From Jewel Quest to World of Warcraft, gaming has always occupied a niche online. By combining the social might of Facebook with the narrative element of experiential games like Oregon Trail or The Sims, Zynga -- a social network game developer based in San Francisco -- was able to become one of the fastest-growing companies on the Internet. Millions of Facebook users play FarmVille, Mafia Wars and the company's other titles -- with many shelling out real dollars to add to their virtual barnyards or crime syndicates. A recent New York Times report put Zynga's estimated value at $10 billion, noting that investments have quintupled its worth over the last two years.
Andrew Trader was a member of Zynga's founding team in 2007, and until last year served as executive vice president of sales and business development. Previously, Trader was CEO of Tribe.net, a social network sold to Cisco in 2007, and co-founded Coremetrics, a website marketing analytics firm. Trader (otherwise known as "AT") is currently entrepreneur-in-residence at Maveron, a venture capital firm with offices in Seattle and San Francisco. In a recent interview with Knowledge@Wharton he discussed the rise of social gaming, how "gamification" is seeping into other industries, the importance of analytics in Zynga's success, and the different strategies male and female users employ in building virtual worlds in its games.
Read the edited version of interview here.......
From Virtual Barnyards to Real Dollars: Andrew Trader on Zynga, 'Gamification' and the Power of Analytics
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