We caught up with OMGPOP chief executive Dan Porter, Zynga’s chief mobile officer David Ko and board member and Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet to get the inside story of how OMGPOP’s sale went down. It’s been a whirlwind six weeks for OMGPOP, which transformed from an also-ran social gaming company into the maker of the most successful casual mobile game in the market right now. The company was picked up by Zynga today for what we heard was $ 210 million.

TechCrunch: So how did you choose Zynga over other companies that were talking to you?

Dan Porter: It was a bromance. Well, irrespective of this deal — and this isn’t the first time I’ve gone through this process — I met David Ko and Mark Pincus. Then I met a bunch of people on the mobile side. In my mind, there was this idea of Zynga. But here were all the real people and they really wanted to build fun games.

TechCrunch: Your company culture seems really different from Zynga. They’re known for being very analytical and data-driven and OMGPOP’s culture sounds looser than that. Is that going to work out?

Porter: Dave had this vision of having an environment that would actually let people be creative. We talked about how the Words With Friends group [who came from the Newtoy acquisition] could keep their culture. It was really, really sincere and I wouldn’t have done the deal otherwise.

I’ve said this before but we’ve only had one mission at the company. I really, really wanted to make a game where you sit on the bus and see everyone playing our games. This is the first time this has really happened. It is a really amazing feeling. And now we have the resources and support. At the end of the day, you’re making creative content and you’re putting your heart and soul into it. It’s so personal.

TechCrunch: How many press hits did Dan have to do before Zynga really picked up on this game?

Ko: This game was obviously rising on the charts very quickly. I’ve got a lot of apps and there was this moment where we realized how powerful Draw Something was. I said on the press call earlier that I was using Draw Something on my way from the San Francisco airport and Mark was playing it against his family and friends.

We’ve had tremendous respect for this team. They’ve been around for a couple years and we both want to differentiate ourselves by creating high-quality social experiences. These guys are literally focused on the same values. It was a meeting of the minds.

TechCrunch: Are all of OMGPOP’s employees going over?

Porter: Yes, they’re all fired up. They’re already changing their LinkedIn profiles.

TechCrunch: So what changes with the game now?

Porter: Starting tomorrow, we’re going to be adding cows. No really. So, Words With Friends has a chat feature and we’d like to focus on that.

We’d like to give people a better opportunity to capture their drawings. There should be a save feature for saving your pictures. I didn’t really get this idea until I was playing with one of my kids. You know how you like to save your kids’ pictures and put them on the refrigerator and they draw these crushingly heart-breaking stick figures. We’ve got to make this feature fast.

TechCrunch: How is the monetization of the game changing? It’s very front-loaded right now with paid app downloads and in-app purchases of color packs. But eventually, it may end up being far more advertising-dependent like Words With Friends.

Zynga: We’re not talking about changes in monetization.

TechCrunch: How many extra unique users is this adding?

Zynga: We can’t talk about that.

In a separate call, we caught up with OMGPOP board member Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Sabet has also led the firm’s investments in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare.

TechCrunch: How much of a conversation was there at the board level about whether to go down the acquisition route versus stay independent?

Sabet: We had a lot of conversations. There were lots of companies that were interested in OMGPOP. But we saw that Zynga’s price was good for all shareholders and employees so the board was unanimous. Zynga kept all the employees, who are coming along and staying in New York City. Dan got along with Mark Pincus and David Ko. It just felt really right.

TechCrunch: Why Zynga over the other suitors?

Sabet: We all came to the same conclusion that it was a good offer and that we should take it seriously. It felt like everyone thought it was the right thing to do. Everyone also felt like Zynga was the most entrepreneurial partner of all the buyers. Dan Porter and Mark Pincus spent a lot of time together to make sure there was a cultural fit.

TechCrunch: What was it like to see this company through the years and then through this hit?

Sabet: This was a quite a journey. We were the first VCs in this company and I was the first outside director. We made our investment back in 2008 and we invested in every single round.

So I have all of this history. OMGPOP had some really cool games, but they never kind of broke out. They never got massive. So when Dan showed us this game, Draw Something, we all thought it was really cool. But we had no idea whether users would like it.

Then it became absolutely amazing. Every day, Dan would send out the stats from the day before, like what happened in terms of downloads or what celebrity had tweeted about it. Each day was more amazing than the previous one.

TechCrunch: Dan wasn’t the original founder though. It was a Y Combinator company originally called Iminlikewithyou, right?

Sabet: Yeah, we had invested $ 1 million when Charles Forman was still running the company. He was the chief executive and founder. It was a dating site that then pivoted into gaming. Shortly thereafter, Dan came into the company and then he became chief executive. A year ago, Charles left day-to-day operations but stayed on the board.

TechCrunch: What does this teach you as a venture investor about the gaming industry?

Sabet: The interesting lesson is that these things take time. These companies sound like overnight successes but they take awhile. We were the first investor in Tumblr, but it was not an overnight sensation. We were early investors in Twitter, but after one year, it had just 500,000 users. People can get seduced with the idea that these companies get their breaks quickly. This is a good reminder that if it doesn’t happen the first year, it can work out. It just takes time.

This team worked really, really hard and they built the most popular social game on the planet right now. Dan’s an unbelievably talented guy. Even after all of these years, they stayed on and worked really hard every single day. It’s not easy to do.

I hope they get the recognition. I know they’re all happy. It’s pretty cool. It’s Drawsome.

TechCrunch
Kim-Mai Cutler

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All the talk these days is of the new iPad and its magical screen. Apple isn’t the only one who can do that, you know. In fact, most display makers are looking forward to post-HD resolutions as one of the big selling points of the next generation of displays. Other tablets are already approaching iPad levels of pixel density and it would be foolish of the likes of Google and Microsoft not to be planning for it.

Fortunately, Microsoft is well aware of the trend and has plans in place for dealing with displays with pixel-dense displays (or “Retina” to the vulgar).

The specifics are laid out with no quarter given to laymen in this post at Building Windows 8. The gist is that they have analyzed the expected range of display sizes and resolutions, and have identified a sort of “Goldilocks Zone” for the three general classes of resolutions: standard, HD, and quad-XGA (2560×1440). Inside this zone, text and UI elements aren’t blown up too cartoonish proportions or shrunk down to a size that’s frustrating to touch.

In the first case, buttons and text will be shown with no scaling. In the second case, they’ll be 140% normal size (i.e. elements 100 pixels wide will become 140), and in the third, 180%. 50 and 100 percent increases apparently were not convenient to the Windows 8 team, though whether they decided on these numbers because of, say, certain sub-pixel scaling methods, or because 50 and 100 were too big, it is not known.

The alternative is a resolution-independent continual resize that would render every button and character the same size regardless of the size or resolution of the display. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is simply not in place for that: the way text is stored and rendered, the size and restrictions of web content, and much more prevent this more advanced solution. It’s on the way, but for now these scaling milestones will have to do.

The author of the post, Microsoft UX team member David Washington, admits that high-density screens make many familiar UI elements, such as pulldown menus and small close boxes, “increasingly burdensome.” A new ecosystem of gestures and visual elements will succeed them, presumably — Metro, for instance.

Lastly, Windows 8 thoughtfully includes native support for the SVG filetype as a development asset, so you can build good-looking scaling into your app more easily than with multiple or high-resolution bitmap images. How easy it will actually be to build for what is certain to be an incredibly diverse hardware ecosystem, we’ll soon find out.

The iPad (which gets a mention in the post as well) currently has the best screen on the market, but that’s an advantage that likely won’t last out the year. Whether Windows 8 and its apps will utilize equally well the promise of high pixel-density screens is yet to be determined, but it’s good to see the future of personal displays and devices being planned for and executed on by the majors.

TechCrunch
Devin Coldewey

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Back in December, Robin wrote about a Detroit app development startup called Rock City Apps, which had just raised a seed round of funding for its stealth iPhone app, UpTo. At the time, Rock City Co-founder and CEO Greg Schwartz (also the former CEO/co-founder of Mobatech and a director of business development at Warner Music) said that the “platform focused on the future tense that makes sharing calendar events simple and social,” but wasn’t able to say more.

We’ve since caught up with Schwartz to learn more about UpTo, which recently went live on the App Store, and it turns out there weren’t any smoke and mirrors in that description.

So what’s all this about future tense? Well, Schwartz explains that, while many of us love to share on Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and beyond, most of the content being shared is either in near-realtime or has already happened. If you’re checking your Foursquare feed when I check in at a restaurant, or your Twitter feed when a friend posts a great article, you’ll see that in realtime. But there’s some serendipity involved, as the majority of people don’t religiously refreshing their Twitter or Facebook feeds, they check in periodically. In most cases, the photos, links, and other content you discover is old news.

So, UpTo wants to focus on building a social network around your calendar so that you can easily track (and act on) the events coming up in the lives of the people you care about. There are a lot of teams out there hacking away on event-sharing apps (Facebook, for one, recently launched “Suggested Events” to help you discover new events), but when we asked Plancast founder Mark Hendrickson what his impressions were, he said that, comparatively, he thinks UpTo has some serious potential.

That’s because UpTo is using the iPhone calendar API to collect your personal calendars — the ones that you use the most, whether that be Google Calendars, Outlook, Yahoo — UpTo is agnostic and accepts them all. As you may know, Google Calendars is already social, but really only with other GCal users. The app’s agnostic integration is thus intended to significantly lower the amount of friction that stands in the way of sharing by taking the calendar you might already have synced with your iPhone, tearing down those calendar walls, making it social so that users can quickly share or add events while they’re on the go.

Most eCalendars make it easy to share with small groups, like colleagues or family, but there’s really no way to share specific information with different subsets of people in your life. Thus, UpTo wants to add that group sharing functionality, a la the Circles of Google+, to your calendars, allowing you to add friends from Facebook, existing contacts, etc., and parse them into groups that you can share with, adding, removing or editing those as you go.

UpTo offers a “quick share” button that allows users to share events from their calendar with a couple of clicks, choosing which groups to share with in doing so, or blast events from the calendar out to Facebook or Twitter. Users can also tag and share to UpTo, Facebook or Twitter directly from their calendar, again choosing the particular groups they want to share with using hashtags, like “#family,” or “#fb” and “#t” for Facebook and Twitter.

This also works both ways, which is smart, since you can add events to GCal, for example, from within UpTo. The apps also lets you get a sense of the activity level of your calendar by providing a heatmap view so that you can which days or busiest for any particular group. Also a good quick way to measure virality of particular events. (See image below.)

The other important element of UpTo is its chat functionality, which allows users to have conversations in realtime around individual events, so that if you have a “meeting with investors” event scheduled for Friday, friends or other members of your team could chime in and say “don’t forget to mention that we’re oversubscribed,” add suggestions, etc. The chat feature, in a sense, aims to make UpTo feel like GroupMe for your calendar.

In general, people are 90 percent more likely to attend an event if it’s in their calendar, Schwartz tell us. And with one-click event adding, UpTo is making it a lot easier to get events on your calendars, and share those with the people you care about. In terms of monetization, you might be able to see where UpTo plans to go. Schwartz says that they want to tap into the “intent graph,” to facilitate better, or at least more targeted, marketing.

Most social networks are looking at your past data to guesstimate what you intend to do in the future, serving banner ads or deals accordingly. Eventually, UpTo wants to build an aggregated event feed, sharing events based on categories based on popularity or subgroups like “tech.” If they were to throw in a popular restaurant’s sponsored happy hour event, it’s already easy to add that to your calendar, and brands/merchants know you’re a lot more likely to go if you have it in your calendar, especially if it’s cross-platform.

Again, for UpTo to take off, it’s all about how appealing it can make the experience of browsing and sharing the events it pulls in from calendars. So far, the UI looks great, and it’s easy to use. Schwartz said that in developing UpTo, they wanted to create an experience that doesn’t require people to change their existing behavior in relation to the way they interact with their calendars. In that way, they’re not trying to change the eCal, just make it more powerful, and more social.

They haven’t yet launched a web platform, but it’s on the way in the next few months, as is an Android app.

For more, check out UpTo at home here.

TechCrunch
Rip Empson

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