We all hate conference calls -- having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you've actually logged in, there's a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who's talking at any given time. UberConference, which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to fix all that by providing a visual interface to all others on the call. Audio conferencing is not just a pain in the ass, but it's also a huge business -- a $3 billion business -- that's mostly controlled by big telco providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. By providing an easy-to-use alternative, UberConference hopes to disrupt the existing market.

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.