Zynga, the social gaming company famous for FarmVille and popularity with Facebook users launched CityVille in 2010.
“IT staff watched participation on CityVille build slowly the first few days—at that pace, it might have taken two years to reach the first million participants. Then registration started to ramp up. Four months after launch, CityVille had brought 20 million new users to Zynga’s daily computing workload. Planning data center capacity for that kind of unpredictability is a slippery exercise. That’s why Zynga instead launches games using Amazon’s EC2 infrastructureas a service, so it pays only for the capacity it uses and is ready for spikes. But that’s not the end of the story. Once a game hits a more predictable level, Zynga brings it in house, onto what it calls Z Cloud, servers it runs using a private cloud architecture similar to what Amazon runs.”
Innovation in European postal services
Many used their extra cash to create digital mail products that allow customers to send and receive letters from their computers. Itella, the Finnish postal service, keeps a digital archive of its users' mail for seven years and helps them pay bills online securely. Swiss Post lets customers choose if they want their mail delivered at home in hard copy or scanned and sent to their preferred Internet-connected device. Customers can also tell Swiss Post if they would rather not receive items such as junk mail.
Sweden's Posten has an app that lets customers turn digital photos on their mobile phones into postcards. It is unveiling a service that will allow cell-phone users to send letters without stamps. Posten will text them a numerical code that they can jot down on envelopes in place of a stamp for a yet-to-be-determined charge. “
BusinessWeek
Photo Credit
May 31, 2011 in Industry Commentary, Mobile applications and commerce | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)