Zynga, the five-year-old social gaming company that leveraged an early partnership with Facebook and unlikely hits like FarmVille into Web 2.0 gold, is now a publicly traded company. But what?s in Zynga?s future?
Posts Tagged Gold
Electronic Donor Wall: A Way To Say Thanks In Style
Showing the names of people and setups that helped build a new school, erect a new monument, or fund a program is a vital way to recognize and thank individuals for their contribution. During the past, these displays often involved plaques or framed photographs on the wall. Changes in donor status or the addition of new donors meant extra expense for new engravings, rearrangement of wall mountings, or the purchase of new plaques. With an electronic donor wall, changes can be made on-the-fly, and the display can be made more creative and interactive.
An interactive donor wall can involve a few computer monitors. These slim monitors can be hung on a wall or inserted within the display itself. Info, graphics, and photos can be added to the display from a remote computer. New donors can be added into existing displays and photographs can be included in slide shows on the screen. People will be drawn to view the display, and contributors to deserving causes will get more notice than they do when masses of names are shown on matching gold engravings.
A great thing about using an interactive donor wall is that the organization can be imaginative in their approach. If a fundraiser event is in process, graphics showing how much has been raised can be included. Photographs taken across the development of a building can be used to make a slide show, permitting viewers to see the history of a project. Hand-written thank you notes can be scanned and displayed, giving details on how contributions managed to help individuals.
An electronic donor wall displayed in an area with lots of traffic may become part of the scenery after time. Individuals will be less likely to notice it after the initial few times they go by. In order to keep awareness of projects fresh, organizations can make seasonal or regular changes to these walls. Adding engaging facts, holiday themed backgrounds, and additional pictures may catch the eye of someone that has seen the wall before. Drawing people to read about impending events, and fund-raising success can create greater contributions and collaboration.
An electronic donor wall can supply interactive and entertaining information to the public while recognizing people who gave their money or time to an organization. These displays take up less space, are less difficult to maintain, and can be cheaper than standard donor walls.
Give your member the recognition they deserve with a donor wall. Rise Display also offers an interactive donor wall.
The Guild turns product placement into merchandising gold
In December 2009, just in time for the holidays, the extremely obscure web series The Guild produced a series of parody ads entitled “The Guild Sells Out!” The concept simultaneously satirized the kind of over-the-top merchandising familiar to any child of Saturday morning cartoons, as well as the misperception that producing a long-running web series is a lucrative venture.
Doing the “Sell Out” shorts put a comical spin on the concept of merchandising the show — but two years later, it’s become a reality, kind of. Beyond t-shirts manufactured by Jinx and a series of comics published by Dark Horse the following officially licensed Guild-related products are now or will soon be available:
- A limited-edition necklace version of the staff carried by Day’s avatar Codex, by independent jewelry designers Jenny and Jimbob.
- A Codex Halloween costume for adult ladies, by HalloweenCostumes.com.
- Two posters, available for sale on ThinkGeek.
- A line of “animated maquettes” (think small hand-painted statues) of Guild characters, by Quantum Mechanix.
- A set of collectable trading cards, created by Cryptozoic.
- A limited-edition six-pack of soda by Jones Soda.
- A booster pack for the classic card game Munchkin, created by Steve Jackson Games.
What do many of these things have in common? They’re all the kind of merchandise you might run across while attending a gaming convention. And that’s not a coincidence.
When preparing to launch the fifth season of The Guild (which will premiere its season finale this week), both Evey and Day said that they were looking at a much more ambitious concept — instead of shooting largely in apartments, the season would take place largely at a geek conference. “We were on location 90 percent of the time, there were tons of extras — it was more of a movie shoot than any other season,” Day said via phone.
But because, according to Day, the budget for Season 5 was relatively equivalent to Season 4, they needed to look to other means to supplement the production — thankfully, though, the conference setting offered a natural opportunity to integrate product placement. “The question was ‘Can this add to our universe?’ instead of it just being ‘Please give us some money,’” Day said.
This product placement took multiple forms. For example, according to Evey via email, HalloweenCostumes.com PR representative Stephanie Beadell approached The Guild the day after they’d realized they needed multiple conference-appropriate costumes for Tink (Amy Okunda), as well as enough costumes for an auditorium’s worth of background extras.
“HalloweenCostumes.com provided costumes in exchange for advertising and promotion of their company. And because almost all of Tink’s cosplay outfits use their costumes as a base, it’s nice for the fans to know where to go if they want to make one of those outfits to wear to a Con,” she said.
As the show is already sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint, Day and Evey were careful to run all additional product placement deals by those companies, and were careful to seek out things that would “in no way trample over their brands,” as Day put it.
And from those product placement deals, many of the merchandising opportunities later emerged. For example, the Steve Jackson Games deal followed the prominent placement of Munchkin in the Season 5 premiere, and HollywoodCostumes.com pitched the idea of a well-made officially licensed Codex costume after supplying the production with other costumes. “The things we’ve done have been very carefully picked for the cool value — they added value to how people enjoy the show,” Day said.
The Cryptozoic trading cards are another example of a property approaching The Guild for a potential merchandising opportunity, in this case through Felicia Day’s agent at ICM, George Ruiz. “We’ve all been huge fans of the show since the beginning and thought Guild trading cards would be really cool,” a Cryptozoic press representative said via email. It’s the first deal they’ve made with a web original property, but “I don’t think it will be the last. Web broadcast is really no less impactful than traditional networks. For us and our customers it’s already a well accepted form of content distribution.”
Cryptozoic's "Guild" trading cards will be available for purchase
On the surface, a merchandising blitz like this could be seen as “selling out” — except that everything that’s being manufactured has real appeal for the show’s established audience, the core demographic of which is not just passionate about the show, but gaming culture in general.
“I think the origins of the term ["selling out"] probably come from someone not preserving the heart of why people like something in order to make a profit,” Day said. “I’m confident that we’ve taken every consideration to make all our partnerships fit with our show philosophy and our fans and we’ve heard very little feedback to the contrary.”
“Being able to partner with brands with independent cred was very important to to me, because that’s the spirit of the show,” Day added. “We didn’t want to partner with anyone that people wouldn’t think was cool.” According to Day, fans were as excited about the specialty Jones Sodas as they were about actual episodes.
When asked what her favorite piece of merchandise might be, Day’s first response was the Codex Halloween costume, which enables folks of all shapes and sizes to dress up just like her. “I never thought that would happen,” she said.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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A Beautiful Glimpse of the Milky Way From Spain’s Tallest Mountain [Video]
Certainly, Norwegian photographer Terje Sorgjerd has a talent for capturing the awe-inspiring. Taken on El Teide in the Canary Islands, this time lapse captures the Milky Way galaxy overhead as sand wafts across the landscape as gold clouds. [The Awesomer] More »
LvL Guide For WoW – Make Gold Fast With Dailies
There are more and more people enrolling in the ranks of World of Warcraft just about every single day. No one can get enough of this online game and there are an abundance of reasons why. In WoW, you can free yourself from the realities of everyday existence. Just take it easy, do a few dailies to generate a little gold, and just have fun with friends – not a bad way to enjoy an evening. And as you do this, you’ll naturally generate gold throughout time.
However, there might come a moment when you want to get a little more out of the time you expend in the game. There are actually goods that cost 20,000 gold, and surely you really want those items. This means that in order to get the most out of your WoW experience, you’ll will have to earn gold as swiftly as possible.
The Fundamentals:
But precisely how do you do this? There are a variety of things to bear in mind when attempting to make gold swiftly in WoW by accomplishing dailies. You most likely may have learned that daily quests award you with gold for completing them. And initially, in WoW, items usually do not cost that much gold to buy. But eventually, those things become outrageously expensive, particularly the best of the best items you’ll want to get when you hit level cap. So, you will need a strategy so that you can afford all the items you wish, if you would like them prior to the end of time.
Focus on Gold:
If you wish to build up a stockpile of gold quickly in WoW, you have to supplement your regular activities with activities developed specifically to make you a lot of gold. Doing dailies is a fantastic way to make a lot of gold quickly. All daily quests pay out gold when you complete them. The secret is to concentrate on the amount of gold every daily gives you when you finish them. It’s also wise to take time into mind when attempting to make gold fast in WoW using dailies. If you can make 200 gold, but it takes you 5 hours to do it, that is not very much gold per hour. There are excellent methods to make a lot of gold per hour, including optimized speed gold dailies runs.
There are a WoW lvl guide that can direct you step-by-step through finishing speed gold dailies runs, among other cool things. Zygor’s Dailies & Events Wow Lvl Guide is truly one of those guides. Save up your gold from accomplishing speed gold dailies runs every single day and you’ll be on your way to making gold fast in WoW and purchasing those steeply-priced items you want.
Yuri Milner: Genius Investor or King of the Gold Rush?
Russian investor Yuri Milner, the man behind the aggressive venture group Digital Sky Technologies, tends to let his money do the talking. He doesn’t make a lot of public appearances, but his significant investments in companies like Facebook, Groupon and Zynga — usually at very high valuations — are one of the driving forces behind the current wave of speculation around Silicon Valley and beyond.
His tactics, which seem to focus on buying into high-profile startups at almost any cost, have grabbed headlines and upset some of Silicon Valley’s longer-standing investors. In particular, they focus on moves such as his offer of 0,000 to every single company coming through Y Combinator, regardless of whether he’s seen the business or not.
So there were some high expectations when he arrived for an on-stage interview at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit. It doesn’t sound like it went down well, however.
By all accounts, interviewer Jeff Randall, a seasoned British journalist who covers the business beat, struggled to elicit much from a monosyllabic Milner.
“Curious” twittered one audience member. A “car crash” said another. David George-Cosh, a Canadian reporter with the National newspaper, went even further. “I strongly believe Yuri Milner is the worst interview subject in the history of the technology business.”
Still, the crowd stuck with it because they all wanted to know the answer to the question everyone asks about the DST boss: what can he see that we can’t? Gathering from what he did say, the answer seems to be “not much.” After all, Milner has a fairly good track record online (after a string of failures and moderate successes in Russia, he built Mail.ru into the country’s largest website), but his strategy seems to be simple: Bigger investments deliver greater rewards.
Here’s a mixture of direct quotes and paraphrases taken from reports of the event.
- “It’s not about revenues: the fundamental economics in digital business is scale and margins. The top line has become the bottom line.”
- “We have to be near the younger entrepreneurs because they are more disruptive.” By the time they reach 30 or 35 there are other factors they have to take account of in their lives (like families).
- The adults of tomorrow will have fragmented attention spans, multi-task, process more information and be interactive as a group.
- ”Amazon will be the largest retailer in the world in 20 years.”
- The next big trend will be curation. The amount of information online is like Moore’s Law, it’s doubling every 18 months. In the future, 50 percent of our consumption will be driven by personal networks, 50 percent by algorithms.
- “It’s not how much something’s worth today, it’s what it’s worth in five or 10 years.”
- “There are a probably a total of 25 companies in the world that fit our investment criteria.”
- When do you cash out? “I think you should at least wait until they go public,” he said. “When the founder starts selling, you should start selling as well.”
In a lot of these cases, it’s hard to see how Milner’s advice aligns with his actions. Younger entrepreneurs? Sure, Mark Zuckerberg and Groupon’s Andrew Mason were young when they started. Zynga’s Mark Pincus, however, is 45.
And the idea that just 25 companies fit his plans? Given that Y Combinator is putting 40 companies through in its latest boot camp, that seems odd — unless you count Y Combinator as an umbrella company for all the others (I’m not sure Paul Graham would like to see it that way).
Or when he spoke on the subject of exits? Well, none of DST’s investments have turned into exits, despite the fact that — particularly in Facebook’s case — some of the founders have been cashing out for years already (in many cases, specifically because of the money that DST brought to the table).
His other insights seem to be fairly straightforward: Fragmented attention, multitasking and Amazon’s continued success don’t exactly seem like radical bets. To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it all.
Perhaps the real difference is not what Milner sees, or whether he has a guiding philosophy to picking his investments. Maybe he sees the same things as everybody else, but is happier with risks that others shy away from. Perhaps it’s just that when he sees an opportunity, he’s willing to pay more than others to be part of the game?
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
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