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Facebook game maker Zynga launches its own social games platform, Zynga.com

Popular Facebook game maker Zynga is scaling up and branching out from the clutches of the worlds biggest social networking site with the launch its own Zynga.com website and gaming platform.

The shift means users will soon be able to play Zyngas popular social games including CityVille, Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker and Hidden Chronicle outside of the Facebook ecosystem.

The Zynga Platform is designed with two simple goals: more access to the best social games and more people to play with, said Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus. Were excited to offer new features like the live Social Stream which will enable you to play in real time with your friends and find new ones. Player profiles will let you check your friends helpfulness score to see whos most likely to help you back. And youll be able to chat and play live with your friends and a community of players interested in the same games as you.

Third party game developers will also be able to publish their games on Zynga.com, the beta version of which will launch in early March. Initial Zynga platform partners will include developers MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava.

Zynga made it clear that it is not (yet) cutting its ties with Facebook. Users will still pay for virtual goods using Facebook Credits but will now be able to interact with other gamers outside of Facebooks own social network. In its IPO filing earlier this year Facebook revealed that Zynga accounted for 12% of its 2011 revenue.

http://zynga.com/

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Facebook game maker Zynga launches its own social games platform, Zynga.com

NIA Features Publicly Traded Enterprise Social Networking Companies in New Report

FORT LEE, N.J., March 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Jive Software went public this past December in one of Wall Street's hottest IPOs of 2011. Not only did Jive go public at $12 per share, which was above its projected $8 to $10 per share offering range, but Jive sold 15% more shares to the public than initially planned. This allowed Jive to raise $161.3 million or 38% more than the $117 million Jive was projected to raise. Jive closed its first day of trading up 25% to $15.05 per share and today it just reached a new 52-week high of $24.53 per share for a gain of 104% from its December offering price.

Jive currently has 61.31 million shares outstanding. This means at Jive's new 52-week high set today, it reached a market cap of $1.5 billion. This is a huge premium for a company with only $77.29 million in trailing twelve month revenues, with a net loss of $50.8 million. However, with the enterprise social networking industry projected to grow by 61% annually from a $600 million market last year to a $6.4 billion market by 2016, NIA considers Jive's current valuation to be perfectly justified based on what Jive's revenues are likely to reach by 2016.

With Jive getting all of the headlines in the media because of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs leading its IPO in December, most investors on Wall Street actually believe that Jive is the only publicly traded enterprise social play. The truth is, there is another public enterprise social company that NIA believes has even better technology than Jive and it is trading for only a small fraction of Jive's valuation. The company is BroadVision Inc. and NIA believes it has the potential to far outperform Jive for the rest of 2012.

BroadVision went public in 1996 and was one of the biggest plays during the original dot-com boom, rising to a market cap as high as $13 billion. While most companies that thrived during the dot-com bubble have since gone out of business, BroadVision has managed to completely turn itself around from being deeply in debt with negative working capital to today being debt free with $54.4 million in cash. BroadVision has completely reinvented itself over the past couple of years with the launch of Clearvale Express and Clearvale Enterprise, BroadVision's two enterprise social networking platforms for businesses.

BroadVision's closest comparison in the industry is Yammer, which just announced Wednesday evening that they raised $85 million in venture capital funding, blowing away rumors that they would raise $50 million. BroadVision and Yammer are the only two enterprise social companies utilizing a "freemium" business strategy. BroadVision is offering its Twitter-like social platform for businesses, Clearvale Express for free so that the company can benefit from the network going viral. Any employee at any company can instantly setup a Clearvale Express enabled network for free and immediately begin using it to collaborate with their co-workers on projects at work.

When management of a company finds out that their employees are having huge success with Clearvale Express, they can then pay to seamlessly upgrade to BroadVision's Facebook-like fully featured social platform for business, Clearvale Enterprise. NIA considers BroadVision's Clearvale Enterprise to be far superior to Yammer's paid social platform. It has many unique features that make it stand out from Jive's enterprise social platform, including the ability for companies to create both internal networks for their management, employees, etc. as well as external networks for their customers, partners, etc.

BroadVision is the only company that has paid attention to how all these social networks relate to each other. Many of the employees on the internal company social network are also likely to want to interact with customers on an external network. Others will need to communicate with partners and suppliers. Some of the content created on one network is likely to need to be posted on at least one of the others. To solve these problems, BroadVision has invented social ecosystems, which allows businesses to manage all of their corporate social networks together as a series of connected networks that can overlap both members and content as needed.

BroadVision only has 4.515 million shares outstanding. Based on its closing price yesterday of $42.69, BroadVision's market cap is only $192.75 million or just 1/8 of Jive's market cap of $1.5 billion. NIA believes that BroadVision deserves a valuation that is much closer to Jive. With BroadVision being one of only two public companies in the new most rapidly growing emerging technology market, and with BroadVision appearing to be undiscovered and extremely undervalued in comparison to Jive, NIA has been rapidly accumulating BroadVision and it is currently the largest position in NIA's portfolio.

NIA today released a brand new report entitled '2012 Social Network Stocks 2.0 Report.' NIA's new report features many enterprise social networking companies both public and private including BroadVision Inc., Jive Software, Yammer, Telligent, Moxie Software, Lithium Technologies, and NewsGator. It also features consumer social networking companies including Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Renren. With Facebook scheduled to have its IPO in May, NIA believes that social networking stocks will be in play on Wall Street for many months to come and we are working hard to determine which social companies offer the greatest investment potential. To receive NIA's extremely valuable exclusive new report released today, go to: http://inflation.us/social2012.html.

About NIA: The National Inflation Association is an organization that is dedicated to preparing Americans for hyperinflation. NIA offers free membership at http://www.inflation.us and provides its members with articles about the U.S. economy and inflation, daily news stories and blog updates, and important charts not shown by the mainstream media. NIA is the producer of economic documentaries that have received a combined 17 million views including the critically acclaimed 'Meltup,' 'The Dollar Bubble,' 'End of Liberty,' 'Hyperinflation Nation,' and brand new 'College Conspiracy.' NIA provides unbiased reviews of the major online sellers of gold and silver bullion and also offers profiles of gold, silver, agriculture, oil, and alternative energy companies that could prosper in an inflationary environment. NIA is the creator of 'NIAnswers,' the world's most comprehensive database of questions and answers about inflation, currencies, debt, and precious metals.

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NIA Features Publicly Traded Enterprise Social Networking Companies in New Report

Incarnate Word women’s basketball postgame press conference – Video

01-03-2012 14:34 The age-old expression in sports that "it's hard to beat a team three times in a season" was on display in Allen, Texas as the University of the Incarnate Word women's basketball team defeated Midwestern State University at the Lone Star Conference Women's Basketball Championships on Thursday afternoon.

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Incarnate Word women's basketball postgame press conference - Video

How to Install WordPress From Scratch – Video

02-03-2012 07:47 Hosted by author Deltina Hay, this in-depth tutorial demonstrates how to install WordPress on your Website server. Deltina talks in detail about the software needed to install WordPress, how to set up a secure database for WordPress, how to populate the WordPress configuration file, how to establish FTP access to upload WordPress, and, ultimately, how to install WordPress.

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How to Install WordPress From Scratch - Video

Split Testing: Google Website Optimizer with WordPress – Video

02-03-2012 11:02 Full tutorial: OutsourceFactor.com | This video is part of a detailed tutorial on split testing. Google Website Optimizer is a free option but can be very confusing for people using WordPress. We cover how to setup an experiment in Google Website Optimizer, and how to properly paste your code into WordPress.

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Split Testing: Google Website Optimizer with WordPress - Video