So it’s Saturday night and you’re out with friend. Are they the inconsiderate jerk who can’t stop checking their smartphone? Or is that you? Either way, here’s one way to make dinner a little more interesting. I’ve seen/heard this described as both “The Phone Stacking Game” and “Don’t Be a Dick During Meals”. It’s been mentioned  on a  couple of blogs , but a quick  straw poll of my friends suggests that it hasn’t become widespread yet, at least on the West Coast. Which is a shame, because it’s perfect for folks in tech. Here’s how it works: At the beginning of the meal, everyone puts their phone face down at the center of the table. As time goes on, you’ll hear various calls, texts, and emails, but you can’t pick up your phone. If you’re the first one to give in to temptation, you’re buying dinner for everyone else. If no one picks up, then everyone pays for themselves. You can explain the game in a few different ways. Most obviously, it could be a protest against the incessant, unthinking use of cell phones during social gatherings. Or maybe it’s a game that acknowledges the new reality and tests your willpower accordingly. Personally, I like to think of it as a free market exercise. After all, people love to say, “Sorry, but I have to take this.” Do you have to answer it? Really? Is it that important to you? Great, then you can pay. No matter what the explanation, it could make for a tense meal. And I look forward to defeating MG Siegler . [ image via Kempt ]

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The New York Times released its latest earnings report earlier this week, spurring another round of discussion about the newspaper’s paywall, which was launched  near the beginning of last year . The consensus: Early signs are positive, but it’s not doing well enough to offset plummeting print ad revenue. What’s the solution? Well, if you listen to a number of online media pundits, it’s all about bringing more value to the most devoted members of The Times’ readership. Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram suggests , “Regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.” It’s a point he’s made before , as has Clay Shirky , who wrote that “this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival.” I’m a happy New York Times subscriber, but I have to say: I don’t think The Times is doing a good job on this front, or much of a job at all. It’s odd, because NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Shirky, and she seemed largely on-board with his ideas: I think Clay has outlined it exactly right. I mean, this model was not designed to get everybody who comes to our website to pay. Clay is absolutely right in terms of the distribution of the audience, and I think this is true for most publishers. The vast majority of people come and turn one article or two articles. But there is a very loyal minority of folks who told us through rounds and rounds of research that they value the New York Times content, they’d be willing to pay to support the New York Times content. And so the key for us in this model was threading that needle – remaining open to the Web, enabling those who are coming to us for that one article or two article, et cetera, to still enjoy the content but at the same time enable those who are very loyal to have some kind of a different experience with us. Warren goes on to outline some of the advantages of a Times digital subscription — not just access to unlimited articles (20 per month is the limit for non-paying readers, though there are lots of ways around it), but also to the Times smartphone and tablet apps, as well as bonus apps like Politics and Collections, and email newsletters giving behind-the-scenes portraits of the newsroom. Now, as someone who’s constantly reading The Times on both his laptop and his iPhone, I’m happy to fork over $15 a month isn’t a bad price for those features, but I also feel like they’re a missed opportunity. As Shirky puts it, newspapers “must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.” Those seem to be some of the main reasons people subscribed , but The Times isn’t doing much to encourage that feeling. The closest it comes is through its newsletters, but those newsletters also have the clearest shortcomings. I’ve been a Times subscriber since the program started in March, and in that time, I’ve received a total nine newsletters. And of those, five are “Innovations” emails, which function as ads for new features on The Times website — useful, maybe, but not particularly loyalty-inspiring. Emails offering “The Story Behind The Story” are better (though a still a little impersonal for my taste), but they show up about once every two months. Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan makes an interesting comment about this during his interview with Shirky and Warren: He notes that NPR has convinced one in six listeners to donate, while The Times has only convinced one in a hundred to subscribe. He later says, “If you get into the tote bag business, we’re going to have a problem.” Here’s the thing about those tote bags — they’re nice, but as NPR broadcasters constantly remind listeners, they’re not the real reason to donate. To pick an example from my local NPR station, is there anyone who would pay $144 just because it’s a great deal on a KQED hoodie ? (I hope not.) They make the donation because they love KQED, and the hoodie is a sign of their dedication. Compare that to The Times digital subscription page and pricing model, which are all about functionality — there are three pricing levels, and they reflect different levels of mobile access. That approach has its limitations — from a functional equivalent, it can be hard to justify the price, especially when you take into account the easiness of circumventing the paywall and the low price of other online services. (As a friend pointed out, it’s $15 a month for the cheapest plan, which is more than a basic Netflix subscription.) To keep The Times in business, however, I’m happy to pay $15 a month, and I’d probably be fine paying significantly more. I don’t think the basic subscription price should change (if anything, it seems a little high), but I suspect the paper could also offer higher price points without providing a dramatic improvement in the product. It just needs rewards that make subscribers feel loyal to The Times, and maybe a little special — the digital equivalent of a tote bag.

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Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues , or $445 million. In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening. This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10. This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below. Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network , had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year . Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million. There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users. The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results: Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats. Heavy trading volumes indicate high volatility among investors. Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

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I just donated $40 to Wikipedia, because I promised myself I would every time I poked fun at its holiday donation drive and then just never got around to it. Did you know that you could actually donate during the off-season (Via the covert  “Donate to Wikipedia” link at the far left of each individual entry page)? I didn’t, before I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales whether it was possible to donate in the off-season. Spoiler alert, it is. My 40 bucks got me, in addition to the very sweet ‘Thank You’ letter below, the satisfaction of paying duly for something I use all the freakin’ time. Dear Alexia, You are amazing, thank you so much for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation! This is how we pay our bills — it’s people like you, giving five dollars, twenty dollars, a hundred dollars. My favourite donation last year was five pounds from a little girl in England, who had persuaded her parents to let her donate her allowance. It’s people like you, joining with that girl, who make it possible for Wikipedia to continue providing free, easy access to unbiased information, for everyone around the world. For everyone who helps pay for it, and for those who can’t afford to help. Thank you so much. I know it’s easy to ignore our appeals, and I’m glad that you didn’t. From me, and from the tens of thousands of volunteers who write Wikipedia: thank you for helping us make the world a better place. We will use your money carefully, and I thank you for your trust in us. Thanks, Sue Gardner Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director This year the Wikimedia Foundation raised $20 million during its high gear donation drive, to cover a total budget of $28.3 million — the deficit is made up in grants and off-season donations. Money raised is spent on things like servers, bandwidth, maintenance and staff. Here are the financials if you want to dig deeper. During the online encyclopedia’s blackout protest of SOPA , many off us felt the pang of “You don’t know what you’ve got until its gone” when we wanted to know something about, let’s say, Exponential Growth and that info wasn’t readily available. Google would be a bunch of spam if not for Wikipedia. I personally use Wikipedia more than I use makeup, multiple times a day. And I spend a good amount of money on makeup, AT LEAST $40 on a mascara/lippy combo. What do you use Wikipedia more than? Do the math …

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We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year , but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.

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Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: The Peek Bites The Dust Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab The $199 PlayBook Returns For A Limited Time

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Tucows is probably best known for their slew of web services and their extensive reseller network, but CEO Elliot Noss sees room to grow in another space: mobile. After spending months conducting a private beta for a few hundred users, Tucows has officially opened up their Ting wireless service to all comers. The goal? To offer wireless customers “a whole different type of carrier relationship.” “Big name carriers have services meant to maximize their profitability, not their service to customers,” Noss told me. That customer-centric vision extends from Ting’s selection of voice plans (there are six, with minute buckets ranging from 0 to 3,000) to customer service (there are no tiers, and all reps can provide “geek-powered” support) to their handling of overages. Like I mentioned earlier, Ting has six tiers of voice plans . If you’re signed up for the 500 minute plan and go over on your allotment, you’re automatically bumped up to the next plan. While thoughtful, it can at times be worse than the standard overage model imposed by other carriers, especially if you only tiptoe over your limit. Even so, Ting attempts to make up for this by having it work in the opposite direction too — you’ll automatically be bumped into a lower plan and credited accordingly if you use fewer minutes than the month before. Just for kicks, I threw my own Verizon bill into the Ting savings calculator to see how much I could potentially save should I decide to make the switch. For my two-person 700 minute Verizon family plan with 2GB of data and 1,000 messages per person, Ting estimates that I could save nearly $436 each year. Maybe not the most impressive savings I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly enough give me pause. There are more savings to be had if you or your loved ones aren’t huge data hogs (like me), as their data packages are easily the priciest parts of the Ting formula. At this stage in the game, hardware choices are a bit limited. Ting service uses Sprint’s mobile network to provide the actual connectivity, so most of the handsets in Ting’s lineup should seem familiar to Sprint customers and phone enthusiasts. The newest device in the lineup is Motorola’s angular Photon 4G, while mid-range Android devices, flip phones, and mobile broadband devices fill out the rest of their roster. In typical MVNO fashion Ting doesn’t bind users to long-term contracts, but that leaves those users paying the full retail price for their hardware. While it’s still usually a better deal that getting a subsidy on a phone and paying higher bills each month for two years, people could get (understandably) gun-shy when it comes to taking the plunge on an unknown entity like Ting. Even so, Ting may be able to drive adoption thanks to some help from its parent company. MVNOs historically haven’t had much sticking power, but Ting could potentially lean on Tucows prodigious list of reseller partners. According to Noss, Tucows resellers will also be able to offer Ting wireless service to their own customers, while Tucows handles payment processing and billing. If reseller reception of Ting is positive — and Noss tells me that so far, it is — then Ting’s lack of a physical retail presence could be offset by leveraging existing Tucows affiliates. Noss’s plan for Ting is to start off small, with their first promotional efforts slated to begin in the middle of this month. Frankly, I wish them all the best — while Ting isn’t a perfect service, their twist on wireless service has some facets that I think every carrier could benefit from absconding with. In the meantime though, Noss is content to keep his expectations pretty grounded. “If in one year, we were known as the carrier that sophisticated users were using, that’s fine by me.”

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We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing . But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011. The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. Is this just a happy coincidence, or did Zuckerberg “manage” earnings to make a statement? Companies have many different accounting levers they can pull to slightly adjust their reported earnings. With that very precise number Zuckerberg is telling Wall Street that number is completely under his control. Investors like companies with that kind of leeway because it signals predictability. It is also nearly ten times Google’s profits of $106 million the year before its IPO. I am not sure where it ranks in terms of profits for an IPO, but I would not be surprised if it the highest of any tech company ever. And, of course, it’s a lesson in what’s really cool. It’s the ultimate comeback to Hollywood’s caricature of Facebook.

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AOL reported better than expected fourth quarter earnings this morning. The company, which owns TechCrunch, reported revenue of $576.8 million, which is down 3 percent from Q4 2010 revenue of $596 million. Earnings came in at $0.23 per share, or $22.8 million, which is down 66 percent from $66.2 million a year ago. Analysts expected $0.16 per share. AOL says total revenue decline was its lowest rate of revenue decline in 5 years. While global advertising revenue was 10%, subscription revenue declined by 18%. AOl also saw a 15% growth in global display revenue and a 20% growth in third party network revenue. “AOL took a large step forward in Q4 and I am very pleased with the way we ended the year,” said AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong. “Our Q4 results highlight AOL’s ability to methodically improve our consumer offering and financial performance. We continue to invest in AOL and will continue to improve our operations during 2012.” The company says that traffic was flat from Q3 2011 as “growth in the Huffington Post Media Group sites offset declines at MapQuest and AIM.” View this document on Scribd

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Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired mobile app and game studio Select Start Studios. The acquisition will be used to further Shopify’s mobile commerce initiatives. While all Shopify stores already include mobile optimized storefronts and checkouts, the acquisition of S3 will bring over 20 new mobile-focused engineers to the Shopify team to continue developing mobile offerings for merchants. Shopify’s web-based platform allows anyone to set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card processor for payments. Storefronts and shopping carts can be customized and the platform assures security for all transactions. Today, the ecommerce platform has over 20,000 active online stores in 80 different countries. for example, Angry Birds uses Shopify’s platform for e-commerce sales (and a sizable portion of Angry Birds online store’s sales are made through a mobile device, says the company). Shopify recently raised $15 million in new funding.

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