Zyngachief executive Mark Pincus said that the social game company has hit more than 15 million daily active users for its mobile games, compared to 10 million during the fall.

He made the announcement during the company’s first conference call with analysts after the company’s first quarterly financial release as public company.

Driven by the strength of games like Words With Friends, the mobile game growth will help supplement Zynga’s player base of 240 million monthly active users on Facebook. Mobile is a big strategic opportunity for Zynga, as the market for games on mobile could be much bigger in the long run.

“The world is embracing play,” Pincus said in the call. “Social gaming and more broadly play is becoming the new TV.”

John Schappert, chief operating officer at San Francisco-based Zynga, said that Zynga’s core strengths are its tech infrastructure, its detailed analytics, and its huge user base.

He said that 80 percent of the company’s daily active users were on Zynga’s own proprietary zCloud, or its Zynga-owned data centers, at the end of the year, compared to just 20 percent a year ago. More traffic will be transferred to the zCloud this year, which means Zynga will not use Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services data centers as much as it has in the past. The zCloud cuts costs and makes games run reliably and fast.

Zynga’s strategy going forward is to launch new games, enhancing existing games, expanding into mobile, improving monetization, and expanding internationally.

Scramble With Friends was released in January and it became a top-five brand in the Apple App Store. Daily, monthly and monthly unique user numbers all showed growth in the fourth quarter, Schappert said.

CastleVille exceeded expectations when it launched in the fourth quarter, but Mafia Wars 2 was a disappointment. Early results from Hidden Chronicles, launched last week, are positive.

“The team has gotten a lot better at driving new-player conversion with packages and offers,” Pincus said. Dave Wehner, chief financial officer, said that the number mobile payers is growing as well.

Reach, engagement and monetization are the key measures of Zynga’s performance. Monthly Unique Users (MUUs) measure reach and they grew 38 percent to 153 million users. Many of those play multiple games, so the monthly active users is 240 million. FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Poker accounted for 78 percent of revenues. The number of paying users in 2011 was 12.2 million, or about 5 percent of all players. Player conversion in the fourth quarter was 1.9 percent, up from 1.7 percent in the third quarter.

Zynga’s games are available as free-to-play titles. Users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. A small number of users actually pay, but they buy enough virtual goods to make the entire game profitable, and Zynga is increasingly monetizing the users who don’t pay via advertising. Most of Zynga’s revenue is from virtual goods purchases, but advertising revenue tripled in the quarter. Both mobile and Facebook ad revenue grew, Wehner said. International revenue grew faster in the quarter than domestic revenue.

The company has games in 17 languages now, compared to five a year ago. Head count was 2,846 up about 92 percent from a year ago and 2 percent from the prior quarter. Zynga is still investing heavily in research and development.

Capital expenses were down in the quarter, but the company still spent money as it built out its privately cloud, zCloud. Zynga has a line of credit that allows it to borrow up to $1 billion. Despite the cheery nature of the talk on the call, Zynga’s stock price continued to fall in after-hours trading, with the stock at $13.42 a share, down 6.5 percent from the close. But Zynga’s stock price on Tuesday’s regular session rose 6.95 percent.

Schappert said that Zynga is still working on Project Z, which is in closed beta testing. The site is Zynga’s own social network where it will host its own games on a destination platform. It connects with friends on Facebook. Schappert said he hoped that Project Z could launch soon. Zynga spent $110 million on research in development in the quarter, up 139 percent. Most of that went into game development.

“The results were in line, guidance was actually very good, but the comment about it being back-end loaded caused the stock to pull back a bit,” said Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities. “I am a little disappointed that they didn’t guide to Q1, so there will probably be continued volatility for a while.”

Wehner said on the call that the back-end-loaded 2012 is a consequence of the pipeline of games and the usual pattern of bookings during the first half of the year. Wehner said that Words With Friends is an ad-driven game with very little virtual goods purchases associated with it.

Atul Bagga, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said the quarter seemed “pretty strong” with revenue, earnings per share coming in above expectations. User numbers and other metrics were also up in the quarter, so he continues to believe Zynga has a large opportunity just by growing monetization, mobile users, international revenue, and expanding on to new platforms.

Schappert said, “We have a bunch of games in the hopper right now and we will release them when they are done and when they are great.”

Source: V.B

Shape, the company behind online instant messenger service IM+, announced Monday it has raised $10 million from Russian brokerage firm Finam.

IM+ is an online instant messenger and mobile app that connects with multiple instant messaging services including Aol instant messenger, Jabber, Skype, Google Chat, and Facebook Chat. You can send instant messages from multiple accounts in one interface and save your chat history. The service has more than 17 million monthly users.

Shape also recently released a new instant messaging app called Beep (pictured above) to compliment IM+. The app sends push notifications to your phone when you receive an instant message. The company hopes the app will take the place of traditional text messages. There are similar products on the market, including web-based IM aggregator imo.im.

“With the new release of Beep in-app push messenger [it will] allow people to save on SMS and MMS while simultaneously chatting on Facebook, Skype, Google Talk and tweet,” said IM+ founder Igor Berezovsky in a statement.

The funding kicks off a partnership between Finam and Shape, which are teaming up to create an instant messenger service for the Russian market.

Shape was founded in 2002 and has grown to include more than 60 employees. The company has headquarters in Germany and also maintains offices in the U.S. and Asia.

Source: V.B

Wednesday, March 7 is the date covetous Apple fans can finally catch their first real glimpse at the much-ballyhooed iPad 3, according to a new report.

Citing reliable sources, iMore editor-in-chief Rene Ritchie declared that we can expect Apple to unveil its newest tablet on the first Wednesday in March. The day aligns with past Apple media events, and the date matches the early March timing AllThingsD reported last week.

“Along with the 2048×1536 Retina display, the iPad 3 will feature a quad-core Apple 6 system-on-a-chip, and possibly 4G LTE networking,” Ritchie said.

We’ve suspected for some time that the iPad 3, should it be called that, will feature a faster processor, faster graphics, and a retina display.

Perhaps more interesting is that Apple will once again (coincidentally?) reveal its latest touch-based machination just days ahead of South-By-Southwest Interactive, the annual Austin gathering of industry insiders and wannabes.

Last year, the beloved device maker lifted the veil on the iPad 2 a week prior to the geeky affair and started selling the device during the show. News and online buzz surrounding the remake of Apple’s category-defining device easily eclipsed that of the conference, and out-shined launching startups, keynote addresses, lavish parties, and so forth. One year later, Apple could easily do the same — should it choose to release the iPad 3 during SXSW Interactive again. The launch date, however, is still unknown.

But now that the big reveal is less than one month away, maybe we can all happily sit back and wait for Apple to show off the new device instead of continuing to speculate about features. Fat chance. The run-up to the long-awaited event is sure to make for intensified gossip and maybe, if we’re really lucky, a few early leaks.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source: V.B

The late Steve Jobs was honored with a Grammy Trustees Award on Saturday for his contributions to the music industry, which included helping to develop the iPod and reshaping the way music is sold with the iTunes Store.

The award is meant to “recognize contributions to the music industry in areas other than performance,” CBS News reports, and was accepted by Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue.

“Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him,” Cue said at the awards ceremony. “He told us that music shaped his life. It made him who he was. Everyone who knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and the Beatles had on him.”

Apple was previously awarded a technical Grammy in 2002, but this award is meant specifically for Jobs. Other recipients of this year’s Trustees Awards include band leader Dave Bartholomew and jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Past winners include Walt Disney and The Beatles, company that we’re sure Jobs wouldn’t mind standing alongside.

Source: Venture Beat

Apple and Samsung together hoovered up more than 95 percent of mobile phone profits last quarter, leaving little left for other players, says Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley.

Actually, there wasn’t a whole lot left for Samsung, either, once Apple was done with things.With strong demand for the iPhone 4S, Apple alone took home around 80 percent of all mobile phone profits in the fourth quarter, up from just 56 percent in the third quarter, according to the analyst. Yet the company holds just 8.1 percent of the global mobile phone market.

At the same time, Samsung’s share of industry profits shrank to 15 percent from 26 percent, but its share of Android customers jumped to 39 percent from 35 percent.

For the quarter, Apple sold 37 million iPhones, helping it ring up overall earnings of $13 billion. Samsung didn’t reveal how many smartphones it sold, but one analyst pegged the number as high as 35 million.

Apple and Samsung spent the better part of 2011 battling each other for the top crown. Combined, the two have managed to make life hard for the rest of the industry.HTC managed to squeeze out 3 percent of all mobile phone earnings last quarter. Nokia and RIM followed, each with 2 percent of the profit pie. Motorola and LG both ended the quarter flat, while Sony Ericsson showed a 2 percent loss.

While Apple and Samsung are both in strong positions as they carve up a larger slice of profits, most of the other companies are facing their own struggles.

Nokia is in the midst of a transition to Microsoft’s Windows Phone from its once-strong Symbian OS. But the company has admitted that 2012 is likely to be a difficult year as it moves forward with that transition.

RIM has been hit by increasingly lower sales and a looser grip on the enterprise market. The company is also coping with a management shakeup with new CEO Thorsten Heins being counted on to help turn things around.Even Motorola is waiting to see if its takeover by Google receives regulatory approval.

As a result, Walkley doesn’t expect much to change for the less dominant players this year:

Source: Cnet