Inside Social Games

Conduit Labs, maker of social music site Loudcrowd has just raised $3 million in a second round of funding, as discovered by PaidContent in an SEC filing. This marks the second set of financing for the young company, as it raised $5.5 million from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks back in 2007.

The funding will likely go toward further developments within Loudcrowd, which seems to have been doing decently well in recent months. It reported more than 2 million game plays as of May.

The site allows players utilize the “Party” space, letting people simply hang out and “chill” with other avatars or “dance” with them through a simple click and playing the Dance mini game. Interestingly enough, dances can be funny, flashy, or flirty, and are addictive enough to coax roughly 20% of Loudcrowd users into dancing and hanging out around eight hours a week.

Of course, if this isn’t your style, users can play games of the original version of Loudcrowd which was launched this past March. However, the club-themed site has since added two interesting features: Impress and Spark, both of which are available through the aforementioned social Party feature.

Impress is actually more of a vocabulary type of game. As dull as that might sound, it is executed in the fashion of a sort of rap battle. Players are presented with an open-ended sentence and have to click floating word bubbles containing words or phrases that might fit as they move about the room, while avoiding words or phrases that wouldn’t fit. It seems easy enough, with a simple point and click mechanic, but with such a limited amount of time (like “spitting rhymes”) it is actually quite difficult.

The second addition we saw on Loudcrowd was more of a puzzler: Spark. This one should be extremely interesting for the casual audience since traditionally, most casual players are looking for a challenge of the mind. Well, this particular challenge is based both on visuals and sound. Players are given a track and a set of light bulbs (consider them circuits) on a grid. The objective is to direct electricity from one conduit to another, by rotating the light bulb/circuits, while avoiding red barriers and having it move in rhythm with the music. While it sounds simple enough, there are a limited number of moves, so each successive puzzle becomes significantly more difficult.

As with the original Spin and Dance games, these new titles are able to unlock new music tracks to listen too (as they play in the background constantly), and frankly, none of it is too bad at all. Suffice to say that this makes for an excellent outlet for new artists to get noticed, and thus far, Loudcrowd hosts over 250 tracks from 50 artists including the Canadian duo, MSTRKRFT, Santigold, Justice, and remixes from Juan MacLean.

All in all, the games are fun, and have a unique flavor for a variety of palettes. Of course, the site is still growing, but it seems to be doing well thus far, and the music alone makes for a great site to just have playing in the background. The idea is great, and with a new chunk of funding coming down the pipe, it will be interesting to see what the next Loudcrowd evolution will be.