cityville

Zynga shuts down Baltimore office, consolidates in Texas, N.Y.

Zynga is shutting down its Baltimore office and consolidating its presence in Texas and New York, the company announced today.

The Baltimore closure, which affects about 1 percent of Zynga's roughly 3,000 employees, comes shortly after the company shut down the studio's CityVille 2 game.

Zynga offered the Baltimore employees a chance to transfer to other positions in the company, Zynga COO David Ko wrote in the blog post announcing the moves. About half of the approximately 30 Baltimore employees decided to stay.

Zynga will also consolidate teams in offices located in McKinney, Texas, with its downtown … Read more

Zynga goes 'whodunit' with 3D CityVille 2

As critics continue to ding Zynga for a lack of mobile revenue, the company is making another bet on one of its most popular desktop franchises, CityVille.

Zynga released CityVille 2 today, a 3D and more interactive game based on the original's premise of building a own city in which you are mayor. At its height, CityVille had 100 million players. Today, that number is down to 16.2 million monthly active users and 2.1 million daily active users.

Mark Nelson, the director of design for CityVille 2, said the orignal CityVille, which launched nearly two years ago, … Read more

Zynga teases new CityVille 2 amid company struggle

Zynga is now testing a sequel for "CityVille," the company wrote on its blog today.

The social games creator promises are more "visually rich game" with "CityVille 2," which was released today to specific players for testing.

"It has all the features in CityVille that players love -- from neighbor visits and crews to buildables -- blended with some of the innovations we introduced in CastleVille and FarmVille 2 such a crafting and 3D graphics," according to the post.

The company has said -- and Wall Street seems to agree -- that … Read more

Shining light on new Kindle Paperwhite

Monday's CNET Update has a glow about it:

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite e-reader is now shipping, and CNET has given it the Editors Choice award. You can read the full review here. The Nook GlowLight dropped its price to $119 to match the Paperwhite.

Apple has released a Wi-Fi bug fix for the iPhone 5 on Verizon. The bug caused the iPhone 5 to use data even when the device was connected to a Wi-Fi network. Verizon won't charge iPhone 5 customers for any excess data as a result of the bug, but customers should download the fix … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1366: Won't someone think of the routers!? (podcast)

The Wikileaks war is escalating and it's threatening to go all "War Games" on us. 4Chan's forces, the Anonymous group, are DDoS-ing the heck out of sites like PayPayl, MasterCard, and anyone who bows to "government pressure." Meanwhile, secret forces of, uh, governments, are DDoS-ing Anonymous right back. And who's caught in the middle? The poor, innocent routers. Also, SpaceX successfully takes off, and scientists tee off on NASA's arsenic microbe. Ouch. --Molly