Zynga Files for a $1B IPO; Intuit’s Small Business Index Indicates Growth, Facebook’s Chief Tops Google+ Charts

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Today, Mountain View Patch brings you “Bits and Bytes,” where we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

Riding the Tech IPO wave is social gaming giant and the biggest developer of Facebook Apps, such as FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia wars—Zynga. Zynga recently filed for a $1B IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With 60 million active daily users and 232 million monthly users, the gaming company sees 2 billion minutes of play per day. It did $235 million in quarter revenue last March, up from $101 million in 2010. Founder and CEO Mark Pincus is a 16 percent owner of the company, and his total compensation for 2010 stood at $520,239.

Intuit’s Small Business Employment Index showed an uptrend trend in employment, hours worked and compensation, as employers added 45,000 new positions to their payrolls. The small business employment for June is up by 0.2 percent, which translates to an annual growth rate of 2.7 percent. Economist Susan Woodward finds the numbers encouraging. “The revised numbers for May look better than we thought so altogether there is more cause for optimism.”

Google’s loss could be Microsoft’s gain. Where censorship issues forced Google to pull out its popular search engine out of mainland China, Microsoft recently struck a deal with Baidu.com, the leading Chinese search engine for English language search services. With 10 million English language searches a day, Baidu was looking to step up its search services in English. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is expected to appear on Baidu’s web pages by the end of 2011.

According to a VentureBeat report, Google is planning to roll out an optimized version of Google+ for businesses and organizations. The Mountain View-based company will test its business version with select vendors over the next few months, said Google+ Ads Lead, Christian Oestlien. The business-focused version is expected to include rich analytics and the ability to connect with AdWords.

Google may be rebranding Picasa and Blogger to align them to its Google+ brand strategy. Google intends to retire the Picasa and Blogger names in favor of “Google Photos” and “Google Blogs.” With this move, Google hopes to seamlessly integrate both the services into Google+.

Website Google+ statistics gives an interesting bit of trivia on the most followed people on Google+. Competitor Facebook tops the charts with its CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in the No. 1 position. Zuckerberg has about 45,000 followers. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Bin, are the next most-followed people.