Cross-platform in-game advertising company SponsorPay is reporting year-on-year revenues increased 125 percent in 2011, crediting the growth to its new Android pay-per-install network and its video advertising product BrandEngage.

SponsorPay’s growth reflects the increasing popularity of video advertising, as the format has gained traction in both mobile and social games over the past year. SponsorPay launched BrandEngage last July, following on the heels of competitors like Flurry and Tapjoy, who began offering video advertising products after it began to become apparent they performed far better in mobile apps than traditional banner ads. SponsorPay’s BrandEngage product allows advertisers to show players both videos and brand engagement campaigns, which the player can watch, Like and share.

SponsorPay began its life as a virtual goods monetization company on Facebook, but followed the same trajectory as many of its clients, looking to mobile after the mandatory use of Facebook Credits made the platform far less lucrative.

The Berlin-headquartered company picked up $5 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners in February to develop its mobile product lines. SponsorPay’s advertising appears in games from Ubisoft, Bigpoint, Gameview Studios and Digital Chocolate. The company is predicting similar growth in 2012.

Digital Chocolate announced a series of significant executive hires today and revealed its games are coming to Android devices.

According to a Digital Chocolate press release, Nokia’s former head of program management execution, Kaj Häggman, is now Digital Chocolate’s vice president and the general manager of its Helsinki studio. Emmi Kuusikko, the former director of user and market insight at Sulake joins Digital Chocolate as vice president of product management.

Although Digital Chocolate announced the hires today, according to Häggman’s and Kuusikko’s LinkedIn profiles, both executives have been with the company since the tail-end of 2011.

As part of the announcement, Digital Chocolate also revealed Army Attack would be joining Zombie Lane on iOS, and that both games would be making their way to Android, tablets and other browser channels. The press release did not indicate if the mobile version of Army Attack would be cross platform, or if it would be a stand-alone game like the mobile version of Zombie Lane. The company also revealed that its new St. Petersburg and Seattle Studios are working on games for “new genres and platforms,” but did not give any further information.

As part of the changes, Digital Chocolate also promoted Edmund Chui to VP platform engineering, Jerome Collin to VP product management and Sean Dornan-Fish to VP game design. In Finland the company promoted Marko Lastikka to VP production and Miikka Kukkosuo to VP regional sales.

In February the company raised $12 million in Series D funding in a round lead by Intel Capital.

Grave Maker is an upcoming social game for Facebook, iOS and Android, set to launch in February 2012 and currently undergoing beta testing on its own dedicated site. The game has been built entirely using YoYo Games’ own Game Maker product, and is intended at least in part as a demonstration of Game Maker’s application in making cross-platform social games as well as more traditional interactive entertainment.

The game casts players in the role of a graveyard keeper, and tasks them with defending the graveyard against frequent attacks from disgruntled locals. This is achieved by sending undead minions into battle to confront the locals, and gradually building up the graveyard with useful structures, crops and decorations.

Gameplay blends several popular social and casual game styles together into one coherent experience. Sending minions into battle is somewhat similar to the “tower defense” genre, where enemy forces approach the player’s base along a predetermined path, and the player must deploy defenses (in this case, minions) to deal with them as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the building and crop harvesting is similar to city-building and farming games, with actions taking time to perform, and crops ripening and spoiling over time. In an interesting twist, the player acquires new troops with which to defend their graveyard by planting them just like normal crops. Finally, the combat involves elements of role-playing and strategy combat games, with both player minions and enemies having varying strength levels, and some working better than others against one another.

Since the game is currently limited to a ten-level beta demo on its own website, social and monetization features have not yet been implemented, nor can it be tracked via our traffic tracking application AppData. Planned social features include a “fear factor” rating for players’ graveyards, where friends will be able to compare what is effectively the “net worth” of their land of horrors. There will also be the facility for players to send gifts to one another.

Meanwhile, monetization will be accomplished through use of the game’s hard currency of skulls. The current version doesn’t give any specific indication of what players can expect to purchase using skulls, but the placeholder menu promises “special items, structures and creatures.”

When the game launches in February, however, it will be simultaneously released on Facebook, iOS and Android. This is made possible by the  HTML5 and cross-platform export support found in YoYo Games’ newest Game Maker product, Game Maker Studio, set to release shortly after Grave Maker’s launch. Game Maker Studio’s export pipeline means that the game can be made once and easily deployed to multiple platforms rather than having to go through a lengthy and complex porting process. The multiplatform support also allows one game account to be used across all three versions, meaning a game can be started on Facebook and later picked up on the go via an iOS or Android portable device.

“Grave Maker is a huge project for YoYo Games and in many ways, it represents the culmination of everything we’ve been working towards with the Game Maker package,” says Stuart Poole, head of publishing at YoYo Games. “Grave Maker is every bit a modern social game, but its cross-platform abilities and the power of GameMaker’s HTML5 support means that the player gets the same gameplay experience across all three platforms, with the game in play accessible from any of them, at any time.”

Dueling Blades is an upcoming fantasy-themed RPG/strategy game set to launch on Facebook in March 2012, with iOS and Android versions to follow later in the year.

The game casts players in the role of their own customizable 3D avatar and throws them into live battle against both other players and computer controlled opponents. Gameplay takes the form of “simultaneous turn based strategy,” allowing players to take part in live conflicts while working around common latency and hardware limitations of social network users.

“Dueling Blades is not your usual social game,” explains Joseph Cooper, COO and lead programmer at developer HourBlast Games. “It is a ‘core’ game with a strong multiplayer experience, and we believe our game will grow organically with the viral marketing channels already present on Facebook.”

Cooper is also seeking relationships with key publishers to raise the profile of the game prior to its official launch in March, aiming for players to have “tons of opponents to battle at the initial launch.”

The game is built on the popular Unity3D game engine, meaning that the port to iOS and Android devices proposed for later in the year will be a relatively quick and straightforward process. Cooper notes that Google+ is not currently in the team’s release plan, but they are looking into the possibility for the future, and have also tested the game using Google Chrome Native Client, meaning the game may also see a release via the Chrome Web Store.

Dueling Blades will be monetized following the free to play model, with bonus items available via microtransaction. In the Facebook version, these will be handled directly using Facebook Credits, while the iOS and Android versions will use their respective platforms’ in-app purchase systems. Items on offer will initially include experience bonuses, boosters and vanity items, with the team working on additional monetization strategies for the game in the long term.

“We are not against analytics,” says Cooper, “but we still believe a well-developed game can monetize on social platforms. In a few weeks, we will be crowd funding through Kickstarter to support the launch of Dueling Blades. We have a lot of fun rewards to give out, such as creating a custom likeness of a supporter to be used as a non-playable character in our game.”

The rewards won’t stop after the Kickstarter funding period is over, either — Cooper is proposing that real-world rewards will be on offer for player victory in tournaments.

“Weekly rankings and a dynamic league system will provide the simplicity of core game concepts for all gamers alike to enjoy the diverse fighting system in Dueling Blades,” explains Cooper. “We hope Dueling Blades will be at the forefront of competitive fighting games on social and mobile platforms. As social gamers, we see a void in the social gaming platform; the creation of Dueling Blades is the first step to filling it.”

Dueling Blades is set to launch on Facebook in March 2012. The Kickstarter funding drive is set to begin in the next few weeks.

Scotland-based newcomer Outplay Entertainment enters the social and mobile game market this month with two games launched on Facebook that will eventually become cross-platform experiences on iOS and Android in the first quarter of 2012.

The term “cross-platform” has been used a lot by developers in the last year as Facebook-spawned devs make their first attempts at mobile games and mobile developers attempt to migrate their apps to Facebook and other social networks. It can mean two completely unrelated games that share a common theme, like CrowdStar’s It Girl for Facebook and Top Girl for mobile. It can mean a game that is identical across all platforms, but not connected by platforms, such as Rovio’s Angry Birds on G+ versus Angry Birds on just about every other device under the sun. It can also mean games that are the same game no matter what device the player users, like Zynga’s Words With Friends — which is what many developers term “true” cross-platform play.

Outplay Entertainment currently falls toward the Words With Friends end of the spectrum with its two games, Booty Quest and Word Trick. When the mobile versions launch, players will be able to initiate games on Facebook and then have that same game immediately available to them on iPhone or Android if they switch devices. For future projects, the developer may lean more toward CrowdStar’s cross-platform model where one platform has the “main” gameplay experience while another platform provides supplemental elements. Similar to what Ubisoft has planned for its upcoming Ghost Recon games, this could take the form of a mobile companion game generating additional currency or experience points for the Facebook main game.

For now, though, Outplay is focused on getting its foot in the social-mobile games door and scaling quickly. Though there is some skepticism that developers cannot use Facebook as a sustainable starting point on which to build a business, the developer feels it has an edge by virtue of experience, compelling gameplay, and ample resources to direct toward marketing. The company was founded by brothers Richard and Doug Hare, two video game industry veterans that have come a long way from 1997 when they first founded a development studio focused on porting Windows games to the PlayStation console. In the following interview, the brothers outline Outplay’s approach to the rapidly shifting market:

Inside Social Games: How two brothers can work together without killing each other?

Richard Hare, Outplay Entertainment Co-Founder (pictured right): It’s probably the fact that we grew up playing games together. It’s been a hobby and then it became a common interest. The first company of scale we created was The Collective, which we formed in 1997 with one other business partner, and focused on console development. We grew that over the course of eight years to 150 people, then we merged with Backbone Entertainment in 2005.

Doug Hare, Outplay Entertainment Co-Founder (pictured right, with child): We merged the companies, created Foundation 9 Entertainment, and then sold the majority of it in 2006. As a result of that investment, we grew to about 800 people in 11 different studios. That’s when we started [researching] Facebook as a platform and at the same time saw the [rise] of Apple with the launch of the App Store. It was difficult to go after those markets from within our company, so it ended up being easier to start a new company. We’re still substantial individual shareholders at Foundation 9, but we have no operational involvement.

ISG: How did you end up back in your native country, Scotland? What’s the development culture like there?

Doug: We started with the idea of doing Outplay in the states as a very virtualized company with lots of different individuals collaborating on the product — after 800 people, we were drawn to the idea of a small company. As we refined our view of the market, it became apparent that games were services rather than products you could fire [off] and forget, so we started realizing that we needed a fairly substantial internal capacity. We started looking at various locations where we could set that up, and [chose] Scotland. We came to that realization around April or May of last year and came back in September to start meeting with VCs and angels investors. We officially opened our doors in April 2011.

We can’t claim to be experts, but a lot of stuff happened while we were away [from Scotland]. But one of the surprising things [about] Scotland is that it’s the home of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. Those games originated here and Grand Theft Auto is still developed here. [Video games] is not a huge industry in terms of headcount, but in terms of the size of the country — five million people — the amount of relevance is amazing for such a small country.

ISG: We’ve heard some people say that Facebook isn’t the best place to launch a studio anymore now that Zynga dominates the market and cost per install (CPI) is really high. Where do you see opportunity on the platform?

Doug: It’s a question of having the type of product people want to play. Whether it’s the App Store, the Android Market, Facebook, or Xbox Live, they have the same challenges around discoverability — grabbing people’s attention so that they come back. [The opportunity] comes from the quality of the product that we create, the genres that we select, and the part where we can direct a reasonable amount of marketing toward [the games] to get traction. We’re not trying to be Zynga, we’re not trying to compete for the same audience. They’re an atypical outlying phenomenon. We’re making different types of games that will ultimately attract a different audience.

ISG: Booty Quest is a match-3 game and Word Trick is more like more like Scrabble, both very casual older female-skewing genres. Is that the demographic you’re primarily focused on?

Richard: There’s a multitude of reasons why we led with those genres. From our perspective, they’re great games. It’s a style of casual game that we enjoy playing. And because we’re forming a new team in a new country, we wanted smaller scale products with a relatively constrained and focused style of developing. From a market analysis standpoint, they seemed like logical bets to start with [because] even though there are many match-3 games, there’s a large appetite for that style of entertainment. We also felt we could create something that was innovative within those [genres]. These are an exercise in proving out the team and proving out our product. As we move into next year, you’re going to see more complexity in content types and development.

ISG: How do you offset CPI on new games, being such a new studio? Is it all in the marketing or will you integrate an ad platform or hot new viral mechanic no one’s thought of yet?

Doug: We’re moving rapidly and beyond simple raw marketing. We have other secret sauce as to how we [attract] audiences that we’ll be rolling out next year. It’s something along the lines of what you mentioned — only it’s saucier and more secret.

ISG: On the cross-platform side, what’s your approach? Are you using HTML5 or building native apps by platform?

Doug: We built our own technology for cross-platform development. HTML5 is interesting, but the experience that we have on mobile devices is just not something that you’d be able to get on HTML5 right now.

Word Trick and Booty Quest exist very happily on [PC or mobile]; the experience is satisfying regardless of the platform. However, that’s [not the case] for most types of games. Taking another type of game and making the same experience [on multiple platforms], one of them is going to be a pure experience on one of the platforms whether you like it or not. We’re not going to make the games identical all the time; we’re going to have games that you want to play on Facebook, on PC. And then we’ll have another game that’s a different experience [but related to the Facebook game] on a different platform. The two games are standalone, but if you play both, you’ll move faster through the experience. It’ll be a better experience overall.

There are other companies that are doing this. But there will be a change in the patterns that people play [by] and we want to have an approach to where we’ll be there whenever [the player] want us, no matter what the device.

Richard: The key is being sensitive to the context of the platform you’re playing on. There’s certain things that work extremely well or are only possible on mobile. We want to make sure it’s not going to be an exercise in porting between desktop and mobile, but trying to recognize the true experience based on the context. We’re not going to do, “Here’s the Facebook game,” and then a few months later, “Here’s the mobile game.”

ISG: You define your games as “skill-based,” even though they’re not actually related to the concept of gambling — where players compete against one another to earn prizes relative to their skill. What does the term “skill-based” mean in the context of your games?

Richard: One way of looking at it would be that there’s always a level of challenge that can be worked and mastered. That’s something that has a natural appeal and draw over time because it’s not too easy. With gameplay mechanics, we want to make sure that it’s always rewarding and satisfying. It’s finding the right level of skill or challenge. That will be based on the style of product — [Booty Quest] is more reaction-based while [Word Trick] challenges your vocabulary.

Doug: Both games require you to develop [a skill]. It’s rewarding to see your development of that skill, more fundamentally satisfying than games that are based on patience. The term “skill-based” reflects casino gaming, but the idea is really that you’re demonstrating a skill and the evolution of that skill is underpinning the overall enjoyment. There are a lot of games on Facebook that don’t have the requirements for what [we define as] skill. They have behaviors that can be rewarded, but there’s no change in behavior.

ISG: What does the road ahead look like for you, beyond launching new products? Are you in the process of raising funding?
Doug: We raised our seed funding at the start of the year, so we’re not raising money right now. When we pitched the company as an investment opportunity, the idea was that we were going into it [with] the functionality a publisher would have — dedicated community management, dedicated quality assurance, marketing, and public relations. We’re at 32 people right now — we started with two in April — and we grew ourselves in the space of three-and-a-half months. We’ve built these games and mobile versions that are nearly complete. What we’ve accomplished, when you think about it, is quite a lot.

Adobe confirmed today that it is no longer adapting its Flash Player to newer mobile devices, instead guiding developers to package native apps with Adobe Air or build cross-platform applications in HTML5.

The move indicates just how badly Apple’s ban of Flash hurt Adobe in terms of getting traction with mobile developers. Apple frequently called out the inefficiency of the Flash platform on mobile devices, most recently in an April 2011 blog post from the late Steve Jobs. A ZDNet report came out last night, breaking news of Adobe’s decision.

There were a handful of apps (e.g. iSwifter) that could more or less convert or run Flash apps on iOS devices, but this doesn’t seem to have been a long-term solution for most game developers looking to take their Flash-based games cross-platform. This leaves Flash-loyal game developers with two options: write native apps for each mobile device, or explore alternatives that can produce a single product that runs on various devices.

With a big push from industry giants like Google and Facebook, HTML5 has emerged as an alternative to writing native applications, despite frame-rate issues that present challenges for game developers. Facebook recently launched its own mobile platform with support for HTML5 games from a test pool of established mobile and social game developers.

A handful of indie developers are currently launching HTML5-based arcade and board game titles on Facebook, iOS and Android. Though some of these titles are experiencing growing pains in their early days, they are functional on both web and mobile. Most developers have told us, however, that it’ll be at least another year before HTML5 comes into its own for game development.

Adobe says that it will now take a larger role in contributing to HTLM5 development both through investment and by working with Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM. Hopefully this will yield better HTML5 tools more quickly than a year out from now, as Adobe’s strength has always been tools.

The rest of its mobile work will focus on native app packaging with Adobe Air and the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. The developer will also supply bug fixes and security updates for existing Flash mobile apps. Adobe Flash Player 11 and Air 3 launched in October with a keen emphasis on high-end gaming graphics and HD video for PCs; Adobe says it’s already at work on Flash Player 12.

Zynga said it reached an average 9.9 million daily active users of its games on iOS and Android through the third quarter, according to an amended filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission today.

It means that Zynga is gradually weaning itself off the Facebook platform. Nearly one-fifth of the company’s 54 million daily actives are now on iOS and Android —  which are platforms not operated by Facebook. Keep in mind though, that Zynga’s daily active metric double-counts users who play more than one of the company’s games.

That figure may also make Zynga the company with the most daily actives relative to any other developer on iOS and Android. Storm8 said it had 4 million daily actives on iOS and Android in June. Glu Mobile said yesterday that it had 2.1 million daily actives across its network of games in its quarterly earnings call.

>> Continue reading on our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.

Showtime Pumping DEXTER Facebook Game With Sweepstakes
Showtime is promoting its new DEXTER Facebook game, Dexter Slice of Life, with a pre-launch sweepstakes that includes weekly prizes of $500 and a grand prize of an all expenses paid trip to Miami.  As we reported earlier, Dexter Slice of Life is being developed by Ecko Code with gameplay directly tied to the plot of the show’s sixth season, and fans of the show can play out the events of each episode the day after it airs. The season premiere of DEXTER is October 2nd, and Dexter Slice of Life launches on Monday, October 3rd.

Adobe Hoping Flash 11 Will Fend off HTML 5
Adobe revealed Flash 11 and the Flash-based AIR 3 to the world this week, placing a lot of emphasis on how the new software can be used by game developers, calling Flash 11 and AIR 3 the “game console for the web.” The new tools have been designed to be easier to install, more powerful and compatible with more systems, working with 64-bit on Windows, Mac and Linux. The move comes at a time when Adobe is looking up to shore up Flash as a development platform in the face of growing competition from HTML 5, the still-evolving development platform championed first by Apple, and now Microsoft, who are building their Windows 8 operating system to use HTML 5, blocking Flash entirely.

Has Facebook Added $15 Billion to the Economy?
A study conducted by the University of Maryland claims that Facebook apps have created an entire new segment of the high-tech industry, adding at least 182,000 jobs in the US alone. According to the findings, the so called “app economy” created by Facebook has lead to  53,000 new jobs specifically in companies that develop applications for the social network, and that has lead to job creation in connected sectors, which has pumped an additional $12.19 billion in wages and benefits into the U.S. economy.  While the claim seems to be good news, tech blog Gigaom is raising doubts and criticizing the report for using too many estimates and not enough hard data. For those interested in the numbers, and the methods used to obtain them, the full report can be found here.

American Express Gets into the Virtual Goods Market
American Express is following in the footsteps of rival Visa with the purchase of virtual currency company Sometrics. The deal, worth $30 million, will expand Amex’s Serve digital payments platform, giving it access to Sometrics’ existing customer base. Before the acquisition, Sometrics’ served 250 million customers. In February, Visa bought game monetization service Playspan for $190 million. According our Inside Virtual Goods Report, the virtual goods market will be worth approximately $1.2 billion in 2011.

Zynga Goes on Defensive Domain Buying Spree
While Zynga was announcing Mafia Wars 2, they were going to great lengths to protect that new IP.  Zynga purchased over 75 web addresses on September 20th, according to information uncovered by Fusible. The addresses cover almost every possible iteration of the Mafia Wars name, from insulting – mafiawars2sucks.com, to fawning – ilovemafiawars2.com, to purposely mistyped – wwwmafiawars2.com. While none of the domains seem to go anywhere yet, the complete list can be found here.

Tagged Acquires Startup WeGame to Strengthen Gaming Ties
Social networking service Tagged, which bills itself as the social network for meeting new people, has acquired social gaming service WeGame. While the announcement was short on specifics, the two services essentially serve the same purpose. Tagged allows users to make friends by browsing user profiles, playing games and sharing gifts, and adding WeGame to the mix allows Tagged to offer its user base more gaming focused social discovery tools and more monetization options. In the last year, Tagged has launched a new mobile website and beefed up its in-house game development.

Facebook to Make Big Bank off Credits in 2011
According to a report by eMarketer, Facebook’s revenue from Facebook Credits will top $470 million dollars in 2011, more than three times what it made from credits in 2010. In 2009 credits contributed to 5% of the social network’s revenue; thanks to the growth of social gaming and virtual goods, the currency now makes up 11% of Facebook’s income. According to an eMarketer interview with VentureBeat, one reason for the jump was the July 1st change that made Facebook Credits the mandatory currency for social games, standardizing the Facebook social gaming platform and giving Facebook a 30% cut of every transaction.

Grasshopper Manufacture Partners with DeNA for Social Games
Japanese studio Grasshopper Manufacture, most well known for the surreal titles its CEO Suda51 dreams up, is adding social games to its portfolio. Grasshopper is partnering with DeNA, the Japanese mobile and social gaming juggernaut to bring its games into the smartphone market. In an interview at the Tokyo Game Show, Akira Yamaoka, Grasshopper’s chief creative officer said that Japan’s game industry “absolutely cannot ignore mobile games.” The partnership seems to be a natural move for DeNA, who recently purchased ngmoco:) and Punch Entertainment’s Vietnam studio bolster its Mobage platform.

Sony Unveils a New, Much More Social Home
Sony has unveiled the new look for its integrated social network PlayStation Home. Originally created as a virtual world for hardcore gamers, the new Home, which is currently in closed beta, will have distinct districts that showcase different genres of games, making it easier for Home users to quickly navigate to the kinds of games they want to play. The games will be lighter, more casual and free to play, but supported through virtual goods transactions. Currently 30 developers are creating games for the new version of Home.

EA Aiming to Be the Social Kings in Three Years
According to a speech by CEO John Riccitiello, EA has set a $3 billion goal for online revenue in the next two to three years, with the ultimate goal of surpassing reigning champion Zynga as the biggest social gaming company in the world. Currently the majority of the 100 million people playing EA’s social games are from The Sims Social, which now boasts more than 51 million users. In related news, EA announced that it is creating a spin-off of its NHL franchise for Facebook called NHL Superstars that will launch in October. Meanwhile the gaming giant has signed a distribution agreement with Aeria Games to bring games from its Play4Free division (such as Battlefield Heroes and Need for Speed World) to the 23 million strong gaming network.

MapleStory Adventures Already at Three Million Players
The Facebook version may not be out of beta, but that hasn’t put off fans of the MapleStory franchise. According to Nexon, their first Facebook app MapleStory Adventures has already attracted more than three million users.

Angry Birds + Starbucks = BBFs?
According to report uncovered by Edge, Rovio is in talks to bring Angry Birds to the one of the most ubiquitous franchises in the world, Starbucks. While few details are known, Rovio may be bringing Angry Birds leaderboards into Starbucks as way to encourage people to play the game while they’re getting their daily caffeine fix.

Social Games Can be Hardcore Too
It turns out hardcore social gamers are a lot like regular gamers, according to a study funded by Kabam. In a national research survey, statistics showed that a growing number of young men are “hardcore social gamers” – i.e., they are playing social games from “hardcore” genres like FPS, strategy, RPG or MMO. 82% of hardcore social gamers are also console gamers, and according the study, the lure of the social game experience is siphoning time from consoles. 27% of those surveyed reported a decline in their gameplay on other platforms. The study also showed that the social gaming demographic is growing quickly – 41% of U.S. Internet users reported having played a social game. A full breakdown of the statistics can be found here.

Social Gaming Network Face Up Gaming Goes into Beta
Developer Game Face Gaming is hoping there’s room in the crowded social games landscape for its new online gaming platform, Face Up Gaming. The platform is a non-wagering poker site that combines social networking elements with competitive online gaming. According to CEO Felix Elinson, the goal is to create a global gaming platform that supports cross language play that’s accessible from any internet device. Players will be able to log on, play a game and maintain connections they make with fellow players after the game is over. Face Up Gaming just went into limited beta, with plans to move forward into an expanded beta by October.

GetGlue Adding Social and Game Elements
GetGlue, the check-in based social network for media, has updated its iPhone app and website to incorporate more social elements. Users now have a conversation stream that shows them check ins from their friends and the general user community. GetGlue has also added leaderboards, which show users which of their friends are checking into the service’s most popular content. GetGlue currently has 1.5 million users.

Hanging With Friends Comes to Android
Zynga has brought the latest offering in its With Friends franchise to Android. Hanging With Friends made its Android debut on September 20th as a free download. As a result of the launch, the game is now cross-platform, allowing users on both iOS and Android to challenge one another in the word guessing game.

Capital One Comes to CityVille
On September 20th Capital One launched a major three-game promotion, adding Capital One branded content to CityVille, FarmVille andPioneer Trail.  This is not the first time Zynga has teamed with Capital One, but it is the first time a company has launched a promotion across multiple Zynga games simultaneously.

[Launch] Big Bang Theory Comes to Facebook with Mystic Warlords of Ka’a
The hit CBS show The Big Bang Theory celebrated the debut of its fifth season with the launch of a new Facebook game called The Big Bang Theory: The Mystic Warlords of Ka’a. Based on the character’s favorite game in the show, The Mystic Warlords of Ka’a is a digital collectible card game, where fans can collect and trade cards with one another, play with characters from the series and challenge their friends to matches. The game was developed for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment by Dire Wolf Digital.

MindJolt, the casual-social gaming company run by former MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe, announces a new string of games today along with the news that the company has successfully transitioned its business model from advertising to virtual goods.

The announcement comes roughly five months after MindJolt acquired social mobile game company Social Gaming Network (SGN) and free online game network Hallpass Media. At that time, MindJolt was very clearly activating on DeWolfe’s strategy to expand off of Facebook onto mobile and open web platforms. The acquisitions also helped MindJolt bring much of its game development in-house, effectively educating the company on how monetize games through virtual goods sales as opposed to advertising.

The result, DeWolfe tells us today, is a successful pivot into a new business model with virtual goods now making up one-third of MindJolt’s revenues. Though he declines to give specific numbers, he confirms that annual revenues are in the tens-of-millions and expected to exceed the $20 million figure reported in November 2010. Since April of this year, the company has released or re-launched a handful of games on iOS, including Warp Dash, Master Shot, Dress-up – Fashion, and Mini Cafe.

In the next few months, we can expect to see seven new games out of MindJolt, the first of which DeWolfe says is coming to iOS in as few as a couple of weeks. The upcoming titles include Fluff Friends – Races, Bird’s the Word, and another game inspired by DressUp, which was a web game bought by MindJolt as part of the Hallpass Media acquisition.

The big challenge now will be tackling cross-platform releases, a task many social and mobile game developers struggle with. Currently, MindJolt is building native apps for each platform — web, Facebook, iOS and, eventually, Android — with only very light integration between games of the same franchise via Facebook Connect. The games essentially look and play the same on each platform, however, and DeWolfe says that this is helpful when it comes to promoting games cross-platform.

Another component of the cross-platform challenge is creating a critical mass of users that support the MindJolt brand. As of right now, the company says it has a pool of over 30 million mobile installs, over 70 million social platform installs on social platforms, and over 25 million unique monthly active users on the web. Moving eyeballs between these platforms is crucial in supporting new game launches — as other cross-platform developers like OMGPOP have experienced when shifting audiences between Facebook and iOS.

“We’re getting a trememndous amount of traffic and downloads from web,” DeWolfe says. “It doesn’t usually work to advertise something on the web and then have people go through the friction of the iTunes store, downloading, and then picking up their device and actually using it.” The near-identical appearance of the apps, he says, reduces the friction.

Going forward, MindJolt is also releasing its first in-house developed Facebook game today, titled Bubble Atlantis. Though still integrating the teams at SGN and Hallpass Media, DeWolfe tells us that the company is still “opportunistically” looking for game developer talent acquisitions or second-party partnerships. After successfully beefing up its mobile business, the bar is now higher for what MindJolt can do on social network game platforms and on open web.

China is fast-becoming the second-largest market in terms of downloads for many developers including companies like Rovio, but it lags behind in terms of monetization. The country came in just behind the U.S. in page views on Google’s AdMob advertising network in July, according to statistics the network shared at an iOS developer conference in China this past weekend.

The promise is there, but how do mobile developers take advantage of it?

Over the past two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai, I’ve had the chance to talk with several mobile developers like High Noon-maker Happylatte, PapayaMobile, PopCap Games and other companies being incubated in former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee’s incubator Innovation Works.

It’s an incredibly complex and different market from the U.S., but here are a few insights into developing and marketing iOS and Android apps there:

1) Android may be the long-term bet, but iOS is showing surprising resilience in spite of lower incomes here: 

iOS has leapt up the ranks of mobile search referrals to Baidu in recent months and sends more queries to the Chinese search engine than Android does, according to a source at the search company familiar with the data. Google’s AdMob also said that close to three-fourths of the pageviews on its network in China are from iOS as compared to Android during the same presentation that the picture at the top is from. Nokia is still the biggest platform in China though.

There aren’t good public estimates available on the actual number of consumers carrying Android and iOS devices considering that there are many “Shanzhai” or knock-off phones that are based on Android but are incompatible with the platform. Plus, many people bring phones into the country through relatives and friends abroad. The country’s largest carrier China Mobile — which doesn’t even sell the iPhone — said it had 7.44 million iPhones on its network in its last quarterly earnings call.

Dianxin, one of the makers of a local variant of Android known as Tapas, estimates there are 12 to 15 million Android devices currently circulating in the country. Many other local mobile-focused companies like PapayaMobile say they’re building products assuming there are at least 10 million iOS and 10 million Android phones circulating in the country.

An unlocked iPhone 4 costs 4,999 renminbi here, or roughly $780, well above its American price and even farther above the discounted price with a two-year plan that most U.S. consumers choose. That is about twice what the average new Android phone from Samsung, Motorola or HTC retails for at 2300 to 2600 renminbi or $360 to $410, according to China-focused research firm ZDC. Most people buy their phones unlocked — and often at full retail price — then pick a carrier afterward.

Apple is an incredibly revered brand in China. Based on observation, it’s hard to say there is a more potent and accessible status symbol for Chinese consumers with newfound discretionary income than the iPhone. There is a reason there are fake Apple stores here. There is a reason why Apple’s newly appointed chief executive Tim Cook said in the company’s last earnings call that China brought in $3.8 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and $8.8 billion in revenue in the fiscal year to date.

Apple has also gotten away with a lot more than many other Western consumer technology companies which have come here only to fall flat on their faces. Unlike Google, Apple maintains a favorable relationship with the Chinese government. It likely censors sensitive content from the local version of the app store to comply with the Chinese government’s restrictions. Google doesn’t support paid apps in Android Market in China and unless it censors its store (which would require substantial changes to the store’s current review process), it would be hard for it to gain mass adoption here. In that case, alternative Android app stores may thrive.

2) There are many local variants of Android, but none of them are really that big — yet.

Unlike many other Western markets, there are several custom versions of Android here that are tailored to the needs of Chinese consumers (or in less promising cases, the needs of Chinese carriers and OEMs). Because the Android market here is still so new, most Android users still have the standard version of Google’s OS.

“None of them are really big right now,” said Si Shen, the chief executive of Android mobile-social gaming network PapayaMobile.

Don’t worry about them for now. But if you are interested, the handful that come up most often in conversation are:

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.