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Zynga forays into India; opens office in Bangalore
BANGALORE: Social networking game provider Zynga has forayed into India with the launch of Zynga Game Network India.
Zynga’s first facility outside the US, the office will be based in Bangalore and will focus on game development and large scale infrastructure to support the delivery of Zynga games.
“Initially we plan to hire about 100 best of breed computer scientists and engineers over the next year for our first international facility,” said Zynga India country manager Shan Kadavil.
“Our focus will be on building the next generation infrastructure that can handle the tremendous growth of Zynga games. We plan to building game studios that can do end-to-end game development in India,” he added.
The company says that though most game players play for free, 3 to 5 per cent of the users actually pay to play games. Some of the paying players pay for ‘extra turns’, while others pay for exclusive virtual items and collecting. The desire to spend by the paying players is driven by what Zynga terms as ‘Social capital’.
Zynga CTO Cader Lee revealed that virtual goods were a better revenue generation model than an advertisement based one.
Zynga revealed that according to Think Equity LLC estimates in March 2009, for the five top daily developers, daily actual users’ size had grown by five times over the preceding six months. The top 20 of the 25 applications on Facebook were games as compared to six months before that when 16 games were among the top 50 applications of social networking sites.
Zynga Chief People Officer Colleen McCureary revealed that social networking gaming had a potential to grow to a size of around $10-12 billion over the next two years and estimates the number of social networking game users to grow to around 500 million this year.
Zynga’s has a bouquet of 20 online games currently and plans to launch four more games shortly. Its games are available on Facebook, Myspace, MSM games, Tagged, Yahoo and iPhone include FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, Café World, FishVille and Petville.
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Inshorts Group chief Deepit Purkayastha joins IAB video council for Southeast Asia and India
The co-founder and chief executive of the short-form content platform has been inducted into the IAB SEA+India Video Council, giving India a stronger voice in shaping digital video frameworks
NOIDA: India has long been the world’s most chaotic, multilingual and mobile-first digital market. Now, one of its most prominent short-video executives is getting a seat at the table where the rules are written.
Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and chief executive of Inshorts Group, has been selected as a member of the IAB SEA+India Video Council for 2026. Run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the council brings together senior leaders from Southeast Asia and India to shape standards, best practices and measurement frameworks for the fast-evolving video and digital advertising ecosystem.
The timing is pointed. According to the IAMAI-Kantar Internet in India Report 2025, over 588 million Indians are now consuming short-video content, with growth increasingly driven by rural and non-metro audiences. India’s active internet user base has crossed 950 million, with 57 per cent of users now coming from rural markets. Yet the frameworks that govern how video consumption is measured and monetised were largely designed for single-language, Western markets and have struggled to keep pace with the scale, diversity and complexity of India’s digital landscape.
Purkayastha is no stranger to these debates. He already serves on the AI Council at Marketing and Media Alliance India and as co-chair of the Digital Entertainment Committee at the Internet and Mobile Association of India. His induction into the IAB SEA+India Video Council extends that influence into the global video standards arena.
Inshorts Group sits squarely at the intersection of these forces. Its flagship product, Inshorts, India’s highest-rated short news app, reaches 12 million active users with 60-word news summaries. Its sister platform, Public App, reaches 80 million monthly active users across more than 700 districts and 12 languages, serving communities that most global platforms barely register.
Purkayastha said the opportunity was about building something more representative. “India today sits at the centre of the global video ecosystem, but the frameworks that define how value is created and measured have not always kept pace with the realities of our market,” he said. “Being part of the IAB SEA+India Video Council is an opportunity to contribute to a more representative and future-ready approach, one that accounts for diversity in language, context, and user intent.”
As a council member, Purkayastha will contribute to shaping regional standards across video advertising, measurement and platform governance, with a focus on frameworks that are native to India’s multilingual, mobile-first ecosystem rather than imported from global benchmarks designed elsewhere.
For years, India has been content to play by rules written for other markets. Purkayastha’s induction is a signal that it is done waiting to be consulted and ready to start writing them.
