Zynga settles with employee over alleged theft of game secrets

Zynga said it had settled a lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets by a former employee, with the employee also issuing an apology.

The games company filed a complaint in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco, in October last year, alleging that Alan Patmore, formerly general manager for its CityVille game, misappropriated trade secrets from Zynga before joining competitor Kixeye.

Before his departure from Zynga, Patmore is said to have copied over 760 Zynga files into a folder on his computer that he later transferred to a folder on his personal Dropbox cloud storage account, according to Zynga's complaint.

The data included, among other things, more than ten unreleased game design documents, information on the proprietary methods Zynga uses to identify which games and game mechanics will be successful, and an internal assessment of the relative success of new game features introduced over the last quarter by CityVille, according to the complaint.

The data Patmore took from Zynga "could be used to improve a competitor's internal understanding and know-how of core game mechanics and monetization techniques, its execution and ultimately its market standing," Zynga said in its complaint.

"I accept responsibility for making a serious mistake by copying and taking Zynga confidential information when I resigned from Zynga," said Patmore in a statement provided by Zynga on Wednesday. "I understand the consequences of my actions and I sincerely apologize to Zynga and my former colleagues," the statement continued.

Zynga and Kixeye also reached a "mutually agreeable settlement" of their litigation involving Patmore in the court. The lawyers for Patmore could not be immediately contacted. The court has meanwhile entered a request for dismissal of the case by Zynga, after receiving a notice from Zynga of unconditional settlement.

The commercial terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Zynga had asked the court for damages and injunctive relief, preventing Patmore and others from retaining, accessing and disclosing any of its data.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.
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How To Build Little Doors Inside Your Shell: The Secrets of Snail Carpentry

"I am going to withdraw from the world," says a snail in Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Snail and the Rosebush. "Nothing that happens there is any concern of mine."

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In the fall, snails get cold. They sense the days getting shorter so they prepare for what's coming. You'd expect them to, of course, but it's how they do it that surprised me. Until I read Elizabeth Tova Bailey's new snail book, I hadn't a clue. They begin by slipping into their shells ...

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... head in, foot last. And then they start building doors. Not doors of wood or stone or soil. Being snails, they choose mucus.

The goopy ooze they use for locomotion is also a sticky attractant, so using their feet (sorry, "foot"), they pick up bits of stone, leaf and soil, and, according to the Rev. William Kirby, who described this back in 1835, using that foot "as a shovel to make its mortar ... [as] a trowel to spread it evenly," they build a door. They seal the entrance to their shell in a manner something like this ...

Robert Krulwich/NPR

Snail scholars call this door an "epiphragm." Depending on the species and the harshness of the winter, a snail might make it thick or thin, or in some cases, it may make several of them, as described by Ernest Ingersoll in his 1881 essay, "In a Snailery."

"Withdrawing into the shell, the animal throws across the aperture a film of slimy mucus, which hardens as tight as a miniature drum-head. As the weather becomes colder, the creature draws itself a little farther in, and makes another 'epiphragm' and so on until ... the animal [is] sleeping snugly coiled in the deepest recesses of his domicile."

I imagine if you could X-ray a snail shell, you might see — if it's an especially cold winter — a series of doors within doors within doors ...

Robert Krulwich/NPR

These slime plates, according to the anonymous author of "Snails and Their Houses" (1888), "act on the principle of double windows, enclosing a layer of air between each pair, and so effectually protecting [the snail] from the cold."

Breathing? Eating? Pooping?

So how then, does an enclosed snail eat, defecate or breathe? The answer is: It slows itself way down. Whether dormant or hibernating, it stops eating, its heart rate goes to barely a beat or two a minute and, writes Elisabeth Tova Bailey, "its oxygen intake diminishes to one-fiftieth of its active use." As for defecation, I'm guessing some things they just live with.

I do worry about suffocation, though. Three doors in, buried in its hard shell, where is the snail to get any oxygen? Well, says Elisabeth, the doors may be porous to air, or "(s)trategically located breathing holes may be incorporated." However they do it, and different snails do it differently, when it starts to rain and snow, the snail is snug, warm and protected. Ready for winter.

Robert Krulwich/NPR

Then months later, when temperatures rise and the sun stays longer in the sky, the snail somehow senses springtime coming, breaks down its doors and steps out for a stretch and another season of crawling, eating and, with a little luck, loving. It all happens slowly, of course, but it happens year after year. Doors are built. Doors are de-doored, the dance goes on, snail-style.

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Elisabeth Tova Bailey's book is The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. I've blogged about it before (when I learned that snails have teeth). The citations to old books in my post, I got from her. In her chapter about hibernation, she notes that making these mucus doors relieves snails of the chore of migrating — and then she tries to imagine a hibernating snail. What a concept! That gets her thinking about a French poet, Jacques Prevert, whose "Song of the Snails on Their Way to A Funeral" tells the story of "two snails that plan to attend a service for an autumn leaf that has fallen to the ground. They travel toward their destination, and when they finally arrive for the funeral, spring has come and all is happy again." Ah, sometimes things just work out.

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HTC investigates three employees for stealing company secrets

IDG News Service - Three HTC employees are under investigation in Taiwan for allegedly leaking company secrets and embezzling money from the smartphone maker.

The Taipei District Prosecutors Office said Friday it is investigating two managers and an engineer with HTC's design department following a complaint by the company.

Currently, two of three employees are being detained, Taipei deputy chief prosecutor Huang Mou-Hsin said Monday. One of them is Thomas Chien, HTC's vice president of product design, he added.

Huang declined to comment on the nature of the HTC secrets leaked.

Chien has been working at HTC for 12 years, according to a company blog post he wrote in February, where he praised its latest flagship phone for its all metal design. Chien could not be immediately contacted for comment.

HTC declined to comment on the investigation. It said in a Monday stock exchange filing, "the company has sufficient resources in our design team and this situation will not impact the company's operations, product portfolio plans and our overall business performance."

The investigation represents another blow to the Taiwan-based smartphone maker at time when it has been struggling to lift its product sales. The company's second quarter net profit was down 83 percent year-over-year, the latest in a string of weak financial earnings. But HTC executives believe the company can bounce back by releasing new products later this year. In addition, HTC has also launched a new marketing campaign starring Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr.

HTC declined to comment on the three employees investigated and if they were still with the company. In 2011, HTC lost another design executive, Horace Luk, who resigned from his post as chief innovation officer.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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HTC investigates three employees for stealing company secrets

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