Posts Tagged ‘Mark Pincus’

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a cover boy — specifically, the cover of Fortune, as he was named the magazine’s 2010 Business Person of the Year.

Other tech and media movers and shakers to crack the list of 50 included Apple CEO Steve Jobs (No. 3), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (No. 4), Baidu CEO Robin Li (No. 6), Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (No. 7), Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos (No. 10), Google CEO Eric Schmidt (No. 11), Zynga CEO Mark Pincus (No. 12), IBM CEO Sam Palmisano (No. 15), salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (No. 18), Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen (No. 19), Disney CEO Bob Iger (No. 22), Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (No. 24), Pandora founder Tim Westergren (No. 26), Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes (No. 27), DirecTV CEO Michael White (No. 32), Samsung Electronics CEO Geesung Choi (No. 39), Comcast CEO Brian Roberts (No. 43), and Mail.ru Group CEO Yuri Milner (No. 46).

Fortune reporter Peter Newcomb wrote on Hastings:

What does it take to be at the top of business in 2010? We searched for leaders who didn’t just crawl from the wreckage of the Great Recession, but sprinted from it. This year, Hastings has thrown his company’s muscle behind delivering television and movies over the Internet, risking his $2 billion-in-sales DVD-by-mail business. The result: a company that has grown from a gnat to a giant. Now when deals are made in media, the increasingly important question is, “What’s the Netflix piece?”

And Hastings told Fortune:

We are in a new race, and we are a player with some very large and substantial firms. Just to be in that league is an amazing place from where we were.

Yesterday Mark Pincus, the CEO of popular social gaming startup Zynga, went on Charlie Rose to discuss the future of the social gaming space. There’s nothing really new stated except for a brief mention of a new startup created by Mark Pincus’ wife. Over the past couple years, Zynga has surged to the top of the social gaming space, now attracting over 230 million monthly active users across all their applications. While growth has appeared to slow for the holidays, Zynga is leaps and bounds beyond any competitors at this point.
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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to interview Mark Pincus of Zynga gaming network. Zynga is currently one of the most dominant social gaming companies on the web. Social gaming in general is a nascent industry but is gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of attention as participants are attracting millions of users to simple applications. You may have experience playing games such as Scrabulous on Facebook. That’s only one social game (not produced by Zynga).

Zynga now has the largest Texas Hold’em poker game on the web with a presence across a number of social networks including Mysapce and Facebook. Back in February we covered the launch of the Zynga gaming platform which enabled developers to leverage some of the traffic being generated by Zynga’s overall network. At the time, Social Gaming Network (a Zynga competitor), also launched their own network. Both systems ultimately provide the same thing but currently Zynga appears to have significantly more traffic.

In the podcast Mark brings up some of the statistics being generated by their network which are substantial. We also had a chance to discuss Mark’s thoughts on the future of social gaming and where this space is headed overall. There were a few points during the interview when my Skype had some hiccups but through context you can figure out what Mark was saying since it is no more then quarter-of-a-second interruptions. Hope you enjoy!