Facebook’s high-profile CTO Bret Taylor is leaving the Silicon Valley social networking giant later this summer, with future plans to work on an as-yet-to-be-determined start-up.

The move is likely to be of concern to some over the newly public company’s ability to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, especially in the wake of continued intense media and investor scrutiny over its rocky IPO last month.

That’s especially true since Taylor has been in charge of both platform and mobile efforts at Facebook, a critical arena for it.

A pair of Facebook execs under Taylor — Mike Vernal and Cory Ondrejka — will be taking over platform and mobile, respectively.

Vernal joined Facebook in 2008 from Microsoft, leading the original Facebook Connect project and also working on platform efforts and the development of Open Graph. Ondrejka arrived at the company in 2010 through the acquisition of Walletin; he previously worked at Linden Labs on Second Life virtual worlds.

While well qualified, they have big shoes to fill. Named to CTO two years ago, Taylor has also been a strong public figure at Facebook events, including its recent developers conference. And he was front and center at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week at the announcement of Facebook integration into its newest iOS.

In an interview today, Taylor said he understands that his departure will be perceived as a disruption, although he noted that Facebook had a deep bench of talented technical staff under CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“I had always been upfront with Mark that I eventually wanted to do another start-up,” he said. “And we felt now is the best time after the IPO and the launch of some recent things for me to do that.”

That includes the Apple deal, Facebook Camera and also its App Center, which helps users find mobile and desktop apps their friends like.

Facebook is also reportedly working on a major effort to create its own smartphone, a project known as “Buffy.”

Taylor, who had previously worked at Google, has a strong start-up background. He left the search giant to found FriendFeed, a once-popular social aggregator. FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.

Noting that his time at Facebook “has been the among the most fulfilling times of my career,” Taylor said that his departure was only part of life as usual in Silicon Valley.

“Cross-pollination among companies is what drives so much of innovation, so I would not project a lot onto this event,” he said. “I am really confident that the mobile and platform leaders at Facebook can deliver what needs to be done.”

When asked about the worries he had for the company, Taylor said the challenge of becoming public was top of mind internally.

“We are dealing with the cultural change of increasing attention, from going from a private company with a lot of scrutiny to a public company with a lot more scrutiny,” he said.

But he maintained that Facebook’s ability to remain nimble as it grew was strong, noting that the tech side continues to work in small teams. “These details really matter,” he said.

As for his own future, Taylor said he had not decided the area that he was going to focus on, but that he would be starting something with another former Googler, Kevin Gibbs.

Taylor said that he would probably focus on an industry he does not understand well as a consumer, as he did when he was working on Google’s mapping efforts.

“People said we had no sense of direction, so making maps better made sense,” he joked. “That turned out pretty well.”

Here is Taylor’s post on Facebook about the pending departure:

I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be leaving Facebook later this summer. I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m excited to be starting a company with my friend Kevin Gibbs.

While a transition like this is never easy, I’m extremely confident in the teams and leadership we have in place. I’m very proud of our recent accomplishments in our platform and mobile products, from Open Graph and App Center to Facebook Camera and our iOS integration. I’m even more excited for the world to see all the amazing things these teams have coming.

I’ve learned more than I ever imagined in my time at Facebook. I’m also extremely grateful for my relationship with all of the amazing people I’ve worked with here.

I want to give a special thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve not only been my boss for the past three years, but my mentor and one of my closest friends.

Thanks to all of you at Facebook for the most incredible three years of my life.

That’ll buy a lot of digital pushpins.

(UPDATE: Pinterest and Andreessen Horowitz confirmed the new funding, which is $27 million. The firm’s Jeff Jordan will join Pinterest’s board.)

In an interview, Jordan said that the amount of interest in Pinterest — get it? — was a big reason for the deal.

“People love the product, even though it is only in beta so far, with consumers who use it voraciously,” he said. “It’s elegantly social.”

Co-founder Ben Silbermann said the focus at Pinterest — which has only eight employees — was to “provide users with a place to discover and share in an inspirational way … we want to help people get in touch with their interests in real life.”

The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet and is still in invite-only mode, has become the hottest start-up of late in Silicon Valley, given its quick growth and compelling idea that has been called “experiential shopping.”

To me, it is just a really cool way of finding stuff of all kinds — from kids’ toys to inspiring quotes to travel tips — using a very savvy crowd of users via social visual bookmarking.

It’s kind of like Oprah on steroids, with users creating and sharing virtual collages on the handsome and easy-to-use site. Others can than “re-pin” them and great stuff rises in rank.

The site has previously raised $10 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the company at $40 million.

The addition of PayPal to Xbox brings into question whether Sony will be next after its very public debacle, which included shutting down its PlayStation Network after hackers obtained personal information associated with accounts, including names, addresses, email addresses, birthdates, usernames and passwords.

Additionally, it cautioned consumers that their credit card information may have been obtained.

Integrating PayPal may not eliminate all of those concerns, but it could potentially add another barrier between a customer’s sensitive information and the outside world.

In the announcement, neither Microsoft or PayPal hinted that the integration had anything to do with security or Sony’s woes. A PlayStation spokesperson did not respond to an email, asking whether it was considering alternative payment methods in the future.

However, beyond Xbox or PlayStation, it is becoming increasingly common for a variety of payment methods to be offered by merchants. In particular, game companies have been aggressive. For instance, on Facebook players can commonly charge virtual goods to their mobile phone bill or PayPal, among other options.

Other new payment mechanisms are also in the works. Visa revealed part of its digital wallet strategy last week, saying that it would allow consumers make payments with their credit card through an associated username and password instead of typing in their entire credit card number.

Not only could it be more secure, consumers often find it more convenient. In fact, convenience seems to be one of the main factors of the relationship between Xbox and PayPal.

Microsoft said Xbox 360 owners in more than 20 countries around the world will now be able to use their PayPal accounts to buy Microsoft Points, Xbox LIVE Gold subscriptions and Games on Demand.

The integration began rolling out early yesterday morning and will be available worldwide in the next few weeks.

eBay-owned PayPal said in a blog post nearly 75 percent of people who identify themselves as gamers also have PayPal accounts, according to an Ispos study from March of this year.

The branded-currency announced today comes just a couple of months before Facebook is mandating that all social games use Facebook Credits as the default payment system.

A Zynga spokeswoman said the launch of RewardVille has nothing to do with Facebook Credits because there is no real money being exchanged.

Still, it’s hard not to see how the Zynga-branded coins isn’t a ploy for the game-maker to build its brand as Facebook inserts itself more and more into the gaming experience.

The new program, announced today at SXSW, is called RewardVille, which will give players zPoints and zCoins in CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille and Vampire Wars.

The coins will can be used to unlock exclusive and limited edition virtual goods to apply across multiple games.

The rewards system has multiple layers. For instance, users will be awarded points as they play games. As points are accumulated, users will increase their level. As players level up, they will be rewarded coins.

The coins can be used in any participating game, meaning that if you started off as as a heavy FarmVille user, the coins can be redeemed in CityVille to advance your status. The virtual goods in AwardVille will be exclusive, and cannot be purchased with real money or Facebook Credits.

Limited edition items include the “Stepped Skyscraper” in CityVille or a “Ring of Fire” in FrontierVille, which will help you advance faster in your game. All players who sign up for RewardVille in March will receive one free item per game.

Players will be able to earn as many as 80 zPoints per game or 300 zPoints total in one day.

Zynga’s created a well-polished video on how it works:

The France-based company said it is hiring in its San Francisco office, and that more than 15 percent of Ubisoft’s Bay Area workforce will be focused on its social gaming business this year.

Currently, there’s roughly 300 employees, but that number is expected to grow.

To be sure, that’s a lot smaller than other social game makers, like Zynga, which employs 1,500, or even other major game publishers, like Electronic Arts and Disney, which have acquired social game companies Playfish and Playdom respectively.

But Ubisoft’s incremental investments in social demonstrate a broader appetite in the videogame industry for emerging platforms.

It’s part of a strategy Ubisoft calls “companion gaming,” said Chris Early, vice president of Digital Publishing.

We caught up with Early last week in San Francisco to hear more about the company’s increasing digital efforts.

Early defines companion gaming as having a single brand that crosses multiple platforms, including console, social and mobile.

An analogy he uses is how a baseball fan attends professional games, but also likes to read about the games in newspapers or on the Internet–a fan wants to engage across all platforms.

So far, Ubisoft has created 10 Facebook titles and has several more titles planned for the year, he said.

One of the more successful games is CSI Crime City, which Ubisoft made in collaboration with CBS.

It currently has a modest 1.9 million monthly users on Facebook, according to appdata.com. From there, Ubisoft’s titles drastically taper off, with its next title, Castle & Co., generating only 620,000 monthly users.

However, Ubisoft is using the platform to experiment with cross promotion.

For instance, it worked with CBS to create direct ties between the Facebook game and the TV show. During sweeps week last month, the TV show writers added clues in the show that could be used to unlock in-game bonuses on Facebook.

Early says the strategy is about putting the core intellectual property at the center of the experience and then building games based on that, whether it’s on Facebook, console or mobile.

Ubisoft’s mobile game efforts so far have consisted of mostly partnering with Gameloft, which builds the games. While Ubisoft used to own stock in Gameloft, its ties to the company are now limited to family relations. Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot is the brother of Gameloft’s CEO Michel Guillemot.

While questions arise in the industry on how much focus on social and mobile there should be right now, Early is cautious because he doesn’t see digital overtaking physical games anytime soon.

“Digital will not kill physical,” he said. “There will always be support for a certain percent.”

One primary reason for that is because digital platforms have infinite shelf space, which make discovery extremely difficult for the consumer, he said.

On Facebook, consumers must sift through thousands of titles to decide what to play. Same goes for Microsoft’s Xbox Live or Sony’s PlayStation Network. “You have to look at the top 10 sellers, or rely on a friend,” he said. “There’s a significant hurdle to digital.” The same has been said about mobile, where getting visibility on Apple’s App Store or the Android Market has been difficult.

He said with physical sales, stores have limited shelf space and customers can more easily browse through titles in a store and get recommendations from employees.

For now, there’s not a lot of pressure on Ubisoft from Wall Street to make a ton of money in digital. It hasn’t purchased a social-gaming studio for millions of dollars and therefore doesn’t have an urgency to see a return.

At least not yet.

It is forecasting revenues of $1.4 billion this year, which is about 17 percent higher than in 2010. It also expects that 2011 will mark a return to profitability and positive cash flow.

In addition to investments in Facebook, Ubisoft plans to support the launch of the Nintendo 3DS portable with more than six titles. It also is investing heavily in Microsoft’s well-selling Kinect platform. So far, it has sold more than two million games for the platform, giving it an 18 percent market share in the U.S.

Both major media companies and start-ups are experimenting with new tools that combine technology and reality in a bid to get children to engage with real-world objects. And researchers are already investigating whether the new tools help kids learn better than regular computer games do.

Last month, children’s media giant PBS Kids, part of the Public Broadcasting Service, began testing games that use “augmented reality,” or computer-generated content that is combined with images from the real world. Using augmented reality, a computer or smartphone can detect objects and provide information about them. Children can also move the real objects to make something happen in a computer game.

Other games that bridge the gap between real and virtual ask kids to document their activities by taking photos, making videos or recording their location using a GPS device, typically with the help of their parents.

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The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing this morning that it has finalized a partnership with Sprint to enable its customers to charge small items to their Sprint bills.

T-Mobile USA is the only one of the majority carriers left without an agreement, but you can safely assume one is coming soon.

BilltoMobile, which is majority owned by Korean-based Danal, already inked deals with Verizon Wireless in May, and AT&T in October.

In some circumstances, other other mobile-payment partners, including Boku and Zong, are piggy-backing on BilltoMobile’s relationships, so they can also enable mobile payments.

To be technical, the deal with Sprint is a Direct Mobile Billing Gateway Service Provider agreement. It essentially means that it has a direct line into the carrier’s billing systems, so that small purchases will be charged to the mobile bill.

The deal does not extend beyond digital goods to more expensive physical goods like books from Amazon.com.

Through BilltoMobile’s direct relationships with carriers, it has been able to significantly lower fees to make charging items to the phone bill feasible. Those fees have fallen significantly for digital items, which have high margins, but are often not low enough to make charging physical items reasonable. So, currently, the rates are appropriate for charging virtual good inside a Facebook game, or maybe even a song or purchase of a higher level in a video game.

As we previously reported, Zong told us that some physical goods with higher margins will be enabled sooner than you think.

BilltoMobile said Sprint’s implementation is expected in the coming months.

The company now reaches more than 240 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. across mutliple carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

To make payments, customers don’t have to register, set up or download anything. Purchases are completed in seconds using a two-step authentication process.

PayPal is also going after this space, however, this year it will also be focusing on rolling out an in-store solution to allow consumers to use their PayPal account at the register.

The eBay-owned company announced the pilots last week at its analyst day, and we followed up with PayPal’s president, Scott Thompson, to find out what the company has in store.

Thompson said the program will target the “everyday spend category,” meaning large merchants that specialize in groceries, gas and other broad categories.

To be sure, PayPal, which is on track to become bigger than eBay over the next few years, is quickly expanding as it sees opportunities in mobile and other alternative payment options.

So far, it has been more focused on becoming an online and mobile payment platform for virtual and digital goods, including the ability for customers to pay for small and inexpensive items without leaving an app or Web site.

In terms of physical payments, however, PayPal’s experiments have consisted of a partnership with Bling Nation that allows users to adhere a sticker to their mobile phone to pay for in-store items using a PayPal account.

Thompson said the partnership was a good test, but it was mostly focused on small merchants and wasn’t going to get mass adoption.

For the trials this year, Thompson wouldn’t disclose what technology the company will be using, but he promises it won’t require swapping out expensive point-of-sale machines.

“Anytime there’s a real-time network and it is online, it’s addressable by us,” he said. “We’ll address it with software.”

He said PayPal is technology-agnostic, which is perfect for today’s world of different views and different standards. “If there were common standards, there would be no need for PayPal. With all of the competing standards, and our ability to run above them, we have the opportunity to win over the next three to five years.”

Thompson said the solution won’t require issuing plastic cards to customers, which is inherently not secure because they can be lost, or overcharged. “The future is pushing money to the merchant vs. the merchant pulling money from your bank account.”

The pilots will include using a couple of different techniques to find out what customers like.

Any way you slice it, the opportunity in front of it is enormous (and uncertain).

In 2010, PayPal’s mobile revenues totaled $750 million, and is forecasting for the segment to grow tenfold over the next three years. He says if PayPal is able to get just one percent of retail sales, it will be able to double the size of its business.

PayPal is not the only one fighting to be at the checkout. Other payment providers, such as Visa and MasterCard will be there, along with other start-ups, such as ISIS, the wireless-carrier-led initiative in the U.S.

Don’t confuse this with how companies, like Zong and Boku, are trying to enable consumers to charge some higher-margin physical goods to their carrier bill. That goes after only a small segment of payments, whereas PayPal is aiming for the everyday stuff.

A really addictive experience.

Or at least that’s the hope of YooMee Games, which is unveiling a new gaming platform today (yes, another one!) that allows developers to add features to their games, like tournament play and one-on-one challenges.

The San Francisco-based company’s founder, Prita Uppal, jokes it is the Chuck E. Cheese of the Internet because of the tickets.

It starts with players placing wagers or buying tokens for a chance to win money and tickets that can be turned in for prizes. “It’s an arcade. You buy coins and then compete with others in tournaments and get tickets based on the outcome, which can be turned into cash or prizes, based on how many tickets you have.”

Think skee ball, but with better prizes than Tootsie Rolls.

At the start, YooMee will have more than 30 games to choose from, including popular puzzle games, like Bubble Town and Cube Crasher, and word games like WordStone. Prizes include Amazon gift cards, digital cameras and other gadgets.

Uppal said the company is not a casino and people are not gambling on the site, because the games are skill-based and not based on chance. “It’s completely skill-based competition. It’s legal. All the casual games you see and play on the Web are skill games–so you can wager and compete and earn money.”

Still, the business model is complex, having to optimize winnings for the player while also distributing money back to the developer and keeping some for itself.

Users don’t have to pay to play–instead they can play for free and view ads, such as a video pre-roll. That business is doing well, and allowed the 22-employee company to reach profitability in October.

Uppal says YouMee isn’t competing against other companies that are providing developers other services, such as leaderboards, comments or rankings. Rather, it can be used in addition to those services. It also uses Facebook Connect, so friends can easily find one another from their regular social network.

Commonly, a player will be introduced to the “arcade concept,” which Uppal is also “calling social competition,” after playing one of the games. A message will appear that says something like, “If you had paid 50 cents, you would have made $10 with this score. Do you want to enter this competition?”

In founding the company, Uppal placed a few good bets of her own.

She met her first VCs on the ski-lift chair in Park City, Utah. Directly from the ski slopes, U.S. Venture Partners flew her to Silicon Valley–she was without a computer and practically still wearing her ski boots–to give a 45-minute presentation. She had a term sheet two days later.

And she found her second VC after seeing a psychic, who predicted that the letter “A” and foreign money were going to be really important. That led her to take meetings with Altos Ventures, which has roots in Asia. “I wouldn’t have ever spoken to them if it weren’t for the psychic.”

[CLICK HERE FOR LIVE COVERAGE OF THE PRESS EVENT]
But a select crowd will get to see the iPad newspaper tonight, at an equally notable Manhattan location: Rupert Murdoch’s apartment, where the News Corp. CEO is hosting a “low key” cocktail party.

Although News Corp. owns this Web site, my email invite to tonight’s pre-launch launch event hasn’t arrived, and I’m told it never will. The company hasn’t offered me a peek at the Daily, either.

But at this point I’ve still got a pretty decent sense of what Murdoch’s guests will see this evening, and the rest of us will see tomorrow: A newspaper that’s both old-fashioned and cutting-edge.

People who have gotten up  close to the the Daily describe a digital paper where many of the news stories look just like news stories you’d see anywhere else.

Others will look more like iPhone apps, featuring interactive graphics or videos, or photos you can swipe, pinch and zoom–with perhaps almost no text at all.

And there’s more! There’s no 3-D video yet, though it’s on the agenda. But there will be an audio feature so you can have stories read aloud to you. And there’s a crossword puzzle! And Sudoku!

A Daily-watcher who thinks the thing is amazing compares it to the Daily Prophet, the magical newspaper read by Harry Potter and his wizard pals.

More jaded observers tell me it’s more or less what they’ve seen in existing iPad magazine apps, particularly Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and Condé Nast’s Wired. The big difference is that those magazines come out monthly, and the Daily will get beamed to your iPad… daily.

Still, the most striking thing about the Daily has nothing to do with any technical bells and whistles. It’s Murdoch’s insistence that he can sell a digital newspaper app to consumers trained to expect that digital news is what you get on the Web, for free.

The Daily is almost defiantly anti-Web: It will have a free site, with a grudging sample of perhaps 10 percent of the newspaper’s stories, but that’s it. While Web news sites increasingly focus on aggregation and filtering of other people’s content, the Daily will focus on making its own stuff, even though plenty of other people are already doing it.

And while News Corp. officials have tried to argue that the Daily isn’t a newspaper but something else, it is most definitely produced using a newspaper model: Six sections, written once a day–the Daily team is particularly excited about its sports coverage–and delivered in the wee hours of the morning.

The Daily will allow for some midday updates, but it’s really designed to land with a digital thud on your virtual doorstep, just like the newspapers Murdoch has loved all his life.

Murdoch will charge 99 cents a week for a subscription, and he’s certainly going to get some takers at the start, especially since the Daily will be free for the first two weeks after tomorrow’s launch.

Which will be a noisy one. The press will give it plenty of free promotion, and News Corp. will augment that with a digital ad campaign, in addition to offline marketing donated and/or bartered from other Murdoch properties. Perhaps there’s a way to mention it once or twice during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast on Fox.

Much more important will be the endorsement from Apple, which is using the Daily to roll out a new “push” subscription feature.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was supposed to appear onstage in San Francisco with Murdoch to bless the launch, will send content boss Eddy Cue to New York tomorrow instead.

That’s still Apple’s seal of approval, though, and I can’t think of another time the company has so conspicuously blessed a single third-party product. That alone will be enough to prompt an enormous number of people to try it out.

Remember that Apple already has a customer base of  some 125 million iTunes users–if you do want to buy this thing, you won’t need to pull out a credit card. A few button clicks will do.

The real question, of course, is how many people are going to pay for the Daily a month down the road, when the buzz is gone. And there’s no way to guess at that when you get your first look at the thing. No matter when that happens.

The Seattle-based company is the king of casual, for producing hit titles such as Plants vs. Zombies, Zuma Blitz and its most-recognized title, Bejeweled, which four million people still play every day.

“We are ready to be public this year if we think it makes sense,” said PopCap’s CEO David Roberts.

For most of the company’s existence, it has made money primarily by charging users for a game that they either buy in a box off the shelf or download over the Internet. In 2010, PopCap’s revenues totaled $100 million.

But the revenue mix is slowly starting to change.

Always an equal-opportunity platform developer, PopCap has aggressively developed games for computers, video-game consoles and mobile phones, leaving no gem unturned.

Now it’s focused on Facebook, the ridiculously lucrative market that has spawned new game companies like Zynga, Electronic Arts’ Playfish and Disney’s Playdom.

Two years ago, PopCap started to see Facebook’s potential and launched Bejeweled for free. In May 2010, it started monetizing the game by selling virtual goods, like coins and power-ups. It took only two months for PopCap to hit $1 million in monthly revenues on Facebook.

Roberts declined to say how much it is making on virtual goods now, but points out that it is the sixth-largest developer on Facebook in terms of daily active users, after other game makers, like Zynga, Electronic Arts and others, according to AppData.

“Our biggest growth is Facebook, virtual goods and microtransactions,” he said. “We are halfway through our transition from license to Facebook.”

If it is not already obvious, Roberts says, the two dominant themes of the year will be social and mobile.

PopCap’s iPhone games have also done exceedingly well, scoring two of the top 10 best-selling apps of 2010. Bejeweled 2 and Plants vs. Zombies were ranked fourth and ninth, respectively.

Interestingly, of the games that made the list, each of them costs 99 cents, except for Plants vs. Zombies, which costs $2.99.

What makes gaming such a big opportunity?

The major trend developing from smartphones and social is that games can now be as popular as a movie and “not be a weird, niche-y thing,” he said. “The new platforms are what drove that change.”

The trend that Roberts is referring to was cemented late last year when Activision Blizzard reported that Call of Duty: Black Ops hit $1 billion in sales after slightly more than one month. In its first five days alone, it outpaced all records for five-day box office receipts of any movie.

Unlike Call of Duty, PopCap’s games are more inviting. It forgoes guns and missiles for brain teasers and puzzles that offer players a few minutes of relaxation.

That’s not a small niche. On average, roughly 50 million people are playing a PopCap title across its network every month.

Roberts said there’s an opportunity to communicate with that audience more, but it has some learning to do, about how and when to send messages on game tips or cross-promoting titles. “If we are going to be a broad-based consumer company, we have to learn to be that kind of company.”

PopCap has 400 employees, half of which are based in its downtown Seattle sky-rise offices and the other half at its studios around the world, including Shanghai and Dublin. It has the enviable position of being profitable and self-funded, other than taking a small mezzanine round of funding a couple of years ago.

An in-app payment option was supposed to be released last quarter, but Google delayed the launch in order to get more feedback from developers, who had been very busy at the end of the year with Christmas app development and sales, according to Chu.

(Meanwhile, start-ups like Zong are already offering in-app payments for Android, but Chu said he’d prefer developers to wait until Google can get its own version out to provide a consistent user experience.)

In-app payments are important because they enable developers to sell virtual goods and premium features, both major potential sources of mobile revenue in addition to paid apps and advertising.

Android has a ways to go to convince developers that its app platform is on par with Apple’s iPhone, especially in terms of monetization. “We are not happy with the payout purchases in Android Market,” Chu said.

Google has been slow to form partnerships with carriers, and so far has done so only with T-Mobile USA and AT&T, but Chu said this is currently a major area of investment.

Asked whether carriers get too large a cut, Chu said that carriers deserve a share of the profits since they significantly subsidize the cost of phones.

Chu acknowledged problems with Android Market’s initial approach, mentioning Google has made changes, such as taking a more active approach to removing bad apps, and reducing the refund window (the length of time customers have to return paid apps) from 24 hours to 15 minutes.

Chu said his team is actively working on products to improve Android Market merchandising and app discovery with better search and lists, as well as an improved ranking system.

Google is open to feedback about changing the refund window, said Chu, but it will draw a hard line about refunds for virtual goods. Not gonna happen, he said.

The program will encourage users to purchase virtual goods that their friends have already bought.

Speaking to an audience of application developers who are concerned about Facebook’s move to require developers to use its Facebook Credits virtual currency system, Liu mentioned Buy With Friends as an example of a program Facebook is providing that will help developers make more money.

Liu said Buy With Friends gives developers tools to help users share their in-game purchases. In testing so far, she said “more than 50 percent of users elected to share a purchase.” As an example, after a friend has made and shared a purchase, a player might see a message that says, “Your friend has unlocked this deal for you–get 40 percent off this special monster food,” Liu said.

I’ve argued in the past that much of what we call “social commerce” isn’t very social yet, but this seems like an example of a product that actually deserves that label.

Facebook is also offering incentives, including promotion and premium ad targeting, to developers who use Facebook Credits as their in-game currency.

Facebook Credits are used by some 150 developers, but many of them elect to also use their own branded currency so as not to be locked into the Facebook system. This introduces a silly amount of complexity, with users often having to convert their real-world money into Facebook Credits into in-game currency, all at different exchange rates.

Liu also said that Facebook is testing a feature that improves users’ ability to purchase additional credits without leaving the game environment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

While Facebook Credits has been in beta for some time, and an announcement like this was expected, this is the first time Facebook has revealed its whole plan.

The program is a lot like Apple’s iTunes, which keeps 30 percent of the revenues and shares 70 percent with application developers, except that instead of buying an application, users are typically paying for virtual goods from within a social game, such as a new tractor for their farm or a fancy new pair of shoes for their avatar.

Up until now, Facebook Credits had been in beta, and initially developers were upset by Facebook’s announcement that it was creating its own payment platform (and taking a big chunk of revenues with it). But slowly developers have agreed to use its payments platform, and many of them are pleasantly surprised that it requires less work and monetizes better.

Today, it is used in more than 350 applications from 150 developers, including Zynga, Playfish, CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, PopCap and Arkadium. Already it represents more than 70 percent of virtual-goods transactions volume on Facebook.

Rather than developers having to scrape together a number of payment providers for each country Facebook operates in, Facebook has integrated a number of payment platforms for them, including pay-by-mobile, gift cards, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.

For consumers, the benefit is that they can enter their payment information once and buy currency across lots of games.

In a recent interview, Katie Mitic, the director of platform and mobile marketing for Facebook, told us that the company has been working hard at introducing Facebook Credits to consumers through free offers and trying to make it as effortless as possible to spend money within games.

While Facebook will require social-game developers to use Facebook Credits starting July 1, they won’t have to use Facebook Credits as their sole in-game currency. That means game developers can continue to brand their own coins and currency within games, such as Zynga’s FarmVille Cash.

However, Facebook will be offering incentives for those who do use Facebook Credits. Developers who choose to will receive early access to product features and premium promotion on Facebook, including featured placement on the Games Dashboard, premium targeting for ads and access to new co-promotion opportunities, Facebook said in an announcement today.

Mitic said it hasn’t been a very difficult sell to get developers on board. For instance, roughly 20 of the top 25 applications are using Facebook Credits, and companies like CrowdStar have made the choice to integrate Credits completely.

After Digital Chocolate integrated Facebook Credits, it said its average revenue per user tripled and billing issues by consumers fell by 60 percent.

So far, Credits can only be used within games, but Mitic said the platform will open up more broadly over time. “Games are the real opportunity right now,” she said.

Over the next five months or so, Facebook will continue to seed Credits among users and ensure that a huge audience is familiar with how to use it before the switch.

He’s building a network that he thinks can be as meaningful to today’s generation as MTV was to the rock ‘n’ roll era.

The opportunity doesn’t come around very often, he admits, but he believes we are at a tipping point, where games, mobile devices and high-speed networks will lead to a new entertainment channel, saying such moments “are infrequent, but when they do come along, a lot of value will be generated.”

Young’s plans were only accelerated three months ago after the game developer sold for $400 million to a company that is far from a household name in the U.S.–Japanese-based DeNA (pronounced D-N-A).

We caught up with Young at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco to understand how Ngmoco’s mission has changed, and to learn about what the two have in store for the U.S. market.

DeNA is a publicly traded mobile social network that has a market cap of $4.5 billion and annual revenues of $1.25 billion.

The company has been on an acquisition spree over the past few months, buying U.S. mobile game-makers, like Icebreaker and Gameview Studios, along with making a handful of other U.S. investments.

In Japan, DeNA is known for its mobile-only social network called Mobage-town (pronounced Mo-bah-gay), which runs on lower-end feature phones and makes all of its money selling virtual goods within its network of games.

Now DeNA is looking to expand into the U.S., and to transition from feature phones to smartphones in Japan.

Ngmoco will become the backbone for both.

Ngmoco was spawned from the iPhone application boom, having received investments from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund and, more recently, Google Ventures. It created iPhone games like We Rule, and We Doodle and Rolando.

Then, last summer, it played down the development of games in favor of creating a gaming platform, called the Plus Network. The network allowed players to log in to the same account across multiple games and to participate in leaderboards and awards. In other words, it was a social network of sorts.

Not very coincidentally, Young’s idea for the Plus Network was modeled after DeNA’s Mobage-town in Japan. He even presented it to investors that way in slides when raising money. The Plus Network will now become the basis for Mobage in the U.S. and Japan.

The network will be open to third-party game developers who are looking for a single log-in experience, a community of users playing within a social network and a monetization platform. It will run on Android because the platform is more open than Apple’s iPhone.

Already, Ngmoco has some traction.

It has signed a deal with Samsung to become its default Game Hub on all the Android phones and tablets, and it has 40 developers participating in a beta. Within the next two months, Ngmoco expects to launch “We Rule” on Android and to launch the fully integrated Mobage service in the second quarter.

One way to think about Mobage is a Facebook-like platform on top of mobile phones that companies like FarmVille’s Zynga could leverage. Young prefers to compare it to MySpace, except that MySpace failed to catapult itself from its leadership position on music to become a entertainment destination.

One stark difference between social networks on PCs and Mobage is that users won’t necessarily be playing with friends, but rather a network of game players you may or may not know. Young argues that’s a benefit: “It’s difficult to escape if everyone is watching you.”

If it sounds ambitious, it is.

But it’s something Young is comfortable with.

When Ngmoco originally launched, its first logo read ng:moco :) with a few Japanese characters written underneath. Roughly translated, the Japanese characters said “future entertainment company.”

Young said it was in Japanese for two reasons: It looked cool, and because it was too cocky to come out in say it.

Today, he doesn’t hesitate: “Now we have the chance to do it.”

Young has a set of three priorities: Launching and executing Mobage as a brand on Android; building a small number of games to show off the platform’s potential; and finally to move the Mobage platform from mobile to tablets, and then to the TV.

In a video interview, Young describes in more depth how Ngmoco could become the next MTV, and proves that he really did use the word “cocky”:

Photo Credit: mobilopen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/ngmocos-ambitions-accelerate-from-game-maker-to-future-entertainment-company/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110119/the-ipad-now-can-take-command-of-computers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110119/the-ipad-now-can-take-command-of-computers/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:03:08 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1739 It has long been possible to control one PC or Mac from another, legally and with permission. Though the process can be tricky to set up, companies often use it as a maintenance and training tool, and some consumers use it to help others solve computer problems, or to reach back to their home or office machines while on the road to access information.

But what about remotely controlling a PC or Mac from the newest category of digital device, a multitouch tablet? Well, it turns out there are apps for that.

Such apps have been around on super-smart phones like the iPhone for years, but phone screens are so small that using them to open and operate programs and folders on a Mac or PC is very frustrating, at least to me. The iPad, with its roomy 10-inch screen, is a different story. It actually has the real estate to make the process much more practical.

I’ve been testing a couple of these apps on my iPad, using them to remotely control Windows PCs and Macs at my home and office. In fact, I’m typing this paragraph in Microsoft Word on a Mac remotely from the iPad.

My conclusion is that these apps do work, but even on the large iPad screen, they’re too clumsy and confusing to use on a regular basis, mostly because touch-screen tablets aren’t a great match for the way traditional computers—designed for a mouse and a physical keyboard—work. Also, the apps have some functional limitations, and they are heavily dependent on the speed of the network or Internet connection, which can make them slow at demanding things like video.

A view of a Windows PC on an iPad via LogMeIn Ignition.

For my tests, I selected two apps squarely aimed at average consumers. One is called LogMeIn Ignition, and is the iPad and iPhone incarnation of a longstanding computer-to-computer remote-control product called LogMeIn. The other is called iTeleport. It has been around, under various names, since the early days of the iPhone, and now comes in an iPad edition as well.

Both apps get around the complexity of setup by installing a special free program on the computer you wish to control that talks to the iPad app. The apps can see and control all the computers on which you have installed companion programs. I found setup easy and the connections generally reliable and fast enough, except for video.

But the big drawback to these products is that they are clumsy in controlling the target computer. Each allows two basic methods for this. In one, your finger moves the computer’s mouse cursor and you click the virtual mouse by tapping. In the other, you can directly tap on things on the remote screen. In my view, LogMeIn was better at the first method and iTeleport was better at the second. But I found both clumsy and tedious in both programs, especially when I tried to combine controlling the remote computer with the frequent need to use touch to move the image of the screen around the iPad’s display.

LogMeIn Ignition costs a one-time fee of $29.99. The iTeleport app can be used free for 30 days, after which it costs either $2.99 a month or a $24.99 one-time fee. For the next seven days, iTeleport is running a sale that cuts the price to $1 a month, or $10 for the one-time fee.

Both apps can control multiple Windows or Mac computers, at no extra cost. For my tests, I used each to remotely access the same two Windows PCs and two Macs, both desktops and laptops. One limitation: neither app allows you to transfer a file from a computer to the iPad.

While there are some differences between the products, they are fundamentally similar. Once you log in, you see the remote computer’s screen on your iPad screen. In my tests, with both products, I was able to open Web pages, check email, view photos and use productivity apps. I also was able to print documents from the computers on my home printer, even while I was miles away.

In both apps, you pinch and zoom to enlarge or reduce the view of the target computer screen, and can rotate the image of the screen.

The iPad can’t play Flash videos, but these apps allow you to view such videos from your PC or Mac on the iPad. But there are catches. For one thing, neither program lets you hear audio from the computer through the iPad, so the videos (and music you play remotely) are mute. Also, in my tests, even over a fast connection, I could never get a video from the remote computer to play smoothly over either app.

LogMeIn also offers a version for Android, unlike iTeleport, and that allows audio to be transmitted. I tested this on a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and it worked.

One big difference is in the level of security or privacy the two apps offer. Both encrypt the remote connection, but LogMeIn requires you to sign in twice: once to its own service and once to the computer itself. iTeleport skips the computer login, so it feels less secure. In addition, iTeleport outsources its authentication to Google. You sign into the product using your Google credentials. This is simpler, but requires you to trust Google with the privacy of the contents of your computer.

Each program has special keyboards and shortcuts to add things to the iPad that computers use but the tablet lacks, such as function keys. Each also has various gestures you can use as shortcuts. But the overall effect is confusing.

Bottom line: You can control a PC or a Mac from an iPad, without any complex setup, using these two apps. But, unless you spend a lot of time learning to get good at it, the process is clunky and best used only when you absolutely must.

Find all Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110119/the-ipad-now-can-take-command-of-computers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110116/snagfilms-snags-10-million-in-funding-at-50-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110116/snagfilms-snags-10-million-in-funding-at-50-million-valuation/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:15:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39577

SnagFilms, the online video distribution site for professional documentaries, has nabbed $10 million in funding from Comcast’s investment arm and New Enterprise Associates, and will also now be distributing fictional independent film releases.

That and the new investment giving SnagFilms a valuation of $50 million should be big news at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, the famous independent film gathering opening in Park City, Utah, on Thursday.

And SnagFilms also announced that well-known industry exec Bingham Ray is joining the start-up to spearhead its distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films.

The service, unlike the subscription-based video giant Netflix, currently distributes free non-fiction documentary films with advertising, as well as offers rental streaming and purchase options.

And it is profitable, said Ted Leonsis, the former AOL exec who is the founder and has been the driving investor in SnagFilms.

“It was always my personal frustration as a backer of documentaries that you could not get distribution far and wide,” he said in an interview earlier today.

He noted that while Netflix is really now focused on big studio fare, “what we’ve discovered is a big supply of independent video that has never seen light of day, but that has a big audience.”

SnagFilms’ strategy is to give broader reach to these films, which often don’t even have a theatrical opening–or, if they do, are very small.

Along with its site, which digitizes the films and adds advertising to them, SnagFilms also encourages Web sites and others to grab films and create a “virtual movie theater.” (You can see my effort below.)

It also has video-on-demand deals with Comcast, Verizon and more, as well as purchase options with Apple’s iTunes and others.

Earlier this month, SnagFilms also launched an impressive and free iPad full-movie-watching app.

SnagFilms also owns a popular news site called indieWIRE, which covers the independent film market, and the new funding will also be used to expand it.

That market has been in need of a boost of some kind, since it has been struggling as financing has dried up for the production of quality documentaries and outside-the-Hollywood-machine movies.

It has long been hoped that the Internet would perhaps save and strengthen the genre, with its supposed long-tail magic.

But the going has been slow. Currently, SnagFilms has 2,000 films in its online library, although Leonsis said the aim is to use the new funds to get 10,000 films on the service as soon as possible.

“We’re trying to build a beachhead in the independent film world,” he said of SnagFilms, which currently has about 40 employees in Washington, D.C., and New York. “We think we have a niche and video is the killer app on Web now.”

Leonsis, who has backed such notable documentaries as “The Rape of Nanking,” said NEA’s Peter Barris will join the board, along with existing investor Steve Case.

Case and Leonsis, of course, were the dynamic duo of AOL’s glory days.

So, I am rooting for another win in an arena that needs it.

Thus, here’s my own movie palace online and also the official press release from SnagFilms:

Watch more free documentaries

Industry Powerhouses NEA and Comcast Invest in SnagFilms

$10 million in new funding to distribute documentaries and fictional independent films on all digital platforms and devices, globally

Washington D.C.–January 17, 2011 – SnagFilms announced today it has received $10 million in growth capital from new investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Comcast Interactive Capital (CIC). Existing investors, including Ted Leonsis (SnagFilms’ Founder) and Steve Case, also participated. The financing will be used to expand its distribution of independent films–including, for the first time, fictional independent releases–across all digital platforms and devices, and on a global basis.

SnagFilms is a leader in distributing free, ad-supported titles from a library of over 2,000 non-fiction films. Last year, SnagFilms entered the transactional world with launches of video on demand channels on Comcast and Verizon FiOS, as well as titles for sale through the Apple’s iTunes store. Earlier this month, SnagFilms debuted its iPad application with the largest collection of award-winning U.S. films offered free to iPad users.

“As a profitable company with substantial private investors, SnagFilms didn’t need to raise outside capital,” said company founder Ted Leonsis. “However, we saw overwhelming strategic value in involving NEA, a pioneer and leading venture capital firm, and CIC, the investment arm of Comcast. SnagFilms is very well-financed and uniquely positioned now to bring the full array of independent films–fiction and non-fiction, U.S. and foreign–to global audiences on all platforms and devices. We’ve amassed a library of 2,000 documentaries since our launch, and we’re now building distribution opportunities for tens of thousands of independent films in both categories. That’s great news for film fans and for filmmakers.”

“SnagFilms is perfectly positioned to fuse technology and content in a manner that has marked many of the transformational industry leaders we have helped build in the past,” said NEA Managing General Partner Peter Barris, who joins the Company’s Board of Directors. “New devices and digital platforms will allow consumers unprecedented access to quality content, and SnagFilms will be there to delight them. We are pleased to be able to invest in SnagFilms at this time, and to help them add fictional indie films to their expertise with documentaries–and to take both genres to the full swath of digital platforms and devices.” Among many other investments, Barris serves on the board of Groupon as its first VC investor.

“We are excited about the new opportunities SnagFilms creates, especially for independent filmmakers who historically could not get distribution,” said David Horowitz, Managing Director of Comcast Interactive Capital. “This investment reflects our view that consumers are demanding a diverse selection of high-quality content that can be watched on any platform or device.”

SnagFilms also announced that industry veteran Bingham Ray will join the Company to help guide its entry into distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films. Ray, former President of United Artists, October Films and Kimmel Entertainment, and honored for Lifetime Achievement by the Gotham Awards, has deep experience in the acquisition, marketing and distribution of motion pictures, including “Hotel Rwanda,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Secrets & Lies,” “War Room,” “High Art,” “Last Days” and “Breaking the Waves.”

“Bingham has been an advocate for filmmakers throughout his career,” noted Rick Allen, SnagFilms CEO. “His record of successful distribution on traditional platforms provides a strategic sense and depth of relationships that will be invaluable as we extend our model into a broader array of films. Bingham will be a key member of our large presence at the Sundance Film Festival this week and beyond.”

“I’ve been a big fan of SnagFilms from their earliest days, and am truly thrilled to be part of the team as they expand the service, bringing more filmmakers to bigger audiences on a wider array of platforms,” said Ray. “This is the future of our business.”

“SnagFilms plus Bingham Ray is a great combination,” said Tom Bernard, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics. “Bingham knows the indie world as well as anyone alive and is admired for his experience and for always delivering for filmmakers. He’ll be a big asset to SnagFilms’ expansion.”

In addition, SnagFilms intends to use its new growth capital to expand its indieWIRE unit, now in its 15th year as the leading web source of news, reviews and analysis of independent film.

“indieWIRE’s traffic is now ten times what it was when we purchased it two and a half years ago,” Allen said. “Before the Academy Awards are announced later this month, you’ll see new editor-in-chief Dana Harris add ongoing features to our coverage of the indie world, and exciting new blogs to our Network, like the recently-added blog The Playlist.”

About SnagFilms

SnagFilms features free ad-supported viewing of more than 2,000 award-winning titles from some of the greatest names in documentary film. All films are shareable across the web. Since its launch in July 2008, SnagFilms’ library has been featured on over 2 billion web pageviews, with more than 325 million minutes of SnagFilms titles streamed across over more than 100,000 affiliated sites and webpages, including through partners such as Aol, Comcast, Hulu, the Starbucks Digital Network, IMDb, the Miami Herald, hundreds of non-profits, special interest sites and blogs. SnagFilms also offers selected titles via VOD (with Comcast and FiOS), on iTunes and through a new free application for the iPad.

OVGuide has twice named SnagFilms a Top Site and MovieMaker Magazine named SnagFilms to its annual list of “50 Best Websites for Moviemakers.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110116/snagfilms-snags-10-million-in-funding-at-50-million-valuation/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110113/fewer-than-6-percent-of-gamers-buy-virtual-goods-and-thats-big-bucks/ http://allthingsd.com/20110113/fewer-than-6-percent-of-gamers-buy-virtual-goods-and-thats-big-bucks/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:04:32 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1608 Fewer than 6 percent of the social game players in the U.S. spend money on virtual goods, but that’s adding up to a whopping $653 million this year alone.

When you add other sources of revenues, including lead-generation offers, which are incentives for filling out a survey or signing up for a subscription, and advertising dollars, the social gaming industry is expected to break $1 billion this year for the first time, according to eMarketer.

In 2012, revenues will rise to $1.32 billion, with a majority of sales still expected to come from virtual goods.

Still, as the audience for social games is expected to rise, so are advertising revenues. EMarketer forecasts that advertisers will spend $192 million in 2011, a 60 percent rise over last year, and in 2012, advertising revenues are expected to jump another 41 percent.

The success of virtual goods and the rise of advertising will lead to more branded virtual goods, said Paul Verna, author of the eMarketer report. “This is the largest segment of the social gaming economy, and one that marketers are increasingly turning to as a branding vehicle. We expect to see more branded virtual goods as social gaming matures over the next two years.”

Still, these figures appear modest in comparison to the turbocharged bets companies are making on the space, and the revenues that the leading companies are achieving.

Two acquisitions over the past year and a half easily exceed this year’s revenue projections alone, bringing into question whether the projections are modest or the industry is overhyped.

Disney purchased Playdom for upward of $700 million, including earnouts, and in late 2009, Electronic Arts acquired Playfish for $400 million. Those together value the space at more than $1 billion, and that doesn’t include Zynga, which remains independent and is the largest social games company on Facebook. Its revenues were estimated at more than half a billion dollars last year–up from about $300 million in 2009.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110113/fewer-than-6-percent-of-gamers-buy-virtual-goods-and-thats-big-bucks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/inhale-digital-raises-round-to-build-the-groupon-of-virtual-goods/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/inhale-digital-raises-round-to-build-the-groupon-of-virtual-goods/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:30:06 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1557 What’s better than Groupon? A hybrid approach that mixes both the best of daily deals and Zynga’s addictive social games, like Mafia Wars and CityVille.

To be sure, this is on a much smaller scale than either of those two companies — it’s just getting started.

But Inhale Digital thinks it is on to something by offering so-called daily deals for online games, including game credits and virtual goods.

The New York-based company is officially launching today, and is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million from investors, including Canaan Partners.

For example, one of its deals could say that social game, Spa Retreat, will offer “50 Summerlight credits, 2,000 coins, five diamonds and one astrology center.” This bundle, normally valued at $8, will cost $2.99. Or, Inhale Digital will offer free credits in Chocolatier: Sweet Society are normally valued at $3.

Inhale Digital is integrating its offers into Facebook, allowing users of the social network to sign up for the deals, and discover new games. The first games publishers on the Inhale Digital platform include Hexify, Horseracing Simulation, Summerlight, PlayFirst, and Three Rings.

Gerard Cunningham, CEO and founder of Inhale Digital, was formerly the founder and president of Betfair, an online wagering company, and also held positions at Lands’ End and the Gap. In a release, he said: “The online game market is exploding, yet online game discovery is broken…Games that might not otherwise find paying players will find themselves embraced by an eager market.”

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