Zynga announced on Wednesday it had acquired Spooky Cool Labs, a Chicago, Ill.-based gaming studio focused heavily on real-money gaming titles.

“We have a legacy in social casino franchises with Zynga Poker, and we believe that free-to-play social casino games for the Web and on mobile have the potential to reach and connect a much broader audience,” Zynga’s chief revenue officer Barry Cottle said in a company blog post.

“Spooky Cool Labs is the right team to help us bring the feeling of being on a casino floor and the thrill of hitting a big jackpot right to players wherever they play,” he said.

Terms of the deal, which was first noted by TechCrunch, weren’t disclosed.

As Zynga has signalled for some time, real-money titles are a big bet for the company’s future. It recently launched two of its first real-money games in the United Kingdom, ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino. This was the fruit of Zynga’s partnership with bWin, a major operator that has licenses to operate online real-money gaming websites in multiple countries across Europe.

But real-money gaming is still nascent for Zynga, especially due to restrictions on online gambling in the United States, one of Zynga’s key markets. The company has said it hopes to eventually release real-money games in the U.S., but necessary legislation and lobbying efforts could take at least a year or more before Zynga sees any progress.

The acquisition also comes on the heels of a large round of layoffs — approximately 18 percent of Zynga’s workforce — in an effort to reduce costs and restructure the business toward mobile.

Spooky Cool Labs will stay based in Chicago, and founder Joe Kamikow will also continue leading game design for Aristocrat Leisure Limited, a major slot machine company based in Australia.

As it seeks to play catch-up in e-commerce, Walmart Stores Inc. has concluded it doesn’t want to simply clone Amazon’s model since it also has to worry about supplying its stores.

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As an alternative to both the pushy salespeople at the lots and the overwhelming, inconsistent inventory on the Web, a startup called Tred has what might be a better idea: Home test-drives.

For $19 per car, Tred employees come directly to shoppers’ homes, bearing product information and market research rather than sleazy negotiating tactics. Customers do have to go to a dealer to eventually purchase the car of their choice.

Tred employees aren’t salespeople, and they don’t work on commission (apparently, the company tried that in an earlier version that didn’t work as well). Tred is paid an unspecified fee by the dealers.

Right now, Tred is only available in the Seattle area — in fact, it only has four of these car delivery people, total. The company is in talks to expand via affiliate deals with dealers, said Tred CEO Grant Feek.

In testing, Feek said the company is seeing conversion rates of 40 percent. “What got me was this is a conversion-based business,” said Tred investor Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, who said he first heard about the startup through an email from the investing site AngelList. “You can watch data move all the way through the system.”

While a car is indeed a big purchase, and Tred isn’t necessarily aiming to be a more expensive option, “The last couple innovators in our domain have been 100 percent focused on price,” Feek noted. “We really believe that there’s more to this process than price.”

Tred was part of the TechStars program, and has raised $1.7 million from Fraser McCombs Capital, Lowercase Capital, Maveron Capital, former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner and others.

Here’s an interesting exercise I tried recently when talking with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists involved in e-commerce: “I say ‘Fab’; you say?”

“Inspiring.”

“Ballsy.”

“Ambitious.”

And then …

“A creation of the tech press.”

“Another Groupon.”

“Bankrupt within five years.”

There’s something about the two-year-old commerce company — and its brash CEO Jason Goldberg — that turns people into full-on Fab believers or never-gonna-convince-me haters.

Get ready for more of both kinds.

Fab just announced that it has raised an additional $150 million, bringing total investment to $310 million. The company’s pre-money valuation was $1 billion, according to spokeswoman Deborah Roth. And this is only the first part of its D round, Fab said, as it expects to close additional funds within a few months.

The round includes an investment from Chinese Internet behemoth Tencent, which owns a popular instant messaging service and gaming platform, among other products and Internet properties. Japan’s Itochu also contributed to the round, in addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Atomico, which headlined a long list of current investors who also participated.

Goldberg wrote in a blog post that Tencent will help bring Fab to millions of new people around the world. In an interview, though, he said that the two companies are still discussing how their strategic partnership will manifest itself to consumers.

One of the reasons Tencent was an attractive strategic investor was because it was amenable to a relationship that would keep the Fab brand front and center, Goldberg added, even as it helped bring the company’s products to the Chinese market.

“We had a lot of other companies that wanted to invest in Fab, and most of them wanted conditions and stipulations around it being their brand out front, or having a separate [joint venture] in their country,” Goldberg said. “We thought that was backwards.”

A source tells AllThingsD that Alibaba was one of the other international companies that Goldberg approached about an investment. The Fab CEO wouldn’t confirm or deny talks with Alibaba, but said, “All I can tell you is that there were various other companies that we spoke to, and many of these wanted different stipulations … that we weren’t willing to acquiesce to.”

The new investment should only lead to more chatter among industry insiders who believe, among other worries, that the company is raising too much money; that it is expanding too fast; that it must have weak margins; or, of course, that it will ultimately be stomped out by Amazon.

“Look, those are fair questions,” Goldberg told me in an interview. “I don’t consider us a success yet. We know we have a lot of work to do. But we believe in our strategy, and believe it’s going to take a good amount of investment to continue to build a ‘wow’ experience and build a great new e-commerce brand.”

He went on to say that when plans for international expansion were first talked about during a board meeting, he was the most apprehensive person in the room. But, to make a point, he used Zappos as an example of a great e-commerce brand that could have been much bigger, in his opinion, if it had expanded globally before clones in those areas beat it to it.

He said European clones also forced Fab’s hand, and made it necessary to expand rapidly overseas.

“We didn’t want to be in a position where we built our brand in the U.S. and another equivalent of Fab was built in another market,” he said.

Yet it’s clear in Goldberg’s blog post that he is sensitive to critics, as he addressed several points raised by them.

For one, he said Fab will differentiate by leading the way in a new commerce category “emotional commerce.” This is a clear attempt to separate his company from the likes of Amazon, which he said specialize in commodity purchases. And it’s smart — if you’re Fab, you create a separate market that doesn’t already exist, so you can own it.

Goldberg writes that emotional commerce “is all about getting lost in the moment.” To me, that means impulse buying — more specifically, the buying of things that you want, but don’t necessarily need. And, with the visual appeal of its properties and apps, Fab is appealing to even the most restrained shoppers.

Goldberg also took on some of the critics of the company’s finances, claiming that Fab has gross margins of 43 percent. It’s not clear, though, how Fab can sustain them as it expands rapidly, and whether it will eventually be able to curb its losses, which reportedly reached $90 million last year.

So, what does Fab need all this money for? Goldberg is stressing logistics, and how improvements in that part of the business have already resulted in much faster order-to-ship times. He says the company will open factories in the Netherlands this year, and Nevada next year.

The company is also going to ramp up its investment in working with designers to create products that end up being exclusive to Fab. Fab needs to absolutely nail this one if it really wants to prove that it is building a moat between its business and those of other e-commerce giants.

Goldberg said five percent of all revenue this year will come from products exclusive to Fab. The hope is to push that percentage to 30 percent to 40 percent by 2016.

“That’s a huge focus for us, internally,” he said.

Fab will generate sales of between $200 million and $300 million this year, Goldberg said — a large range, owing to the fact that the company isn’t quite sure what to expect out of international holiday sales.

“There are some who will call us a success because of this fundraise,” Goldberg wrote toward the end of his blog post. “They’ll say we’re worth billions. And, of course, there are some who will call it a bubble. We know that the truth is that raising money is not success.”

It’s certainly not. But in many ways, it has become the storyline Fab is best known for. When it no longer is, perhaps Goldberg might finally feel comfortable calling Fab a success.

Glass Will Be the Next iPhone — But Today It’s A Newton

Google Glass is a “when,” not “if,” product. The prototype version of Glass that’s currently available to developers, known as the Glass Explorer edition, shows enough promise that we at Forrester Research think it’s just a matter of time until it takes off. However, its short battery life — as well as the limited Mirror application programming interface (API), which restricts app developers’ access to the device’s native hardware sensors — makes version 1 Glass more of a Newton than an iPhone. By that, we mean that Glass is very compelling, but extremely limited in its current form, just like Apple’s Newton was. Glass is continuously improving via over-the-air updates and new applications, though, and we have no doubt that in time, it will be the next iPhone — the next great platform for engaging consumers and workers.

Glass Extends Smartphones’ Utility With a New Interaction Model

Glass works like an extension of your phone: It tethers to a smartphone (iPhone or Android) for connectivity, and it takes the friction out of communicating, searching, sharing images and accessing location-based services by allowing users to complete these actions hands-free. Marketers who want to build Glass apps (known as Glassware) will find it technically simple but conceptually different from other types of marketing engagement.

The basic interaction model for Glass is via “timeline cards”: Timeline cards display content, such as text, location-based information and media; swiping forward and backward shows cards in the order they were created or used. You can think of it as a filmstrip — going backward shows earlier frames, going forward shows later frames — except that each frame or timeline card is a living object that can be updated. For marketers, this means thinking about your brand in the context of someone’s day — what essential information or utility can you provide, in what contexts, with just a few words or images?

Think about Glass apps like an SMS or MMS conversation: A series of asynchronous alerts that form meaning over time. It’s not like the screen-based sandbox of a smartphone app. Your Glassware coexists with other apps on the timeline and competes for a user’s attention. As with SMS, marketers will need to be extremely thoughtful about how frequently to send alerts or updates to a user’s timeline because it’s easy to cross the line between engagement and annoyance on Glass.

Marketers Must Seek Permission to Engage

Glass presents a challenge for marketers: Consumers will expect marketers to deliver contextually relevant, useful experiences, but marketers have imperfect tools and systems for delivering that relevance. Google’s policies instruct developers not to “use users’ personal information for purposes beyond the limited and express purpose of your application … without getting specific opt-in consent from the user. Don’t sell, rent, or otherwise provide a user’s personal information to any third party without getting specific opt-in consent from the user.” In other words, the Web-based targeting technologies marketers rely on have no place on Glass.

The good news is that because Glass apps are permission-based, if consumers invite you to engage with them on Glass, you’ll likely know who they are anyway — you probably have an existing relationship with them, and they trust you enough to invite you to engage with them on this intimate platform. Activities (such as being in a certain location at a certain time of day) will cue targeting, rather than cookie-based navigational history. These new schemes will coexist with industry initiatives already underway to measure and target across PC and mobile, using registration or personally identifiable information (PII) data (where a direct relationship exists) as the matching key or using device data and inference to make good guesses.

Marketers and third-party developers may be shut out of tracking users on Glass, but that doesn’t mean Google isn’t doing so. We expect Google to wield even more power over brands in the future, thanks to the insight it collects on users through Glass. Carriers gain more power, too — Verizon already sells aggregated data from mobile phone usage via its Precision Market Insights product. Because Glass tethers to the phone, even more data that can potentially be packaged and sold will flow through carriers’ networks. The bottom line for marketers: You’ll have access to plenty of data from Glass, but it won’t be through the targeting technologies you’ve come to depend on, and you’ll rely ever more on Google and its network partners to get that data.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, tracking the wearables market. Follow her on Twitter @srepps.

So Farb has left her career in investment banking with Goldman Sachs to start Darby Smart, a San Francisco-based company that hopes to upend the crafts industry by selling fun, easy-to-follow crafting kits for amateur do-it-yourselfers. The kits — which will range from $24 to $44, including shipping — will be thought up by designers and crafters with large followings on blogs and Pinterest. Those creators will get a cut of sales.

To get off the ground, Darby Smart has raised a $1 million seed round led by Forerunner Ventures, REI Capital and Maveron. Warby Parker co-founder Dave Gilboa is one of several individual investors in the round.

When evaluating the market opportunity, Farb said she was shocked to find that giant arts-and-crafts retailers like Michaels and Hobby Lobby don’t do more online to appeal to aspiring crafters looking for some guidance.

“There are two sides to the problem,” Farb told me in an interview. “Consumers like me who are in the store and are so frustrated. And on the other side, influencers who have huge readerships or followings on Pinterest or blogs, and who are not making any money in commerce.”

Darby Smart’s first offering will be a $29 kit for crafting a clutch purse out of a magazine — recently, Farb pointed out, Kate Spade sold a “book clutch” for more than $300. New kits will go on sale every three days.

The startup is going to have some competition. Brit + Co., for example, also sells DIY craft kits, but Farb said she views the company as more of a potential partner than anything else right now, since its focus is more on media.

One trend Farb won’t be jumping on? Subscription commerce.

“My take is, if we build an amazing delightful product,” she said, “people will come back because it’s amazing and addictive, not because we have their credit card on file.”

Maybe you can get into the endorsement business.

And Adam Winnick says he can help. Backed by $500,000 in angel money, he is launching Subblime, a site he’s describing as “a social hub for YouTube influencers.” A more practical way of describing the site would be “a place where YouTube celebrities can list stuff they like or have been paid to like.”

Those celebrities have their own pages of lists; here’s one from “WhatsUpElle,” who Winnick lists as a cofounder:

Right now, the money part is embryonic, but Winnick imagines a mix of different ways for YouTubers to profit, from basic affiliate links to more sophisticated cost-per-action ad campaigns. At some point, he thinks he’ll take a 50 percent split of revenue that video celebrities make from his site; for now, the talent keeps 100 percent.

So, all of that makes sense, in a Pinterest-meets-Web-video way. The only question is whether people who are famous on YouTube, who are already figuring out how to sell stuff, want to aggregate on another place to do that.

Winnick says he’ll have embeddable widgets so YouTubers can also sell/endorse stuff on their Tumblrs and other properties. But he argues that there’s a benefit to hanging out with other people who make popular videos, because fans of one video star are likely fans of another: “I give them a platform where they can engage the audience.”

In February, Motif started letting individuals, professional financial advisers and big brands create their own motifs. Today, the startup is organizing those portfolios into a public catalog, and is announcing that it will start paying at least $1 to the advisers and brands every time a Motif user invests in their motifs.

Perhaps more interestingly, the startup should get regulatory approval within six months to start paying nonprofessional individual investors when someone purchases a motif they create, Motif CEO Hardeep Walia said in an interview.

“If you have good ideas, you’ll have the chance to get paid for them,” Walia said.

While startups such as Betterment and Wealthfront aim in many ways to help replace financial advisers, Motif is hoping to create a catalog of thematic investment ideas that even professional investors find useful.

The company has raised $51 million from Goldman Sachs, Norwest Venture Partners, Ignition Partners and Foundation Capital.

There’s no excuse, really, considering that practically every major Internet company offers some form of calendar with built-in integration to notify you of your friends’ birthdays. (It’s Facebook’s forte.)

E-retailer giant Amazon knows that people like me exist, and wants to make the best of my terrible memory. That’s at least part of the idea behind Amazon Birthday Gift, the company’s Facebook-integrated social gifting product rolling out Tuesday.

The concept is simple: Send a friend whose birthday is coming up one of Amazon’s Birthday Gift cards — a virtual gift-card credit to spend on Amazon.com — which won’t show up for your friend until their actual birthday. Other folks (including the forgetful ones like me) come along, and can contribute their own money toward adding to our friend’s birthday gift amount, thus increasing the size of the pot for your buddy’s special day.

I’ll give Amazon this — it’s lightweight, and certainly clever. Tap into Facebook’s existing social graph birthday calendar, and Amazon becomes constantly available as a gifting option, a way to divert dollars over to its massive online retail platform.

But Amazon’s Birthday Gift product is far from alone on Facebook. There’s Wrapp, to begin with, the social gifting application that lets you and many other contributors give gift cards to friends, working in much the same way as Amazon’s new product.

That’s not to mention Gifts, Facebook’s homegrown social gifting product, birthed out of the company’s acquisition of startup Karma last year. With Facebook Gifts, you’re readily prompted to buy stuff for friends via Facebook itself, choosing from a growing list of physical, virtual and digital gifts.

So, yes, Amazon is vying for gifting attention on Facebook.

But despite being on Facebook’s turf, Amazon is strong here. The commerce giant’s gift cards offer recipients credit toward hundreds of thousands of items on Amazon.com — a veritable playground of stuff — which means that the birthday boy or girl isn’t limited to just what Facebook Gifts or Wrapp’s gift cards offer. In Facebook’s case, the gift selection is still relatively small, and Wrapp is still working hard to grow its partnership roster. That’s a strong pitch for gift-givers to use Amazon’s service instead.

Now the question is, Amazon or no, do people actually feel comfortable sending birthday gifts via a Facebook page?

Perhaps — if it’ll help them remember to send it in the first place.

Or rather the simulated cyber attack exercise dubbed Quantum Dawn 2. As reported by Lauren Tara LaCapra at Reuters, it’s an exercise that will run through most of the business day on June 28, simulating a significant cyber attack against several Wall Street banks.

Organized by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, it will involve numerous banks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, the U.S. departments of Treasury and Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. At least three executives from each participating organization will take part.

It will start off at first with some seemingly random bursts of confusing information, followed by a pause that will give execs a chance to make decisions. Later on, it will accelerate, and conditions will appear to get a lot worse.

This is the sequel to 2011’s Quantum Dawn 1, which included in its scenario a group of armed gunmen running around lower Manhattan trying to gain access to various exchanges and attempting to blow stuff up.

In that exercise, all the participants were in a single conference room comparing notes and making decisions. This time around, they’ll be working from their own offices, much as they would during a real-world attack. The point is to create a more accurate “fog of war” situation.

The simulation comes as big banks in particular are being warned by federal regulators to improve their defenses against the threat of cyber attacks. BofA, J.P. Morgan Chase and Capital One Financial are known to have come under attack in recent years. A recent survey by Verizon found that 75 percent of cyber-security incidents at large companies were motivated by financial gain.

The push comes as government officials grow increasingly concerned about the ability of a cyber attack to cause significant disruptions to the financial system. Banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Capital One Financial Corp. have been targeted by cyber assaults in recent years, including potent “denial-of-service” strikes that took down some bank websites off-and-on for days, frustrating customers. Banks have spent millions of dollars responding to or protecting against such attacks, including a wave of attempted online assaults targeting major banks beginning last year that U.S. defense officials say had the backing of the Iranian government.

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But what about Best Buy, the retail giant looking hard for a turnaround, as it tries to fend off Amazon and other online-only electronics sellers?

First, from a financial point of view, it seems to be a no-brainer.

“If you offer a retailer some money, they typically will take it,” Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at The NPD Group, said in an interview.

The two companies did not release any financial details of the deal, but it’s a safe bet that Microsoft is spending handsomely to help redesign Best Buy’s PC departments into Windows Stores and train 1,200 Best Buy employees to man the new outlets.

Second, the appearance of the new stores appears to be fresher, a bit of an upgrade from the current Best Buy experience. The devices sold within them might be the same, but new wrapping won’t hurt.

Third, adding Microsoft to a roster of mini-stores that already includes Apple and Samsung may push other consumer electronics manufacturers to pursue a similar deal with Best Buy. A brand like Sony, for example, has the breadth of devices that could make sense for a mini-store, Baker told me.

Fourth, it’s a vote of confidence — albeit from a company with its own issues — that brick-and-mortar retail still matters. If you want to take a customer away from a competitor, you do it in the real, physical world.

With these moves, Best Buy is starting to look a little bit more like a tech mall within a store — a setup not uncommon overseas in cases where retailers essentially lease out part of the store to a manufacturer. The difference here, according to Baker, is that Best Buy is still maintaining most of the control, such as deciding how their floors are stocked, making it less likely that the new arrangements will hurt the Best Buy brand.

Will the branded stores within Best Buy alone lead to that massive turnaround? Of course not. As it is, we already know the company has work to do when it comes to its digital presence.

But the new look of the mini-stores — the Windows Store being the most recent example — brings some necessary excitement to a company desperately in need of some. And that certainly counts for something.

Founded in 2009, the marketplace site Thumbtack has been working at this problem for a while. It has a directory of 250,000 U.S. service providers. But last fall, when it changed its payment structure to charge providers for offering a price quote to address a certain user’s request, growth started shooting through the roof.

That’s not to say Thumbtack is huge, yet. The company doesn’t disclose its size, but comScore counted 421,000 U.S. visitors in May. Co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta said Thumbtack had $300 million worth of requests in the past year. As the startup doesn’t have a well-known brand (yet), the majority of customers find the site through search, according to Zappacosta.

Meanwhile, esteemed venture capital firm Sequoia Capital makes a very few investments per year — fewer than 15, usually — and almost all of them are Series A. Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier had his eye on Thumbtack for years, and was intrigued to learn that they now have significantly more jobs than competitors like TaskRabbit, Zaarly and RedBeacon.

“What became clear is they’ve gotten to real scale and figured out a business model that really seems to work,” Schreier said in an interview yesterday. “It has the marketplace dynamics of Airbnb and eBay, but there’s this automated service component that’s the magic, and that makes it very differentiated,” he said.

So Schreier and his partnership decided to make a somewhat later-stage bet, and have led the company’s $12.5 million Series B round. Thumbtack had previously raised $5.7 million from Javelin Venture Partners and angels including Scott and Cyan Banister, Joshua Schachter, Jason Calacanis and Ali and Hadi Partovi.

Unlike some other competitors in this space, Thumbtack is particularly broad — it lists almost any sort of local service. However, the site acknowledges that customers use various services differently, and treats them as such. “There’s never going to be an Uber for wedding photography,” noted Zappacosta.

As a result, I often click on mobile ads, regardless of whether I’m interested in what’s being pitched, just to see what awaits on the other end of the finger-tap.

So, a few days ago, I did just that, after seeing a link in a Promoted Tweet from Best Buy on my Twitter iPhone app advertising a two-day Father’s Day sale. There I was greeted by the image to the right.

And while I could make out prices and images of computers and TVs without zooming in or squinting, that was about it. And once you ask me to zoom in — tap — I’ve clicked on the “X” and I’m gone.

And then, yesterday morning, another Best Buy Promoted Tweet arrived in my stream on my Twitter iPhone app, advertising the Nintendo DSi. Of course, I clicked.

This time the result was much worse: A broken page, telling me “there was an error when processing your request.”

I closed out and clicked again. Same result.

I’m not just picking on Best Buy — these types of experiences are par for the course in mobile advertising that could lead to buying online. And, as we all know by now, mobile phones are still challenging devices to advertise on, especially with all the different devices and screen sizes.

Despite the challenges, advertising on mobile devices is expected to rise 76 percent from $4.36 billion in 2012 to $7.65 billion this year, according to research firm eMarketer.

But if you are going to spend the money to advertise in mobile — especially on a popular platform such as Twitter — it’s probably a good idea to make sure the experience for the consumer will be a decent one.

It’s also not a good look for Twitter, which is effectively sending its users off to unreadable pages. Once that happens a few times to the same Twitter user perhaps they think twice before clicking on a Promoted Tweet again.

Still, Twitter doesn’t seem to feel this is its responsibility. “Brands control the content that they put into a Tweet, regardless of its promoted or organic,” a spokesman wrote in an email. “We don’t screen what the final experience looks like on specific landing page[s], etc.”

A Best Buy spokeswoman acknowledged that the company has work to do in digital.

“As we have shared previously — most recently during our Q1 earnings, we are focused on accelerating our online growth and are taking a number of steps including consistent browsing across devices to improve the online experience for our customers,” she wrote to me in an email.

“We’ve talked publicly about our dot.com platform being woefully underfunded,” she added. “The new Executive Team has recognized this and is making the additional investments to get the site improved for our customers across all platforms.”

As for the broken link, “a brief outage this morning on our Web site” was the cause, she explained.

It’s no secret that more and more people are making purchases from their mobile phones. EMarketer estimates that mobile commerce sales will increase 56.5 percent this year to $38.84 billion, from $24.81 billion in 2012. But those mobile shoppers choose the brands that make it easy.

In the end, I did indeed end up buying my dad a Father’s Day gift from my iPhone — a label maker, just like he asked. But it happened on Amazon.com’s mobile website — and while I was standing in a Staples analog store.

This year, for instance, the share prices of real-estate Web-search companies Trulia Inc. and Move Inc., both with headquarters in the Bay Area, have surged nearly 90 percent and 60 percent, respectively. Shares of Seattle-based Zillow Inc., the most-visited online home-search service, are up 90 percent.

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Overall, a variety of Internet tech companies have had a very good year when it comes to the stock market. Since the beginning of January, for example: Yahoo shares are up close to 33 percent; Microsoft gained more than 30 percent; Google has risen more than 23 percent; AOL is up close to 19 percent; Amazon has gained close to 10 percent; and eBay has risen just above two percent.

The only Debbie Downers of tech investing in the period? Facebook (down close to 10 percent) and Apple (down nearly 20 percent).

But the past month has been another story, with most Web company shares down, down, and some more down: Yahoo (down 1.6 percent); Google (down .05 percent); AOL (down 10 percent); eBay (down 6.5 percent); Apple (down 3.4 percent); and Facebook (down 10 percent).

The gainers: Amazon up just over four percent; and Microsoft, which is seeing a lot of activist shareholder interest of late, is up 6.6 percent.

One bright spot? Shares of the long-troubled daily deals site, Groupon: Its stock is up an impressive 46.5 percent for the year, and close to 14 percent over the last 30 days.

As everyone knows by now, Zynga’s in a bit of trouble. The social gaming company laid off 18 percent of its workforce last week — 520 employees — as it tries to find its footing in mobile.

But at the E3 conference, an event that has traditionally been geared toward core gamers, many attendees aren’t as concerned with Zynga as you might think a bunch of game-industry folks would be.

In fact, some say it’s a toldja moment.

“These people don’t care about Zynga,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who has been consistently bullish. “It’s a different animal, social gaming. But Zynga will do fine.”

David Wood, an independent games consultant who previously built mobile games for MTV and Nickelodeon, concurred: “Some say, ‘Aha, I knew it was coming!’ Others sort of feel badly because maybe they know people at Zynga, or maybe they’re trying to get into that space. But at the end of the day, it’s just another sign of volatility.”

This dismissive attitude stems mostly from the resistance on the part of the core gamers to really accept Zynga — or any casual, social, or mobile-only game maker — as one of their own.

When news of the layoffs broke, “there were people in my Twitter feed who actually celebrated, to the point where I had to step in and say, ‘Look, this is someone’s livelihood,’” said Michael Futter, editor of Game Informer. “These are people in the core market who are disgusted with the habits Zynga has introduced to gaming.”

The “habits” refer to Zynga’s model of selling virtual goods through in-app purchases, often to advance the game. Industry jargon like “whales, dolphins and minnows” is used to describe big spenders, sometimes-spenders and those who take advantage of free-to-play, but not the freemium features. Within free-to-play, there are “ethical” models, and then there’s Zynga, serious gamers say.

Of course, it all depends on whom you ask. For a group that professes not to care about Zynga, most of the people I spoke to seemed to have strong opinions on the matter.

One investor said Zynga is mostly definitely a topic of interest — if only a cautionary one.

“I think people here care about Zynga,” said Nassar Batley, managing director of a digital media and gaming investment firm. “The investment community needs to be looking at Zynga as an example of what went wrong and be more cautious.”

E3, on the whole, isn’t totally oblivious to the mobile or social gaming world. This year, for the first time, there’s a section of the conference dedicated specifically to “mobile and online games,” although this is set apart from the main show floor and, so far, has attracted only a modest crowd.

Zynga, it should be noted, is not present in this section at the show.

Many in the industry are quick to point to Electronic Arts as an example of a core-gaming company that has thrown a lot of weight behind social gaming.

But EA has had its own rounds of layoffs, and in April announced that it would kill off Facebook games The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.

Cautionary tale, indeed.