But now his blog posts come with the Like button. I dig that. It's good to be able to share.

Seth is a thinker. He challenges. I doubt he would be a great manager of a restaurant, for example. But we got plenty of those. We don't have enough people of the Seth Godin kind.

I really like Seth's writing style. It is so direct and obvious and simple. So when he says something profound, it does not feel complicated but rather obvious. Seth will say the darndest things.

15% changes everything
The art of seduction
Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking
The paradox of promises in the age of word of mouth
Self marketing might be the most important kind
Is everything perfect?
The management of signals
A hierarchy of failure worth following
Information about information
Upstream and downstream
Two kinds of schooling
The big sort
So easy to talk about lunch
Insubordinate... 50th anniverary free ebook
It's not my birthday
Fans, participants and spectators
Low esteem and the factory
Payola
Betting on smarter (or betting on dumber)
What's the point?

My favorite of all these posts: A hierarchy of failure worth following.

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Zynga: The Google Of Games?

Image via CrunchBase

That is common practice. To use a well known entity as a metaphor. At an event I attended during Internet Week, an entrepreneur on the panel said, "We are the Netflix for fashion." You don't buy dresses, you rent them. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) That is a great way to describe your company. If your company is not very well known, it makes sense to use a well known company as a metaphor. I'd love to be able to say about this blog, we are the Zynga of blogging (we are not, I am not), because Zynga, let's face it, is a well known name and it is huge. At the layperson level people probably are more familiar with the Farmville name than Zynga, but Zynga is big. So you have to ask, what's going on here?

New York Times: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

Mark Pincus, Zynga’s 44-year-old founder....... he had set out to build an enduring Internet icon, one that was synonymous with fun. ..... There has to be more than “a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal ...... the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was “like search before Google came along.” ..... the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook ...... While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. ....... the games are free to everyone ...... has been profitable since shortly after its founding. ...... investors, including Google and the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, have put about $520 million into the company ...... Zynga has been valued at more than $4.5 billion ..... Silicon Valley’s next billionaire .... “He has nailed the next killer app, the next compelling thing that’s going to happen” in media. ...... Six million Facebook users, who grew tired of constant updates about their friends’ games, joined a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” ...... Facebook started restricting the messages, and Zynga’s traffic dropped sharply. ..... little effect on revenue because many players who dropped out didn’t buy virtual goods. ..... about four times larger than its nearest rival, Electronic Arts. Playdom is third ...... Pincus is something of an aging whiz kid. ..... A serial entrepreneur, he sold his first company, Freeloader, an early Internet broadcast service, for $38 million, and took public his second, a business software maker called Support.com. ........ talks of building a “digital skyscraper” ..... a visionary leader. ..... also known for his sharp elbows and irreverent style ..... brags about being fired from a consulting firm job for having little patience with his bosses. ...... “I didn’t believe in paying dues” ...... open about his distrust of many venture capitalists ...... a Silicon Valley firm turned down an investment in Zynga, telling him he was “not coachable.” ......"I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away." ...... “As the company has had more exposure and visibility, I have had to realize that more people take what I say seriously” ..... Twenty to 30 percent of visits to Facebook are to play games .... When Mr. Pincus first envisioned Zynga, most investors and peers doubted that a gaming start-up could become the next big thing. .....“Zynga has the most revenue, growth and happy customers of any three-year-old venture we’ve ever backed,” says John Doerr

Farmville was the next big thing because Farmville offered Facebook users that Facebook itself did not. Sitting down to catch up or talk serious topics can be socializing, but you can't do that all the time. That is why people play board games.

And traditional video games were missing a big point: the Internet. There was email before Hotmail, but they all missed a big point: the Internet.

There were other online games, but many of them were solitary exercises. To Farmville social is fundamental. Social has been as big a trend as search, and Zynga respected that.

And there has been the interactivity part. Playing Farmville is a very different experience from blogging. It is very different from taking pictures and sharing.

Free might not count for innovation, but it is. It is a big one. What if you did not have to download anything to play Second Life? What if it had been free? Keeping the game free has been fundamental to Farmville's growth.

There has been a monetization fit. Yahoo did display ads, fine. But Google could not have done that. Ads on Google had to act like search results to make sense. Similarly Farmville monetization had to be part of the gaming experience. There has been a great fit.

Pincus is not 22. Zuckerberg is not the norm in entrepreneurship. Most - the vast majority of - entrepreneurs are closer in age to Pincus than to Zuckerberg although the media will have you believe otherwise. I think Mark Pincus' age is an important detail in this story.

Pincus has had a track record of giving the finger. Out of the box thinking requires that. Bloomberg got fired too. And so he went ahead and started a company. Got to do something. What are you going to do with all that nervous energy?

Gaming as a basic fabric of the web experience, wow.

Every human activity ever, if you can figure out a way to take it online, there is a business model for that.

And there is room for reinvention. Believe it or not, Geocities was my first blogging platform. It was simple enough. But then platforms like Blogger came along and blogging took off. Geocities was a community before Facebook was a community. Facebook did not invent community, it reinvented it.

Farmville is a reinvention of gaming. The question to ask is, can Zynga re-reinvent gaming? Will it still be hot five years from now? Google is still around and fairly hot. Android and Chrome alone make it pretty cutting edge, I think.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me

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