Zynga Tells CupidWithFriends To Stop Using ‘With Friends'
Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site's name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga's trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends.
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Yahoo Wants To Buy Everyone, Tumblr Edition
The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo is not following this rule, with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post-Marissa Mayer hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction. Deals I have heard rumors Yahoo was trying to get into over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $800 million asking price). Path (at a $2 billion asking price). Pinterest. Hulu. Zynga. Daily Motion. And at a smaller scale: Gdgt. Wavii. Media Ocean (?). A spate of others. And now Tumblr. "Literally they talk to everyone," said one person familiar with the matter on the matter.
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Running With Friends, Zynga's Entry In The Endless Runner Genre, Launches Globally
If you're a fan of endless runner games like Temple Run, starting today you'll get your chance to do more than outrun a pack of demonic monkeys — you can take on your friends too, with Zynga's new title Running With Friends. That's the basic distinction that Travis Boatman, Zynga's senior vice president of mobile, offered when describing the game to me. There's already "a huge group of players that love these games," he said, but they aren't able to "play with friends and family the way that I can in Words With Friends." At the same time, even though the social component is Zynga's main addition, Boatman said the team was also focused on making sure the core gameplay was fun.
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Viddy Co-Founder Chris Ovitz Lands At Mobile Gaming Startup Scopely
Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz has landed at another buzzed-about Los Angeles startup, the mobile gaming platform Scopely. He used to head up business development at the mobile video startup Viddy, which shot up like a star on the Facebook platform and iOS charts only to later to come back down just as dramatically. At Scopely, he’ll be a vice president of business development, where he’ll work on external opportunities (presumably deals with third-party game makers) to grow the network and the business. Scopely is pursuing a playbook that many other mobile game developers are following. They’re trying to grow the biggest network of gamers possible using apps built both in-house and by outside studios. With an eight-figure number of monthly actives, Scopely is still smaller than other larger competitors that have publishing programs like Zynga and Sequoia-backed Pocket Gems and the Japanese giants like DeNA and GREE. But they say they’ve been able to get all of their games into the ...
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‘First Legal' Online Gambling Site Launches In The U.S., But Only For Nevada Residents For Now
Want the fun of losing your wallet without the free drinks and oxygen high? Now Nevada residents can legally gamble online at ultimatepoker.com, which could roll out nationwide as more states legalize the practice. Since the infamous 2011 “Black Friday” that took down PokerStars and the online gambling cottage industry, a court of appeals overturned the Federal Wire Act law that banned states from legitimizing it for their own residents. Nevada (of course) was the first to pave a legal pathway for casinos to reach residents in their own homes. The rush to legalize gambling was so fierce that Nevada ratified the law under emergency procedures to beat out New Jersey. “As to our competitor, New Jersey, they should be accustomed to following Nevada,” joked Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval. If the urgency is any indication, more and more states could bring gambling to a large swath of the American public soon. According to The Republic, “Instead of checking a box certifying they are older ...
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