“ScamVille” Lawsuit Dropped Against Facebook: Rebecca Swift has withdrawn her potential class-action lawsuit against the social network, although she has not yet dropped her charges against Zynga. Both were in court over scams that ran on offer walls in social games. More on MediaPost.

God of War III Rages into 7-Eleven: The latest game to make use of virtual goods is the heavily anticipated console (PlayStation 3) title, God of War III. Though the game doesn’t release until mid-March, marketing in the form of Slurpee cups will be starting on February 1st. Each cup will grant the consumer a special code that will allow them to download various content such at behind-the-scenes videos, animated Kratos themes, and special armor usable within the game.

Peanut Labs Announces 11 More Publisher Partners: Peanut Labs Media, provider of monetization services via surveys, offers, and direct payments, announced this week 11 new social publisher partners. The list includes Aeria Games, Backstage Technologies, Blue Frog Gaming, Challenge Online Games, Inc., CyberStep, Gamepot USA, Inc., Large Animal LLC, Ray Flame Entertainment, Inc., SmallWorlds, Vogster Entertainment, and Zeevex. Each new partner will have access to the myriad of monetization methods Peanut Labs offers as well as making use of the turnkey platform’s sales logistics, customer support, currency conversions, optimizations, and inquiry resolutions.

Adobe Plans for iPad: Currently, one of the biggest concerns with Apple’s new iPad is that it imposes restriction that currently disallow users to access Flash-based content on the web. Frankly, this is a big issue considering that Flash content makes up most of the internet nowadays. However, Adobe’s Flash blog states that they and about 50 other partners in “the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliever on any device. ” Hopefully, this means we’ll be able to use Flash on the iPad sooner rather than later. [image via The Flash Blog]

Microsoft Downplays Virtual Currency: Despite the social movement for Microsoft, Wednesday played host to the announcement that the company would be downplaying the role of its Xbox Live virtual currency, Microsoft Points. Apparently, a number of users have been complaining about the Point pricing system, calling it “misleading.” To mitigate the issue, Microsoft will be displaying the real world currency (based on location) in tandem with the virtual currency price.

Gowalla Grants User-Generated Content: One of the key features of the location-based iPhone application, Gowalla is the prospect of trips. In a nutshell, players would have to visit various locals in order to complete a “trip” and would earn corresponding digital “pins” as a reward. However, most of these required users to go out of their way. In light of that realization, Gowalla announced a new feature that would allow it’s players to create their own trips using locations they regularly visit. Should the trip prove popular, Gowalla will promote it based on “the quality and relevancy of the trip, [and] the number of people who have completed the trip.” Afterwards, participants will be given their own custom, in-game pin artwork as a reward.

Motally Brings Mobile Analytics to iPad: Third party developers aren’t wasting any time with Apple’s new iPad. Just Thursday, mobile analytics firm, Motally announced that it will be bringing its services to the iPad. Already, it’s platform allows publishers to collect data and create analytic reports on the usage of their applications on the iPhone, but with the expanded service will now also be able to access said data through the iPad. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg as Mottally has stated that intends to support the iPad SDK once available.

Loopt to Spin Location-Based Apps in a New Way: A new location-based iPhone app called LooptCard from Loopt may be coming soon. Using the same type of technology as apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, this title is adding one more step to the check-in process with real world, vendor deals. Yes, these will be location based deals, but more than that Loopt is looking to get vendors to incorporate their game-like ideas of only offering deals as rewards for doing certain tasks or checking in at certain times of day. In addition to these new ideas, LooptCard is also planning, according to TechCrunch, to make direct use of Facebook’s social graph. [image via TechCrunch]

C64 for iPhone Emulator Gets a Little Social: For all those classic game lovers, the Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone is getting a little bit more social through the use of OpenFeint. Games will be receiving social features such as global leaderboards and/or achievements. Updated games within the emulator include Jupiter Lander, Lemans, Artic Shipwreck, Uridium, Nebulus, and Paradroid.

EA Considers Building or Buying Facebook Sports Apps: “We are learning an awful lot about a very different type of game experience than we are used to doing,” head of EA Sports Peter Moore tells Reuters. “You’re seeing a focus in our M&A activity being on companies that will enhance our digital strategy.”

There are a lot of simple, social apps available on the iPhone — games that are fun to play with friends, but may not be fun for all that long. Or maybe even not that fun, actually. Since these games typically cost money, buying them can be a tough call. Here’s a look at a few we’ve come across while perusing iPhone social platforms including OpenFeint, Plus+ and Scoreloop. They include: Drawbridge from Nucular Games, NBA Hotshot from Freverse, Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise from ZIO Interactive, and Hotwired from Kankado.

Drawbridge: This game certainly looks interesting enough, using an almost Little Big Planet art style consisting of simple graphics intended to look like cardboard cutouts. However, the game only has one objective, lower the drawbridge of your castle to let in allies and raise it to deny enemies. Each of the two character types are represented by either being unarmed or holding a spear respectively. In a Lemmings fashion, they all walk toward the end of the bridge and clear off the edge. Their only hope for survival, lies in the hands of the player letting them cross.

Controls, or the control (singular), rather, consist of touching the screen to lower the bridge and releasing to raise. For each ally that crosses into the castle keep, the stream of stick figures speeds up, forcing the player react quicker with each passing moment, and after three mistakes (letting an ally fall or an enemy in), the game is over.

Sadly, this is all there is to the game. One, infinite, never-ending level. Granted, the game is integrated with OpenFeint, so there are leaderboards of high score (score is based on how many allies you let in) systems so you can share with friends. Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly enough to make up for the listless game play, proving that the addition of social elements is not enough to salvage everything.  Frankly, it’s $0.99 cost was… upsetting.

NBA Hotshot: While medieval stick figures got a drawbridge slammed in the face, we had high hopes for the NBA licensed NBA Hotshot. The app is basically a digital version of the arcade game where players try to shoot X amount of basketballs into a hoop. Like Drawbridge, this game, too, only has one control mechanic, but whereas the former title only has one tap, Hotshot makes use of a flicking motion to pick up direction and strength, as well as basic physics to influence the path of the ball.

This simple mechanic creates a decent amount of depth that is actually fairly fun to play. Using just this flick, users can participate in Classic Play to shoot as many shots as possible within 40 seconds, with the hoop moving back after 20 seconds, and Three Strikes, where users shoot until they miss three times. Each shot made is worth one point, and two if the ball is flashing.

Unfortunately, the physics does feel a bit off, and it can be a bit hard to get the game to pick up your flick strength, but overall, NBA Hotshot was fun to play. In fact, the game comes with some nice social elements as well. Beyond its bluetooth enabled head-to-head mode, this application is socially empowered via plus+. This adds a decent amount of longevity through leaderboards and achievements. Couple this with the unlockable NBA licensed basketballs, and many players might find themselves playing this $0.99 app whenever they’re looking to kill a little time.

Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise: The third application on our list goes to that overly cute, Japanese kitty from Sanrio in Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise. This is another simple game, yet is easily the best looking out of the apps we’re looking at today. Visuals aside, this cute game has the players controlling virtually everything with the iPhone’s accelerometer. Players touch and drag a slingshot to send Ms. Kitty as high as she can go and tilt and turn the iPhone to collect apples and special items while she parachutes down.

For each item collected, the player’s score increases, but the trick is to do so without hitting the myriad of obstacles that are in the way. Doing so will cause Hello Kitty to drop some of the “special items,” mentioned prior, that had been picked up. One wants to hold on to these as they actually consist of backgrounds, photos, and other small items that the player can actually use to decorate a small virtual room in game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like other’s can see it, but it is a nice addition, nonetheless.

What people can see, however, is your scores as this title is empowered by yet another social platform. This time, it is the folks over at Scoreloop. Every time a player completes a level, they can put in a nickname and submit their high scores to the global leaderboards (and since it is using Core Social, they actually feel like part of the game and not a third party). Unfortunately, this social addition isn’t quite enough to justify the game’s $2.99 price tag. It is fun and cute, but the longevity runs out fairly quickly, thus the lite version comes much more recommended.

Hotwired: The last new iPhone game to take a peak at is Hotwired from Kankado. For the record, this game actually isn’t socially empowered by any of the third party platforms. However, the very nature of this game is, indeed, social.

Hotwired is actually a digital rendition of those very old analog games where you attempt to run a metal loop around an electric wire without touching it. In the game, one can play by themselves, using two fingers, keeping them relatively close to each other, and attempting to not touch a moderately swift moving wire. As they play, they unlock newer and more complicated levels.

What is most entertaining though is trying to play with two people. It is quite difficult, mainly because you have to try to keep the iPhone from moving, but once you get the hang of it, it is most amusing. You see, any time you touch the wires, the game buzzes and vibrates the phone, and watching someone instinctively jump and/or yelp is quite fun. Unfortunately, the amusement doesn’t last for a long time, and it is probably not worth its current $1.99 price tag. However, like with Hello Kitty, this game too, has a lite rendition that is certainly worth a try.

This Friday’s AppData list of top emerging Facebook games doesn’t have any new “graduates” to report — none of the games from last week’s list have yet passed a million users, the point at which we kick them off (and call them successful). However, there’s a solid set of growers that have returned, along with a couple potential new breakouts in Gangster City and Little Warrior.

To help spot the steady growers, about half of the games, we’ve colored them a brighter green:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Gangster City	459,799	+454,127	+98.77
2.	Little Warrior	687,761	+291,986	+42.45
3.	開心寶貝	991,633	+282,715	+28.51
4.	Band of Heroes	872,653	+130,145	+14.91
5.	Rummy Royal	199,376	+96,652	+48.48
6.	Frosmo	350,365	+90,242	+25.76
7.	MiniPlanet	336,934	+84,211	+24.99
8.	Sanalika	287,842	+73,274	+25.46
9.	IQ Test	463,531	+72,488	+15.64
10.	Spot The Difference	486,413	+63,810	+13.12
11.	Ninja Warz	802,095	+61,225	+7.63
12.	Temple of Mahjong 2	433,727	+59,389	+13.69
13.	Poll	955,345	+53,956	+5.65
14.	Little Rock Pool	451,568	+53,412	+11.83
15.	The True Age Test	562,703	+49,772	+8.85
16.	Flowers for Friends	402,451	+49,402	+12.28
17.	Dress Me Up	400,511	+47,805	+11.94
18.	Xx..Me 2 u bears..xX	281,162	+46,835	+16.66
19.	COLLAPSE!	877,523	+41,786	+4.76
20.	Bingo World	314,374	+41,169	+13.10

Is Gangster City, by Playfish, just another Mafia Wars clone? Not exactly: there are cut-scenes, music, a detailed story and other new aspects. We noted the game’s high level of polish when it launched, and it seems that players are responding well so far.

Next up is Little Warrior, a sort of rudimentary fighting game a bit like My Brute or the newly-released Killer Toon. The game has languished for some time, but got quite the bump in users over the past week, as you can see below.

開心寶貝 and Band of Heroes, the number three and four games, are both about ready to grow out of this list. There’s one big difference between them, though — the users of the former game are highly engaged, with about 39 percent of users returning, while Band of Heroes has low user engagement, suggesting that it may not be a lasting success.

Finishing off the top five, Rummy Royal is just what it sounds like: a way to play the Rummy card game on Facebook. Users seem to enjoy traditional games lately; there are two more just on this list, Temple of Mahjong 2 and Bingo World.

We took a look at virtual goods and social gaming in China, last week. Today, we’ll look at the app ecosystem inside RenRen.com and Kaixin.com; of these two sister sites, RenRen is the more popular and has one of the most open developer platforms in the country. We’ll look at how they present and promotes apps to users but focus more on RenRen.

Background

RenRen.com is one of China’s top 3 social networks. Together with sister SNS Kaixin.com, it accounts for around 16% of the total social network market in China, according to a 2009 report on social network usage released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

16% may not seem like much (we last reported Facebook’s estimated U.S. market share to be hovering around 58.6%), but it’s a sizable figure for the highly fractured China social networking market. According to the chart above, ‘other networks’ combine to make up around 15% of the total market, or nearly as much as RenRen.com. Unlike in the U.S. or other markets around the world where one or two dominant players have tended to emerge, China’s social networking market includes many smaller players. Here, the CNNIC has chosen to group these as ‘other.’

The CNNIC estimates that the average user has multiple social network profiles – around 2.7 per user, to be exact. The graph shows the how much of that 270% belongs to each of the major networks:

To calculate our 17% market share estimate for RenRen.com, we combined percentage figures for RenRen.com and Kaixin.com — both owned and operated by parent media company Oak Pacific Interactive, who has also recently announced that it will merge the two sites’ userbases. Then we divided by 2.7 to capture the number of users on social networks. Notice that the ‘Other’ category makes up a very substantial percentage of the total.

Overall, RenRen.com is China’s 14th most trafficked site, while Kaixin.com trails as the 122nd most trafficked site. This is according to Alexa, an imperfect web measurement service that is one of the few to make China web traffic publicly viewable. Kaixin001.com, on the other hand, is China’s 11th most visited site. Note that Kaixin.com and Kaixin001.com are not the same social networking service. Kaixin001.com was established in early 2008, seven months before Kaixin.com, and continues to occupy a very significant portion of Chinese social networking traffic.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the portals themselves. Both RenRen.com and Kaixin.com have identical user interfaces, save for slight color theme variations. Additionally, both networks leverage one app directory to bring social games to millions of users every day.

The RenRen.com homepage: friend updates, requests in the upper right-hand corner, instant messaging at the bottom, and a tab for apps in the blue section at the top of the page.

The Kaixin.com homepage. Same friend updates, same requests in the upper right-hand corner, and same app directory link, this time in orange.

Market share split:

Why is Kaixin.com so far behind its sister site? RenRen.com started out as Xiaonei.com, one of China’s earliest and most popular social networking services. Like Facebook, Xiaonei seeded itself from within college campuses (its name means ‘on campus’) and fueled its growth by leveraging the high interconnectedness of college networks. Later, Xiaonei’s parent company, Oak Pacific Interactive, decided to rebrand the site as the network for ‘everybody,’ or RenRen. In late 2008, an Oak Pacific subsidiary company, Qianxiang Wangjing, observed the increasing popularity of Kaixin001.com, and of its apps and games, and quickly launched a competitor site, Kaixin.com. In popular usage, the ’001′ gets left out, so both go by ‘Kaixin,’ which simply means ‘happy.’ In May of 2009, Kaixin001.com filed an unfair competition lawsuit against Oak Pacific for starting the site, which, according to China Daily, remains unresolved today.

Anyway, Kaixin.com jumped into the social networking game a little later than others, as its traffic numbers clearly indicate. At the same time, though it offered apps and games earlier than some of its competitors, Kaixin001.com remains closed to 3rd party development to this day. For the remainder of this article, we will look apps from the RenRen.com portal – one that’s both open to 3rd party development and sees significant traffic from China’s millions of social game players.

Major features:

The App Directory

Like top social games in the United States, the most popular Chinese social games demonstrate a remarkable lack of game genre diversity. Farming games dominate across the board. Other popular game themes are fish / aquarium, pets / animals,  and restaurants / kitchen.

RenRen’s top five games showcase familiar themes with a few variations: several are developed in-house by the SNS itself, and payments look a little different in China than what we’ve seen thus far on Facebook.

1 – Sunshine Ranch by Rekoo
18,932,037 monthly active users
1.6 million daily active users

Sunshine Ranch is a ranching and livestock game where users grow crops, raise animals, manage farm operations, and engage in ‘friendly competition’ to drive their ranch to the top of the leaderboard.

In an interview with Inside Social Games last August, Rekoo CEO Patrick Liu indicated that Sunshine Ranch was already seeing 7 million DAUs across all Chinese platforms at that time, and today it still holds the number one spot on RenRen.

2 – RenRen Café by RenRen
8,142,643 MAUs
870,172 DAUs

In RenRen Café, users recruit friends to be their café’s head chef, to act as waitstaff, or to “scrub the toilet.” The café also incorporates numerous self-expression mechanisms – users can earn or purchase unique decorations and specialty dishes to enhance their café and get ahead.

Notably, RenRen Café is developed in-house, and features fancier-than-usual 3D graphics:

3 – Building One by Shanghai Kai Ying Network Technology Co.
5,092,524 MAUs
588,491 DAUs

Building One is a virtual world that somewhat mirrors the increasingly common urban Chinese experience of living, working, and playing in mixed-use high-rises. Users play house, run a small business, and simultaneously socialize and compete with friends and neighbors. Building One is developed by Shanghai-based Kai Ying Network Technology Co., which received an undisclosed amount in a funding round from Kleiner Perkins’s China branch earlier this month.

4 – Happy Farmer by Beijing Tong Chi-Star Technology Co.

6,173,628 MAUs
574,688 DAUs

Happy Farm, likely to be China’s most popular social game, mirrors the familiar farm game mechanisms that have helped to make farm-themed games on Facebook wildly popular.

But this is not that Happy Farm. Well, not exactly. The ‘Happy Farm’ we’re familiar with here is the popular game by Five Minutes that made its way onto Facebook in mid-2009. According to AppData, Five Minutes’ Happy Farm is seeing 2,945,975 monthly active users and 921,131 DAUs.

According to an independent Chinese application data service, Five Minutes’ Happy Farm is seeing 27 million MAUs and 3.4 million DAUs on RenRen. So why didn’t we see it on “Most Popular” leaderboard (sorted by MAUs) within the portal itself? It appears that there may be a disconnect between RenRen’s own way of displaying and promoting certain apps and how well other apps are doing.

Happy Farmer is an identical knockoff, created by a company called Beijing Tong Chi-Star Technology Co., Ltd. Development, that made it into the top 5 when we took this snapshot, but is in fact not as popular as Five Minutes’ Happy Farm. We’ve reached out to contacts in the Chinese social gaming industry for comment, and will explore this question more in the next article in this series.

5 – Happy Aquarium by 6 Waves
4,688,484 MAUs
539,880 DAUs

Not to be confused with Crowdstar’s Happy Aquarium on Facebook, 6 Waves’ Happy Aquarium is that developer’s most popular app on RenRen, and its only app to have made it into this recent top five. Users get ahead by raising aquatic pets (some are more valuable than others), and decorating their aquariums with magical props.

Note: It appears this app may actually be made by Twofishes Interactive, as the developer has a very similar app called “My Fishbowl” on Facebook. That app has been promoted through 6 Waves.

In our observations of the leaderboard, significant traffic to the RenRen app platform is going to apps developed in-house by the SNS itself. This includes RenRen Cafe, noted above, but also factors in such non-game apps as photo albums, gifts, and a ‘voting’ app. Other top apps come from larger developers who have already made forays into markets outside of China’s SNS. Within the leaderboard’s top 20, many of the same names come up over and over again, not unlike lists we’re seeing on AppData week over week.

Update: Happy Aquarium was actually developed by Happy Elements Co., formerly Twofishes Interactive Co., while being published by 6 Waves, according to Haining Wang, Senior Director of Platform, Value-Added Services, and Social Gaming at RenRen.com.

Will they monetize?

How much money is there in the Chinese social games market? We noted in the last article in this series that the virtual goods market in China is estimated to be tracking toward $5 billion for 2010, while our latest numbers show the virtual goods market to be heading towards $1.6 billion in the U.S. But, what percentage of the impressive $5 billion is actually coming from virtual goods transacted within social games? Developers are not yet publicizing data on the ARPUs they’re currently seeing, but here are a few things we do know:

1. Chinese networks are notoriously difficult to break in to because not all are not open to third party app development. Kaixin001 and QZone, China’s two biggest social networks, currently feature in-house apps only.

2. Those that do officially allow third party development are often open only to ‘select’ developers who have cultivated business relationships (‘guanxi’) with the SNS. Additionally, as we’ve previously learned from an interview with Rekoo CEO Patrick Liu, the SNS often takes around a 50% cut of revenues.

3. Direct payment by bank card still seems the most common way to pay. Apps on RenRen integrate with payments provider YeePay, which offers bank card payment, mobile payment via SMS, prepaid card and timed IVR, but NOT credit card payment.

4. As of yet, there are no advertising offers of the likes we see on Facebook, but we did observe that you can now ‘earn’ points on Sunshine Ranch by inviting your friends to install the app.

We have previously noted an increase in Chinese developers creating apps for Facebook – enticed by its openness and massive global audience. We are also now seeing significant foreign capital flowing in to the Chinese social games market, despite recent barriers imposed by the Chinese government in the form of a ‘ban against foreign investment in the online games industry.’ (Note that this would explain why Shanghai Kai Ying Network Technology Co. received its recent multimillion dollar infusion from KPCB’s China gropu.) In the next post in our China social games series, we’ll take a look at the promises and pitfalls of the Chinese developer landscape, and look at why some of China’s most promising companies are looking to social networks beyond their borders.

Well, if you haven’t heard by now, shame on you. Apple’s latest creation, the iPad – a tablet device – is now out. We’ve touched on what this $500 device can do, and shared our expectations for third party developers, but just what are these developers saying? Here’s a roundup of conversations we and others have been having with them.

Note that the people who are talking are already focused on developing for the iPhone and other mobile platforms, so the news is most immediately relevant to them. Most of the responses are along the same lines — the iPad is going to expand casual and mobile gaming. On the social front, the bigger screen, faster processing speed and Wifi and 3G connectivity means that the device could be especially good for multi-player games.

Scoreloop has already announced its support for the Apple iPad through its Scoreloop Core Social, a mobile social networking platform. Chief executive Marc Gumpinger says that the first “Scoreloop enabled games for the iPad are already in the works.” One is to be Astro Ranch HD, a 3D space farming title from Tag Games (Astro Ranch is the iPhone title).

We also recently spoke to the folks over at Aurora Feint, developers of the OpenFeint social platform on the iPhone. They expect the iPad “to be a key console for gaming and especially casual and social gaming” and that Apple will “bring all its capabilities and user base to the tablet.”

And, Jason Oberfest of Ngmoco tells us that “we think the device is a big step forward for portable gaming and will give Apple a strong foothold in the home gaming space.”

Trip Hawkins, founder of social developer Digital Chocolate has also made positive comments towards the new device. In an interview with Pocket Gamer, he says that the “iPad and other tablets will be the expansion of the game market to include more ‘Omni Gamers’ who don’t currently think of themselves as gamers. These will be consumers from all walks of life and they’ll initially get a tablet instead of a laptop PC or DVD player and the next thing they know, they’ll be playing a game on Facebook and downloading apps.”

VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi was at the iPad launch event yesterday in San Francisco, and interviewed a number of the developers who attended. Shervin Pishevar, founder and chairman of the Social Gaming Network, said “the iPad will turn our laptops into the rotary phones of the future,” in that the device will take over as a central part of people’s day to day activities.

While developers are excited, they’re also buy looking at how to build games that best fit the new device. Here are a couple of Takahashi’s video interviews that address this point; the first is with Ge Wang, the chief technology officer at Smule and the second is with Travis Boatman of Electronic Arts’ mobile division.

Ge Wang of Smule talks about the iPad from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

Travis Boatman of Electronic Arts talks about the iPad from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

April 20 | San Francisco

2007 was the year social applications were born. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, and soon after similar platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible. Three years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry.

Now, in 2010, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Who Is Speaking?

We’re excited and honored to announce the following initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Register Now

A limited set of 20 “early announcement” tickets is now available at a special announcement price of $149. This price will change when these first 20 tickets are sold out. Space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

About this time a month ago, social startup SparkyBee launched its first game, Sparky Words. As far as word games go it was pretty fun. Since then, the company has developed its second Facebook application, Bee2gether, which it describes as a relationship game intended to “reinvent your online social experience.”

Though it is described as a game, Bee2gether is really more like a compilation of standard social networking features intertwined with gaming mechanics. Players jump right in as the app breaks down your Facebook profile and uses its information for itself. From here, players can then work on their ultimate goal: To be the most popular user on their network.

Users are able to search for random Facebook users as well as friends that have also installed the game and mark them with a relationship status (assuming they accept your friend invite). Said status can be either friendly or romantic with each one leveling up by percentage until you take the relationship to the next level (i.e. romantic relationships range from just “flirting” to “sharing a toothbrush”).

In order to improve these relationships — and your popularity — you do what one would normally do in real life: have interactions. These consist of everything from uploading pictures or video, sending gifts, going on virtual dates or vacations, or even owning property together.

As weird as that last item might sound, the game does have a built-in virtual mall in which you can buy homes, cars, artwork, and jewelry for yourself and others. These virtual goods be bought using virtual currency (called Credits, but not Facebook Credits) and can be kept or sent as gifts. Unfortunately, this is where some of our first complaints about intuitiveness came into play.

Now, for the record, Bee2gether is still dubbed “beta,” so such issues are likely to change. Nevertheless, the virtual goods mall – as SparkyBee calls it – was not exactly easy to find. There’s no main menu icon for it. It was only discovered via a help tool that says what you should do next. Apparently, if you click on an existing relationship, too, that opens up that profile and has a link at the top to buy gifts as well, but even that seemed unnecessarily buried. Also, when gifts were purchased, all that could be found was a blurb saying you bought X, Y, and Z. They couldn’t be viewed anywhere. Considering buying virtual goods is often about personal expression, not being able to display them renders them a bit ineffective.

The company has also stated that the game is delivered upon a platform developed themselves, which is how they offer their mail system and virtual goods mall (which they also say can host games by other developers). We’re interested to see where that goes.

Another issue we stumbled upon is that the game has in-game mailboxes within it, but when you click them, there is no way to get back to the main page and a browser refresh was needed.

Beyond these complaints, everything else was just minor, beta, bugs here and there – nothing to write home about. Of course, Bee2gether does still raise the concern as to how effective the idea is. Frankly, it is a cool concept, and having all the core social networking features (friends, profiles, a sharing feed, gifts, etc.) enhanced with a some game play-like mechanics really does make everything more gratifying. However, one has to wonder how many people will migrate over to use an app that contains most of the features they already have on their Facebook homepage; even if they are a little more fun.

In the end, Bee2gether is a good idea from the creative standpoint, and the only real problems are with intuitiveness and unviewable virtual goods.

Well the Super Bowl is almost upon us, and it looks like social developer Zynga is taking advantage. How, might you ask? Why, with virtual goods, of course. Just like a myriad of developers offered limited time virtual goods for their conclave of titles around Christmas time, Zynga is looking to springboard off of America’s most popular sporting event.

The move first came to our attention in Zynga’s, and Facebook’s, top application FarmVille. Certainly a curious choice for football as far as content goes, but considering the game’s at nearly 75 million monthly active users (MAUs), it makes for a great business one. Regardless, the farming behemoth has offered out 10, limited edition, football-themed virtual goods for its players.

The creativity is certainly there, ranging from a Football Tree, to a Gnome Ref, to even a “Line Quacker (yes, it is a duck with a football helmet). Of these goods, half can be bought using earnable in-game currency, while the others cost the buyable virtual currency, Farm Cash. Currently, the items are only available for six days, so there is a bit of urgency in purchasing them, which will likely coax many players to buy a little extra coin so they can afford them before they are gone. Furthermore, the football themed animals all cost the virtual currency and are just way too cool to pass up.

We should note, however, that Zynga is not using the official logos of NFL teams, rather approximate colors.

It also looks as if the other popular Zynga app, Café World, with its 30 million MAUs, is also offering similarly themed items. The difference here, is that they are not limited to just football, but other sports as well and include football shaped tables, bobble heads, and even big foam fingers. Furthermore, they aren’t noted as “limited” unless you click on a football helmet icon called the “Mystery Crate.”

This particular item costs the virtual currency Café Cash (and grants a random gift), as does some of the new sports items. Curiously, a majority of these goods still only cost the in-game currency (even if it is a bit pricey). Nevertheless, and even if it isn’t officially “big game” themed, it is highly coincidental and will probably receive sale boosts due to the coming event anyways.

On a somewhat separate sporting note, the Winter Olympics are coming as well to Vancouver, Canada on February 12. To that end, we also noticed that one of Zynga’s newer titles, PetVille (roughly 18 million MAUs) is offering a myriad wintery virtual goods within its furniture store under the guise of the “Snow Games.” The list of items includes skis, skates, snowboards, and flags.

Sadly, Zynga has not released any data regarding its seasonal, Christmas, virtual goods from its games. But because the company keeps rolling out new themes, we have to assume the efforts are generating meaningful engagement if not revenue.

Apple has just announced its long-expected tablet device, and it’s along the lines of what people expected: a 10-inch iPod Touch, basically. How is this going to impact social applications, especially social games? Essentially the same way that the iPhone, the iPod Touch and other devices already have — the tablet, called the iPad, will expand the mobile device market.

But by how much? We expect the impact to be significant, yet limited by Apple’s existing distribution and monetization mechanisms.

The combination of features is certainly promising. The app store comes built in. The 10-inch screen means there’s more room for sophisticated apps. Wifi (with option of 3G) connectivity means apps can easily build to be multi-user; the data plans, provided by AT&T are also relatively low, coming in at $14.99 for 250MB worth of data per month, or $29.99 unlimited. The price of the device itself is surprisingly low, starting at $500 for the most basic model (no 3g plan and not a huge amount of data storage).

Added up, these features make the iPad a device that people can buy relatively cheaply, take most anywhere and use high-quality apps — a ripe market for third  party apps. Video game publishers are already excited.

The hardware specifications:

- 0.5 inches thick, 1.5 pounds — “thinner and lighter than any netbook,” in the words of Steve Jobs
- 9.7 inch IP LCD display
- a  1GHz “A4″ chip that decodes high definition video for up to 10 hours on a single charge
- accelerometer
- compass
- speaker
- mic
- dock connector
- besides the 10 hours battery life, month of standby life
- Wifi
- 3G option

These features become even more significant when paired with Apple’s software platform. For experienced iPhone developers, expansion will be straightforward: Apple has made it so that all 140,000 existing apps in iTunes can function on the iPad, with the option to double the pixel count to better fil the screen. It is also introducing a new software development kit for the iPad. And as a further incentive to developers, it says it will be featuring iPad-specific apps within iTunes — the main distribution point for iPhone apps.

Another obvious positive: The iPad is meant for a wide variety of uses besides being a place for third party developers. Apple has built a new version of iWorks specifically for the iPad, it has created an iTunes-like store for books — hi, Kindle — and it has worked with newspapers to help them create tailored versions of their content for the device. Of course, the device will also sync seamlessly with Apple’s applications on its other devices — contact book, calendar, mail, etc. All of these factors will make the iPad more relevant to people, in turn making the iPad a better way for people to find third party apps.

Limitations

The market for this sort of device is only half-proven, with Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle, and netbooks providing the closest examples of successful products. However, the device looks very impressive, and on the whole we expect it to do well in the market, especially as Apple lowers prices from here on out, as it has done with other hardware.

Apple thinks there will be “a whole ‘nother gold rush for developers if they build for iPad.” And we agree that similar to the iPhone SDK, the device will create new opportunities for third party developers. Specifically for games, monetization should also increase because they’ll be able to start building free apps for the iPad that can integrate for-fee virtual goods — the result of an iTunes rule-change last fall, meaning the first generations of iPhone apps did not effectively have this option.

However, the usual downsides to development for iTunes are still present: the iPad lacks a “social graph” of active human relationships and doesn’t have the built-in communication channels that come with it. The result is that there are limited ways for developers to find new users. Besides being featured in iTunes, methods for app growth include using social platform services provided by Facebook and MySpace, or gaming companies like Ngmoco, Scoreloop and Aurora Feint, or advertising and press attention. Meanwhile, Apple also restricts important ways of making money from apps — specifically in-house virtual currencies within games.

Many developers will likely build for mobile devices in the coming year — and we expect many to do things like integrate Facebook Connect so you can play a game with Facebook friends. So far, though, no third-party distribution service has helped developers reach anywhere near the size and revenue run-rates of applications on social networks, as we detail in our latest Inside Virtual Goods report. We expect iPad applications to do well overall, but as the device is an extension of the iTunes platform, we expect its success to be hindered by Apple’s ongoing limitions on distribution and monetization.

[Thanks to the great live blogging by Engadget, Gdgt and TechCrunch. Screenshot credits visible in the watermarks.]

In the latest effort by big game developer Electronic Arts to become more social, the beta rendition of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online has just added Facebook Connect. Already containing the social elements seen in many free online games, this latest addition has taken what community it contained prior and paired it to Facebook’s.

For an online game Tiger Woods Online is surprising good looking and has a fairly quick load time, with a quality you might have seen towards the end of the PlayStation 2’s lifespan. Of course, this is all only surface value, so upon diving deeper, we discovered that the game play wasn’t too shabby either.

Basic play is simple enough: Players choose from single player, multiplayer, or tournament modes, pick a course (which are all real golf courses), and choose which character they wish to use. The controls are fairly intuitive too, using the position of the mouse and three clicks – one to start the shot, a second to choose power, and a third for precision – on a small power meter at the bottom of the screen. All three are based on timing, and the better it is, the better the shot. Rinse and repeat until you make a hole.

It’s best to practice in single player, but once you’ve gotten a pretty good feel for your digital clubs, you may want to try multiplayer and tournament play. The former is interesting, because it has a very massively multiplayer feel — you watch other golfers shots (live) in the form of multicolored arches while you chat with them. Tournaments, on the other hand, can be daily or weekly with one and four rounds respectively. It is all done asynchronously with scores posted on a leaderboard and in-game cash prizes for the winners.

If you’re not too good at the game yet though, don’t worry, as playing matches earns users experience, which, in turn, determines their skill level in the game. This means that tournaments offered will always be limited to the player’s experience level.

Assuming the player does win some digital coin (as a side note, this can be earned through normal play as well), they can visit the Pro Shop to and purchase virtual goods that augment their avatar’s ability as well as provide a little social expression. Unfortunately, the beta version does not currently have this feature available. However, the player can at least visit a separate “Swing Trainer” to learn new skills and swing types.

This feature is noted under the “My Golfer” section of the game’s site, and conveniently, the home of the Facebook Connect link-up. Without doing more than a simple button press, users sync their EA and Facebook accounts, thus granting players the ability to not only post achievements earned to their Facebook stream, but also invite Facebook friends to join them.

This actually leads to a pretty cool social feature, in its own right, called “Fans.” It comes off as, basically, a friends list, but rather than just a location to show who’s online and where they are playing, more fans also equals more experience earned when you play. Moreover, you can even “Favorite” them to become a fan of theirs. Once done, you can sponsor them for a chance to earn extra cash, thus truly creating a social two-way street.

For a beta version, Tiger Woods Online makes for a pretty fun and relaxing experience. Its simple and intuitive controls don’t need much in the ways of instruction, and for an online game, it was surprisingly high quality in the visual department. Frankly, if you like golfing, and you like free games, then Tiger Woods Online is worth a try.