King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week).

King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards.

King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.

The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform.

“Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi. It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites.

The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in.

All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari, which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook.

“We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale. “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.”

Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.”

He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities.

When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish.

Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions. That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners.

Earlier today we spoke to Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg at TechCrunch Disrupt, on the anniversary of his company’s pivot from gay social network to design-focused flash sales site, and a week after its mini-pivot to curated social shopping site.

In addition to expounding on the past, Goldberg spoke about his expanding vision for the new eCommerce, and how he saw Fab as essentially competing with retail giant IKEA, rather than other eCommerce sites like One Kings Lane and “some companies that recently went public.”

During the talk, the fact that Fab was raising another Series C round was alluded to, “nine figures” at a valuation of over a billion according to one source. After some investigation, we’ve figured out that Fab is indeed looking to raise $100 million, and according to two of those sources the valuation is under $1 billion, at $700 million pre-money.

In addition we’re hearing (we keep hearing things) that VC firm Atomico has already expressed interest in dropping $50 million into the pot, and existing investors have committed to $25 million. We’re also hearing(!) that Fab might have even higher offers and hasn’t committed to anything just quite yet.

The company has good reasons to keep its options open; A little over a year after Goldberg made the decision to change course, the company has amassed over 4.5 million users, over 2 million orders and will surpass $100 million run-rate in 2012, hoping to garner a half a billion in revenue by 2013.

Brad Garlinghouse, who just took over as CEO of YouSendIt and used to be a senior vice president at Yahoo several years ago, has a few ideas for the ailing web giant. The company’s got a pile of cash including $2.6 billion in cash and marketable securities from the end of last quarter, plus $6.3 billion more from selling the Alibaba stake over the weekend.

“Yahoo has billions and billions of dollars. Yahoo can do anything that they want,” he said, adding that he thinks the homepage alone is worth more than $1 billion in search and advertising revenue. Garlinghouse thinks the company should be aggressive about acquiring young companies to bring in entrepreneurial leadership. At the top of his list are Flipboard and Gravity. He is, by the way, the Yahoo executive that wrote that infamous “Peanut Butter” manifesto from six years ago.

“As a leader, [Flipboard CEO] Mike McCue would be transformative to the culture of Yahoo,” he said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in New York. Gravity would help with personalizing content, which Yahoo doesn’t do enough of with its homepage, even though it has a deep Facebook integration. In fact, Yahoo has poked around different news reader apps for acquisition targets. They had looked at Scribd’s reader app Float for between $2 and 8 million but walked away. But the ideas Garlinghouse is suggesting are more about acquiring leadership and talent instead of standalone products.

Garlinghouse adds that he doesn’t think Yahoo is totally doomed, unlike other naysayers out there. ”I’ll be a contrarian,” he said. “In 1996, the cover of Businessweek was about the death of an American icon and at the center of that was Apple Computer. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world. Period.”

Also for a non-contrarian opinion, Garlinghouse says Yahoo’s board did the right thing in tossing former chief executive Scott Thompson over his resume (cough) inaccuracies. “The board had no choice.”

He also gave new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn some credit for getting the Alibaba deal done quickly. “He managed to do in one week what at least two or three CEOs weren’t able to do.”

Michael Arrington, who interviewed Garlinghouse, also pressed him on how YouSendIt’s file-sharing can compete with enterprise-focused upstarts like Dropbox and Box.net. Garlinghouse said the valuations of both companies might hinder their progress forward. (He declined to reveal YouSendIt’s most recent valuation.)

“Raising a ton of money creates challenges,” he said. “You’ve got an employee problem because options are priced at a $4 billion valuation plus investors want a 2 or 3x return. How many companies can afford a $10 billion acquisition? You’re not going to pay $10 billion. You’re just going to build it yourself.”

Xfire, which offers social networking tools for gamers, just announced that it has raised $3 million in new funding.

The round was led by Singapore-based IDM Venture Capital. It’s apparently targeted specifically at expanding Xfire’s presence in Asia — the company recently announced that it’s partnering with China Youth Goyor Technology company to bring its services into the Chinese market.

The company’s services include a gamer profile, in-game voice and instant messaging, and live broadcasting. It has changed hands several times in the past few years, getting acquired by Viacom in 2006, then by Titan Gaming in 2010. Xfire became independent again last fall. At that time it also raised $4 million from Intel Capital and others.

Xfire says this funding will probably be part of a larger round.

Facebook shares dipped as much as 4.4 percent in pre-market trading today and are now below their final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. They’re currently trading at $36.66. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled.

That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year.

There was a raging debate during the weekend over whether the bank underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line. Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent.

These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more.

SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data review today, the company would attempt a second launch on Tuesday, May 22nd. This comes as SpaceX’s maiden voyage to the International Space Station was cut a half second short by an automated safety function built into the rocket.

SpaceX is attempting to become the first privately owned entity to reach and dock a capsule with the ISS, therefore increasing its chance to win what will likely be a lucrative contract to ferry cargo and humans between Earth and Space. So far these duties have been carried out by the U.S., Russia and Japan. However, as governments are cutting space budget programs they are looking to hand over these relatively nominal duties to the private sector and redirect funds to long-range space exploration and science programs.

Come next Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to make history again

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SpaceX, the private space exploration company founded by PalPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, is ready to boldly go where no private company has legitimately attempted to go before: The International Space Station. (Live video of the rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida is embedded above.)

In just a few hours at 1:55am Pacific Time (which is 4:55am Eastern time) Saturday morning, SpaceX will attempt to make the first ever privately-funded launch to head to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch will be made with its Falcon 9 rocket, which is set to deploy its Dragon capsule. As SpaceFlightNow has very clearly reported, this is a risky and unique proposition in many ways:

“SpaceX aims to launch its privately-built Dragon capsule Saturday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, fly the craft to the International Space Station, and deftly approach the complex for astronauts to grab the free-flying satellite with a robot arm.

It is the first time a private company has attempted such a feat.”

Obviously it is a super ambitious and expensive endeavor, but the SpaceX company is very keen to remind people that this is still an experiment. After all, this is the first time that a non-government US entity has made a move to land on the International Space Station.

As SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told SpaceFlight Now: “We know this has been touted as a huge mission. We keep trying to say it’s a test. Nonetheless, it’s a big job.” The company has repeatedly emphasized to the press that this is “just a test flight.”

Indeed, it is possible that we could watch the Falcon 9 go down in flames. But of course, the smart people at SpaceX have clearly taken great care to make sure that is not the case here on Saturday’s launch. In any case, we’ll have to wait and see to be sure — and the high stakes are a part of the excitement of it all.

In a slightly larger lens, there is the hope that some of the newly-minted Facebook affiliated folks who acquired millions on Friday will opt to invest in projects that are nearly as interesting as Elon Musk’s endeavors. One can dream, at least.

Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don’t blame you. Sure, there’s the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real problem for online publishers (who have enough problems already).

Israeli startup ClarityRay says it’s not something looming in the misty future — it’s happening now, and it’s only going to get worse.

In a recent study (download PDF), the company claims to have looked at “over 100 million impressions across several top-tier publishers in the US and Europe” finding that 9.26 percent of all impressions were blocked. The likelihood that someone is using an ad blocker varies significantly by browser — Firefox users are the most likely to use a blocker, followed by Safari (the desktop version) and then Chrome. The report goes on:

The combined market share of Chrome and Firefox is only increasing. Moreover, the great popularity of ad-blockers points to a strong public need; as awareness increases, a free, widely available solution that is one-click away on every platform is bound to increase its consumer adoption. It is, therefore, our estimate that ad-blocking will double within 20 months.

The company’s logic, at least as presented here, didn’t quite convince me that ad blocking will double, but I’m not debating the larger points. Naturally, ClarityRay is offering a solution.

“We believe ad-blocking today is a lot like how pirate MP3s were before iTunes: they point to a valid consumer need, but do so in an unsustainable manner business wise,” says co-founder and CEO Ido Yablonka.

In other words, Yablonka wants to provide an alternative that addresses the complaints of the “ad intolerant” while allowing publishers to make money. To that end, the company offers two complementary products — one that bypasses ad blockers, and another that allows publishers to offer subscriptions for an ad-free version of the site. So if you’ve installed an ad blocker and you visit a ClarityRay customer, you’ll still see a single ad, Yablonka says. Don’t want to see it? Then pay.

At the same time, Yablonka acknowledges that each publisher has its own audience and its own needs, and he says ClarityRay customizes the program for customer based on crowd analysis.

Even though the company hasn’t received much coverage from the press, Yablonka says it’s already live with several large publishers, totaling 2 million unique monthly visitors. (Yablonka says he can’t disclose any customer names publicly, but he did point me to a couple of sites where I could see the technology live and working.) ClarityRay has also raised $500,000 in funding from Saar Wilf who sold his company Fraud Sciences to eBay for $169 million, and is now serving as the company’s chairman.

While Mark Zuckerberg rang in Facebook’s first day as a publicly traded company back in Silicon Valley, TechCrunch TV was in New York City to report on the scene from the NASDAQ stock market’s Marketsite building in Times Square. The opening bell and initial trades were a bit anti-climactic in person, as we’ve written — NASDAQ is a digital exchange after all, so there’s not too much to see visually.

But it was a great opportunity to check out the NASDAQ “floor” in person, and talk all things Facebook with David Kirkpatrick, the NYC-based founder of Techonomy, Fortune Magazine alum, and bestselling author of the book “The Facebook Effect — The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World.”

You can watch our whole chat with Kirkpatrick at the NASDAQ Marketsite in the video embedded above, which I’d recommend because he gives a pretty compelling interview. Below I’ve included a few of his insights, just to whet your appetite (and perhaps inspire you to endure all 30 seconds of that pre-roll video ad):

Why it seems like everyone has come down with Facebook IPO fever:

“People are realizing the extent to which technology is changing everything in modern society, and Facebook is kind of the most prominent symbol of that. I think that’s one of the reasons why this is so obsessively watched.”

A chicken in every pot, a Facebook stock in every portfolio? It could happen:

“There may be a surprising number of new investors who buy shares in Facebook and were not stock investors previously. Whether that might make them more willing to buy other kinds of stocks, I don’t know. Frankly I doubt it. But I think that a lot of ordinary people who are likely to buy Facebook stock are people who are going to do it because they love Facebook so much. And they’re not just Americans, they’re people all over the world.

…The thing about Facebook is it has more passionate users than any product I’ve ever heard of. And that is an odd thing for a public company, and it could mean it’s a very widely held stock.”

Why Zuck stayed home in California:

“I think it was in order to symbolically say, things aren’t going to be that different we’re going to stick to our knitting. That’s why they had a hackathon last night. It was very symbolically chosen… it’s the same thing as wearing the hoodie to the investor presentation.”

How Facebook’s IPO could finally make jeans and hoodies acceptable in business, once and for all:

“I think business in general is stuffy, and slow-moving, and needs a jolt of Red Bull, really. I don’t know why businesspeople always have to wear suits — it’s stupid, it’s idiotic, it doesn’t even look good, and it’s not very contemporary.

…If Facebook continues to retain this degree of prominence in the market economy, I think it will begin to have an influence that the CEO of that company doesn’t wear a suit.”

GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched – a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile – is almost inexplicable.

GameStop Mobile is, in short, an unlimited data and voice offering for $55 a month (down to $20 a month for pay-as-you-go plans.) GameStop is just selling SIM cards and service and is running on AT&T’s network with some notable dead spots.

The stores actually do take trade-in electronics so, potentially, the company could begin selling unlocked GSM phones to customers who come in for games. Because of the intended audience – kids and the adults who bring them as well as a few die-hards who aren’t yet into PC gaming – it makes some sense for this service to exist.

The synergy also opens AT&T to new markets and, more important, places GameStop right at the nexus of mobile and gaming – a place it absolutely needs to be once future consoles stop accepting optical media.

However, with revenue down and hard-core gamers moving to services like Origin and Steam, there is little impetus for folks to trek out to the local GameStop for titles. Here’s hoping this latest attempt at monetizing the audience works as well as their midnight launches of Diablo III.