Bing Gordon is a name you’ve probably never heard of. A former creative director at Electornic Arts, he’s now an investor in social gaming giant Zynga and sits on the company’s board – and it’s about to make him a fortune.
With Zynga to go public – reportedly as soon as next week – Gordon is about to turn a $US35 million investment into a profit over $US600 million.
Gordon’s been on the gaming scene for awhile, over 26 years. And as the industry has changed, so has his keen sense of what consumers want. As this Bloomberg piece shows, Gordon was keen to find out what exactly was driving this shift into social gaming – and how he could get in on the action.
While Gordon was still at EA, he went to speak with Zynga chief Mark Pincus.
“Mark has a very enlightened view of partnering with people who can really help,” entrepreneur Paul Martino said. “While EA didn’t like what they heard at the time, Bing sure liked what he heard.”
Eventually, Gordon started meeting more and more with Zynga. Eventually, he leaves and invests as part of Kleiner Perkins, which had shifted into focusing on energy companies, rather than internet start-ups.
After Gordon left EA, the company has struggled to compete, moving into social gaming as well by acquiring PopCap. But as the Bloomberg piece points out, Gordon is well-liked and received by many executives, is keenly aware of what’s happening within the industry, and is a brilliant investor.
In fact, he’s on the lookout for the next big thing.
“Gordon is hunting for the next big idea. During visits to Lockerz’s offices in Seattle, he holds three- or four-hour brainstorming sessions where he sketches out features on a whiteboard,” said Kathy Savitt, the start-up’s founder.”
“One of the things about Bing that’s so disruptive is not just his ideas but his presence,” Savitt says. “He might start singing, he might recite a poem, but he’s definitely someone who is full of life in everything he does.”
It’s been several weeks now since Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away, and most of the untold anecdotes from colleagues and family members have found their way into the public sphere. This new piece from Wired offers a late look at the man and his legacy – and his obsessions with revolutionising the industry.
Steven Levy writes back to the 1980s, when Jobs revealed some of the company’s most daring products, and how he revelled in the idea that Apple was a juxtaposition of the arts and sciences.
“When I suggested that he seemed to be striving for an almost Zen-like simplicity in his designs, he agreed, mentioning an early brochure with a single image of an apple against a white background.”
The piece fast-forwards to the 1990s, when Jobs returns to Apple. Speaking with Levy, he describes how the company would be preparing to distill Apple into a minimum number of product categories. He reveals the iMac, and describes the road he wants the company to follow.
That trend continues through the 2000s, but as Levy describes, it soon comes to an end.
“In the last couple of years of his life, I didn’t see Jobs as often. His medical leaves meant he wasn’t giving as many interviews. Also my move to Wired meant that I wasn’t writing as frequently. On rare occasions, I would email him to see if he was willing to speak on background on a given subject, just to share his perspective. When he was inclined, he’d respond, and it could result in a long conversation.”
“I left with the impression that Jobs knew what was important to him.”
Throughout Jobs’ life, he was always very explicit that Apple would be a company not just focused on creating great products, but that this would be a means to an end of making communication and technology easier and more beautiful.
This piece highlights that desire, and as Levy points out, it was with him throughout his entire career – through the Macintosh, the iMac, and the iPod – until his death.
Facebook has been in a bit of trouble lately, after the agreement with the FCC that mandated the social network submit itself for auditing every two years. But this piece on the New York Times takes a look at some of the nifty features that you may not even know about.
For example – did you know you can edit link names and descriptions when posting them to your wall? If you don’t like the details automatically presented, you can just change them.
You can also post playable MP3s, create polls, collaborate on documents – and even invite non-Facebook users to events.
Plenty of entrepreneurs use Facebook, and a substantial number of businesses have their own page. This is a great piece to scrub up on some skills that could help in your day-to-day use.
This week the European Commission announced an inquiry into the way Apple is selling eBooks. Part of that investigation will also see five major publishing groups investigated, which the EU claim may have been engaging in anti-competitive practices.
There’s a strange omission here, some have argued, in that Amazon hasn’t been targeted at all.
But as this piece in The Atlantic Wire points out, there’s some merit to the omission. It cites a lawsuit brought against Apple in the EU earlier this year that suggests Apple is allowing publishers to set eBook prices, allowing for industry-wide inflation.
And it references a piece that shows there may indeed be evidence that Apple is allowing eBook prices to rise.
This is bad news for Apple, and great news for Amazon, which wants to control as much of the book selling – and publishing – market as it possibly can. And as the piece suggests, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos may be using this opportunity to gain even more power.
“Amazon is staying quiet about Apple’s antitrust troubles, but we doubt they’re upset about being cast as the victim. There is some damning evidence against Apple, including the telling and now well-known exchange in which Steve Jobs tacitly admitted to targeting Amazon with the iBookstore model to The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg.”
“Nevertheless, even if its caught cheating in the eBook game, Apple’s still a more valuable company than Amazon based on its humongous market cap, and Steve Jobs was still the more celebrated CEO.”
Google has been under fire by savvy tech users over the past few weeks for making a change that means users have to type in a search query twice if they want use different categories, as opposed to just clicking on a new tab.
But there’s a new change in Gmail that many other users are frustrated over – the change to make Gmail chat windows bigger than they were previously, obstructing the view of the text box.
It’s not a huge change, but as this piece on The Atlantic argues, it’s an annoying one.
“What happened, Google? We know that designers at the company use tons of data to come up with their user interfaces, so why do things keep going wrong with the company’s product releases?”
Google has also been getting hit for the release of its Gmail app, which suffered a number of key problems and was pulled soon after it was launched.
As this piece points out, something strange is happening at Google, where design doesn’t seem to be as sharp as it used to. Has something changed within the internet giant?
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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