My mistake.. the last sentence should be "... Q1 2011 profit number ..." instead of "... Q2 2011 profit number ..." -- sorry.

Regarding Zynga, how about doing as suggested and read the details? (I won't comment on Groupon, as I've never believed in their product at all)

Their quarterly revenue actually went up by more than $30M over the previous quarter; $279M vs $242M. They didn't launch a new game the entire year, until May 31st. (one month before the end of Q2) Since then, they have also launched a new Indiana Jones themed game, Adventure World. Keep in mind that Zynga will be one of the early players on Google's new social network, already launching their biggest game, Cityville, on the platform.

They had higher than normal hiring expenses, including a $10M payment as part of an executive's sign-on bonus. They also paid out $10.6M in a stock warrant. Both of these are quite likely to be one time events, and neither of them made many appearances in the media. If you take those two payments out, you are back at ~$22M in profit, which would be an increase in year over year, and almost double Q1 2011's profit of $11.8M. My source outlines most of this for you, in case you'd rather not read through the details yourself. I knew the Q2 2011 profit number, but here is another source for you to check out in case you don't believe me.

Do you live in New Zealand? From my understanding, it's quite expensive to do many high bandwidth activities at home due to their low caps.

To say that poker is pure skill is simply untrue. A perfect example that comes to mind is Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 WSOP? You can honestly say, straight faced, that he was the best poker player in that tournament? I didn't think so.

Perhaps you should watch some more poker on TV, or head down to your local card room more often; poker is not all skill. All it takes is a little luck on one or two hands and the tides turn. In that moment when you shoved all in with AK suited, and you get a ridiculous call with 4-3 off, the skill it took to get you to that point is thrown out the window when the flop comes 443.

you took my reply as a serious answer. that's so cute.

tell them to go home and get on their PC?

In my experience, "smartphone customers" and "value their freedom" are mutually exclusive in the US.

A quick macports search shows both of them available. Am I missing something here?

vim @7.3.125 (editors)
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emacs @23.3 (editors)
The GNU Emacs text editor

and I don't think Facebook is so central to the industry that anyone cares if they fall.

That's laughable.

Facebook is social gaming right now. There is at least one multi-billion dollar company created just from Facebook games (Zynga) who reaches something like 50 million social gamers per day. There are other multi-billion dollar companies who've recently entered the social gaming industry (Electronic Arts [EA], and Disney come to mind) and are trying to get a share of this enormous market.

As much as we (slashdot crowd) probably don't like Facebook, the fact remains that it is quite central to most anything relating to 'social' on the internet. Seriously, what else is there that has anything to do with what Facebook's doing that people are using in mass? I outlined a little bit about the insanely profitable social gaming arena that has used Facebook's massive user base to spread like wildfire. Where else can people play these sorts of games with all of their friends? People really enjoy the social aspect of Facebook. In fact, according to a study of ~7,800 Thai students, their primary reason to use Facebook was to relieve stress. (source)

To be honest, I'm not sure why I took the time to respond to this. I think the tech geek type tend to dismiss Facebook because it's not something that we're really into. The facts, however, show that Facebook is quite central to tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions of people's "internet lives", for lack of a better term. Think about this: Facebook has over 9 times the page views of youtube.com, the second most popular website in the world. (source)

Like he was saying: a severe case of reality deficit disorder. Maybe you need to try some construction or janitorial work for a few months to help cure that.

You do realize that EA bought Playfish, a producer of Facebook games similar to Zynga, right? I'd venture a guess that this has much, much more to do with those sorts of games than it does their 'traditional' PC/console games.

With Zynga probably becoming a billion-dollar company in 2011, people are starting to finally take notice of the micro-transactions that have been popular in Asia for some time. My take is that EA is making these sorts of changes to try and catch up to Zynga in the social gaming space.