Word: takeoff
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Zynga's tactic of gaming Facebook's architecture was critical to its takeoff. It flooded Facebook with ads. It exploited the social network's distribution engine to pepper players' friends with updates and invitations. To release games quickly, it used a roll-up strategy, buying YoVille, licensing Texas HoldEm (which it renamed zyngapoker) and imitating rivals. Playfish's Restaurant City was around before Cafe World, and FishVille is reminiscent of Crowdstar's Happy Aquarium. Even FarmVille rips off Happy Farm, a hugely popular online game in China (richly ironic, given China's disregard for intellectual property). Once it had collected...
...watch, the takeoff roll for Air France Flight 380 lasted 35 seconds. "39 seconds," corrected Laurent Bonnard, a French historian, as we chatted in a lounge area later. Either way, all the planiacs on board Air France's inaugural A380 Airbus flight from New York City to Paris agreed the takeoff was a thing of beauty. Imagine an apartment building with wings that steps into the sky with the quiet grace of a ballet dancer. The lack of engine noise - it's 50% quieter than a 747-400 on takeoff - was downright eerie. The A380...
...France's national carrier got the debut of the Europe-built jet off with considerable élan. The flight leaving John F. Kennedy Airport was packed with partying Francophiles, journalists and airline junkies. A band on board played "C'est Magnifique" before takeoff and during the flight; birthdays were celebrated; the champagne flowed...
...lead-up to the launch had already produced a YouTube moment. On Tuesday, in the minutes before the expected takeoff, engineers were scheduled to pull on a lanyard to yank off a little red sock protecting a probe atop the rocket's nose. The yank cleared the probe, but the sock caught on something at the top of the rocket, something an amused NASA spokesman later insisted hadn't occurred in 500 practice runs. It took nine minutes of mostly close-up, viral-video-quality tugging before the dangling sock released, even as engineers debated whether the snafu amounted...
...away its poor track record, arguing that when scaled by its enormous population, its pollution problem still falls well short of developed countries'. Asian leaders have also argued that since economic development, itself, is a resource-burning and pollution-intensive endeavor, the delayed onset of the region's economic takeoff casts it unfairly as the villain in an era of global warming. Although both of these claims have considerable merit, a damaged planet engenders little sympathy for the Asian excuse. On an absolute basis, Asia now makes the largest contribution to total growth in global pollutants - a trend that must...