King (company)

King Digital Entertainment PLC, also known as King.com, is a social games company. King develops games for the web, for mobile (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), Facebook, and Windows 10. King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in that role since co-founding the company in 2003. Founding partner Melvyn Morris serves as chairman. The company has 1400 employees and parcels development out to small, autonomous teams of designers working with a "startup" mentality. In 2013, it spent $110.5 million on research and development, roughly 6 percent of sales. On November 2, 2015, it was announced that King would be acquired by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion and this deal would be complete by Q2 2016.

History

Prior to founding King, Zacconi, Morris and Toby Rowland worked together on uDate.com, a site created by Morris. Morris sold the site for $150 million in 2003. The three joined forces with Sebastian Knutsson, Thomas Hartwig, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne to start King in 2003. Originally headquartered in Sweden, King nearly went bankrupt before a Christmas Eve cash infusion in 2003. The company raised $43 million in 2005 by selling a large stake to Apax and Index Ventures. The company finished the year with a profit for the first time and has been profitable each year since. Rowland, who had served as co-CEO, departed the company in 2008 and sold his stake back to the company for $3 million in 2011. Angel investor and former board member Klaus Hommels sold his similar stake at the same time.

Saga

Sagas are stories mostly about ancient Nordic and Germanic history, about early Viking voyages, the battles that took place during the voyages, about migration to Iceland and of feuds between Icelandic families. They were written in the Old Norse language, mainly in Iceland.

The texts are tales in prose which share some similarities with the epic, often with stanzas or whole poems in alliterative verse embedded in the text, of heroic deeds of days long gone, "tales of worthy men," who were often Vikings, sometimes pagan, sometimes Christian. The tales are usually realistic, except legendary sagas, sagas of saints, sagas of bishops and translated or recomposed romances. They are sometimes romanticised and fantastic, but always dealing with human beings one can understand.

Background

Farm

A farm is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used for specialised units such as arable farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, dairy, pig and poultry farms, and land used for the production of natural fibres, biofuel and other commodities. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. In modern times the term has been extended so as to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or sea.

Farming originated independently in different parts of the world as hunter gatherer societies transitioned to food production rather than food capture. It may have started about 12,000 years ago with the domestication of livestock in the Fertile Crescent in western Asia, soon to be followed by the cultivation of crops. Modern units tend to specialise in the crops or livestock best suited to the region, with their finished products being sold for the retail market or for further processing, with farm products being traded around the world.

Heroes

Heroes may refer to:

Film

Television

Series

Episodes

Literature

Google Play

Google Play or Google Play Store, and originally the Android Market, is a digital distribution platform operated by Google. It serves as the official app store for the Android operating system, allowing users to browse and download applications developed with the Android SDK and published through Google. Google Play also serves as a digital media store, offering music, magazines, books, movies, and television programs. It previously offered Google hardware devices for purchase until the introduction of a separate online hardware retailer, Google Store, on March 11, 2015.

Applications are available through Google Play either free of charge or at a cost. They can be downloaded directly to an Android or Google TV device through the Play Store mobile app, or by deploying the application to a device from the Google Play website. Many applications can be targeted to specific users based on a particular hardware attribute of their device, such as a motion sensor (for motion-dependent games) or a front-facing camera (for online video calling).