The year was 2008 and Zynga had it all figured out. Facebook became a portal to games for those who had never played. Viral growth there was unchecked. Facebook ad rates were low, so buying traffic was cheap. And most games were played on the desktop. But soon everything changed, and Zynga never recovered. Here’s a look at four big shifts that caused Zynga’s power and share price to plummet. Too M

How Big Is Facebook’s Data? 2.5 Billion Pieces Of Content And 500+ Terabytes Ingested Every Day Facebook revealed some big, big stats on big data to a few reporters at its HQ today, including that its system processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day. It’s pulling in 2.7 billion Like actions and 300 million photos per day, and it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data

Startups Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion, Turns Budding Rival Into Its Standalone Photo App Facebook has just finished a deal to acquire mobile photo sharing app Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram will remain an independently branded standalone app that’s separate from Facebook, but the services will increase their ties to each other. The transaction should

For most bootstrapped startups, using web and operational services can be expensive. From A/B testing to creating business cards to email, company expenses add up. Enter Y Combinator startup Anyperk, which aims to provide companies and startups with discounts on web services. Basically, Anyperk, which is the first Japanese team funded by Y Combinator, allows startups to access discounts on service

Video: Free-Moving Kinect Used To Map Room And Objects In Detailed 3D We’ve seen hacks for the Kinect from the very start, and even some that suggested one like this might be possible: a Kinect being moved around like a camera, recording the depth of everything it sees and building up a full-3D map of the room and every object in it. They call it KinectFusion, and it’s really quite fascinating to

This is a post I never thought I’d have to write. Unfortunately, I do. And the worst part about it is that it should be Michael Arrington writing this post, not me. But he can’t. TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of an

We all know the broad strokes: a boy is born to a graduate student and her Syrian boyfriend. She places the boy for adoption. He comes to live with Paul and Clara. The boy grows up in Santa Clara county. It’s flat, lots of one story buildings, mostly middle/upper middle class, outside of the bad parts. Parts of it are pretty, parts aren’t. He wasn’t coddled. His biological mother makes his adoptiv

Why Japan’s GREE Overpaid For Mobile Social Gaming Startup OpenFeint Over the past year, there’s been an apparent trend taking place of Japanese gaming companies acquiring U.S. social game developers. DeNa bought social gaming company Ngmoco for $400 million last October, adding to an acquisition of mobile social gaming studio GameView in September. A little over a month ago, Japanese mobile gamin

The cellphone market in Shenzhen is like a flea market where everyone is selling the same thing. If it looks like an iPhone, it’s here. There are hundreds of models, hundreds of odd names, and hundreds of people arrayed along the inside of a huge room. There are four or five floors of this mess. This is the Shanzhai market. Shanzhai is a strange amalgam of counterfeiting, national pride, and Robin