Mark Pincus On Zynga’s Facebook Addiction: “We’ve Never Thought Of It In Terms Of Attachment (Or Detachment)”

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after its IPO two weeks ago, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga’s “attachment to Facebook.”
“Zynga is very tied to Facebook,” Kara Swisher brought up immediately, describing the two stocks as “tethered together.” Indeed, Zynga makes up 15% of Facebook’s revenue, and Facebook makes up most of Zynga’s.
“They’re really important not just to us.” Pincus said, “Facebook is providing a new part of [the ecosystem's] stack, there is now a social stack and an app stack.” Pincus went on to describe the social graph as “magical” but expressed concern at Facebook’s pace of innovation on mobile, “On the web they’ve been really important with regards to distribution.”
Pincus called out for more mobile discovery options, and referred to Android and iOS as platforms that held just as much importance for the future of Zynga. “Discovery and the return path to apps still needs innovation on mobile,” he emphasized.
In order to address the lack of a unified place to discover apps of mobile, Pincus brought up that Zynga had aspirations to become this platform, aiding third parties in the distribution of social games, an ambition that Swisher compared to that of Xbox Live. But it’s sort of tough to become a platform while you’re still addicted to another.
Because Pincus didn’t clearly address how its reliance on Facebook for its primary revenue was being dealt with strategically inside Zynga, The Verge’s Josh Topolsky asked the CEO again about Facebook during Q&A, “How are you going to get detached from Facebook?” Topolsky said, “What is your actual strategy for being a business on your own?”
“We’ve never thought in terms of attachment or detachment,” Pincus responded, “We have a 90 to 10m rule, which means that if a platform can bring us 10m DAUs in 90 days then we invest at scale. Facebook met that rule and Android and iOS have the potential, he said.
“I think of it like the evolution of TV.” Pincus explained. “People wanted to watch TV but our desire to watch TV wasn’t created by the networks, it was a relationship between us and content. People have a latent interest in playing independent of the platform and we are willing go anywhere.”

11:13 by Robert dawne · 0

Women Are More Likely Than Men to Have a Blog, Facebook Profile [STUDY]

When it comes to the demographic discrepancies of social media usage, we tend to think primarily about age. Young people, we assume, are Facebook addicts; older people, we assume, are Facebook-phobes. And while generational divisions have represented, and continue to represent, a primary division in the way Americans use social media, there’s another important factor, as well: gender.
In a report released Friday, Nielsen found that women, overall, are significantly more likely to engage with social media than men. Per Nielsen’s Internet-usage index, women are 8% more likely than the average online adult to build or update a personal blog — while men are 9% less likely to do so. Similarly, women are 18% more likely than the baseline American to follow a brand on Facebook or other social media sites … while men are 21% less likely. Have created at least one social networking profile? Women: 6% more likely to have done that. Men: 7% less likely. Used the Internet to purchase a product featured on TV? The ladies: 12% more likely. The dudes: 14% less likely.
These are striking discrepancies — particularly because they’re not just about purchasing trends. (It’s long been documented — and Nielsen reiterates it in this report — that women are the more active gender when it comes to digital brands and online purchasing. Just as they tend to dominate with traditional brands and analog purchasing.) The Nielsen findings suggest an intriguing generality, though, to women’s digital affinities: The ladies aren’t just more likely to buy stuff online; they’re more likely to be online in the first place. They’re more likely to blog. They’re more likely to be on Facebook or Twitter. They’re more likely, in general, to represent themselves as digital personas.
That’s fascinating, in particular, because it’s part of a clear trend. A June 2010 comScore study found that women, globally, spend more time online than men (24.8 hours a month for women, as compared to 22.9 hours for men.) A September 2011 report from Rebtel, the mobile VOIP provider, found that 68% of women who use the web to stay in touch with friends, family and acquaintances do so using social media, while only 54% of men do the same. And a February 2012 report from the firm Porter Novelli found a similar breakdown: In a survey of U.K. women, 65% said they used social media at least once a week, while only 51% of men said the same. (The same survey, however, found results that contradict one element of today’s Nielsen findings: Men, it concluded, were more likely than women to write their own blogs, read others’ blogs, and comment on others’ blogs.) And a February Pew survey determined that “women use Facebook more than men,” with women averaging 11 updates a week — compared to 6 updates for their male counterparts.
Those are striking findings, and worth many, many follow-up studies. They’re also a good reason for optimism when it comes to the web as an agent of social change.

10:06 by Robert dawne · 0

Google to Launch TV Service

Google is looking to get into the paid TV business.
The company filed an application last week to provide video service to residents of Kansas City, Mo., according to The Wall Street Journal. If approved, the service could launch as soon as a month from now, according to the article, which cites a “media executive currently involved in negotiations to license channels to the service.” Offerings in the video package would include live TV as well as on-demand and online access to TV channels, according to the report, which was based on an earlier article by The New York Post.
The source told the WSJ that Google plans to look beyond the Kansas City market and into other areas where Verizon’s Fiber Optic Services (FIOS). Controlling the pipes to TV subscribers would offer Google a new revenue stream.
Reps from Google could not be reached for comment.
The Kansas City application coincides with another request to put a satellite antenna farm near the company’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. That addition could allow Google to receive movies and TV shows that could be bundled with a new Internet service in Kansas City that promises to be up to 100 times faster than the average Internet connection.
Google chose Kansas City for its ultra-fast service last March. Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan., beat out about 1,000 other municipalities for that honor. That fiber-optic-based Internet service is expected to go live there this summer.
This isn’t the first time that Google’s ambitious plans for TV service have been exposed. The Wall Street Journal also reported in November that Google was in talks with Disney, Time Warner and Discovery Communications about providing content for its fiber-optic based video service in those cities.

07:07 by Robert dawne · 0

Barry Diller Wants To “Transform Television” With Aereo, A DVR In The Cloud

Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV.  Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media concentration” as media companies increasingly want “to protect that closed system.”
The problem with Internet TV so far, says Diller, is that “there wasn’t a lot to watch” other than “cats swinging from chandeliers.” And other hardware solutions presented the problem of more boxes in the living room. “Who wants another remote, box, wires?” asks Diller. “Everyone already has enough of all that stuff.”
But he sees Aereo as a way “to transform television and how you receive it.” The way it works is it actually sends live broadcast TV to your computer or iPad. Aereo builds boxes the size small refrigerators with arrays of tiny TV antennas inside. Each of those antennas can be programmed and deliver broadcast video over the Internet to viewers . And this is how the company gets around legal barriers, it is just tuning into live TV. This is a similar approach in concept to what Slingbox did, but instead of tuning into your own TV, it tunes into a TV antenna in the cloud.
The iPad app looks like a program guide with DVR functionality. So you can record any show available on the system, but only broadcast stations like ABC, NBC, and FOX are available at launch. Cable channels aren’t available. The other limitation is that the service will be capacity constrained. It needs one tiny antenna per user in order to stream TV to them.
Aereo is launching live today in New York City. The service is invite only and will cost $12 a month for a virtual DVR with a dual tuner and 40 hours of storage.

IAC is a media conglomerate with a wide range of online assets. In November 2007, announced they would be separating IAC into 5 public companies. IAC will consist of: Ask.com, Bloglines, CitySearch, Evite, Excite, InsiderPages, iWon, My Fun Cards, My Way, Popular Screensaver, Smiley Central, Match.com, chemistry.com, ServiceMagic, Shoebuy.com, BustedTees, CollegeHumor, Garage Games, [Gifts.com], Green.com, Instant Action, Very Short List, Vimeo, 23/6. IAC is also an investor in Active.com, Brightcove, FiLife, Medem, Merchant Circle, OpenTable, Points.com and SHOP...

10:08 by Robert dawne · 0