New Conceptf of Zynga IPO coming soon

Zynga is preparing for an IPO and a login can next week, to come to those who on the plans of the company know. The creator of the franchise-make presented to the public city online game, in a rapid melting of the tech IPO market.

Zynga has this in the works for many months," says Nizan Hargil, Director of research at the capital city of GreenCrest. Two other sources have confirmed that the submission of the IPO coming soon. The first review of public finances of the company provides for four years. Hargil of believes that Zynga 14.5 billion. The company had great success with FarmVille, FishVille, mafia wars and several other games on Facebook.

Zynga would apart from the other splashy tech startups that began this year. LinkedIn, which went public last month, revealed that he won 15 million in 2010. Before LinkedIn every year since its founding in the Red 2003-with the exception of a small profit in the year 2006 was.

The flow of red ink of GroupOn is even deeper. GroupOn for his introduction on the stock market on Thursday reported that 413 million dollars in the year 2010 lost and lost nearly 114 million in the first quarter of 2011. Investors seemed to these figures, with pent-up demand for tech IPOs. The website with a value of 9 billion dollars in its debut, leaving more than doubled shares of LinkedIn (LNKD). Commerce is somewhat since stabilised but actions are still well above the IPO price of $ 45 for LinkedIn.

How Zynga makes money: Zynga could more successfully, as it is "in a completely different category", Hargil said that most of his colleagues. He is of the opinion that the freedom is a whopping $ 17 million in a cash society per month. "This is one of the companies to the rapid growth in history, in all areas," says Hargil. "Zynga is not your default Internet bubble companies." No four years many companies have large margins growth and income. »

Hargil believes that Zynga 80% of the turnover of only 3% of his payment user virtual goods, such as tractors and animals for their businesses online real money receives.
0: 00/2: 34 Zynga channels SimCity

The 20% comes from unique forms of advertising, he said-as Starbucks (JPM, Fortune 500) numbers, coffee in CityVille must be a virtual memory. These users have virtual memory to visit 10 times for the construction of a Starbucks franchise in their own virtual city. "It's very clever methods that require a constant Benuztern," said Hargil. "It is much more powerful than traditional banners." "He is very intelligent."

A spammy past overcome: this "intelligent" business methods are Zynga past, where it was spammy spam and scammy tactics for new players to acquire and monetize existing.

Facebook users are so frustrated with Zynga overload their intelligence reports and dashboards, in particular on Facebook decided to prohibit the practice. "" The current users of Zynga listings found flooded shady third-party partner services try. ""

"Zynga use questionable methods, said Hargil."they are using with great success, to be a profitable company, before it triggered a dollar, unique venture. "." Zynga worked distance itself from this "dirty" about it, and they did, to attract a lot of movement to the company for IPO-including the EUR 500 million in a row earlier in this year of funding.

Final Fantasy maker Square Enix hacked

The company confirmed that e-mail to 25,000 customers who signed up for product updates, may have been stolen as a result.

Summary of 350 people for a job at a Canadian office may also have been copied from a Web server.

Square Enix, which makes the popular Final Fantasy, Deus Ex and Tomb Raider game, apologized for the violation.

In a statement, he said: "Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our site Eidosmontreal.com as well as two of our websites product.

"We immediately took forum site to assess how it happened and what has been accessed, then took further steps to improve the safety of these and all our Web sites before allowing the site to go live again."

It is clear that the sites affected were Eidosmontreal.com, Eidos managed by Square Enix subsidiary and Deusex.com, a promotional site for upcoming game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Scammer dream

Graham Cluley, consultant at Sophos security firm, warned that a leak can cause problems for those concerned.

"With the email there is a danger that players can be sent by e-mail from someone pretending to be from a company that makes them click on a link or run some malicious software," he told BBC News.

"Summary of the basis for identity theft. They have all crooks want. The only thing missing is the credit card information.

Cluley noted that there is also enormous potential for embarrassment, as it was unlikely those who have applied for jobs would be at their current employers to know.

Square Enix says that there is no evidence that information was disseminated.

He also stressed that the company does not hold customers' credit card information at its web servers.
Mr Chippy

Shortly after the attack, the site displays a message "owned Chippy1337", as well as several other well-known names attacker, including Xero, XIX and Venuism.

However, it appears that some or all of these names may have been misappropriated from the real attackers.
Lara Croft Tomb Raider Eidos-owned maker of one of the hacked sites. The company belongs to Square Enix

Magazines Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations appeared on the Internet that appear to show the perpetrators discussing a hack, as they carried it out.

In one section, the persons involved wrote: "We put it in the name of chippy1337 write the names of Ryan, DFS, Xero, Nikon, XIX, venuism and evilhom3r.

And the same person, then add a comment, "LOL [laughing out loud]."

Security in the video game industry has been in the spotlight in recent weeks after a hacker attack on Sony PlayStation Network and the SOE system of online multiplayer.

Personal data of over 100 million users were stolen from company servers.

Investigations into the source of data breaches continues, with a specialist computer forensic teams and the FBI are involved.

PlayStation Network remains offline, more than three weeks after the invasion was detected.

Electronic Arts's Plan to Get Your Last Gaming Dollar

A trailer for Battlefield 3, the latest installment of the hit video game franchise, fills the giant screen at a theater used by Electronic Arts (ERTS) to show off its movie-like wares. "You can fly F-18s, Cobra attack choppers, and drive tanks in the same space at the same time!" says EA executive Frank Gibeau over the noise, as realistic-looking soldiers grunt, curse, and shoot their way through a ravaged city. "It's all-out war!" Battlefield 3, due out later this year, is what big-time games aimed at PlayStation 3s (SNE), Xbox 360s (MSFT), and Wiis are supposed to be: engaging, high-production-value spectaculars.

A few minutes later, Gibeau, who oversees EA's nonsports games, enthuses just as much about Battlefield Heroes, which has none of that cinematic stopping power. It's a stripped-down, cartoonish version of the game that EA lets people play for free on a dedicated website. About 7 million people have signed up so far, and many end up spending money on add-ons that spruce up their characters—the same characters they use on their Battlefield console game. During one recent limited-time offer, EA sold 20,000 virtual parrots, at $10 each, that sit on soldiers' shoulders. Over the past year, the company sold $48 million worth of digital goods and services tied to the Battlefield franchise. "In the past, that figure would have been zero dollars," says Gibeau.

EA Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello has been talking up the digital gaming shift for a decade. It wasn't an easy sell. Investors punished the company's stock as they watched EA lose money and talk big without much to show for it. Shares took a dive in late 2008 and have been stuck near $20 a share ever since. Now the strategy seems to be paying off. On May 4, EA reported $833 million in sales of digital goods for the 12 months ending in March, up 46 percent from the year-earlier period. That figure blew away analysts' estimates of about $750 million, with the company now tracing 22 percent of its $3.8 billion in revenue to virtual wares. It expects digital sales to pass $1 billion this year. "Ten years ago, I thought he was a complete idiot," says Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. "Now he looks like a visionary."

The console business could use a little vision just now. During the 12 months ended in March, Nintendo's profits fell to their lowest level since 2004; Activision Blizzard's (ATVI) once-booming Guitar Hero franchise has been put "on hiatus," according to Activision. Hackers recently turned Sony into the laughingstock of the Internet by breaking into the PlayStation network and forcing its shutdown. Much of the pizazz these days comes from companies that make games for Facebook and smartphones, such as Zynga (maker of FarmVille and CityVille) and Rovio (Angry Birds).

EA's Riccitiello says FarmVille, Angry Birds, and other such games have helped expand the world's population of gamers from about 200million 10 years ago to more than 1 billion today. Gamers aren't just males aged 18 to 34 anymore: Families now discuss tending their virtual farms at the dinner table; middle-aged women while away their free time by hurling birds at pigs. As a result, the console games that used to account for about 80 percent of industry sales now make up 50 percent. "It's not that the console is getting tarred and feathered," Riccitiello says. "These other things are just rising so damned fast."

alien in the game

A prestigious NASA scientist's discovery of fossilized remains of bacteria in meteorites could shake up everything we thought we knew about the evolution of life in the universe. However, Richard Hoover's decision to publish his work in the Journal of Cosmology, a highly controversial online publication, has apparently encouraged a dismissive -- or at least highly skeptical -- response in the scientific community.A controversial, game-changing claim published in a journal with a reputation some consider sketchy has the scientific community both praising and damning the reported discovery: fossils of bacteria embedded in meteorites from outer space.

Image of permineralized remains in the one of the meteorites studied by Richard Hoover. (Credit: Journal of Cosmology)

"Scanning Electron Microscopy investigations of the internal surfaces of carbonaceous meteorites have yielded images of large complex filaments that exhibit features diagnostic of cyanobacteria and other prokaryotes," or simple cellular life forms, claims Richard Hoover, Ph.D.

A NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center scientist, Hoover published his discovery in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, an online publication edited by Rudolf Schild, Ph.D., who directs the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics telescope program.

The journal boasts a prestigious editorial staff that includes Sir Roger Penrose, an Oxford University astrophysicist and one of the world's leading cosmological experts. Nonetheless, it's being attacked as little more than a junk science repository by other scientists, including University of Minnesota biology professor PZ Myers.

"It isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea ... that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth," Myers writes on his science blog. "It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint."
Catalyzed Conversion

Ancient and durable, cyanobacteria -- the name derives from their characteristic blue coloring -- produce energy much the same way plants do: via photosynthesis, the sunlight-catalyzed conversion of carbon dioxide into nutritious sugars.

Electron microscopic images of meteorite fragments showed tiny filaments Hoover claims "exhibit structures consistent with the specialized cells and structures used by cyanobacteria" for such basic life functions as reproduction and motility.

The filaments aren't alive anymore, but are merely fossil remnants that -- if indeed they did come from outer space -- "would be a really, really cool discovery," said Kelly Smith, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy at Clemson University who serves on a NASA panel assembled to consider the religious, social and ethical implications of discovering life in outer space.

"If Hoover is correct, these bacterial filaments would suggest that life evolved elsewhere -- perhaps on Mars," Smith told TechNewsWorld. "The discovery would take all the origins of life research and turn it upside down."

Earth, Mars, and our solar system have been around for billions of years -- long enough for a life to have evolved on another planet and then -- as climatic or planetary conditions gradually became hostile -- move to planet Earth, where perhaps conditions started out poor, but got better over time.

The life could have been humanoid, animal -- or bacterial, Smith said. It would just have needed a way off the planet, and a family of rugged bacteria backpacking aboard an outbound meteorite might have survived the trip.

"These claims could also suggest independent origins of life," Smith explained. "Life could have evolved independently here -- and somewhere else, too. In that case, the whole creationism/evolution debate could get really complex, because such a scenario would suggest that life can arise more easily than we have long thought."
Cosmology Controversy

Had NASA's Hoover published his findings in a top-tier academic journal, some of the controversy might have immediately vanished. The Journal of Cosmology, however, "is a 'junk journal' to quote a person in cosmology and astrobiology whose views I respect" said Time magazine science journalist Michael Lemonick, who wrote about Hoover's (Nasdaq: HOOV) discovery and checked on the journal's reputation.

"Some of Journal of Cosmology's articles seem downright flaky," Lemonick told TechNewsWorld. "Very few serious scientists take it even a little bit seriously."

That's most likely because "scientists know which journals are top-tier, mid-level, and fringe," Clemson's Smith explained. "The information they publish, therefore, doesn't affect scientists much. But it can affect the public's perception of science and damage the integrity of science."

Although Smith doesn't advocate publishing prohibitions that would toss junk science into the trash, he does "worry about these things, because I deal with controversial philosophical issues like intelligent design and creationism. I just urge that people be a bit more skeptical and discerning about what they hear and read."

As for Hoover's claims, they have yet to be verified by other scientists. Until then, skepticism will likely reign.

"There's always the chance, of course, that an apparently flaky view will turn out to be correct," Time's Lemonick said. "But then again, it might just be completely flaky."