One of the dominant themes for social gaming companies this year has been the desire to move into new markets. Often the destination is Asia, where gaming, especially online, is far more common. Last year, when we were predicting a $1 billion virtual goods market for the United States, Asia’s was reportedly worth $7 billion.

But how quickly are developers actually setting up operations across the Pacific? It’s true that many developers have set up social gaming studios in mainland China, and are localizing titles for particular markets, like Japan’s Mixi social network.

But overall, Southeast Asia has generated the most traction for social gaming companies — on Facebook. Social networks in mainland China tightly control third-party access, and byzantine government gaming regulations make the market even less accessible. Mixi and other Japan-based sites are lucrative, but smaller than some others in the region and have a reputation of being culturally impenetrable.

The story isn’t so much that social game developers are leaving Facebook for Asia-based social networks. It’s that these companies are following Facebook’s expansion to Asia — and taking advantage of regional talent and markets on the side.

Zynga in Asia

The most active American company, by far, has been Zynga. In some ways its first Asian deal was its acquisition of GoPets last November, which although a California-based company, had its roots in South Korea.

Zynga started its Asian dealmaking in earnest in late spring:

• In May, Zynga acquired XPD Media, a Beijing-based social game developer with 40 employees
• Late in July, Zynga confirmed a $150 million investment from Japan’s Softbank
• Earlier this month, Zynga picked up Unoh, a Japanese developer, for a reported $11.6 million

In July, we were reading in the Chinese press that Zynga had acquired two more companies in Chengdu City, but a Zynga spokesperson denied that any such deals had taken place. For the moment, the company is probably focusing most intently on Japan.

Everyone Else

Softbank hasn’t just bet on Zynga; the Japanese tech giant also placed a $10 million investment with RockYou in June, following an earlier $50 million round. Those investments aren’t one-way for Softbank, which probably hopes that the companies will create Japanese games that it can profit from through its web or mobile services.

Among the few other deals what we’ve heard about, there is also a partnership between Japanese mobile developer DeNa and the social platform OpenFeint, and various publishing deals between small Western developers and 6waves, which is based in Hong Kong.

As with Softbank, those are both cases of Japanese companies reaching across to American companies — a trend that may turn out to be more prominent than the reverse, given the larger and more entrenched market in Asia.

In April, we also reported that two of China’s biggest gaming companies, Tencent and Shanda, were looking at acquiring Crowdstar and RockYou, respectively. Tencent itself has also built Facebook games, while there are a number of smaller Chinese companies on Facebook who likely aren’t sizable enough for large acquisitions but could enter other deals, including 5 Minutes, Boyaa and Happy Elements (links go to our coverage).

There’s one more, somewhat unquantifiable measure of activity from American companies: studio operations in Asia. Most major companies have a presence, including CrowdStar, Playfish, PopCap, Playdom, RockYou, Slide, Kabam, and Zynga.

It may be challenging to get visibility into what these companies are doing in Asia. As RockYou cofounder Jia Shen commented in a recent interview with us, Asia’s social networks place little value on transparency, making it a guessing game as to which companies are doing well.

But it’s difficult for any company to cross the Pacific and expect to do well alone. During the rest of this year, we’re likely to see more acquisitions and partnerships, as well as the first signs of success from the most serious efforts at internationalization.

Top Chef Basic Training is the latest social game designed to help promote a television show. Hosted on Bravo Network‘s Top Chef site, it uses Facebook Connect to get people making food and sharing the action back to Facebook friends.

The last major Facebook Connect title of merit was the Science Channel’s quiz-app, Head Games late last year. Top Chef Basic Training, developed by Animax Entertainment, is also centered around the theme of its show. The game-play is rather dull, but the title a better job than most have so far with promotional social titles.

Learning the game is simple enough, as the process of making a dish is broken up into three major sections which consist of gathering ingredients, preparation, and presentation. Each one can be accessed as a practice drill, but only when the player plays all three sequentially can they earn any real score or reward.

Recipe Recall is the first of the three, and is basically a stylized game of memory. Here, users are given a dish containing random ingredients (cabbage, onion, cheese, etc.) and must remember the ones that appeared after they’ve been covered by clicking on a set of images below. As users get them correct, more and more ingredients will be added to the dish to be memorized with the objective being to score as many points as possible in 60 seconds.

Once finished, it’s time for the second 60 second mini-game, Knife Skills. This segment requires a bit more twitch skill as the objective is to chop up as many of the ingredients as possible. Moving a knife back and forth, players try to time when to chop as the food slides back and forth on the screen at varying speeds. Eventually, more than one food product will appear at a time, and cutting both will earn bonus points (note, that there is only one try before the next food item appears). It’s moderately amusing, but rather tough to get used to. The knife is at an angle, so there is no real focal point for chopping, thus making accuracy difficult.

The last game is the final preparation for the dish aptly called Presentation. It’s probably best described as a problem solving game, as users are presented a burger or sandwich of some sort and must pick the correct foods that comprise its layers. This includes the bun, meat, cheese, toppings, and so on, with extra layers added as the player moves along. Like the previous two, this game, as well, is timed at one minute.

Once players finish an entire game, the points they earn in each drill will accumulate to produce a final score that will be posted within three leaderboards – All-Time, Weekly, and Monthly. These are, as one might expect, made up of all Facebook connected players, but the user can adjust it to only show friends. Beyond this, though, the only other social element is earnable medals and badges that can be posted to one’s feed.

In truth, Top Chef Basic Training is not really all that much fun of a game. The different segments it is comprised of are just too simplistic and merely food variations of very dated game concepts. That said, it’s not really a title intended to garner millions of monthly users, but more a promotional piece for the Bravo show itself. To that end, the title does better than most as the game does, at least, look good — good enough to make you hungry — and is technically sound.

Overall, it’s not a game that players are likely to come back to, although if it gets people paying more attention to the show, it will accomplish its purpose.

It’s been some time since we’ve seen anything from social developer Happy Elements. In fact, it has been a while since we caught wind of any major apps out of China as a whole. However, the social game maker is doing quite well with its new virtual space/business title 開心 Lounge Bar, which appeared in our fastest-growing Facebook games list last month.

Currently, the Restaurant City’esque title has 1.1 million monthly active users running virtual bars. Filled with the features that made the Playfish game popular, Lounge Bar has the right elements for growth. However, quality is also a major issue, and many aspects of the game feel a bit too inspired by its predecessor.

Unfortunately for us, the game is pretty much entirely in Chinese (save part of the title), but it is still easy enough to figure out. The theme is similar to Bar Society, in which the objective is to build up a successful bar. Unlike that game, however, Lounge Bar feels a bit more like a classy metropolitan lounge than a typical bar, hence the name.

Using themselves as an avatar, players assign themselves and their workers various jobs such as waiting tables, cleaning, or mixing drinks. Like most business oriented virtual spaces, customers file in to purchase drinks. Should they receive them in a timely manner, the rating of the bar will go up, which, in turn, equates to more paying patrons. Like in Restaurant City, customers having to wait too long for service, trash on the floor (trash appears while the user is logged off), and insufficient seating will lower the rating.

The biggest impact to ratings are wait times for drinks, which can be alleviated by adding decorations and hiring friends to work for you. Unfortunately, the game takes a step backwards socially with that feature, as it requires the friend to start playing the game before the user can hire them. In most virtual space games like this one, friends can be hired regardless.

Other social elements are still intact though, such as the ability to trade ingredients for new drinks. This is prudent as these aren’t all that easy to come by. Thus far, we’ve gotten new ingredients for logging in daily and completing various “tasks”, one of which was to upgrade a particular drink on the menu.

The menu itself, sadly, feels pretty much identical to the original Restaurant City in that players serve different types of drinks, upgrade them to make them worth more, must collect ingredients to make them, and can even post to their feed asking for ingredients. More than this, it just feels the same visually, down to the user interface elements.

As a matter of fact, many UI elements in Lounge Bar feel taken from Restaurant City. We’d estimate that over half the game derives from the Playfish title, including some of the décor (which if not a direct copy, is still very close). Even the “hire a friend” menu is the same, as well as the exterior 2D street of bars that represents the player’s and their friends’ virtual spaces. Even the shack “invite” buildings are there.

As for the décor, there is actually a massive volume of items one can decorate with. The app does have items, such as dividers and toilets, that are identical to Restaurant City, but it also has some very unique ones such as scuba divers, hula girls, and giant coral. Overall, it does provide a very wide palette of decorative potential.

On the social side, the hiring of friends has already been mentioned, but there are other, more minor aspects, such as the gifting of a round of beer, although it’s hard to say if this has any real benefits beyond normal gifting. Annoyingly, friends are also needed to expand one’s bar (in addition to level and money), so Lounge Bar effectively penalizes players whose friends choose not to play.

Lounge Bar is still doing well, and continues to grow. Regardless, it’s disheartening to see what amounts to a cloned app, rather than any effort at innovation. In the end, Lounge Bar is technically a “good” game, since it’s cloned from one, but it certainly isn’t an original one.

Why did Google buy social application developer Slide? A main line of speculation has been that the company wants to build a social gaming platform, and there are many reasons to assume that.

But we’re hearing that the search leader is focusing on creating general social products first, and it is still just at the start of doing that. Specifically, Slide founder Max Levchin will be personally responsible for leading the design and launch of a new social product, including some form of third-party platform around it.

Social games could become part of the plan later, of course. They generate a substantial minority of Facebook’s site traffic and create substantial revenue in the form of virtual currency purchases. Gaming companies, other social networks, widget developers and everyone else has been trying to get in on this action already, as scarcely a day seems to pass without another self-described “social gaming platform” launching.

For its part, Google has shown many signs that it wants to get in, too. Within the last several months it has reportedly bought a stake in social gaming market leader Zynga, acquired virtual goods payments service Jambool and small widget and game developer LabPixies, and has been hiring product managers to focus explicitly on games.

The problem, as many other would-be platforms have already been discovering, is that the “social” part of social gaming has to come first. Then, games can be developed on top that use people’s social identities and the communication channels around them. Facebook has been able to create a social gaming ecosystem because it already convinced users to establish real-world identities and make online connections representing real-world relationships, all based around easy-to-use sharing features.

Google, we’re told, understands what the order of operations needs to be here. It is trying to fill the “social” product hole that it has until now either ignored or deprioritized. Somewhat-popular social network Orkut has not disrupted Facebook in most major markets, somewhat-used platform standard OpenSocial has not fully lived up to its potential, and none of Google’s social products overall have contributed significantly to Google’s revenue.

So what will this new social network thing look like? Google has not yet decided, and in fact the company has been busy sorting out the organizational structure around it. This was part of the reason that Google’s top executives decided to purchase Slide. But it was not just a talent acquisition.

Look more closely at Slide, along with the other social companies that Google has been buying, and you can see pieces of its plans coming together.

Slide’s History of Self-Expression

Slide has not been the most successful social game developer; Zynga, along with Playfish, Playdom, CrowdStar, and others, all have much larger and more engaging games on Facebook. Instead, its first big success was with photo-editing slideshow widgets on MySpace, in the earlier part of the decade — before the social network had a formal developer platform. Even though MySpace didn’t want third parties using its service at the time, users wanted to decorate their photo albums with sparkles, neon colors, cute icons, and the other self-expression options that Slide offered. And Slide, in turn, developed its expertise in this area, figuring how to get viral growth from the widgets, and hosting millions of photos and other media. The company still makes 40% of its revenue on its MySpace widgets, from things like branded virtual goods in slideshows and other types of ads, we’ve heard from industry sources.

Following the launch of Facebook’s platform in May of 2007, Slide quickly used its expertise to amass millions of new users. At the time, Facebook’s interface was a natural fit. Third parties could let users install application boxes on their profiles. Slide, along with long-time widget competitor RockYou, basically ported over many of their leading MySpace widgets, and not just slideshows but other self-expression winners like Top Friends.

But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his product team decided that they wanted information-sharing, not so much self-expression. The company had already been going this direction with the launch of the news feed in late 2006, but in a series of platform policy changes over the course of 2007 and 2008, it went further. The biggest was that it hid then ultimately removed third-party boxes from user profiles.

It also refused to introduce a key component of MySpace widgets: the option to auto-play Flash. On MySpace, Slide and RockYou were able to have their highly visual, audio-powered content playing as soon as users load a page. Facebook understandably didn’t like this user experience, even though it had proven an effective way for developers to get users engaged. Here’s how RockYou chief executive Lance Tokuda described the issue to us, back in June of 2007.

The lack of auto-play with Flash almost kills the viral loop around friends visiting your profile. We’ve received a number of requests for this feature and we’re still hoping that Facebook will find an auto-play solution at some point. They are considering an opt-in solution. Without opt-in, I’m sure they would meet strong resistance from their loyal users. With opt-in, I think the experience might be positive by adding more engagement to their site.

Yet Facebook’s sharing focus has proved massively successful in the last few years, making the service becoming the default way for millions of people to consume information from around the web. The news feed has also proven to work great for social game developers, who relentlessly have users sharing gaming activity to their friends.

Slide, RockYou, and other companies that had built their businesses around self-expression, struggled to adapt to the changing ecosystem. They developed social games, often via expanding on themes from their earlier successes and cross-promoting the new titles to their existing users. Some titles, like SuperPoke Pets, have gained decent traction. But not nearly as much as Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and the other social gaming market leaders of today — these companies made gaming the focus from the start, and grew significantly over the course of 2008 and 2009 as the platform shifted.

What Will Slide Do Now?

Many developers we know in the industry have considered Facebook’s platform changes and policy enforcement to be purely subjective, if not mercurial. That view is perhaps inevitable, considering that Facebook has constantly been redefining its core features, and figuring out how to deal withthe spectrum of developers (some of whom have been described as spammy, and in some cases scammy). Facebook itself has been working hard to move past the conflicts of the past, redoubling its efforts to provide developers with clarity around products and policies, as company chief technology officer Bret Taylor recently highlighted to us.

We believe that Levchin and his team will craft the rules of the platform to be extremely clear, in some places copying the best practices that Facebook’s platform has evolved to, and in other places making the platform work differently. Google has the incentive to play up any contrast it can to what Facebook has done — expect lots of spin around how it is more open and friendly to third parties than Facebook has been.

In sum, Slide has been through most of a decade’s worth of social development, across a variety of platforms, and it has dealt with severe platform changes. Now, Levchin and his team are getting the chance to pull all their lessons together and create what they hope will be a viable platform alternative to Facebook. Dozens of employees got large retention bonuses, ranging from six to seven figures, specifically to retain their skills in building massive non-gaming social applications.

We would not be surprised to see Google Me (or whatever it is called) making self-expression a priority, maybe even ways for users to do things like customize and auto-play slideshows on their profiles. And we also expect to see Levchin and his team to integrate the most social, self-expression focused parts of Google, like YouTube, Picasa (sort of), Blogger, Orkut and whatever else it can.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Facebook— tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, August 9th, 2010

• CloudCrowd Offers Peer-Reviewed Crowdsourcing Through Facebook
• Wowd’s Facebook Client Lets Users Refine Their News Feed
• Wildfire Builds Promotions Business on Facebook
• Facebook Tests New Birthday Wall Post Feed Story
• Facebook Tests Notification Unsubscribe Button For Feed Posts

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

• This Week’s Top 20 Pages: Eminem, YouTube, ‘House’, Megan Fox and More
• Webtrends Acquires Transpond Facebook, Mobile, and Web App Creator
• Credits Landscape, Platform Growth, Ad Growth, and Privacy Key Themes for Facebook in 2H 2010
• Facebook Introduces Official Korean-Language Page
• A Facebook Location API Could Be Coming Soon

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

• Now Showing: Threaded Comments for Multiple Posts of the Same Link from Different Facebook Friends
• Eminem Joins Lady Gaga, Other Musicians and Hits 10 Million Fan Mark
• New Facebook Photo Album Layout Launching for Everyone, Showing Up to 200 Photos Per Page
• Facebook Temporarily Blocks All Ow.ly URL Shortener Links
• Facebook Goes Againsts Google/Verizon Net Neutrality Legislation Proposal

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

• How Contests Can Create Long-Term Engagement with Users on Facebook
• Facebook Adds Graph API, OAuth 2.0 Integration to iOS SDK
• Brazil, Latin America’s Largest Country, Sees Facebook Growth in Key Demographics
• Combat Malaria With Nothing But Nets and Facebook Credits
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: DeNA Global, Meteor Games, A Bit Lucky, EA, & More

Friday, August 13th, 2010

• Facebook Live Launches, Broadcasting Celebrities, Product Launches and More from Company Headquarters
• Parature For Facebook Manages Customer Support For Your Brand’s Page
• Facebook Job Postings this Week: Engineering, Ads, Dubline and Palo Alto
• Booshaka Social Search Catagorizes Facebook Pages For Browsing Updates
• Note on Facebook’s Application Stats Reporting Bug
• Facebook Roundup: Data Center, Credits, eBay, Spotify, Delta and Cristiano Ronaldo

FarmVillain Gets Approved for the App Store — After four attempts, the FarmVille spoof app, FarmVillian is finally available in the iPhone App Store. Now, users can take revenge on their friends for spamming their feeds with fertilizer requests with funny and in some cases offensive jokes.

gWallet Forms Advisory Board — Social media monetization firm, gWallet, announced a new advisory board this week. With executives, brand marketers, and entrepreneurs such as Marc Ruxin, Eric Bader, Joe Hyrkin, and Doug Chavez, the board is intended to drive the company’s overall strategies, moving them forward, as it applies to what big name advertisers are looking for. The hope, is to better bring big brands into the social gaming space.

Cie Games Officially Launches Car Town with Big Brands — Cie Games has officially announced the launch of its virtual space game, Car Town, on Facebook. However, the game doubles as a business opportunity, with automakers earning a licensing fee each time a player buys one of their cars in game. Honda is among the first to join, and will provide an in-game showroom for its CR-Z sport hybrid and will advertise via virtual, in-game, billboards. Other noted licensing partners include DeLorean, Dodge, Fisker, Ford, General Motors, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Lotus, Mazda, McLaren, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Opel, Ram Truck, Scion, Toyota, Vauxhall, and Volkswagen.

HeyZap Launches HTML5 Support — The embeddable, social games distribution platform from HeyZap got an upgrade this week as the company has announced that it will now support HTML5 games. Until now, HeyZap has focused exclusively on Flash-based titles.

MySpace Gets New User Homepage — MySpace is getting a new design for its user homepage, as Mashable covered this week. The new look will focus on content discovery through the stream and better sharing tools. Currently, only a handful of people have access to the new layout, but all users will have it come August 16th.

[image via Mashable]

Doubloon Launches iPhone Support — The virtual goods optimization service from Doubloon is coming to iPhone this week. Announced Wednesday, the company will provide Cocoa libraries for iOS developers who wish to add a ready-to-go virtual goods transactions platform to their games. Additionally, the beta iPhone Library will allow for easy integration with the Doubloon API.

Buy a Pet Society Mayor Today — Pet Society fans can now take a piece of their game home with them as Playfish has made available a limited edition figurine of the Pet Society Mayor. The item can be purchased in both the US and UK Playfish stores on Amazon.com for about $25.

PayPal Seeks to Improve Virtual Goods Transactions — According to the Associated Press, PayPal is looking to make it easier to purchase virtual goods. Typically, digital goods are bought with some form of virtual currency that is bought in blocks of money such as $5, $10, or $20. Since many goods cost less than this, PayPal is planning to allow people to purchase such items with a sort of tab, then charging them once they accumulate a set amount.

In addition to this, eBay Inc. is currently in talks with Google to possibly bring the PayPal payment service over to the Android smartphone, according to Bloomberg.

Germany-Based Entreprenuer Dives Into Social Games — Germany-based entrepreneur, Ibrahim Evsan (or “Ibo”) has teamed up with Thomas Bachem to start up Up Web Game, reports TechCrunch. Founders of the European video sharing site, Sevenload, the pair is seeking to get into social games with their first project “Fliplife,” a 2D variation of the Second Life concept and built on its own proprietary platform.

PopCap Buys Intriguing Domains — PopCap Games has purchased dozens of gambling-oriented URLs for some of their most popular games such as Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, and Zuma. A full listing can be found at superannuation. As for what “plantsvszombiescasino.com” will be used for, your guess is as good as ours.

As many developers may have noticed over the past couple weeks, starting around the beginning of the month, Facebook began reporting some suspect traffic numbers for certain applications. For example, some applications have seen steep increases in reported traffic numbers that do not match stats that developers themselves are seeing in their own logs.

We’ve been in detailed conversation with Facebook about the issue, which they confirmed was a bug when it first appeared two weeks ago. Facebook says they are still working on correcting the bug, though they don’t know exactly when numbers for the affected apps will be corrected.

In the meantime, we’ve taken the step of flagging applications on AppData that have clearly had suspect gains reported by Facebook. For those apps which we’ve flagged, we are instead using the last accurate numbers from before the bug appeared in calculating developer totals. We’ll let you know as Facebook resolves the issue.

Although Jambool and Google weren’t offering comment about the report this week that Google bought the virtual currency service provider, cofounder Vikas Gupta has now confirmed the deal — although the company’s not saying anything about the reported $70 million to $75 million price.

Joining Google has been a long road for Jambool and its monetization product, Social Gold.

Like other companies in the same space, Jambool has been getting squeezed out of Facebook as that company introduces its own virtual currency, Credits. Gupta responded at length to Facebook’s aggressive introduction of Credits in a lengthy interview with us last month.

Despite the Google acquisition, Jambool says that it’s still doing business as usual, and will continue to operate all its accounts and work on Facebook.

Here’s the message that the Jambool homepage is currently displaying; it doesn’t provide detail on what the company’s plans with Google are, although one can easily assume that those plans have something to do with Google’s new social product efforts.

A Letter from our Founders

August 13, 2010

We are excited to announce that Jambool is becoming a part of the Google family today.

Jambool started as a social collaboration platform in 2006. In 2007, we shifted our focus to build applications on social networks. Along with success, we found fun and lucrative ways to monetize our apps – specifically virtual currency and goods. That led us to create a platform to help developers create, host, manage and monetize their virtual economies.

Social Gold has grown by leaps and bounds since it went live in 2008. In the first half of 2010, we’ve processed more than double the entire payment volume we processed in all of 2009. And we’ve welcomed hundreds of developers to our platform. The fact that our highest revenue day was in the last week attests to the continued growth of online gaming.

Our vision is to build world-class products that help developers manage and monetize their virtual economies across the globe. When the opportunity arose to join forces with Google to execute against this vision, we couldn’t pass it up. We are thrilled to bring the Social Gold platform to Google’s global users. And we invite you – our customers, partners, and friends – to continue on the journey with us.

Over the last few years, we have had the great fortune of working with an incredible team. Every day, we are amazed and humbled by what they have accomplished. We have had terrific support from our partners, investors and advisors; and we are lucky to have worked with each of them. Thank you!

As a team, we remain passionate about innovating on behalf of our customers. We aim to deliver the most frictionless, seamless transaction experience inside applications and games on every platform. We are thrilled to be part of Google, and we look forward to the exciting road ahead.

The game has only just begun.

Vikas & Reza

Another top role has been filled at Zynga, with the hiring of former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta as executive vice president of business. Van Natta, who was also chief revenue officer at Facebook until 2008, is also getting a spot on Zynga’s board of directors.

In some respects this hiring looks a lot like Zynga’s last placement, which made investment bank pro Dave Wehner the chief financial officer.

Both Van Natta and Wehner are men with deep connections across the tech and media industries, at home and internationally. That kind of experience can be difficult to find in the insular Silicon Valley community.

Zynga’s plans look increasingly geared for a broad expansion, though, and it will need executives that can guide it into new areas. As such, these recent appointments don’t necessarily imply an IPO, as some have speculated — the company would need to make similar hires whether or not it’s planning an offering.

Another similarity between Wehner and Van Natta’s hiring is that both men were reportedly involved with the company long before they were given their positions. In Van Natta’s case, he was serving as an advisor, as All Things D reported in July.

There has been plenty of activity at Zynga lately. Aside from the new hires, the company has also taken investments of over $100 million from both Softbank and Google, acquired developers Unoh and Challenge Games, and entered into high-profile brand partnerships like its 7-Eleven cross-promotion.

Though the last few weeks have been a bit quiet, the past seven days have certainly been a lively bunch for hiring amongst the major social developers; based on the data found on LinkedIn. A large portion of the activity took place over at Slide as a number of individuals are changing roles due to the recent acquisition by Google. In fact, the company’s Vice President of Operations, Ken Brownfield,  is now an Operations Manager for Google. Additionally, the developer formerly known as Watercooler, Kabam, has also been added to our list.

As a side note, be sure to check out the Inside Network Job Board to see who’s hiring now.

Here is the list:

CrowdStar

• Brice Morrison -  As the company’s only new hire this week, the former Technical Designer for Electronic Arts, Morrison is now a Game Designer for CrowdStar.

Kabam

• Jim Pearson – Formerly an Art Director for Playdom, Pearson joins the Kabam team as their new Art Lead.
• Keith Crowell – In a simple title change, Crowell was once Director of Customer Service while under the Watercooler tag. Now under the Kabam logo, he is Director of User Experience.

Playdom

• Ted Howard – Howard is now the Directory of Developer Experience at Playdom. Prior to this, his role was Director of External Development.
• Chad Meyers – Playdom gains a new Server Programmer in the form of Meyers. Previously, he was a Software Engineer for Seven Studios.
• Kaesi Solomon – A former PM at Tendril, Solomon is now a QA/Developer for Playdom.

Playfish

• Ian Griffiths – Griffiths changes roles at Playfish from QA Manager to Associate Product Manager.
• Martin Ritchie – With experience as a Senior Software Engineer at J.P. Morgan, Ritchie joins Playfish as a Server Side Developer.
• Ke Ren – Now a Server Developer at Playfish, Ren was previously a Senior Software Developer at Truphone.

PopCap Games

• Scott Willoughby – The former Director of Conversion & Retention Marketing at SEOmoz, Willoughby comes to PopCap as its new Customer Engagement Manager for Social Games.
• Darren Toshi – PopCap gains a new Facilities Manager with Toshi. Previously, he was Site Operations Manager at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

RockYou!

• Nathaniel Lee – Formerly an Illustrator/Animator for Zynga, Lee is now a Flash Artist at RockYou!

Slide

• Tawnee Kendall – The first of many rearrangements since the Google acquisition of Slide, Kendal is now Sr. Strategist of Customer Operations under the Google tag. She was previously a Community Manager under the Slide name.
• Ruben Zakarian – Under Google, the former QA Lead Engineer, Zakarian, is now a Software Engineer in Test.
• Pedro Meza – Though still a Software Engineer, Meza officially adopts the Google tag.
• Christyn Tannenbaum – A Product/Business Analyst for Slide, Tannenbaum is now a Quantitative Marketing Manager.
• Paul Thiel – Formerly an Engineering Lead, Thiel is now a “Member of Technical Staff” for Google.
• Kee Zhang – Zhang keeps his Graphic Designer role from Slide as he transitions over to Google.
• Ken Brownfield – Previously the Vice President of Operations for Slide, Brownfield is now Operations Manager with Google.
• Ray Courtney – Only a minor title change for Courtney with the acquisition as he goes from Engineering Manager to Manager of Software Engineering.
• Cameron Boehmer – Boehmer keeps the same title of Software Engineer through the acquisition transition.
• Cory Petosky – Petosky, too, remains a Software Engineer, though his tag changes from Slide to Google.

Zynga

• Rajneesh Malik – A former Sr. Recruiter for Microsoft, Malik is now a Recruiter for Zynga.
• Arya Asemanfar – In a job role change, Asemanfar is now a Principal Software Engineer at Zynga. He was a Developer.
• Kenji Bliss – Bliss joins Zynga as its newest 2D/3D Artist. Previously, he was a Concept Artist for Firaxis Games.
• Yohanes Frezgi – Once a student at Harvard Business School, Frezgi is now a Product Manager for Zynga.
• Heather Houston – Formerly a Research Associate at Cornerstone Research, Houston is now a Product Manager for Zynga.
• Arvin Bautista – Zynga gains another 2D/3D Artist in the form of Bautista. Before this, Bautista was a Senior Artist for Backbone Entertainment.