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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions… → Read More
Casual gaming startup PlayFirst has secured $16.5 million Series C in a round led by DCM that included original investors Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners. The new round brings total funding for PlayFirst to $26.5 million. San Francisco based PlayFirst was founded in 2004 and is focused on creating “shared casual game experiences around lasting original… → Read More
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