zynga

How's this for irony:

It was less than a year and a half ago that Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of MySpace.

But last week--just as the failed social-networking site sold for a paltry $35 million--Van Natta could have bought it himself for a fraction of his stake in Zynga, the social-gaming phenom that just filed for its IPO and where he's a top exec and shareholder.

As the San Francisco-based Zynga's chief business officer, he was listed second after CEO and founder Mark Pincus on its S-1 on the list … Read more

Too busy to keep up with today's tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Friday, July 1.

Google+ contributor and Mac pioneer talks with CNET (Q&A) A core feature of the new Google+ service is Circles, which makes it drag-and-drop easy to build "circles" of friends in the browser. Meet Andy Hertzfeld, the man behind Circles--and the original Mac. More

Living life without unlimited data CNET's Maggie Reardon helps current Verizon customers understand their data options, and also offers pointers on choosing among Apple, Google Android, and RIM … Read more

After a bit of a delay, FarmVille creator Zynga has announced plans to go public.

The company filed its Form S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today. According to the company, some of the shares will be sold by Zynga, while the remaining shares will be sold by "certain stockholders." Zynga has enlisted Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch, among other investment banks, to act as underwriters.

According to The New York Times, citing "a figure used to calculate the registration fee," Zynga is expecting to raise about $1 billion … Read more

Zynga is half of the big IPO we've been waiting for. The other half, if course, is Facebook. But Zynga is likely the cleaner story for investors. Expected to file its public offering papers tomorrow, we can prepare to see in them some heartening information: Most likely, we'll see a company that's raking in money from a broad base of consumers, based on a scalable and maintainable base of technology.

Zynga is a beautiful, shark-like machine. Its focus is on getting consumers to pay for online interactions, and it does that well. The company builds cartoony world-building … Read more

Zynga, the online gaming company behind FarmVille and CityVille, plans to file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering as early as tomorrow, CNBC is reporting.

The San Francisco company plans to raise between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in a filing that would value the company at between $15 billion and $20 billion, according to the CNBC report.

While the Zynga filing has been expected, it would add to an already frothy lineup of Net start-ups looking to cash in on lofty valuations for tech companies. Earlier this month, daily-deals company Groupon filed papers … Read more

On today's show, we're kind of down on Microsoft Office 365 and poor MySpace's future, but we feel a tiny bit positive about the overlapping circles of nerdiness that could be possible with Google's new Plus social networking beta. Also, find out what you love on Google, if you can, and see all the movies you want for $50 a month. Plus: our new favorite word! Philanthrodorks!

For a trade show all about the latest and greatest in interactive entertainment, it's somewhat shocking that many of the most popular video games being played right now are either underrepresented, or not represented at all. We are, of course, speaking about the social and casual games that have audiences larger than almost any traditional console game, and what's more, have managed to tap into the recurring revenue stream of microtransactions that seems to elude so many others.

This is no unintentional oversight. Many attendees of E3, the Game Developers Conference, and other industry events say that games such as Farmville and Cityville are not "real games," and that even mentioning them in the same breath as Halo or Gears of War would be to cheapen the entire medium.

At E3, these kinds of games are woefully underrepresented, despite having in many cases tens of millions of players (MAU, or monthly active users, is the standard metric for social games--the most popular game of this genre, Zynga's CityVille, currently has 90 million monthly active users). If you looks around artfully, however, you can still find a few examples. EA's social/casual subsidiary PlayFish, is here, and has scored with games such as Pet Society and Madden NFL Superstars. At E3, a portion of EA's giant floor space was devoted to The Sims Social, a Facebook version of the popular suburban life simulation game. … Read more

On today's show, Apple responds to the Mac Defender concerns with a support forum and a promised OS X update, Google may announce mobile payments via NFC as early as tomorrow (Thursday), and Facebook might launch a music service with Spotify (but no, not in the U.S. -- yet). Also, TiVo makes tons of money from suing people and Brian Tong bids a teary farewell to Oprah. --Molly

Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

Their strong performances show the huge investor appetite for fast-growing and high-profile Web 2.0 firms. Wall Street is also prepping for eventual public offerings from social buying site Groupon … Read more