In-game product placement advertising company MediaSpike today announced it’s making its services available to mobile developers and that it has hired Manny Anekal as Chief Revenue Officer. Anekal, who formerly led in-game advertising sales at Zynga, EA and Microsoft, will also “initiate” the company’s presence in New York City

MediaSpike is geared towards letting developers and advertisers work together to put product brands into games with a minimal amount of fuss. The way the system works is developers can apply two-dimensional images with product advertisements to parts of their game.

MediaSpike allows advertisers to use lightweight SDKs to target specific user groups while the company’s background servers do the lion’s share of the work. An advertiser selects the target audience’s demographics (which determines which partner game the content will appear in) and the length of the campaign. From there, the SDK lets a user select what type of item would sport a brand image, with arbitrary sizing being automatically supported.

Now iOS and Android game developers can join MediaSpike’s platform lineup alongside offerings for Flash and javascript developers. Mobile game developers can add this new revenue stream by dropping in the appropriate library and declaring which objects can become placements. MediaSpike then works with major brands to place the appropriate ads.

MediaSpike also revealed that a recent campaign for Pepsi which placed virtual vending machines in Gaia Online had players interacting with the machines and even complaining when the campaign was finished and the machines removed.

Director of Digital Brand Marketing at PepsiCo Beverages Andrea Harrison said “We love seeing these kinds of results.”

Director of Sales & Business Development at Gaia Interactive Christopher Castagnetto was also pleased with the service. “For a small, one-time integration effort you get a new, on-going revenue stream that also enhances the user experience,“ he said. “We’re looking forward to many more product placement campaigns.”

Director of Sales & Business Development at Gaia Interactive Christopher Castagnetto was also pleased with the service. “For a small, one-time integration effort you get a new, on-going revenue stream that also enhances the user experience,“ he said. “We’re looking forward to many more product placement campaigns.”

Mobile advertising and publishing platform Tapjoy today announced it hired Jeff Drobick as Chief Product Officer. Drobick was formerly President and CEO of Geeknet Media and eBay Vice President of Information Management & Delivery.

“Jeff’s combination of bidded ad platform expertise and the proven delivery of data-rich applications will have a significant impact on our product roadmap and how we serve our clients and partners,” Tapjoy President and CEO Steve Wadsworth said in a statement. “The CPO role is vital at any technology company, particularly in a sector that moves as rapidly as mobile. This addition also speaks to the incredible opportunity ahead for Tapjoy, as we refine and focus our product roadmap and position the company for our next phase of growth.”

We last heard from Tapjoy when it announced its partnership with Kontagent, a mobile app analytics company known for its kSuite platform. The partnership with Kontagent allowed the two companies to release the app analytics platform, the Kontagent Partner Edition, for all developers and advertisers working with Tapjoy.

Tapjoy also recently brought on CFO and Executive Vice President at Acxiom Corporation Warren C. Jenson to the company’s Board of Directors.

One of the ongoing issues we hear about from developers is how difficult it is to monetize the free players who don’t convert. While in-game ads are often the default solution, it can be difficult to manage the content provided by ad services, especially if more than one network’s been partnered with. Mobile and web ad monetization group Supersonic Ads Media Group is looking to streamline the experience with its newly-launched Ultra server.

Ther server is a Supply Side Platform (SSP) powered by SupersonicAds. Using Ultra, publishers and developers can use a single ad server for all their social game ad formats. In layman’s terms, that means devs can perform multiple tasks without having to deal with multiple integrations and reporting systems.

“The ad formats in social games are focused on rewards-based advertising,” SupersonicAds CEO Gil Shoham tells us. ”These are basically offers that provide virtual currency and incentivized videos. There isn’t any ad server out there to deal with these formats in terms of optimization, virtual currency, and fraud.

“We’ve discovered that social game developers have some very specific needs and requirements different than other content providers. Every ad network that a publisher would like to integrate includes a technical aspect,” he further notes. According to Shoham, dealing with these multiple software integrations takes time away from game development, something many smaller studios can’t really afford due to limited resources.

Shoham tells us Ultra’s been in development for over a year, though it soft-launched about six months ago. So far, he says approximately 30 developers are currently using Ultra’s toolset to help manage their advertising. While a complete list of these developers hasn’t been released, one high-profile partner already making use of Ultra is King.com. The Candy Crush Saga developer has been working with Supersonic Ads for years, we learn.

Both Ultra and SupersonicAds’ established services are clearly paying off for the company. So far, the company’s been venture-funded, though Shohan reveals it was profitable in 2012. For more information about SupersonicAds and Ultra, check out the company’s official website.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game provider Gameforge today revealed it saw a dramatic increase in user conversion due to SponsorPay’s advertising platform.

Gameforge’s data comes from a yearlong study it conducted, which shows 16.4 percent of non-paying users converted to paying users within the 12-month period. Additionally, the study shows 3 percent of these converted users purchased virtual currency and/or premium content in these games over 20 times during the study.

In a statement, Gameforge Payment Product Director Andreas Schulze noted his company expects to see continued conversion growth. He also said he thinks SponsorPay has positioned Gameforge to take advantage of the direction the market’s headed.

One of the biggest concerns among social and mobile companies is how to increase user conversion and increase monetization, so data like this will likely make the platform an appealing potential partner for developers. This is the second time in as many weeks that SponsorPay’s had results to brag about: Earlier this month, the company reported it more than doubled revenues in 2012 thanks to a 479 percent growth in transactions on its platform.

Value-exchange advertising company SponsorPay today announced it more than doubled revenues in 2012 thanks to a 479 percent growth in transactions on its platform.

SponsorPay credited this growth to its BrandEngage platform, its mobile ad network and user acquisition campaigns for Fortune 500 brands and app developers.

“Mobile became the dominant growth engine for SponsorPay last year,” CRO and co-founder of SponsorPay Janis Zech said. “It’s still early – mobile ad spend will grow exponentially over the next few years, and our aim is to continue to outgrow the market significantly.”

SponsorPay also touted conversion rates on social engagement were as high as 76 percent, and click-through to online retail pages were often greater than 30 percent. The company cited its Domino’s campaign specifically, which integrated video ads into social games, resulting in 36 percent clicking through to the Domino’s online ordering page.

You can read our full interview with Zech about SponsorPay’s plans for mobile in 2013 here.

Monetization and insights provider W3i is stepping up its game with Pocket Gems and other mobile game developers on Android going into 2013. This could be the year that Google’s platform finally catches up in revenues to Apple’s iOS.

Through its expanded partnership with Pocket Gems, W3i now provides monetization solutions to Tap Paradise Cove and Campus Life. Far from being mere banner ads, the monetization service focuses instead on providing a native experience in these Android apps — tailoring ads, offers and video campaigns to the user experience.

Erik Lundberg, General Manager at W3i’s San Francisco office (pictured), explains that the shift toward native experiences comes from mobile advertising finally moving away from online advertising models. With 15 years in online ads before joining W3i just eight months ago, he’s had time to study the changing trends.

“In the early days of ads and mobile apps, people took online models and slapped them on a smartphone like small banner ads that are only 100 pixels wide,” says Lundberg. “Users have tuned those out. More native ads like a full screen interstitial or offer-based ads, we see a much higher CPM, like 10 times higher. We think that trend will continue toward native ads that are a part of the application instead of just throwing up a banner.”

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Inside Network Research’s newest report, Facebook Games: Increasing Consumer Engagement, finds that almost half of Facebook’s games-playing audience are daily active users.

The study, on sale now, surveyed 1,418 adult Facebook users in the United States between August and September on their games habits. Of those, 31 percent played games several times per day while 18 percent played at least once per day. This highly engaged audience seems to be enjoying the games that bring their friends into the experience either in turn-based games (e.g. Words With Friends) or competitive games (e.g. War Commander).

Not surprisingly, Inside Network Research also found that niche games and those with coherent cross-platform experiences like Candy Crush Saga increased retention better than Facebook-only games aimed at a broader audience. At our Inside Social Apps conference in New York earlier this month, we heard developers on the monetization panel say that their philosophy toward game design has increasingly become a quality discussion, with platform coming at a much later point in a game’s development cycle.

You can find this report and others from Inside Network Research here.

Applifier, the Robin Hood of Facebook games cross promotion, has closed a $4 million second round of funding led by Lifeline Ventures.

The influx of funds will be put toward accelerating Applifier’s growth on iOS, where the company currently hosts a video-based discoverability service called Everyplay. Its Facebook video ad service, Impact, will migrate to mobile next year. To that end, Applifier is staffing up both its engineering-focused Finnish headquarters and a much smaller developer relations-oriented San Francisco office. Applifier currently has about 25 employees total.

Everyplay continues Applifier’s mission of leveraging games’ appeal to generate organic growth and retention. The SDK, when implemented into a developer’s game, allows players to capture video of their in-game play experience and post said video to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Everyplay’s site (picture, right — click to enlarge). Since we first saw the service, the site part of the experience has evolved into more of a gamers social network, with avatar creation, status updates and a Follower system similar to Twitter’s. Players can link their Facebook accounts to Everyplay, but that is used more as a means of finding friends instead of a substitution for a virtual identity.

Speaking to Inside Social Games this week, Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen explains that gamers naturally prefer anonymity to the use of real identities in games. But at the same time, he admits that the social nature of sharing games — showing them off, beating set high scores, competitive multiplayer, etc. — requires some form of connection.

“We want to make a safe and fun environment,” he says. “So we’re not launching the face-cam part of Everyplay until Q1 next year when we have moderation in place. We don’t want this to be Chatroulette.”

Everyplay is currently live in two iOS games, Fatcat Rush and Stair Dismount, and the SDK is now widely available to developers. A few additional features are planned for Q1 in addition to the face cam capture function — such as a picture-in-picture video display where game developers can choose to show community videos or trailers from a game title screen as an engagement tool. Like Applifier’s previous service on Facebook, Everyplay monetizes through native ads (e.g. sponsored or promoted videos that function on a traditional CPI model) and could potentially branch into other forms of display ads.

Laakkonen — along with many others in the social/mobile space — believes that the next big frontier for mobile games will be tablets, so the sooner Applifier can establish itself on mobile, the better off it will be. This is not unlike the situation the company faced in 2008 when it first contemplated the rapid growth on the Facebook platform.

“We’re hoping for explosive growth on mobile, because [there are] similar market conditions to what we faced on Facebook,” Laakkonen tells ISG. “We don’t know where things will go, but for now, it’s about discoverability.”

Applifier’s second round saw participation from existing investors MHS Capital and PROFounders and from new investor Webb Investment Network. Angel investors include Steven Lurie, Anthony Soohoo, Philip Reisberger and David Wright and Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. The $4 million brings Applifier up to $6 million in total funding following a $2 million round closed in February 2011.

Facebook is rolling out search for App Center, allowing users to not only find apps by name but also by keyword such as “cars” or “fitness.”

This change will help users better navigate App Center, which previously offered filters by category but no direct search. The main search bar in the Facebook header wasn’t always helpful, either, since it searches people, pages, places, groups and everything else on Facebook. Plus, it does not yet offer keyword search. If users don’t know the title of what they are looking for, it isn’t very helpful.

App Center is more focused on discovery and surfacing web, mobile and canvas apps that users are likely to be interested in based on other apps they’ve tried and what their friends use. App Center allows users to see photos and read details about an app before adding it. These details are now indexed in App Center search, and Facebook says there are no changes or additional requirements for developers. The company did not offer details about the search ranking system, but it is likely a combination of keyword relevance, MAU, star ratings, friend connections and more.

In a blog post Wednesday night, Facebook announced that it would allow developers to create Sponsored Results ads for their canvas apps through the App Dashboard in four steps. Developers can create more targeted search ads through the Power Editor or the API, as was available previously. Sponsored Results appear in the main search typeahead, and for now there are no ads in the App Center search module.

In early October, Facebook said 220 million people visit the App Center each month, and compared to users of the previous Apps and Games dashboard, users who discover apps through App Center are 40 percent more likely to return to the app the next day.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

Come join Inside Network and SmartRecruiters in November for happy hour.

Our “Network, Get Work” event brings together job seekers and companies in the social media and tech industry. Whether you’re interested in joining tech start-ups or global firms in the Bay Area, recruiting for top social media talent, or just someone interested in connecting with like-minded peers, we’ve got drinks for you.

You’ll find us at SmartRecruiter’s San Francisco headquarters on Thursday, November 1. RSVP on Eventbrite and read on for more details:

Inside Network & SmartRecruiters’ Network, Get Work Party

What: Drinks, conversation, networking
Who: Recruiters, job seekers, anyone interested in the social media or technology space
When: Thursday, November 1, 2012 6:00-8:00 pm
Where: The SmartRecruiters Office: 56 Tehama St, San Francisco, CA 94105
Why: To connect great companies with top-notch job candidates, to network, and to have fun!
Complimentary food and drinks

SmartRecruiters is the social recruiting platform that makes hiring easy. Leveraging the latest cloud technologies along with intuitive design, SmartRecruiters gives social enterprises everything they need to post jobs, manage candidates, and make the right hire. The mission of SmartRecruiters is to eradicate unemployment by removing friction in the labor market. Its 20,000+ customers have created over 100,000 jobs.

The Inside Network Job Board, powered by Mediabistro, is the highest-quality recruitment space for positions in social media, gaming, and mobile apps. Leading developers, product managers, marketers, and investors in social and mobile industries rely on Inside Network for expert news, research, and analysis—now they can rely on us for jobs, too! Come discover our hidden pool of top-notch talent at jobs.insidenetwork.com.