At AllThingsD, we love Liz Gannes too, but not quite as endearing-creepily as Steve Clausnitzer of Hubski, a “thoughtful” social aggregation site, does.

Like a lot of start-ups, he wants our fantastic social reporter to check out his site and possibly write about it. But, unlike others, to entice Liz Clausnitzer has penned a little ditty that he posted on YouTube.

You need to watch it to experience the full oddball effort (although we all agree on her very lovely smile)– but mission accomplished on us noticing you, Steve!

I can make no promises that Liz will cover Hubski, of course.

But she is not alone in the video PR pleas — embedded below is one from June to our commerce reporter Tricia Duryee about a new online game from Sir Mix-A-Lot (who seems to do this sort of thing a lot):

Silicon Valley’s Silver Lake and DST Global of Russia, as well as Chinese private equity firm Yunfeng Capital, are leading a $1.6 billion tender offer for privately held employee and shareholder stock of China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources close to the situation.

Yunfeng, by the way, was co-founded by Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma, as well as other prominent Chinese entrepreneurs.

Along with DST, Silver Lake and Yunfeng, Singapore-based investment firm Temasek is also participating in the tender offer as an investor, but in a smaller way.

The deal, which has been discussed for some time, was signed earlier today and will be presented to its employees in an internal company blog, which will be in Chinese.

To get around persistent foreign ownership issues in China, sources said, DST and Silver Lake are ceding voting control of their stakes to Alibaba management.

If the tender is fully subscribed, that would mean a stake of just under five percent for the group, sources said, and it gives Alibaba a $32 billion enterprise valuation.

The impetus for the tender offer, which begins today, appears to be trying to address a cash-out, paper-rich issue for Alibaba employees.

There are no active secondary private markets in China, as is the case for tech start-ups in the U.S., and there is also no IPO in the foreseeable future for Alibaba. Thus, management has been looking for a way to give its employees and also other shareholders some liquidity.

This tender offer is not a capital raise by Alibaba and is only aimed at eligible employees and shareholders. The purchase of the Alibaba shares is expected to close before the end of December.

It will be done via a special investment vehicle, specifically aimed at this purchase, that includes a spate of investors. Giant Interactive Group, a Chinese online game developer, for example, said it had committed $50 million to the fund.

It’s not clear what the implications are for Alibaba’s biggest shareholder, Yahoo, which sources said is not selling shares in the tender offer. Yahoo’s fully diluted Alibaba 39 percent stake is now worth $12.5 billion in the deal.

That’s discounted due to tax issues and also the inability of the Silicon Valley Internet giant to sell its Alibaba shares.

In other words, investors will likely welcome this higher valuation, but realize a public offering is farther away than ever.

But it is interesting in that it clearly shows a strong relationship between DST and Silver Lake, which have jointly been mulling a possible bid for Yahoo along with Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as I previously reported.

Some will speculate that Silver Lake and DST now have an in with Alibaba, which is important, since a large slug of Yahoo’s market valuation is due to its Alibaba and also Yahoo Japan! assets.

If Yahoo is sold, of course, the disposition of the Alibaba asset is an important part of the deal.

More to come, including the implications for Ma, who has been under siege of late around his spinning out of Alibaba’s Alipay payments service and the noisy battle that later ensued with Yahoo. Yahoo and Alibaba, as well as its other large shareholder, Japan’s SoftBank, settled that dispute earlier this summer.

His involvement in Yunfeng, which is buying the company’s shares in a special fund that Ma is not in, will likely attract some scrutiny, anyway.

Sources said Ma is a minority investor in Yunfeng itself, has no control rights and is not a director. In addition, Yunfeng has no relationship with Alibaba.

In another interesting twist, Alibaba rival Tencent has close ties with DST’s Internet affiliate that used to share the same name, having invested $300 million last year in the affiliate that holds major Russian Internet properties.

“This is the first alternate-reality game I’ve played, and I didn’t know what to expect,” the resident of Twentynine Palms, Calif., says. But he and other players he met through the game soon guessed “the test” must be a promotion for a new video game.

Instead, though, the teaser campaign is part of an elaborate marketing plan for Wrigley’s 5 gum. Wrigley introduced the brand in 2007 to try to bring teens and young adults back to chewing gum. The company was acquired by Mars Inc. in 2008.

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The success of the price cuts — as deep as 40 percent — will be vital for the company’s prosperity.

“If this price cut doesn’t work, there’s not much more they can do,” said Macquarie Securities analyst David Gibson.

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Finland’s Rovio Entertainment Ltd., the game’s developer, this month will publish the first in a line of books, “Bad Piggies Egg Recipes,” with such fare as egg-salad sandwiches and egg sushi. The title refers to the game’s porcine thieves, who become targets for an enraged group of birds after stealing their eggs.

Next up: Angry Birds in the classroom.

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I shall say no more than this: Pretty please watch this video for the Champion Jockey interactive game, which you can play on Microsoft’s Kinect player, if only for the bobbing and weaving dude who demos it.

If only.

I must underscore how much this looks like my high school prom date’s dance stylings, but it’s even better than that, since I could not completely appreciate those at the time.

Enjoy:

Monthly game sales at brick-and-mortar retail shops have suffered as gamers flocked to both online marketplaces and cheaper games on Web sites such as Facebook and smartphones such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

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The San Francisco-based company announced the acquisitions — Kirkland, Wash.-based Griptonite Games and Toronto-based Blammo Games — as part of its second-quarter earnings yesterday.

Over the past year or so, Glu has aggressively been trying to reinvent itself as a company that develops free-to-play games for mobile devices with features similar to those found on Facebook. Previously, the company was known for selling feature phone games around the world.

Following several acquisitions in the space — including the agreement by Electronic Arts to purchase PopCap for $750 million, and Zynga’s healthy appetite, which has included purchasing more than one company every month for the past year — Glu has been named as a potential acquisition target.

In this case, it appears to be getting out in front of the trend.

Over the past year, Glu has been fairly successful with such hits as Contract Killer, Bug Village and Gun Bros, mostly on the iPhone and iPad, but also increasingly on Android.

In the earnings call yesterday, Glu’s CFO Eric Ludwig explained that the acquisitions were due in part to Zynga’s competitive threat as the social games giant increases its mobile acquisitions. “Glu already has scale in sales, marketing and G&A function, but we have been capacity constrained in our development studio side,” he said, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript of the call.

Both of the acquisitions were paid for in stock.

Griptonite, which has about 200 employees, has been focused on developing titles for multiple platforms including consoles, Nintendo’s DS and the iPhone, but will switch over to making freemium games this year. Glu issued a total of 6,106,015 shares of common stock for the company, which, based on yesterday’s stock price of $4.60 a share, is close to $28 million.

Blammo Games, which was already developing two titles for Glu as a partner, will receive 1 million shares of stock with the potential to earn up to 3.3 million if it hits certain revenue milestones. Blammo is run by Christopher Locke, who was one of the creators of Smurf’s Village and Zombie Café, two very popular games.

As far as the earnings report, revenues totaled $17.7 million in the second quarter, increasing from $15.9 million in the year-ago period. The company also narrowed its losses to $1.8 million, or 3 cents a share, compared to $3.2 million, or 10 cents a share, in the second quarter of 2010.

For the first time, smartphone revenues from free-to-play games exceeded revenues from its legacy feature-phone business. It said that in the quarter, smartphone revenues totaled $9.4 million to leapfrog feature-phone sales of $8.3 million.

Okay, Hollywood has apparently made a movie from the classic Hasbro game “Battleship.”

But instead of plastic pegs in a board, it’s chock full of special effects, aliens and a lot of explosions.

Yes, aliens. It’s a long way from B1.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

So exactly how fecund is “FarmVille”?

If reports hold, we’ll all find out today what the yield is from the online gaming phenom Zynga, which will finally be filing its regulatory documents sometime today.

The S-1 for a public offering valued at up to $20 billion, which will contain all kinds of juicy information about the San Francisco-based start-up’s business, is likely to come out after the markets close. Zynga is expected to raise $2 billion in the offering.

Before everyone gets to see what’s in it, there’s a lot that investors should be looking out for, based on recent IPO filings by similar companies, such as Groupon.

Digging Up New Accounting Ground

As Tricia Duryee pointed out, Zynga will be the “first major U.S. company supported primarily by the sale of virtual goods” to file.

That’s what will likely make the Zynga filing very interesting, from an accounting point of view.

How Zynga handles its accounting is sure to be much scrutinized, especially since Groupon attracted all kinds of ugly from its unusual treatment of its financial results.

To defocus from its money-losing under GAAP acounting, the Chicago-based social buying service used the more attractive “Adjusted CSOI,” which is defined as adjusted consolidated segment operating income.

My definition: Sketchy!

Zynga’s finances are expected to look better, reportedly generating about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue.

It will be important to pay attention to the breakdown of those revenues and about what period of time the company accounts for them.

As Duryee wrote, Zynga has several choices:

Game-based model: The company recognizes revenue over the life of the game.

User-based model: Revenue is recognized over the estimated life a user plays the game.

Item-based model: Revenue is recognized based on the implied or explicit life span of the item — in other words, how long it would last in the real world. Examples of more durable goods are virtual vehicles, furniture or weapons. Revenue from these would be recognized for as long as the player stays active in the game. Revenues from a more consumable item, like a virtual cup of coffee or a jolt of energy, would be recognized almost immediately.

And there are still other factors to take into consideration, such as whether the goods were paid for with virtual currency or real cash, and how much information a company has for establishing the averages.

In the Revenue Weeds

Another interesting thing to study will be the revenue breakdown for Zynga, especially as it relates to its biggest platform provider, Facebook.

Such as: How many in-game items are purchased directly on Facebook versus through gift cards purchased in the store? How big (or small) is Zynga’s advertising business? What about mobile games? Will the profitability of individual games be called out, with details about their performance?

And, of all its various distribution platforms for its games, where does it get the most mojo?

That’s important, since Zynga will be seen as a proxy for Facebook’s business. Thus, a lot of investors might find some nuggets of information, since the pair are so tightly intertwined as businesses.

Facebook, of course, has been famously trying not to IPO, so any indication of the social networking site’s business will be carefully studied.

Reaping the Insider Rewards

Lastly, it’ll be important to see who is selling what and when among current Zynga investors.

Groupon ran into a buzz saw of criticism from the giant payouts its founders took out of the company from its massive venture funding rounds.

As Peter Kafka wrote:

Groupon raised a total of $946 million in two funding rounds last winter. It kept $136 million of it to help run the money-losing company. The remaining $810 million was paid out, via stock purchases, to CEO Andrew Mason and some of his backers, including Eric Lefkofsky, and, notably, the Samwer brothers, who sold their CityDeal company to Groupon in 2010 … Of note: This wasn’t the first time Groupon had raised money and taken cash off the table. In April 2010, the company raised $130 million, and handed $120 million to many of the same people.

My definition: Even sketchier!

Along with its founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Zynga investors are the pantheon of venture players, including Digital Sky Technologies, Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures and angel investors LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.

How much Pincus and others inside the company have taken out and are selling should be one of the first places new investors should look.

Because with the hyped valuations that many of these Web 2.0 companies are getting, who’s zooming who should be a key sign to pay mind to.

Though BoomTown was dubious, this trailer for the upcoming J.J. Abrams movie “Super 8″ is pretty cool beans.

It is in the style of an interactive video game–in fact, Abrams worked with the creators of the recently released “Portal 2″ to embed it right into the video game–and turns out to be mighty scary, since the film concerns an escape of dangerous aliens after a train derailment.

Check it out:

Earlier this week, the online game industry got a jolt of attention after Myspace co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe doubled down his investments in the game space. After purchasing MindJolt in early 2010, DeWolfe acquired two more companies this week: SGN, a developer and publisher of social mobile games; and Hallpass Media, a popular free online game network.

Given all the scuttlebutt, here’s the official list of the top 10 online game properties ranked by unique visitors in March, according to comScore.

In first place is Spil Games, the Netherlands-based company that has localized its games around the world. It continues to dominate the charts, attracting nearly 50 million unique visitors last month to its various girl-, teen- and family-focused properties. In second place is GSN Games, a company owned by DIRECTV and Sony Pictures Entertainment, and in third and fourth places, respectively, are well-known players like Electronic Arts and WildTangent.

But Hi5, the former social network that is trying desperately hard to remake itself into a game destination by luring over popular games from Facebook is a surprise at sixth place.

In fact, this marks the company’s debut appearance.

Hi5 put out the list today to make the assertion that the transformation has been a success. Well, sort of. Truthfully, this marks the first time comScore categorized the company as a game network instead of a social network. Still, with 21.7 million unique visitors, it leap-frogged other well-known properties, such as Nickelodeon, Yahoo and MSN.

Here’s the chart:

Photo credit: Wallyg

Nothing makes you feel like a rock-and-roll god more than shredding on Activision’s Guitar Hero or Electronic Arts’ Rock Band–except, of course, for actually becoming one.

Rock Prodigy, from the angel-funded and cumbersomely named The Way of H, is an app for Apple’s iOS that replaces plastic videogame guitars with the real thing and helps players earn skill and musicianship, rather than just points.

Co-founders Tyson Butler and Harold Lee designed the game/teaching tool to mimic the interface of a Guitar Hero style game, with scrolling notes atop a digital fretboard.

Instead of tapping buttons and strumming a plastic flipper, Rock Prodigy lets you sit in front of your iPhone or iPad and play real notes on your own six-string. The notes are then detected by the iPad or iPhone. When you hit the right note, you earn points and the song goes on.

“We want to provide people an easier and more rewarding way to get into music and advance more quickly. We want to put positive, rewarding, game-like elements on top of real music education,” Lee said.

Ease of music education seems pretty close to Lee’s heart. He dropped out of two different music schools before finishing a musicology degree.

If you’ve spent any time with Rock Band, Rock Prodigy’s business model will also seem familiar.

The app is free, but songs cost $1.99 each. For twice the going rate on iTunes, users hear the master recordings of popular songs–the start-up licensed the masters, so they can separate the recorded tracks and silence the guitar part when notes are missed–and get the flowing sheet music composed for each song at four difficulty levels.

“At the beginner level, you are only playing one out of every twenty or thirty notes,” Lee explained. “We have music majors who are essentially writing simple guitar arrangements for each of these songs, at the different levels.”

Butler, who plays the part of CFO to Lee’s CEO, explained that the biggest issue for them initially was licensing the music.

“We had really ambitious goals early on, but there was a long time when we had only successfully licensed one song.” he said.

Users would have probably gotten pretty tired of playing nothing but Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” over and over.

Their catalog is a little more fleshed out these days, which Butler partially attributes to guidance from two of their angel investors–Rob Cavallo, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, and prominent entertainment lawyer Charles Ortner.

Rock Prodigy’s second act will be to expand the app’s offerings to serve other instruments, but Lee really summed up the grand mission well.

“We feel this has the potential to be the new sheet music,” he said. “That’s what we really believe.”

If you believe in miracles, watch me fail at playing Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” in fact, at the end of the video interview and jam session with Lee: