Business

Editor’s note:  Adam Rifkin is co-founder and CEO of PandaWhale, an online network of interesting things and people. He has never owned Facebook or Zynga shares. . You can follow him @ifindkarma. Facebook and Zynga have experienced similar roller coaster-like devaluation from their peak stock valuations, and they’ve been partners for years, which is why MarkZ and MarkP often get lumped together in the same sentence by fearful investors whose stock is underwater: “Facebook and Zynga (insert analysis here).” Such bundling masks a deeper structural truth. The reasons that the two companies have tanked in the market could not be more divergent, and more indicative of the character and strategic vision of the startups’ respective founders. Forget any analysis that lumps the two companies together, and instead find lessons in Aesop’s fable that are important to every startup founder. Zynga is the Grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, playing and trying to get others to play. The fundamentals of Zy...

Facebook and the FTC today finalized their earlier announced settlement over charges that Facebook had “deceived” its customers by “telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” Unlike this week’s earlier $22.5 million FTC settlement with Google, Facebook does not face any financial penalties. Instead, the company will have to promise that it will give its users “clear and prominent notice” and get their consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. In addition, Facebook will have to submit itself to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years and maintain a “comprehensive privacy program.” The FTC launched its investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices in 2011 and the two organizations first announced that they had settled the charges last November. Today’s announcement marks the end of the public comment period and finalizes the settlement agreement. Here are the de...

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 If Facebook could collect its 30% tax on what we pay monthly for Spotify, Hulu, or Netflix using the subscription payments system it’s rolling out today, it’d have nice new revenue stream to swim in. But that’s a deep cut for developers to give away just to smooth out friction in the one-time subscription set-up for material services. So far, the only partners listed in the subscription payment beta started in June Facebook has listed are game companies like Zynga and Kixeye offering discounted virtual good and currency packages as beta partners. Facebook is a huge...

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 As they get older, lots of software engineers dread the seemingly inevitable move from being a programmer to being a manager. After all, if your true passion is writing code, taking on the responsibilities of managing other people may be a bit more lucrative, but it will obviously take away the time you can spend doing what you love the most. That’s ultimately why Steve Wozniak decided to make the move from Hewlett-Packard to Apple full-time, back in the company’s earliest days, according to Walter Isaacson’s autobiography of Steve Jobs, which read: “[An old friend told...

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 Until now, every Facebook mobile ad had to be triggered by you or a friend’s activity, but today Facebook begins testing a new non-social ad unit that lets developers buy mobile news feed ads that open Android and iOS App Store purchase pages when clicked. They’re designed to help developers grow their business. The ads are cost per click, not cost per install-based, however Facebook tells me it hopes to let devs measure installs driven by their app ads in the future, and is now taking developer signups for the currently small private beta. By opening up the mobile...

Go to almost any small business website and you will find you can’t make a call. A real call where you talk to someone simply by clicking a button. Infratel hopes to change all that. The Seattle company has received $3 million in funding from Prostor Capital and Runa Capital to provide its cloud-based telephony service for providing click-to-talk capabilities. Infratel now has the capability for a business to add an app on Facebook to make calls to a pre-programmed number. The website app works in a similar fashion. The app is installed on the site. The user enters a phone number to pre-program the application. The user then adds the provided widget code to web pages where the visitors will see the “Click to Call” button. Infratel charges according to the number of minutes you use. It has two tiers of service. Subscribers can use a Facebook only service or a combined offering that includes both a Facebook and Web app. Infratel will compete with social CRM providers such as Salesforce...

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 Facebook announced in a blog post today that they are doubling the site’s release speed, rolling Facebook onto new code twice per day. “Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed “ship often,” release engineering manager Chuck Rossi writes. First, there will be a push driven by Facebook’s New York office, followed by the social network’s regular daily push from the California team. Rossi says the developers are producing six times the amount of code per week as Facebook was in 2008, when he joined. “It’s exciting and I think it crushes what ...

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 Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7,000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. At today’s Facebook Ecosystem Conference, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is just that there are so many different SKUs. As a result, Facebook can’t re-build mobile apps and iterate on the experience in the same way it does for the web. Now that Facebook is on so many platforms, most of its focus is on refining the apps and making them better. Facebook generally pushes updates to its platform on the web every day or even twice a day, but that’s not something that the company can do for mobile. So the company is working on a new release schedule specifically fo...

Jon Orlin is the Executive Producer and Production Director for TechCrunchTV at TechCrunch. Jon founded the video production studios at Yahoo! and also co-founded the live daily streaming webcast, Yahoo! FinanceVision. Before that, he was an Executive Producer at CNN for many years, overseeing daily news programs. His work at CNN won a Peabody and Emmy Awards. Jon also... ? Learn More For all its successes Facebook has yet to conquer mobile. With that thought in mind TechCrunch is hosting our 5th annual CrunchUp today at the gorgeous Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA. Throughout the day leading developers, Facebook executives and industry experts will take the CrunchUp stage and speak on the state of Facebook’s platform, products, ads and mobile initiatives. Our live stream is available below, thanks to our partner Ustream. You can join the conversation on Twitter using #crunchup. You can create your own sound bites to share using the SnappyTV app. Check out all of the coverage of our ...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More In the final discussion of our Facebook ecosystem CrunchUp today, AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre and Facebook VP Greg Badros took the stage to address Facebook’s advertising strategy. Bedecarré wasn’t as skeptical as his new boss Martin Sorrell (whose advertising conglomerate WPP just announced that it’s acquiring agency AKQA, and who has said that Facebook is “not necessarily an advertising medium“), but he made it sound like the company has a lot of work to do to win over advertisers. The numbers tell part of the story. Bedecarre (who’s the middle figure in the photo) said that WPP is upping its spend on Faceb...

Peter Deng of Facebook said on stage at the TechCrunch CrunchUp today that the company’s mission is now focused on mobile. There is no single team that is focused on mobile, said Deng, Facebook’s director of product management. Instead, each group, be it the messaging or location teams, are thinking about mobile development. It’s the right team that makes for great development, Deng said. By breaking the groups into small teams, Deng said developers can move quickly on the company’s design and social philosophies and better understand nuances of the experience they are seeking to convey in Facebook apps. It goes as far as Deng spending time thinking about seating arrangements so interactions between team members can be as efficient as possible. Desktop app development is now moving toward twice daily pushes.  Mobile development will also move toward a time based approach, operating on six-week schedules. The first four weeks are for development, test and iteration. The remaining two ...

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 Facebook pages for the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Miami Marlins, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, and Washington Nationals were hacked today, as someone updated the teams statuses to a variety of funny (or offensive–or both!) messages. For the Chicago Cubs, the message was, “Fuck Bill Murray.” The White Sox endorsed Mitt Romney over President Obama: The Marlins announced the fan-favorite pitbull giveaway: The Yankees posted about a Derek Jeter sex change: The Padres post was less than welcoming to some fans: The Giants have no love for Chick-fil-A: And the Nationals announced they were heading back to Montreal: ...

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 So here’s the real story behind App.net founder Dalton Caldwell’s plans to build a new, open API framework for developers to build off of. According to him, Facebook pressured him into selling his company, rather than competing with the social network’s newly released App Center. In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to his blog on Wednesday, Caldwell recounted his side of a meeting with Facebook’s developer relations team, which occurred in mid-June. Prior to the meeting, App.net was working on a mobile app that would let users see which apps their friends were using, and make suggestions about new apps to download. It used Facebook Connect and Facebook Open Graph to identify interesting apps and to share them with social connections, and Cald...

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 Facebook moves pretty fast. If you don’t attend the Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp, you could misunderstand it. To give us the lowdown on how well Facebook’s ad business is doing and what it’s like to ride the Facebook traffic roller coaster, we’ve got two big new additions to the day’s panels. Rick Marini- Founder and CEO of BranchOut, the most popular Facebook-based professional networking tool. Tom Bedecarré - Chairman at AKQA, one of the world’s leading ad agencies that helps brands spend millions on Facebook. Get your tickets to see them and Facebook’s heads of p...

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...