Zynga has been taking it on the chin from the SF Weekly the last few weeks. First there was a four part series about some stickers that Zynga’s ad agency put on the streets of San Francisco – lame but not exactly Third Reicht territory. But the last two days the newspaper has focused on Zynga’s penchant for stealing game ideas from other companies. FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars were all copies of other company’s games. That warranted a cover story.
The SFWeekly even gave this copying thing a name – Farmvillians. Which is kinda catchy, although it’s no Scamville if you ask me. Scamville was major league evil. Copying business ideas is just being part of Silicon Valley.
All this got me thinking about the quote “Behind every great fortune there is a crime” and the tendency of some people to go legit just as soon as they’ve won the game. Then they hope that they can wipe the slate clean and be accepted in the better parts of society.
John Seely Brown and John Hagel are two of the most respected technology and business thinkers in Silicon Valley. Seely Brown is best known as the long time Chief Scientist at Xerox Parc, while Hagel is the author of a number of influential business articles and books including Net Worth.
The great change in contemporary economic life – what Seely Brown and Hagel call the “big shift” – is between the old centralized command-and-control industrial economy and today’s democratized edge economy. Sometimes sounding more like Marxist revolutionaries than Deloitte consultants, Seely Brown and Hagel see the pull economy as fundamentally changing every aspect of 21st century life – from business to education to politics to social activity.
Google really did just change the game in search today with the introduction of Google Instant. While Google execs at today’s event emphasized how much faster it makes search, Google Instant is really about showing you more search results. And this will have very interesting implications for consumers expectations of what they want from search, search market share, and how sites try to game search through SEO tactics.
Google Instant turns search into a realtime stream of results which flow onto your screen as you type your query. With each letter you type, a whole new set of results flash by. This is important for several reasons. First and foremost, you will now see many more search results than you would have otherwise. Most people never click through to the second page of search results. If it is not in the first ten blue links (or really the first five or six), it might as well not exist for most people. With Google Instant search, instead of people seeing only ten results, they may now see 50 or 100 (depending on how many letters they type and how far they get through each search query).
It’s safe to say we’ve reached the pinnacle of humanity with this next bit of news: you’ll soon be able to update your Facebook status using OnStar. It’s the first “entertainment-y” option to be offered by OnStar, perhaps designed to cash in on some of the goodwill that has gone Ford’s way with its Sync system.
Tom Kershaw, senior VP and GM of Interconnections Solutions at Telcordia, shares his perspective on Handset Apps, Standardization and Privacy Issues in mobile technology.
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Zynga has been taking it on the chin from the SF Weekly the last few weeks. First there was a four part series about some stickers that Zynga’s ad agency put on the streets of San Francisco – lame but not exactly Third Reicht territory. But the last two days the newspaper has focused on Zynga’s penchant for stealing game ideas from other companies. FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars were all copies of other company’s games. That warranted a cover story.
John Seely Brown and John Hagel are two of the most respected technology and business thinkers in Silicon Valley. Seely Brown is best known as the long time Chief Scientist at Xerox Parc, while Hagel is the author of a number of influential business articles and books including Net Worth.
It’s safe to say we’ve reached the pinnacle of humanity with this next bit of news: you’ll soon be able to update your Facebook status using OnStar. It’s the first “entertainment-y” option to be offered by OnStar, perhaps designed to cash in on some of the goodwill that has gone Ford’s way with its Sync system.
