The chip maker’s shareholder returns for the year will include its regular quarterly dividend of 7.5 cents, amounting to about $50 million a quarter.

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Complicating Sharp’s attempts to survive increasingly dire finances, two former presidents have joined current President Takashi Okuda in seeking to negotiate deals with different sets of possible investors, creating confusion among creditors and potential investors about who is in charge at a critical moment.

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And if you haven’t here’s a rundown: A collection of pension funds led by the investment arm of the labor federation Change to Win — a.k.a. CtW — has decided to start a push to eject three HP directors who are standing for reelection at a meeting next month. The three in the CtW’s sights are Chairman Ray Lane (pictured), John Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson.

CtW owns about 7.8 million shares, which amounts to less than one half of 1 percent of HP shares outstanding, so the chances of the group succeeding are pretty small. But the larger group behind the effort is said to own about 135 million shares, or nearly 7 percent of HP’s equity. That’s enough proxy oomph to get HP’s attention, so the company is taking the effort seriously; a delegation from the board, including Lane, was to meet with representatives of the group today.

Below is the group’s original letter outlining certain problems and demands for changes that it wants from HP. Among them is a request for an “independent special master” who would be appointed to investigate the circumstances leading up to the $11 billion acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy. That deal, you’ll recall, famously went south when HP announced that Autonomy assets would account for about $5.5 billion out of a total $8 billion write-down late last year.

The group also demanded that HP sever ties with its auditing firm, Ernst and Young. Specifically, it complains that HP has paid the firm too much in fees unrelated to auditing work, while those same fees at Dell and Apple have been falling, thus giving the appearance of a conflict of interest between different arms of that firm. It goes on to question other factors, such as whether or not Enrst and Young was paying enough attention to the acquisition of EDS, which itself was the target of another $8 billion HP write-down earlier in 2012: “The Audit Committee’s willingness to allow Ernst & Young to perform multiple and conflicting roles for HP severely undermines shareholder confidence in the ability of the Committee as currently constituted to steer an appropriate course in the future. As a result we believe that this relationship must end now, and that HP should immediately begin the process of finding a new external auditor,” the letter reads in part.

Here’s the letter from CtW in full.

CtW HP Letter by Arik Hesseldahl

Chief Executive Tim O’Shaughnessy announced the investment in a memo to employees Wednesday. “This new investment round will allow us to dedicate the resources we need, while also building a significant cash reserve against unanticipated events or bumps in the road,” he said in the memo.

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On Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer called the company’s mobile efforts a “nascent source of revenue,” a theme she reiterated in her appearance earlier this week at a Goldman Sachs investment conference in San Francisco.

There, she said that the company was going to cut down on its apps portfolio from more than 60 to “the dozen or so applications that people use all the time on their phone” to turbocharge efforts in the key arena.

Touting her mobile aspirations, as well as noting Yahoo’s clear weakness in the area, has been a carefully concerted Mayer effort to get in front of investors’ worries about the company’s mobile performance.

In fact, Mayer addressed the issue in an interview with Bloomberg recently, noting rhetorically: “Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser or a social network, how are we going to compete?”

How, indeed.

Because, according to sources inside the company, direct mobile revenue hovers only around $125 million annually, mostly from search revenue on mobile devices. While users are consuming lots of Yahoo Web pages on their phones, which could technically boost the sales numbers higher, rendering most desktop-created ads on mobile is not the same thing as the significant mobile revenue Yahoo needs to generate.

There’s no question that Mayer has taken every public opportunity she can to talk about how important mobile is to Yahoo’s future and how she is going to double down in the area. Along with loudly proclaiming her commitment to the fast-growing sector, she has also bought a number of small mobile startups since she arrived at the Silicon Valley Internet giant last year.

Last week that meant Yahoo scooped up Alike, a mobile app that helps users discover nearby venues and places to visit based on your interests.

But, while these acquisitions are all interesting and important to spur innovation and consumer engagement, they are still very tiny steps to solving the big problem for Yahoo to make mobile a truly significant revenue stream without any of the most critical elements of the ecosystem that rivals have.

It’s not that Yahoo has not tried in the past, having mounted several aggressive and quite elaborate mobile efforts over the years. But, without going into painful detail, most have had little traction overall and no needle-moving revenue to speak of.

The constant shifting of mobile-focused execs has been another difficulty, with little continuing leadership since Marco Boerries left in 2009. To fix that, Mayer appointed Adam Cahan as Yahoo’s mobile product kingpin in November. The former IntoNow founder and CEO oversees all mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

But mobile monetization is another issue, without a significant mobile advertising czar in charge — a task which then presumably falls to new COO Henrique De Castro. But while the Google exec is an experienced enough online ad exec, he was definitely not known at the search giant for any serious mobile expertise.

Yahoo will need that and fast, because however you count mobile revenue at the company, insiders there admit it is extraordinarily low. That’s probably why Mayer declined to share specific mobile revenue figures in Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, instead touting 200 million daily active mobile users.

Impressive? Not exactly. By comparison, Facebook said it had 618 million daily active mobile users with 23 percent of its $1.33 billion in Q4 revenue from mobile, from an almost zero base a year ago.

That’s 10 times more than Yahoo — about $300 million a quarter versus $30 million.

Interestingly, at the Goldman conference, Mayer made the point that no one has cracked the mobile monetization puzzle. True enough, but both Facebook and, of course, Google are well down the road to doing so, while Yahoo remains stalled as yet.

To be fair, the acceleration of mobile monetization at Facebook is perhaps easier for the social networking giant, which has been achieving that by leveraging its singular product and audience and building its own mobile ad technology.

And Google has already been hard at work retrofitting its massive search business to aim at mobile, has strengthened its efforts with the purchase of AdMob and Motorola and, of course, has made the early and enormous investment in its Android platform.

From a stand start, it’s all a much harder task for Yahoo, which has a plethora of product offerings that all require different mobile monetization solutions. It’s a bigger problem since Yahoo’s own mobile ad targeting and contextual search is considered weak and unable to serve better targeted ads in a variety of mobile experiences. That means things as simple as when you search for a sports game, you get a beer ad.

In improving this, Yahoo has few choices — building it up in-house, acquiring a company with mobile ad expertise or partnering with someone in a significant manner, which most suggest is its best alternative in the short term.

The first is certainly important, which is why Mayer is pursuing the range of mobile startups she has, seeking both apps consumers will love and engineering expertise in the area. That is all well and good, but focus has to be on creating great products first and, as Mayer has said repeatedly, money should follow.

The second has also been considered, with Yahoo looking at a range of possible acquisitions to improve its mobile ad technology. In this, because of Yahoo’s huge scale, there are still few choices, boiling down to the larger players, JumpTap and Millennial.

Yahoo has mulled over acquiring both over the years and even recently, although the price tags are high and there are issues about whether this will solve the problem or not.

One possible short-term alternative is to do some kind of mobile advertising or contextual search deal with Google and perhaps one with Apple, which has its own iAd offering.

According to sources, Yahoo’s current search partnership does not preclude the company from working with Google in certain mobile monetization areas. In fact, the pair recently struck a deal, as Peter Kafka wrote, “to begin running some of its AdSense display ads on Yahoo sites, and will become one of several ad networks Yahoo uses to fill some of its pages.”

That’s money in the bank for Yahoo, which Mayer — an ex-Googler, too — knows might extend well to mobile monetization and innovation. She has famously handed out free smartphones to all employees, which is a nice touch and also an important message to send to them and others.

But it will take a lot more than an iPhone in every cubicle at Yahoo, because mobile is the issue she will be scrutinized for, given the stress she has put on it as one of the key ways to revive Yahoo.

“There is no question Marissa will be judged on bringing the product management expertise she demonstrated at Google to Yahoo to make things consumers want to use in mobile,” one top Yahoo insider told me. “The thing is, she has to also actually make some real money doing it.”

But that kind of chatter doesn’t matter much to Wall Street, which is very happy that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has finally decided to dump his magazines. Time Warner shares closed at $53.63 today, up 2.5 percent since midday Tuesday, when the news first broke.

And that boost was enough to bring TWX to levels it hasn’t seen since the fall of 2007. Back then, Dick Parsons still ran the company, and it still owned AOL and Time Warner Cable. And Lehman Brothers wasn’t a smoking crater.

The bump reflects the certainty that even if the Meredith joint venture doesn’t happen — and my understanding is that those talks are quite far along at this point — Bewkes has now committed to dumping publishing, period.

Smart people I talk to say that if the Meredith deal falls apart, then the next step would be to pursue a public spinoff, a la Time Warner Cable and AOL. While I had originally assumed that both traditional publishers and non-strategic investors would want to take a crack at Time Inc., I’ve since become disabused of that notion: A straightforward sale would create a huge tax bill for Time Warner, because even in their declining state, some of these magazines are going to create huge capital gains. Spinning them off into a newco should solve that.

[Shutterstock/Andrew Bassett]

Wikipedia

The interest in the six-person company shows how significant recording game play has become over the past year as other sites like Machinima and TwitchTV have become phenomenal hits within the gamer community.

What’s different about Kamcord is that it is recording mobile games, whereas other companies in the space have so far been focused on console gaming and PC gaming.

Matt Zitzmann, CEO and co-founder of Kamcord, said the company is announcing a seed round today totaling $1.5 million. Other investors in the round include Merus Capital, Y Combinator, XG Ventures, Digital Garage, Plug and Play Tech Center, iVentureCapital, GVA Capital and Netprice.

Kamcord is distributing its software to game developers via a software development kit, which records what’s happening on the phone’s screen while someone plays a game. After a level or game is completed, the gamer has the opportunity to watch the video and then share it to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or email — which they very well might do if they achieve a new high score.

So far, the free SDK is live in more than 57 games on iOS, and is creating an average of seven videos per second. While that’s a lot of video, the number could be deceiving, since developers often automatically record game play regardless of whether a user ends up sharing or watching it. The video is stored on the phone until it is shared.

Zitzmann hopes to monetize the technology by helping developers drive downloads to their games. For example, last month he said that Kevin Rose, a partner at Google Ventures, tweeted a link to one of his videos. Afterward, 20 percent of the viewers clicked through to either the App Store or Google Play to see more info on the game (it’s unknown how many people downloaded it).

Zitzmann said Kamcord is playing off a number of trends that are currently hot, which is likely the reason for investor interest.

“We are riding a few waves: The rise of mobile gaming, plus app distribution changing and the popularity of recording and sharing,” he said.

Along with the potential for others to enter the space, Applifier, with offices in Finland and San Francisco, has developed a service called Everyplay that allows users to post their game play to social networks. The company recently raised $4 million, according to Inside Social Games.

Driving the rally: A number of analyst reports calling out the slide as unmerited, and touting Apple as undervalued. In a note to clients this morning, Topeka Capital Markets’ Brian White said Apple’s slide is a real head-scratcher.

“The sell-off in Apple’s stock over the past eight weeks has gotten to the point of being ‘insanely insane’ given the depressed valuation, new blockbuster products for the holiday season, the attractive long-term growth opportunities that lie ahead and the company’s ability to distribute significant cash flow to investors,” White wrote. “Those investors that have missed Apple or have been under-weight the stock, now have another opportunity to buy Apple before sentiment takes a turn for the positive during what has historically been the strongest quarter of the year for the stock.”

Given the action today around Apple shares, it seems that quite a few investors have had similar ideas, setting up the company’s stock for the same seasonal pattern it has been following for years. As I wrote this weekend:

“This pre-holiday decline is a historical pattern. It’s been happening for years. Apple shares slip late in the year amid profit-taking and some irrationality or other. And then the company reports monster first-quarter earnings in January, and they spike. It happened this year. And last year. And the year before that. And the year before that, as well. … Over the past decade, Apple shares fell an average of more than 1 percent in December back to 2002, and rose an average of more than 3 percent in January.”

A group of well-known technology investors has bought a $20 million controlling stake in Blue Bottle Coffee, a specialty coffee retailer that is gaining fame among the Bay Area’s hipsters. Among the group: Tony Conrad, a partner at True Ventures, Google Ventures, Twitter Inc. co-founder Evan Williams, and Kevin Rose, the founder of the Digg Web site.

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It’s about time. Facebook stock is in free fall — more than halved from its initial listing price at $38 per share — and investors are freaking out. Wall Street responded accordingly with its share of finger-pointing, calling for the heads of executive management.

Questions of blame aside, this is Zuckerberg’s first chance to address some of the biggest questions hanging over his company’s head, with the potential to assuage at least some investor concern.

Here are a few topics I think he should speak to — after that, delivery is on him.

Strategy: Short Term vs. Long Term

Since Facebook first filed its S-1 to go public, Zuckerberg has made no bones about his lack of regard for the Street. “We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote in his founder’s letter last February. “We make money to build better services.” Essentially, it was a message saying that Zuckerberg wouldn’t put short-term fiscal gains ahead of the long-term well-being of the company.

The grim reality of being public, however, has set in. Investors have shown waning confidence in the company’s monetization prospects through the sinking share price. Despite the continued insistent focus on the long-term, Zuckerberg needs to address the here-and-now, what Facebook can do in the short-term.

Why? Because despite whatever grand plan Facebook management has for the company, the reality is that a tanking stock price affects a company in palpable ways, from internal struggle to strain on external partnerships. Shrugging off concerns can only work as a strategy for so long.

How, for instance, can Facebook use its newly gotten IPO gains to get ahead? What sort of immediate acquisitions will the company focus on? Is Facebook in the business of acquiring teams for talent, or for technology?

From there, Zuckerberg could then elaborate further on his vision for Facebook, and how the company’s biggest initiatives — especially Open Graph and working with third-party developers — will benefit Facebook in the long run. While this is obviously more comfortable territory for him, the public needs a better idea of how Facebook plans to get there.

Monetization, Mobile and Otherwise

Everyone already knows Facebook’s scale is massive — the company comes closer to the billion-user mark with each passing day. But despite the scale, there’s still that other lingering problem: Revenue.

Right now, Facebook’s ARPU (average revenue per user) isn’t as impressive as some of its peers (like, say, Google), hovering in the dollar to buck-and-a-quarter range. What’s more, user growth is slowing in North America and Europe, where the ARPU is highest, while the fastest-growing areas of user growth — places like Asia and what Facebook calls the “rest of the world” region — typically have some of the lowest ARPU numbers.

Add to that the growing trend of users flocking to mobile devices, a platform that Facebook readily admits it has not effectively monetized. That’s certainly a problem for Facebook when sources of user growth like developing nations rely primarily on low-cost mobile devices to access the company’s services.

And as my colleague Peter Kafka has stated so aptly before, Facebook is still figuring out its whole advertising game. It doesn’t have, for instance, a Google AdWords-like product, essentially a straightforward way of showing advertisers where their ad budgets are going.

But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. Can Zuckerberg plainly and clearly explain what’s in store for Facebook’s advertising strategy for monetizing mobile, or shed light on any potential ad products that we aren’t privy to? That’d be nice.

Supporting the Troops

If you’re an employee inside of Facebook, the last three months have sucked. I’ve heard tales from exasperated Facebook employees who go home from work only to hear from friends and family how awful they’ve heard the company is doing. It’s a wear on internal morale — something that could seriously affect attrition rates.

That’s especially true considering the additional pressure over the next 18 months, as employee shares continue to come out of lockup. Those sitting on millions from when they first signed on could essentially cut and run to a new outfit, either joining a competitor or perhaps taking the money to float a new start-up of their own.

What Facebook needs is a public rallying cry, something beyond the internal all-hands meetings Facebook holds regularly, in which Zuckerberg has reportedly reassured his employees, while acknowledging that the stock slide was “painful” to witness.

A strong declaration of solidarity that, yes, things are tough, but the company has banded together to weather the storm, could help ease the scrutiny his employees face from everyone on the outside.

And it would also be a reminder to prospective Facebookers that the company is still hiring actively, and that it’s still a desirable place to work for a young, upstart engineer.

Admit It: You Blew the IPO

Lastly, there’s the botched IPO that will live in infamy. All we’ve heard is Wall Street and media chatter, with Facebook staying largely mum on the topic. No explanation on why it went down the way it did, no retrospective on what the company would have done differently. (The most we’ve heard was from CFO David Ebersman on Facebook’s first earnings call in July, parroting the “long-term” party line: “We’re disappointed in the way the stock has traded. But we’re focused on long-term.”)

Basically, the public wants to be leveled with. Insight as to why things went south the way they did could ease tensions with retail investors who feel scorned from the offering, particularly when buying into Facebook seemed like a sure bet from the start. It won’t necessarily yield any immediate returns, but it could stanch further bleeding, keeping some from cashing out sooner rather than later.

It’s the elephant that has been in the room for months. Talk about it.

Mark Zuckerberg: CEO

Ultimately, much of Zuckerberg’s appearance will boil down to something intangible: The way he carries himself.

Will his performance onstage carry with it the gravitas of a CEO in control of his company, a commanding presence who knows how to lead? Has the young tech prodigy moved past the days of sweaty public nervousness? It’s unclear what to expect, exactly: I haven’t seen him at an event in the flesh in more than a year.

But one thing’s for sure: He needs to nail it.

At least four Groupon investors who held stock in the daily-deals company before it went public have sold or significantly pared back their holdings in recent months. Since its initial public offering in November, Groupon has shed more than three-quarters of its stock-market value, or about $10 billion.

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Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is no longer brushing off concern about his company’s sinking stock price, acknowledging to employees for the first time that the selloff could hurt them.

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So, why did the company’s stock fall a jaw-dropping 20 percent?

In a nutshell: During the quarter, most of the company’s growth came from its lower-margin products business and not its super-lucrative coupons business.

Groupon Goods, which sells everything from bed linens to yogurt-making kits, surpassed $200 million in annualized revenue in the quarter.

While that’s impressive for the nine-month-old business, investors and analysts have a good reason to be bummed. Sales from Groupon Goods, along with other items the company sells directly, accounted for 12 percent of revenue during the period. When excluding these items, revenue actually fell 7 percent compared to the first quarter.

Additionally, since Groupon purchases some of these items in advance, its expenses went up. In the second quarter, Groupon’s so-called “cost of goods sold” increased to 24 percent of sales, up from 14 percent in the year-ago period, explains The Wall Street Journal.

In a detailed analysis of this trend, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget said: “Groupon’s core business … is now shrinking.”

The chart on the left illustrates this well.

In the second quarter, you can see how the company’s revenue is no longer increasing by leaps and bounds. Additionally, the company blamed some of the period’s difficulties on economic woes in Europe and foreign exchange rates. For example, Groupon said revenue increased 45 percent year over year, but would have jumped by 53 percent if the impact of foreign exchange was eliminated.

But it’s the core business that most investors find themselves concerned with. Going forward, the company is offering a conservative forecast. In the third quarter, it expects revenue to total $580 million to $620 million. Meanwhile, analysts are expecting revenue of $605.5 million, or slightly above the midpoint.

During the conference call, executives declined to discuss margins for Goods, which is really at the heart of the matter.

“The success we’ve had on Groupon Goods is a reflection of our consumer brand,” said Groupon’s Chief Andrew Mason, who added that the opportunity reminded him of the company’s early days. “Our customers think of us as a way to find unbeatable prices.”

In after-hours trading, the company’s stock fell nearly 20 percent to $6.06 a share to hit a new all-time low.

Angel investor Peter Thiel and venture-capital firm Accel Partners are among early backers who are sitting on sizable paper gains, even with the company’s stock down 43 percent from its $38 offering price. Mr. Thiel and Accel, for example, bought into the company when it was valued at less than $1 billion. Today, its market capitalization is about $60 billion.

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That would continue a trend established earlier this year when peers Groupon Inc. and Zynga Inc. faced similar circumstances — the expiration of rules that temporarily barred early investors from selling more shares into the market.

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The company sold 3.5 million shares last night at $26 a share, raising $100 million. At that price, the company has a market valuation of roughly $1 billion.

Only last week, Kayak had estimated that it would sell 3.5 million shares between $22 and $25. The stock can be found on the Nasdaq Exchange under the ticker symbol KYAK.

After its initial opening, shares continued to rise, trading as much as 25 percent higher.

Kayak was founded in 2004 by Steve Hafner, Kayak’s CEO, and Paul English, Kayak’s CTO.

The IPO has been a long time in coming. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company filed nearly a year ago, but faced multiple delays as the economy sputtered. More recently, the offering was considered to be a possibility again, after other companies — such as LinkedIn, Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook and others — went public with varying degrees of success.

Palo Alto Networks, a provider of Internet firewall technology, also started trading early this morning, jumping as much as 48 percent in its public debut.

Kayak had raised a combined $223 million over four rounds, including a mammoth $196 million round in 2007 from Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, most of which was used to acquire rival SideStep for about $200 million in cash and stock.

Now that’s over, and founder and CEO Mark Pincus has been on roll. In June, he appeared at the D: All Things Digital conference. Later the same month, he hosted a press event at Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters, and earlier this week he was the keynote speaker at the GamesBeat conference.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Pincus explained why he’s got so much to say. ”We are happy to be able to talk now, and excited to share our message,” he said.

As the largest social games company, Zynga has a lot going for it, but without clarity on how it will achieve its next phase of growth, investors are playing it safe.

Yesterday, Zynga’s shares plunged in early trading to $4.78 a share, representing an all-time low. Earlier that morning, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson cut his second-quarter estimates, saying he believes fewer people are playing Zynga’s games than he had originally anticipated. By the end of the day, the stock regained some ground to close at $5.02 a share, which is still down 50 percent from its IPO price in December.

But now with no restrictions in place, Pincus is excited to talk about the company’s upcoming slate of games on Facebook, including two new Ville franchises, and how Zynga will continue targeting a very large audience of people who have never considered themselves gamers.

He’s also bullish on mobile, which he says is just starting to reach the scale that Zynga looks for in a platform. He defines sufficient scale as the ability to reach 10 million users in the first 90 days. And, finally, Pincus is eager to gab about the huge opportunity for Zynga to open up its platform and make its internal tools and infrastructure available to third-party game developers.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Growing the gaming pie:

Our goal is to convince people who have never played games before to play because it’s social, easy and free. It’s not about going after a mature market, or people who are hardcore gamers. We will know we’ve gotten our games right when we help to grow the market. CityVille grew the market — the entire ecosystem – by 18 percent [according to daily active users tracked by AppData.] We hope Bubble Safari, The Ville and ChefVille bring in new people, too.

On opening up its network to other developers:

Pincus: We are optimists about the future, and believe there is a bigger opportunity if we all work together rather than being isolationists and not interconnecting. We use a term called ”social liquidity.” It’s when you come to our game, or the next great Angry Birds, and you find it’s really easy to get your friends playing the game, too. We are fundamentally a growth company. Our vision is to have a billion people playing games together. [Based on the most recent numbers available, Zynga reaches 292 million people.]

On leveraging Zynga’s investments in infrastructure:

We do see an opportunity to provide infrastructure that we’ve developed to the rest of the industry, but not in a commodity-like way, like hosting and scalablity. Amazon’s AWS does that. I don’t want to underemphasize our infrastructure, though — it has led us to scale much more efficiently through a combination of data centers and software. We have been able to reduce the servers required by 90 percent. Bubble Safari would have taken 2,000 servers a year ago, and we use 200 servers today. That is real innovation that dramatically reduced, not just our capital and operating expenses, but also the amount of server engineering. It cuts the amount of engineering in half.

We’ve also created some important technology that we can make available to the industry, but beyond that, the games that are on our platform can be more social. All of our analytics are geared toward helping a product manager and engineer figure out what features drive more social. We track Active Social Network, or ASN, which is the number of people who you interact with during a given period of time.

That’s been the most important metric as we make our games more social. As we move it [ASN], our retention and revenues go up.

On becoming a publisher for third-party titles:

I think that if we can interconnect our games and audiences with each other then we have a massive opportunity as an industry to drive more network effects at much bigger scale for combined players. And through that drive, we can increase game discovery and create higher retention and revenues, especially as I look at mobile. My view — unlike other companies, like Gree, which see this as a winner-take-all situation — I don’t believe that’s how mobile is going to evolve.

I believe mobile will be much broader and fragmented and open than that. I think that there’s potential for networks to emerge for developers that will drive discovery and engagement and player experiences. Mobile is going to play out much more, and will be more about the industry collaborating and connecting than a single player owning an opportunity. We want to be an important part of that.

On why it is not winner-take-all:

Everything about mobile is fragmented, like the desktop used to be. Mobile games today and apps spread more by word of mouth offline than online. I think that when you think about the mobile user experience from the end-user point of view, it’s a throwback to the desktop experience. It’s a mission-oriented and destination-oriented experience. You aren’t starting with an open search bar, or even an App Store, normally. You are starting by looking at your desktop, and you are going into one of the apps. It’s a decentralized experience. Maybe Apple, Facebook or Google will centralize that experience, but it’s looking like it will continue to evolve as a decentralized experience, which is much more fragmented.

On why developers will want to work with Zynga, which is also a competitor:

I think that any large consumer app or network has an opportunity to open up its APIs to curate or publish great work. The developers will decide if: a) they see short-term value, or b) it is a long-term valuable relationship. Over time, you’ll have to deliver a win-win that’s consistent, valuable, transparent and reliable. We want to do that. We aren’t the first game network to have third-party developers. We aren’t in it for the next four quarters. We are in it for the next four decades. We want to get it right and be in the market soon, but we want to figure out how to help the ecosystem and be a reliable partner.

Disappointing debuts of Web companies such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. have put some pre-IPO investors under water, leaving them with shares worth less than what they paid. Other investments remain profitable, but with much smaller gains than projected as recently as a few months ago.

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“We started to see that freemium was coming in, and it took us a long time to move over,” said Nick Earl, who heads up EA’s mobile and social worldwide studios. “In all candor, we are behind.”

In an interview with AllThingsD at E3 in Los Angeles this week, Earl said the dominant model will be “freemium” in mobile. As with other game makers who depend on this model, EA will allow players to download the games for free, but then will charge a fee to buy virtual goods that enhance the game.

“We are all over that,” Earl said. “There will be a few one-time download games in the future, but they are such the exception, and the norm will be freemium games.”

As an example, EA is currently charging $5 for Madden, $5 for Need for Speed, $2.99 for The Sims 3 and 99 cents for Tiger Woods on the iPhone. A short list of free titles includes Monopoly Hotels and The Sims FreePlay.

Earl said to expect a summer launch of The Simpsons on mobile, which will mark the beginning of the transition.

The game starts off with Homer Simpson causing a nuclear explosion that wipes out Springfield (doh!); the player’s job is to rebuild Springfield using different characters, like Lisa, that are unlocked along the way, according to CNET.

Electronic Arts is one of the largest mobile games developers on both Android and iOS, but it also represents one of the biggest holdouts when it comes to shifting to free. Over the past couple of years, companies have found it easier to gain large audiences by making their games free, and then monetizing them through virtual goods. Players who get hooked on a game often end up spending more than they would have if they had paid for the game upfront.

Earl said it has taken EA so long to make the transformation because it requires a different skill set to build a one-time download. Freemium games act like a live service, which have to be able to support thousands of daily active users.

He said that as part of the switch EA will end up spending more time and energy on each title, and will ship far fewer games.

“Over the last three years, we reengineered the console business,” Earl said. “There was a lot of mediocre stuff and we moved to making a lot fewer good titles. Basically, we are taking that approach to fewer, bigger and better from console to mobile and social, and adapting to freemium.”

The company’s new mobile strategy represents just one component of EA’s goal of becoming a more digital company.

EA also used E3 this week to unveil a new digital platform, which it will spend $250 million on over the next four years, to investors at a breakfast. (Slides from the presentation can be found here.) The platform’s goal is to enable game players to access their same identity across mobile, social, console and PCs.

As I wrote earlier, the platform approach is one that many companies are attempting.