Ki Mae Heussner / ABCNEWS:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Diane Sawyer as Website Gets 500-Millionth Member Zuckerberg Says New Movie is Fiction;' Claims He Never Agreed to Share Facebook Ownership If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest one in the world.

Looks like Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has woken up to smell the same coffee I'm smelling -- that Apple is chasing HP to become the world's biggest PC maker, and now the MSFT top man has said he's gunning for the tablet market.

As the world waits for Ballmer's words to materialize as something with somewhat more than Zune's 1 percent marketshare, and iMac maker Quanta confirms it will make twice as many iMacs as it will make all-in-on PCs for HP, let's look at Ballmers wordage...

On Apple's storming uber-succesful iPad, Ballmer said, with great grace, "Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a product -- they've certainly sold more than I'd like them to sell."

Enchantee. Also enchanting is Microsoft's determination that Windows 7 tablets will become relevant once the company delivers a credible machine (assuming it can get hold of the components).

"They'll be shipping as soon as they are ready," Ballmer said. "It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch."

"We have got to make things happen. Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we have to with Windows 7 on slates. We're in the process of doing that as we speak."

Translation: Now Apple's shown us how, we're firing up the photocopiers. Or is that unfair?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how replacing an existing system is a bad idea and refactoring is a better direction. In that post I said:

Generally, wholesale re-engineering of a system is a bad idea, because the system still serves a purpose and its' functionality is a moving target. If the system does not serve a purpose, then what is the point of rewriting it?

The main reason that systems do get replaced regardless of the advice above is corporate politics. What I mean is that in some cases, the politics involved with continuing to maintain a maligned application are costly. The better political decision could be to start over and just replace the old system. This should not be seen as an easy decision, but there is one topic that must be discussed in this situation, sunk costs. Fred Wilson had a fantastic post about sunk costs earlier this week:

Sunk Costs are time and money (and other resources) you have already spent on a project, investment, or some other effort. They have been sunk into the effort and most likely you cannot get them back.

The important thing about sunk costs is when it comes time to make a decision about the project or investment, you should NOT factor in the sunk costs in that decision. You should treat them as gone already and make the decision based on what is in front of you in terms of costs and opportunities.

The moral of the story is, when looking to replace a system, do not consider sunk costs. Many people in management will use sunk costs as part of the argument of build vs. buy. Generally, sunk costs are irrelevant to the discussion. If you are deciding to replace an existing system, mentally you have already written off the costs of the system. So, using the money spent on the existing system as part of the costs of building a new system is disingenuous. To put it in even simpler terms, let's say you have an old PC that is running slowly but you have not maintained it well. If you decide to buy a new PC, do you include the costs of the old PC? I know it is not a great analogy, but it is the same general idea.

Now, if you can compare the costs of just rebuilding the system vs the cost of buying the system while ignoring sunk costs, you are finally comparing apples to apples. However, given the topic of my recent post, I would like to add a third apple to the comparison. How much would it cost to refactor and enhance the existing system to match the features of the proposed systems? Disappointingly, most management teams will not consider this third option. We are trying to get rid of the system, why would we throw more money at it?

For many enterprise applications, the cost of the software and support is in the millions of dollars. So, if a purchased application will cost you $5 million, and you are willing to pay that amount, why not consider talking to the team about modifying the existing system? People will talk about the political problems, but if an application works well people will not care how it got built. The other option, rebuilding the system is almost always a bad choice. There is the thinking that the team will have learned from the effort of building the first system, so the second system will be so much better. What normally happens is that the system gets over-designed, complicated and bloated with tons of features in an attempt to ensure that you do not see the failure of the first system.

What option would you choose?

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AOL is offering a robust platform for political advertising, called the Politics hub, that will allow marketers to create targeted campaigns across AOL's growing properties across the web. The move should be one of many as ad networks work to take advantage of spending by political groups.

According to Jeff Levick, President of AOL Global Advertising and Strategy, the goal is to create a clear resource in AOL for political marketers to use:

Our Politics hub lets campaigns and issue advocacy groups take their messages directly to voters and key influencers in a proactive way through display advertising, and we make the on-boarding process something that is simple, easy and intuitive.

AOL's network has grown as the company has concentrated on acquisition of new content sites hitting specific niches and creating content for those sites to draw more users. The result is a network of more than 80 sites and an audience of more than 250 million.

One figure sure to attract political marketers is that according to AOL, 83 percent of voting age Americans use the Internet. The platform will feature display ads that will take advantage of geo-targeting, being able to focus down to the congressional district level, and make no mistake local is the key to all of this since political battles usually ebb and flow district to district. Combined with targeting AOL is hoping to leverage their more traditional user base combined with their in-display to provide a political marketplace that most sites short of Google won't be able to match.

Political Advocacy Groups Have Adopted Social and Search, Will They Adopt Display?

Facebook has already seen an influx of political advertising because of the network's ability to slice up user data by sex, age and other lifestyle interests allowing political marketers to more accurately select the type of audience they want to target.

This cycle, we don't have a major Republican candidate who isn't asking about Facebook or isn't doing it, said Peter Pasi, the Executive Vice President of Republican online consulting firm Emotive LLC, in an TechPresident article.

The Supreme Court's recent ruling to loosen limits on corporate spending coupled with the successful blueprint of online and social media outreach which helped vault President Obama into the White House in 2008, should create a large push in political dollars this year online. Republicans in general are taking a page out of President Obama's playbook and investing in online outreach. The Tea Party activists found success on the conservative side with social networking activity. It helps stretch the advertising dollar.

As Lauren Dugan of SocialTimes looks at it:

Dollar-for-dollar, Facebook advertising money might not directly equal more votes. But with larger budgets, politicians are able to do more with their online presence and ultimately increase their visibility, attractiveness and reputability on social networks like Facebook. New media, including social networks like Facebook, might not actually be all that new in terms of how politicians reach the people, with higher campaign budgets bringing in more supporters in the end.

AOL is looking to be the next choice for those advertising dollars after Facebook as it can sell eyeballs that are reading very narrow content while at the same time bringing bring more strategy and campaign assistance to the table. It also has a slightly more conservative base than Facebook another point that AOL is banking on to win some dollars.

While Google still sits at the top of the political advertising food chain, AOL's move highlights the trend of another traditional vertical moving away from traditional media in order to find green pastures online, thanks to rich metrics. As long as traditional media offers sketchy information about who is watching and who is engaging, online advertising markets will increasingly hold the edge.

International management, I.T. consulting and technology firm PA Consulting Group claims that the so-called "iPhone death grip" (the method of holding the iPhone 4 to degrade antenna performance) is a problem unique to the new iPhone. After performing tests, the firm confirms that the phone's wireless performance was generally in the same range as other smartphones except when held in the "death grip" - then, it performed significantly worse than its competitors.

According to Simon Tonks, the consultant who led the testing, "Our tests indicate that the 'death grip' issue is real, and is worse for the Apple iPhone 4 than for other smartphones."

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PA Consulting Group: "Death Grip Worse for Apple iPhone 4"

The death grip issue is aggravated by the fact that the radio performance on the iPhone 4 was already fairly poor, the firm reports. "The iPhone 4's radio performance was also found to be generally at the lower end [of the range]," said Tonks. "This means it will tend to drop calls earlier than other phones and may suffer more in areas of weak signal. Though, overall it's still within the normal performance range for similar products."

In addition to testing iPhone 4 signal strength itself, the firm also compared the iPhone 4 to other leading devices, including the Blackberry 9700 and the HTC HD2. The results of the tests were recorded in a snazzy YouTube video which features an upbeat rock n' roll track, padded test rooms and humorous clips of people attempting to use the iPhone 4 by taping it to their head or augmenting the signal strength with a wire coat hanger.

The silliness of the video (at least until the halfway point) may detract from what are actually legitimate tests from the firm, an award-winning group known recently for its work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce methane emissions, work with the Butan government in using biometrics in border control, its design and development of the first disposable medical injectors for automated injections and its work in saving companies millions through supply chain optimization, among other things.

Is That Horse Dead Yet?

The group's experts confirm that ultimately, the iPhone 4 represents a trade-off between product design and innovative features versus ensuring a product works effectively. They also noted that a rubber band placed around the antenna provides a significant performance improvement.

While reporting on the iPhone 4 "death grip" seems a bit like beating a dead horse at this point, considering that Apple has already acknowledged the issue and announced it would offer free bumpers to iPhone 4 owners, it's notable at least for the fact that these iPhone complaints have now gone worldwide (PA Consulting Group is UK-based). This news confirms that the issues with the antenna aren't just a problem primarily affecting U.S. users dealing with AT&T's poor network performance, but also affect iPhone 4 owners in other countries as well.

Enough! Here's the truth about Facebook revenues, user numbers, and its IPO plans.

We've heard from a source who would know that 2010 revenues will come in between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. People say Facebook's 2010 revenues will be $1 billion to $1.1 billion because an interviewer recently put those numbers to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and he said "estimates are not so far off in either direction that it's causing us any pain, so we feel no need to correct it." The truth is Facebook wants to keep this bar low and easy to clear.

Facebook could very well have far more than 500 million users. For one, 500 million is how many "monthly active" users they say they have. For another, Facebook freely admits it sandbags user-number announcements to keep expectations low enough to exceed them.

Facebook will not go public for a very long time and it might not ever. A source told us in March that an IPO could be 36 months away. Even when Facebook does IPO, it will be less like most public companies and more like a private company with some non-voting shares available to the public.

In the clip below, Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick explains why a Facebook IPO might not ever happen:

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• Why You Can Say Facebook Is Worth $35 Billion With A Straight Face
• Disney Paying Up To $763 Million For Social Gaming Company Playdom
• FarmVille-Maker Zynga Has Raised $410 Million Here's Why That's Weird

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which still hasn't come up with a phone that can credibly compete with Apple's iPhone, is preparing a tablet computer to compete with Apple's iPad.

This is not surprising -- RIM, stunned by Apple's success, now probably thinks it needs to do everything Apple does, just to keep on the curve.

But we would be very surprised if RIM could put together a combination of hardware, software, pricing, and marketing that anyone would find compelling enough to buy instead of an iPad. So it's probably toast.

Meanwhile, a few new bits on RIM's efforts, via Bloomberg:

• It's going to be called the "Blackpad," according to a Bloomberg source. RIM bought the domain blackpad.com, a fact that was revealed earlier this week.

• RIM will introduce it in November.

• The Blackpad will be about the same size as the iPad, and will be able to use a BlackBerry's internet connection (something Apple's iPad can't use an iPhone for -- at least not yet).

So who's going to buy this thing?

BlackBerry loyalists? It's not like this is a situation where having a plastic keyboard is helpful. Or a situation where anyone would want to use their BlackBerry apps on a bigger screen.

Companies who use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server? What are they going to use it for, without a decent app platform or great operating system? They'd probably sooner look at Windows-based tablets.

Any other ideas?

See Also: Apple Tried To Buy Palm Before HP Won The Bidding War -- And RIM Completely Blew The Deal

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• So, Who's Going To Buy Skyhook Wireless Now That Apple's Out? Microsoft? HP? RIM?
• RIM CEOs Say Steve Jobs Is Full Of It -- Unlike iPhone 4s, BlackBerries Actually Work
• Apple Tried To Buy Palm Before HP Won The Bidding War -- And RIM Completely Blew The Deal

Facebook, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network, has no plans to go public until at least 2012, Bloomberg reports after talking to unnamed sources close to the company. The company apparently wants another year of growth before going public. Initially, Facebook was rumored to be going public in 2010, and then in 2011. The draconian procedures and bureaucratic migraines that come with going public notwithstanding, one big question comes to mind: Is Mark Zuckerberg missing an opportunity by not going public now?

If they have other sources of capital, the company would probably be better off deferring an IPO until Zuckerberg had more experience under his belt, said Ray Valdes, a San Jose, California-based analyst at Gartner Inc.

Poppycock! I don't buy these nonsensical arguments that Mark needs more experience he is the only 26-year-old I know of who's put a company worth $158 billion on the defensive.

Logically speaking, it makes perfect sense for the company to wait it out. Facebook has revenues that are growing at a massive clip rumored to be around $1.4 billion in 2010, and that can only go higher. A few more years of that kind of growth and you are looking at a company that may make a bigger splash in the public markets.

On the flip side, things can go wrong. In the fast-changing world of social networks and fickle online consumers, the tide shifts more rapidly than you think. In the last ten years, we've seen seemingly unshakeable major Internet brands eBay and Yahoo stumble and struggle. The future of a search monopolist (Google if you want to know) is being questioned in business media. Hey remember five years ago there was nobody better than MySpace. Who knows what lurks around the proverbial corner. What if the seemingly unstoppable growth flattens out in late 2011? Can the company go public then?

More importantly, the stock market is like a Mexican telenovela on speed responding to sentiment and not so much to logic. At the moment, it seems Wall Street will pay top dollar for Facebook.

Who is advising Facebook to wait for another [year] of growth? Wall Street wants to fund that growth and get in! Jim Cramer, founder of TheStreet.com, host of truly crazy Mad Money and a reformed hedge fund manager tweeted when I asked him what he thought about Facebook's IPO (or lack there off.) Market craves growth, he added. With few growth options, he felt that it was time for Facebook to strike and use public money to fund its growth. I believe that this market is so desperate for growth that it might have paid $70-80 billion for Facebook. At present, Facebook is valued at close to $25 billion on SharesPost, a private exchange which allows company insiders to sell their holdings to investors in private transactions.

An IPO like that could have other repercussions it could lift the slumbering fortunes of Silicon Valley, which is waiting for the initial public offering market to party like it's 1999. There are a lot of significantly large companies that are stuck in neutral because public markets, for now, are waiting for a powerful signal like a Facebook IPO.

What do you guys think? Is Facebook smart to wait it out, or do you agree with Cramer strike when the iron is hot?

Related Post from the Archives: By the Numbers: Facebook's Road to an IPO

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Do you think you've got the stones to be an entrepreneur? The cajones? The balls? The ovaries? The guts? Of course you do. How many people who say they want to be an entrepreneur, when pushed, actually break down and admit that they can't cut it? In my experience, not many. Being an entrepreneur seems like it is the new Doctor or Lawyer in terms of the cool thing to be successful at. It certainly hasn't always been that way, and of course there are many who still think the golden path to success is layered with extra years in school and an advanced degree. I'm not saying they are wrong those are fine professions that can often reap great financial, and often personal, benefit. However, I can honestly say I have yet to meet a completely content lawyer. I have met a few content Doctors and Dentists that are reasonably happy in their career, but most of them are older. Even those ones invest a lot of their discretionary income in unrelated businesses (with a super high failure rate unfortunately). And don't get me started on the poor souls who lose their life to Wall Street, consulting firms, and investment bank and the other 100+ hour work weeks all in the name of career advancement. Good for them, no thanks for me.

The younger Doctors and Dentists that I know aren't operating in the medical field that used to exist. There are a lot more rules and regulations, and many of them are taking (gasp) jobs working for large medical companies. Some of them are simply taking over Dad's practice, or worse yet, using his money to build an exorbitant facility. Seriously, have you seen some of these places new Doctors/Dentists are building? I don't get it. But anyhow, I digress. The consultants and investment bankers and other Ivy League jobs that still await newly minted MBA's from the top schools are continuing to pay well, but there aren't as many of those jobs available as there used to be. And besides that, most of them suffer for years until they can find the time (or get the guts) to leave and join a company with some sort of entrepreneurial flavor anyway. Others will stay at the McKinsey's of the World forever, and they will most certainly create a lot of wealth for themselves, but again no thanks. That path isn't for me, and once again, I'm guessing it isn't for you.

I'd venture to say that most people aspire to work for themselves and have a life they can truly call their own. I'm guessing if you are reading this, you'd like to work for yourself. You'd like to own a business. You are tired of being subjected to decisions that really aren't yours. You are tired of Corporate America and you'd like a change of scenery. You'd like to create your own opportunities that generate wealth for you, your families and your employees. Those are all noble goals. You do not have to be an entrepreneur necessarily to create opportunity and wealth though. You can work at Bain & Co. or B of A for 35 years and have opportunity and wealth for both you and your family. So it must be the first part that attracts you to entrepreneurship the working for yourself part, right? While I'm sure when a lawyer finally makes partner' status, or a consultant is moved up the chain enough at the Investment Bank, there are layers of security that create a feeling of having arrived'. I can't help but wonder though if that compares to the satisfaction of getting to that same place, but from within a company you really helped build.

Working for yourself as the saying goes, isn't really for yourself' at all. Almost any great company I know of has partners, investors, banks, board members and such that really make it group of people working for themselves'. Semantics aside, it's still this type of environment, where you alone or you with a group, own a company and run it day to day. That's what you want to do, right? That's what you talk about doing, right? Talk is cheap though. Action speaks louder than words. There really is only one way to find out if you can answer the questions at the very beginning of this post. How is that you ask? By failing. Yep, failing.

It's highly unlikely that your first entrepreneurial venture will be a large financial success. It is unlikely it will be a financial success at all. Perhaps you will buy yourself a job and make a few bucks, but in the previous paragraphs that wasn't what you were aspiring to, was it? You wanted a permanent lifestyle change. You want to be your own boss. You want to build and own a part of something that you genuinely helped create. You want all the financial success that you would have had if you stayed in the fill-in-the-blank-here career all of those years. In order to do that in fact, the only way to do that you have to understand that failure is a legitimate option.

What do I mean by that? Of course I've heard the saying failure is not an option'. And I totally agree. At the risk of sounding like I have MPD, I'm not saying you have to accept failure. In fact, abhor it. I am saying that it's a concept that you can learn to master instead of suffer from. How? By recognizing failure quickly and either changing direction to avoid it (if possible) or doing everything you can to quickly recover from it. The first part is where the great entrepreneurial stories come from. The near-death experience of company XYZ that paid it's last dime for payroll, product, advertising, rent or some combination of that in order to rise again and make it to the top of the widget world. Maybe that will be you. Awesome and congrats.

What is more likely is that you will find yourself, at some point, stuck with a business and a financial situation, that are going to be difficult to fix. So, what do you do? Having learned from failures of my past, I'd simply say this. If you are going to continue forward because being an entrepreneur is the choice you've made, hurry up and fail so you can get the mess cleaned up and get on with the next thing. Fail fast. Fail inexpensively. Fail without risking it all. Gone are the days that you have to risk everything you have in order to be an entrepreneur. With the advancements in technology and the steep discounts in international labor and materials, there is just no excuse for blowing your every last cent on a business before you find out it won't work. There is no honor in throwing good time and money after bad. Have the guts to say this isn't the one and move on. Have the guts to say I did all I could here, I'm going to do something else now. Have the guts to admit that you failed.

Let me reiterate that I am not suggesting you wimp out and jump ship early. No way. Never. What I am saying is understand that entrepreneurship comes with success and failure. It's just part of the deal for most people. So if you can recognize it quicker, minimize the time and money damage, and move on it'll be that much sooner and closer to you big win.

So go on now, get out there and FAIL! Just remember, a success is waiting around the corner.

Be prepared to be scared about your cell phone privacy. Two security researchers showed today how they can track down cell phone numbers, identify the person who owns the phone, and then track the whereabouts of that person. And they can do it with technology available to ordinary civilians.

That last part is the shocking part. Government investigators and police can do this. But Don Bailey and Nick DePetrillo (pictured) showed they were able to do it by collecting bits of information and then amassing them into a powerful tool that can invade your privacy. They showed off working code and other proof from Project Carmen Sandiego (named after a computer game where you tracked somebody down as part of a geography lesson) at the Black Hat security conference today in Las Vegas.

This is intelligence gathering for civilians, said Bailey, speaking to a roomful of security researchers and hackers. We can find out where you are, who you talk to, where you are most vulnerable.

Bailey and DePetrillo joked that they could get actress Megan Fox's cell phone number and sell it to the highest bidder. But they said the point of doing this isn't to get the cell phone numbers of celebrities or executives like Apple's Steve Jobs. They wanted to show how security should be stepped up for cell phones and how shockingly easy it is to do. If they could do it, they reasoned, then the bad guys with evil intent have probably already figured out how to do it. In effect, Bailey and DePetrillo said that they have enough information to put together a White Pages for cell phones, with home numbers for everybody's cell phone.

Governments can pretty much afford the technology to do this now. But ordinary civilians can't. One of the tools they exploit is a central database called a Home Location Register, which records the phone number of every SIM (subscriber identity module) authorized to use the cell phone network based on the GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) standard, which is the standard used in about 80 percent of the world's phones. You can access HLR data through various third-party resources, Bailey said. You can cross reference that with Mobile Switching Center information that determines where you are, generally.

That data tells the researchers what city the user is in. They reverse engineered this data to get more information. In other countries, the MSC data has zip code data embedded in it, making it much easier to find someone's location. U.S. data isn't that easy to figure out. But the researchers say that can take a given MSC number and find out its location and its cell phone provider.

That information should be privileged, but it isn't, Bailey said. I shouldn't know that you switched from AT&T to T-Mobile.

You can buy CallerID information from companies such as Targus, which gets data from Verizon and other carriers. They add your name to the CallerID database with phone number data. If you buy a cell phone in the U.S., your name will wind up in a CallerID database. With this data, the researchers were able to reverse engineer the data to create a White Pages for mobile phones, which means they can put a name to a cell phone number. With the name and phone number together, the researchers can assemble other information.

It's extremely easy to build your own database, DePetrillo said.

The databases are more expensive if you want to get the most current data, but older data is cheaper, costing only 0.0024 cents per name looked up. One of the things they can do with names is piece together who your co-workers are, because they will be using company-purchased phones with similar phone numbers.

Some of the techniques they use to glean information include backspoofing. But if you don't want to do that, you can buy databases from Bulkcname.com for around $100 per 1,000 name lookups. The researchers say they can get 10,000 names identified for just $30. You can verify the data by cross referencing it with HLR data, which tells which carrier is associated with certain phone numbers.

During the talk, the researchers showed slides of text that showed phone numbers, names, locations and company affiliations. They can even make educated guesses about which banks of phone numbers are assigned to prepaid phones, which are phones bought at stores and can generally disguise their owners. The researchers say they can pinpoint people 99 percent of the time. With Google, Facebook and other tools, you can often then put a face to the name. You can find out if there are multiple phone numbers associated with one person.

Our intent is to get people thinking about their actions and their vulnerabilities, Bailey said. You can target people. You can locate private individuals. You can locate groups of individuals. You can track where people are traveling. That's a lot of information. It can be scary.

Added DePetrillo, This is simple stuff to understand. I have information I shouldn't have. I didn't do any crazy, insane hacker tricks. It requires very little intelligence.

Tags: BlackHat, Carmen Sandiego Project, security

People: Don Bailey, Nick DePetrillo

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if Google was a one trick pony, relying too heavily on advertising revenues, he replied:

If you've got a one-trick pony, you want the one we have. We're in the ad business, and it's growing rapidly. We picked the right trick.

Schmidt hopes display advertising and mobile will turn into two $10-billion dollar opportunities for the company:

If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can't make money from that?' Schmidt asked rhetorically. All it would take, he said, is $10 per user per year. Among other things, Google might earn such sums from selling access to digital content from newspapers.

Damn shame, a vast majority of those billion would be using a version of Android that doesn't have anything to do with Google. Or that most of those billion pay less than $5-a-month to their phone companies today.

Pony image courtesy of Flickr user, Mariacecita under Creative Commons

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At least Apple pays taxes...

Here in the America, the CIA's drone program targeting extremists in the tribal areas of Pakistan is the subject of heated debate. The CIA calls it a uniquely valuable and precise counterterrorism tool. The Obama administration, which has stepped up the program significantly since taking office, considers it legal under the 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. The human-rights community, along with many security experts, fear that the program will create more terrorists than it kills due to anger at civilian casualties.

Pakistanis, however, think the drones are sorry; huh? What are you talking about? Did you say clones?

That's according to a new Pew poll on Pakistani attitudes (PDF) that's filled with surprises. Top of the list: Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes. Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they've heard nothing at all about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley.

But it's not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they're a bad or very bad thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people. While some researchers claim that if you limit your pool of respondents to the tribal areas, support for the drones actually goes up, 32 percent of overall respondents think they're a necessary measure. (Although perhaps that's a robust total of people saying a foreign government should shoot missiles at their fellow countrymen.) And almost half of Pakistanis believe the fiction that the drone strikes occur without Pakistani government approval.

That's not all the poll found: Pakistanis are freaked out about their economy; highly anti-American; and less concerned about terrorism than they used to be although that latter part might not be such a bad thing.After a $7.5 billion aid package passed Congress last year to bolster Pakistan's civilian government and reeling economy, here's what the U.S. has to show for it: Pakistanis exhibit as much anti-American sentiment as any populace on earth. According to Pew, 59 percent of Pakistanis consider the U.S. an enemy, and only 17 percent consider the U.S. a friend. Pakistanis give the U.S. its lowest ratings among the 22 nations included in the spring 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, the poll notes. You have to go to Egypt or Turkey to find similarly negative views of the U.S. in Pew's findings a fact, perhaps, that helps contextualize why the Pakistani intelligence apparatus funds U.S. enemies in Afghanistan, as WikiLeaks reminded us this week. Still, 64 percent say they want better relations with the United States.

Then there's Pakistani attitudes on terrorism, something the poll considers ominous. As Pakistani forces continue to battle extremist groups within the country, nearly all Pakistanis describe terrorism as a very big problem, it warns. However, they have grown markedly less concerned that extremists might take control of the country. Specifically, 69 percent worried in 2009 that the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups might rout the government. Now only 51 percent feel that way. Is that necessarily bad?

Haider Mullick, a Pakistani scholar at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University recently returned from a wide-ranging trip surveying Pakistani military development during the army's 18-month campaign against the Tehrek-e-Taliban, or TTP. The effort brought Pakistani troops into tough battles in South Waziristan. In his view, it's natural for Pakistanis to be less concerned about an enemy that they see their army battling, especially considering that last spring, the Taliban were entrenched barely 60 miles from the capitol city of Islamabad.

TTP lost major territory in Swat, Buner, Shangla, Bannu, South Waziristan. That's very signficant, Mullick says. Also, historically speaking, once an insurgent group becomes weak, popular support for reconciliation goes up. And the fight against the insurgents still has popular backing: 49 percent of Pakistanis support it, far more than the 20 percent who oppose it, though 30 percent register mixed feelings.

The Pakistani military effort in the tribal areas is a mixed picture. By January 2010, the United Nations Refugee Agency accommodated 114,000 refugees from the fighting in camps it set up in the Northwest Frontier Province, with nearly a million more living in nearby host communities. The military is apparently holding territory in Swat and South Waziristan, though there's not much of a civilian government presence there. Militants have been making their way to the Punjabi heartland of the country and the military has yet to advance into North Waziristan, the remaining safe havens of al-Qaeda, the TTP and their allies. But the campaign has won persistent accolades from generals David Petraeus and Jim Mattis, who note as did the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. this week that more Pakistani troops have died fighting Taliban than NATO troops have in nine years.

Paradoxically, the military's fight against the Taliban may have impacted Pakistani sentiments toward extremist groups. Fifteen percent of Pakistanis rate the TTP favorably, though, and 18 percent have favorable views of al-Qaeda. Both are higher than last year's 10 and nine percent favorables, respectively. But Pakistani perceptions of both groups are still down from 2008 levels, when a roughly a quarter of Pakistanis expressed approval of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. And the negative ratings for both groups are high, although the TTP's 65 percent unfavorable rating outstrips the 53 percent antipathy Pakistanis record for al-Qaeda.

Still, no matter how you dissect the poll, what comes through is Pakistani dissatisfaction. President Asif Ali Zardari has an approval rating of 20 percent, more than 40 percent lower than when he took office. The economy has been hit hard by the global downturn, and about half of Pakistanis expect things to get worse, while only 35 percent were pessimists last year. Corruption, economy, energy, inflation trumps the threat from terrorism in many places, says Mullick. See? We're not so different after all.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

See Also:

• WikiLeaks Drops 90000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally
• Pakistan's Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others
• 3 GIs Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a
• Report: U.S. Drone Goes Down Over Pakistan. Again.
• State Department Flies Mercenary Air Force Over Pakistan
• G.I.s Slain in Pakistan: Psyop Sergeant, Two Nation-Builders

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham today offered an overview of how he has seen the angel and startup world evolve in the last year. Among other trends, he argued that the traditionally structured venture round is becoming irrelevant.

Speaking at AngelConf, the angel investing event hosted at Y Combinator's office in Mountain View, Calif., Graham compared the traditional venture model to the classic children's book Are You My Mother? Startup entrepreneurs raising funding are like baby birds, asking every venture capitalist, Are you my lead investor?

Now, however, more venture rounds aren't really being led by a single investor, and they don't have an official close date or amount, Graham said. There may be an official lead investor, but they're the lead in name only, and don't dominate the process like they used to. This benefits the startups because the lead investor has less power to screw them over. Even if well-intentioned the startup isn't held back by if the lead isn't moving fast enough to raise money. And rather than distracting itself with intense fundraising, a startup can keep raising money in the background as needed.

Graham said this is part of a larger trend where founders have more power than investors, a trend that incubator Y Combinator has been based on since the beginning. Entrepreneurs who have had difficult dealings with VCs may be skeptical that this power shift is really occurring, and even Graham acknowledged that the fundraising model the described isn't happening for every startup yet. But that's how the best ones are raising money.

If the best startups are doing this, what do you care what the other ones are doing? he said.

Companies: Y Combinator

People: Paul Graham

There's no better time to be alive than right now as far as I'm concerned. The food is awesome, there's great music being made all over the world and we have this fantastic little thing called the Internet, which allows me to work with good friends from all over the planet.

Yep, 2010 is the best year yet.

This deep love I have for today doesn't mean I don't occasionally wish awesome things from the past would come back, however. In the early 80's most of the best games were text-based, meaning the graphics were provided by the player's imagination. Just as film-making will never match books in my opinion, modern graphics haven't yet caught up to the power of well-written text games and their ability to harness the imagination. But today such games are all gone, right?

Nope. Like I said, the best time to be alive is right now, and a big part of why is the Internet. There are countless text interactive fiction games being made now, three decades past the medium's commercial prime, and they're almost all freely available on the Internet. Called Interactive Fiction today, a list of the best games in this field would take ages to compile, so I'll just show you a sampling of my favorite games that can be freely played online.

Lost Pig And Place Underground by Grunk

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

So begins this less-than-epic quest, in which our hero attempts to find a pig.

No, really: that's the plot. And it's amazing.

This short game's narrative voice is deceptively simple, and will have you laughing out loud more than once as you play it. It also features some pretty good adventure-game-style puzzles, but don't give up too quickly: you can deduce everything easily, making this a great game for beginners.

You can play Lost Pig online right now or find more information about Lost Pig at the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB.)

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Like many geeks I'm an avid devotee of Douglas Adams' writing in general and the famous Hitchhiker's Guide media franchise in particular. I love the radio series, the television show, the books and even tolerated the movie. I'm also quite fond of the classic Infocom game of the same title.

Happily this classic is playable online today. Find a version of the interactive fiction game with some graphics at the BBC's website or the text version at Douglas Adam's website.

The real charm of this game is its narrative voice the text was written by Adams himself. This game is not easy, and includes no hint system, but devotees of Adams' work should struggle through it's worth it just for the one-liners.

For A Change by Dan Schmidt

The sun has gone. It must be brought. You have a rock.

If you think that reads more like poetry than it does a game you're probably right. This is a game as well as a poem, and a pretty good one at that.

A surrealistic adventure featuring an invented vocabulary provides an experience no other medium possibly could, and makes a strong case for the continued existence of text games. Be sure to check this one out.

Play For a Change' online or find out more about the game and download links at IFDB.

Photopia by Adam Cadre

Less a game than it is a story, Photopia is considered by many to be the most influential piece of interactive fiction in the post-Infocom era.

For this reason I highly recommend trying it out, although I fear talking too much about the plot will give too much away. I personally find this game beautiful, though there has always been controversy surrounding it so make up your own mind.

Check out Photopia now or find out more about the game over at IFDB.

Whom The Telling Changed by Aaron A. Reed

As your village in ancient Mesopotamia decides whether or not to go to war the legendary story of Gilgamesh is told. Your role is to, by asking the right questions, manipulate public opinion toward fighting or not fighting. This game is great if you have a working knowledge of the Gilgamesh epic (read it free here) and even better for repeat playing, as there are multiple possible endings.

Click here to play Who The Telling Changed now or read more about the game at IFDB.

Infocom Games

If you're wondering where Zork is, the answer is that it's hard to say. Technically Activision owns the rights to the Zork trilogy and the rest of the (amazing) Infocom library, which fueled the 80's text game craze. They've not released any of these titles recently so far as I know.

This website seems to feature pretty much all of them, however, and you can play them in your browser. I'm not sure how legal this is, but it's there and working.

Conclusion

This is but a small number of the text-based games you can find online, of course. You can find many more over at the IFDB, which serves as an online database of the many free games available. You'll also find downloading instructions for any particular game there.

Well, do you think text games could be funor do you lack the attention span for them? Do any Interactive Fiction fans recommend games that I missed here? Comment away; we won't tell you that you can't.

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What if your phone automatically went silent when you step into the movie theater? Texted your significant other when you finished your long commute? Or automatically turned down the volume when a particularly loud friend called? It can; here's how.

Android application Tasker gives you total rules-based automation for your Android phone. It's not free, but it offers a free 14-day trial download. In the Android Market, it's 3.99 in UK moneya little over $6 U.S. If you grab the trial, or shell out the cost of a Double-Double meal at In-N-Out Burger to buy it in the Market (scan the QR code at left), you'll discover it's worth the cost, even if you only have one super-specific use for it.

Since Tasker can do nearly anything on your phone (it's mostly limited by your imagination), here's some up-front ideas about what kinds of uses seem particularly attractive:

Set preferences for each application: Give the Kindle app a longer screen time-out. Make Maps or Foursquare automatically turn on GPS, and have a file browser launch when you trade out SD cards. Have your music and other audio apps lower the volume to 50 percent when you plug in headphones, so you never get a way-too-loud moment.

Time of day automation: Make your phone go into airplane mode overnight, but re-connect for a few minutes every 30 minutes to grab messages. Set up your phone to play specific or random songs from your collection as an alarm, back up files from your SD card every day, load up an application at a certain time.

Set up contact rules: If you've got a friend who talks too loud, make your call volume go down when they ring. Create a home screen widget that sends an automatic SMS ("In the car," maybe). Set your phone to pop up a more iPhone-style message box, rather than background notifications, when you miss calls or get SMS from certain people. Have your phone always record messages from a certain caller.

: More fun, crazy-advanced stuff: Encrypt and decrypt data on the SD card based on your rules. Have speaker phone turn on when you lay your phone flat on a table. Change the home screen icons for apps, have your phone get drastically efficient when battery's below 10 percent, and change your wallpapers to reflect the time of day or the number of messages.

Those use cases barely scratch the surface, really. Take the developer's tour, and you'll see there are variables, hundreds of events and triggers, and nearly infinite setups. Want to have Reddit.com launch on your browser if your alarm clock goes off on a Tuesday while Wi-Fi is on? You got it.

We'd need to write a research-paper-length treatise to cover everything Tasker can do for you, so we'll instead offer up a few examples of app models we've found handy.

Task 1: Turn on GPS/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi for Certain Apps Automatically

I don't keep GPS positioning on all the time, both for battery efficiency and a niggling sense of privacy. At the same time, I dislike when Maps, My Tracks, Navigation, or Foursquare ask me to turn on GPS, and I'm required to click "OK," then make the toggle in Settings, then head back. For just those apps, I want my GPS to automatically click on. When I'm done with those applications, the GPS should shut off, too. You can easily pull the same trick for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or most any system function, but we'll just show how GPS works.

From Tasker's main screen, hit "New." You'll be presented with six options, or "Contexts": Application, Time, Day, Location, State, and Event. Think of "Context" as an "If""If X is happening ..."

In this case, we're going to choose Application, then pick out the app we want to apply a rule to. You can pick out apps one at a time and apply your "Tasks" to them, but you can also apply Tasks to all applications, or pick out apps you don't want your Tasks to apply to with the "Not" button at bottom. We'll just pick out one app, Maps, which I almost always want GPS to be turned on for.

After you pick your Context, now it's time to add one or more Tasks. Thinking ahead though, we're going to apply this kind of actionturn GPS on when the app launches, then turn it off when it's moved away fromto a few different apps after this. So hit the "New" button in the upper-right corner, then type in a name for your Task that you'll easily grasp later, like "Auto-Launch GPS."

Now it's time to tell Tasker what Task we want to fire when this Context is happening. As you can see at left, you basically get your whole system to play with. The thing we want, GPS, is under "Misc."

In the bar under the GPS "Set" option, you've got three options: On, Off, and Toggle, the last of which just flips the setting the other way, whichever way it is. There's also a checkbox for an "If," which, if clicked, drops down a box where you can enter in a variable and make it a condition. You could, for example, only have GPS turn on if airplane mode is set to off ("%AIR - Isn't Set"). Our needs, for now, are simplejust have GPS set "On," no matter what.

Well, that was pretty easy. Now you'll see that "GPS Auto-Launch" has just one task: "GPS - Set On." Let's say you were a little more protective of your GPS chip, though, and you wanted Tasker to ask you about GPS, Wi-Fi, or whatnot. The gear-and-screwdriver logo in the lower-right corner gives you that option. Set your "Task Type" to "Menu," and you'll get options to set how long the menu stays up, if there's a default option selected, and even set a background image, if you're feeling extra-custom. But we're just having Tasker take care of the GPS switch for us, so get back to the Tasks screen.

You could hit "Test" in the lower-right corner to see how Tasker handles launching Maps and turning on GPS automatically, but we're going to specify one more detail of our auto-launcher. Hit "Done" to get back to the main Tasker menu, then tap on the right-hand side of the process you created, the side with "GPS Auto-Launch" and a green arrow. From the menu that pops up, choose "Add Exit Task." When we told Tasker to do something when Maps launched, we created an "Enter" task. By adding an "Exit" task, we can have something else happen when Maps is closed down or put away. You can add these Exits to all kinds of conditionswhen you're no longer near a certain location, when it's no longer a certain time, etc.

Update: Not all Tasker tasks need an Exit taskin general, whatever settings you've changed while a task is running will set themselves back when you're done. In this case, though, we're getting a little more extra-cautious control over turning the GPS off.

After hitting "Add Exit Task," you'll run through the same process you used to create the GPS turn-on: create a new name template, add the task GPS from the Misc menu, then set it to Off and hit "Done." Now, back at the main screen, you can see that there's a Context (Maps launches), an Enter task (GPS Auto-Launch), and an Exit task (GPS Shutdown). Hit the "Apple" button at the very bottom, and now Tasker will be watching for Maps to launch, then do its auto-GPS thing.

This trick worked fairly well on my Nexus One, despite Tasker providing a pop-up note that application exit watching wasn't as stable on Android 2.0 and later. Worst case scenario, it doesn't launch GPS, and I do it myself.

Task 2: Create an Ultimate Morning Alarm

The next step, adding multiple tasks to a time condition, isn't all that different, but it does show off how far Tasker can go in automating your phone. So let's create Kevin's Ultimate Alarm.

Hit "New" and choose Time as the Context. I'll have this alarm go off at 6 a.m. and, if I don't respond, play for 3 minutes. You could just set 6-6 as your time to run until you take action, but I'll be nice to my morning self. We're going to add another context, the days of the week, later, but for now, you'll be moved into the Tasks section.

For my own Ultimate Alarm, I'm having a song play from my collection, make my Remember the Milk tasks load up on the screen, and have my phone say, in text-to-speech, "Good morning, Kevin. It's going to be a great day." Why? Because, why not? For these pieces, I added three Tasks:

• MediaMusic PlayMusic Play Dir. After long-clicking on the "Dir" field and choosing my Music folder, I also checked "Audio Only" and "Random." If you wanted a particular song, you could swap "Music Play" for "Music Play Dir."
• AppLoad AppRemember the Milk. Fairly simple, and I could set a different starting page in Remember the Milk's own settings, if I liked.
• MiscSay. Then just fille in the text you want, choose a language, and mess with any other fields you'd like. "Stream" sets the output you'd like the audio to go through, which helps if you've got other things, like songs, going too. You can, of course, mess with the pitch and speed of the voice, too.

When you're all done and hit "Done," tap on the left-hand side of your Ultimate Alarm entry, where the clock is. From the menu, roll down Context and hit "Add," then choose "Date." From the pop-up chooser, you can get very specific about the months, days of the month, days of the week, and other selectors for when your alarm goes off. Mine's a basic Monday-through-Friday deal.

That's all there is to that one, but it's a pretty nice package.

Task 3: Make Your Phone Quiet Down When Face-Down

Now I'm going to create a kind of "Quiet Down" mode for my phone. When I put it face down on a flat surface, like arriving at my desk for work, it should turn off GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth (and, heck, you can turn off EDGE/3G data, if you'd like), and then turn the system, ringer, and media volumes all the way down but keep vibrate on. You could add an Exit task to turn some or all of these back on, but that's giving a bit too much leeway to the phone's sensors.

For our context, choose State, then pick Orientation. You'll get the options you see at left. I like to stay away from "Face up," "Standing Up," and "Upside Down," because they're pretty common occurrences. For this example, "Face Down" is a pretty deliberate action you take with your phone.

For the tasks, I added "Bluetooth" and "WiFi" from the Net menu, set to Off, "GPS" from Misc set to Off, and set the volumes for "Media Volume" and "System Volume" to 0 from the Audio menu. "Silent Mode" with Vibrate could simplify your setup, but I like to be sure. Hit Done, and you're all set.

It's good to see you. Grab your coffee. Pull up a chair. Now, go ahead. Pray.

What?

You know, pray.

Um, what do you mean?

It's first thing in the morning. If you want to be spiritual, you are supposed to pray. So pray.

Can I point something out to you? I mean, without making you mad? Do you realize what you just said makes
no sense?

What do you mean. Of course it makes sense. Spiritual people pray.

I'm sure they do, but that still doesn't make sense. Pray is a form of talking, right?

Right.

Let me try an experiment. Listen to this: It's good to see you. Grab a cup of coffee. Pull up a chair. Now talk. Now laugh. Now yell. Now argue.

Talk with who? Laugh about what? Yell at whom? Argue over what?

Exactly. You tell me to pray, but you don't say to whom or about what. You tell me that praying is an important
spiritual thing, but change praying to talking and I will wonder whether you know what you are talking about.

But isn't it obvious? Isn't prayer always talking to God and about everything?

Technically, it is possible to pray to other people. And what exactly does everything mean?

So what should I say to all these people reading this?

Hmm. That's tough. I mean, how well do they know God? have they ever talked with Him before?

Dunno. What difference does that make?

Well, if you are talking to someone you don't know, wouldn't you say, Hi God. We hardly talk. I'm not even sure whether to say singular you or plural. But good morning! How are you this morning?

That counts?

That counts. If you wait for an answer, of course.

You mean, God actually talks back?

Yep.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The scientists on the project ranked having low-quality relationships with friends and family as equivalent to frequent substance abuse (that is to say, 15 cigarettes a day or heavy alcohol consumption) but worse for a person's health than not participating in exercise and being obese.

Timothy Smith, project leader from Brigham Young University (BYU), in Utah, claims that "the importance of having a network of friends and good family relationships is comparable to quitting smoking and exceeds many risk factors of mortality such as obesity, physical inactivity."

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

Sponsor

"I Googled It"

During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant, "What is this website?" The student answered, "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."

That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assign information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because - and only because - it was the first search result.

Only 10% of the students made mention of the site's author or that author's credentials while completing tasks. However, in reviewing the screen-capture footage of those respondents, the researchers found that even in this supposedly savvy minority, none actually followed through to verify the identification or qualifications of the site's authors.

Google was not the only search engine used in the study, but it was one in which the students put a lot of trust. The students felt emotionally tied to the service in some cases, noting how much they loved it and depended on it. (Those who used Yahoo! said they merely "liked" it.)

Regardless the choice of search engine, though, the first step in information-seeking was always the use of such a service, which was typically referred to as a verb. And yes, in addition to "google it," some even said they would "yahoo it."

Wikipedia Not Trusted as Much

Another interesting finding from the study involved the use of Wikipedia. Perhaps because of teachers' insistence over the years that the user-generated encyclopedia is not a credible source of information, only a third of the students used Wikipedia to search for answers when given particular tasks. This is a drop from earlier studies (like Raine & Tancer, 2007) which showed Wikipedia use at 46% among students.

Other popular trusted sources included SparkNotes (a study guide site), WedMD, Planned Parenthood, CNN, BBC, Microsoft (specifically Encarta and Office-related resources) and those sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Some students even thought that .org domain name meant a site was inherently trustworthy - they weren't aware that the .org extension can be freely registered just like .com and is not for nonprofit use only, as may have originally been intended.

Students Need Media Literacy Education

While the size of the study was only 102 students, the demographics of the group were both ethnically and racially diverse, reaching a representative sample of first-year college students at the University of Chicago.

In summary, the findings showed that students are not always turning to the most relevant clues to determine the credibility of online content, said the researchers Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristen Yates Thomas. Further initiatives that help educate people in this domain are needed, they claim.

Image credit in original article: flickr user Paulo Fehlauer

Online games phenom Zynga and Japanese Internet and telecom giant SoftBank announced a joint venture to develop and distribute social games across Japan.

The new Tokyo-based service will be called Zynga Japan and is Zynga's first foray into that country.

The companies also said SoftBank had completed a $150 million investment in Zynga, which has been previously reported.

It's Zynga's second major move into Asia. In May, the start-up acquired China-based social gaming developer XPD Media.

The San Francisco-based Zynga, of course, has been on a tear of late too, striking deals with Yahoo and Google, as it seeks to expand its distribution from Facebook, the social networking platform where is first took off.

Zynga also recently signed a five-year agreement with Facebook.

SoftBank made other digital news yesterday, when it announced that it would switch its algorithmic and paid search from Yahoo (YHOO) to Google (GOOG).

Here's the official press release:

ZYNGA AND SOFTBANK CORP. LAUNCH JOINT VENTURE TO ACCELERATE SOCIAL GAME INDUSTRY IN ASIA

SOFTBANK INVESTS $150 MILLION IN ZYNGA

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYOJuly 29, 2010Zynga and Softbank today announced a joint venture that will develop and distribute social games across Japan. The new joint venture, Zynga Japan, brings together leaders in social games and consumer technology to offer millions of new users the ability to play social games anytime and anywhere. In conjunction with today's announcement, Softbank has completed a $150 million investment in Zynga. With this agreement, Zynga and Softbank will tighten their relationship as business partners.

The joint venture extends Zynga's reach to a wider global audience and marks the company's first foray into the rapidly growing internet and mobile market in Japan. Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will tap into Japan's rich history of gaming and leverage Softbank's cutting edge mobile and Web technology to produce the best social games in the market.

Zynga is a leader in social games and I am delighted to partner with them to introduce their social games to Japan, said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank. We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse.

We're excited to partner with Softbank to bring Zynga's social games to Japan and gain insights from the Japanese market, said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder of Zynga. As one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Softbank is bringing the mobile internet to consumers making the social web more accessible to people everywhere.