Top Items:
Business Week:
In Some Virtual Worlds, the Thrill Is Gone — Zynga and other social game developers search for the next FarmVille-scale hit — Just a few weeks after Mafia Wars 2 went live on Facebook, Din Shlomi got tired of playing the game. A self-described hard-core gamer from northern Israel …
RELATED:
Eric Eldon / TechCrunch:
Zynga Builds Its CastleVille Walls, As Its Facebook Traffic Flattens And Falls — New Facebook game CastleVille is one of Zynga's fastest-growing titles ever, as it announced a few days ago. That's good news for the company, but maybe not good enough when you consider the trajectory …
Discussion:
Softpedia News, Thanks:eldon
Evelyn M. Rusli / DealBook:
Zynga's Tough Culture Risks a Talent Drain — Zynga's chief executive, Mark Pincus, got an earful from employees last month. — In dozens of e-mails to a companywide list, frustrated workers complained about the long hours and stressful deadline periods.
Seth Weintraub / 9to5Mac:
Apple's Black Friday Retail Store Sales were “off the charts” — We obviously had to white out numbers above - From Apple's Retail inventory system. — A source inside Apple Retail has shared with us the numbers for Apple's Black Friday sales event. Black Friday is always huge shopping …
Discussion:
ITProPortal
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Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Black Friday E-Commerce Spending Up 26 Percent To A Record $816M; Amazon Most Visited Retailer — As we heard on Saturday, IBM reported a 24 percent increase in online sales for Black Friday this year. ComScore is announcing even stronger results for e-commerce, with Black Friday seeing $816 million …
Discussion:
CNET News, comScore, Inc., Reuters, PC Magazine, WebProNews, ReadWriteWeb and MediaPost
Brian X. Chen / Bits:
A Look at Apple's Spot-the-Shopper Technology — A Black Friday visit to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif., offered a glimpse of the new technology Apple is using to speed purchases. — A store employee, Diego Aguirre, demonstrated an internal iPhone application that, for the last few weeks …
Discussion:
CNET News, The Verge, Redmond Pie, iDownloadBlog.com and ifoAppleStore
Nick Bilton / Bits:
Disruptions: Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It's Not Clear Why — Millions of Americans who got on a plane over the Thanksgiving holiday heard the admonition: “Please power down your electronic devices for takeoff.” — And absolutely everyone obeyed. I know they did because no planes fell from the sky.
Randall Stross / New York Times:
Data Furnaces Could Bring Heat to Homes — TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat.
Discussion:
GeekWire, Feld Thoughts and Gadgetopia
Kellex / Droid Life:
DROID 4 vs. DROID RAZR - The Evolution of DROID, Specs, and Official Pictures — The DROID 4 has come from out of no where to having us within just a couple of weeks away from launch. The current target date that we have seen from Verizon is December 8, the same day that we could potentially …
Discussion:
Droid Life, Business Insider, Neowin.net, MobileWhack.com, Pulse2, PhoneArena, Digital Trends, Engadget, Geek.com, 9to5Google, SmartKeitai, IntoMobile and DailyTech
Om Malik / GigaOM:
My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too — Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed …
Discussion:
@scottbeale, @joshelman, @devindra, @cpen and @jason, Thanks:pkedrosky
Benjamin Wallace / Wired:
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin — In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list's veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory.
Discussion:
The Verge, Daily Patricia, A VC and @nytimesbits
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
More EXOdesk details surface: 10-point touch, custom HTML5 apps — After teasing the EXOdesk themselves in a YouTube video, the company has passed along some details on the “interactive desk” to The Long Climb. In addition to the (perhaps optimistic) rendering you see above …
Discussion:
Mike Halsey's The Long Climb
