RockYou, a social game developer, will be laying off a number of employees, we’ve confirmed with the company. The total number of employees being cut, explains CEO Lisa Marino, is 100, but there are two parts to the cuts. First, around forty employees from Playdemic, a social game development studio that RockYou acquired in January, will be rejoining Playdemic as a spinoff as the studio has been sold back to the original founders. The social game Gourmet Ranch will become part of Playdemic.
Marino says that around 56 employees will be let go from RockYou’s headquarters in Redwood city, including some staff from the game organization, media, and general and administrative services. After the Playdemic spinoff and the layoffs, RockYou will be left with half of its staff, with 90-ish employees, says Marino.
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RockYou is continuing its acquisition strategy today with the purchase of Australian social game developer 3 Blokes. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2006, 3 Blokes has developed four social games for Facebook, including their most recent title, Galactic Trader, a space trading and combat game with 200,000 monthly active users. The acquisition also bring RockYou a number of talented and seasoned casual game developers. The studio is led by George Fidler, a former COO of EA’s Asia Pacific Studio. John Passfield, formerly CEO of 3 Blokes and now VP of Creative for the studio, was previously Creative Director at Pandemic’s Australia studio and co-founded Krome Studios. → Read More
Forgive the snarky headline, but history has shown that navigating a once-hot consumer Web company through the trough of the hype cycle is one of the hardest jobs in Silicon Valley. And very few come out with a billion winner on the other side. (Cough, cough, MySpace, Digg, Six Apart…)
But if anyone is going to pull a turn-around off at RockYou, it’s Lisa Marino. Marino joined RockYou in better days, when her husband Ro Choy was the company’s head of business development. Choy left to start his own thing, but Marino stayed on, continually taking on more and more sales and executive responsibility as the company began to crumble.
She took over as chief operating officer nine months ago, managing layoffs (including possibly RockYou’s founder Lance Tokuda) while she successfully recruited new gaming talent starting with senior VP of games Jonathan Knight. Likewise, she spent nine months cutting expenses dramatically, while managing to grow the top line more than 40% in the fourth quarter. Typically, those two don’t go hand-in-hand. → Read More
RockYou earlier this morning announced that it has acquired social game developer Playdemic.
Based in Manchester, England, RockYou says Playdemic will operate independently as a subsidiary studio and develop Facebook games for a mainstream audience. Paul Gouge, Playdemic CEO and founder, will lead the studio as VP and General Manager. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
RockYou founder and CEO Lance Tokuda is no longer leading the company, we’ve confirmed. Tokuda helped found RockYou back in 2005, and led it through several funding rounds totalling nearly $130 million. The change comes at a critical time in RockYou’s life, as the company attempts to reinvent itself and bounce back from substantial layoffs.
I spoke with RockYou COO Lisa Marino, who says that Tokuda told the company he would be stepping down last month, around the time that it pivoted to focus primarily on social gaming. A significant but undisclosed percentage of RockYou’s workforce was laid off as part of the transition, and the company hired former EA exec Jonathan Knight to serve as SVP of RockYou Games. → Read More
RockYou, a social network app developer that also has an advertising branch, has had substantial layoffs this week, we’ve just confirmed. The company says that it has “restructured the organization” in the last couple of days, and that going forward it is going to focus exclusively on social games, where it “sees the largest opportunity”.
A company spokesperson declined to comment on how many people were laid off (the best I could get out of them was that it was less than half the company) — we’re working to get a more specific number. → Read More
RockYou, one of the largest developers of social games and applications, this morning announced that it has inked a long-term deal with Facebook.
Under the terms of the agreement, RockYou will be making Facebook Credits the exclusive virtual currency in its games and apps for the next five years.
As is standard for developers on Facebook, RockYou will receive 70 percent of the revenue from Facebook Credits, while Facebook will keep the remaining 30 percent. → Read More
Social network application developer and advertising platform RockYou has just raised another $10 million in funding from SoftBank. With the deal, the company has acquired a majority of the shares in its joint venture, RockYou Asia. The company previously raised a whopping $50 million in funding last November. This latest investment brings the startup’s total funding to $127 million.
RockYou develops and acquires social networking applications, but a big part of their business is serving advertising to their own as well as third party apps. RockYou Asia is a social and mobile application developer providing entertainment tools and social applications to users in Asian Countries. Games include RockYou Battle Monsters, Umajin RockYou, Usaru Biyori, Crime World, Hug Me, and Speed Racing → Read More
We recently wrote about 8Coupons and Yipit, which both aggregate Groupon-like deals. Today, Peanut Labs is launching a different twist to the crowdsourced local deal; the startup is allowing users to earn virtual currencies by buying local goods and services at huge discounts, called Cherry Deals.
So when playing a game on Facebook, a user will see the option of earning points for the game is they buy a Groupon-like deal. Cherry Deals uses your IP address to figure out where you are, and then serves up both national and local deals. Once you click on a deal, you can pay with your credit card within Facebook and you will receive the virtual currency in your gaming account. Cherry Deals will also serve as a standalone Facebook app. For now all the deals are U.S. based but Cherry Deals plans to expand to the U.K. and Canada by the end of this year. → Read More
What’s the most common password among the 32 million people who’s accounts were hacked at RockYou late last year? According to a study by Imperva (download here), it’s “123456,” followed by “12345,” “123456789″ and “Password,” in that order. “iloveyou” came in at no. 5.
Sigh.
Only 0.2% of users had what would be considered a strong password of eight or more characters that contains a mixture of special characters, numbers and both lower and upper case letters, says the study. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.
I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”
With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”
As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending to protect your privacy. → Read More
Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach, and their blog is eerily silent – but the details of the security breach are going from bad to worse.
The first issue is that RockYou attempted to downplay the entire incident, first by covering it up by not notifying users and then downplaying it in an official statement as being an issue that only affected ‘older’ applications. The hacker responsible for the initial breach published a small portion of the dataset he had retrieved and was able to show that not only did he have access to their entire database, but also passwords were stored in the clear. This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites. → Read More
It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.
Over the weekend, the security firm Imperva issued a warning to RockYou that there was a serious SQL Injection flaw in their database. Such a flaw could grant hackers access to the the service’s entire list of user names and passwords in the database, they warned. Imperva said that after it notified RockYou about the flaw, it was apparently fixed over the weekend. But that’s not before at least one hacker gained access to what they claim is all of the 32 million accounts. 32,603,388 to be exact. The best part? The database included a full list of unprotected plain text passwords. And email addresses. Wow. → Read More
This was inevitable, particularly after this video surfaced. Sacramento based law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is investigating complaints about unauthorized charges imposed social network users who were mislead into accepting offers of dubious quality. Among those being investigated: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga, RockYou, Offerpal Media, SuperRewards and many others.
It’s ScamVille, the lawsuit. And we’ve spoken to one other law firm considering a class action claim against these companies.
Will users be vindicated and get their money back? Maybe part of it. A recent class action settlement against WebLoyalty for post transaction marketing scams led to a $10 million settlement, just a tiny fraction of the total revenue pulled in by these offers. The law firms are the ones who get a payday. → Read More
Zynga changed their lead gen scam policy this morning (the whole Scamville background is here, see updates at bottom as well). And now RockYou is taking steps to clean up their act to, according to an email we’ve been forwarded.
In an email to RockYou’s publishers, they say that they will begin complying with Facebook’s rules on offer scams (and like you, we’re not sure why they haven’t been complying all along, but lax enforcement is likely the cause).
Two interesting nuggets from the email though. First, RockYou says that from now on you’ll only see “clean, safe surveys from top tier brands advertisers.” All of the surveys we’ve seen are mobile subscription scams, so I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a clean, safe survey.
Second, the email says “the Facebook compliance team will be keeping a very close eye on offer walls starting tonight.” We’d heard that Facebook is coming down hard on app developers around scams right now, but Facebook won’t comment about it other than to say that they have always been monitoring application offers and enforcing the rules. From what we’ve seen, that enforcement didn’t bring much in the way of results, but perhaps they’re more serious about the situation now.
The full email: → Read More
In September 2008 Facebook application developer and advertising network RockYou sent a standard notice to all of their potential and existing advertising partners – which is virtually everyone that creates Facebook Applications. The problem was that they cc’d everyone, creating a firestorm of angry (and sometimes funny) feedback. RockYou basically published a complete list of advertisers and developers working on the Facebook platform.
RockYou VP Business Development Ro Choy apologized in the comments to our previous post, saying “We take privacy of all our partners very seriously and have reviewed and corrected the process that enabled this.”
Despite Choy’s assurance that the problem had been fixed, they did the same thing on November 25 (we gave them a pass that time). And now they’ve done it a third time. In a thinly veiled mass mailing advertisement, RockYou asks scores of developers to buy some of the “600 million impressions that we deliver each day.” And once again, they cc’d everyone, which annoys the recipients to no end. The message is below.
On an unrelated note, if you are looking for advertisers for your Facebook application, I’ve got a very high quality list for sale. → Read More
At 6:40 pm last night, a RockYou employee sent out an email to RockYou’s entire existing and potential advertising partners – 450 people in all. The email itself was a simple notice of RockYou’s new advertising website, and a request to “please change their ad tags to reflect the changes in our ad servers.”
Pretty run of the mill stuff, except RockYou included every email address in the CC field, providing every recipient (and everyone it’s been forwarded to, including us) with a complete contact list of every major application developer and potential advertiser on the Facebook platform.
Nice.
Hundreds of reply-all’s flowed in. Some of my favorites: → Read More
