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5. Apple Will Appeal ITC Import Ban on Older iPhones, iPads
6. Inside Dell’s Scorched-Earth PC and Server Price-War Plan
7. Apple Signs Sony Up for iRadio, Now Has All Three Major Music Labels on Board
8. The CIA Invests in Narrative Science and Its Automated Writers
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Thing is, that still doesn’t change the harsh truth for companies braving the huge, often uncomfortable transition to the mobile world after years of building a business on the Web.

That’s the perfect way to describe Zynga — which reports earnings today after the bell — the social gaming company smack in the middle of a long, slow trudge toward creating a “mobile first” business. (Sound familiar? Just ask our friends over at Facebook, and the many PC makers whose market is drying up in front of their eyes as tablets and smartphones eat their lunch.)

For Zynga, the reality is that even if the company can pull it off in the long run, it’s not going to be so pretty in the short term. As of Wednesday morning, the Street’s consensus expects Zynga to post a loss of four cents per share on revenue of $209.8 million.

Still, some analysts remain optimistic — if not today, then for the future. “While Zynga faces a challenging transition as it looks to diversify from Facebook to Zynga.com and mobile, we think trends in core Web franchises such as FarmVille and Zynga Poker are stabilizing and the advertising segment improves from the shift toward mobile games,” said J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth in a research note.

The company hinted at some strides made last quarter in the mobile space, breaking out for the first time its number of monthly active users on mobile devices. As of the last earnings report, nearly one-quarter of Zynga’s roughly 300 million monthly active users play Zynga’s games on mobile devices. That’s about 72 million people, and not bad for a company in transition.

One other bullish area for analysts is something Zynga has pushed hard into recently: Real-money gaming. The company launched two of its titles in the United Kingdom on the first of this month, and plans to push out more in the coming year. Zynga is pretty much stuck overseas with real-money gaming for now, as current U.S. law keeps the company from letting stateside users gamble online.

Again, while that may prove another promising revenue stream eventually, it’s still off in the future.

“For Zynga, any hope for real, sustainable top-line growth likely rests primarily on opportunities in on-line gambling — opportunities that are at least a year away,” Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia wrote in a research note.

We’ll be on the call this afternoon to see how Zynga’s mobile efforts are going — perhaps the company is doing better in the short term than analysts expect. Or perhaps not.

Games will still not be a “primary pillar” of Facebook, product manager George Lee said (that privilege is reserved for the Timeline, News Feed and Graph Search). But they will be increasingly woven into the “whole experience,” starting with games-focused sections of the new News Feeds and Timelines that the company has started rolling out to some users.

Lee said games were the “dominant use case” for Facebook by 2010. However, as both Lee and platform gaming head Sean Ryan noted, users were unhappy with notification spam — particularly from what Ryan would only call a “farming simulator game.”

At the end of 2011, the company huddled on how to make both users and developers happy. “We think we’ve reached a balance right now,” Ryan said.

A few quick-hit numbers from Facebook’s presentation: 250 million monthly active users play games, amounting to one-fifth of all the people who visit Facebook each day; compared to March 2012, game installs are up 75 percent; and monetization has also increased, with Facebook paying out more than $2 billion to developers last year.

Ryan also laid out the company’s goals for 2013, which include desktop (“We care about desktop because it’s big, and it’s growing, and we can make it grow faster”), more cross-platform games that players can enjoy equally well on both desktop and mobile, and broadening the types of games available on Facebook’s sites and apps.

More than half of the Top 400 iOS games are integrated with Facebook, a spokesperson noted via email.

The company also plans to roll out the ability for developers to charge players’ in-game purchases using their local currencies (instead of the now-defunct Facebook Credits) “in a few weeks.”

Mr. Campbell, a technology veteran who has coached Silicon Valley CEOs such as Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, had been called in by Zynga investor and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to advise Mr. Pincus as the social games company’s stock plunged and some of its online games lost traction. Some Kleiner Perkins partners warned Mr. Campbell that he might not make much progress.

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Just once, can Zynga publish a game that they didn’t clone from another developer?

– Electronic Arts spokesman Jeff Brown’s reaction to the latest lineup from the social games powerhouse

Zynga, the publisher of social games such as Words With Friends and FarmVille, went public in a $1 billion offering in December, one of a number of young Internet companies to stage an IPO of late.

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But there’s probably a simple explanation for that: It has to prove it is worth the $1 billion it is asking for.

The San Francisco-based social games company filed for an initial public offering back in July, valuing the company at around $15 billion to $20 billion, according to some estimates.

To pull off a blockbuster IPO like that, Zynga will have to be at the top of its game. Literally.

Two sources told AllThingsD that Zynga’s IPO plans have been delayed until after Thanksgiving, and earlier this week, Bloomberg reported the same thing. Although the sources also say Zynga is also keeping its strategy very quiet.

A company spokesperson declined to comment.

In October, the company appeared to be ramping up for its public debut.

It hosted a splashy press conference at its new headquarters, affectionately called the “dog house,” where it unleashed 10 new products.

But it’s nearly a month later, and almost none of them have launched yet,
including the two most critical: CastleVille, which is the first update to its ’ville franchise in a year, and Project Z, which is a big part of showing some independence from Facebook (Even though there are signs of Facebook everywhere on the platform.)

More to the point, the company has to launch some of these games in order to juice revenues.

In September, critics were worried that the company was showing signs of slower growth. In the second quarter, it reported its first-ever dip in the company’s preferred measure of sales. Zynga attributed the 4 percent decline in “bookings” to three million fewer daily active users.

But like it or not, the company is a hits-based business. Fewer hits = less users.

And, in the first half of the year, Zynga launched only one major game — Empires & Allies, which broke a five-month hiatus. After that, it announced two other major releases: Adventure World and Mafia Wars 2, and a couple of minor releases.

But with a few more weeks under its belt, Zynga may get a couple more of these 10 launches out the door and have a better sense of how its fourth-quarter numbers are shaping up.

That’s the forward-looking story it would want to tell to investment bankers on its road show.

If all goes well, it will launch CastleVille in the next couple of weeks. The game is not revolutionary, but rather is a very polished fresh take on the same genre of social games Zynga is famous for. Players must build kingdoms and fulfill quests through the help of their friends, and in this case, it has some very fancy background music recorded by a professional orchestra. Zynga did not disclose when Project Z would launch.

The game plan of having a strong quarter going into the road show follows Groupon’s plan.

In the third quarter, the daily deals giant cut back on marketing expenses while maintaining a profit in North America. Plus, it demonstrated it could deliver on a number of other key metrics. The week after reporting Q3 results, it went on its road show, and then, ultimately, was able to increase the number of shares sold from 30 million to 35 million to raise $700 million.

On the same day, Zynga coincidentally reported its third-quarter earnings, including higher revenues and profits compared to the previous period.

So the big question is whether Zynga’s newest ’Ville, which comes out in the next couple of weeks, will be able to top it. It’s a good problem — one that any game maker would love to have.

On one hand, the social game maker would love to stretch out the life of the game for as long as it can. But CityVille is nearly a year old, and other games, such as Electronic Arts’ the Sims Social, are nipping at its heels.

In other words, it’s time for a new franchise hit, especially with the company’s IPO looming.

Zynga unveiled CastleVille last month at a press conference in San Francisco, and now it’s prepping to launch the game on Facebook in the next couple of weeks.

With CityVille, it took just 24 hours for more than 290,000 people to move in, which beat Zynga’s biggest game launch ever — FrontierVille. Although Zynga has launched several games since, CastleVille will be the first ’Ville title since CityVille went live last December.

CastleVille does not stray far from the ’Ville genre. Players are challenged with building the castle of their dreams. They meet peasants, princesses and pirates in the medieval world, exploring new areas while decorating and building a kingdom of their own.

Bill Jackson, creative director of CastleVille, says the game is a natural extension of the franchise. FarmVille was about freedom of expression and sharing with friends, and FrontierVille added the concept of narrative and storytelling.  “CastleVille expands on that,” he said.

Jackson said Zynga built the game to be more fast and efficient. For instance, there are fewer prompts to share accomplishments with your friends. Instead, Zynga will rely on Facebook’s new “open graph” feature, which allows some of these things to appear automatically in the top-right ticker rather than in your main news feed.

Zynga also spent a lot of time — and money — on the music. Zynga hired a full orchestra to create all the background music and sound effects. While many people mute their games since they play at work, Jackson recommends a pair of headphones so you don’t miss out.

The game also has a lot more detail and animation: Fish jump in the pond, frogs croak, and trees reverberate with each chop of an axe. The illustrations are inspired by a number of themes, including DreamWorks’ “Shrek.” (Is it just a coincidence that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, is on Zynga’s board?)

When asked whether this will steal away CityVille’s audience, Jackson said, “Players who played CityVille will find this one interesting, as well.”

When CastleVille launches in the next couple of weeks, it will be available in 17 languages around the world.

It may be taking a longer route, but after spending a year or so experimenting, it says it is getting close.

At a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday, it unveiled plans to launch seven Facebook games over the next several months.

The games are being built in-house and some through third-party studios.

Meanwhile, other companies have gotten up to speed much faster, such as Electronic Arts, Disney and Zynga, which have spent millions, even billions, to get big quick.

“I’m not going to make hundreds of millions of dollars in acquisitions,” said Ubisoft’s VP of Digital Publishing Chris Early. “We’ll never stop looking for acquisitions, but it will be mostly smallish developers with great IP as opposed to buying our way into the market. We said let’s do it organically and understand it as we build.”

Over the past year or so, he said all of Ubisoft’s 23 studios around the globe have been able to experiment. “Five of them liked it and have devoted expertise to it going forward,” he said.

Ubisoft, which is headquartered in France with offices in San Francisco, hosted an event in the states to show off the company’s upcoming lineup of digital titles.

Currently, the company has two major games on Facebook including Smurfs & Co., which rose to the top of the charts in conjunction with the movie release, and CSI: Crime City.

Over the next several months, they have seven more titles planned, including CSI: Miami; House, M.D.: Critical Cases; NCIS: Major Crimes; CSI: New York; NCIS: Los Angeles and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. Another undisclosed game is also in the works with Loot Drop, a studio founded by John Romero, known for Doom and Quake.

It also announced several more mobile games, which are also being built in-house or through a partnership with Gameloft. As part of that, it plans to launch its first Android games to join Apple’s iOS. Some of the games include Assassin’s Creed Rearmed, Rabbids Go, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, Michael Jackson the Experience and Monster Burner.

Early said in the past month alone, Ubisoft’s digital revenues have increased 45 percent.

Digital revenues include social and mobile games and digital downloads on consoles.

Early said the company’s strategy with mobile and social is to leverage its existing games from the videogame console market to make what he calls companion apps.

Last year, it experimented with its well-known franchise Assassin’s Creed. The Facebook game was called Project Legacy, and the only way of discovering it was if you played Assassin’s Creed on the console. By playing both, users could earn currency, earn points and unlock treasures that could be carried back and forth from console to Facebook.

This year, you’ll see Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon overlap between the console, the PC and Facebook games in the same manner.

CEO Peter Relan explained that, going forward, every franchise game CrowdStar makes will be distributed globally on Facebook, iOS and Android, as well as on leading social networks in China, Japan, Korea and Russia, where Facebook is not dominant.

In the fourth quarter, Relan said, the Burlingame, Calif.-based company is on track to unveil four new game titles that will become available on multiple platforms, for a total of eight launches. One of the games on Facebook will be announced as soon as tomorrow.

“I am transforming the company this year from only Facebook games to a company that builds franchises across Facebook, mobile and global,” he said.

The three-pronged approach is called Project Trident, and was conceptualized in January, when Relan returned to the company as CEO and raised $23 million in capital.

“I looked at the future, and I looked at the current business, which was primarily a Facebook games company, and I said we need to be a company that does Facebook, but also mobile and global. I’m very convinced that triples the market.”

Many social games companies have identified mobile and international social networks as the best way to diversify from Facebook, so that concept is not new.

But Relan believes that CrowdStar is positioned to be a leader.

“This is a huge thing for a company to do. Zynga has done this, but we are the only other company with that ambition,” he said.

For example: CrowdStar’s It Girl game on Facebook was launched on mobile as Top Girl.

By the end of the year, Relan says, the game will be available on 10 different social networks worldwide, including iOS, Android, the Web and Facebook. Today, CrowdStar is announcing a partnership with Korea’s giant online NHN subsidiary. Five more launches for It Girl will take place in the fourth quarter.

Relan believes this will triple the company’s addressable market beyond the 800 million users on Facebook.

To provide a sense of the numbers, Relan noted that It Girl on Facebook has 330,000 daily active users and 3.4 million monthly users. When you add global social networks and mobile devices, it jumps to one million daily users and nearly eight million monthly users.

In other words, Facebook makes up less than half of the game’s users.

Relan says that with the addition of the upcoming Asian launches, he expects to end the year with two million daily users and 10 million monthly users. “That’s just on that one franchise. That gives you a sense for a Facebook game versus a global multiplatform approach.”

With more platform diversity also comes more revenue diversity. Relan said that last year the company had virtually zero mobile revenues, and today mobile accounts for half.

While that may sound like a bad thing, optimistic developers could find a positive way of looking at it: There’s still a lot of room for growth.

Facebook told developers on Friday it was changing the way it measures the number of people who visit an application, and yesterday, the full impact of that announcement became blindingly clear.

“Everyone lost about a quarter of their users,” said Peter Relan, the CEO of Crowdstar, which now has 12.5 million monthly active users down from 17.8 million on Friday, according to AppData.com, which publishes data on a daily basis.

Facebook explained it traditionally measured and reported app usage based on the number of people who visit an app, similar to the way in which many Web analytics companies measure Internet traffic. But now it measures the number of people who authenticate the app, or give permission to the developer to see its information.

In essence, it’s shifting from measuring “visitors” to measuring “authenticated users,” which more accurately reflects the usage of an application.

“From our perspective, it’s the users who get through that make the money, so to some extent, the old figures weren’t revenue-generating numbers anyway,” Relan said.

More importantly, however, the shift will be psychological.

By simply changing the way it measures its figures, Facebook is able to make it appear that the social gaming market has expanded. That’s important because many developers thought the market was saturated and locked up by developers like Zynga, which has hundreds of millions of players.

In other words, the thinking was that if such a major percentage of Facebook’s roughly 800 million users are already playing games, what’s the point?

Now, all of the sudden, there’s a larger pool of non-gamers.

“I think Facebook has some challenges. Because mobile is taking off, they want to show that there’s still more growth available on Facebook; otherwise it’s too saturated,” Relan said.

While Facebook may attempt a positive spin on this news, the impact of the recalibration was really startling over the weekend.

Zynga, which has more active users than the next 15 social game developers combined, lost almost 20 percent of its user base. Today, under the new measurement standards, it has 195 million monthly active users, falling from the previous number of 262 million, according to AppData.

Electronic Arts, which is the second-largest social game developer, saw its user base shrink to 71 million from nearly 98 million.

In Facebook’s original explanation, it tried to downplay the impact: “While this change will result in a perceived decline in active users for some apps, the number of users actually engaging with an app or playing a game is unaffected by this change.”

Of course, there’s always a chance in the future that the key industry metrics will change again. “It’s a young industry,” Relan said.

Of course, higher quality means bigger budgets.

To that end, the San Francisco company is announcing today that it has raised $10 million in a second round of capital.

The investment comes from Idle co-founder Rick Thompson, the former chairman and co-founder of Playdom, the social games company Disney acquired last year. Thompson previously led Idle’s initial round of $9 million.

In a recent interview with Thompson, he told me, “I think developers are having to retire old practices and will have to provide experiences that people do enjoy. What I am saying is that the bar is being raised and the established players are having a harder time reacting to the environment, and it’s hard to let go of that. The innovation is coming from emerging players.”

But even the established companies are starting to see that players on Facebook are becoming more discerning.

Zynga announced on Tuesday that its upcoming release on Facebook, called CastleVille, will be one of the first social games to have music recorded from an orchestra, which is more typical of console productions.

Today, San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee is scheduled to visit Idle Games’ new 36,000-square-foot offices as part of a campaign to increase the number of tech jobs in the city.

Jeff Hyman, Idle Games’ CEO and co-founder, said in a release, “We believe that Facebook games will only thrive by delivering the highest quality entertainment experience to users. That’s why we’re taking a new approach to Facebook game design with an emphasis on delivering a truly social experience, while raising the bar for creativity, quality and innovation.”

The company’s first game, Idle Worship, will launch soon. In the game, you are a god vying for the worship of friends, strangers and the indigenous population of Mudlings. The game will allow players to play synchronously, meaning that you’ll be playing together with friends in real time.

For a peek at what they consider quality, watch this trailer:

Zynga unveiled a slate of new products today, and mobile was a central theme.

In addition to announcing a new online games platform, three new Facebook games and one new game on Google+, Zynga also revealed five mobile games.

Three of the games — Zynga Poker, Words With Friends and FarmVille Express — will utilize HTML5 technology and run on Facebook’s iPad app and mobile Web sites. Those games are expected to launch tonight.

A fourth game is Mafia ShakeDown; the fifth is Dream Zoo, a standalone mobile game that is Zynga’s first zoo-themed game.

Dream Zoo will challenge players to pet, feed, bathe and breed all sorts of animals, from rainbow giraffes to polka-dotted flamingos and electric-green elephants.

In an interview at Zynga’s event, Chief Mobile Officer David Ko told me it will be the first time Zynga is incorporating location-based check-ins — similar to Foursquare or Facebook Places — into a mobile game.

He said the game will rely on Facebook’s data, allowing users to check in based on where they are playing the game.

In a follow-up interview, Ya-Bing Chu, the general manager of Words With Friends, told me users will get rare items in the game for going to a particular location, but generally, Zynga will be experimenting to see what users end up liking.

In the game, players will be expected to complete expeditions, but he said you could envision how that could overlap into real life, like going to a city park or even a real-life zoo. ”We aren’t sure what will work,” he said.

Zynga’s mobile announcements today can be considered a major push, given that Zynga has been slow to roll out aggressive plans in mobile. Dream Zoo and Mafia ShakeDown are expected to launch shortly.

Yesterday, it hinted that it will share its plans for leveraging Facebook’s new HTML5 mobile platform, but that there are other surprises to come. The event is titled “Unleashed,” so expect a lot of talk about where the company is headed with mobile in general.

Stay tuned at 10 am PT to hear the latest from the mega-successful social games company, which is currently seeking to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering.

9:57 am: Just showed up, expect the show to kick off any minute.

The press conference is taking place in Zynga’s new headquarters. In the atrium, there’s a big stage set up, and the press gallery is sitting in a bunch of retro chairs. Feels a little bit like an MTV talk show.

Zynga invited my dog, Fletch, to come play at the event, but he doesn’t have a travel budget, so he had to stay home in Seattle.

Pretty fitting that Zynga’s office, a.k.a. “the dog house,” has a hot dog stand. As you may know, the company was named after the dog, Zinga, owned by founder Mark Pincus.

10:10 am: The event may be starting. We are watching an infomercial on how Zynga was able to contribute to Haiti relief after the earthquake.

10:25 am: Ok, while we waited to get things started I was able to go get a Blue Bottle cup of coffee that takes five minutes to drip into the cup. What a perk!

Someone is getting excited. Just heard my first barking dog.

10:35 am: Here we go. There’s a montage of games from Poker to CityVille and Adventure World, Words With Friends and FarmVille. You’ve probably played one of them.

10:37 am: Founder and CEO Mark Pincus has taken the stage.

This is the first media event of any kind we have done in our new building, he says.

He jokes that they are about games, and we should feel comfortable being loud today.

He said they are launching 10 new products today, all of which have been in development for a year. Today we will meet the people and faces behind the innovation.

Pincus: There are 1,700 Zynga employees in this building alone, and at some point they will come out and say hi to us.

Pincus: He wants to know how he can get “you guys” to play games. We are all busy, and how can he get us all to play.

For us, it’s a platform. We aren’t the company that will make the next hit game, we are trying to do something broader than that. We want this experience to make up a platform for play.

10:44 am: Pincus says they spend a lot of time on the “FTUE,” or the “first time user experience.”

We want to give you a five to 15 minute experience that feels like a meal, we don’t try to ask you to change your day. Just like a good show, and I’ve been addicted to “Breaking Bad,” if you do like our games, we hope to give you enough depth for you to invest three, six months or a year.

We are going to show off Zynga Direct, whether on the Web or mobile, we are going to build a whole sandbox around the games and not just in the games. Facebook is here today and we are excited to be their launch partner for their platform announced yesterday. We’ll be showing off three HTML5 games that will be part of that.

When we unveil the pieces of Zynga Direct, we hope that you see that it is the deepest Facebook Connect experience on the Web today.

10:48 am: We are showing you CastleVille today, which is the next Ville game in our franchise. That game has been in development for more than a year, and it has beautiful art. It has new ways to collaborate and get ahead by partnering with other players in the game.

We are going to show you a new casual games category today in the hidden objects genre.

David Ko, Zynga’s chief mobile officer, will be showing a number of mobile titles launching in the next few weeks.

10:51 am: Pincus is now handing over the stage to Cadir Lee, CTO, who is in charge of building out so much of the technology in the back-end.

10:52 am: Lee: The first thing I want to talk about is our gaming engine, which has been built from scratch on Adobe’s Flash 11.

We have our own private cloud called “Z Cloud,” which is focused on being able to play our games all of the time no matter if it’s Christmas Eve. We’ve been known to deploy a 1,000 servers in one week in order to support a new game.

This isn’t the sexy stuff, but Zynga’s cloud and gaming engine technology is key. Often, the company is considered an analytics-driven company, rather than a gaming company. Lee is touching on some of this now.

Lee: We’ve long been known as an analytics company, which shows how our players engage. How do we match people up, so that you can have a social experience with a person across the street or around the world. How do we connect you with the right person at the right time.

Roy Sehgal, VP and GM, is now on stage to unveil a new genre, called “hidden objects.” It’s one that Disney’s Playdom has developed through a game called Gardens of Time.

Zynga says its first game is called Hidden Chronicles.

The concept behind hidden objects is finding clues hidden in a room, sort of like looking for Waldo. They are right in front of you, but difficult to find.

Up until Playdom’s release, critics didn’t believe that the popular PC download category could be made into a social game.

Sehgal: It’s going to be social. It’s going to be extremely easy to learn, but hard to master.

10:58 am: You can play with your friends to see who can find the most hidden objects, or provide hints to your friends.

This game is extremely interactive. No matter how many times you play an individual scene, it will be fresh. I believe it will be one of the most beautiful games you will play.

On the screen, Sehgal is showing various scenes that take place on a train, underwater or in the outdoors. The art is rich and historic-looking.

11:00 am: Now there’s a demo of the new Mafia Wars 2, which just launched yesterday, and is promising to be a much richer experience than the original version that came out three-plus years ago.

Since it’s already out, feel free to check it out on Facebook. No need to read a description here.

11:06 am: Mafia Wars 2 is also now live on Google+, which is the company’s second game on the platform after Poker. Remember, Google has a substantial stake in Zynga.

11:07 am: There’s an update to Zynga’s Poker game next. It was launched in July 2007, and after four years, we are still the largest and most social Poker game.

Zynga is unveiling Zynga Casino, including Zynga Bingo.

Casino games has been identified as one of the leading categories on Facebook with others experiencing lots of success, including DoubleDown Casino.

Zynga Bingo will be launching soon.

11:10 am: Bill Jackson, Creative Director, is now on stage. He’s from the company’s Dallas studios, and he says they developed the latest in the Ville franchise, called CastleVille.

The other Villes in the franchise are FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille and now CastleVille.

Jackson: It’s a new level of social, and offers the best of all the Ville games have to offer.

The game has a whole new cast of characters, who look like they are from Shrek, complete with rugged heros and refined ladies who fall in love.

Jackson: CastleVille takes storytelling to a whole new level, and in a personal way. Your journey through the game is different based on who you are.

Zynga is bringing massively mutliplayer role-playing games to the mass market.

CastleVille will have music from an entire orchestra that was recorded in Seattle. Jackson says this is the first time this has been done in a social game, although it is common in console games.

11:18 am: The peanut gallery has been asked to turn around to see all of the Zynga employees — or at least half of them — that have gathered around the balconies of the atrium.

Pincus: We just wanted you to see a few more faces.

Pincus is now introducing John Schappert, who recently joined Zynga as COO from Electronic Arts. He has taken over running all of our games, leaving Pincus to be more entrepreneurial.

11:22 am: Schappert: We are building every kind of play for everyone, everywhere.

We are building on iOS, Facebook, Android, Google+ and Tencent in China.

Helping us deliver on play anytime, anywhere, is David Ko, chief mobile officer.

Ko has an update on Zynga’s mobile plans, which have not been as aggressive as others have been in the space so far.

Ko: We’ve always felt that we need to be the best content creators out there, regardless of what platform.

It’s my pleasure to not talk to you about one or two new games, but five new games launching shortly. It is around Facebook’s HTML5 platform announced yesterday.

The first two are Words With Friends and Poker, and the third is FarmVille. All three games will be available tomorrow.

Another new game is Mafia ShakeDown. You’ll be able to request missions and have the opportunity to be the next “Don.” This game will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

The last game is called DreamZoo, which is Zynga’s first game in the zoo genre.

In a short video, Zynga shows off DreamZoo. You can collect animal varieties and feed and clean your animals.

11:29 am: Schappert is back on stage. He says they have over 60 million daily active users, and they play games over two million minutes everyday.

He is unveiling something called Project Z, which is a Facebook Connect enabled platform. It allows you to play in an environment that’s tailored just for games.

In a sneak peak, a video says players are able to chat, share and form instant communities worldwide.

Schappert: It’s a social gaming playground. You can start a game on Project Z and then continue on Facebook and vice versa. It’s not launching today, but people can start creating a gamer tag starting worldwide today.

11:32 am: Pincus is back on stage to wrap up the presentation:

We really want to build a platform for play. We haven’t changed our vision since starting. We want to be the biggest macro bet on social gaming. We believe in social gaming. We believe that everyone around the world will embrace play, so everything we are doing is an attempt to bring that to life.

We know it’s early and it’s primitive, we know so much of game play and social-ness is early, and over the next few years it’s going to be so much more. It’s going to be mobile. There’s going to be a World of Warcraft feeling, but something you can understand in five minutes.

11:35 am: OK, that’s it folks. Formal presentation is over.

In summary, before today, there were a few niches that Zynga had not yet entered. That left opportunities for competitors to do well on Facebook. With Zynga’s 10 announcements today, including a number of new mobile and social games, the gaps have narrowed significantly.

Zynga has expanded into new genres, like hidden objects and more broadly into casino, and has five new games on mobile. It is also launching its all-new standalone online game network separate from Facebook that goes direct to consumers.

If Zynga was looking for a big bang before its IPO, this might have been it.

Thanks for reading — more coverage and analysis coming shortly.

In an interview in Silicon Valley, Brad Serwin, the COO of Playdom’s social games unit, said the company has finally started to come out of hiding after being acquired for $563.2 million, plus a $200 million earn-out, more than a year ago.

One reason it took so long, according to Serwin: The general pains of integrating a small company into a larger organization.

Since the acquisition, Playdom has moved to new offices in Palo Alto, Calif., which it shares with Disney Mobile (which was formed through the acquisition of another Silicon Valley start-up, Tapulous).

Both have been learning to work with a parent company that is headquartered 350 miles away.

“A year after the acquisition, we are successfully transitioning into an operating division within Disney,” Serwin said. “We are 100 percent back to work.”

It took long enough, especially given the radical change the industry has undergone since Facebook launched its third-party application platform in May 2007. [More on how the industry has changed  in an interview today with Rick Thompson, a founder of Playdom.]

Since then, games have become the most popular applications on the platform, and have evolved from simple and inexpensive time killers to graphically rich applications.

Facebook has changed the rules, too.

This has impacted everyone in the space, not just three-year-old Playdom. Two of the biggest challenges emerged when the social network shut down its viral channels: When it became difficult to acquire new users by posting messages on users’ pages, and when Facebook implemented Credits, a virtual currency that requires developers to cut Facebook 30 percent of all revenues.

Playdom execs believe the company has finally reorganized, and are planning on making a big splash in what many worried was a dead pool.

Of the dozen titles slated for the next year, two games will come as soon as this month, and up to three games — coming in January, March and August — will leverage Disney brands.

Playdom’s next game is called Secret Agent X. For now, it is only available in beta in some international markets, but it is coming to the U.S. in the fall. In the game, a player leads a dual life as an average citizen who at night becomes a secret agent, exploring new locations and completing missions with the help of high-tech gadgets.

In the trailer for the game, seen below, a suburban housewife manages to save the world, all the while keeping her cover by making sure dinner is on the table on time.

As the seventh-largest app maker, according to AppData, Playdom falls below Zynga, Electronic Arts and even such new entrants as Germany’s Wooga.

That said, Playdom’s recent launch of Gardens of Time was considered a breakthrough hit that used game mechanics rarely seen on Facebook. The social game falls into the category of “hidden objects,” where players try to find a list of items in a room, similar to “Where’s Waldo?”

The concept behind hidden objects is not new to gaming, but it is new to Facebook, and was recently identified as a niche worth pursuing. Today, Playdom’s game is garnering nearly three million daily active users, which registers slightly below Zynga’s new Adventure World.

Playdom hopes it will prosper by bringing new concepts to social gaming and also by leveraging Disney’s big brands to catch players’ attention.

As a recent test, Playdom renamed its game GnomeTown as Disney’s GnomeTown. Serwin said the game performed much better with the new name.

Playdom’s close competitor Playfish is also relying on the intellectual property of its parent company, Electronic Arts. It has seen its Sims Social title climb the charts to become the second-most-popular game.

On the other hand, Zynga, which is the largest social games maker, has made up all of its own properties, ranging from FarmVille to its newest property, Adventure World. More recently, it has used name-brand promotions within its games to garner attention, such as Lady Gaga in FarmVille, and more recently, Enrique Iglesias in CityVille.

“Competitors have chunks of IP, but we have a lot to choose from,” said Serwin, adding that it’s not as if Playdom alone needs intellectual property: “Everyone needs IP.”

Serwin said the Playdom division’s plan is to work closely with Disney; it has hired a liaison who works in Burbank every day to make sure Playdom’s plans are on course with what Disney has in mind.

Still, Serwin can’t deny that the lull in game making has dragged down the results of Disney’s Interactive Group. Disney reported $21 million in accounting adjustment in the third quarter and $34 million in the second quarter tied to Playdom alone, and the losses are expected to continue.

In the second-quarter earnings call, President and CEO Bob Iger tried to explain its multimillion dollar charges to analysts:

“We thought it would be wise to improve the quality of the games that we’re going to release. So, we took a five-month hiatus, which had not been planned, from releasing games, to build a higher-quality game, and then also to re-stack our technical capabilities to deal with volume or to deal with scale, which we are hoping to achieve.”

Iger declined to say when the group would hit break-even, but that it was expected to get into the black by 2013.

Iger gave Gardens of Time as an example of a game that is monetizing well. “We feel good about the direction of Playdom, particularly with this new hit game in the marketplace,” he said, adding that new games in the pipeline will be based on Disney, ESPN and Marvel brands.

It has taken more than a year, but Serwin believes Playdom is ready.

“We’ve made a connection with people at Disney to get it done,” he said. “Whether it should have happened faster or slower, I don’t know, but it’s happening and it’s great.”

Matt Spiegel is perhaps best known for starting Resolution Media, which he led for more than four years before selling to Omnicom Group. Since then he’s held several positions at the global advertising and marketing company, including CEO of its media digital group.

Spiegel begins today as the CEO at Tap.me, which is building an ad network focused on monetizing games. It is starting with mobile applications and then will move to other platforms, like Facebook.

The founding team, which is made up of former game developers, including CEO Joshua Hernandez, recognized the need for a better ad platform.

“What they witnessed in the game space is that most ads interrupted the game play and were not very effective,” Spiegel said.

The ads were either banners that were ignored during game play, or were premium sponsorships, which consisted of integrated product placements. The latter was more effective, but time consuming and not easily scalable.

Despite the downfalls, games continue to be the most downloaded applications. “We’ve reached a tipping point, where the consumer attention and time spent on games has gotten to the point where brands should look at it as a content channel,” Spiegel said.

So, in essence, the company believes that ads should not interrupt the game play, but that they can be shown before the game.

It works like this: A game developer picks something in its game that can be sponsored, such as being able to jump higher, access to a virtual good, gaining more speed or endurance, or being able to unlock a new level. Tap.me then provides advertisers that will sponsor those items, like Red Bull or Gatorade. Players have the choice of playing with or without the advertisements.

Because many of the ad units are for similar actions or items, the market can reach scale, unlike customized sponsorships, like a car company providing a free tractor in a farming game.

So far, the company has more than 35 games signed up on Apple and Android and recently hit two million uniques on the Tap.Me platform. Some games include: Hospital Havok 2, Escape 3D: Bathroom 2, Drake’s Tower, Charmed and Mr. Runner.

Hernandez said so far most of the players, or 88 percent, opt in for the advertisements and are choosing to interact with the brand. He said the sponsorships also result in longer game play, and that the users who did pick to see the ads spent 63 percent more time in the game than players who did not.

Tap.me was originally founded in 2009 as a game company, but after seeing the challenges with in-game advertising, it shifted its focus in 2010 to advertising. The 15-employee company has raised $1.44 million from angel investors and two Chicago VCs, I2A Fund and Hyde Park Angels.

Now with Spiegel on board, the company plans to raise more capital and accelerate the number of advertisers and game makers it has on board.

The new game has adopted game mechanics that have become standard in almost every Zynga game, such as decorating and building off a plot of land and visiting friends’ territories.

But because it’s a mafia game, there’s a little bit more of an edge. Decorations include casinos and row houses, and there are grittier worlds to travel to, including the Neon strip.

Oh yeah, there’s fighting, too. Players must amass weapons, armor and vehicles in order to be able to fight other characters or knock off their banks.

But for those who already play Mafia Wars, many of the story plots will feel familiar, and for those who play other Zynga games, the game mechanics will be nearly identical.

The sequel is part of Zynga’s efforts to systematically give major facelifts to some of its original game franchises on Facebook that helped define social games.

Mafia Wars 2 will be available within the next few weeks.

The gangster category on Facebook and mobile has been well established, so it’s hard not to compare it to other games already out there, such as Funzio’s Crime City. Also in the works is Kabam’s The Godfather, which takes place in New York and will have the brand power of the major blockbuster film.

Given Zynga’s current install base of 4.4 million active monthly players on Mafia Wars, and it’s network of millions of others, the game will still likely be a hit.

It also won’t hurt that it will be available in 16 languages at launch, which is the most that Zynga has ever released out of the gate.

In the second quarter, Zynga said its “bookings,” which are sales recorded during the same three-month period, dipped four percent. Additionally, it said three million fewer people played Zynga games on a daily basis than in the previous quarter.

After the company’s updated IPO filing was released last week, critics have been dissecting the results and coming to the conclusion that the drop in bookings is a sign of things to come. So, is it?

Probably not.

In fact, the San Francisco social games company, which is seeking to raise $1 billion in the public markets, may be gearing up for its second wind.

In the first half of the year, Zynga launched only one major game — Empires & Allies — to break a five-month hiatus.

Since then, it has moved quickly, announcing two other major releases: Adventure World and Mafia Wars 2. In addition, it has launched a number of minor releases, including an expansion to FrontierVille, as well as Words With Friends, which was brought over to Facebook from mobile.

It has also launched two titles on Google’s new games network, and it is making a big announcement — called “Zynga Unleashed” — on Oct. 11, at a press event at its new headquarters.

Today, Zynga is looking a lot more like an entertainment company that must continue to deliver new hits in order to gain new players, much like a TV studio needs to produce new sitcoms in order to get more viewers. Practically speaking, if Zynga doesn’t release a new game, then it won’t see a lift in users.

While Empires & Allies was technically launched in the second quarter, it launched in June, so it would have only one month of results before the end of the quarter.

Given that it launched virtually no games for five straight months, the second quarter still performed fairly well.

In that quarter, Zynga’s revenue totaled $279.1 million, increasing 115 percent compared to the same period in 2010.

More to the point, the new titles it has launched since then have already garnered millions of new players.

Empires & Allies is attracting nearly five million daily active users; Adventure World is clocking 4.5 million; Words With Friends is bringing in four million; and FrontierVille’s Pioneer Trail is garnering 2.4 million, according to AppData.com. All told, that’s about 15 million more users, which exceeds the 13 million players who play CityVille, the most popular game on Facebook.

Getting more players is key because fewer than five percent of its players actually pay to play. The big question will be whether the new games will be enough to offset Zynga’s older games that are either stagnant or losing players.

In August, Google announced it had added gaming to Google+, introducing a dozen or so games from a handful of developers.

Zynga, which is the leader on Facebook and has received an investment from Google, initially contributed Zynga Poker. Today, it added CityVille+ to the new game platform.

In a blog post, Zynga writes: “CityVille grew to become our largest game on Facebook, so naturally we wanted to ‘build’ a presence for it on Google+. Ultimately, we want to make our games accessible to everyone, everywhere — no matter where they play or what platform they play on.”

So far, the success of the Google+ games network has been limited, given the comparatively few users on the network versus Facebook. Today, Liz Gannes reported that Google+ has roughly 43.4 million users, according to the latest estimates. On the other hand, Facebook now is claiming up to 800 million on a good day.

Rovio’s Angry Birds, which has not yet launched on Facebook, is claiming to be the most popular game on Google+.

Recently, Zynga’s dominance on Facebook has been questioned by other recent rising stars, including the popularity of Electronic Arts’ the Sims Social, which has a chance to unseat CityVille as the No. 1 game in the not so distant future.

But this story is about GameHouse, the Seattle company’s $100 million casual games business.

The facts aren’t pretty.

Revenues are down and there are 100 fewer employees than there were a year ago. Twice, RealNetworks has said it was going to spin off the division, only to cancel plans later.

But from the fourth floor of Real’s headquarters, where stained frat-house couches and Friday happy hours rule, Matt Hulett, the SVP and president of GameHouse, spins a completely different picture.

He believes he is running the next social games powerhouse.

“I’m not happy until we are in the Top 10,” he said.

Hulett isn’t necessarily delusional. He’s happy being the “restart” or “turnaround” guy who gets his hands dirty.

Since Hulett got the job about a year ago, GameHouse has become one of the top 20 game makers on Facebook.

Unlike Zynga, it concentrates on casual titles, such as puzzle games, slot machines or what you might call “match-three” games, which fit into the Tetris-like genre. Currently, some of its best titles are UNO, Scrabble and Collapse! Blast.

But its monthly active users total only 4.6 million, and its daily active users don’t even surpass one million. For an unfair comparison, Zynga has 268 million monthly users and 48 million daily users.

Today, Hulett is unveiling its latest match-three game, Bayou Blast, slated for release on Facebook at the end of October. Users blast away gems by tracing a line over matching gems in one contiguous line. Bayou Blast, which represents a culmination of the company’s social efforts to date, will be followed by Let’s Make a Deal and new slot games in the beginning of the year.

When he took the job, Hulett made some drastic decisions.

He saw the company’s traditional online download and subscription casual games business in decline. Logically speaking, fewer people are willing to pay $20 a month for a subscription when there are games on Facebook for free.

But Hulett figures if other casual game makers — like Wooga, PopCap (acquired by Electronic Arts) and King.com — can climb their way up the charts, why can’t he?

Social now comprises up to half the company’s team, and this year Hulett plans to invest $10 million in the effort. He said he cut the headcount from 400 by more than half about a year ago, and has rehired social game developers and others with experience building infrastructure, such as analytics. Today, GameHouse is back up to almost 300 employees.

What’s more, Hulett says he can rely on a backlog of great intellectual property, which created games with very long lives on the Internet, for Facebook and eventually mobile. It can even remarket those new Facebook titles to its GameHouse member base of 20 million users.

If GameHouse does get into the Top 10, I asked Hulett if RealNetworks will announce that it’s ready to be spun off — again.

“We’ve announced that we were going to separate twice. I won’t be the one who says it for the third time,” he said. “I want our metrics to speak for themselves. If all that stuff happens, then a lot of things happen. It’s best to get inbound calls.”

At least one company that wants a bigger Seattle presence and is on pace to acquire a company every month could be the one on the other line: Zynga.

Today, a teaser video appeared on Facebook, offering a look at the characters, clues as to what the narrative will be about, and the tagline “Being bad never felt so good.”

No details on the launch date, other than it’s expected soon.

Zynga has picked up the pace of releases since filing for an initial public offering in July, adding Empires & Allies, Words With Friends and Adventure World. Without a doubt, it remains the largest game maker on the platform, with nearly 50 million daily players and 268 million monthly players.

Given the recent launches, Mafia Wars, which launched three years ago, has dropped on the charts to become Zynga’s 11th largest game, with five million monthly players.

Zynga’s competition is coming from two fronts: Companies using branded intellectual property to launch games, and game makers using more advanced game mechanics.

In the crime category, Zynga will soon have serious competition from Kabam, which is working on a game based on “The Godfather”; the game version is due out of beta later this year.

The teaser video for Mafia Wars 2 reveals that the game is about building your empire and getting revenge. Zynga’s first version of the game was what the industry calls a “text-based role-playing game,” where you click to complete various jobs.

Using that mechanic alone for the sequel would appear out of date today, so it will be interesting to see how Zynga evolves the game while still creating something that’s of interest to millions of people.

Here’s a look at Mafia Wars 2:

As of yesterday, EA became the second-largest social games company on Facebook, trailing behind Zynga, which is seeking $1 billion in an IPO.

EA’s rankings have been propped up by the recent launch of the Sims Social, which over the past week became the fastest-growing game on Facebook, and by its roughly billion-dollar acquisition of PopCap, which has Facebook titles such as Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz.

Electronic Arts jumped in the rankings yesterday after AppData, which tracks the performance of games on Facebook, started counting the performance of EA and PopCap together.

The company’s acquisition of PopCap closed last month.

Zynga’s lack of brand names might ultimately hurt the company in the long term, but so far it has been able to make its own hit titles, such as FarmVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Empires & Allies.

Its IPO appears to be on track, unlike another Wall Street darling, Groupon, which faces increasing scrutiny and potential delays. But ultimately, investors may want to know how the San Francisco company plans to respond to increasing competition from companies with access to big brand names.

Other brand names that have gained recent traction include the Smurfs & Co, which is the second-fastest growing Facebook game after the Sims; and Kabam, which is planning an upcoming game based on “The Godfather.”

EA initially got its footing in social through the purchase of Playfish, and over the past year it has used those resources to focus more on titles, such as the Sims and other recognizable names, like Monopoly, FIFA and Madden NFL.

As of yesterday, EA had 71.5 million monthly active users, a distinct second to Zynga, which has 275.5 million monthly active users, according to AppData. The next-largest social games company is Germany’s Wooga, which has 38.5 million monthly active users.

EA’s biggest title on Facebook is the Sims Social, which has almost 30 million monthly active users, or about 7.8 million players who return daily. At that size, the game compares to Zynga’s fourth-largest title, FarmVille, which has 35 million monthly users and eight million daily users. EA’s second-largest title is Bejeweled, a PopCap game, which gets nearly 10 million monthly users.

Of course, both companies are expecting social games to become a significant business down the road.

SuperData, a New York-based market intelligence firm, estimated in a report released last week that the North American social games market will grow 35 percent this year to reach $1.4 billion.

Thanks to portable devices, like smartphones and tablets, and games on Facebook, men and women alike are squeezing a few minutes of game play into their daily lives, which is actually leading to more social interactions in and out of the living room.

Or at least that’s the conclusion of a new study released this week by Latitude, a research and consulting firm that counts DirecTV, Yahoo, Food Network, ESPN and other major media companies as clients.

The report, which studied 290 smartphone owners, examined the future of gaming and tried to illustrate the portrait of the “new gamer.”

This is not an economic forecast. There are no hockey stick graphs here. Rather, this is a touchy-feely explanation for why more people are gaming than ever before. As a result, it might as well have included a chart that pointed up and to the right, and named companies, like Apple, Zynga or Angry Birds’s Rovio, as major benefactors.

Read the report here, watch a video here, or better yet, take a look at this infographic (click to enlarge).

Photo Credit: Mario Spann.