Zynga Does Some Good (For a Change)

Zynga, creators of The Games Clogging Your Facebook News Feed and Stealing Your Data For Quite Some Time, are contributing to the flood of money heading toward Haiti for disaster relief purposes. (So are we! See our Gamers4Haiti Charity Drive post to see how you can help right here at GamingAngels.) Users of these popular social networking games can purchase special limited-edition social goods, where 100% of the proceeds will go to the World Food Programme, which is currently distributing food and other forms of relief to those displaced and injured as a result of this week’s earthquake. So far, over $1.2 million has been raised in support of these efforts. The limited-edition goods include white corn that will not wither if left unattended for a week (FarmVille) and a Haitian drum (Mafia Wars). Zynga has also set up their own donation portal at Zynga.com, where users can donate directly

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Zynga raises $180 million in investments

I’m sure many of you either play or know of FarmVille, Mafia Wars or any of the other big games that developer Zynga has launched on Facebook. Well on the heels of speculation that FarmVille is more popular than Twitter, it has been revealed that the Russian investors Digital Sky Technologies, who gave Facebook $200 million, will be investing a huge chunk of money into developer Zynga. The total investments from various sources for Zynga will be $180 million. This is honestly pretty amazing, and a good thing for Zynga and other companies looking to social media to build game applications. At the same time I’m left wondering more about the details as not much is mentioned in the New York Times article about the deal. It’s interesting to see how a small app on a social networking site can blow up and become such a huge entity that they

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