The machine is nicknamed Milky Way 2, but is formally known as Tianhe-2, (the word translates literally as “Sky River”), and was built at China’s National University of Defense Technology. In taking the top spot, it knocked Titan, a machine built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, off its perch.

Now, before any of you reading in the U.S. get all bummed about the decline of American technical superiority, consider this: Its main computing engine was made in America. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each containing two Intel-made Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, bringing the total number of computing cores to 3.12 million.

Its total performance is 33.86 petaflops, which means it can conduct 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. I’ll write that number out so you can see all the zeros: 33,860,000,000,000,000. That’s almost twice — but not quite — as powerful as Titan, which can do 17.59 petaflops. Titan runs on 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

This is the second time that a Chinese machine has topped the list, which is updated twice a year. The first was in 2010, when the Tianhe-1A system at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin took the crown, and did so with a relatively quaint — by today’s standard — 2.57 petaflops.

China’s dominance was short-lived the first time around: Japan nabbed the title with a Fujitsu-made machine in late 2011.

American machines have dominated on subsequent Top 500 lists, until today. A year ago, an IBM-made machine called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, held the top spot. It’s now No. 3. Titan took the title in November.

A few more facts about the new list: There are now 26 machines that have a computing capacity north of one petaflop, up from 23 on the last list. Some 54 machines are using graphical processing units from the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Intel to boost their computing oomph, down from 62 on the last list.

And while it may not have the fastest computer in the world, the U.S. leads the world in total supercomputing capacity: Of the machines on the Top 500 list, 252 are in the U.S.; 112 are in Europe, with 29 in the U.K., 23 in France and 19 in Germany; 66 are in China; and 30 are in Japan.

The Top 500 list (which you can see in full here) is compiled twice every year by Hans Meuer at Germany’s University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In an interview published online late Wednesday by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency, said he believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, including hundreds in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland.

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Just like Pandora, users can create radio stations based on songs they’re listening to. And, yes, iTunes Radio lets you share those stations you create with friends. You’re also able to flip through curated channels picked by the dudes at Apple, and even select a channel based on what’s trending on Twitter.

Apple has its work cut out to take down Pandora, which currently holds 70 percent of Internet radio marketshare among the Top 20 Internet radio stations in the U.S., according to Pandora. And it’s a cross-platform app, which means reaching all sorts of users, not just the Apple devotees.

That’s not even including Amazon, Google’s new All Access music service and the myriad other competitors in the space.

But Apple still has a broad customer base who have bought millions of its products. And iTunes radio will be built into all Apple software, including iOS, OS X and Apple TV. So there’s your instant install base, right off the bat.

iTunes Radio comes ad-free if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber, Apple’s existing cloud-based music service which lets users incorporate their previously purchased tracks into their cloud-based library. Apple will kick off iRadio starting first in the U.S., with plans to add more countries over time.

Along with the new Radio service, Apple introduced a series of improvements to other iOS apps, like Siri — which will come with a new interface and feature Twitter integration and now routes to Bing for search queries — and debuted iOS in the Car, which, just like it says, brings many iOS applications to the screen of your vehicle (think “music and Siri access from the driver’s seat”).

There’s also FaceTime audio, which lets users make high-quality audio calls over Wi-Fi, and is integrated with China’s Tencent Weibo.

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The issue will likely be near the top of the agenda when U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping start their first summit meeting Friday the Sunnylands estate in California. Their meeting comes as the disclosure of a broad U.S. government effort to collect phone records of millions of consumers has rekindled the debate on privacy and civil liberties.

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In an interview on Thursday, Lenovo Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said the company is looking for deals in servers and computer storage. “Servers and storage is the business we want to expand and develop,” he said on the sidelines of the Fortune Global Forum, in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu. “If there is an acquisition opportunity, we will take it.”

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Zynga confirmed it was laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs, as it seeks to drastically restructure its troubled business.

The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company, cutting $80 million in staff costs for its 2,900 current workers. It will also include the closing of its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as other infrastructure costs, adding to the total expense reduction.

Zynga continues to have big offices in San Francisco; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India, as well as several small units across the U.S. (such as Seattle and San Diego).

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

In addition, Zynga has now said in a press release that it is downgrading its investor guidance for the second quarter with results at the lower end of what Wall Street has been expecting.

After a rocky IPO and trying to cope with rapid changes in its core businesses, Zynga has been trying to refocus the company’s franchises and network on the shift to mobile and a narrowing of focus at the company.

That refocusing will now have a big impact on Zynga’s financial performance. For Q2, the company had previously said its “bookings” — related to sales of in-game virtual-good purchases and advertising — would be in the $180 million to $190 million range. Today, Zynga said results would now be in the lower half of that range.

In addition, its GAAP net loss for the quarter will be higher than expected, rising from a loss of $26.5 million to $36.5 million to a loss of between $28.5 million and $39 million.

All other metrics are expected to remain the same, including: Revenue ($225 million to $235 million); earnings per share (a loss of three to five cents); adjusted EBITDA (break even to a loss of $10 millon); and non-GAAP EPS (a loss of three to four cents).

Wall Street is not reacting well to the bad news. Zynga’s shares have dropped from 11 to 12 percent since AllThingsD.com broke the news of the layoffs. It is now at about $3 a share, giving the company a market valuation of $2.4 billion. Trading for Zynga was briefly halted, before the company confirmed the cost cuts.

Zynga is laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs and more drastically restructure its troubled business toward mobile, according to sources close to the situation.

The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company and cut $80 million in staff expenses. Zynga currently has about 2,900 workers.

But the action will also include the closing of its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as the slashing of other major infrastructure costs, adding to a total reduction that is likely to be much larger.

Zynga continues to have big offices in San Francisco; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India, as well as several small units across the U.S. (such as Seattle and San Diego).

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

(Update: Zynga has halted trading on the Nasdaq stock market pending news.)

(Second update: Zynga confirmed layoffs and cost cuts, noting they will complete them by August.)

The reason? Mobile — a business Zynga must conquer, despite its currently smaller prospects for monetization compared to its Web business.

After a rocky IPO and trying to cope with rapid changes in its core businesses, Zynga now must refocus the company’s flagship franchises and network on the shift to mobile and a narrowing of focus at the company.

In other parlance, this is a “right-sizing” of Zynga to reflect a more somber reality that these mobile businesses are not as large as its Web-based one that rode the startup to glory on the explosive growth of social networks, primarily Facebook.

Sources said the reason for the more substantive cuts now, after earlier ones last fall, is because the decline of its Web business has been more drastic than anticipated, while the rise of its mobile business has been slower than needed. That’s been especially true on Facebook, which was once one of Zynga’s key money-making partners.

It has resulted in a perfect storm of trouble for Zynga, which has struggled with its business since its public offering, as investors have scrutinized the longevity of the hits-based online gaming business. Despite the continued strength of some of its big properties, such as FarmVille, the life cycle of most casual games has been short.

Zynga has tried to fix the situation by moving to the faster-growing mobile space. In addition, CEO and founder Mark Pincus has tried to solidify its top management, as well as bring in more board help, to strengthen efforts to revive the company.

Zynga has already been on the cost-cutting path, closing less successful games and other more ambitious products that had enjoyed less than expected traction. For example, the company has “sunsetted” 18 games in recent months, as it has deployed more resources and development to mobile efforts.

Mobile continues to be the biggest trend in the deck, by far. And that extends to people living their lives online and documenting them as they go — just look at the growth of shared photos. But last year’s theme was the mobile monetization gap, and it still exists.

Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, thinks there’s a $20 billion opportunity in Internet and mobile advertising.

And mobile usage is starting to take a bite out of the column next to it. Global mobile traffic is now at 15 percent of Internet traffic.

Global smartphone penetration is at 21 percent.

Some companies are just starting to replace desktop revenue per user with mobile revenue per user. See: Facebook.

But back to usage and shipments. Meeker called this a “stunning slide,” as it depicts the steep growth of tablets versus previous slow builds.

And here’s another angle that shows global market share heading to mobile operating systems.

To help make the case for wearable computers (and “driveables” and “scannables”), Meeker pointed out that the average smartphone user reaches for his or her phone 150 times per day.

Some big milestones for mobile access came just in the past year. Starting in the second quarter, the percentage of Chinese Internet users accessing the Web via mobile shot up above the percentage accessing via desktop.

And over in South Korea, at the end of the year, mobile search queries grew larger than PC queries.

And there are some country-to-country comparisons to be made. As of the beginning of this year, there are now more iOS and Android users in China than in the U.S.

And according to survey data, Chinese users spend more of their time on mobile and Internet than the couch potatoes watching TV in the U.S.

EyePhones Will Replace iPhones

Remember MS-DOS commands, and the WordStar keystroke combinations we had to memorize? Then the first Macintosh featured a mouse-driven GUI that was game-changing because it removed a layer of friction for both the data going in and coming out. When we tried that first model, we knew we could never go back to a C prompt.

And yet the impact of graphical computing was minor compared to how facial computing will change our lives, and how we all relate to The Collective. Think of it as a man-in-the-middle attack on our senses, intercepting all the signals we see and hear, and enhancing them before they reach our brains.

This is not science fiction, and based on prototypes I’ve seen, it’s a good bet that design teams in Google, Apple, Samsung and various military contractors are building eyewear computers that will render smartphones as obsolete as the first generation of mobile computer. I’m not talking about Google Glass, with its cute little screen in the corner. I mean an immersive experience that processes what we see, and then overlays graphical objects onto our field of view for true Terminator vision. The U.S. military has this capability today, so that troops can see pointers to their platoon members and markers of known IED locations. So now it’s just a question of making the hardware small, cheap and available in four adorable colors.

Not only will our favorite apps on eyewear computers be more immediate and engaging, but we’ll experience new computing capabilities so compelling that we’ll find them indispensible. For example, eyewear computers can record our lives and enable us to summon any relevant conversation or incident from our past. With eyewear computers, we can truly share experiences in real time, transporting ourselves to the perspective of someone on a ski slope, or in a night club, Wimbledon match or the International Space Station.

Just as Terminator did in the movie, we will air-click on actual things we see to interact with, investigate or purchase. We’ll integrate facial recognition and CRM for background data on everyone we meet. When we travel abroad, signs will appear to us in English, and when someone is speaking to us, we can simply turn on English subtitles.

A new generation of games will be more immersive and engaging than ever before.

Five years from today, when smartphone sales are in decline, we will ask ourselves: Remember when we used to spend our days looking down at those little screens?

Cyber Warfare Becomes Okay

Ever since Hollywood gave us “War Games,” the fear of cyber apocalypse has gripped America. We’ve outlawed hacking to such an extent that if you’re shut down by a cyber attack, or your data has been stolen, it’s a federal crime to even probe the attacking computers, let alone disable them. Rather than educate and activate our best and brightest hackers, we prosecute and imprison them.

Businesses haven’t complained, because they’ve never wanted to fight back. You can’t prosecute the attackers even if you find them, and admitting a breach may spook customers and even invite more attacks. So, instead of fighting, we’ve just quietly taken the punches, and wished it all away. But wishing it away is like trying to reduce teen pregnancy by preaching abstinence.

Two years ago I watched a TED audience cheer Ralph Langner for exposing the Stuxnet worm which our government developed to retard Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was as though the U.S. and Israel invented malware. Somehow, it was evil for us to use cyberspace to stop the most vitriolic, warmongering fundamentalist on our planet from making nuclear bombs. Because cyber is “unconventional,” we somehow consider it to be just as taboo to use as nuclear and chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported this morning that “Hackers Find China is a Land of Opportunity.” Not only has China allegedly hacked Google and Evernote to spy on its citizens, but it has funded massive efforts to steal information valuable to economies and national security. Attacks on our banks, utilities and defense contractors can be traced back to units in the Chinese military. We even know what building they’re in.

As cyber war rages on around us, I predict that Americans will come to appreciate that cyber operations can achieve our military and intelligence objectives far better than bullets and bombs. Cyber weapons are faster, more effective, safer, and orders of magnitude cheaper than kinetic weapons. Stuxnet penetrated where missiles cannot.

Indeed, the stigma associated with offensive cyber activity is breaking down, now that cyber attacks have exploded in frequency and scale. The banks are now asking the Feds to join the fight, so DHS, FBI and NSA are trying to figure out how to collaborate, without going to jail themselves for hacking or disclosing classified data.

This sea change presents great opportunities for startups to build a new ecosystem of cyber capabilities that defend our nation and support our military and intelligence objectives. We’ve got the best security experts in the world. New startups are enabling the exchange of threat data, using honeypots to collect counter intelligence on foreign hackers, and deploying Hadoop clusters to track botnets. They even develop exploits around newly discovered vulnerabilities to deliver offensive payloads.

Over the next five years, our nation will embrace the capabilities of American hackers to fight back in cyberspace, securing our economy and our lives. Our Defense Department will need fewer bombers, missiles and destroyers, leading to a Cyber Dividend that will fund health care, education and debt reduction.

David Cowan is a partner in Bessemer’s Menlo Park, Calif., office. He invests mostly in network technology, infrastructure SaaS, consumer Internet and cyber security.

That’s what Snapdeal and its investors are betting on. The India e-commerce marketplace is coming off of a $50 million Series C investment round, which included participation by eBay, pushing total funding past $100 million.

Snapdeal cofounders Rohit Bansal (left) and Kunal Bahl

The 800-person company started as a site that listed deals for services, but has since shifted to one that sells everything from consumer electronics to women’s shoes — all from third parties, akin to the Amazon Marketplace.

I sat down with CEO Kunal Bahl earlier this week, while he was on one of his biannual U.S. visits where he meets with investors and other e-commerce entrepreneurs. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Jason Del Rey: You started as a deals site, a la Groupon. Why the switch to a broad online marketplace model?

We started in February 2010 as a local merchants marketplace for services. Merchants would come and list their discounted services for an entire year. It wasn’t valued for just one day, like daily deals. It helped us build a lot of traffic and become a household name. Within six months, there were 50 players in the space.

By mid-2011, something interesting was happening. Merchants started reaching out, saying, “You have a lot of reach, and I manufacture watches, or men’s footwear. Can I list these on Snapdeal?” We started testing out listing physical products and showing early progress. Then we took a trip to China that convinced us this was the way forward.

What was that trip?

At the end of 2011, we visited China and did the same trip there that we do here, where we meet with investors and e-commerce companies. It gave us a very deep understanding of where India is headed in the next six or seven years. It’s very hard for us to relate to eBay or Amazon, because they are 20 years ahead of us. But Chinese companies are a lot scrappier, and maybe only six or seven years ahead of us. It’s a lot easier for us to empathize with them.

How much of your business is still the deals business?

One percent. This is the pivot Groupon always wanted to make. But they wouldn’t have been able to make it, because eBay and Amazon are already there.

But eBay, for example, is also in India, right?

EBay came to India in 2004. They’ve done a pretty good job, but are focused on C-to-C. Our focus is B-to-C, primarily. Globally, marketplaces are moving more and more to B-to-C.

Why’s that?

It’s very difficult to build trust in C-to-C. In B-to-C, you really know who the seller is. It’s typically high-trust, and tends to get faster traction.

And here is the macro reason: India retail is about 600 billion, out of which about 7 percent is modern, organized retail like big-box stores. Everything else is small mom-and-pops, export/import businesses. No individual fashion brand does more than $200 million in sales. There’s huge fragmentation from the supply side and retail distribution. The marketplace is really set up to aggregate long-tail of supply on one side and demand on the other.

You say you have 20 million registered users. How many visit the site each month?

About 14 to 15 million.

How do you market to them right now?

Mostly email. We create customer segments, and email at different frequency with different segments. We’ve also put a lot of effort into personalization and recommendation on-site. Those things account for 25 percent of our sales right now.

Amazon and eBay now have huge advertising businesses. Do you sell advertising on your site?

We recently started testing it. In the coming quarter or two, we’ll be launching our own ad exchange, giving sellers the opportunity to get prominent placement, but not in search results. We’re going to have a display ad network on the site for sellers.

eBay just led a $50 million round in Snapdeal. How did that happen?

India is really the last large ecommerce frontier left in the world. The Snapdeal team has been successful in building a scaled business in 18 or so months. Needless to say, that attracted interest of many large players, given the importance of the Indian market to their future growth, to which they set very, very aggressive targets. One way to achieve that is through the BRIC markets. And out of the BRIC markets, India has a tremendous amount of headroom for growth. And, hence, are some of the big, global players very interested in Snapdeal? The answer is, “yes.”

How do you make money?

We take commission on everything we sell. No insertion fee, no listing fee; we will never charge a listing fee, even though most marketplaces charge a listing fee. We realize the market in India is young, and we need to reduce hurdle for sellers to come to list.

What cut does Snapdeal keep?

It can range by category from 5 percent to 15 percent.

What’s your revenue?

We’ll do $400 million in topline this year — gross merchandise value. And, in India, building a $400 million business is like building a $1.5 billion business in U.S.

But your cut of that is only 5 percent to 15 percent?

It averages out to somewhere in the low teens.

Is it safe to assume you’re not profitable?

No, we’re not. And that’s okay. There’s a time for everything, and right now getting to great scale is very important to us.

What’s your biggest challenge right now?

Making sure enough new transactors are coming onboard in India. There are 100 million Internet users and a little over a billion people. But only seven to eight million have done a non-travel e-commerce transaction online.

Lenovo’s solid results stand out in the global PC industry, which is struggling with weak demand as more consumers turn to tablet computers and smartphones. Global PC shipments in the first quarter fell 14 percent from a year earlier, according to research group IDC.

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Tokyo-based SoftBank has agreed to give the federal government the right to approve one of the directors it names to Sprint’s board. That director will be responsible for overseeing national security issues. People familiar with the matter said the government is also seeking the right to approve some of Sprint’s equipment purchases and wants the removal of Chinese gear from a Sprint affiliate’s network.

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That’s what David Goldstein, president of research outfit Channel Marketing, said of Apple after the grand opening of the company’s first retail stores in 2001. Yet 12 years later, the lights in Apple’s stores remain lit, there are 406 of them spread across 14 countries, and they boast hands-down some of the most valuable retail space in the world.

In the first quarter, Apple’s average revenue per store topped out at about $13 million, reaching its highest level ever for a non-holiday quarter, according to Asymco analyst Horace Dediu. And the company collected a record $57.60 in revenue per visitor, with about $12 of that being profit.

Impressive numbers for Apple, which continues to outperform all other retailers on a per-square-foot basis in the U.S., by a very wide margin. Apple Stores earn twice as much per square foot as Tiffany & Co., the second-most-lucrative U.S. retailer, and three times as much as Lululemon Athletica, the third-most-lucrative.

And the company’s average revenue per visitor will only improve as it expands internationally, particularly in big untapped markets like China. Apple essentially doubled down on its retail presence in greater China over the past year, raising the number of stores to 11 from six. And according to CEO Tim Cook, that’s just the beginning.

“This isn’t nearly what we need, and it’s not the final by any means,” Cook said earlier this year. “We’re not even close to that. But I feel that we’re making great progress, and I am very happy with how things are going.”

And whatever the China market may lack in individual wealth, it makes up for in volume.

“This is one of the great paradoxes in Apple retail: The more Apple expands internationally, the higher their average retail revenue becomes, despite them opening stores in emerging markets such as China,” said Carl Howe, VP for research and data sciences at Yankee Group. “As a proof point, the New York flagship 5th Avenue Apple store used to be one of the highest grossing stores in the entire Apple chain, pulling in somewhere around $350 million in revenue in 2010. Today — based on anecdotal evidence, but I believe this to be true — nearly every Apple store in China sells as much or more than the 5th Avenue store. China may have a lower percentage of wealthy people than the U.S., but they have more absolute numbers of them.

“What I think this all says is that Apple has itself as a global aspirational brand, and that people will go to amazing economic lengths to own Apple products,” Howe said. “So long as Apple maintains that premium brand and value, the only limits to its retail growth is how many stores it can build.”

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

In its second deal in as many weeks, China’s largest e-commerce company will pay $294 million for a 28 percent stake in Internet mapping company AutoNavi Holdings Ltd., AutoNavi said in a statement Friday. The two companies will also cooperate and combine their data to develop e-commerce products that make use of the actual location of smartphone users.

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(Correction: With more details on Wong’s correct position below, who will be working as “senior advisor” to United States CTO Todd Park and not as Chief Privacy Officer.)

Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director of products and longtime veteran of Internet litigation issues, has been picked by the Obama administration to be the nation’s top privacy officer assisting U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The exact details of her new position are unclear, but it’s likely that she’ll be working closely with Park, who assumed office after replacing Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s first CTO (a position also created by the Obama administration).

Wong’s appointment, first reported by CNET, is a new position in the White House.

Wong joined Twitter approximately five months ago to head up its legal team, which has long dealt with First Amendment issues for the microblogging service. Previous to her time at Twitter, Wong spearheaded decisions at Google on whether certain user-generated content would remain up on YouTube and other Google-owned applications. She also dealt much in litigation with China and its government’s decisions to censor Google search content in 2010.

Sources said Twitter has not yet picked a replacement for Wong.

Neither Twitter nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.

Full correction: A previous version of this post stated Wong’s new position was as Chief Privacy Officer. As was amended this morning, sources said Wong will act as “senior advisor” to Park. We will update what that role means when we get more information.

I did just that this morning. (And you can, too, right here.) One section I found especially interesting is headlined “Role of Electronic Warfare in Future Conflict.” It details the Pentagon’s current assessment of how China’s People’s Liberation Army looks at action in the digital realm, and if nothing else, it’s certainly worth thinking about.

It’s pretty well understood that if the U.S. and China found themselves in a shooting war tomorrow, the U.S. would hold a significant military advantage. Its land forces, planes and ships and surveillance technologies are all more advanced. But much of that advantage comes from the ability to quickly share information on the battlefield, and to see everything that’s going on.

China, the Pentagon says, sees electronic warfare as a way to “reduce or eliminate” those technological advantages. How? China’s military doctrine calls for making its enemy blind, deaf and dumb by disrupting its ability to communicate and share information. “Effective EW is seen as a decisive aid during military operations and consequently the key to determining the outcome of war,” the Pentagon writes. “Potential Chinese adversaries, in particular the United States, are seen as ‘information dependent,’” the report says elsewhere.

If you’ve been paying attention to China’s numerous alleged intrusions against many, many computer systems and networks owned by U.S. government agencies and companies like Google and Intel that have disclosed attacks in the past, it’s not surprising. But when cast in the light of an overarching military philosophy, it’s more troubling.

Earlier this year, the world learned about the existence of a division of the People’s Liberation Army called Unit 61398. This unit is thought to be responsible for a series of cyber attacks against no fewer than 141 distinct companies or organizations since 2006.

The role of these attacks, the Pentagon says, is pretty straightforward: Spying and information in preparation for a day when a potential conflict might come. “China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs,” the report says. It could also give China’s leaders insight into the planning and capabilities of U.S. forces and into how leaders might respond, and that information could be “exploited during a crisis.”

China’s military thinkers, the report says, see electronic and information warfare as a “preemption weapon,” one that can be used to achieve “information dominance.” The ultimate aim: “Preclude the need for conventional military action.”

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, who I’ve quoted before. But the quotation I have in mind bears repeating: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

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Alibaba, which operates online shopping sites Taobao and Tmall, has invested $586 million to take a stake of about 18 percent in the Twitter-like Weibo service, Sina said. Sina also has granted Alibaba an option to raise its stake in the unit to 30 percent.

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Xiaomi sells out its supply in minutes each time it makes them available on its website.

At D: Dive Into Mobile, Xiaomi co-founder Bin Lin talked about the company, its sell-at-cost strategy and how it hopes to make money on services.

Lin, who previously worked for Microsoft and Google, also talked about the challenges that non-Chinese companies face in that market.

Here’s the full video of his interview with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130429/bin-lin-shows-dive-into-mobile-the-power-of-android-in-china-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130425/china-unicom-q1-net-jumps-89-percent-on-3g-fixed-line-broadband-growth/ http://allthingsd.com/20130425/china-unicom-q1-net-jumps-89-percent-on-3g-fixed-line-broadband-growth/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:30:39 +0000 Paul Mozur http://allthingsd.com/?p=315480 China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. said Thursday net profit surged 89 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier as its third-generation mobile communications network and fixed-line broadband businesses continued their rapid growth.

Chinese telecommunications carriers are scrambling to ramp up their networks to accommodate the rapid increase in data traffic in the world’s largest mobile market, as more people replace their basic cellphones with smartphones. China has already overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130425/china-unicom-q1-net-jumps-89-percent-on-3g-fixed-line-broadband-growth/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130422/u-s-eyes-pushback-on-china-hacking/ http://allthingsd.com/20130422/u-s-eyes-pushback-on-china-hacking/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:30:15 +0000 Siobhan Gorman http://allthingsd.com/?p=314254 The Obama administration is considering a raft of options to more aggressively confront China over cyber spying, officials say, a potentially rapid escalation of a conflict the White House has only recently acknowledged.

Options include trade sanctions, diplomatic pressure, indictments of Chinese nationals in U.S. courts and cyber countermeasures — both attack and defense, officials said.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130422/u-s-eyes-pushback-on-china-hacking/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130420/google-glass-workday-and-wtf-firefox-os-10-things-you-need-to-see-on-allthingsd-this-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20130420/google-glass-workday-and-wtf-firefox-os-10-things-you-need-to-see-on-allthingsd-this-week/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:00:05 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=314024

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

It’s been a long, hectic week for news — so it’s understandable if you’ve missed a couple stories on the technology side of things. Here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. In an essay in AllThingsD Voices, Jan Chipchase writes that Google Glass is the company’s “unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy … it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view.”
2. At D: Dive Into Mobile, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users.
3. Also announced at our mobile conference were Facebook’s updates to its iPhone and iPad apps to incorporate the “Chat Heads” from Facebook Home. As of Wednesday, those changes have started rolling out to users.
4. In an interview with Arik Hesseldahl, Workday co-CEO and Greylock Partner Aneel Bhusri said, “it’s the most disruptive time in 25 years” for enterprise, and that landing HP as a customer at Workday “gives people more comfort that the cloud is real.”
5. Peter Zatko, a computer hacking expert better known as Mudge, is leaving his post at DARPA, where he was tasked with helping government agencies fend off cyber attacks. Mudge’s next stop? Google.
6. If the netbook wasn’t dead already, it will be soon. New data from research house IHS iSuppli say shipments of the mini-computers will fall to zero by 2015.
7. Maybe you’ve heard of this small company called Microsoft? Windows Phone head Terry Myerson is casting his division as an underdog and going on the offensive against Google: “[there is] clearly mutiny in the Starship Android,” he said.
8. Facebook would love to put its new Home overlay on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Apple almost certainly doesn’t want it there. In this interview, Kara Swisher asked Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer and mobile head Cory Ondrejka to explain the two companies’ complicated relationship.
9. If you haven’t heard of Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi yet, you will soon. With 7.19 million handsets sold in 2012, Xiaomi president Bin Lin said the company expects to sell twice as many this year.
10. And finally, one of readers’ favorite quotes of the week came from AllThingsD’s own Walt Mossberg. He kicked off Dive Into Mobile by asking Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs about Firefox’s mobile operating system: “So … what the f**k?”

To stay on top of the latest, you should follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130420/google-glass-workday-and-wtf-firefox-os-10-things-you-need-to-see-on-allthingsd-this-week/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130419/mobile-and-global-ten-minutes-with-ebay-ceo-john-donahoe/ http://allthingsd.com/20130419/mobile-and-global-ten-minutes-with-ebay-ceo-john-donahoe/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:29:39 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=313367

Photo Credit: eBay

As e-commerce has grown more competitive with the rise of startups like Square, micro-payments companies like Stripe and independent stores like Etsy, John Donahoe has had his work cut out for him.

But the CEO has done well during his tenure at eBay thus far, kickstarting the company out of a period of stalled growth, spurring the Marketplace and PayPal payments businesses and continuing to see consecutive quarterly growth.

To keep this up, Donahoe is singing the same tune as the rest of the industry: Focus on mobile and target international markets. We caught up with him for a bit this week, where he expanded on eBay’s ambitions.

On the Rise of Mobile and Spurring Engagement

“We know that mobile users are more engaged than non-mobile users. To keep that going, the simplest thing we can do is to just be present and continue to make it easy for our customers. To do that, we’re building useful, compelling mobile apps and making the registration process very easy.

“For us, the registration flow on mobile devices in particular is easier — the best one we’ve got. You’ll remember we bought Card.io (a startup that makes mobile purchases much easier). You can just take out your credit card, take a picture and boom — you’ve made an account.

“During that first three to 18 months after registering, we see a kind of ramp up to what they buy, and the frequency with which they visit.

“Second, it’s the multiscreen users that tend to be more engaged over time. For example, we’ve seen you browsing on your smartphone and then you buy an item on your desktop. That’s increasingly the wave of the future. You’re going to have screens on everything — your smartphone, your laptop, your car, your watch, almost anything with a surface.”

On International Growth

“Here’s some facts in rough terms. There’s more than two billion Internet users today, and that number will double over the next two years. Think about who’s going to make up those new users — 78 percent of those new users will be in BRIC and emerging markets. You gotta go to where the people are, and the majority of those people will be accessing the Web by the smartphone.

“They’ve become global Internet citizens, if you will, but they want to trade, and in many cases there won’t be a local e-commerce option. Russia, for example, wants goods and services that aren’t available there. So they’ll shop on eBay. Because such a large portion of our business is cross-border, we see many consumers coming in from these emerging markets.

“Again, that’s where our mobile leadership really helps. There’s a lot being said about mobile first right now. We’re not saying it, we’re doing it.

“We’ve launched Russian mobile apps. We’ve got a large team of mobile app developers. We bought Critical Path Software. We bought Duff Research. The innovation and the cycle time with which we can build innovative work is getting faster and faster.”

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