Zynga Ramps Up Private ...

As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games’ DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure. Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools. As GigaOm reported last year, xCloud was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. And startup RightScale provides a management console for Zynga’s public cloud (powered by AWS) and the private cloud. Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga says that it doubled down on increasing physical server capacity in order to move games over to the private cloud. For Zynga, this increased not only the ability to scale but also reliability. For social games specifically, zCloud offers 3x the efficiency of standard public cloud infrastructure. For example, games in the public cloud would require three physical servers, zCloud only uses one. Last year, Zynga began to launch games directly in zCloud instead of in the public cloud. The first new Zynga game to launch in zCloud was CityVille Hometown in June 2011. Since then, every Zynga game has launched in zCloud. For example, CastleVille, which holds the record for the fastest growing Zynga game was launched and scaled in zCloud. Currently, Zynga stores 1.4 Petabytes of data at any time and has the ability to deploy up to 1,000 servers in a 24 hour period. The company says the power they deployed for zCloud alone during the second half of 2011 could’ve kept 166 international space stations in orbit. 36 billion gifts were gifted during the holiday season in 2011, and Zynga has increased its server capacity by a 100 times over the past year (see infographic below). For now, Zynga has no plans to eliminate public cloud powered by AWS. But clearly, this infrastructure is being used sparingly.

Uber Launches Its First...

Uber , the private car share service that allows you to summon town cars via an iPhone, has opened up shop in Paris in time for international Internet conference LeWeb . Adding context to the jumpy video of the very first Parisian Uber ride above, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick , who was on my flight from SFO, tells me that there are a few Uber-enabled cars in the city of Light currently, and tomorrow that number will start steadily increasing. I’m still waiting for confirmation of pricing and other details (I’ll update this post as soon as I know). Sure there are already many options for those seeking taxi service within Paris, but Uber, with its appeal to the tech-savvy and fashionable, has a good chance of gaining a foothold in the class-conscious city. “This is going to end the monopoly of the taxis in Paris,” said LeWeb founder Loic LeMeur ,”You will have models here, not like Geeks in San Francisco.” In an effort to preserve today’s Uber supply for customers, Kalanick took a regular taxi from Charles De Gaulle airport. You can find Uber in the App Store here.

CapLinked Partners With...

CapLinked, the LinkedIn-meets-SalesForce for private investing, has landed a significant deal today, helping Microsoft BizSpark startups raise cash via a new capital raising tool. As we’ve written in the past , CapLinked launched to allow entrepreneurs to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies. Investors can use CapLinked to manage deals, build public profiles, leverage LinkedIn contacts and connect with promising startups. Startups enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program will have exclusive access to new feature Deal Rocket, which allows them to submit their ‘deal room’ to dozens of angel groups and early stage venture capital funds around the country. Here’s how Deal Rocket works. Companies can create secure, viral deal rooms on CapLinked to manage their capital raise or asset sale. The deals can then be shared with prospective investors and advisors, who can then invite others to view the deal. And companies can submit their deal to over 100 angel groups and venture capitalists pre-aggregated into Deal Rocket for review. As you may know, BizSpark is a Microsoft startup accelerator program that provides fledgling companies with resources such as access to Microsoft software development tools, free or discounted software or cloud services, as well as access to the software giant’s broad partner network and as much marketing visibility as they can give them. For background, CapLinked was founded by former PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson and funded by a number of well known members of the PayPal mafia. Jackson says over 55,000 individuals and 6,000 companies are currently using the site to manage the private investing process and share $5 billion worth of deals. For now, Deal Rocket is only available only to BizSpark startups, and will soon be available to other CapLinked users in the future. It’s a actually a pretty significant deal for CapLinked considering that there are over 45,000 startups in the CapLinked program. And having Microsoft as a partner isn’t to shabby either. Crunchbase CAPLINKED Company: CAPLINKED Website: http://www.caplinked.com/ Launch Date: 2009 Funding: $1.25M CapLinked is a free online platform for private companies, investors, and their advisors to network, manage a capital raise or asset sale, and exchange updates. CapLinked makes private investment... Learn more Crunchbase MICROSOFT Company: MICROSOFT Website: http://www.microsoft.com Launch Date: 4/4/1974 IPO: 13/3/1986, NASDAQ:MSFT Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of... Learn more

Cloud Solutions Company...

Appistry , a St. Louis, MO-based developer of cloud solutions, has raised $12 million in funding in a Series D round led by private equity firm eXome Capital. Stuart Mill Capital and other private and existing investors also participated. The round, which includes term debt, pushes the total of capital raised by Appistry to over $34 million. Appistry’s flagship CloudIQ Platform applies cloud architectures to ‘big data’ challenges. The solution, which is designed to support data-intensive and analytical applications used by enterprises, basically enables Appistry’s clients to rapidly turn raw data into actionable intelligence. Appistry customers include FedEx, GeoEye, State Street Bank, Lockheed Martin and multiple US government agencies.

With No IPO In Sight, T...

Twitter is once again raising money, this time at a $7 billion valuation, according to Spencer Ante of the Wall Street Journal . That valuation would be almost double the $3.7 billion valuation Twitter got last December when it raised $200 million from Kleiner Perkins and other private investors. But that valuation would put it below the $8 billion to $10 billion takeover talks rumored last February, which Twitter denied . Those takeover rumors were also reported by Spencer Ante. Twitter certainly could raise more money. Many investors would like to own shares, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet found a revenue model to match its technological and cultural impact. Perhaps DST, which was muscled out of the last round by Kleiner, would be interested to take another look. Despite all the IPO activity among Web companies these days, Twitter is not believed to be preparing for an IPO anytime soon. It simply doesn’t have the financials to make that kind of run for the public markets. But with 200 million tweets per day and growing, there’s got to be a business in there somewhere. Right? CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase