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We all know that social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time and has turned games like FarmVille into a mainstream phenomenon. And via international expansion and deals with Facebook and Google, Zynga has continued its path to domination of the social gaming market. We have an idea of the company’s revenue and other gaming statistics, but there is some data involving the backend of the platform that has not been revealed. Today, Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee is speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference about the gaming giant’s infrastructure, business and challenges.

Lee offers the following statistics:

• 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game.
• The company adds as many as 1,000 servers every week to accommodate growing traffic.
• Zynga’s properties move a whopping 1 petabyte of data daily, and the company operates its own data centers; using a hybrid private/public cloud infrastructure.
• Zynga’s technology supports 3 billion neighbor connections on games like Frontierville and Farmville.

The company itself has been steadily adding employees, through both acquisitions and new hires, and now counts more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.

Lee says that the three main goals of the company are to establish trust with users, make games available, and provide quality experiences for users. Challenges that the company faces, says Lee, include workload (i.e. having to add 1,000 servers in a given week). And demand is also a factor that needs to be mitigated, as game launches bring large amounts of users to the platform. Even feature launches bring massive traffic to Zynga’s servers. Lee recalls the launch of Superberries, which was planted by 10 million Zynga users. Gamers planted 700 million Superberries in the launch weekend alone.

Fits.me, the Estonian biorobotics and virtual fitting room company for e-commerce clothing retailers and shoppers, has secured a Series B round of financing to the tune of €1.3 million (roughly $1.75 million). The round was led by the Estonian Development Fund and brings Fits.me's total funding to €2.6 million. CEO Heikki Haldre says virtual fitting rooms are what online apparel retailers need to be able to compete with traditional brick-and-mortar clothing shops, as they aim to remove the biggest barrier to buying sweaters, shirts and whatnot on the Web: the fact that you cannot try them on prior to purchase.

Brands and businesses are increasingly setting up Facebook Fan pages, which acts as their social homepage on Facebook where they can interact with customers and hopefully find new ones. These Fan pages can be customized with all sorts of tabs and apps. A new app launching today called TextualAds lets marketers ask for their fans’ phone numbers and send them targeted text-messages.

It is SMS marketing meets Facebook. TextualAds may be the first app to use Facebook profile and demographic data to target SMS ads. The SMS messages can be targeted to fans (who opt-in) based on their age, gender, country, city, or exact geo-location. A nightclub or bar could send out free drinks coupons to women under 30, for instance, who are fans of that bar. Or It could send an SMS message to any fan who happens to be walking in the vicinity. A spa having a slow weekend could entice women customers to “Bring in three friends and get 25% off.”

The app businesses create a customized tab on their fan page which encourages fans to submit their cell phone numbers, and also offers a dashboard on the backend which shows a breakdown of the number of total fans, mobile fans, by gender and location. It also lets businesses manage their SMS campaigns. Here are what some sample screens look like, courtesy of AppBistro (one of the startups that launched at our last Disrupt).

Fabulis, a social network for gay men (“and their friends”) started by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg, is today launching fabulis 2.0, an upgraded version of its website and iPhone application. The fledgling company has also raised another $375,000 from undisclosed angel investors, bringing the total of capital injected into the startup to $1.25 million.

Fabulis calls version 2.0 a “major relaunch as a full-featured interactive social network”. Basically, that means it’s increasingly morphing into a well-designed mix-up of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon and Yammer, still specifically targeting gay guys.

Goldberg tells me Fabulis has attracted about 80,000 active members to date (the site launched about 5 months ago), with 5,000 new members signing up on a weekly basis.

With the launch of new site / iPhone app, these users will be able to update their status and view a stream of updates from other users (hence the Facebook and Twitter comparisons).

In addition, members are now able to “check-in” (hence the Foursquare comparison) and share their location with their friends or the community as a whole. Still available on the site are messaging and chat functionalities (hence the Yammer comparison) and a gay-relevant event directory.

Users can also “like” and comment on status updates from others, and sync their activities to their iPhone application. Members can now also easily link their Facebook Places profiles, effectively enabling them to pull in their Facebook check-ins and thus share their current locations with their Fabulis friends.

Also new in 2.0: Fabulis Auctions, which lets users bid on brand-name designer fashions and other stuff using the site’s very own virtual currency (Fabulis Bits) and Fabulis Exclusives, which are basically exclusive promotions and experiences available only to Fabulis members (hence the Groupon comparison).

Goldberg says users can expect the company to now launch new features weekly both on the web and on mobile devices to add to the current offering.

RightScale, a company that offers a cloud computing management platform, has raised $25 million led by Tenaya Capital with DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures participating. This brings RightScale's total funding to $42.5 million. RightScale's cloud management platform helps engineers design, deploy, and manage business-critical applications on the cloud. RightScale platform is particularly useful for small to medium sized businesses who lack the development resources to transition into cloud computing. RightScale's simple dashboard sits on top of Amazon Web Services and includes the ability to auto-scale servers according to usage load, and features pre-built installation templates for common software stacks.

Netflix was widely rumored to be launching its online movie streaming and subscription service in Canada today, so this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Still, the company has just made things official, and also announced the price, which is always useful information: $7.99 per month, with the possibility to sign up for a free trial month. For the record: the Canadian introduction marks the first availability of the Netflix service outside the United States.

Netflix has also detailed which devices already let Canadian customers stream movies, TV series, documentaries and whatnot:

- Nintendo Wii
- Sony PS3
- iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch)
- Blu-ray disc players from Samsung and Toshiba
- PCs and Macs

Later this fall, Microsoft's Xbox 360 should be joining the Netflix streaming ranks. Also to be added later: Blu-ray disc players from VIZIO and Insignia, Internet TVs from Samsung and the recently retuned Apple TV when it makes its way to Canada.

As part of today's launch, Netflix announced Canadian license agreements with major studios such as Lionsgate, MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Pictures, as well as Canadian distributors Alliance Films, Maple Pictures, eOne and Mongrel.

Content available to Canadian Netflix members as of today includes films like "Superbad," "A Beautiful Mind" and "Slumdog Millionaire" while first-run feature films from Twentieth Century Fox, including "(500) Days of Summer," "My Life in Ruins" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" will be released concurrently with their release on linear pay TV in Canada.

In-cycle programming including the new romantic comedy "Running Wilde", which will stream from Netflix on the same day as the show airs on network television in the U.S.

Prior season episodes of TV series "Mad Men," "Leverage” and "Monk" are also available, as well as shows from the Discovery Channel ("MythBusters"), Nickelodeon ("SpongeBob SquarePants"), Canada's Nelvana Studio (animated episodes of "Babar" and "Franklin") and the BBC ("Robin Hood" and "Fawlty Towers").

Initially, the Netflix Canadian service will be available in English only, but the company said it expects to add French language capability over time, not pinning a specific date.

It’s also worth noting that Netflix’s Canadian offering is for online streaming only, with no physical DVD rental service planned, at least for the time being.

Dear Canuck readers, tell us what you think of all the above.

Salesforce is known for continually updating its products, launching new features and versions throughout a given year. So it makes sense that three moths after launching the company's foray into social collaboration, Chatter, to the public, Salesforce is already releasing a new version. Today, Salesforce is launching Chatter 2, what it calls the "next generation of social collaboration technology." The new version will be available in October, says the company. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform's first three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 20,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce's client base using the platform.

Dropbox, which develops an easy-to-use file sharing service, is releasing a new set of mobile apps today, including updates for the startup's iPhone, iPad and Android apps, and the first release of Dropbox for BlackBerry (which the company hinted at earlier this year). And DropBox is launching an app directory complete with app information, screenshots and reviews for the over 100 third party mobile applications that use the company's mobile APIs for document editing, image capture, note taking and more. DropBox opened up its mobile API in May, along with the initial launch of the company's Android App. The startup, which won a Crunchie for Best Internet Application at this year's recent awards ceremony, enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free, with add-on plans offering more storage and functionality for a fee.

Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is partnering with gaming company Namco Networks to power microtransactions for the company’s gaming properties.

Through the partnership, Namco integrate Live Gamer’s virtual economy platform into its new social game, Hamster Pirates, which launches this Fall. Live Gamer will power its virtual goods merchandising, analytics, virtual item gifting, support for earned in-game currencies, item storefronts, catalog management, payments gateways, cash-in flows, and more.

Live Gamer has scored a number of other notable partnerships to power micropayments for gaming companies, including a deal with gaming giant EA, THQ and Real Networks.

Competitors to Live Gamer, which bought recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash last year, include PlaySpan.

Writing is hard. Just ask anyone. Stringing words together, spelling them right, and ensuring you follow rules of grammar and propriety are the blue-collar labor of the intelligentsia. So say you want to send an email to someone who speaks a language other than the one you speak? Do you go out and spend years to learn that language and then report back, ready to splatter out idiom and tricks of usage like an old pro? Absolutely not. You use something like AIType.

AIType is for folks who generally speak and understand a language but aren’t quite certain on some of the rules and conventions. For example, a foreigner writing a note to someone in English will often mix up word order or futz up word choice. AIType is a predictive system for writing that, in short, lets you sound like you know what you’re doing.

Based on a catalog of phrases, the system searches for the next applicable word and lets you translate that word into your own language, ensuring you mean what you say. It’s not perfect. For example, some words feature more prominently than others in the list, leading to mistakes in word choice. The crystal lattice of language understanding is hard to crack and so you could introduce glaring problems into the text without meaning to.

Regardless, tools like AIType will help folks write better. It works like a combination spell check, grammar checker, and Google Scribe. AIType is free and you can download it right now to add its features to almost any Windows application (no OS X support yet).

Obviously programs like this have been around for a long while and many have led to some delightful malapropisms thanks to overzealous suggesting engines. Google is also interested in this market as is EType so I’d say AIType needs to figure things out pronto and get this service out as widely as possible.

The service supports multiple languages and has a number of databases already compiled. It learns based on texted entered most of the rules of usage.

The company will sell “servers” that will allow financial and other companies to embed AIType technology into their desktop and laptop fleet without risking security breaches through cloud interaction. Most of the prediction, in fact, is made on AIType’s own servers and this would plug that hole.

While this program won’t help you learn another language – in fact, if you’re not at least slightly conversant in that language it won’t work at all – it’s good way to prevent potential shamefacedness while peacocking to your lady friends in foreign lands.

Sharp is to acquire 100% of Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco-based independent power producer and developer of distributed solar projects, for up to $350 million in cash.

The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, provided authorities approve the transaction.

Sharp, Japan's largest solar-panel maker, says it expects demand in the North American photovoltaic market to rise significantly due to an increase in the number of projects for power companies, hence the move.

Recurrent holds an approx. 2 GW project pipeline of solar power generation plants located in the U.S. and Canada, and is also developing business in other areas, including Europe.

With Recurrent, Sharp aims to become a total solution company in the photovoltaic field, extending from developing and producing solar cells and modules to developing and marketing power generation plants.

Recurrent Energy raised $75 million from PE firm Hudson Clean Energy Partners back in July 2008. Mohr Davidow Ventures is another investor.

Whatever MySpace has up its sleeve for it’s upcoming mid-October relaunch apparently isn’t enough to keep all the remaining execs at the company. Vice President of Communications Tracy Akselrud has resigned from MySpace and has joined Brew Media Relations.

Akselrud joined MySpace in 2006 and was second in command in the communications group until SVP Dani Dudeck left the company earlier this year to run corporate communications for Zynga. Akselrud ran the communications group until the company hired SVP Rosabel Tao.

To some extent Akselrud will be getting the band back together with Dudeck, as Brew is one of the firms Zynga uses for PR help. Akselrud said she’s excited to be working with Dudeck again.

For more information on departing MySpace execs, see the second paragraph here.

At this point, my head is spinning. Earlier tonight, I wrote about how Verizon is still full-steam ahead on destroying the fabric of Android. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have AT&T playing up the fact that they got a “D-” on a coverage test instead of an “F”. I seriously just can’t decide which carrier is worse.

Earlier today, a study by Credit Suisse was released stating that 23 percent of iPhone users currently on AT&T would switch to Verizon if that carrier offered the phone. That number is slightly off from the 34 percent that was previously reported, but is still pretty massive. In total, that represents about 1.4 million customers that would jump ship from AT&T to Verizon without hesitation. But speaking today at the Goldman Sachs media and technology conference, Communacopia (yes, awful name), AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had something interesting to say about possible defections.

Stephenson noted that 80 percent of AT&T’s iPhone base is either in family plans or business relationships with the carrier and that these type of customers tend to be “very sticky.” So essentially what he’s saying is that those 80 percent of iPhone users probably won’t leave even if they want to. Wow, that’s a fresh approach.

The correct answer there would have been to say that AT&T will be doing all it can to improve its network and its customer service to ensure these people stay. And that they’re confident that they will. Or really, anything would have been better than an answer that basically amounts to “we have them trapped.”

Of course, this seems to be the company line these days. The same 80 percent figure was touted in a recent SEC filing.

But this may be my favorite part of Stephenson’s talk, from CNBC’s report:

Stephenson emphasized the “extended array” of smartphones Apple subscribers can pick from, which reads as AT&T saying it’s not too reliant on Apple.

Does he really believe that iPhone users are going to switch to some other phone that AT&T offers instead of switching to the iPhone on another network? I mean, seriously?

This is basically like saying, “well, we offer you crappy service on one of the most popular devices out there, so why don’t you try this less popular device and stick with us?”

That’s what we call a lose-lose situation. Brilliant.

It's been nearly two weeks since Google Instant launched, and aside from conjecture and personal opinions about the new UX (everyone seems to either hate it or love it), we're finally starting to see some real data about how the new Google search experience is affecting organic traffic levels and other facets of SEO. Despite assertions to the contrary, SEO hasn't been killed by Instant, but nor have the changes been inconsequential. Google Instant is slowly changing how search engine optimization professionals work, what they focus on, and the bottom line results seen by their clients.

When Google Instant first launched, we predicted three major SEO trends we expected to see. Since then, we've been collecting data from users of our SEO platform, Drive. Here's how our guesses matched up with the results we've seen.

The Prediction

Real Estate is at a real premium in the age of Google Instant. A SERP that once showed seven or eight results above the fold now only has room for four or five results below the Google Instant suggestion dropdown. Based on this, we expected traffic to decrease dramatically for those results that Instant shoved below the fold. As a corollary, we expected traffic from above-the-fold keywords to rise, especially due to the general nature of Instant to present the searcher with more and more options to click those results, as they appeared automatically above the fold as he or she typed.

The Data
To test this theory, we focused on keywords that consistently ranked between position six and eight both before after the introduction of Google Instant, comparing how those keywords fared with counterparts ranking #1 through #5, and those in positions nine and ten. Focusing on such specific criteria gave us our smallest sample, but it was still large enough to be representative—and surprising. We actually found that once a user stopped typing, Google Instant was more likely to make the user scroll down the page: keywords in lowest positions showed the largest growth. Google Instant, however, seems to make searchers less likely to click to Page 2 of the results; keyword ranking past position #10 showed a significant decrease in traffic. Keywords that remained above the fold showed some growth, while keywords that had just dropped below the fold—where we expected to see the largest change—showed a barely-discernible decrease in traffic.

What To Do About It
Google Instant has changed how the SERP looks and how many results show, but—overwhelmingly—the behavior of most searchers to click on the top results hasn't changed. Only now those top results are shown more often and are driving more traffic, so obtaining a top position is more important than ever. On the flip side, keywords ranking at the bottom of Page 1 are starting to get more attention, while keywords on subsequent results pages are tanking. Time to do that extra work to push your keywords from the top of Page 2 to the bottom of Page 1.

Long-Tail Keyword Compression
The Prediction

Our first prediction when Google Instant launched was that we would see less keywords driving approximately the same amount of traffic to sites—at least to well-optimized sites with a well-round keyword strategy. Because Google Instant focuses the user's attention on more popular search phrases, by suggesting them and showing their results as the user types, fewer users will use longer tail, less popular phrases. Searchers typing a longer, more obscure variation of a keyword are unlikely to complete it before they see the results—automatically loaded onto the SERP—they were looking for.

A company selling iPod Car Adapters, but ranking for a lesser-used phrase, like "iPod Car Cables," is unlikely to get much traffic from that phrase, as a searcher using Instant would almost never get to that search before seeing relevant results. For a site counting on unpopular, "forgotten" long-tail phrases like that, their traffic will dwindle. For sites ranking for a variety of relevant head and tail keywords, search volume will stay constant, even as query variety dwindles.

The Data
So far, this one is coming true in a major way. While organic traffic levels have risen about 5% for all Drive users since Instant was introduced, keyword variety has fallen more than 15%! Thousands of phrases are no longer driving any traffic, but most sites aren't suffering for it.

What To Do About It
Firstly, take a deep look at your analytics. Find out which tail keyword phrases have stopped generating traffic, despite ranking well, and stop optimizing those phrases, shifting to your attention to the more popular variations of those phrases that are still generating traffic—and likely generating much more of it. Follow up with some keyword research—using Instant—to discover other popular varieties of those keywords that are showing up In Instant suggestions.

The Google Prude Paradox
The Prediction

One of the most interesting aspects of Google Instant is how much it put the search engine's "prudishness" on display. Even with SafeSearch turned off, Google Instant will not show suggestions for adult terms or keyword phrases. We'd expect sites banking on adult terms, especially long-tail terms, to see little difference in organic traffic, since Google Instant basically doesn't apply to them. Complementary to this, we'd expect sites that rank for "mature" but not necessarily "adult" terms—like "sexy videos" or "sexy girls"—to see slightly more traffic. As a searcher types a keyword phrase that starts out mature and gradually gets adult, the searcher might be enticed enough by a site showing up in the progressive results that has mature, but not adult, content.

The Data
We expected a slight increase in traffic. What we saw was huge: a more than 20% increase in traffic from "mature" keywords. A 25% increase in traffic from keywords containing the word "sex." Google Instant is really changing user behavior here, waylaying a searcher intending to type an adult query with what is usually PG-13 content.
What To Do About It
This applies to a small group of sites, but if you have content that falls into that narrow band between Safe For Work and not shown with SafeSearch on, optimize that content as much as possible.

Conclusion
All this data comes with a large caveat emptor: it's only been two weeks—long enough to see some data, but the data we'll see in another month will definitely better illustrate the changes wrought by Google Instant. Full adoption of Google Instant—when it launches on mobile and in the browser address bar; when it is supported by more browsers and by those accessing Google through https on not via the home page (iGoogle, for instance)—will also further clear up these results. Some of the above may be disproven; other trends may continue. What's certainly clear is that Google Instant has changed things, and SEOs need to react.
Data for this article was compiled by looking at the top 10 accounts in Drive and the approximately 10,000 tracked keyword driving traffic to their sites, along with the more than 60 million organic hits these sites received in the 13 days preceding and post the launch of Google Instant.

Eli Feldblum is the CTO & Co-Founder of RankAbove, the leading provider of scalable SEO solutions, intended for SEO professionals working at or on large web properties. Feldblum is an eight-year veteran of the SEO world, and has spoken and published throughout the industry. More predictions and data that either backs them or knocks them down is available here, and even more data will be available during a joint webinar between RankAbove and ComScore taking place on October 14th.

TripIt, the site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails, is upgrading its premium version today to be even more useful. Now TripIt Pro will track any pro member's flight itinerary so they are notified of a price drop that could trigger a potential airline refund.

TripIt Pro members will now be alerted by email and text message when they may be eligible for an airline credit or voucher. Any eligible flight within TripIt Pro is automatically monitored for post-purchase price drops. Consumers simply contact the airline via phone to obtain their credit, armed with the information TripIt Pro provides in its alerts.

The startup has activated the feature for a select number of beta testers and users have been receiving credits or vouchers ranging in value from $20-$600. It’s a no-brainer; and travelers have nothing to lose.

TripIt Pro now also features new benefits from partners; enrolled members will received a complimentary membership to Hertz #1 Club Gold and Regus Businessworld Gold (which is a $660 value). And the yearly fee for TripIt Pro has dropped from $69 to $49 (coincidentally this is about the same amount has you would pay to check-in two bags on most airlines).

TripIt Pro’s existing features include a notification via text or email when there is a flight delay, cancellation or gate change. If there is a need to reschedule, TripIt Pro finds alternate flights, including flight status and open seats. The service also tracks frequent traveler points all in one place and allows travelers to designate an inner circle of people with whom to share all their trips. And the premium service works on the startup’s mobile apps.

A few days ago Law professor Eric Goldman wrote a vehement blog post entitled, “Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist” denouncing the recently enacted paywalls around documents older than two months on the popular document sharing site.

“[Scribd's] value proposition always has been open access to the documents–freely shared with everyone and indexed in the search engines. The paywall destroys that value proposition. They’ve taken the documents that I wanted to freely share with the public (many of them public documents like court rulings and filings) and made them inaccessible.”

Goldman got a lot of feedback from the blogosphere, which unsurprisingly was anti-Scribd paywall. While the Scribd communications team expressed their concern to Goldman and invited him to the office when he sent them a pre-publication draft of the post, there was no apology, until today.

According to Goldman, he received the following email earlier from the Scribd communications team, which includes a link to an apology blog post from CEO Trip Adler which commits to making changes to the archive program. Despite the outreach to Goldman in order promote the public response, within an hour the post was down, replaced by a 404 page.

I have emailed Scribd to find out what’s up and will update when they respond.

In the meantime, here is the text of the apology post Goldman originally received, paywall free.

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Michelle Laird > xxxx@scribd.com

Date: Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 3:34 PM

Subject: Scribd Archive Changes

To: Eric Goldman

Hi Eric,

Just wanted to update you. Here is an apology from Trip Adler, CEO and immediate changes [sic] are making.

The blog post copy is below.

Regards,

Michelle

• Home
• About Scribd

The Scribd Archive, an Apology and Immediate Changes

September 21, 2010

A few weeks ago, we launched a program called the Scribd Archive, which we hoped would encourage readers to contribute to the Scribd community. They could do this by uploading their own documents in order to download older documents in the Archive or pay a small fee. This in no way restricted the ability to read and share content on Scribd.

I believe the intention was good, but we made some mistakes that we need to acknowledge and fix. We didn't communicate the program clearly to you, our content publishers, and we didn't give you enough control over when/if you wanted your content in The Archive. So first, I'd like to sincerely apologize to the community of users who publish content on Scribd. You are the ones who power the site, which would not exist without your contributions.

We're certainly not perfect, but in our effort to be better, we will be making several important changes:

• Clear opt-out — anyone uploading to the site will be informed about The Archive and can easily opt-out of the program here; we will also post clear information about The Archive on your "My Docs" profile page.

• Proactive messaging — you'll be notified when your documents are ready for the Archive and again given the opportunity to opt-out of the program; we will also prominently let readers know that if they want to download for free, they can simply join the community and upload a document.

• Community advisory board — we've established a Scribd User Advisory Board (SUAB) to help ensure that we incorporate community feedback on upcoming Scribd products.

Our goal is to bring readers and creators of content together using the inherent efficiencies of the Internet and other technologies. We're constantly learning new ways to do this better. If you have questions/concerns about The Scribd Archive or other Scribd products, please email me directly at xxxx@scribd.com.

–Trip, CEO and C0-founder

–

Update: After this post went up, Scribd decided to repost their apology, from Scribd CEO Trip Adler, “We took it down because we were making some final considerations.  It’s now back up in it’s original form.”

You can check it out here.

Photo: Dave Keeshan

Online forums pervade the web, but often these forums leave much to be desired in terms of design and layout. Huddler has launched its white-label solution to allow publishers to migrate online forums into sleek, feature-rich web-based communities.

Forum and website publishers can partner with Huddler to modernize their sites. Huddler’s technology adds product reviews, image hosting, wiki functionality, user image galleries, specialized search functionality and aesthetic improvements to any forums.

Founder Dan Gill says that forums are still massive in terms of members and traffic, but features and the interface of many forums has lagged behind. Huddler is claiming that its model will increase search traffic and be able to make money for publishers. In addition to adding features for forums, the startup also aims to monetize thee sites through display advertising and affiliate marketing.

Over the past year, Huddler has been in private beta, with 24 publishers using the startup’s technology including, EpicSki, ChefTalk, DenimBlog, and Head-Fi. To date Huddler has raised $5 million in funding from NEA.

As you can see from the before and after pictures of Huddler’s makeover of EpicSki, Huddler’s technology seems to help spruce these forums up a bit.

Online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle has acquired meeting scheduler TimeBridge, we’ve learned. We’ve confirmed the acquisition with MerchantCircle. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2005, TimeBridge provides a web app and an iPhone app that allows users to coordinate and schedule meetings easily. The company, which has over 500,000 users, also offers a number of features that allow users to conduct meetings, including web, phone and video conferencing. The app will send attendees email and SMS reminders and allow users to upload documents and capture notes.

Ben Smith, co-founder of MerchantCircle, says that the startup plans to use to TimeBridge to allow merhcnats on its network to schedule appointments with consumers. Merchant Circle, which has been steadily growing, provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.3 million small businesses. MerchantCircle has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200.

While the company will continue to operate TimeBridge’s scheduling platform, TimeBridge’s technology will also eventually be integrated into small businesses’ profiles to allow consumers to schedule appointments and calls with merchants (see picture below). Smith said that the acquisition was also a talent acquisition; and says TimeBridge’s Yori Nelken will bring both his technical skills and business acumen to MerchantCircle.

Another asset of TimeBridge that was attractive to MerchantCircle was the patent portfolio that TimeBridge has in the online scheduling space. TimeBridge has raised $14 million in funding to date. MerchantCircle has been steadily adding new features, expanding to international markets, and increasing traffic to its site, perhaps in preparation for a possible IPO in the coming year.

About a week ago, we noted that Verizon was gearing up to launch its own app store for Android phones. This app store, called V CAST Apps, would be completely separate from Android’s existing Market for apps. In other words, it’s Verizon kicking their partner Google in the man region.

Of course, we all knew neither side would spin it that way. And sure enough, today we have Verizon’s take. During their Verizon Developer Community Conference earlier this afternoon, the company took the time to respond to the charges that they were taking over control of Android devices with maneuvers such as this. Jkontherun has a good overview of what was said, but Verizon itself was tweeting key parts. Here’s my favorite:

V CAST Apps is NOT out to take over the phone. It’s about choice, and about simplicy [sic] – carrier-billing — and quality — great apps.

Oh Jesus. Here we go again. It’s not about control or money — no, of course not. It’s about “choice”. Excuse me while I vomit in my mouth.

Does anyone really believe that Verizon really cares about choice here? What they care about is not  ”becoming a commodity connectivity provider,” as James Kendrick puts it. And that’s fair enough, there’s nothing wrong with a company wanting to be successful and maintain their success. But I’m sick of this spin that all of this is for the betterment of all. Verizon cares about making money just like every other company and that’s why they’re doing this.

But there are two main reasons I have a problem with all of this. First, Verizon has proven itself to be incapable of making a decent consumer experience. I’ll refer back to my experience with the Motorola RAZR which was delayed for many months so Verizon could load it up with their crap UI and V CAST junk. And now we’re seeing it with the Droid Verizon phones. They’re packed to the gills with garbage compliments of Verizon. There is no question that Google needs to improve the Android Market experience, but as the creators of Android, I have much more faith in them doing that than with Verizon circumventing it.

Second, here’s what really annoys me: believe it or not, I really like the idea of Android. I love the idea of an OS ecosystem that works across a range of carriers. In the U.S., Apple isn’t doing this, Android is. I like anything that gives the carriers less power. The problem is that Verizon is now using Android’s openness to ruin that approach.

Verizon is essentially making Verizon Android phones different from all other Android phones.  Say I buy an app through the V CAST app store then a year down the line I buy another Android device on Sprint. Guess what? It won’t work on the new device. This was supposed to be an open ecosystem — instead, it’s turning out to be very, very fragmented. We’re seeing now that a Verizon Android phone and a Sprint Android phone will soon only share a bit of branding in common. The harmonious ecosystem is being razed.

And all of this doesn’t seem to bode well for the prospects of a Verizon iPhone. Does anyone believe for a second that Apple is going to let Verizon open their own app store on the iPhone? Not a chance. They’ll be lucky if they get a V Cast content app pre-loaded on there — you can bet Apple doesn’t even want that. So why would Verizon want to have anything to do with a device that will turn them into the “commodity connectivity provider” when Google is giving them the keys to the castle?

And so, despite the best efforts of Apple and Google over the past few years, the carriers are now striking back. And it’s us, the consumers, who will lose as a result. How’s that for “choice”?

[image: Warner Bros.]

With the news this week that the recession officially ended in June 2009, there's a ton of commentary about how it still feels like we're in recession. But from where I sit, it never felt much like a recession at all. Revenues tightened up and people didn't get raises, but I don't know any friends who lost apartments, few who lost jobs and few companies that went under, just because of the crash.

Compare that to the post-2000 crash, when I'd estimate that half of my friends in the Bay Area were laid off and out of work for months or in some cases, years. I may sound like those old grandmas who insists on rinsing and reusing paper towels because they never got over the Great Depression, but honestly, that was a recession. This thing we just went through? From the Valley standpoint it was an excuse to trim fat and put some decisions off.

This should seem obvious– after all we'd been built up to a crazy level in the late 1990s, propped up by IPOs that weren't sustainable. But somehow I keep finding myself in this debate– including in China at the World Economic Forum last week– and the broader business press keeps projecting that this was “the big one” when for a lot of us out here, it just wasn’t.

Well, I'm tired of having the debate, so I spent the afternoon digging up some stats to back up my anecdotal sense of things. Spoiler alert: I was right. We–meaning Silicon Valley– got off pretty easy this time around. When I say "Silicon Valley" I mean that as the universe of American tech startups not the geographical area, although there's clearly a lot of overlap.

I looked at six indicators for startup "health": The number of funding rounds, the amount raised, the number of M&A transactions, how much those transactions netted, the number of IPOs and how much those IPOs netted. I compared the percentage of drop, between peak and trough quarters over the last two downturns. (Dow Jones VentureSource actually did the looking up; thanks to them for the quick turn around on data.)

Here are the results: There was a downturn in all six metrics in this last recession but it only lasted from the third quarter of 2008 through the first quarter of 2009, compared with an 18 month retrenchment from the first quarter of 2000 through the middle of 2001. (In general, that is. Some measures bounced back quicker.) And don't forget– that was the period when Sequoia Capital sent out its death-and-destruction-are-coming memo instructing people to cut the fat and cut spending. That pull back is called catching your breath and being prudent, not a true correction because a market was overheated. In the middle of the recession I wrote that things weren't so bad in the Valley because we weren't the cause of the downturn this time, we were just an innocent bystander. But as it turned out, we were more of a bystander that got splashed with water than a bystander that sustained any real collateral damage.

Let's look at funding deals first: In the 2000-era downturn the number of deals getting done fell 53% and the amount of money going into those deals fell 64%. In the more recent downturn the number of deals getting done fell only 20% but the amount going into those companies fell 47%. So for sure there was less money for startups to play with but there wasn't an even comparable free-fall in the number of companies that could raise money before and after each crash.

Now let's look at money from liquidity. That matters, because that's the big money that sloshes around an economic area that makes people feel rich– paying for dinners, buying houses and having a lot of ripple effects on other parts of the economy. The number of acquisitions dropped a similar amount– 15% in the recent recession and 18% in the post-2000 crash. But the proceeds from acquisitions took a bigger hit in the post-2000 era, at 66%, than it did in the 2008 crash at just 26%. Translation: The going rate for companies fell this time around, but wasn't decimated. In the post-2000 crash, acquisitions bounced back quicker than other stats — not hugely surprising as VCs were likely incentivized to move some properties that suddenly couldn't go public.

That brings us to IPOs, where we see the biggest difference. In the post-2000 crash IPOs fell a whopping 93% in one year's time and the amount raised from IPOs fell 94%. The startup universe went from a peak of nearly 70 deals in the first quarter of 2000 raising a combined $7.3 billion to just five deals raising $467 million. That can make a whole company, a whole industry and a whole major economic area feel destitute in a flash. Comparatively, the startup universe went from six IPOs in the first quarter of 2008 to four over the next five quarters, raising about the same amount. Simply put– there was little room for IPOs to fall during this last downturn.

And that last stat is the one that drives all the others. Valuations and the number of deals did soar in the Web 2.0 era but it had nothing to do with exits or the broader market, so the broader market didn't tank them. What did drive the increase? Some was legitimate new value being created online– or rather displaced from traditional media. But a lot of it was our own economic cycle of an overheated venture capital universe that lags the market-based economy by years, because venture capital funds invest and exit over ten year periods– meaning a correction isn't immediate and the broader market was buoyed up when asset managers went to reinvest a few years back, putting off a shakeout even further. So there are loose correlations but little direct cause-and-effect.

What about jobs, you might ask? After all, numbers came out a few days ago showing that the Bay Area– while slightly better than the State as a whole– has unemployment of around 9%, almost double what it was pre-downturn and comparable to the national numbers, which are causing plenty of pain. That's where we get to the difference between “Silicon Valley” the geographical place and “Silicon Valley” the lazy shorthand for venture-backed tech startups. Dig a little deeper into the numbers and you'll see that in terms of local job losses construction was the hardest hit, with sectors like retail and personal financial professionals, in part being replaced by technology tools, also hit.

My point: Stop whining. If you couldn't raise money your company probably wasn't working, which doesn’t mean it was bad, it just means you were a startup trying to do something risky that didn’t work. If no startups go under–in good times and bad times–entrepreneurs and investors likely aren’t taking enough risk. If you lost your job–and you work in tech– you likely either worked for a public company that had more systemic problems (cc: Yahoo, eBay) or the recession was an excuse to get rid of you. Either way, you likely have been rehired somewhere since. The verdict is in: It wasn’t just like 1999. It wasn’t bubble 2.0 and it certainly wasn’t dot-com crash 2.0.

Facebook product manager Jared Morgenstern is on stage at the Facebook Gaming event in Palo Alto and after describing the internal codename “Super Mario Party” as “Doing things with your close friends is better than doing things with strangers,” (yes, random) he finally got into what newsfeed changes Facebook will be making with regards to games in order to make the Facebook gaming experience less annoying for both the people who are playing and the people who want nothing to do with games.

This is big with regards to exposing users to games, as Facebook is making a concession to gamers still reeling from limitations on game updates. From the Facebook blog …

“People who do not play games will only see stories when a particular game is added by a group of friends, instead of ongoing News Feed stories. These dedicated stories will show which friends are playing a game, making it easy to join them. Over the coming months, we plan to launch additional features that provide improved and personalized social games and News Feed experiences. Happy gaming!”

Here is an outline of the games-related interface changes below:

Fix Navigation In Order To Make It More Useful

1. Smarter Bookmarks — The left hand panel of bookmarks that just sat there before, will now actually take user behavior into account, using a relevance algorithm i.e # of days in the last 30 days that you’ve used an application.

2. Stronger Reengagement Channel — Facebook will replacing the grey text of gaming notifications with the more stand out blue bubbles. In addition to the functionality of retracting games requests, Facebook will be moving requests to the left sidebar.

Simplifying And Strengthening Behaviors

3. Requests to the Dashboards — Gaming related requests will now be moved  to the games dashboard.

Understand Our Shared Audience

4. Targeted Stream Posts plus Personalizing Stories — People who don’t play games will only see when a game is added, instead of ongoing “Marissa is building a barn in FarmVille!” type updates.

Make Viral Loops More Frictionless

5. Simplified policy changes — In the coming months Facebook will be adding more changes and features in order to streamline the social gaming experience.

VP of Business Development Dan Rose closed off the announcement by saying that, "We recognize that some of the things that we've done in the past.. sent a signal that maybe we don't care about games or thought that they should be less prominent" and reaffirmed Facebook’s desire to be the best place in the world to play social games. With about 200 million people playing games monthly, it is definitely are the largest in terms of population.

At a Gaming Event in Palo Alto today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that games are one of the primary reasons some people visit Facebook, confirming that 40% of its userbase is using the site for social gaming. The top ten games on Facebook have more than 12 million users each.

But Zuckerberg says it’s complicated, “While they’re in the top five things that people like, they’re also in the top five things that people hate.”

Read more in Jason Kindcaid’s liveblog from the event.

I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network is having a special press event to talk about the current social gaming landscape. We expect there to be some important announcements this evening — the event is being led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and there are myriad game developers in attendance. My live notes and a video stream are below.

Facebook’s Dan Rose has taken the stage.
Talking today about changes to FB platform, user experience around games.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage.

• Today, talking about two themes: quality and apps/games. Every day almost 300 million people come to FB.com.
• Hundreds of millions of people love games on Facebook. Hundreds of millions hate them.
• Let’s talk about quality. We have a team called the Site Integrity/Graph Integrity team. Try to make it so that each experience people have on the site is a positive one.
• In last two months, ‘friend spam’ — friend requests that aren’t accepted — are down 40%
• One of biggest drivers of negative experiences has been games. But poll Facebook users, and games are in the top five. There have been at least four large companies building games. On the other hand, games are one of the biggest complaints we get. Often right up there on list of top five people wish weren’t there. How do we manage that?
• When we turn weight of game stories in News Feed up — we get complaints. Turn it down, get complaints. We want to build and enable anything that hundreds of millions of people want to use.
• Solutions are pretty simple: if someone is playing a game, and they want context about that game… then don’t limit stories about that game. On the other hand, if you’ve never played a certain game, then you probably don’t want to see context from a lot of friends who are playing that game.
• Talking about how if you play a game, it should be easy to access. If you stop playing it, it should fade out of your experience.

Jared Morgenstern, PM for Facebook’s games team, has taken the stage.

• We now have a dedicated gaming team.
• Talking about how much he likes games. Zelda, Nintendo Power… video game colleges.
• Top 10 games on FB have more than 12 million active users each
• Championed building a team dedicated to games at FB. Various teams are building ‘war rooms’. Surround office with people on the project. Had idea at a hackathon to make a loft in a conference room… a gaming focus loft. Designed so you can see the faces of the people you’re playing against.
• Doubling down on infrastructure

• Starting with a vision…doing things with your close friends is better than doing things with strangers

The actual changes…:

• Smarter bookmarks. Sorting bookmarks by actual usage. Relevance = number of days in the last 30 days that you’ve used an application. Will always be core set of services at the top (FB services) and then personalized set of features based on what the user often users.
• Stronger reengagement channel Using blue bubbles as notifications instead of just grey text. Will make it more apparent to users.
• Moving game requests from bottom right area of requests module, to be part of the same left sidebar.
• Ability to retract requests.
• Will start targeting shared stories to only users playing the same game (this is big) — no more spam about cows that you don’t care about. For users that aren’t playing a game, Facebook will show ‘Discovery Stories’. “Everett and Joey are playing Social Chess”, but you won’t see their every move.
• Making viral loops more frictionless with policy changes.

Dan Rose is back on stage. “We recognize that some of the things that we’ve done in the past.. sent a signal that maybe we don’t care about games or thought that they should be less prominent”. We’re dedicating more resources to games. Have big team working on Credits.

Tried to do collapsing of stories earlier, but devs didn’t like it. And gamers didn’t like it either — because they only saw some of the stories they wanted to see. And people who don’t like games didn’t like it either, because they were still seeing these stories, only fewer of them.

Q&A:

Did you just say that a user playing a game can’t share a story with a user who isn’t playing that game?
A: Requests and discovery stories will be only new user channels.

Q: I have some friends that play games a lot, I know I can sort News Feed based on friends, not content. Is there thought to sort News Feed by not user, but content?
A: Jared: Games dashboard kinda sucks right now. There will be a wave of innovation around dashboard. One thing we did test is an embedded stream in games dashboard that filters content based on games you’re playing.
A: Zuckerberg:One thing we’re trying to emphasize is that this is a set of infrastructure changes that gives a base from which to build on. Someone asked can you now not publish a News Feed story to all of your friends? What we found is that most people were trying to share it with other people who were having relevant exp. in content. We may add more features to broadcast more broadly in the future. We did a lot of testing of this to make sure this balanced out to around where we were before. So if some of these seem like big swings… They are big swings in that people who play games will see a lot about games and people who don’t wont… But in testing it’s neutral in terms of ecosystem. Good base to build things from.
A: Rose: If I know two of my friends are playing a game, that’s more relevant to me than any information they might post from that game if I haven’t started playing it yet.
Q: Talk about discovery stories.
A: First set will be based on someone installing your app and playing it on an amount of time that shows engagement. Will also be controlled by privacy setting.

Are you making a Credits dashboard?
A: Yes, we’re building things that will make it easier to see what’s going on with your business.

Strategy for free credits?
A: One of goals is to increase number of people on FB who are buying virtual goods in games. One of ways we’re attempting to do that is to give free credits to users.

Last 6-8 months cost of user acquisition has gone up. How do you see credits being rolled out? Will it be a requirement?
Rose: Credits are important for users to make sure that when you buy them on FB you can use them in any game that you play. That only works in a world where all of the games accept credits. 170 games accept credits. Want to get all games accepting credits.
Zuckerberg: A lot of changes balance out two curves. One is cost/ease of getting new people on your app. Second is cost/ease getting someone continually engaged in game. Our view is that early on it was all virality. Trying to boost engagement now.

Q: Can you still target feed posts to specific users?
A: Current algo is that you can change feed form showing friend lists, won’t show up if a player isn’t playing the game. Request removal: Open Graph API call to remove all requests. Can’t do it individually.

It’s no secret that one of the biggest issues Android has faced is fragmentation — there are many devices running older versions of the OS, and carriers are generally painfully slow about upgrading older phones (only around 30% of handsets are currently running the current version, Froyo). One way that Google has been working to mitigate this problem has been to decouple key Android applications from the core operating system, allowing it to update its apps more frequently, without having to worry about carriers getting around to distributing OS updates. And today, it’s put one of Android’s most essential applications on this fast track: Gmail.

You can now download a standalone version of Gmail from Android Market (use the QR code below if you don’t want to have to go looking for it). The app includes some nifty new features, including a menu with options like ‘Reply’ that follows you down the screen as you read a message.

It also includes what Google is calling “limited support” for Priority Inbox, which basically means you can browse the ‘Important’ label (“limited” is definitely an appropriate choice of words here).  Fortunately the fact that this is now a standalone app means we can probably expect more frequent updates in the future

This isn’t the first key Google application to get the standalone release treatment: Google Maps, Voice Search, and the main Google Search application have all been released separately as well.

In two days, Zynga has hit the $500k mark in a charity campaign that launched late Sunday on FarmVille for the "L'Ecole de Choix," a K-12 school the gaming giant is building in Mirebalais, Haiti.

Farmville players can donate money directly by purchasing Sweet Seeds for a special beet that won’t wither. In addition, Zynga is making a corporate donation if players reach a community goal. Every FarmVille player was given a Haiti Backpack, and players can exchange School Supplies (free gifts) to fill the backpack.

If players exchange 400 million gifts, Zynga will donate $100K to the charity, in addition to the funds donated for the Sweet Seeds. So far, the initiative has resulted in 200 million gifts exchanged. Zynga is donating 100 percent of the proceeds for this campaign to the school, and Facebook has also agreed to donate their Facebook Credits fees as well.

It’s an impressive amount of money to raise (not to mention interactions) in such a short time. Zynga says that this is one of the most popular campaigns the company has ever run, second only to its Earthquake Relief Campaign, which raised over $1 million in five days on Farmville. Zynga’s fundraising goal is is to generate enough donations to complete building the school and provide 1 year of operating funds. The campaign for the next 10-14 days depending on how much money players are able to raise.