zynga

FarmVille creator Zynga has a new social game launching today on Facebook, called FrontierVille. With 60 million active players (although the number can vary widely month to month), FarmVille is the unstoppable juggernaut of social games (a relatively new category, which includes games played on Facebook and other social networking platforms), and Zynga is hoping lightning strikes twice.

The new game takes the action in an even more rural direction than FarmVille, setting up shop in a far-flung frontier town. Game designer Brian Reynolds describes it as, "Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille." And … Read more

Zynga, the online gaming powerhouse, has acquired Austin, Texas-based Challenge Games.

The social game start-up will be renamed Zynga Austin and will focus on product development.

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, Challenge focuses on virtual goods games, such as Warstorm.

Zynga did not reveal the terms of the deal.

The San Francisco-based Zynga has been on a bit of a deal tear of late, inking partnership agreements with both Yahoo and Facebook recently.

Facebook rolls out its new privacy changes live during our show! How nice of them. In a nutshell, near as we can tell, everything is going to be simpler and Facebook is really sorry that they really mean it about the whole privacy thing. And we get that, but we need some time to get over it, you know? Also, the DOJ may be looking into Apple's iTunes monopoly and we have a big discussion about the future of American space shuttle. Get your emails ready now.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new privacy features for the site on Wednesday. The controls are simpler but not private by default. You still have to seek out privacy settings and change them if you care about controlling who sees what.

But this does seem to be an improvement.  Here is a short

You can now control who can see and interact with each and every thing that you post on a day-to-day basis. Facebook is calling this Granular Data Permission. There is also just one setting that turns off access to your information by third party sites … Read more

Yahoo once again has pride in its company, said CEO Carol Bartz Wednesday, just after outlining the dozens of ways in which the company needs to improve.

Investors and their Wall Street representatives are gathered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Wednesday for an investor day that was closed to the press, but available via Webcast. Yahoo's stock has gone on quite the roller-coaster ride over the past 12 months but as of Wednesday, it's almost exactly where it was a year ago. So how is Yahoo going to fix that issue?

By modernizing its technology and improving the amount of … Read more

The indignities start with problem in the New York studio that keep Molly from being visible on today's show, and then end with the realization that all those browser preferences are basically a trackable fingerprint that's further eroding any illusion of online privacy you might have ever had. Also, Google's getting into the phone business. Again.

The mood over at Farmville is less "Animal Farm" and more "Charlotte's Web"--or that's what the big tech companies involved would like us all to think.

In what may be the culmination of one of the past year's silliest Silicon Valley high-stakes playground games--or, perhaps more appropriately, barnyard games--social gaming giant Zynga and social network Facebook have put out a press release to announce that they are not, in fact, feuding. Actually, they've reached an agreement! For five whole years! In the name of all that is good and right in … Read more

At a gala charity event Saturday night featuring "Avatar" director James Cameron, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a who's who of tech industry luminaries, the X Prize Foundation laid out its vision for the next five years.

Already in 2004, the foundation has paid out $10 million in prize money for the winner of the Ansari X Prize, which in 2004 went to the first non-governmental team to launch a vehicle into space twice in two weeks. The prize winners were Burt Rutan and the Paul Allen-backed team that built SpaceShipOne.

The foundation offers … Read more

It may owe its fortunes to Facebook, but the word is that social-gaming giant Zynga is getting ready to launch its own site in a bid to wean itself from its dependency on the popular social network.

According to TechCrunch, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus hosted a company meeting Thursday afternoon in which he asserted that hit games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World and others might soon appear on their own social games site called Zynga Live.

"'Pincus announced at a 5 p.m. meeting yesterday at Zynga that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live,'" TechCrunch wrote, quoting from an anonymous insider e-mail.

The theory here is that Zynga and Facebook are clashing over the percentage that the social gaming giant might have to pay to use Facebook Credits, the social network's nascent currency platform.

"'Facebook and Zynga [have] been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst,'" TechCrunch quoted the e-mail as saying. "'In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga's feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga, in the process, threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks."… Read more