PlayFirst

Earlier this year, the startup inked a major deal with Big Fish Games and today it has announced that social game industry executive Mitali Pattnaik has joined PlayFirst as General Manager, Social Games.

Pattnaik started her career at Microsoft at the beginning of the millennium, and joined Electronic Arts as Marketing Manager after a four-year stint at the software company. She didn’t stick around for long: she was hired by Yahoo in September 2005 to fill the role of Senior Marketing Manager, where she oversaw worldwide marketing for Yahoo! Search.

Most recently, she led the marketing and monetization efforts for social gaming at Electronic Arts, where she returned as Online Marketing Manager and later, Head of Marketing, in April 2008 before leaving the company for the second time around late last year. In her new role at PlayFirst, she will lead all company’s social gaming initiatives, including the development and publishing of games for Facebook and other social platforms.

PlayFirst’s chief executive, on a sidenote, is also a woman. The company is led by Mari Baker, former Executive in Residence at Kleiner Perkins and founding CEO of KPCB/Sequoia-backed Navigenics.

The holiday is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Valentine and was established by Pope Gelasius I in 496 AD. It is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines"). The holiday first became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

Modern Valentine's Day symbols include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten valentines have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards.

Chromium Notes

posted

WebKit

Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.

WebKit is the open source web browser engine that both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers (among others) are built on top of. As such, it should be obvious why both are so heavily involved in the project (others on the graph include Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM).

The graph ranges from 2007 to the present. According to it, on November 15, 2009 Google surpassed Apple in number of commits for the first time. Google has been ahead ever since, and the gap between the two appears to be growing. That said, the two big spikes for Apple came during major releases of Safari, so when Apple releases another version, it could spike up ahead of Google once again.

I’ve included a picture of the graph below (Apple is the blue line, Google is green, “Other” is purple, Nokia is gold, and RIM is light blue). But be sure to check it out on Chromium Notes’ site as you can drill-down to see more detail there. The author has also posted the code for the graph on github.

Facebook messaging has been the bane of users’ existence for years. My first public gripe was in 2008, when I said that urgent changes were needed. The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox.

But Facebook messaging is also only indirectly linked to the email, which is still the standard way that people exchange digital messages when not on Facebook.

Facebook has occasionally dabbled with improvements to messaging, like adding the ability to search messages. But for the most part it has remained static. And not very useful.

Even MySpace moved away from their aging messaging platform to a true webmail service in 2008 (albeit one that lacked POP or IMAP support).

But now Facebook is getting itself back in the game. And if the details we’ve heard are accurate, Project Titan, or whatever it’s called when it launches, may be the kind of product people flock to.

First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com.

Email is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect.

Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at. Gmail killer? I don’t think so. But a strong product move nonetheless.

“One defends when his strength is inadequate, he attacks when it is abundant.”—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Apple iPad isn’t even available yet, but already it is forcing Amazon to respond in a variety of ways to protect its competing Kindle eBook business. Amazon just snapped up a touchscreen technology startup, presumably to update the already ancient-looking Kindle. Emboldened book publishers are pushing back on Amazon’s $9.99 pricing now that they can sell the same eBooks on the iPad for $14.99, and Amazon is capitulating. And the Kindle team at Amazon, which once had an arrogant approach towards publishers when it was the only game in town, is now bending over backwards to solicit their loyalty, says one editor at a publishing company who has noticed the change in tone.

The coming battle between Apple and Amazon will occur on many fronts, but place where Apple can really hurt Amazon is on pricing. Just as Apple initially did with 99-cent songs on iTunes, Amazon imposed a uniform $9.99 price on bestsellers in the Kindle Store.  A single price helps to establish markets for new product categories, especially when that price is at a discount to the physical alternative.  While the 99-cent strategy worked well for Apple in digital music, in books Apple doing a jujitsu move on Amazon by allowing publishers to have more control over the pricing. Now Macmillan is demanding that Amazon sell its eBooks for $14.99, and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is making similar grumblings about  HarperCollins.

Even before the Macmillan dustup, on the day of the iPad launch Steve Jobs predicted (in this video with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg that Kindle and iPad “prices will be the same. . . . The publishers are actually withholding books from Amazon because they are not happy with it.”  And voilà!  All of Macmillan’s books disappeared from Amazon, to the great joy of Barnes & Noble. The books will be back soon at the higher price, but the pressure from other publishers to follow suit is already growing.

Simply by allowing a $14.99 price on the iPad, Steve Jobs destroyed Amazon’s $9.99 price advantage.  At first glance, it might seem that Amazon will actually come out the winner here, since it was losing money on each $9.99 bestseller and now will be making money on those.  For instance, it currently pays publishers 50 percent of the list price for bestsellers, which is typically $28.  Thus it loses about $4 on each Kindle bestseller. Under the new agreement with Macmillan, it will pay 70 percent of the new list price of $13 to $15 and pocket about $4 on each sale. Forced to make a trade-off, book publishers prefer to make less on each digital book under the new iTunes economics and keep the list price higher in order to protect sales of physical books.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Amazon is actually not the winner because it just lost pricing power to the book publishers. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney explained why in a note earlier this week:

This one is counter-intuitive. Typically, people think of pricing power as the ability to raise prices. With AMZN, it’s the ability to lower prices and to compete on Price, Selection & Convenience. If Amazon is forced to do away with $9.99 pricing on all best-sellers (which typically account for 5% of book retailers’ sales), it will be less able to compete effectively with other eBook retailers.

The economics of eBooks for Amazon just changed.  It was willing to take the loss on that 5 percent of sales to win customer loyalty, bring them into the Kindle Store, and buy other titles at a profit.  It was a loss leader.  Just like Amazon loses money on free shipping or Amazon Prime, it chose to lose money on bestsellers to gains loyalty and market share.

Mahaney estimates that Amazon will sell 3.5 million Kindles this year and 100 million eBooks.  He estimates total Kindle hardware and eBook sales (assuming the $9,99 price) to come to $1.9 billion, or 5 percent of Amazon’s estimated total revenue for 2010.  If Amazon can’t hold the line on the $9.99 price, it will be harder to sell 100 million eBooks and there might also be less demand for Kindles. (The ability to buy new books at a steep discount is one of the Kindle’s main appeals). Every million Kindles Amazon doesn’t sell will result in a 1 percent reduction in Amazon’s total estimated revenue for 2010.  (Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth estimates only 3 million Kindle sales this year). Will the iPad dampen sales of the Kindle and its eBooks, and by how much?

Amazon cannot afford to lose this war.  Not so much because of the potential revenue impact this year, but because as digital books become more popular they will become a bigger part of Amazon’s business than of Apple’s.  What we are seeing is a fight over who, if anyone, will get to be the iTunes of eBooks. Amazon holds that position today, but book publishers saw how iTunes emasculated the music industry and don’t want to repeat that experience.  Perhaps nobody understands that better than Steve Jobs, which is why he is now playing a different game.

But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing.  Microsoft can throw all the money it wants at AOL on the search side, it probably won’t make a difference. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes:

On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have a long partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.

So he is not ruling out Bing entirely, but if you read between the lines it is clear that he values Google almost as much as a distribution partner as he does as a search partner. Add in the fact that he still seems to be on good terms with his former boss Eric Schmidt, and it is clear that he is leaning heavily towards sticking with Google.

Oh, by the way, this also means that he’s fine with Google being a huge news aggregator, because those links are extremely valuable and he understands that better than the CEOs of most other media companies. Google’s unique position as a source of traffic to Websites is one of its great strengths in any negotiation involving another Web company. I’ve heard this before from other Web CEOs who let Google get away with a better deal than they would otherwise because they fear reprisals in the form of lower search traffic. Google, of course, needs to keep up appearances that it delivers the best search results no matter what, but there are other ways Google can help juice a site’s traffic.

Update: As I was writing this post, Tim Armstrong called me. He emphasized that “Overall, we do feel distribution is important, we also like revenue. We will balance those things.” It all “comes down to what the actual distribution deal is.” In other words, he is still negotiating.

But he did shed some light on how a distribution deal could work. “You can’t really affect the index in partnership deals,” he explains, but there are lots of other things AOL and Google coudl do. On AOL’s end, it could change the way pages are set up and how much advertising is on each page to make them appear in results better. On Google’s end, there are opportunities to get more traffic “through Oneboxes and other types of integration like on the News property.” (The Onebox is Google’s unified results at the top of organic search which pulls from different sources). Another possibility is to include search advertising inventory into the deal. So Armstrong is definitely thinking creatively about how to get the most out of his next search deal.

A source briefed on the matter tells us Facebook is working on a feature that will allow users who access the network from mobile devices to "check-in" and broadcast their current location to all their friends.

Huge local business reviews site Yelp rolled out a similar "check-in" feature earlier this month.

Allowing users to "check-in" is Foursquare's primary function.

Facebook, with its huge scale and wealth of engineering talent, could squash Foursquare. Mainly, that's because like with Foursquare -- and unlike with Yelp or Twitter -- Facebook friends are your real friends.  They are the kind of people you want to see that you've checked-in at a bar, and then meet you there.

We'd caution that this is a single source and that plans can always change. At a place like Facebook, lots of things are always being hacked together, but no one is ever quite sure what will make it as a full release product.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- a Bill Gates acolyte -- has shown plenty of willingness to use great ideas first conceived of elsewhere. Just ask Twitter.

Reached, a Facebook spokesperson refused to comment.

For his part, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told us he fully expects Facebook and others to launch "check-in" functionality, making it "commodity by the end of the year."

Dennis says Foursquare's survival depends on providing "the most incentive for a user to check-in." Right now, Foursquare awards frequent users badges and calls the users who check-in at certain venues the most "mayor."

"I think we're doing this better than anyone else and I think we'll continue to do so. We have so much stuff on the whiteboard that we haven't even touched yet... we're really just getting started."

Here's who Dennis and company are going against:

Yelp

• Advantages: Scale, brand, ardent community, large app install base. More money from investors like Elevation Partners.
• Disadvantages: Not your real friends. It's a site for writers.  No Foursquare-like gaming element.

Gowalla

• Advantages: Closer to mainstream than Foursquare. Has more money than Foursquare, from sexy investors like Greylock. Not based in New York so it's closer to "real" America.
• Disadvantages: Not based in New York, which is the perfect city for this kind of software.

Facebook

• Advantages: Huge scale. Has tons of engineering talent. Like with Foursquare, Facebook friends are your real friends -- the kind of people you want to join you when you go out.
• Disadvantages: Unlike Foursquare, Facebook can afford to fail. 

Potential rivals also include Twitter and CitySearch.