Announcing Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto & Europe
September 29, 2011 – 8:27 am | 349 Comments

In early September, we got the unfortunate news that the San Francisco Port Authority was closing Pier 38 (home to Dogpatch Labs San Francisco).

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Articles tagged with: Zynga

Word With Friends User Onboarding
August 28, 2011 – 2:14 pm | 2 Comments
Word With Friends User Onboarding

I’ve written about the importance of using user-segmentation to deliver unique user / site experiences and email marketing. Here’s a brilliant example of Zynga’s Word With Friends (the mega-popular Facebook & mobile Scrabble game).
Obviously …

Starbucks Cards: Game Mechanics Done Well
January 21, 2011 – 10:34 am | 236 Comments
Starbucks Cards: Game Mechanics Done Well

Last week I wrote about the “do’s and don’ts of gamification“… in other words, how to effectively add game mechanics to your site / service. Thanks to the success of leaders like Zynga and Foursquare, …

Optimizing Call to Action Buttons
August 10, 2010 – 5:22 am | 439 Comments
Optimizing Call to Action Buttons

Smashing Magazine has a terrific guide to designing “call to action buttons.” Design and optimization can increase conversions dramatically – just ask (and study!) these conversion-focused leaders:
- Social gaming: RockYou, Slide, Zynga, etc
- Flash Sales: …

Zynga’s Frontierville: 0.45 DAU / MAU (50% Better than #2 Farmville)
June 30, 2010 – 4:29 am | 641 Comments
Zynga’s Frontierville: 0.45 DAU / MAU (50% Better than #2 Farmville)

When Zynga launched Treasure Isle, I wrote about the economies of scale that enabled them to drive nearly 17,000,000 monthly active users in the game’s first 18 days… staggering figures. Zynga’s latest game, Frontierville, is …

Frontierville.com: A Strange Redirect to Facebook App
June 13, 2010 – 7:08 pm | 451 Comments
Frontierville.com: A Strange Redirect to Facebook App

Earlier this week Zynga launched their newest game Frontierville – it already has 1.3m monthly actives and 450k fans. While Frontierville’s gameplay inherits many of the best practices of its siblings, its domain behavior doesn’t. …

Game Mechanics, Badges & eBay Feedback Ratings
April 23, 2010 – 7:12 am | 244 Comments
Game Mechanics, Badges & eBay Feedback Ratings

Thanks to the success of Foursquare, Booyah / MyTown and Zynga, “game mechanics”, “badges” and “leaderboards” have become cornerstones of any web marketer’s dialect and user-acquisition strategy.
What these three companies have done so well is …

Zynga’s Treasure Isle: Economies of Scale in a Social World
April 19, 2010 – 10:38 am | 198 Comments

There are two camps in the world of social gaming:
- One side thinks that it has been won outright by Zynga
- The other side believes that we are in the early innings of a nine-inning …

Farmville Defaults to Facebook Credits
March 10, 2010 – 6:56 pm | 223 Comments
Farmville Defaults to Facebook Credits

I encourage you to read Eric Eldon’s piece on InsideFacebook about how Facebook’s most popular game, Farmville, now defaults to Facebook Credits and Payments.
As location and geo dominate the blog headlines (Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla), …

Facebook Widgets Play Video
February 26, 2010 – 6:20 pm | 550 Comments
Facebook Widgets Play Video

As seen in the below screenshots, Facebook Widgets now feature and play video in-line (although I am not entirely sure that this is a new release – it is my first exposure to it). These …

Zynga’s 6 Core Values Help Create a Culture of Success
February 13, 2010 – 3:27 pm | 250 Comments
Zynga’s 6 Core Values Help Create a Culture of Success

In a recent New York Times article, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that all employees need to “be a CEO of something.” Its a terrific mantra and speaks to the importance of ownerships, responsibility and …

Farmville + Monopoly = Settlers of Catan
January 25, 2010 – 11:28 am | 414 Comments
Farmville + Monopoly = Settlers of Catan

I am late the Settlers of Catan rage, which according to the Wall Street Journal, swept Silicon Valley in December. But I uploaded a photo of Catan to Facebook (shown below) and got a great …

MyTown Social Gaming Strategy
January 24, 2010 – 12:33 pm | 276 Comments
MyTown Social Gaming Strategy

MyTown is best described as Zynga meets Foursquare. Take the best aspects of social gaming (Zynga) and combine them with location based networking (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp) and you have MyTown: a game that awards points …