Alec Baldwin's alleged air rage boosts Words With Friends

What happens when a celebrity such as Alec Baldwin gets kicked off an American Airlines flight for refusing to stop playing the Scrabble-like game Words With Friends -- even after flight attendants have asked passengers to turn off all electronic equipment?

A flood of people rush to play the game on Facebook, and Zynga, the company that makes the popular word game, releases an image of a Words With Friends board that reads "Let Alec Play."

A spokeswoman for AppData, a company that measures app use on Facebook, said Words With Friends has increased its daily active user count by 100,000 since Tuesday morning, from 5.4 million players to 5.5 million players.

As for how Zynga is responding to the deluge of publicity, a spokeswoman for the company said it had no comment. However, if you go to Zynga's Facebook page, you'll find that company officials are clearly delighted.

This is Zynga's latest update:

"Word of the day: ALEC (adj.) Typically associated with "smart" as its prefix to refer to wise guy, or smarty. Worth at least 8 points! this one goes to the smart ALECs out there -- playing our game at the risk of getting in trouble!"

Everyone is laughing it seems, except American Airlines.

The airline company, which tried, and failed to get in touch with Baldwin via Twitter on Tuesday, released the following statement on its Facebook page:

"Since an extremely vocal customer has publicly identified himself as being removed from an American Airlines flight on Tuesday, Dec. 6, we have elected to provide the actual facts of the matter as well as the FAA regulations which American, and all airlines, must enforce."

The statement goes on to explain that "the passenger" declined to turn off his cellphone when asked to do so by a flight attendant at the appropriate time, and ultimately stood up -- with the seat belt light still on for departure -- and took his phone into the plane's lavatory. He then proceeded to slam the lavatory door so hard that the cockpit crew was able to hear it -- even though the door to the flight deck was closed and locked.

According to the airline, "the passenger was extremely rude to the crew, calling them inappropriate names and using offensive language."

American Airlines concludes that its employees had no choice but to remove him from the flight.

Of course, the world at large might never have realized that Baldwin's tantrum was inspired by having his Words With Friends game interrupted if he hadn't named the game in a Twitter post he wrote about the incident.

"Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving. #nowonderamericaairisbankrupt.”,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Baldwin's Twitter account has since been deactivated.

It was also a publicity bonanza for Zynga that Baldwin's spokesman, Matthew Hilitzik, released a statement explaining that his client "loves 'Words with Friends' so much that he was willing to leave a plane for it."

Zynga seized on the incident, launching a viral campaign, "Let Alec Play," which made the rounds across social networks minutes following Baldwin's tweets.

The move raised eyebrows in Hollywood, where even grizzled seen-it-all entertainment publicists were impressed.

"That was the most brilliant PR move I've seen this year," said John Vlautin, who runs SpinLab in Los Angeles.

ALSO:

SETI telescopes get new life listening for signs of alien life

Wife of Rovio chief dons Angry Birds gown at Finnish Palace

Alec Baldwin "extremely rude," called crew names, airline says

-- Deborah Netburn

Left photo: A Zynga statement on the Alec Baldwin matter: a Words With Friends board spelling out "Let Alec Play." Credit: Zynga

Right photo: Alec Baldwin in "The Aviator." Credit: Andrew Cooper / Miramax Films

LinkedIn third-quarter loss disappoints investors

LinkedIn recorded its first quarterly loss since the online professional network's initial public offering in May.

The loss wasn't as steep as some analysts had predicted, but the stock fell as much as 8% in after-hours trading. It came as the company increased spending on research and development to attract more users around the globe.

LinkedIn lost $1.6 million, or 2 cents a share. It had earnings of $4 million, or 2 cents, in the third quarter of 2010. If not for certain items, LinkedIn said it would have earned 6 cents a share. Revenue more than doubled from last year to $139.5 million, more than the $128 million analysts had forecast.

Total operating costs more than doubled to $134.9 million as LinkedIn opened an office in Tokyo and bought IndexTank to improve search on its site.

This is an especially important quarter for LinkedIn because employees and other insiders can begin selling their shares starting Nov. 21. Investors may be nervous that the end of the lockup will usher in a tidal wave of sales that could cause the stock to drop.

LinkedIn made its hotly anticipated public trading debut before the economic turbulence that has delayed the IPOs of other Silicon Valley companies such as social gaming company Zynga. As such, it's a bellwether for the sector. Groupon, the daily deals company, is set to price one of the year's most closely watched IPOs on Thursday.

LinkedIn maintained its pace of adding about two new members a second, finishing the quarter with 131.2 million members. It continues to trade at about twice the $45 price it fetched at its IPO. It also hosted a town hall meeting on jobs with President Obama last month.

LinkedIn said Thursday that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC to sell more stock. The company said it planned to use the proceeds for "working capital and general corporate purposes." 

RELATED:

LinkedIn earnings beat expectations

LinkedIn preparing for an IPO

Business card? He has your profile

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, center, and CEO Jeff Weiner, right, applaud after the opening bell at the Big Board as the company goes public. Credit: Mike Segar / Reuters

Google+ social network gets games in bid to rival Facebook

Google is looking to become a player in games in a bid to rival the popularity of Facebook.

The Internet search giant is rolling out games on its new social network Google+.

Games are one of the most popular features on Facebook. An investor in San Francisco social gaming company Zynga, Google aims to keep Facebook from dominating the lucrative market for social games, which has become a major revenue stream for the world's most popular social network with more than 750 million users.

Google+ will initially offer 16 games including the popular Angry Birds and Bejeweled Blitz. It said it’s looking to make more games available shortly.

Google is getting a quick jump on games after launching Google+ in late June. It has already signed up millions of users even though the service is still being tested and is invitation only.

Google+ is a direct challenge to Facebook ,which has been siphoning eyeballs and advertising dollars from Google as people spend more time on social networks.

In an interesting twist in the heated competition between the two tech giants, Facebook sent out a note to reporters right before the Google announcement that it was holding an event for game developers Thursday night, and that reporters were invited to try out new gaming products and speak with the developers at an event at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto on Friday.

Zynga, the social gaming company which has filed to sell shares to the public, built its business on Facebook. Now its titles will also be available on Google+, although only Zynga Poker to start, not FarmVille or CityVille.

Note: If you want to play games on Google+, you will have to grant the games access to information from your Google account.

For a few giggles about Google+, check out this video.

RELATED:

Zynga files long-awaited IPO plan

Google plans social games platform to compete with Facebook

Zynga's IPO filing gives glimpse into viciously competitive realm of social games

-- Jessica Guynn

Image: A screenshot of games in Google+. Credit: Google

Trouble for tech in market sell-off

The double-whammy of the S&P downgrade of U.S. government debt and double-dip recession fears is turning into a real downer for tech stocks.

The Nasdaq fell nearly 7% on Monday, even peeling some of the glow from Wall Street darling Apple.

But few tech companies have been as hit as hard as LinkedIn in the market sell-off. The first major U.S. social networking company to go public beat analysts' estimates for second-quarter earnings last week. But the stock fell more than 17% in trading Monday.

LinkedIn was not alone. Other tech companies that recently went public also fell. Does that mean the initial public offering window for tech companies could slam shut again as investors look for safer bets?

"I don't think anyone has a good answer on that yet, it's too raw and too new,” Deutsche Bank communications technology analyst Jonathan Goldberg told VentureBeat. "In general, market conditions are going to make it hard for any IPO to come out."

That could spell trouble for social gaming company Zynga and daily deals website Groupon, both of which have filed to go public. It could also postpone IPOs from other prominent players such as Yelp.

That, in turn, could have a chilling effect on the tech boom in Silicon Valley that has seen investors throw billions at start-ups.

Could another global meltdown trigger a repeat of Sequoia Capital's 2008 "RIP Good Times" presentation? That's when the venture capital firm invited about 100 executives from its portfolio companies to give them a sobering overview of what the economic crisis meant for Silicon Valley and their start-up dreams.

RELATED:

What recession? It's boom time again in Silicon Valley

LinkedIn earnings beat expectations

Web 2.0: Rest in peace

-- Jessica Guynn

Image credit: Sequoia Capital

 

Technology bubble? 'We don't think there is,' says Marc Andreessen

Don't tell Marc Andreessen there's a bubble in Silicon Valley.

"We don't think there is," Andreessen said during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital Conference on Wednesday night.

Andreessen, 39, who helped invent the Netscape browser and now runs venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with his partner Ben Horowitz, reasons that bubbles tend to be a psychological phenomenon. He says all the angst about a bubble is reassuring and that he only gets frightened when other people get euphoric.

"If a very large number of people think there's a bubble, that makes us think there isn't  a bubble because a key characteristic of a bubble is that everyone thinks there is a bubble," he said.

Andreessen also analyzed the price-to-equity ratios of large technology companies, including Apple, Google, Cisco and Microsoft, which are trading at single-digit ratios, which he said suggests that the public markets are still scarred from the technology collapse a decade ago and are significantly undervaluing them.

"What that tells me is that the public market hates technology," he said.

So what then of LinkedIn's hot initial public offering?

Andreessen, who's an angel investor in LinkedIn and a huge proponent of its business, had a number of explanations: It had a thin float. Investors are hungry for a growth story. LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman is the best innovator in the industry. And even if you wanted to short the stock, you couldn't because you can't find shares to borrow.

Besides, he said, "it's only one company," which if it created a bubble would make it the "first time in equity history we have a bubble that's affecting one stock."

But there are quite a few high-profile Internet companies –- namely Zynga –- that are lining up to make their own stock market debut. Their valuations have soared in private funding rounds and in trading on secondary markets. Aren't those companies trading at unreasonable multiples?

Andreessen, who has raised $1.3 billion for his venture capital firm to invest in promising young start-ups, says it's hard to draw any conclusions about what's going on in the secondary markets where demand greatly outweighs supply and many institutions as well as individuals can't invest. Besides, he said, LinkedIn fetched four times its price on the secondary markets when it went public.

He saved his favorite bubble argument for last: "Take all of the later-stage companies, all of their theoretical valuations, add them all up and collectively the whole universe is still worth less than Google."

Then he made a statement that seemed, if not bubbly, a bit fizzy. Chalking up the failure of start-ups to bad timing, he said: "Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed."

Related:

Business card? He has your profile

LinkedIn's share prices more than doubles in IPO

Lise Buyer, banker who guided Google IPO, talks about LinkedIn IPO

-- Jessica Guynn

Photos: Marc Andreessen Photo credit: Asa Mathat / All Things D

 

Lady Gaga to put her style, music into Zynga's FarmVille game with GagaVille

Lady Gaga and Zynga are looking to bring some monsters to the world of FarmVille.

On May 17, the Facebook game FarmVille will add a new playable world called GagaVille that will allow players to listen to new songs from Gaga's album "Born This Way," which debuts May 23.

More than 12 million people play FarmVille each day, making it Facebook's most popular game. The deal may attract Gaga's fanbase, which she calls her "little monsters."

Alex Pham has more details on the Gaga game on our sister blog Company Town.

From Pham's report:

The deal calls for Zynga to create GagaVille, a virtual version of "The Simple Life," a reality show that once featured socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on a dairy farm.

Unlike Hilton and Richie, however, Gaga will not have to get her nails dirty. The GagaVille farm, which players of FarmVille will be able to visit starting May 17, will be run by Zynga's developers.

The San Francisco company, whose social games are played by about 250 million people a day, promised that GagaVille will be decked out in the quirky singer's signature regalia. "Think crystals, unicorns and sheep on motorcycles," Zynga said in a press release Tuesday.

Fans also will be able to stream songs from "Born This Way," set to debut May 23, after they complete certain tasks in the game. In addition, those who buy a $25 gift card at Best Buy stores to play Zynga's games will be able to download the album for free.

The team-up between Gaga and Zynga isn't the first. In March, after a historic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, Gaga donated $1.5 million to Zynga's Japanese relief efforts, which totaled more than $3 million.

Zynga has used its games to promote other musicians, including Dr. Dre, as well as movies such as "Rango" and "The Green Hornet," Pham reported. For the rest of Pham's report, read her Company Town post, Zynga to launch virtual farm with Lady Gaga.

REALTED:

Google music launches without label deals

Lady Gaga visits Google, takes questions on YouTube and Twitter

Lady Gaga shows off her new Polaroid printer, camera and glasses as CES 2011

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Lady Gaga poses at a May 6 news conference in Mexico City to promote her new album, "Born This Way." Credit: Henry Romero / Reuters

T. Rowe Price invests in Facebook

T. Rowe Price invested $190.5 million in social-networking phenom Facebook during the first quarter, according to filings made public on financial firm's website.

T. Rowe Price made the investment through 19 mutual funds at $25 a share.

The figure made public in the filings does not include investments made by other T. Rowe Price vehicles, such as separate accounts, spokeswoman Heather McDonold said. She declined to comment further on the investment.

Facebook said in January that it raised $1.5 billion from investors led by investment bank Goldman Sachs, which made the Palo Alto-based firm worth $50 billion at the time. Since then, its shares have been hotly traded on secondary markets. Facebook is now valued at $55.2 billion on SharesPost.

Five T. Rowe Price mutual funds also bought preferred stock in San Francisco social games maker Zynga at $28.06 a share.

Three funds bought $22.2 million of preferred shares in online business review website Angie's List.

T. Rowe Price took a stake in information-sharing network Twitter in 2009 and in Groupon late last year.

T. Rowe Price had $482 billion in assets under management as of the end of 2010. It, like many mutual fund companies, is looking to get a piece of the action in social media. The investments carry additional risks because these companies are not yet publicly traded, yet investors are driving up their valuations.

The latest investment in Facebook comes as the world's most popular social-networking site siphons users and advertising dollars from other Internet giants.

Facebook surpassed Google last year to become the most visited website in the U.S., according to Experian Hitwise, an Internet-tracking company in New York.

In February, more than a third of all online-display ads in the U.S. appeared on Facebook, more than three times as many as its closest competitor, Yahoo, according to research firm ComScore Inc.

RELATED:

Plaintiff says he had a 2003 partnership with Facebook's Zuckerberg

Court upholds Winklevoss twins' Facebook deal from 2008

Facebook's cash infusion whets appetites of investors

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, speaks during a news conference at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto on April 7, 2011.Credit: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg

Zynga adds Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation CEO, to board

Zynga, the maker of the Facebook games CityVille, FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has added Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG's chief executive, to its board of directors.

The San Francisco company's board already includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as well as Bing Gordon, a former executive at video game giant Electronic Arts who now works for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which owns private shares of Zynga.

As Alex Pham reported on our sister blog Company Town this morning, the addition of Katzenberg comes at a high point for the social gaming company:

Katzenberg's move comes amid a a period of wild speculation over the value of Zynga, whose games boasts tens of millions of players each day. Zynga's latest funding round, which raised about half a billion dollars last month, puts its valuation at close to $10 billion, roughly 10 to 20 times the company's estimated annual revenue.

It has been widely reported that Zynga is preparing for an initial public offering next year.

The company's titles, including Cityville, Farmville, Frontierville and Texas Hold'em Poker, currently occupy four of the top 10 applications on Facebook. About 20 million people play Cityville each day, making it the No. 1 app on the social network.

Mark Pincus, Zynga's CEO and founder, announced the addition this morning in a blog post.

"Jeffrey and I have been friends for some time, and I knew he'd be a great fit for the board after he suggested that the blockbuster of 2011 could be ShrekVille," he said. "I see a lot of similarities between DreamWorks Animation and Zynga, far beyond our love of animals."

DreamWorks is a "revolutionary technology company" with a recognized brand, Pincus said.

"It's easy to see the value that Jeffrey will add to Zynga as we grow and look for more ways to delight our players," he said. "In fact, he's immediately sprung into action with his first assignment: finding our seventh board member. I hear that both Jack Black and Mike Myers are incredibly interested."

Pincus said the company was thrilled to have Katzenberg on board.

"I'm looking forward to his guidance, his leadership, and about 1,500 tickets to the opening night of Kung Fu Panda 2," he said.

RELATED:

Zynga buys Newtoy in play for mobile

CityVille passes FarmVille as most played game on Facebook

Tech industry on hiring binge; Google, Facebook and Zynga lead the pack

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg attends a digital filmmakers forum Wednesday during CinemaCon in Las Vegas. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

High-tech industry on hiring binge in California; Google, Facebook and Zynga lead the pack

It's the Silicon Valley hiring boom being felt all over California.

California added nearly 100,000 new jobs in February, and the state's unemployment rate dropped by two-tenths of a percentage point, to 12.2% from 12.4% in January, in part led by a hiring surge in high tech, the California Economic Development Department reported Friday.

Top technology companies are competing fiercely for engineers, designers, computer scientists, data crunchers and other workers with specialized technical skills. But the hiring frenzy has also begun to reach workers with other kinds of skills.

Take Josh Persky, 28, who was working for Fox Sports Radio in Los Angeles when he was laid off on his 26^th birthday. He subsisted on unemployment benefits, then odd jobs, for two years before landing a job in January as an office manager with Causes, a San Francisco start-up that helps people donate money to their favorite charities on Facebook and the Web.

Switching cities and industries changed his life, Persky said. "Every company in the technology industry is growing. Causes employs 24 people and plans to be over 35 people by the end of the year. Every engineer has three offers on the table," he said. "Working in technology is the kind of job you think you are going to have when you are 14 and you have never had a job before."

Silicon Valley is looking like an economic Shangri-La as companies here hire aggressively and court prospective recruits with free food, lots of perks and loads of cash. Competition for talent is especially fierce among Internet and social media companies.

Internet search giant Google gave all of its 24,000 employees a 10% raise this year. And it announced in January that 2011 would be its biggest hiring year ever. Google does not disclose specific hiring numbers, but its previous biggest hiring year was 2007, when it added nearly 6,200 people around the globe.

After Google announced the plans to increase its workforce 25% to more than 30,000, it received a flood of job applications, including more than 75,000 in one week. Google would only say that "a significant percentage" of its employees work in California, but a person familiar with the breakdown said more than a third of Google employees work in the state. YouTube, Google's video-sharing website, also said it would increase hiring more than 30%.

Google faces particularly stiff competition from Silicon Valley rivals such as Facebook, which is also sparing no effort or expense in recruiting engineers and other workers.

"Facebook will be hiring throughout 2011 for all parts of the company," a spokesman said in an email. 

Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, 1,400 of whom are in Palo Alto, and it's growing at a rate of about 50% a year. Last year it opened an engineering office in Seattle and a sales and operations office in Austin, Texas. This summer it's moving from Palo Alto to a 57-acre Menlo Park, Calif., campus that has already been permitted for 3,600 employees, the target growth for Facebook in 2011, a person familiar with the company's hiring plans said.

Popular social gaming company Zynga, which has more than 1,500 employees, expects to double that number in the next year. The San Francisco company is on a hiring streak: Zynga has hired 224 people in California so far this year, and it hired 563 last year.

San Francisco's Twitter, which is valued by investors at billions of dollars, has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013. A year ago, it had just 140 employees.

Bindu Reddy, chief executive of social media advertising start-up MyLikes, hails from Google and has a vast network of contacts in Silicon Valley. Still, she spends more than 70% of her time trying to recruit engineers. Reddy hired nine people for the 12-person team at MyLikes in the last five months, a process she called "intensely crazy." Going up against teams of recruiters at Facebook, Twitter, Google and Zynga, as well as start-ups loaded with cash, she has had to offer 15% over other offers to land recruits.

MyLikes opened a small office in Los Angeles to hire engineers because competition isn't quite as intense in L.A. as it is in Silicon Valley. Reddy landed a couple of former colleagues from Google, which  is expanding its own footprint by leasing more than 100,000 square feet of office space in three buildings in Venice.

Dice.com said it continues to see strong gains in the number of technology job postings in Silicon Valley. There were more than 5,000 open positions on Dice.com starting in March, up 41% year over year. 

In addition to long hunts to fill key positions and sharply increasing salaries, Silicon Valley companies are wrestling with retention as competitors make lucrative offers to try to pick off their key employees. In January, Google successfully beat back an effort by Twitter to hire one of its product development vice presidents, Sundar Pichai. Google also recently gave a top engineer a $5-million bonus package to keep him from defecting.

RELATED:

War heats up for top Silicon Valley talent

Tech firms try to outperk one another

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Zynga employee Lacey Salet brings her dog to company headquarters in San Francisco. Credit: Robert Durell / For The Times. 

Photo: Amitt Mahajan munches on free lunch at Zynga, which offers all kinds of perks to its employees. Credit: Robert Durell / For The Times.

Andreessen Horowitz invests $80 million in Twitter, whose private stock is hotter than ever

Andreessen Horowitz may be a relatively young venture capital firm but it's already a trendsetter.

That's why it caught Silicon Valley's attention Wednesday when it invested $80 million in Twitter. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen's firm got the stake in the microblogging company by buying stock on secondary markets. It did not participate in Twitter's recent $200-million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which valued Twitter at $3.7 billion.

Twitter is one of an elite bunch of fast-growing Internet services including Facebook and Zynga that have gained mass appeal. With investors bidding up those privately held companies, already rich valuations have only been getting richer.

Twitter has earned even greater cachet as Facebook and Google have each looked at buying the San Francisco company. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has said he is not interested in selling Twitter and is focused on building its advertising business.

But the valuations discussed are eye-popping: between $8 billion and $10 billion, even as Twitter still works on turning its more than 200 million registered users into a large, profitable independent business, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A lot of hot air? Expect the talk of a technology bubble to soar just as high as these valuations.

RELATED:

Twitter tries to turn 140 characters into money

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is determined to get the last laugh

-- Jessica Guynn

Illustration: Jon Krause