Zynga is planning to let at least some employees sell a portion of their stock in the hot social gaming company to outside investors, according to two industry sources. Institutional Venture Partners, a late-stage venture firm that has already invested in the company, is the purchaser of all the employee stock going up for sale, one source tells us.

[Updates: Zynga has announced $180 million in funding led by DST, with hedge fund Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, and IVP participating. The New York Times has also just published an article interviewing Zynga executives and board about the deal. The employee stock sale is on, and Zynga employees will be able to sell 10% of vested shares, at $19 per share, according to a new source. One of our previous sources clarifies that IVP has separately been buying up Zynga stock on secondary markets, while another source adds that $50 million has been allocated for the Zynga employee stock sale.]

We have asked Zynga for comment on these rumors multiple times in recent weeks, but we’ve gotten nothing back so far. However, given what we’ve heard, and what we know about Zynga’s strategy, an employee stock sale makes sense.

Facebook, home to tens of millions of Zynga users, let employees sell some stock this past summer to Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies. That move, and this one, are intended to let employees make some money from their hard work while inspiring them to stay around for a long time to come (and make money from the rest of their stock when the company goes public or gets sold). Neither Facebook nor Zynga are looking to make an initial public offering any time soon, we’ve heard consistently from sources in the last few months.

The gaming company is also hiring talented engineers and other employees quickly. It now has more than 600 employees as well as more than 300 independent contractors, the company has said. We and others estimate that it is on track to make more than $200 million this year, with some estimates we’ve heard going higher than that. Most revenue comes from selling virtual goods in a wide range of hit social game, like Texas Hold’Em, Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Café World, FishVille and most recently, PetVille. It also has large games on MySpace, other social networks and some on the iPhone.

On Facebook alone, we track 37 of Zynga’s dozens of applications through AppData. They combine for an unduplicated total of 232 million monthly active users, although this total does not reveal the number of users who play more than one Zynga game. A more interesting measure, perhaps is the fact that it has a combined 64.6 million daily active users on Facebook, or around 19 percent of Facebook’s monthly active users.

Although the company, like others in the industry, has run some scammy advertising offers in the past, it decided to pull them all last month. At that point, it said it planned to keep offers out “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves,” according to chief executive Mark Pincus. This means the vast majority of the company’s revenue is coming from direct payments for virtual goods.

However much money Zynga is bringing in, it is also facing competition from many other growing social gaming companies — companies that are also making money, and can afford to pay well. This employee stock offering is not just a way to keep employees happy, but to preclude them from getting recruited by competitors.

Long-Term Plans

We don’t know how much of their stock Zynga employees are selling, nor the price (assuming that what we hear is accurate). However, we do have a couple other details from one source. Zynga itself may have raised a new $25 million round of funding at a $1 billion valuation — we’ve also heard that this is “way off.” Rumors about a $1 billion valuation have gone around already; we heard it in October, when rumors of a Zynga IPO were also circulating. Others have heard or estimated a similar valuation.

Separately, a regulatory filing for $15.2 million in funding surfaced in November. This was an extension of the company’s second round of funding; and, the money was actually raised in June at a $625 million valuation, according to one source. The $25 million, according to the source, is a new round.

Here’s a game for any Facebook user stuck in a cold part of the world for the next several months: Happy Island, the latest social game from CrowdStar.

You start with a tropical, volcanic island — think: Hawaii — and your job is to grow your tourism business via attractions like hotels, luaus and fruit stands, bringing in more customers and earning more money so you can further expand your island tourism chain.

Also notable is that the game only uses Facebook’s in-house virtual currency, Credits. There’s no other payment system currently available. As we’ve previously reported that Facebook is planning a major rollout of Credits to third-party apps.

The game’s genre traces back to classic casual games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, and more recently, Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom social game. In an interview yesterday, CrowdStar chairman Peter Relan explained that unlike some other park-style management simulations, Happy Island takes it easy on users. There’s minimal penalties for not coming back to the game — the tourists keep coming to your island and earning you money, even when you’re not providing them with constant new amusements. This dynamic is similar to its other games, Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets, where the fish and pets, respectively, might go hungry or dirty, but they don’t die or run off like what happens in some of the competing titles in those genres.

The idea is to make the game universally appealing, or “happy,” as the name suggest. As you progress, your island gets bigger and bigger, and you can expand to more islands. Relan says the company learned to enable this sort of expansion, after watching Happy Aquarium users create scores of fish tanks to take care of their fish farms.

CrowdStar recently promised to pump out original titles every month, pacing competitors — especially market leader Zynga. That developer followed up on Happy Aquarium and other aquarium games with FishVille in November, then followed up on Happy Pets (and preceding pet games, like Pet Society and SuperPoke Pets) with PetVille earlier this month.

Other innovations in Happy Island include a 2.5-dimensional interface, where you can see cartoon tourists walking to different parts of the island; this is a more complex view than what CrowdStar’s other games have offered. You can also do things like zoom out to see your whole island empire or zoom in to closely examine specific features.

The game comes with a lot of easy ways to earn coins, like harvesting simple objects off the landscape. However, any improvements to game features, like an airstrip, dock or hotel, cost either a considerable amount of coins, or a few Credits. There’s also no mention of island locals and how they might feel about the tourists.

Happy Island has been in beta testing for the last 10 days. It currently has nearly 100,000 daily active users and around 243,000 monthly active users; we expect to grow as CrowdStar begins promoting it on its game toolbar on Happy Aquarium and its other apps.

Mihir Shah just left his job as the vice president of app developer RockYou’s advertising network, in a move announced last week. Now, he’s been hired on to be the chief revenue officer at virtual currency monetization company Offerpal.

RockYou has expanded, in recent years, from building applications to selling advertising space on those applications to brands as well as to other developers. It also launched its own advertising offer service in August, giving Shah further insight into a key part of Offerpal’s business.

Shah will “oversee all of Offerpal’s commercial activities, including revenue growth and user acquisition” as well as “managing the company’s relationships with leading advertisers, developers and publishers,” according to the company press release about the news. That’s a wide range of responsibilities.

Like RockYou, Offerpal has been going through a management shuffle this fall, with cofounder Anu Shukla stepping down from her chief executive role to be replaced by direct-response advertising veteran George Garrick.

Shah also has experience in direct-response advertising, having been an early employee at QuinStreet. At RockYou, he “grew the company’s revenues by more than 500% and more than quadrupled gross margin” and was “responsible for 15 billion monthly ad impressions, as well as sales, account management, performance marketing, analytics, and publisher management,” although no specific revenue numbers were disclosed.

Virtual goods have hit the United States this year — 11 million people a month are buying them, leading to  $1 billion in revenue this year, according to our Inside Virtual Goods report.

But are holiday-themed virtual goods going to be a significant part of this revenue? Absolutely – seasonally themed virtual items are becoming just as common as their physical counterparts, and quite a few social game developers already selling them.

One of the companies doing it best is Playfish. Two of its largest games, Pet Society and Restaurant City, are using the more classic sales technique of limited time offers. Pet Society, with its 21 million monthly active users, is offering items such as a “Countdown Christmas Calendar” that grants a new surprise gift each day until the 24th, as well as sets of clothes, and dozens of decorations and furniture. What is worth noting, however, is that none of the items are terribly expensive for a veteran player. In fact, almost every single one could be purchased rather easily, but due to the sheer volume of items available, purchasing too many would quickly run most players dry. Since they are limited, a sense of urgency is established, coaxing the user to buy the extra coins needed before the items are gone.

Restaurant City is also selling a plethora of Christmas-themed virtual goods too. Unlike Pet Society, however, many of the items are not limited. However, two are: The Festive Fridge and Stove. These are not only decorative items for your restaurant, but since the game is about running a business, they also allow you to prepare your dishes 10% faster, thus granting players a competitive edge.

Like the Pet Society goods, the Festive Fridge can be purchased with in-game currency. However, it is extraordinarily expensive - 25,000 coins, while most items are around 5,000 at the high end. In this example, many players will not have enough coins to buy the item before it is gone – thus, they purchase more coins from the developer with real cash. The Stove, on the other hand, is only available through purchased virtual currency.

This is the approach usually taken by Zynga, bringing us to its major title, FarmVille. Zynga offers two forms of tender in FarmVille – Coins and Farm Cash. The first is what can be earned through play, while the second must be bought. Zynga not only provides an exorbitant amount of Christmas items (igloos, presents, Santa’s Workshop, etc.) for purchase, but it makes them limited, makes some cost in-game cash, and makes the best cost Farm Cash. However, nothing offered is something that the user feels they actually need.

Of course, even though these items are less needed, with over 72 million monthly active users, it is obvious that many people are going to convert and purchase the items.

The last example worth mentioning is Fish World. As a matter of fact, of all the virtual aquarium games, this one from Tall Tree Games offers one of the widest varieties of holiday items. Unfortunately, it also feels the least effective when compared to the previous three. The problem is two-fold. Yes, they have Christmas trees, and stockings, and Santas, and even snowman fish, but nothing is marked as limited. Halloween came and went and those items are still there. The same held true with Thanksgiving. Why is this a problem? There is no urgency. Players have grown accustomed to this and because they do not say “limited,” There is no rush to buy extra money before everything is gone.

The second issue is that Tall Tree Games makes a tremendously large amount of its items available only through the Fishbucks virtual currency. Plenty of users have already complained about how everything of use or significance costs Fishbucks. From music, to special fish, to fish feeders, and so on, too much was expected to be bought with real cash, and not enough items of equal caliber have been offered to the average, non-paying player. This, in turn, hurts holiday sales, because it can often frustrate users and drive them away.

Regardless, it will be curious to see how the sales numbers for these holiday goods pan out once the holiday season is past. As it stands, we can only speculate based on hard numbers centered around recent virtual sales near Thanksgiving – specifically, Black Friday. Mobile payments company Zong told us that that coveted day led to a 27% increase for them in regards to virtual goods spending.

Will Christmas virtual goods will see the same success? We’ll let you know as more data comes in.

A Few Games Currently Offering Holiday Virtual Goods:

• Happy Aquarium – Crowdstar: Christmas trees, candy canes, Charlie Brown Xmas tree, menorah, and a snowman squid. Roughly half cost virtual currency while the others can be earned in game. Limitation is unknown.
• Mafia Wars – Zynga: “Marshmallow Overload” Item – Limited (24 more hours) and costs virtual currency.
• YoVille – Zynga: 174 holiday items. Limitation is unknown, but the vast majority of items can be earned in game.
• Fish World – Tall Tree Games: 14 Christmas songs, 17 holiday fish, 22 premium decorations, and 24 non-premium ones. Not limited, and only 27 out of 77 items can be earned in game.
• Cafe World – Zynga: 19 different holiday decorations. Limitation unknown. Roughly half cost virtual currency and half are earnable in game.
• Farm Town – Slashkey: 47 holiday decorations such as lawn elves, lawn Santas, nativity scenes, and menorahs. Limitation unknown, but only 12 cost virtual currency.
• PetVille – Zynga: 21 Christmas and Hanukkah costumes and furniture. Limitation unknown. All can be earned in game.
• Restaurant City – Playfish: 11 interior holiday decorations (two limited and functional) and 19 exterior holiday decorations. Only one costs virtual currency: The Festive Stove.
• FarmVille – Zynga: 43 holiday items. All but one are limited. 21 cost virtual currency.
• Pet Society – Playfish: 81 different holiday goods, including foods, clothing, furniture, and functional items. Limited. All can be earned in game.

Beijing-based Rekoo has been churning out social gaming hits not just on Facebook but on social networks in Asia — and now it has landed $1.5 million in funding from China and Israel-based venture fund Infinity Venture Partners, according to reports.

Readers of Inside Social Games will know Rekoo for its Facebook app, Animal Paradise and Sunshine Ranch, that together total 6.75 million monthly active users and 2.33 million daily active users, according to AppData. Both games are simulations, with the former letting you raise virtual animals (or even steal them from your friends) while the latter is a virtual farming game. They’ve grown to prominence over the last half a year or so, as we’ve been tracking.

In fact, after Japanese social network Mixi opened its site to third-party developers this past August, Rekoo moved in quick and made a version of the game for the site. That game now has 3.8 million users, or around 20 percent of the site’s total (incidentally, the same portion that Zynga’s farming game, FarmVille, has on Facebook). The company has previously — and successfully — launched these titles on Chinese social networks including 51.com, Xiaonei and others.

We previously heard unconfirmed reports that Rekoo was being circled by venture capital firms from the United States; it seems a more local firm won out. This is, intriguingly, also not a huge amount of funding compared to the tens of millions that some social gaming companies have raised — we assume the company is doing well selling virtual goods.

While recent Zynga games have grabbed the headlines this fall — first Café World, then FishVille and most recently PetVille — virtual farming game FarmVille continues to grow by millions of users every month. Here’s a closer look at the stats for this social gaming hit.

As of today, the game has 72.9 million monthly active users, according to AppData, making it by far the most popular game on Facebook. The closest has less than half the number of monthly actives — Café World, at 32.2 million. Put another way, FarmVille is played by more than 20 percent of Facebook’s 350 million users every single month. In the “long tail” of social games on Facebook, it is the “fat head.”

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the game also has grown to have the most daily active users of any app — by far. As of today, it has 27.5 million daily active users. Café World comes in a very distant second with 9.62 million DAU. This means FarmVille has a “sticky factor” (DAU/MAU) of 38 percent, which is one of the highest out of any large application that we know of.

While FarmVille was not the first farming game t0 get big on Facebook, Zynga has effectively used various promotional methods, from cross-promotion on its toolbar to ad buys, to make it big. There are still questions about why FarmVille, and not the many other virtual simulation games on Facebook, has gotten so huge.

And, although social gaming insiders usually consider other genres, like role-playing mafia games, to be more lucrative, we can assume that FarmVille is bringing in serious cash with DAU counts this high. Like most other successful social games, this one has been making its money from virtual goods, specifically things like plant seeds and utilitarian items like pink tractors.

Perhaps people really do just like the farming concept more than they like tending virtual restaurants, pets or fish? Or, perhaps next year, we’ll see games in those genres come to match and even surpass FarmVille? “My father-in-law — a farmer — told me five years ago that I should make a farm game,” as Zynga vice president Bill Mooney related at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat event last week. Mooney, a veteran game producer, says he laughed off the idea at the time. But now he’s the general manager of FarmVille, and one of the key people responsible for its success. Maybe, as his father-in-law suggested, social gamers do have some sort of special connection to civilization’s roots.

	Name	MAU
1.	FarmVille	72,898,865
2.	Café World	32,175,759
3.	Causes	29,261,811
4.	Social Interview	27,873,612
5.	Happy Aquarium	27,405,705
6.	Mafia Wars	26,815,058
7.	FishVille	26,186,935
8.	Birthday Cards	24,957,972
9.	Pet Society	21,450,666
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	20,349,406

Zynga released its newest entry, PetVille, to its ‘Ville game series at the beginning of December, and the game has been seeing the same sort of results that the developers’ most recent releases have, including Café World and FishVille. The virtual pet-caring game has been out for two weeks and has already boosted its audience by 90 percent, the largest percentage boost of any app this week. It now has 10.3 million monthly active users with 9.31 million joining last week.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	PetVille	10,250,099	+9,305,801	+90.79
2.	Birthday Cards	24,957,972	+7,326,053	+29.35
3.	Happy Pets	10,351,430	+2,897,321	+27.99
4.	FarmVille	72,898,865	+2,421,869	+3.32
5.	FishVille	26,186,935	+2,144,789	+8.19
6.	Zoo World	6,185,092	+2,041,084	+33.00
7.	Fish Isle	3,994,610	+1,321,060	+33.07
8.	Santa Yourself	1,499,936	+1,090,353	+72.69
9.	Country Life	4,342,720	+890,132	+20.50
10.	Champions Online	2,569,468	+756,472	+29.44
11.	Treasure Madness	3,144,187	+594,968	+18.92
12.	Café World	32,175,759	+574,733	+1.79
13.	Hug Me	5,243,148	+467,941	+8.92
14.	Poker Rivals	805,571	+433,992	+53.87
15.	Medical Mayhem	1,682,528	+418,233	+24.86
16.	Texas HoldEm Poker	20,349,406	+404,659	+1.99
17.	Happy Farm	3,018,765	+371,314	+12.30
18.	Crazy Planets	2,723,539	+362,523	+13.31
19.	Fish Life	3,128,811	+334,346	+10.69
20.	Forever Friends	2,238,249	+311,212	+13.90

In second place, Birthday Cards continues to prove itself as a useful service for the Facebook community. The Card making/sending app by RockYou! rose 29.4 percent last week, adding 6.6 million monthly active users to a service that 24 million people use every month. However, as we noted over on Inside Facebook, the company has actually built a version of its Zoo World game within this app, which may account for some of the growth.

Note that today’s top 20 list looks at which games gained the most monthly active users in the last week, while our Wednesday list covers the games that gained the most daily active users in the past week. The MAU number shows the long-term trajectory of an app’s popularity, while DAU shows how many people love each game so much that they come back every day; because users tend to pay for virtual goods within apps they come back to every day, the latter number is a better measure of monetization. Also, our Friday list looks the apps that grew by the most monthly active users each week to end with a total of between 100,000 and 1 million — by looking at this lower range, we can sometimes spot smaller apps on their way to becoming hits.

FarmVille, fourth, did just a little better then FishVille fifth, this week by adding 2.1 million new monthly active users, or 3 percent of its total 72.6 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, FishVille grew by 8.19 percent, to end with 26.2 million total monthly active users. Growth has slowed slightly for FishVille compared to its siblings, but is still a top five game this week.

Despite the competition, virtual pet-caring Happy Pets, by CrowdStar, managed to stay in the top five again last week, upping its monthly active users total to 10.4 million, up 28 percent from last week.

All in all, nine of the top 20 games this week are some variation of the pet care genre, whether that pet is a farm or a fish. Second is gift-giving, with three apps — these are not typically games, but the apps’ developers for some reason tend to mark them as games, anyway. Finally, Christmas-themed games barely made it on, with Santa Yourself staying the sole Christmas themed app at 1.3 million users (still, that’s up 68 percent over last week).

Next week, what will happen in the battle of the ‘Villes this month and how will that affect competing pet care games? Will any holiday games come to the forefront of is it a moot point? And will any left field titles break the top 20? Who knows? Feel free to guess.

Japanese anime, manga, comics are popular around the world. In light of this, online entertainment company, GCREST made its social MMO, TinierMe, available to English speaking audiences in North American and Europe.

The game is currently within open beta for the Americas and Europe, and its core game play is exactly what the title suggests: To create a tinier version of you. The web-based TinierMe has players jumping head first into a very manga/anime style virtual world, dubbed SELFY Town, with their whole goal being to create the perfect outfit and room for them.

Quite frankly, once you figure it out, the avatar customization was wonderful. With just the starting money the game grants you (more can be earned through normal game play; i.e. mini-games), it is possible to go from an outfit that screams “newb” to something that looks really cool. Moreover, the game also has a secondary, purchasable virtual currency, G-Coins, for users to spend on even more unique items. Of course, even if you do not spend real money, all of the outfits are all still very nice-looking and most are quite unique, ranging from things like a belt jacket to floating demon flames. Unfortunately, this ability to look so good early on is a double-edged sword. Yes, it is gratifying to get some sort of character improvement, but it is better to take smaller steps forward. If you look awesome right away, then what do you have to look forward to? Nevertheless, as time wears on and the clothing selections increase, this might prove to be a moot point.

Even if clothing becomes limited, players still have a room to decorate, and this proves most expensive. Most of the items worthwhile (chairs, tables, etc.) are about the cost of two or three clothing pieces, so a lot of time has to be spent earning money. However, some of them are quite nice, with interior designs ranging from traditional Japanese, to modern, to “feline” (cat-girl). Make them look nice too, because anyone can visit your room at any time.

While self-expression through avatars and rooms is the key draw, TinierMe also has a number of other basic social elements as well such as diaries, friending, mail, chat, and mood emotes. The MMO also has a few synchronous mini-games too where you can play with other users. One such game is Old Maid, which allows you to play cards with a couple other players simultaneously.

A second mini-game worth mention is the fishing game. When you actually get a bite, you have to “shoot” the fish as it darts about a small screen. You get limited tries, and if you don’t hit it enough, you don’t catch it. But when you do get it, everyone in the immediate area knows via a chat announcement.

Unfortunately, all of this becomes a little difficult to figure out because the game never tells you what to do. Thankfully it is not a complicated game. Furthermore, half of what you can do is from a Flash window, and the other half from a separate web page. This includes equipping items, buying clothing, finding help, and so on. It isn’t a huge deal, but it does break the flow of the game.

Beyond this, the only other major complaint is limitations. As it stands, the game world is very, very small, the clothing selection is moderate, and frankly, there isn’t a whole lot to do. Yes, you can earn new clothes, better stuff for your room, and even pets (eventually), but doing so feels repetitive (just playing the same games over and over to earn more money). Granted, this is a bit of personal preference, but the actually “play” part of this title feels a little lacking.

Regardless, GCREST states that its social MMO does have over a million users over in Asia, thus these opinions are just that. Opinions. The game isn’t bad at all. Quite frankly, the art style is very nice despite a slight variation between the avatar and background, the clothing looks great, the rooms do have a lot of options, and the mini-games are fun. TinierMe just feels like it could benefit from more of everything. The game is still in beta, so we expect to continue to improve.

Xbox Suits Up for the Holidays – Microsoft has laid out its holiday plans for Xbox Live, and they include a myriad of deals, including new avatar items. The specials are starting out with new holiday and tokidoki outfits for sale in the Avatar Marketplace, with some special Disney Classic items coming on Christmas Eve. Furthermore, December 18th will kick off twelve days of special holiday deals in which Microsoft will host one-day sales for Xbox Live Marketplace items including games, movies, add-ons, and themes. [image via Gaming Angels]

MOL Global Buys Friendster – While rumors about some sort of sale have been out there for awhile, Friendster has now officially been acquired by MOL Global, a division of online payments company MOL AccessPortal Berhad. The purchase price has not yet been disclosed but MOL is looking to combine its services with the existing Friendster platform to create a content distribution and e-commerce platform for the Asian market. Currently, MOL holds a network of 500,000 payment channels across 75 Asian countries, while Friendster has over 75 million users of the same demographic.

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million – Location based mobile game/app, Gowalla looks to be doing well as it has just raised $8.4 million in a Series B round led by Greylock Partners. Other investors include Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Veynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis, and Chris Sacca. This brings the investment total for Austin-based company, Alamofire, to $10 million.

PlaySpan Releases VGMarket Digital Goods Study – PlaySpan and VGMarket recently completed its virtual goods study on user buying habits. The study surveyed 2,425 random individuals that made use of either the PlaySpan Marketplace, Spare Change, and/or the Ultimate Game Card. In a nutshell, the study noted that 80% of users make virtual goods purchases for themselves to use in game, with the other 20% gifting them. Furthermore, roughly 66% bought virtual goods once per month while 25% did so once a week. Of everyone, however, 7% made daily purchases and 12%, yearly.

Another curiosity was that most users will not purchases virtual goods from third parties. 42% refused to do so out of fear of getting their account closed while another 42% were afraid of scams. 9% just didn’t know they could.

The full report can be found here.

Sony Offers Players Virtual Goods Rewards – Sony Online Entertainment has launched Facebook pages Twitter accounts for its three big MMORPGs, Everquest (FB, Twitter), Everquest II (FB, Twitter), and Free Realms (FB, Twitter). In order to get players involved in these new pages, they have created the program, ConecDING, that will reward users with virtual goods when the social media pages reach a certain number of fans or followers.

There will be three milestones of 5000, 10,000, and 25,000. At each one, players of each game will be eligible to receive 250 in Sony’s virtual currency, Station Cash (SC), 250 SC and a virtual good worth10,000 SC, and 500 SC and an item worth 25,000 SC respectively. For Free Realms, the goods will be a House Frog and Small Dance Floor; for Everquest they will be The Tome of Friends and The Magic Lute; and for Everquest II it will be The Cloak of Pie and an unannounced item.

Virtual Currency Used to Fight Health Care Reform? – This past week a health insurance group called Get Health Reform Right was apparently sponsoring ad offers that were actually paying social games players in virtual currency to send letters to Congress that opposed the health care reform.

The Business Insider describes the act as “virtual astroturfing,” with astroturfing being the act of orchestrating a campaign yet disguising it as spontaneous public opinion.

YouWeb Invests into Social Gaming – YouWeb, founded by Oracle Internet executive Peter Relan, announced Friday that it is going to begin heavy investment into social gaming in 2010. The focus will be to jump start an entire “ecosystem” centered around its social gaming companies of CrowdStar, Aurora Feint/OpenFeint, and Sibblingz. All ready the “ecosystem” has many entreprenurial startups involved, but by the looks of things, they intend to concentrate the “efforts of entrepreneurs around the real opportunities using its perspective gained” from the aforementioned big three.

YouWeb also plans to host a Social Gaming Eco-System Summit at some point in the near future. It is here that it will clarify and outline these “plans” and “opportunities” for its companies.

Tonchidot Gets $4 Million for Augmented Reality Virtual Goods – Augmented reality, the combination of real world objects with virtual ones, is a growing space in the mobile field, but a Japanese startup by the name of Tonchidot is taking a new perspective on the matter. The company just landed $4 million in funding from DMC and ITOCHU Technology Ventures for a very diferent monetization concept. Based on early demonstrations, the technology could allow brick and mortar locations to sell virtual goods using the “Sekai Camera System.”

Mochi Media Surveys Flash Game Developers About Monetization – Among other results, 20% of developers said they make more than $1,000 a month on games. More here.

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin – Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What type of game mechanic is being favored by a large game developer these days, to the exclusion of still-popular titles? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Even though simple Christmas-themed applications are getting big with Facebook users, social game developers and players don’t seem as interested — at least judging by our weekly list of up-and-coming games drawn from AppData. ‘Tis the season for gambling and Monopoly-style games continue to do well, apparently.

This week’s top gainer wasn’t just the top gaining game, it also was the only game on the list to more than double its audience. With a 62 percent increase over last month, Playfish’s Poker Rivals is doing a fantastic job separating itself from some of the other Poker and gambling titles on Facebook while still gaining a sizable audience. The title has a monthly user average of 681,908 players and is on its way to making a good showing on both our top 20 daily and monthly average users list. However, it still has a ways to go before it catches up with Zynga’s Texas HoldEm poker game, which has more than 20 million monthly active users.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Poker Rivals	681,908	+425,075	+62.34
2.	Super Farkle	848,347	+215,096	+25.35
3.	Ponzi, Inc.	430,715	+177,514	+41.21
4.	Youtopia	353,498	+160,361	+45.36
5.	Top Fish	370,557	+137,133	+37.01
6.	Minigolf Party	941,697	+116,497	+12.37
7.	GooBox – Giochi gratuiti	302,913	+106,367	+35.11
8.	Ask a Friend	800,486	+106,120	+13.26
9.	Fairyland	689,573	+105,225	+15.26
10.	Quiztastic!	783,931	+94,997	+12.12
11.	Ninja Warz	375,789	+91,045	+24.23
12.	Bite Me	184,488	+83,515	+45.27
13.	Candy Cane	148,306	+69,884	+47.12
14.	Rock Legends!	972,154	+68,702	+7.07
15.	Songs	759,654	+59,751	+7.87
16.	歡樂癲地 Funland	520,657	+56,891	+10.93
17.	COLLAPSE!	433,003	+55,062	+12.72
18.	Chug It!	791,875	+48,836	+6.17
19.	Gift Creator	736,934	+46,139	+6.26
20.	Send Holiday Wishes	102,263	+45,225	+44.22

Note that this list look at up-and-comer games, or those that gained the most new users last week and ended with between 100,000 and 1 million users. This view allows us to spot small but promising apps early in their growth.

Super Farkle, the popular dice game by Offbeat Creations, Inc. has upped it’s user base by 25% to a monthly user total of 848,347. And Ponzi Inc., a multi-player Monopoly-styled game, has boosted its audience by 41 percent or about 178,000 people, with a total monthly user base of 430,715.

Other games that seem to be doing well in recent times is Youtopia by Hive 7 in fourth place. The game allows players to follow their industry of choice straight to the top; it’s the newest title for Hive 7 which has ten games on Facebook including the semi-popular Knighthood, which places 23rd on the up-and-comers’ list with about 407,000 players. Youtopia has a little less than 354,000 players, but received a 45 percent boost last week, and it wasn’t the only one. Bite Me by Three Rings and Send Holiday Wishes each enjoyed a 45 percent boost in attention and monthly average players last week.

Three Rings touts Bite Me as a “[a] strategy RPG set in a world of hipster Vampires,” a timely idea that has helped the title become the 12th up-and-coming title this week with a total of nearly 185,500 players. Meanwhile a different type of timely has helped Send Holiday Wishes, by a developer of the same name, drop onto the list at 20th with steady growth and a monthly user average of 102,263 players. Timely decisions should help both of these games rise in the top 20 ranks for the rest of the month at least.

Meanwhile, the Christmas theme is overall not as interesting a proposition to game developers and players, versus . There are only three holiday themed titles in the top 20 for up-and-comers (and two of them are 19th and 20th) and five in the top 40.  At this rate it seems unlikely to change anytime soon, but we’ll see next week.