While Zynga and other gaming companies seem to be doing everything possible to claw their way off the Facebook canvas, at least one San Francisco company is still in. Big time. With just shy of 5 million monthly active users on Facebook, Kixeye is ranked a dismal 72nd on the developer leaderboard behind Zynga, EA and Angry Birds-maker Rovio, according to tracking service AppData. But the astonishing revenue Kixeye makes per user has the company on track to gross more than $100 million in total revenue this year. That's up from between $25 to $50 million last year, according to an independent source familiar with Kixeye's financials. Kixeye is part of a class of companies that is taking Facebook gaming far from its "Cow Clicker" past. The company doesn't target the stereotypical 35-year-old female demographic that Zynga is well-known for, but rather a subset of hardcore gamers that are willing to pay up. Think fewer virtual potatoes and more epic sea battles.red meat bachelor ben good morning america jon hamm jon hamm kim kardashian law school rankings ncaa bracket predictions
Norifumi "Kid" Yamamoto, who has fought for the UFC, K-1, Shooto and Dream, was in a Tokyo subway when he spotted an injured man on the tracks.?
As our lives increasingly move to the digital realm ? whether it?s what we read, what we watch, photos that once sat in frames now uploaded to a server farm somewhere in the rural United States, or even the 140-character thoughts we share with the world ??? comes the very reconstitution of our identities online. A German artist named Tobias Leingruber recently took this concept to its logical extreme when he produced physical identification cards based on Facebook profiles (this attempt at satire was executed so well that Facebook sent Leingruber a cease-and-desist letter three days later). Between the lines of Leingruber?s satire, though, is a very real, emerging concept. What Leingruber hit on is something I refer to as social currency. Social currency essentially refers to the idea that every person has an online identity formed through participation in social networks, websites, digital communities, and online transactions. Our everyday activities -- web searches, status updates, ?likes?, tweets, and comments -- they all leave a trail of data behind which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway.