One of the cofounders of Zynga, the company’s executive vice president of sales and business development Andrew Trader, is no longer with the company, we’ve confirmed. He has been quietly removed from the company’s management page. Remaining cofounders – Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron and Steve Schoettler, remain.
As of a month ago Trader’s title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.
Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only “AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company.” Trader hasn’t yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.
Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its awesome Web app down – for now.
In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook.
In the first half of this year Adobe will release Flash 10.1, which will add support for the countless Flash apps around the web to many mobile devices, including Android. That sounds exciting, but it’s still unclear just how well these Flash apps will perform on mobile devices — for one, there’s the matter of processing power, but there are also issues with screen size and input methods. Now Taimur Asad over at Redmond Pie has installed a pre-release version of HTC Desire ROM (which includes Flash) onto his Nexus One to get an early look at how Flash will perform on the device. And for his first test, he’s put Zynga’s massive hit FarmVille though its paces. We’ve embedded his video walkthrough below.
So how does it look? Passible, at best. Some of Asad’s finger taps don’t seem to register properly (though he admits to not knowing how to play, so he wasn’t always clicking in the right places). 
Social gaming behemoth Zynga is going international. The company is opening an office in India, in the hopes of capitalizing on the rapidly growing market. Zynga says that India has 81 million internet users, and is projected to become the third biggest online market by 2013 (behind the United States and China).
The new development house won’t be building games that are specific for the Indian market, nor will they be modifying existing games. Instead, it sounds like they’ll be building new games that Zynga will deploy worldwide (the company is also hoping a local presence will increase popularity of existing hits like FarmVille). The company plans to hire around 100 people for the new office by the end of the year.
Running on just sugar and caffeine, 32 teams of students worked non-stop for 18 hours to develop applications that they hoped would blow the judges’ socks off. This was at the UC-Berkeley Hackathon, last weekend. Indeed, many teams succeed in their mission. They built some amazing software: to provide server-side rendering of games, convert website mockups to HTML/CSS, create sophisticated playlists for Youtube videos, and to analyze Twitter streams. One team even built a gaming interface for a neural headset.
There were so many cool tools that the seven judges, who included representatives from Zynga, Facebook, and Y-Combinator (and me), had a hard time picking a winner in each category. The exception was the “social good” category. There was only one team was worthy of receiving this prize. The team built a system to enable villagers in developing countries to send SMSs to volunteers across the globe who provide emergency medical advice. But the Silicon Valley judges couldn’t see the value of this technology. One commented, “If the villager has a cell-phone, why doesn’t he just call 911? This is really dumb”. (Most of the judges didn’t understand that 911 services don’t exist in most places in the world, and that SMSs have become the internet of the developing world). Instead, the panel awarded the prize to a team that developed a polling technology for university classrooms and for conferences. The rationale for this decision? “Helping universities is a social good.”
Zynga, the heavily-funded social gaming company, today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Serious Business, fellow creators of social games on Facebook. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it appears to be more of a strategic purchase to bring in more experienced social game development talent.
Serious Business raised $4 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners back in April 2008. Its apps for Facebook include the enormously popular and revenue-generating Friends For Sale and Rock Legends.
Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).
The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.
Zynga’s smash hit FarmVille is about to reach a new audience of future tractor riding, crop harvesting fiends. Today, the company announced that FarmVille will now be featured on MSN Games, Microsoft’s casual gaming portal. This marks the first time that a Zynga game will be featured on a full-fledged gaming site. And it’s only the first step: Zynga says that more of its games will be appearing on MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger in the near future.
Unfortunately it looks like you’ll need either IE or Firefox to get this working (sorry, no Chrome or Safari). Which is just stupid, given that FarmVille works fine on just about every browser out there when you play it on Facebook. We’ve asked Zynga why this is — it almost certainly has something to do with the way MSN Games is set up.
Zynga has made no secret of its desire to expand its games beyond Facebook.com. In November, the company launched a dedicated web portal at FarmVille.com, and it’s doing the same thing for other games as well.
Zynga’s FarmVille, with over 70 million monthly users, won the Crunchies Award for best social application last week. To celebrate, they are giving everyone on FarmVille a virtual gift in the form of the award.
There’s a story about the gorilla award that we give out to the winners. It was inspired by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the gorilla’s first use technology/tools (bones) after discovering the monolith. The full story, and a picture of the actual award, is here.
Anyway, I added the virtual Crunchie award to my somewhat neglected FarmVille farm, right between my chicken and my dairy farm. You can see it below. It’s not a bad likeness.
Yesterday Zynga added offers-for-currency back into its popular Facebook and MySpace games after a two month suspension following the Scamville saga..
Offers from just eight companies are included: Netflix, Discover Card, Blockbuster, HSBC Direct, Gamefly, Book of the Month Club, SnapFish and The New York Times. More will be added over time, each to be reviewed first by Zynga employees for adherence to a “strict set of standards for content and user experience.”
Clearly they are tiptoeing back into offers, and being very careful about how they’re doing it. That’s why it’s fascinating that they’ve chosen Offerpal Media to drive all of the current offers.