By Wagner James Au: Click to view full article

In a recent March Madness themed “tournament” hosted by online headhunting organization BINC, Zynga trounced their first round match-up… wait for it…Google! That’s right. In a poll aimed at identifying the hottest web company to work for, your favorite scrappy social gaming start-up took GOOG to the floor and nabbed the designation of tournament Cinderella by hanging an L on the big brains down at the Googleplex. It might not be “The Big Dance” but its a dance nonetheless and, well, we do like a good party. Get in there and vote for us again in the “elite 8″ as we take on top seeded Facebook in the next round (yeeps!)

Click here vote now. Voting ends Weds April 1st at 5PM PST.

Video predicting our loss to Google (wrong!):

A look at the Facebook vs. Zynga match-up:

By Anthony Ha: Click here to view full article

By Leslie Berlin: Click to view full article

By Sramana Mitra: Click here to view full article

By Stuart Dredge: Click here to view full article

Rev your engines and get ready to test your racing skills! The YoVille team is excited to announce the release of YoMotoX. Log into YoVille and join your real life friends in a head to head race. Pull wheelies, do flips off ramps, and make sure to hit all the power boosts. But, try not to wipe out on the oil slicks!

Here are some of the features in YoMotoX:

• Play with anyone on your friends ladder. Race against your real life friends and send them a notification when you beat them!
• Each time you win a race you earn 10 coins. You can win up to 20 times a day.
• Earn badges to show off your racing skills.
• Practice until you’re a champ and it doesn’t count against your daily wins.
• If you’re feeling lucky try out the betting option, you might win big!

San Francisco – March 11, 2009 – Zynga (www.zynga.com), the largest social gaming company and developer of premium social games for the iPhone, announced today that Brandon Barber has joined the company in the newly created position of vice president of marketing. Barber will report to Andrew Trader, executive vice president of sales and business development.

Barber joins Zynga from Electronic Arts (EA), where he served as senior director of global online marketing. At EA he played a key role in developing the company’s global online presence and was responsible for the concept, design, deployment and profitability of EA’s web services based business model. During his seven years at EA, Barber also established the entertainment and music marketing functions there and created strategic content creation and distribution partnerships between EA and key partners in the music, television, video-on-demand, mobile, online and film industries. Prior to EA, Barber ran the product team at the original Napster, the pioneering digital music company. During his tenure, he helped the service increase from 100 thousand to 100 million users.

“Since we launched just over a year ago, we have become the largest social gaming company and seen the category develop from nascent stages into an influential sector and the fastest growth area in gaming,” said Trader. “At the same time, we have grown to a point where we needed to add a key marketing position and found the perfect person to fit the bill. Brandon’s combination of gaming and digital media experience makes him the ideal person to lead the charge and help build Zynga with consumers everywhere.”

“Zynga is the most compelling story in gaming today,” said Barber. “Mark Pincus and the team have solved the problem of making games social and are in the process of defining a brand new category of entertainment. I couldn’t be more excited to help Zynga move to the next level.”

About Zynga
Zynga is the largest social gaming company with more than 7 million daily users and 30 million monthly users. Zynga’s games are available on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Yahoo!, the iPhone and iPod Touch, and include Texas Hold’Em Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Vampires, Street Racing, Scramble and Word Twist. The company is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. Zynga is headquartered at the Chip Factory in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.zynga.com.

What’s another word for “kick-ass iPhone game”? Scramble! If you’re already one of the hundreds of thousands of daily Scramble players on Facebook or if you own an iPhone and your thumbs are bored, you need to check out Scramble Live immediately. Like, right now. Aside from amazing native iPhone controls, and some new ones, you can connect with your Facebook pals to play and take your linguistic dominance to a new level.

Check out this walk-through from Blake Jamieson and our iPhone team and the coverage on TechCrunch. Word nerds unite!

Click to view article here