Silicon Alley Insider

Zynga: We're Banning All "Offers" From Games

Mark Pincus — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:38:00 -0500

Michael Arrington posted yesterday on mobile offerings still being shown in our new game fishville. I want to explain why this occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this never happens again.

zynga has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with.

with regards to yesterday's incident, the offer provider, doubleding, told us this was the result of their failure to remove an optimization queue which was still showing these ads to 10% of pageviews. i want to be clear that zynga had no control over the pages being shown and never filtered them from michael or anyone's view.

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The Week's Best iPhone Apps

John Herrman — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:12:00 -0500

In this week's never-gonna-switch-so-stop-asking app roundup: Free games, reinvented! Airplane anxiety, averted! Photos, wirelessly printed! Cool apps, discovered by other cool apps! Navigation, cheapened! Black Friday rush, preempted! Google Wave, appified! Screens, pointlessly tapped! And more!

See'em! →

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CHARTS OF THE WEEK: AOL's Revenue Plunge

Jay Yarow — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:00:00 -0500

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100 Things Restaurant Waiters Should Never Do (Part 2)

Henry Blodget — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:10:00 -0500

Restaurateur Bruce Buschel continues his list in the New York Times...

As with the first 50 things waiters should never do, the underlying logic here applies to a lot more than the restaurant business.

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100 Things Restaurant Waiters Should Never Do

The Hot New Business Of Virtual Goods

Henry Blodget — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:52:00 -0500

As we've noted frequently over the past couple of months, virtual goods sales in the US are finally starting to take off.

This has been a big business in Asia for years, and we see no reason why it won't soon be an even bigger one here. It's also an extremely profitable business, with margins near 90%.

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iPhone For Verizon In 2010

Dan Frommer — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:45:00 -0500

Apple will release a new iPhone next summer that works on Verizon Wireless as well as all global networks, a report claims, citing sources in the Taiwan supply chain.

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This Week's Most Popular Posts

Nicholas Carlson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:38:00 -0500

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The iPhone-to-Android Switch: 10 Things You Need to Know

Matt Buchanan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:26:00 -0500

You've had it. Maybe with AT&T. Maybe with Apple's crushing, dictatorial grip strangling the App Store. Whatever the reason, you're going to Android: Land of freedom, carriers not named AT&T, and the great Google.

Here's what you need to know >

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That Dog On A Skateboard Lands A Real Commercial

Ken Wheaton — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:30:00 -0500

Michael Learmonth noted yesterday that American Apparel and ESPN are among those marketers who've had ads placed against the YouTube video of Tillman the skateboarding bulldog.

Well, Armstrong Flooring wasn't just content to run some ads against the video. The marketer, along with agency BBDO, New York, decided to create its own spot with a skateboarding bulldog.

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Sarah Palin Bans Press, Cellphones, Cameras From Speech

Erin Carlson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:30:00 -0500

Sarah Palin is sending a stern message to the media: Stay away!

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Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues”

TechCrunch — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:21:00 -0500

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said earlier this week that he intends to make sure his company’s games don’t include scammy offers in the future. Our full background on this story is here. But what he didn’t say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning qu...

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Woman Of The Year!

Dan Frommer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:20:00 -0500

Google's Marissa Mayer is one of Glamour magazine's 2009 "Women of the Year." She's called "the visionary."

She tells Farhad Manjoo:

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CHART OF THE DAY: Cable Networks Saving Media Companies' Butts

Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:44:00 -0500

Media companies beat earnings estimates left and right this week. How did they do it? In large part, thanks to their television divisions, where cable networks grew.

With two noticeable exceptions, the television segment of these media companies was up, while the overall companies' revenues dropped.

It's the dual revenue structure of ads and affiliate fees from cable companies that grew revenues. At CBS, ad sales were down 5%, but affiliate fees were up 11%. Affiliate fees were up double digits year over year for half these companies. Meanwhile, ad sales were down.

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Employees Are Driving iPhone Enterprise Share Gains--At The Expense Of BlackBerry

Rory Maher, CFA — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:36:00 -0500

This is a report from our premium subscription research service The Internet Analyst. The Internet Analyst is currently in beta, with a formal launch coming towards the end of 2009. To sign up for a free beta trial, please submit your name and email address here.

As we've noted, iPhones are starting to gain share in the enterprise market.

This trend is important for two reasons:

First, the enterprise represents a huge potential market for iPhone and other smartphone growth
Second, the dominant enterprise smartphone vendor, Research In Motion, looks increasingly vulnerable

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Check Out The Quadrangle Conference's Recession-Era Schwag

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:14:00 -0500

Investment firm Quadrangle Group LLC doesn't let media cover its annual Quadrangle conference.

It's a shame, because it's among the few very interesting conferences.

Panelists and speakers include a mixture of hot names like Twitter's Biz Stone and heavyweights like GE's Jeffrey Immelt. Good crowd, right?

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Google Giving Verizon Droid Rare, Massive Promotional Push

Dan Frommer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0500

What does Verizon Wireless -- the top U.S. mobile carrier with 89 million subscribers -- get for selling phones based on Google's Android mobile OS? A rare promotional link directly on Google's homepage -- likely worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per day if Google were to offer it up.

Here's what it looks like, and the second image is what you see when you click through. Google did something similar for T-Mobile last year when the G1 went on sale.

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How To Bootstrap Your Way To Billions

Bob Reiss — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:35:00 -0500

From Entrepreneur.com: Finding ways to get things done with less or no money (bootstrapping) is critical when you encounter run into problems obtaining money for your start-up or small businesses.

Bootstrapping is also a good discipline to instill in a company’s culture. The healthy habits formed by the early need for bootstrapping will carry forward, even in good times, to prevent wasteful actions. Steve Gordon, the founder of Restoration Hardware, said that if sufficient capital had been available to him in the company’s early stages, he might not have been as successful as he was. In bad times bootstrapping could mean survival.

Bootstrapping will allow you to operate efficiently and how to get things done with no, or minimal, cash outlays as well as ideas on minimizing risk and staging risk. You will see that you do not need to raise as much money as you think or as you may be told. It will also help you preserve cash for the unexpected bumps in the road, like forgetting to plan for certain needed expenses.

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Andreessen: We're STOKED About Skype

Henry Blodget — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:24:00 -0500

Marc Andreessen popped up on CNBC this afternoon. Video below. Some key points:

Skype will soon be a multi-billion dollar company and it's growing like a freaking rocketship
Twitter won't kill Facebook
Facebook won't kill Twitter
Ning CEO Gina Bianchini is indeed one of the sexiest CEOs alive*

Also, Marc tells Kara Swisher that he doesn't hate his new partners, the Skype founders, for suing everyone's asses off:

As Andreessen told BoomTown in a phone interview about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players:

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Jared Kushner Tried to Poach Sorkin For 'Observer'

Erin Carlson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:15:00 -0500

Andrew Ross Sorkin has been fielding job offers including one from Jared Kushner, New York Magazine reports.

Kushner, who married Ivanka Trump to much fanfare last month, is the young publisher of the New York Observer, and twice this past year has tried to hire the superstar business journalist away from his high-profile gig at The New York Times. But Sorkin, who will be profiled in next week's issue of New York, declined Kushner's offer to make him Editor-In-Chief of the publication.

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How To Explain Venture Capital To A 5th Grader

Alaska Miller and Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:59:00 -0500

DFJ Gotham's co-founder and managing director Daniel Schultz crafted this deck to explain what venture capital is to his son's class.

Maybe the follow up presentation will be about how the 5th grader founder gets replaced by a more experienced 8th grader when sales start to slip?

(Zing!)

Venture Capital For A 5th Grader →

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