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Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... ? Learn More Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we’ll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they’re surviving in this new world. Get your CrunchUp tickets here. Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been both building and buying its way into mobile gaming to adapt for this change. It’s had a few wins, like the growth of its “With Friends” franchise, and some losses, like the decline of Draw Something’s traff

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Here’s another nugget from the release of Facebook’s 10-Q today: Zynga accounted for 14 percent of its revenues in the first six months of 2012, but that number is down from the 19 percent of revenue that Zynga made up in 2011. Revenues that Facebook collects from Zynga include payment processing for purchases made through its social games, advertising that third parties show on its gaming apps, and Facebook ads that appear on Zynga.com. On the first two counts, Facebook is seeing marked declines in its exposure to Zynga’s performance: It reported that payments and direct advertising from Zynga accounted for 10 percent of its revenue in the first half of this year, down from 12 percent for the full year 2011. Display ad revenues from third parties that Facebook r

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More Wildfire, just acquired by Google, isn’t a social ads company. It relies on its partner Adaptly for access to ads APIs for Facebook and other sites. That means Google may buy Adaptly or another ads company any minute now. Otherwise Google will have to split the profits of social ads Wildfire will continue to sell through Adaptly. As Facebook Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s promoted products are taking off, being the middleman between brands and social networks is become quite lucrative and its only sensible that Google would want to own a social ads API tool and/or

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More Twitter posted an explanation and apology on their blog regarding the Guy Adams/NBC debacle. “That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up,” the post reads. “The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.” The statement confirms earlier reports that Twitter alerted NBC of t

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More There’s a staggering new statistic in Facebook’s 10-Q SEC document today: 102 million people accessed Facebook solely from mobile in June, a massive 23% increase over the 83 million mobile-only users in March. 18.7% of its 543 million monthly mobile users don’t even visit its desktop site. That means if it can’t make its mobile advertising generate a lot more money within the next year, revenue could plummet like its stock price, down 6.2% today to $21.71. Another dead-serious new stat is that Facebook only grew 10% to 168 million in the US this last year, compared

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... ? Learn More Guys, guys, so because everybody obviously wants to party with Josh Constine, tickets to the TechCrunch annual summer party at August Capital are sold out. In case you want a backdoor way in, don’t know a guy and don’t want to scale the fence, our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets are still on sale, though we’ve only got a few left so yeah, roll the dice. In addition to giving you a pass to what promises to be a very intellectually stimulating CrunchUp, the tix offer you entrance to our Sand Hill Road shindig, a get-together which, in accordance with typical Silicon Valley party fare, we’re unofficially calling “Crouching Tige

After just six weeks of hard work, Digg‘s new owners at Betaworks just flipped the switch and re-launched the site. The new Digg was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, but despite the tight deadline, the Digg team managed to get this completely rewritten version of the site out ahead of schedule. As promised, the new version of Digg puts a strong emphasis on images and is currently free of ads. With this relaunch, Digg is also shipping a new iPhone app and mobile web app. Over the last few days, the Digg team already provided a few sneak peeks into the thought process that went into redesigning the site. Earlier today, I talked to Digg’s new CEO John Borthwick who seemed genuinely surprised how much interest there still was in Digg. During our interview, he told me that one of the reasons why the team wanted to rebuild Digg as fast as it could was the simple fact that Digg’s old infrastructure was very expensive to run. According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of th

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More Today the first shots were fired in the high-profile U.S. patent war between Apple and Samsung, beginning with Apple’s opening statements. And no punch was pulled — Apple’s lawyer made a few hard-hitting claims in the courtroom, providing documents that show Samsung thought the iPhone was “easy to copy.” Harold McElhinny (Apple’s lawyer) also showed documents prepared by a Samsung executive that claim that the company was in a “crisis of design” because of the iPhone. The presentation also included images of Samsung’s design evolution between pre-iPhone time and now. But despite the evidence, McElhinny’s most crushing blow may hav

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More Here’s hoping you weren’t planning on using one of Google’s Nexus Qs any time soon — the company has just revealed to pre-order customers that it has postponed the device’s consumer launch because users wanted more out of the curious little orb. That said, Google’s tiny media streamer has been unceremoniously yanked from the Google Play store. All interested consumers can do now is give the company their email address for future updates on the situation, as there’s no word yet on when Google expects that full-blown launch to take place. Thankfully, there’s a silver lining to be found here: anyone who already pre-o

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. Several sources and blogs say the sale price was around $250 million. The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on G

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More There has been quite a brouhaha around Twitter, NBC, and The UK Independent reporter Guy Adams these past couple days. It boils down to this: Adams’ Twitter account was suspended after he tweeted out the email address of the NBC executive in charge of the network’s much-criticized handling of broadcasting the Olympics. After a massive uproar online, Adams’ account has since been reinstated, and Twitter has issued a public apology — but it’s safe to say, this has been largely perceived as a massive fail on the part of NBC and especially of Twitter. As a newer and suppose

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Facebook has become known for making a good number of talent-focused startup acquisitions, aka acqui-hires — but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those “non-material” sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million. Here’s the wording from the document: “During the six months ended June 30, 2012, we completed business acquisitions for total consideration of $24 million. These acquisitions wer

Amazon just updated its Cloud Player music storage service with a number of interesting new features, including an iTunes Match-like scan and match technology that allows Amazon to just scan a user’s music library and add matching songs to that user’s library without having to upload those songs one by one. Just like Apple, Amazon now also upgrades the audio quality of matched files to 256kbps audio, no matter the original bitrate. In addition, Amazon will automatically move all of its users’ previously purchased music from its MP3 store to Cloud Player. To enable these new scan and match imports and audio upgrades, Amazon signed deals with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers. Amazon is also now separating its Cloud Drive storage service for regular files from its music service. While the two were directly linked when Cloud Player first launched and music uploads w

Earlier this year French entrepreneur Ramine Darabiha called for a cypherpunk revival. Looks like he might be getting his wish. Cryptosphere is a new darknet now under development. A darknet is a private and/or anonymous network, sometimes using the public internet for connectivity. Silk Road, a marketplace for illegal drugs, is probably the most famous. You can’t use Cryptosphere yet, but eager hackers can take an early look at what’s done so far in Github. Cryptosphere is inspired by two other peer-to-peer systems: Freenet and the late MojoNation. MojoNation was a peer-to-peer network where members swapped resources in exchange for a digital currency called Mojo. The project was backed by a startup called Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow, which employed Bram Cohen, who went on to create BitTorrent, and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, the creator of Tahoe-LAFS, a peer-to-peer storage system. Freenet provides the ability to upload and download content completely anonymously (or so the devel

Verizon has been slapped with a $1.25 million fine for charging customers to use their cell phones as a mobile Internet hotspot, and has declared that it must allow tethering for free. Google must also reinstate tethering applications from its Android store, which Verizon had asked them to remove. This is especially great news considering more Android devices (and perhaps the next iPhone) are 4G compatible, making mobile Internet nearly universal for Verizon customers. Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T customers should prepare to be gripped by overwhelming jealousy, as it only applies to Verizon. “Today’s action demonstrates that compliance with FCC obligations is not optional,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in a statement. “The steps taken today will not only protect consumer choice, but defend certainty for innovators to continue to deliver new services and apps without fear of being blocked.” We’re unsure how quickly this policy will be implemented, so if you’re a Verizon mob

Stypi is a YCombinator backed startup that was recently acquired by Salesforce.com. Their story details the mechanics for how a small company can manage an acquisition. It provides lessons for startups going through the process for the first time. Stypi is a real-time editor that multiple people can edit at the same time. It also supports several programming languages which makes it an especially cool collaborative tool. Jasen Chen is one of the founders who now works at Salesforce.com on the Stypi project. His story mostly relates to acquisitions of $25 million or less. Here are his five insights into the courtship and the eventual exit: First Contact . That first contact is like meeting someone from the opposite sex. Intentions are confusing but the prospects are enticing. First forays are usually from a founder or the corporate development department of a larger company. These people usually act on behalf of an interested internal team. Get comfortable with this person as this is

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More Mozilla announced today that they are expanding the size of their San Francisco office and will add 125 employees to the office’s current staff of 150 by early 2013. Mozilla currently occupies the seventh and part of the third floor of the Hills Brothers Building at 2 Harrison St. and will expand to include the first two floors. “We are targeting early 2013 to move into the space, and our overall space plan ties to our overall growth plans,” Mozilla CFO Jim Cook tells me. “This space should serve our needs well for the next few years.” Mozilla’s nearby Mountain View office will remain at its current size, as the San Francisco office will swel

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Several weeks ago, reports started to trickle out that a number of Dropbox users were under attack from spam. Since then, Dropbox has been investigating those attacks (with some help from a third-party) and today gave the first update on the progress, saying that some accounts were indeed accessed by hackers, but that it is now adding two-factor authentication and other security features to prevent further problems. For some background: On July 17th, a number of Dropbox users begun noticing an increase in the level spam attacking their accounts. As Sarah reported at the time, the red flag appeared when users begun reporting that the email accounts receiving spam were in fact only tied to their Dropbox accounts, which indicated that the address leak had come from Dropbox itself. Many of those reports came