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Everytime I put my FB login to check my Facebook profile there’s some invitation to participate in some game that I don’t even know and really don’t care but this could change eventually.

A few years ago in a Poker forum, a few friends of mine and myself debated about the idea of real money gambling on Facebook, there was a lot of nonsense and ideal case scenarios because the Zynga’s Texas Hold’em games had an incredible big user base and the users where people that play for fun or entertainment which is different to study the game, the mathemathics behind it and the patterns in specific players, of course, there were nothing that tell us that it was gonna actually happen, it was just a dream.

Now, it has become more reasonable since well, a few months ago there was a big scandal involving major poker rooms like Full Tilt Poker because legally speaking, even when physical casinos can be found everywhere, online poker is illegal in USA.

So there was millions of dollars frozen, companies shutted down and probably some people will go to jail, but this started some series of negotiations to legalize online gambling, so there’s a big market opportunity for online gambling since a lot of players from different poker rooms can’t play anymore.

And here I am, writing about this because Zynga just announced a new title called Sports Casino and also that they have a new partner, RocketPlay. This game is about betting on sports with your friends while you are watching them.

The game seems maybe too casual, but still, we now Zynga is an ambitious company and there’s some possibility that in the future we see them operating real money gambling. Of course, online gambling is still illegal in the US but Zynga games still operate in a lot of other parts of the world so there’s a chance that they see the opportunity I see.

Also, the executive team from RocketPlay use to work at places like BetFair so I think they know a thing or two about online gambling.

At the moment this is pure speculation, but who knows, maybe the next time you enter into your Facebook Account it will be like entering into a casino.

I don’t know what will happen but I know that Zynga is not doing good lately and with all the problems and criticism from the gaming industry and the fight against EA the future of the company doesn’t seem bright so maybe this could be a good moment to pivot into something new. ¿What do you think?

We already know that Facebook made an offer to acquire Instagram a day or two before it’s IPO on april and that it was just a matter of time and bureaucracy before the deal was officially done.

Back then, the offer was nearly $1 billion dollars but with recent changes in the equity price of Facebook, it dropped to something like US $715 million, definitely not bad for a startup but, considering the story that the Instagram founder wanted $2 billion in the first place, it is quite a drop in price for the purchase (nearly 30%).

First of all, for those of you that doesn’t know what Instagram is, let me explain it to you in a very briefly way. Instagram is a mobile photo-sharing service in which after you take a photo, you apply some filters so the picture looks old, vintage, etc. and then you share it.

It gained a lot of attention as an iOS app and was probably one of the most successful apps on the iPhone, then the team released an Android version and within a few days they almost double their user base.

So, ¿What’s going to happen next? Well, I’m thinking about some jokes about what you will see in everyone’s Facebook Account:  Pictures of food or feet with some kind of filter. The truth is that is most likely that Instagram could disappear and the team will be joining the division for photo-sharing in Facebook.

Photo-sharing on Facebook is huge, the social network is now the biggest photo database in the world, surpassing services that are exclusively designed for pictures like Flickr, so it’s not a surprise that the biggest acquisition by Facebook so far is about a photo-sharing startup.

Probably in the near future, when you put your fb login credentials to check your Facebook Profile in your computer you won’t notice any changes, but maybe while making an status update in your phone with a picture, we will see some kind of new functionality integrated to edit our picture before sharing it.

Also, acquiring a team that had major success with a mobile app is a huge win for Facebook considering that their mobile apps in the past have made the impression of not being good at all, not even for the most basic tasks we could do in the social network.

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Before Facebook become what it is today, there were numerous attempts to debate if at some point the company will become profitable, that happens a lot in the industry with startups that escalate quickly but doesn’t seem to have a business model that is known publicly.

Of course, nowadays there are almost 1 billion Facebook Accounts, and even when there’s the effort to only use targeted advertising instead of permanent blocks or logos destroying the layout of the social network, there’s a lot of potential and it already has shown it’s own advantages over advertising in other platforms like the TV.

For one instance, it’s relatively cheaper and even small companies can buy some kind of advertising on Facebook. Also there’s these tools so only the people that you think will be interested in your products or service, will see your ads. So in other words, you don’t waste that much money spamming your ads to people that doesn’t care and that solely fact can even fire back because we all hate advertising about stuff we don’t even care in the first place, that’s why we switch channels between commercials on the TV even when we are going to put the current channel back in a few minutes just in order to avoid ads about stuff we don’t really care.

¿And what’s happening in the world? Millions of mobile devices and tablets are sold across the globe and the trend is that more people will be using smartphones and tablets each year. We have already seen how in some nations, the usage of Internet is almost the same as the TV and soon the TV will function just as a monitor to stream web content, I know a lot of us are already using the tv like that, I don’t even remember when was the last time I sit to watch TV even when I have a cable subscription, so we definitely have something here.

It’s not only about the size of the audience, but that the ads could target real potential customers, but also a matter of credibility because we are so used to tv commercials that most people ignore them and Facebook is experiment with how to promote some product or brand in a more natural way, like telling you that your friend likes Starbucks in a subtle way, of course they are not there yet in the point in which the advertising is part of the content, but in the meanwhile, Internet access is more affordable every day and the web is become bigger and bigger.