On Thursday, Zynga released its third quarter results and showed a loss of only $68,000—far better than the embattled gaming company’s losses of $52 million this time last year. And, because that loss was small, beating Zynga’s own expectations for Q3, its shares got a 12 percent boost in after-hours trading on Wall Street, Thursday evening. Still, that modicum of good news is just a sugar coat on an otherwise dismal earnings statement. Zynga’s Q3 revenue was only $203 million, which constitutes a decrease of 36 percent year-over-year, and a decrease of 12 percent from the quarter before. Also, Daily and Monthly Active Users were both down for Zynga. The company lost almost a quarter of its Daily Active Users compared to Q2 2013 (and that statistic is becoming a bit of a trend: we saw that exact headline on last quarter’s earnings report, too). And Zynga lost nearly 30 percent of its Monthly Active Users from Q2 2013. From Q3 2012, the statistics were down 49 percent and 57 percent, respectively. But it looks like Zynga will be progressing conservatively from here. For the fourth quarter of 2013, the company projected revenue in the range of $175 million to $185 million (a substantial decrease from this quarter’s earnings) and a net loss in the range of $31 million to $21 million. After a summer in which the company laid off 18 percent of its workforce and shuttered Omgpop , a games company it acquired for $200 million, Zynga’s next few months will be watched carefully to see how (and whether) the company will weather 2014. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Zynga almost breaks even in Q3, but user base still contracts
After the customary six months of incubation, Ubuntu 13.10—codenamed Saucy Salamander—has hatched. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated applications and several new features, including augmented search capabilities in the Unity desktop shell. Although Saucy Salamander offers some useful improvements, it’s a relatively thin update. XMir, the most noteworthy item on the 13.10 roadmap, was ultimately deferred for inclusion in a future release. Canonical’s efforts during the Saucy development cycle were largely focused on the company’s new display server and upcoming Unity overhaul, but neither is yet ready for the desktop. Due to the unusual nature of this Ubuntu update, this review is going to diverge a bit from the usual formula. The first half will include a hands-on look at the new Unity features. The second half will take a close look at the Ubuntu roadmap and some of the major changes that we can expect to see over the course of the next several releases. Read 46 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
alphadogg writes “As it embarks on what’s likely to be a long journey to its next big increase in speed, Ethernet is in some ways a victim of its own success. Years ago, birthing a new generation of Ethernet was relatively straightforward: Enterprises wanted faster LANs, vendors figured out ways to achieve that throughput and hashed out a standard, and IT shops bought the speed boost with their next computers and switches. Now it’s more complicated, with carriers, Web 2.0 giants, cloud providers, and enterprises all looking for different speeds and interfaces, some more urgently than others. … That’s what the IEEE 802.3 400Gbps Study Group faces as it tries to write the next chapter in Ethernet’s history. … ‘You have a lot of different people coming in to the study group, ‘ said John D’Ambrosia, the group’s chair, in an interview at the Ethernet Alliance’s Technology Exploration Forum in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday. That can make it harder to reach consensus, with 75 percent approval required to ratify a standard, he said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.