Ubisoft is releasing a version of its popular Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise on Facebook today with the goal of attracting the same hardcore audience that will pay $60 for the console version coming out tomorrow.

In a teaser video, posted on YouTube, Ubisoft’s tagline is: “Finally, a gamer’s game on Facebook.”

Not many publishers have dared to release hardcore games on Facebook because of the technical limitations of Adobe Flash, but also because the platform is largely assumed to attract an audience of 40-year-old women — not exactly the hardcore demographic.

To date, companies, such as San Francisco-based Kabam and Kixeye, have carved out a niche serving these fanatics, who are small in numbers but tend to get pulled in to the game and spend a lot in the free-to-play model.

Now, Ubisoft is experimenting with the genre on the platform with the launch of Ghost Recon Commander, a companion title to Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, which comes out tomorrow for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.

Creators of the Facebook version are promising to offer a multi-player gaming experience that is similar to console-play, while still being easy enough for a casual gamer to be interested. ”I wanted a place where you felt you could vacation and also blow it up,” said Brenda Garno Brathwaite, the co-founder of Loot Drop, which developed the game on Ubisoft’s behalf.

Garno Brathwaite has the pedigree to pull a stunt like this off. Prior to founding Loot Drop, she worked as a creative director for two social media companies, Slide (acquired by Google) and Lolapps. Before that, she worked at a variety of companies, including Atari, Sir-tech Software and Electronic Arts.

What’s more, she’s a hardcore Ghost Recon fan, having racked up 170 hours of game play in the latest version of the console game.

Drawing from her experiences as a player and game-maker she believes they avoided aspects of social games that hardcore players hate while making it accessible to a large audience, including moms.

“I consider myself a hardcore player. I’m a 45-year-old mom that likes to blow my friends up,” she said.

Garno Brathwaite says the multi-player social game uses traditional console play experiences, by including true combat, like blowing stuff up and shooting other players, but also makes it accessible to players who don’t own a console.

Because of that, the game is slightly different. For starters, it is not a first-person shooter. Instead, the 2-D game is played from the viewpoint of an airplane, looking down at the players. Players form multi-player alliances with real Facebook friends and then go on missions.

Another difference is that users can play for five minutes and walk away from their computer without exiting the game. If you did that in the console version, you’d be shot.

One part of the game that social gamers will recognize is a player’s base camp, where no combat happens. In base camp, the game play is more strategic. Players’ build buildings and manufacturer resources to bulk up on armor or other things that will allow you to do better in the field.

Here’s the teaser video for the game:

Zynga and LinkedIn were also down on the news, opening off around 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

After what many called out as a lackluster performance on its opening day, all eyes are on the company’s ticker this week to see how the shares perform going forward. Scores of financial analysts and armchair investors and much of the technology press expected an initial first-day “pop,” a jump of 10 percent to 20 percent or more for fast-moving retail flippers to make a quick buck.

But as Friday’s trading day came and went, and the stock closed only slightly higher than it debuted, many expected that Facebook shares would open off come Monday morning, especially since underwriters were no longer able to prop up the stock by dipping into the greenshoe like they did on Friday.

A great many argued that Facebook shares were priced perfectly, leaving no money on the table for retail investors to come in and sweep up in the first-day pop that so many had expected. Exercising the allotment option was the underwriters’ job, Fortune’s Dan Primack argued vehemently; first and foremost, Facebook was priced to get the most money it could for going public.

Here’s the thing: Like Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley reminds, Amazon’s debut saw the stock break issue and stay below its IPO price for months.

It then went on — over the long haul — to rise 1000x.

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I just took this photo. I’ll tell you about it later.

– Noah Kalina, referring to the iconic wedding photo he took of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

Mr. Greifeld said in an interview with reporters that problems with order cancelations interfered with the IPO process. Tests Nasdaq had conducted ahead of the highly anticipated offering failed to detect the problems, he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But here it is: See, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell are older, healthier, and they go to Broadway shows, not movie matinees. But they’re still rapping about Rachel McAdams.

The best line, of course, is Samberg’s shout-out to Google — a reminder that he’s still waiting for a “fxxxing YouTube check” for the first “Lazy Sunday,” which NBC doesn’t allow on the video site anymore.

But Samberg’s other viral videos are all proudly displayed on a YouTube channel. And while the clip helped build YouTube into a powerhouse that sold to Google for $1.6 billion, it also helped revive SNL and build Samberg’s career. So everybody did just fine.

And here’s the original (which on NBC’s SNL page, at least, came bundled with an ad for… “Sister Act”).

We’re told by a guest of the couple authorized to speak that the ceremony happened in Zuckerberg and Chan’s backyard at their home in Palo Alto, in front of a very small number of family and friends, around 100.

The couple had been planning the wedding in secret for about four or five months, our source says, but told their guests that it was a surprise party for Chan’s graduation from UCSF medical school, where she just got her degree in pediatric medicine. News of the wedding was first reported by the Associated Press.

A close friend of Zuckerberg and Chan played the music for the processional, while another close friend played them off.

While the date of the wedding was timed to Zuckerberg’s birthday and Chan’s graduation, the IPO was a moving target, our source says, and was definitely not part of the whole plan.

The ring, you ask? It was simple, our source says, and Zuck designed it himself.

He went with a ruby.

Mike Isaac contributed reporting.

(Image courtesy of Allyson Magda)

“Our mission isn’t to be a public company,” he said. “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

The speech, which was shot by Bloomberg, took place at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., the day after it raised $16 billion in one of the biggest IPOs in recent history.

Zuckerberg added that it took eight years to turn Facebook into the largest community in the history of the world, and said, “I can’t wait to see what you’ll do, going forward.”

As a bonus, here’s Zuck accepting a hoodie from the Nasdaq.

The move is aimed at helping its smaller operations, such as its mobile, search and e-commerce businesses, gain more independence, analysts said. Over the past year Tencent’s profit growth has slowed as it has sought to spend on a wide array of initiatives to solidify its holdings in areas such as mobile chat and online shopping.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It was a tepid debut for one of the largest and most closely watched initial public offerings. More than 30 brokerages and banks were involved in the offering, which saw a nearly 571 million shares change hands on Friday — a record for a stock debut.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

After raising upward of $15 billion dollars in its first day as a public company, Facebook has acquired social gifting app Karma and all 16 of its employees.

The app is designed to help Facebook users find reasons to give one another gifts, identifying birthdays and special occasions.

It’s an acquisition, not an “acqhire.” So, interestingly enough, the service will stay up and functioning, Karma said on its company blog. As Karma put it, “The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force.”

Facebook makes acquisitions all the time, but it’s rare that it keeps the service up and running afterward. Instagram is the only previous example. Some services like FriendFeed are still alive, but only in maintenance mode.

It’s also yet another mobile acquisition, coming directly after the acquisitions of Glancee and Lightbox. As many have pointed out, Facebook has a weak mobile experience; it seems the company is wasting no time in beefing it up.

“We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time,” a Facebook spokesperson told AllThingsD in a statement. “This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

Snapped up relatively quickly after being founded in June of last year by the creators of Tapjoy, Karma’s background is well-pedigreed; the app was funded by Kleiner Perkins, Obvious Corporation, Sequoia Capital and Felicis Ventures.

The San Francisco game company, led by Mark Pincus, closed at an all-time low today of $7.12 a share, down 13.91 percent, on twice the amount of normal trading volume.

At least for now, we can expect the two companies to trade in lockstep, given their relationship status.

On one hand, Zynga is Facebook’s largest partner, and on the other, Facebook is where Zynga attracts most of its user base. Last year, Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue, consisting of both advertising and virtual goods sold from within social games.

At this point, Zynga couldn’t move fast enough in trying to limit its exposure to just one company, and is currently focused on increasing revenue from other sources, mainly mobile.

After Facebook opened only modestly this morning, Zynga’s stock fell 13 percent, tripping a standard circuit breaker rule that halts trading when a stock trades down more than 10 percent, according to sources familiar with Nasdaq procedures. When Zynga’s trading resumed minutes later, the company’s stock again was halted when shares shot up by 10 percent.

A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment.

Zynga’s slide today can pretty much be explained by Facebook’s wild ride that started off at $38 a share, then shot up to $42 a share, before falling back down to close essentially flat at $38.23.

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Not nearly the blowout that some had been predicting. More of a slowpoke than a superpoke.

“Clearly some of the more ahead-of-themselves valuations didn’t stand up all that well to the IPO stress test,” Max Wolff, an analyst at Greencrest Capital Management, told AllThingsD.

That said, quite a few millionaires were minted today. Some obvious billionaires as well. That very slight uptick gives Facebook a market value of about $104 billion.

“The company was clearly underwhelming in its debut, but nonetheless claimed a rich valuation,” Wolff said. “That’s a testament to the Facebook story, and the number of people who want to own its shares.”

Stern Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said he was surprised that Facebook didn’t get quite the pop investors seemed to be expecting.

“It was certainly a surprise,” Bhatia told AllThingsD. “At the same time, I’m a bit relieved that investors didn’t get carried away and are behaving rationally. The underwriters priced the stock well.”

So what can we expect on Monday for the stock’s second day on the market?

Said Bhatia, “I expect to be flattish in the near term.”

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As The Wall Street Journal points out, this isn’t the first time the carmaker has taken a pass on the game — it also bowed out in 2009.

But the news adds some context to the earlier Facebook news. GM is overhauling all of its ad spending plans, so if you’re a Facebook bull you might find the carmaker’s high-profile sub easier to stomach.

More than an hour after we were scheduled to meet, Harper finally emerged from the bar. We were no longer welcome to do a press interview inside, he said.

The manager had been tearing Harper a new one, after getting hostile phone calls all week about the SceneTap launch, which local paper SF Weekly wrote up under the headline “San Francisco Bars to Install Creepy Facial Detection Cameras Inside Venues.”

Of the 25 San Francisco bars supposed to launch with SceneTap today, about 10 dropped out after the outcry, Harper said. That hasn’t happened in any of the other six cities where SceneTap is live.

As we finally sat down at a nearby Starbucks, Harper insisted that his company was misrepresented. SceneTap doesn’t record video about patrons or, as the article said, “keep tabs on them via facial recognition technology.” Rather, it quickly scans new entrants at each venue to determine aggregate numbers of people, their genders and ages.

The point is to help people decide where to go by getting a sense of who is already there.

The SceneTap system includes a sensor on the ceiling at each venue’s entrance as well as a nearby camera-like sensor for facial detection — a fuzzier version of facial recognition — that describes and time-stamps each person. No photo or video recording takes place, Harper said.

Bars can pay Austin-based SceneTap a subscription fee to get analytics about their own patrons. Users — currently just under 100,000 of them — can check SceneTap’s iOS, Android and Web apps to see what’s going on locally or elsewhere.

Harper just posted a long open letter addressed (rather broadly!) to the city of San Francisco, assuring them he is not a bad guy with bad intent:

“I realize there are aspects of our technology that could appear to be controversial and raise serious red flags for people, and I assure you I’m not taking it lightly. … Unfortunately, I think I underestimated the controversial aspects of this technology and what the public’s reaction would be,” he wrote.

Harper elaborated in our interview, “Every single bar that we’re working with already had surveillance systems and cameras recording and other things that were extremely intrusive, in the general opinion,” Harper said. “What we’re adding on is really just a layer that helps from a marketing and social element.”

On the one hand, I see his point; the SceneTap set-up is definitely not as bad as it could be. It’s not posting women’s social media profiles on a map like “Girls Around Me.”

On the other hand, it’s not really that hard to decide what bar to go to! And it’s still offputting to think about the system guessing my age and gender and posting it, even in anonymous aggregated form, on the Internet.

Here’s Harper explaining himself and his company, in a video from our interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120518/scenetap-interview-san-franciscos-least-welcome-start-up-explains-itself-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120518/and-were-off-facebook-shares-hit-the-nasdaq-with-a-pop/ http://allthingsd.com/20120518/and-were-off-facebook-shares-hit-the-nasdaq-with-a-pop/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 15:31:46 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=209847

Facebook shares began trading on the Nasdaq exchange this morning with an immediate jump of approximately 11 percent to a price of about $42 per share.

It’s a signal that Facebook and its bankers priced its IPO incredibly well; a large leap on the first day would have meant Facebook left money on the table. Instead, the company got the most value out of the shares it sold.

This comes after an initial delay in trading — which usually starts at 11 am ET — of nearly a half an hour, because Nasdaq continued to get last-minute orders, despite the exchange reassuring the public that it was “prepared” for today’s trading mania.

The company officially priced its shares at the high end of its target range last night, settling on $38 per share before the market opened this morning. At that price, Facebook was able to raise upward of $16 billion, a massive capital injection to the company coffers.

At the current stock price, the company is valued at $115.08 billion. That makes Zuckerberg’s stake worth $21.15 billion — for now, at least.

Compare Facebook’s debut to Internet company IPOs of the past year: Yelp traded up more than 65 percent on day one. LinkedIn popped huge on its debut, soaring with a 109 percent bump on its first day.

It’s anyone’s (and everyone’s) guess as to what the stock price will close at this afternoon, though we’ll check back in on it later in the day. Meanwhile, join the thousands of speculative posts on $FB’s closing price at this clever single-serving Web site.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120518/and-were-off-facebook-shares-hit-the-nasdaq-with-a-pop/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20120518/kayak-hoping-to-ride-the-ipo-wave/ http://allthingsd.com/20120518/kayak-hoping-to-ride-the-ipo-wave/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 14:30:43 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=209650 Which will be the next tech company to go public after Facebook?

That’s an easy one: Kayak.com.

The travel search company, which has been putting off its plans to go public for more than a year and a half, is now getting ready to pull the trigger, according to sources.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company is by default one of the prime candidates to go public because it has already filed its paperwork and has been dutifully updating its financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter.

A Kayak spokesperson declined to comment, but the timing is good for a number of reasons.

Not only has Facebook priced at the high end of its range, which makes investors a bit more hungry for tech stocks, but other travel companies have been warmly received by the markets over the past few months.

In December, TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to become an independently held public company. Since then, the company’s stock has soared, trading at $41 a share, up from $27 a share. Expedia is also trading higher, up 50 percent to $41.10 a share.

Kayak could begin its roadshow as soon as Monday and may be seeking as much as $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to CNBC. In its original documents, it said it would raise a minimum of $50 million, which served more as a placeholder than what it was intending on raising.

As recently as last week, it updated its filing to report its first quarter earnings, announcing that it earned $4.1 million on $73.3 million. In the year-ago period, it recorded a lost of $6.9 million on revenues of $52.7 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120518/kayak-hoping-to-ride-the-ipo-wave/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120518/hear-that/ http://allthingsd.com/20120518/hear-that/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 13:35:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=209857

Mark Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters. Shares start trading around 11 am ET.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120518/hear-that/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120518/fb-has-arrived-so-now-what/ http://allthingsd.com/20120518/fb-has-arrived-so-now-what/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 12:01:38 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=209605

It’s here.

Facebook, the 900-million-strong social network that knows more about us than even our closest friends, will become a publicly traded company within the next hour.

Private equity dealmakers will celebrate alongside cadres of newly minted millionaire engineers in Menlo Park, Calif., while retail investors the world around will clamor amongst themselves, tooth and claw, for the chance to share in a mere fraction of the riches.

And yet, after a year of watching tech IPOs — Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Yelp — let’s all admit that it kind of borders on anticlimactic.

We know we’ll most likely see a nice pop in the share price after Mark Zuckerberg rings in the Nasdaq bell remotely from Facebook’s spanking-new HQ in Silicon Valley.

From there, like a floating jump ball up for grabs, the social networking giant’s closing stock price is anyone’s guess — and by the looks of my Twitter feed, everyone’s guess. There’s already a site dedicated to tracking what price Facebook’s stock will settle at when the markets close, a page peppered with numbers posited by the digital elite.

Today is about the money. And yet it is also more than just sitting and watching the ticker tape roll by. For the first time, Zuckerberg’s vision of making the world a more open place will finally apply to his own company.

We got our first taste of it when the company filed its S-1. It’s where we saw that more than half of Facebook’s 900 million monthly visitors are visiting the site via mobile devices, a channel in which the company has yet to figure out a coherent or viable monetization strategy.

We saw that Zuckerberg retains a tight grip on the company’s future — tighter than most CEOs, akin to the likes of Google’s co-founders — holding voting rights on 57.1 percent of Facebook’s mighty class-B shares. He is so tied to his company that he is cited as a risk factor in Facebook’s S-1, of course.

And now we’re witnessing the first defectors from Facebook’s nacent advertising strategy, as with General Motors pulling its $10 million dollars in advertising on Facebook earlier this week, citing it as an ineffective use of the company’s massive marketing budget.

What we’ll soon see is Facebook’s less-pretty public profile, so to speak, with Zuckerberg holding court over earnings calls every quarter, taking heat from investors who expect returns. We’ll be given insight into how the company plans to monetize its different products, and how they actually fare.

Just as Facebook knows so very much about each of us, we, too, will begin to learn a lot more about Facebook.

And yet, through all of this, no matter what grim forecast Wall Street projects, no matter what executive decisions or company road maps the media decries, Zuckerberg’s message is clear — so much so that he made it the poster for the pre-IPO all-night hackathon:

“Stay focused and keep hacking.”

Good luck with that.

(Images: (top) Morin Uwole/Facebook; (bottom) Victor Luu/Facebook)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120518/fb-has-arrived-so-now-what/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-cheers-on-mark-zuckerberg-wall-street-gets-its-chance-soon/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-cheers-on-mark-zuckerberg-wall-street-gets-its-chance-soon/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 04:54:00 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=209696

Facebook employees give their CEO a standing ovation at the start of the company’s pre-IPO hackathon, which will run through the night and finish up shortly before FB shares begin trading on the Nasdaq.

(Photo via Facebook Product Designer Francis Luu, who has a set of pictures documenting the event.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-cheers-on-mark-zuckerberg-wall-street-gets-its-chance-soon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/twitter-tailors-your-who-to-follow-list-but-only-if-you-want-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/twitter-tailors-your-who-to-follow-list-but-only-if-you-want-it/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 23:18:38 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=209621 Twitter began rolling out tailored suggestions for users to follow on Thursday, aiming to give Twitter newcomers better direction in learning how to navigate the somewhat abstruse microblogging platform. The suggestions stem from a tracking cookie Twitter sends to new users, allowing the company to see sites visited within the past 10 days. Twitter then uses that information to recommend who to follow. Users can also opt out of this service.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/twitter-tailors-your-who-to-follow-list-but-only-if-you-want-it/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/here-are-10-reasons-not-to-buy-facebook-before-you-buy-it-anyway/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/here-are-10-reasons-not-to-buy-facebook-before-you-buy-it-anyway/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 22:35:30 +0000 David Weidner http://allthingsd.com/?p=209620 By now, you’ve probably made your mind up about Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering. You’re buying it — at any price and by any means necessary. No one is going to convince you otherwise.

But before you place your order, it is my fiduciary duty to remind you all of the risks involved with this investment.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/here-are-10-reasons-not-to-buy-facebook-before-you-buy-it-anyway/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/the-verdict-is-in-facebook-share-price-set-at-38/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/the-verdict-is-in-facebook-share-price-set-at-38/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 20:16:04 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=209509 Ladies and gentlemen, we have a number.

Facebook shares will trade on the Nasdaq exchange for the first time at $38 per share on Friday morning, valuing the world’s largest social networking Web site at $ 104.12 billion.

At $38 a share, Facebook would raise $16 billion in the offering. The company could sell an additional 63 million in over-allotments if underwriters see the demand (which they probably will).

Facebook initially set its sights on a $28 to $35 price range, but the company steadily raised the target amid growing investor fervor for the largest technology compay IPO in history. Earlier this week, in an amended S-1 SEC filing, the company estimated its share price to be in the $34 to $38 range. The final share price will settle at the top of the estimated range, though not over.

Facebook’s offering debuts after a year replete with hot tech IPOs from Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon. Facebook’s trumps every other. Google’s was the largest IPO in tech history when it raised $1.67 billion in August of 2004. Last year, Zynga raised $1 billion.

But many things about Facebook ramping up to its Nasdaq debut were far out of the norm for tech company IPOs. To kick off its traveling pitch to institutional investors last week, Facebook put together an extravagant, well-produced roadshow video complete with a full explanation of the company’s advertising business, the meat and potatoes of Facebook’s revenue engine. And in celebration of the IPO, the company will host an all-night hackathon at its Menlo Park headquarters on Thursday evening in order to ring in $FB’s debut “the hacker way.”

The mammoth IPO comes despite initial reports of investor reservations about said revenue engine, and General Motors’ ill-timed announcement earlier this week that it would pull its $10 million in ad spend that it reserves for Facebook, citing that the advertisements just weren’t working.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook increased the amount of shares offered to investors on Friday by nearly 25 percent.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be selling close to $1.2 billion in shares at the time of the IPO — for tax purposes, he says — though he still holds more than 580 million voting shares, maintaining a firm grip on complete control over the direction of his 8-year-old company.

It’s official: $FB has arrived.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/the-verdict-is-in-facebook-share-price-set-at-38/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-hits-the-market-complete-coverage/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-hits-the-market-complete-coverage/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 20:01:21 +0000 John Murrell http://allthingsd.com/?p=208342 Full coverage of Facebook can be found at AllThingsD’s Facebook topics page. If you are not redirected automatically, click here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-hits-the-market-complete-coverage/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-close-to-38-ipo-price/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/facebook-close-to-38-ipo-price/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 18:28:34 +0000 Shayndi Raice and Anupreeta Das http://allthingsd.com/?p=209502 Facebook Inc. is close to pricing its initial public offering at $38 a share, said a person familiar with the matter, a move that would value the Internet company at more than $100 billion.

Facebook executives and senior bankers on the deal were holed up in a meeting discussing the price and a decision still hasn’t been made final, cautioned the person, noting that the final price could still come in a dollar higher. The company tried floating higher numbers to investors but was rebuffed, said another person familiar with the matter.

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