Why Connections Matter: The New Business of Social Gaming featuring Mark Pincus, Founder, CEO, & Chief Product Officer, Zynga; with Jason Tanz, Senior Editor, WIRED.
Disruption happens. A technology breakthrough. A shift in consumer demand. A rise, or fall, in a critical market. Any of these can rewrite the future of a company -- or a whole industry. If you haven't faced this moment, you will soon. It's time to change the way you run your business. Now what?
How you decide to respond is what separates the leaders from the left behind. Today's smartest executives know that disruption is constant and inevitable. They've learned to absorb the shockwave that change brings, and can use that energy to transform their companies and their careers.
At the second WIRED Business Conference, presented in partnership with MDC Partners, you'll hear from industry leaders on how to respond to change, and how to use it to your advantage. Through one-on-one conversations between speakers and Wired editors and interaction with the speakers, you'll see how disruption is transforming the way smart organizations make decisions, keeping them on a steady path to growth.
Bio
Mark Pincus
Mark Pincus is a leading Internet entrepreneur who has created four successful companies. He founded the online game developer Zynga in 2007 and has led it to success as a provider of casual games for social networking sites. The company currently has more than 700 employees. Its popular titles, including FarmVille, Cafe World, Zynga Poker, FishVille, Mafia Wars, PetVille, and YoVille, are enjoyed by some 235 million active players per month.
Before that, Pincus founded Tribe Networks in 2003, establishing one of the Web's first social networking sites, Tribe.net. In 1997 he cofounded SupportSoft (originally Support.com), a provider of online tech services and support automation software, and he served as the company's chairman and CEO. He had his initial entrepreneurial success in 1995 with Freeloader, the first Web-based push information service for consumers. Pincus regularly speaks at events such as the Game Developers Conference, Web 2.0, and the SNAP Summit. In 2009, he was named CEO of the Year at the Crunchies. He recently established Zynga.org, which facilitates charitable giving through online gameplay.
Jason Tanz
Jason Tanz heads up WIRED's business coverage. Before joining the magazine, he was a senior editor at Fortune Small Business, an editor at Fortune, and a writer at SmartMoney. As a freelance writer, he's covered everything from mah-jongg tournaments to "nerdcore" rap for a variety of major magazines. He is also the author of the acclaimed book Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
Computer-delivered electronic system that allows the user to control, combine, and manipulate different types of media, such as text, sound, video, computer graphics, and animation. The most common multimedia machine consists of a personal computer with a sound card, modem, digital speaker unit, and CD-ROM. Interactive multimedia systems under commercial development include cable television services with computer interfaces that enable viewers to interact with TV programs; high-speed interactive audiovisual communications systems, including video game consoles, that rely on digital data from fibre-optic lines or digitized wireless transmission; and virtual reality systems that create small-scale artificial sensory environments.
Zynga has never pioneered anything. They simply steal other companies' ideas and use their market clout to muscle market share. To quote mr. Pincus: "I don’t f***ing want innovation.” http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/
Zynga does not provide "connections". It provides an expensive escape mechanism from having to have human interactions for those who suffer from anxieties when dealing with real people.
member. 
Live Now
