The latest big company acquisitions of social gaming startups points to a maturing of the market, as reporting from eMarketer today suggests. While the social gaming market’s "explosive growth will moderate in coming years," major media influences Google and Disney have become interested in incorporating these new business models into their own.

Google will be working with Zynga, who brought Farmville to Facebook years ago. According to eMarketer, Google has a social gaming property in the works and acquired social app maker Slide to help in this venture.

Similarly, Playdom was acquired by Disney, a sign that the animation and entertainment conglomerate is putting faith in the continual success of social-type gaming.

These types of gaming companies have two revenue streams - ad support adding up to $142 million this year, and virtual goods sales will make even more revenue, the combined total which ThinkEquity predicts will reach $2 billion by 2012. In their industry report from 2009, daily active users for the top ten social gaming companies has increased over five times from April to October of last year.

The popularity of gaming on social networks is demonstrated in the top-performing applications - twenty of the top 25 Facebook apps are games. A significant growth area remains in converting active playing users to active paying users - only three-to-five percent of active users directly pay for games. Newer payment methods may assist with this conversion in the forms of credits, prepaid cards and mobile payments.

Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst further explains the dual role of social gaming as culture and revenue. "Facebook was on the ground floor of this trend with Zynga, and other top companies such as Google and Disney are now jumping in," he says. In addition, this trend of consolidation is not over. Verna adds, “I expect other social networks, internet portals and entertainment companies to shift resources toward the social gaming space while they still see it as a potential money-maker.”

Oracle filed a complaint against Google for patent and copyright infringement Thursday evening related to the development of the Android mobile operating system. Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman in a press release posted by MarketWatch explained that the lawsuit’s complaint is that Android infringes upon Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.

The integrated business software and hardware systems company filed this complaint with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, which was quoted by CNET: "Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and devices that operate Android infringe one or more claims of each of United States Patents Nos. 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,104; 6,910,205; and 6,061,520." The complaint calls for a jury trial.

Google attracted attention when they began Android development in 2007, a software system that uses Java-derived tech, Oracle argues, without a proper license. Android competes against Java, which is implemented on other mobile phones. Developed by Sun Microsystems, Java was acknowledged in the documentation as one of the most significant technologies that Oracle acquired from Sun when the latter was acquired by Oracle.

Apparently the suit will not be a surprise to Google. James Gosling, an author of Java, mentioned in his blog Nighthacks that during the Oracle-Sun integration meetings, Oracle lawyers were asking questions about the patent situation between Sun and Google.

Google’s response via TechCrunch has labelled the suit contrary to the open source spirit of Java. “We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open-source Java community with this baseless lawsuit. The open-source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open-source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

For the last few weeks, Alexander Osterwalder has been in Silicon Valley to talk about his must-read book, Business Model Generation, and to see what his next step in the area of facilitating business model will be.

We talk a lot about the fast-changing environment in which companies are evolving and how hard it is for traditional players to grow and change. One of the most painful points is the lack of easy tools to assess the situation and imagine a new paradigm.

This need for fast adaptation strikes a chord in Silicon Valley and its “lean startup” movement led by Eric Ries which tries to democratize the idea of quick iteration for startups and making pivot points to find the business model that best fits them.

Osterwalder’s book deals with business strategy and how to better define and draw business models. The book is full of well-designed concepts created by a team of 470 practitioners, which makes the reading experience painless. But the key asset for the business community is the book’s business model canvas, which the creators give for free on their website, encouraging people to use it:

This canvas is very useful for putting complex ideas on paper in a way that no one has addressed completely in the past. All the simple tools we now use in the business strategy area were created decades ago - the BCG matrix or the Porter’s five forces, for example - so it’s time for change.

This canvas can be very useful for all kind of businesses, from startups to big corporations, to better define their business model and to imagine new ones.

Osterwalder is working on an iPad application that will let people “play” with a business model with virtual post-its to stick on the business model canvas, while collaborating to create a new one. One cool idea could be to create an online business model library. Another idea could be to play with this app on large touch-screen walls. Is this the next revolution in the boardroom and at Sand Hill Road, where the VCs dwell?

News sharing site Digg was undermined by fringe groups of conservative news manipulators for over a year before the story broke yesterday.These users frequently buried news deemed “too left-leaning” by the group, ensuring that this news was effectively removed from the site.

The San Francisco startup, founded by Kevin Rose, was responsible for shaping the now commonplace practice of forwarding articles to social networks, as well as popularizing stories on their front page by “Digging” the stories using a bookmarklet. The “most dugg” stories were often different than what one would commonly find on a more mainstream news portal, as frequent users often skewed more towards technology, liberal views and of course, stories about Digg.com and its staff.

The flipside of the “Digg” action is “Bury,” which the influential conservative Digg members in question exploited, according to Alternet, by means of “multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.” These practices disproportionately affected popular stories on the Digg page, but also trickled down to driven traffic to news source sites. This is not a small effect - Digg is ranked fiftieth among US Web sites by Alexa, likely has three million users and generates around 25 million page views per month (all Alternet numbers).These tremendous shifts in bandwidth usage and page views have overwhelmed Web sites with the “Digg effect.”

A year of undercover investigation connected to author Oleoleolson exposed these groups, now referred to as “bury brigades.” One conservative group, who calls themselves the “Digg Patriots,” buried over ninety percent of certain users and Web sites’ articles. Along with political articles, these groups target other subjects including “education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy,” and articles critical of GOP, Tea Party and Fox News leaders.

A new Digg site is imminent, with various safeguards to help prevent undemocratic gaming of the system. For example, users can now follow individuals or publishers so that they will have access to trusted content whether or not their news items have been Dugg or Buried. CNET reports that they will shelve Bury functionality.

The majority of web browsers offer a “private” mode, which purports to leave no trace of a user’s history on a computer. In reality, certain information is still stored, which allows users to go back to previously visited sites, or at least find out what they were, warn researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

This is partly due to plug-ins and extensions, which mitigate the effectiveness of anonymous browsing modes and leave data accessible to a local attack (which controls a user’s computer), or an attack made by hacked internet sites.

To come to these conclusions, the researchers utilized a model that allowed them to evaluate at long-distance the quality and the resistance of these add-ons. Their findings are relevant for the four major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.

There’s two steps to the system. The first entails analyzing the source codes stored by the browsers and verifying that they’re all protected when users are in private browsing mode. The second step calls for verifying that the protocols used by the browsers don’t affect the private nature of these source codes while in secure mode.

The result is that weaknesses appear, mainly because of the protocols, which preserve and hide the traces of navigation. At the top of the list, according to the researchers: Firefox, which executes the characteristics of HTML, allowing a site to define personal protocols. These, which are established when the user is in safe mode, are still usable and detectable when navigation is ended.

“A hacker could use this to track what a user did on a site and retrace their browsing history,” the researchers say. This is even possible in secure mode.

Other weaknesses, across all the browsers: when a site uses JavaScript, it can order the browser to produce protocols to securitize exchanges, which are used in both public and private modes, and act to define which security objectives to respect, such as server authentication or the confidentiality of exchanged data. In the case of public and private use, the browser can save the information demanded by the protocol outside of secure navigation.

With this, attackers can track the previously-viewed site. The researchers also call out the SMB (Server Message Block), which allows file sharing over local networks on Windows PCs.

“It can undo the anonymity of the ‘private’ mode,” the researchers say.

When Internet Explorer uses SMB to make a file-sharing request with a server, an initial anonymous connection is attempted. If this fails, Internet Explorer sends all the information necessary to complete the exchange: the user name of the server, as well as the name of the computer and the Windows domain. All this while the browser is in secure mode.

The researchers will present their research at next month’s Usenix Security Symposium in Washington, D.C.

Originally published on L’Atelier France.

The calculating methods used by recommendation systems, which place products deemed most pertinent to a user’s profile at the top, need to be simplified, according to researchers at the University of Utah.

The most common approach, called “multidimensional,” consists in analyzing multiple types of user data simultaneously: their age, tastes, contacts and previous purchases, for example. The more data criteria, the better the results. But this also makes the task more complex. Each new criteria multiplies a system’s calculations exponentially.

To address this, University of Utah’s researchers created a method that groups the data into the main outlines that characterize an individual. Rather than analyze all of the data, the system focuses on these outlines.

“Each piece of data has a numeric value,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, one of the researchers, told L’Atelier. “If you look at this data like points on a graph, each with its own coordinates, the distance between the points allows us to find certain similarities.”

The researchers are more interested in the relationships between data than with the data itself. For example, if you think about the height and weight of someone, there’s a good chance that a taller person is heavier than a short person. Thus, rather than measuring the height and weight of a person as independent variables, you need to look at the correlation between them.

“Our approach is not interested only in the relationship of data represented by points on a graph,” Venkatasubramanian said. “We do this by decreasing the respective coordinates of each of them, while preserving the same distance.” The objective? Reducing the “dimensionality” of data.

“Prior methods on modern computers struggle with data from more than 5,000 people,” the researcher said. “Our method smoothly handles well above 50,000 people.”

The advantage of this method is not only an increase in calculation speed, but also a reduction in the amount of memory required for recommendation systems.

The Federal Government is broadcasting an open call to technology professionals to help Washington make cities and public sector organizations more efficient. In the Code for America Fellowship PSA, industry spokespersons such as Tim O’Reilly and Aneesh Chopra describe how cities have less money and more bureaucracy hindering the work it needs to do.

Tech celebs elaborate upon the concept - Mark Zuckerberg asks, "What if city hall spoke with citizens the way citizens speak with each other?" and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posits, "What if some of the most talented designers and technologists in the country applied those talents to building Web apps for cities and citizens?"

Jen Pahlka, Founder of Code for America wants to find out. The project will give selected individuals expenses, benefits and a $35,000 stipend during the eleven-month duration while they build technology that makes local government "more open, efficient and responsive." Working with industry leaders, the Web apps will be spread to cities across the country. The application deadline to try to become a CfA Fellow is August 15, 2010.

Code for America’s first blog entry is dated June 17, 2010, and includes documentation of some posters that feature quotes from United States historical figures like James Madison (System Architect, 1787) and Susan B. Anthony (Accessibility Expert, 1873) in binary.

Earlier this month, the full-time staff of the project grew from one person (Pahlka) with Alissa Black as City Program Director, and Dan Melton as technical director. Previously, they had a team of volunteers, part-timers and a board of directors, including Tim O’Reilly, Pahlka’s mentor.

Black is the Business Analyst Supervisor for the City and County of San Francisco, aided in the Open311 API launch and drove the business analysis process to decide which cities will be involved in CfA’s first year. As for Melton, the Public Affairs and Economics doctorate holder was based in Kansas City.

Voice and audio chat company Skype announced plans to expand its presence in Silicon Valley today. Josh Silverman, CEO, posted to the Skype blog regarding their newly-signed lease at an office space in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, CA. With strongholds in several European countries, and offices in San Jose and Brisbane, Silverman hopes to attract more Valley talent, particularly engineers. The California offices are meant to “also become the home of regional marketing, business development, and the Skype for Business team.”

The company wants to expand its Silicon Valley software engineering base mostly to secure more presence in consumer electronics and mobile devices. Silverman explained to GigaOm today, “There is a huge demand for us to build Skype into other people’s experiences,” Silverman said. “We made a transition from being a pure voice company two years ago.”

This annoucement comes in the wake of Skype’s release of a software developer’s kit, SkypeKit, that transforms the voice and video application into a toolset. The Skype developer’s blog will allow voice or video calling, as well as instant messaging to be embedded into operating systems, interfaces or other applications. The blog refers to this as being “plugged into Skype.”

A GigaOm Pro analysis links the release of SkypeKit to a Netflix-like innovation plan. By enabling wider integration of not only its application but its services across hardware and software, the Skype platform can push its already popular communication suite to “a new billion device market.” Since the company “already holds a commanding lead for computer-based voice and video communications… SkypeKit may strengthen the company’s hold on this market and make it even more difficult for competitors to find a toehold.”

Between a more prominent presence in Silicon Valley and a shiny new toolkit, communications will definitely be looking at what is next for Skype’s platform.

As a part of its Pride 2010 blog entry today, Google announced several changes to its health benefits policy that will help equalize pay for its LGBT employees. These changes include tax compensation, family and medical leave and infertility coverage related to same-sex domestic partners.

Current health insurance policy causes domestic partners to be taxed amounts that sometimes exceed one thousand dollars, which heterosexual couples can avoid by getting married. Though several states allow same-sex couples the act of marriage, this institution is not recognized federally, and benefits can be taxed regardless of marital status. A company’s practice of increasing pay to compensate for expected status is referred to as "grossing up." As of this month, Google will be grossing-up imputed taxes on health insurance benefits, an amount that can exceed one thousand dollars.

As another equalizing practice, Googlers will be given an equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act for domestic partners. This legislation, as explained in the New York Times, requires employers to provide up to twelve weeks’ leave "in a one-year period to recover from a medical condition or to care for a relative." The last measure obviates stipulations during the one-year waiting period before couples can be compensated for infertility-related medical costs.

That is a lot of social issues to cover in a tech blog, but the affects of such benefits policy changes can change an industry. Silicon Valley companies often vie for top talent attention, and benefits can easily sway a decision, especially such groundbreaking support for same-sex couples. Since only a few companies gross up employees’ pay, bargaining pay-offs are high.

“It could have a ripple effect, prompting other employers, and particularly employers in the same industry, to take a look at their own benefits package and see whether it would be appropriate to extend those benefits,” Kathleen Murray says in the NY Times article. “When you have a high-profile company doing anything, that tends to get into the mind of the culture, and it can have a more diffuse effect.”

Businesses: Imagine if your call center knew all the details of a customer’s problem the moment they called. Consumers: imagine if a company could fix your problem before you knew you had one.

That’s the promise of Amdocs, a semantic CRM solution. Scraping myriad datasets for anomalies, Amdocs could make customer service a lot more proactive.

“We’re changing business from a reactive state to an active one, to a personalized approach,” said Bill Guinn, Amdocs CTO, at Semtech 2010 in San Francisco. “Building an ontology that knows and works for the customer.”

The key to Amdocs is its semantic real-time intelligent decision automation, while also ensuring that a business sensibility is built into the code.

“We’re creating concepts in our ontology that focus on business concepts like profitability, like customer retention,” Guinn said. “We created a business level above the customer data in order to solve customers’ problems before they knew they were happening, and to proactively reach out and do something for them.”

Some of the examples that Guinn used were a guy vacationing in New Zealand whose carrier notifies him that posting pictures to Facebook is incurring massive roaming fees, and a woman calling customer service and being greeted with, “Hello, Annabel. Are you calling about the third-party charges to your card?”

“We believe that this kind of technology can be applied to any sort of customer-oriented business,” Guinn said. “Calling a customer center is very expensive for the customer. If I can predict why you’re calling and maybe stop the problem that’s prompting the call, I can immediately service you.”

While semantic technologies are potentially very powerful, few are actionable at the moment. It’s a complex field that’s going to take a while for businesses to understand.

“It takes a PhD to build and understand this kind of architecture, but we need business analysts to do this kind of stuff,” Guinn said. “We need to insulate the architecture inside something business users can understand.”