Publishers Clearing House Acquires Funtank — Earlier this week, Publishers Clearing House announced the acquisition of Funtank LLC and its property, the casual and branded gaming site, Candystand.com. Funtank will operate as a subsidiary of Publishers Clearing House in New York, run by co-founders James Baker and Scott Tannen. The financial details weren’t disclosed.

DeNA Under Investigation — DeNA, owner of Japan’s mobile social network Mobage-Town, is apparently under investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission this week, says AsiaJin.com. Based on reports from Nikkei, the investigation involves unfair business practices, in which DeNA allegedly forced third-party game developers to stay off the network of its competitor, Gree.

Mig33 Goes to Android — The mobile social entertainment service Mig33 launched for Android this week, says Gadget. Now, owners of any Android mobile device will be able to access mig33′s games, chat features, virtual goods, and other social services.

Zynga Steps Up Its Mobile Game — MocoNews.net has highlighted some of what Zynga’s SVP of Mobile, David Ko, said at LeWeb in Paris this week. With the acquisition of Newtoy, the company is getting deeper into mobile games with Ko hinting at location-based titles and noting that Mafia Wars will be coming to Android later this month.

Digital Chocolate Titles Ported to iOS — Digital Chocolate is expanding its Millionaire City remakes of Hollywood City and Vegas City to the iPhone and iPad.

EA Expects Significant Digital Sales Revenue — According to GameSpot, Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown has noted, at the UBS’s 38th Annual Media and Communications Conference, that the company is expecting the revenue from digital goods, this year, to be 20 percent; approximately $750 million.

Castle & Co Launches on Mixi — Ubisoft is taking its cutsie, virtual space game Castle & Co, which was already on Facebook, to Japan’s Mixi social network as “キャッスルらんど” or CastleLando.

SponsorPay Announces New Partnerships — European virtual currency monetization platform, SponsorPay has announced new partnerships with the online games publishers of Gamania and Mail.Ru, and the games distribution company Viximo.

Apple to Improve App Purchasing & Sharing — A release from the US Patent & Trademark Office has revealed a new patent for Apple and the purchasing of applications at places such as the App Store. According to Patently Apple, the system will utilize an “Application Seed” methodology, which means that when users download an app, they will be able to share it with others, allowing them try it, for free, and effectively helping to mitigate the over-saturation of apps on the market.

FarmVille Players Exhorted to Play CityVille — Zynga is pushing its new title hard, having added a “neighbor” called Sam to FarmVille that asks players to go try CityVille. Resident farmers can also see a rather sizable, and clickable, billboard promoting the new game. This follows other cross-promotion techniques that already led us to speculate that CityVille is in many ways a replacement for FarmVille.

Adknowledge Gains New Partners — Adknowledge has partnered with social game developers Ludia and GSN, according to EngageDigital. Users of the games The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune will now be able to earn free virtual currency through the ad offers of Super Rewards.

[Editor's note: Vijay Chittoor is CEO of Mertado, a startup that offers real-world merchandise within social games. He was previously director of product management at Kosmix, and worked as a consultant for McKinsey.]

By all estimates, U.S. social gaming revenues are growing robustly and are expected to reach $1.25 billion by 2011. However, individual game developers still monetize an average of only one to three percent of their audience through virtual goods.

As a result, alternative monetization techniques have been developed for non-paying users — primarily advertisements and promotions linked to virtual currency (including offers, surveys, cross-promoting other apps, etc.). But these have historically come at the expense of reduced user engagement.

All of these traditional methods involve clicking on an ad or an offer to go to a third party website or app, taking users away from the game experience. The best offers have a conversion rate of around five percent, i.e. 95 percent of offer clicks take users away from the game without adding to revenues.

How can game developers enhance their monetization beyond direct payments without losing their users? A few recent solutions have started bridging the gap between game engagement and monetization. These solutions not only keep the user within the game, but also add to engagement by speaking the language of the game:

• Branded virtual goods: McDonald’s recently sponsored Farmville’s first branded farm, which users could simply click to earn virtual currency. This provided instant gratification for the user, great branding for McDonald’s and, most importantly, a great new way for Farmville to engage and monetize its user base. A report by Viximo shows that branded virtual goods are currently a small fraction of game revenues, but projects the number will grow to $150 million in 2013. Not only do branded virtual goods attract 10 times the click-through rates of non-branded goods, they are also proven to increase brand awareness and purchase intent. Companies like Virtual Greats, Viximo and Playspan are starting to distribute these branded virtual goods inside games.  I see a couple of different forms of branded virtual goods today:

1.      Branded goods linked to real-world items: Some marketers are looking to drive sales through virtual goods, and to do so they often link the virtual good to the purchase of a real world item. In another deal, 7-Eleven partnered with Zynga to offer branded virtual goods that get unlocked after users make a purchase at a retail location.  Another example is Old Navy’s recent Black Friday integration with Crowdstar’s It-Girl.

2.      Branded goods linked to brand awareness: Other marketers are not looking for increased brand awareness instead of sales, and in this case, the branded good is not directly linked to any purchase. An example is the McDonald’s farm mentioned above, or Volvo’s campaign around the use of virtual goods to create a “naughty” branding for the newly launched S60.

• Videos: Branded video content, distributed through offerings like RockYou’s Deal of the Day, is another form of brand advertising that can be particularly effective in monetizing games. The key idea behind these is to deliver the ad message though a video that can be embedded within the game, instead of taking users to a landing page outside the game.
• Contests within a game: While one way of increasing monetization is to get more users to become direct paying customers, an attractive alternative is to get the current set of paying customers to engage and spend more. BringIt’s platform for running contests within a game aims to do precisely that, acting as an additional currency sink inside the game. The entire contest experience is delivered in-game, and the contests can even act as a hook to bring users back to the game.

It’s clear that this trend toward monetizing games without taking the user away from the experience will eventually be paramount in successful social game monetization strategies.

There are also a few newer, more experimental monetization techniques. At Mertado, we recently launched an Embedded Shopping unit that offers a new way for game developers to monetize through e-commerce inside the game. Game users are presented with an offer to earn virtual currency or goods if they purchase the deal of the day inside the game; before they buy, they can view a video about the deal, read product details and complete the transaction, all within the game.

The merchandise inside the embedded shops can be customized to the game to some extent; for instance, if your game is themed around baking, the merchandise selection may include products like a cupcake maker, or if the game appeals to a fashion conscious audience, the merchandise can revolve around apparel and accessories. Post purchase, the embedded shops can also suggest ideas for users to spend their freshly earned currency within the game.

In the future, I expect that we will see even more methods of monetization that add to the engagement within the game:

• Bundling of real and virtual goods:  Role-playing games and virtual worlds mirror many aspects of the real world, and that provides a great opportunity for marketing products that are contextually relevant to the game. In the future, I expect that we will see integrations where bundles of real and virtual goods are sold together to users: e.g., buy a real Wine Cooler to earn a virtual one in your game.
• Adding game context to offers: Today’s offer walls display the same offers to everyone. What if offers got unlocked only for players who have reached a certain level of game-play? For gamers this would be a great way to get recognition for higher levels of engagement. For brands and marketers, this would be a great way of connecting with a highly engaged audience and adding to the brand’s story.
• Users as brand ambassadors: Through the use of branded virtual goods, gamers would be in a position to act as brand ambassadors within their circle of friends. Games can reap rich rewards in engagement and monetization by enabling these interactions.

All of these methods will continue to make it easier for developers to create amazing gaming experiences that also monetize very well.  By adding these new options for monetization, developers can potentially expect to double the percentage of monetizing users.

A lot of this analysis has focused on the U.S. market, and I am curious to see how these trends play out internationally.  China is one of the biggest virtual goods markets, and it’s interesting to compare advertising spend in China to the amount of money spent on virtual goods. China’s online advertising market is estimated to be $3.7 billion, which is smaller than its virtual goods market at $5 billion. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where the virtual goods market is much smaller than the online advertising market size of $25.8 billion.

Because of this difference, direct methods of monetizing gaming users might continue to prevail in markets like China over methods that rely on brand advertising or direct response for real goods/services. I would be very interested to hear readers’ opinions on whether some of the new monetization trends emerging in the U.S. will become relevant in China and other international markets.

The ghosts of Zynga apps are haunting our weekly AppData list of emerging Facebook games, defined as those still under a million monthly active users. Not the Zynga apps themselves, but game utilities: this week Farm Bonuses, and last week Frontier Bonuses.

More on these, and the actual games, after the full list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Farm Bonuses	573,688	+445,790	+349%
2.	Pool Master 2	438,424	+297,022	+210%
3.	OyunPark	684,354	+229,018	+50%
4.	MyGame	811,696	+196,326	+32%
5.	SuperPoke! Pets	612,935	+191,944	+46%
6.	Die Herausforderung der Städte	194,833	+191,389	+5,557%
7.	Fantasy Kingdoms	719,757	+172,681	+32%
8.	Downhill Snowboard	202,186	+169,864	+526%
9.	Puzzle Saga	623,302	+169,328	+37%
10.	Crazy Cabbie	198,446	+165,953	+511%
11.	Ninjas Rising	372,546	+162,018	+77%
12.	David Guetta, Play with it!	169,556	+159,032	+1,511%
13.	La sfida delle città	732,871	+146,813	+25%
14.	tko-indonesia	224,292	+143,247	+177%
15.	Sports City	563,578	+141,603	+34%
16.	Gambino Poker	535,007	+136,566	+34%
17.	Gold Miner World	203,300	+133,605	+192%
18.	黑手黨	349,449	+123,417	+55%
19.	Farmandia	648,232	+122,228	+23%
20.	Bricks Breaking	146,238	+116,390	+390%

Developer 101 Apps is pushing out the “Bonuses” line of apps, which also includesTreasure Bonuses, Cafe Bonuses, City Bonuses and more. Each scrapes over your friends’ wall posts to discover any shared items from the respective game that they track.

Many of the other 19 titles are casual games – more than usual, by a long shot. Pool Master 2, which is also number two on the list, is a perfect example. The latest from Social Point, which is currently the largest casual developer on Facebook, it’s a fairly straightforward game of video pool with almost no social features.

MyGame, Die Herausforderung der Städte, Downhill Snowboard, Crazy Cabbie, and Bricks Breakingall fit in the same casual genre, and arguably a few other titles on the list could, too.

SuperPoke! Pets is an odd name to see on the list. The Slide app hasn’t been seen in many months on our growth lists – none have, since Google bought the company for $228 million. That it’s growing could be a sign of fresh activity from Slide. On the other hand, no other Slide app is showing signs of growth.

A handful of other games deserve mention. Fantasy Kingdoms is an older, fantasy-themed farming game that just hit its highest point ever; while both Puzzle Saga and Ninjas Rising offer a break from the casual play with two very different styles of RPG, one based around puzzle combat with a cute wizard and the other on a text-based ninja adventure.

The holiday season is in full swing and the effects of it are beginning to show their results in the hiring world this week. Though six social developers have shown new activity, according to data from LinkedIn, the overall volume is decidedly less than weeks prior. Even the largest developer, Zynga, has hired minimally, while others, such as Playdom, have kept their new hires to only a small handful.

Among all the new hires, the biggest name to show up came from Empire Avenue, which announced that it had hired former BioWare lead designer Brent Knowles as a gameplay consultant helping to bring the Empire Avenue game elements to new social platforms.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post.

And for those searching for new jobs, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

Here’s this week’s full list:

CrowdStar

• Catherine Maske — Now a contract artist for CrowdStar, Maske was previously doing contract work for Freshworld.

Empire Avenue

• Brent Knowles — As noted above, the “Social Stock Market” game of Empire Avenue has acquired former BioWare creative director Brent Knowles as a consultant.

Kabam

• Justin Oronos — A resident advisor for Campus Living, Oronos scored an internship for social developer Kabam.
• Hyewon Chang — Chang joins Kabam as their newest designer & animator. Before this, she was also a designer and animator for Red Giant Studios.

Playdom

• Jeannine Schafer — Formerly a concept artist for Electric Bat Interactive, Schafer joins Playdom this week as a senior artist.
• Rory Desmond — Previously a student at the University of Colorado, Desmond is now a content researcher for Playdom.
• Rebecca Meissner — An internal shift for Playdom, as Meissner changes roles from HR business partner to product manager.

PopCap

• Kim Amsberry — Now a senior technical program manager for PopCap, Amsberry was previously a lead operations analyst for Microsoft.
• Jesse Jaren — A recent student at Seattle Central Community College, Jaren joins PopCap as their newest associate UI designer.

TeePee Games

• Darren Newnham — A new games discovery platform for social, web, and mobile games, London-based TeePee Games has announced Newnham as their new head of content.  Newnham’s most recent role was as business development manager for Sega Europe.
• James Duncan — Duncan is also joining TeePee Games this week as their newest content manager. Prior to this role, he was a video operator for PlayerX.

Zynga

• Adrian Walker — Walker joins Zynga as their newest producer. He previously filled the same role at Seamless Entertainment.
• Rosa Freitag — Now a Brazilian Portuguese linguist for Zynga, Freitag was previously a Brazilian translator at SDL International.

Gaia Online, the creator of a virtual world for teens and young adults, has had more success than most in its genre. But following a round of layoffs in November, the company has signaled what may be a new plan for the future with the release of a Facebook RPG called Monster Galaxy.

Inspired by monster-collection games like Pokemon or Digimon, Monster Galaxy starts you off as a trainer with one monster, called a “Moga”. Your goal is to wander the land and capture more Moga, while completing quests and leveling up. Doing so requires items, monsters’ unique powers and attributes, and help from other characters.

The design budget for Monster Galaxy appears to have been larger than the average Facebook game, with well drawn characters and monsters, detailed landscapes and epic music for every occasion. The story is also more prominent than in some Facebook RPGs; although knowingly predictable, with a quest to defeat the big, bad evil and your childhood nemesis, it also has a tongue-in-cheek way of playing up a lot of tropes.

The gameplay doesn’t deviate much from other monster training games. Unlike games that involve collecting gold or resources and building cities or buying armor, you really only have your monsters, called “Moga”. You can carry up to three “Moga” with you at a time, though you can capture up to 120 Moga total using “Star Seeds”.

From the beginning, you’re assigned quests which generally require you to go to a certain location or to defeat a certain number of wild Moga. While traveling the overland map, you’ll also randomly run into wild Moga and other enemies and engage them in combat. In battle, you choose one of your three Moga to start the fight, and during each battle turn you can use one of your Moga’s attacks, use an item, swap Moga, or run. All Moga belong to a Zodiac sign, and this sign determines the relative effectiveness of the Moga’s special attack in a straightforward rock-scissors-paper fashion.

Capturing Moga still involves a fight; once they’re critically damaged, they can be trapped with Star Seeds. The chance of capturing the Moga seems to depend on the damage done, your level, and the rarity of the enemy Moga. If instead you defeat enemy Mogas normally, you’re rewarded with experience points and a chance of finding more Star Seeds. As your Moga gain experience points and level, they grow stronger, but there’s currently no way to customize their growth. Also, enemy Moga grow in strength quite quickly as you progress in the game, requiring time spent grinding levels.

At “Your House” you can swap Moga and let them take naps to fully restore hp and skills. The recovery time for each Moga depends on its level; the higher the level, the longer it’ll take. However, while your Moga are napping, you’re free to swap them out with other Moga you’ve captured, so you can continue your journey without interruption and level other Mogas. If you’re impatient for a particular Moga to revive, you can also use a Blue Coffee item to instantly restore him to full health.

Monster Galaxy is currently lacking in any strong multiplayer or microtransaction incentives for the players, and doesn’t play much like other social games. You can purchase “Star Coins” with real money, which in turn can be used to buy Blue Coffee and Star Seeds to make your game a little easier, but having a lot of those isn’t required to continue. You can visit your friends’ houses and collect Whistles that help you launch special attacks in battle, but those also aren’t necessary. This ends up making the game a pretty level playing field for all players, and in the end the players who play the smartest and play the most will have progressed further than other players.

Having just launched,Monster Galaxy also still has some kinks and bugs to work out. The longer your session runs, the more the game starts to lag, until you reload the page. The UI will often misreport the probability of an attack hitting, or whether your attack will do extra damage or less damage, and sometimes leveling up a monster that just finished napping will put the monster back into a nap. While annoying, the bugs don’t detract much from the gameplay and experience.

At the end of the day, Monster Galaxy feels like a simple, if grindy, single player RPG, where it’s just you versus the world. Given the setup of the game, it can probably be expected that a PvP area will be added in due course, as well as purchasable enhancements for your Moga. But even as-is Monster Galaxy stands as a relatively unique experience among current Facebook titles, with its reliance on story and apparent disdain for forcing players to spend money or push invites to friends.

Whether called a diorama, crèche, or Christmas Village, people the world over have been creating holiday scenes on the lawn and dining room table since there was a holiday to celebrate. YouTube is rife with videos of elaborate scenes, tended with care by family and friends. When Samantha LeCraft began work on Holiday Village this October, it was with the intention of recreating this space for people to share the feeling of the holidays together over vast distances.

Each player begins with a basic inventory of buildings and 12 coins. These buildings can be placed in a newly created village or in a shared village — a previously created village which the player has been given access to. Villages support parallel gameplay, with changes made by any user appearing in real time, creating a truly social experience. Anyone with access can move and arrange existing items in the village as well as contribute from his own personal inventory. Ownership of contributed items remains with the contributor; if the item is removed from the scene it returns to the player’s inventory.

Players can also set different permission levels for villages that they create. “The game allows for those overlapping circles that Facebook doesn’t support natively. I want my sisters in this village or my friends from college in that village,” says LeCraft.

Villages are comprised of a number of buildings, trees, streetlamps, and décor appropriate to a fictional 1930s New England village. Players can create a Main Street replete with toy store, grocer, clothing store, or brick townhouse, and neighborhoods with stone cottages, hilltop farmhouses (with optional barn and doghouse), or a Cape Code home. Gazebos, Queen Anne-style hotels, churches, and street lamps are all available. And then there are trees – evergreen pines, decorated Christmas trees, and denuded oak and maple. Future plans included a synagogue, frozen pond, and carolers.

Since you need to build an entire village, items for purchase tend to come in lots,like three pine trees,two stone or three country chapels. Why would anyone need three country chapels for a small village? Perhaps multiple chapels add to the New England charm, but they could also be used as gifts to friends.

Themes including day and night, snowfall, white and colored lights are also supported. The music is particularly reminiscent of winter with “Wistful” played during daylight and a rediscovered turn of the century carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” for the evening. “We chose the evening music both for its beauty and because it is a little melancholy,” says LeCraft.”I was shopping and heard the Charlie Brown music and it made me sad… I missed my childhood. That’s what we wanted to evoke.”

In its current form, Holiday Village feels more like an application than a game. With a 7-week production schedule, the goal was to release the minimum viable product then add daily. The first gameplay to enter, which will start to appear today, will focus on balancing the needs of the village’s virtual community. Every 24 hours, each building will produce a combination of happiness, prosperity and/or unity. Tokens represent each property with a fourth wildcard token earned as a bonus for increasing members of your village as well as décor (such as trees).

Token bars on the top of the screen show a random series of needed tokens. Filling a number of these will earn the player coins. A shortage in any of the three token types indicates a community out of balance, and a need to build appropriately. One solution to this for players will be a post office to leave “mail” for village members — including notes mentioning which buildings are needed.

“The gameplay is designed so that it focuses on how to keep your village growing,” says LeCraft. “The game continues with other holidays — Fourth of July for example. The grass will turn green, the frozen pond that children skate on now becomes a swimming hole. But we’ve trained players on Facebook to expect to be told what the gameplay is; there is no expectation of discovery.”

On many levels Holiday Village is not a typical Facebook game. It is slow — relaxing, even — and has no time-management elements, no urgency. What is more, it is truly a social game with players choosing who to play with in a private space that all can affect. As gameplay is added, the seasons change, and new holidays pass, the question will be: are Facebook users ready for a completely new game experience?

Since 2001, Electronic Arts has quietly operated a site that few in its core gaming audience know about called Pogo.com. It has only recently started moving the property onto other platforms, starting with Facebook this April and now moving on to the iPhone and iPad.

Pogo’s new iDevice app will look like a limited version of its destination site, with just five games to start — one of those being Poppit, which EA got press for yesterday when it released an HTML5 version for the Chrome Web Store. Other titles include word and card games.

Like other companies, Pogo is hoping that its audience (about 10 million monthly unique visitors to its web site, and about 900,000 monthly active users on Facebook) will adopt as many platforms as it rolls out, playing the games wherever they go.

There are some differences between the platforms, though. Some are technical, like the ability to use the iPhone’s accelerometer for Poppit. The more important differences may be the social mechanics, though.

On Pogo.com, users play with others that they don’t know, which creates more of a cooperative environment. Facebook creates competition between friends, while mobile will offer some combination. Like Facebook, mobile will also tend toward asynchronous play, since users will just want to slip into games for a few minutes at a time.

Going cross-platform with a property like Pogo may be a no-brainer these days, with Facebook going strong and mobile devices proliferating. “Overwhelmingly people wanted it, even if they don’t have an iPhone. Just given the amount of iPhone and iPods out there, we hope to have even more people who aren’t familiar with Pogo download it,” says Michael Marchetti, Pogo’s general manager.

But Pogo is also an aging site. Its Facebook portal has over a dozen competitors, and there are many more casual apps vying for space on the various iDevices. To succeed, Pogo will have to get its cross-platform distribution strategy just right, with few role models to steer by.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Today we are excited to announce that Facebook CTO Bret Taylor will be joining us for a fireside chat on the Facebook Platform 2011 roadmap at Inside Social Apps. There’s no shortage of big questions facing the future of the Facebook Platform, and following up with our in-depth discussion with him in the middle of the year, we’re happy to have him joining us to talk about the way Facebook is approaching the key issues for the year ahead.

We’ll address crucial topics for developers about Facebook’s Platform-level priorities around engagement, distribution, monetization, and the balance between on- and off-Facebook.com services. We’ll also look at larger questions affecting the way the Platform will expand in 2011 following the launch of the Open Graph this year, including publisher services such as Instant Personalization, the Like button, and other plugins. Finally, we’ll also discuss the growing importance of Facebook’s mobile partnerships and mobile platform services, and what that means for mobile app developers in 2011.

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday, December 17 at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

Online portal and casual game app MindJolt is finding opportunities away from social networks. The company has partnered with Broadcast Interactive Media, which runs websites for local media outlets around the country.

BIM’s properties give MindJolt access to an additional 110 million people monthly, in addition to those it reaches through its own website and Facebook, where it has an app with 10 million users and publishes almost 20 more titles.

Web publishing of casual titles is not a new business; quite a few companies, like Oberon Media, do the same. MindJolt’s strategic edge will be in monetizing the games it publishes.

In November, MindJolt publicly announced AdJolt, a monetization platform including both ads and micro-transaction tools. It also said that it has over $20 million in yearly revenue, helping to account for the over $20 million put into the company when it was acquired in March.

It’s also worth noting that MindJolt isn’t giving up on Facebook; along with its growing number of published games, we’ve noticed that the company has its own cross-promotion bar, shown below, which it may plan on expanding in the future.