Results tagged “Facebook” from Business Insider Blog

With my body still recoiling from the sleep deprivation obtained during the recent product launch I feel the need to divulge more about the industry Heyzap has entered. It's worth $1Bn and no-one has noticed it exists. Well, to be honest, when I say no-one, everyone in the Valley is talking about it but I never appreciated its potential until I arrived.

I'm referring to Social Games, those procrastination tools on facebook such as Farmville and Mafia Wars. Behind these innocent looking distractions lurks an industry worth $650M in 2009.

However, the truly remarkable aspect of this industry is its sheer growth, with revenues looking to hit over $1Bn in 2010. The shining light in this field is Zynga, makers of Farmville and Texas HoldEm Poker. It was only founded in 2007 but has already reached predicted revenues of $480M for 2010, in addition to a potential $3Bn valuation. Although this may sound like a rather steep estimate the true value can't be too far off, mainly due to an impressive expansion from 10M to 230M players in a mere 10 months!

So, the next time you buy a virtual tractor just remember the sheer revenue potential of 230M people doing the same thing.

First off a confession as this blog entry may be slightly skewed by my rose-tinted personal experience.

You see I was one of thousands of primary school children taught to ski at the Midlothian Snow Sports Centre - known as Hillend to everyone - in Midlothian so have some quite fond memories of it.

Learning to snowplow, trying to grab the button tow properly, hurtling down the main slope with carefree abandon and laughing hysterically as friends fell over and hit the mat are all part of my childhood.

I'm not alone in having fond memories as a Facebook campaign with more than 26,000 members is dedicated to saving the facility.

Hillend's future, or lack of, has been on the agenda for the past few months with Midlothian Council struggling to subsidise what is now a loss making venture.

We have dipped our toe in social networking at Business7 and Insider over the past year.

Our Twitter feeds have been quite popular (here and here) and both publications are also on Facebook (here and here).

The next obvious step was to do something on the social network most popular with business - Linkedin.

So that was exactly what we did and a new group for Business7 and Insider readers has been set up here.