Inside Social Games

Zen Bound 2 Revealed for the iPad – Despite the buzz circling Apple’s new iPad, little has been actually seen regarding games on the coming platform. However, via a post from Kotaku, we’ve been able to catch a glimpse of Secret Exit’s Zen Bound 2, a “sequel and a revision” of the original iPhone application. In a nutshell, the original rendition is about attempting to wrap a rope around an oddly shaped object, with the sequel’s concept being more of the same. However, as you can see, the bigger and more powerful iPad sure does make it look better. A full gallery can be found here.

Frosmo Expands to Asia – Frosmo has seen a good deal of success with its tournament and team-based platform of the same name, in terms for social gaming. Already the company has expanded its collection of titles across Europe and into Facebook, but now the Finnish company is expanding into the Asian game market as well. Currently, the company is slated to let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system, and be available through 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren, and Mixi.

Platogo Gets Casual Games Facebook Ready – Though third party firms helping developers socialize their titles is nothing new, a social games platform from Austria, Platogo is looking to socially enable casual games directly for Facebook. Dubbed “Platogo Wrapper” this tool allows developers to integrate their games into Facebook withonly a few lines of code. With this new tool,  apps will be able to take advantage of Facebook friend invitations, leaderboards, achievements, and player challenges.

Game Investments Dropped 29% in 2009 – It would seem like the video game industry has seen some hefty decline due to the recession as VentureBeat reports that of 115 game startups, only $663.1 million in funding was raised during 2009 (discounting those with undisclosed amounts). That is 29% lower than the $936.8 million raised in 2008. In fact, had it not been for Zynga’s acquisition of $180 million deal from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, the year would have been down a depressing 48%.

Tapulous Taps Into Kings of Leon – The popular rhythm-game company for the iPhone, Tapulous, has added another new title to its collection of Tap Tap games. The new app is dubbed Kings Of Leon Revenge, and if you hadn’t guessed already, features, well, the Kings Of Leon. In addition to hosting 10 of the band’s top songs, the new game will also include a curious ”Battle Mode” that will allow users to directly compete with each other using the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities.

Unity Games Gain a Social Platform Through dimeRocker – More and more frequently, social games empowered with Unity3D are appearing around both Facebook and the web. To that end, Overinteractive Media Inc. has announced the launch of a new social platform, specifically tailored to support Unity enabled games, dubbed dimeRocker. Through the platform, games will be able to support microtransactions, achievements, leaderboards, friend invites, challenges, and be deployable on both the Facebook and MySpace networks. Already, around 150 developers have signed up for the service’s beta stages.

Facebook App Penny Drop Teams Up with Kiva – A simple Facebook application called Penny Drop – powered by CircusPop - is out to help the working poor. The quasi, game-like app consists of players using tokens (earnable through logins every few hours and inviting friends) to drop the price of featured items by one cent until someone purchases it. However, working with Kiva, from March 11th to March 22nd, for every token used in Penny Drop, a penny will be donated to Kiva in order to help poor entrepreneurial individuals and businesses grow.

Gowalla Adds New Platforms & Branded Goods – Location-based iPhone app Gowalla has launched its social game on two new platforms this past week: The Android and Palm’s webOS. In addition to this new support, the game is also bringing branded virtual goods to the table from the Travel Channel’s show, Food Wars. With the new deal, players will be able to earn special badges and virtual items by visiting locals featured during the show.

IMVU adds Voices as a Virtual Good – Popular teen-oriented virtual world IMVU announced a curious partnership with Vivox this Thursday. Now, the virtual world will be capable of integrating voice services, but beyond being just another feature, it will also add a new source of revenue. Currently, 25 different voice styles are being offered for the cost of 990 IMVU Credits.

Sometrics Launches GameCoins.com – Social analytics firm, Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com this week - the company’s first direct-to-consumer play. Game Coins will serve as a community site for gamers, allowing them meet new people as well as participate in forums and blogs that revolve around various social games and virtual worlds. More than this, however, the site, per its name, will also be an online marketplace for virtual goods and currencies. From the portal, players can make use of the Sometrics Offer Solution to complete ad offers and earn goods and currency for their MMO, virtual world, or social game of choice. The company tells us it plans to help grow the community through users discovering relevant content in searches. The idea is that by helping people play these games better, its monetization services will get even more usage.

50% of Gamers Will Earn Virtual Currency – According to a survey performed by comScore for Offerpal Media, and released at the Game Developers Conference this week, alternative payment methods enable greater monetization capabilities that one would think. Derived from comScore and Offerpal’s own monetization analytics, 53.3% of players are “very likely” to complete a marketing actions (i.e. completing a survey, watching a video, or shopping online) in order to earn virtual currency for their favorite games. Conversely, only 22.8% of those surveyed stated they’d be willing and able to buy it.

In fact, 29.7% of social gamers actually don’t have the means to buy virtual currency in the first place; at least not with cash options. Curiously, even among those that could, 34.9% stated that they were “very unlikely” to do so.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak on “The State of the Social Gaming Industry” at GDC in San Francisco. It was awesome to see the level of excitement in social gaming from developers and entrepreneurs across the gaming industry – much more than last year. Lots of people are now working on “social” projects, and larger players are preparing to throw a lot more weight in this direction over the coming year.

For those interested in checking out the slides, they are embedded below.

Topics covered: Social games, Virtual goods, Facebook, Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, PayPal, MySpace, Twitter, Social networks, Gaming portals, Payments, Monetization, Mobile, Offers

Japanese internet company CyberAgent is bringing its popular virtual world, Ameba Pigg, to the U.S. market, and to Facebook, as Ameba Pico.

Ameba Pigg has gained around 2 million users in the last 11 months, making CyberAgent one of the larger Japanese companies of its ilk. Here’s our look at the new app.

At first glance Ameba Pico does not look like much. It has a very simplistic art style, and a stiff, child-like, and limited set of animations for the avatar. But the variety and activity within this virtual world bring it to life.

Essentially, the world is broken up into various chat rooms. Each one has a distinctive theme, and since this is a western, U.S. version, they are all parts of New York City. Players are capable of visiting downtown NYC, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the New York Academy, and so on. These areas are more than just aesthetics as well, for players can actually shop at stores in these rooms that contain themed furniture and clothing based on the area. New York’s downtown, for example, sells fedoras while a more creative room, like the Stone Age (which you need to by a “Time Machine” to visit) sells… cave man stuff.

As with most virtual worlds, these purchases go into decorating your own virtual room and avatar. There’s actually a pretty hefty selection too. For the former, users select a base theme (we went with traditional Japanese), and build from there. From the room, players can order new, non-themed, items from a catalog and move, rotate, and remove items from their space. Unfortunately, placement is based on an invisible grid, that has a snapping mechanism similar to Adobe products like Photoshop or Flash. Trying to get a small, single grid-space, item into place is frustrating because it constantly snaps to where you don’t want it.

Clothes, however, work much better. It isn’t that they look better, by any means, but you obviously don’t have the snapping issue, and you can throw on as much clothing as you want. Basically, this allows users to create their own look, to a limited degree, with layers of their own choosing (i.e. a jacket on top of a scarf, on top of a shirt) rather then just have a single slot for one top item, or one bottom item.

As for the purchasing itself… this gets a little interesting. The earnable in-game currency, called Gummies, is not used at all. Purchases can only be done with the buyable virtual currency, Ameba Coins. Traditionally, this is a cardinal sin for a virtual world, but it is mitigated by a third currency called Tokens.

Now, tokens can be used to buy anything in the game, and it only takes one. When the user starts, they are given five, but more can be won in a game called Gacha. For 300 Gummies, users can press “Play,” and it will spit out a random prize, which could be a token, furniture, clothing, etc. And before anyone thinks 300 is a high price, you get Gummies constantly through daily logins, receiving “Pico Props” (a button players can press when they click on your avatar), or accomplishing achievements.

Of everything Ameba Pico offers, however, the best element is not in the game features at all. It’s that the game is global and linked between a stand-alone site, using Facebook Connect, and Facebook. So far, we have seen English, Japanese, and French in those seas of chat bubbles. Heck, there have even been people from Australia and the Philippians walking around. It is very cool to talk with them, if you can, or even play mini-games such as Match Card or Reversi.

Despite a rocky first impression, Ameba Pico turned out to be a wonderful little virtual world. Aesthetically, it certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but as soon as you log in, you can immediately immerse yourself within a highly populated and global realm. Quite frankly, however, it is the latter that makes this Japanese title stand out, and a little taste of other cultures is something we all can always benefit from.

Currently, Ameba Pico has already gained more than 104,000 monthly active users.

All sorts of gaming veterans have been moving to social and mobile gaming recently, and now, a new group of them is forming a startup called SiXiTS. The goal? Through an exclusive partnership with Sibblingz, a cross-platform game technology company centered around social games, the startup is seeking to create “persistent social game[s]” that can be played on Facebook, the iPhone, and even the iPad.

Located out of the San Francisco Bay area, the company consists of individuals with well over 16 years in visual effects experience. According to the company’s new website, team members include CEO and Creative Director Euan Macdonald, COO and Creative Director Nathaniel Hunter, VP of Business Development Mary Butler, VP of Technology Chris Wilson, and CFO Sherry Wangenheim.

The team’s experience stems from such places such as Electronic Arts, Nokia, Disney’s ImageMovers Digital, Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, Mondo Media, Motorola, and 3DO. Some examples of past work include The Mask, The Matrix Reloaded, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Monsters Inc., Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – there are many more.

Unfortunately, SiXiTS has yet to announce what their first social game will be. However, the company says it will be launching into public beta sometime this spring. Hopefully, we will catch a glimpse of what this creation will turn into before then, but considering the visual merits of the mentioned movies, you can bet it will at least look good.

Mochi Media, the Flash gaming platform company that sold to China media giant Shanda Games for $80 million earlier this year, is continuing to focus on social. It’s announcing new tools for developers today, allowing them to provide ways for users to play games against friends and share activity to their social networks. It’s also offering a new $10 million fund for Flash and social games, in conjunction with its new corporate parent, to help finance promising new ideas.

The company worked last year to apply concepts from free-to-play social games to the Flash widget games on its site, introducing a platform-wide virtual currency, Mochi Coins, and a way for users to find friends from social networks and share things like high scores with them.

Mochi had begun live providing ways for developers to integrate pre-roll and other advertising into their widgets. Developers can then let anyone embed their games anywhere the web, and make money for themselves (with Mochi also getting a cut). On top of this, Mochi provides game analytics tools so developers could track usage and figure out where to improve their products. The company now says it reaches 150 million monthly active users, who play 15,000 games on 40,000 different web sites.

The Social API (application programming interface) lets users sign in to play a game via their identities on Facebook (using Facebook Connect), MySpace or Twitter, then play friends from across these sites and and access each site’s communication channels — say, posting a big gaming win to your Facebook wall.

But the API goes beyond what the company launched last fall, as vice president of product management Ryan Nichols tells us. It’s a layer on top of these other networks, and mimicks Facebook’s API so a social game developer on Facebook could easily port their game to it. Once a user adds a friend on Mochi from one of the social sites, that person becomes their Mochi friend — if Facebook goes down, for example, Mochi can still maintain its connection between the two people. The API =also includes a way for developers to message all users on a game, regardless of which social platform they are on.

This is a smart idea, but one issue is that many social gamers prefer playing games on social networks. Why? Many don’t even realize that they’re playing “games,” per se, but rather passing the time doing something entertaining with friends on the site.

The $10 million fund, meanwhile, “will be managed by members of the management team of Mochi Media and Shanda Games. Through participation with the fund, developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as a host of development tools and distribution….”

The big picture here is this: Shanda Games, a publicly-traded company controlled by Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., wants to compete outside of China. Mochi offers distribution and monetization services that allow it to do so; the social features are another step in that direction. The fund is, too. The other interesting angle we’ve been hearing is that netbook usage is exploding in China, and the lightweight devices can’t handle the processing power required for many of the downloadable and massively multiplayer online games popular in the country. The company has organically gained millions of users in China — people who have just found Mochi-powered games on their own — so Shanda is aiming for Mochi to bring its 15,000 games to bear on the Chinese market.

Aurora Feint Generates 5 Million iPhone Game Downloads – Distribution has always been a problem for iPhone developers, but in an effort to improve the odds on this problem, Aurora Feint created a special promotion on its OpenFeint social platform. The experiment was called the “Free Game of the Day Promotion,” and over the past four weeks has generated 5 million free game downloads.

The success has led to the launch of FreeGameoftheDay.com and will put free game offers at the forefront for a stated 15 million users. To draw a parallel on the success, an Aurora Feint partner in this endeavor, Origin8 creator of Space Station: Frontier, saw 160,000 downloads in a single day, and 1 million overall.

iPad Coming in April – We’ve talked a lot about the iPad in recent weeks, but now it looks like the masses will get to check things out for themselves soon enough. Apple announced today that the official launch of it’s new device is scheduled for April 3rd in the United States.

The Wi-Fi only model will be available first, with the 3G added later in the month. However, both will be eligible for pre-order come March 12th, with a cost ranging from $499 to $629, respectively for the 16GB version and $699 to $829 for the 64GB version.

Kwedit Raises $3.3 Million – Kwedit, the virtual goods payment site that allows users, 13 and up, to borrow money for virtual items and pay it back later, has, according to TechCrunch, gained another $3.3 million in a second round of funding led by Maveron. The company says it has signed six new merchants including VoIP provider, PokeTalk, an unnamed MMO, a test prep service, and a credit record protection service.

Peanut Labs Gets New Partners – Earlier this week, ad offer network Peanut Labs announced not one, but three new partnerships including the virtual world Meez, massively multiplayer online game publisher IGG, and virtual currency payment service Zeevex.  Each of the three are slated to integrate the networks collection of products in the near future.

Meez Promotes the Red Cross – One of Peanut Labs new partners, Meez, had news of its own, as the browser-based virtual world announced its promotion of the Red Cross throughout the month of March. The teen-oriented realm incorporates a virtual blood bank where avatars can visit and donate virtual blood in order to receive a limited edition Red Cross t-shirt in-game. Within the digital donation destination, however, will be links to the Red Cross website where they can learn more and even find out how to make real donations.

Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer Comes to iPhone – Previewed, briefly, in early February, Ubisoft has finally released, according to appadvice, Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer for the iPhone. Essentially a game of deadly hide-and-go-seek, players sneak about trying to kill each other over a Wi-Fi connection. Sadly, this means the game is not 3G compatible (yet), but as a launch promotion, the game is currently free, so that is quickly forgiven. The promotion was only slated at 48 hours and the game was released early in the week and is still free as of Friday. So… yeah, download it for free now while you can, as it will cost $2.99 soon enough.

Lord of the Rings Online Links Up to Facebook – Looks like the MMO Lord of the Rings Online is following World of Warcraft’s footsteps out of Middle Earth and into Facebook. Through a basic Facebook application, LOTRO Player Feed, users will be able to sign in using their My LOTRO account information and track/publish accomplishments to their feeds. This includes level ups, rank ups, quest counts, deed counts, and so on. It even tracks when you log on and off (don’t worry, it waits a while after each as to avoid spam). Also, all of the automatic publishing for each in-game achievement can be toggled on or off.

Exponential Entertainment Raises Funding for Hollywood Games – Earlier this week, Exponential Entertainment raised a round of funding from angel investors totaling $700,000, VentureBeat reports. This amount is in addition to another $1 million in convertible debt, but according to to Chief Executive Dave Long, the company is already in talks to raise a total of $3.25 million. Already, the company has Hollywood trivia games on HollywoodPlayer.com, Facebook, and the iPhone.

Heatwave Experiments with Platinum Life - Heatwave Interactive launched and interesting beta test on Facebook Wednesday. The game is called Platinum Life Web Edition and incorporates the music life into a role-playing title where players move from a nobody to a platinum hip-hop star. However, according to Anthony Castoro, the end goal is to create a massively multiplayer online version of the game with the ideas and lessons earned through the social network – and later MySpace and Twitter as well – being applied to the final rendition.

Booyah Introduces Location-Based Virtual Goods – Location-based iPhone app MyTown, from Booyah, has seen a tremendous amount of check-ins and claims more registered users than its competitors. Now it’s partnering with the Swedish clothing chain H&M, and it will be offering users location-sensitive virtual goods. When a users is near an H&M store, they will not only be able to buy unique virtual goods in the MyTown Store, but if they check-in, they’ll even get discounts and promotions for the actual items on sale in the store.

[via VentureBeat]

Back in September we covered the release of the casual massively multiplayer online game, Faunasphere from developer Big Fish Games. The company has already been testing Facebook Connect for the environmentally-friendly game. Now, it is introducing a Facebook application.

Many traditional game publishers are experimenting with how to take advantage of Facebook — can an app work better than Connect, even though both services provide the same user identity information and communication channels?

This is basically what Big Fish is trying to find out.

Will O’Brien, the company’s new vice president of social games, tells us that the app is intended to give users more choice in where they play the game, even though he says the Connect implementation is already showing some positive results.

The company isn’t sharing overall numbers for the game so far. O’Brien says that “as a standalone site, Faunasphere has demonstrated incredible user growth and consistently high average spend per users.”

The original browser-based version and the app are connected to the exact same virtual world. The only difference is that the app is on Facebook. Some portion of users feel more comfortable playing on Facebook than on the web. The result is that when users check out games by seeing ads, or activity in their news feeds from friends who are already playing, some larger portion of them appear more likely to stay on.

AppData is showing limited Facebook Connect traffic to Faunasphere so we’ll be watching for increases.

For those that missed our first review, the game is a quality MMO where players control a cartoonish-looking animal called a Fauna (which, for the record, can be easily shared on your profile too). Set in a sci-fi sort of universe, users proceed around the world completing quests and cleaning up various forms of pollution (some of which fight back). As they progress, they eventually begin to find trees, ground tiles, and even waterfalls to decorate their own personal space called a Faunasphere.

Eventually, players also gain the capability to adopt and grow other Fauna – beyond the first handful you can pick from – via breeding or feeding them “gene food,” leading to over 50 million possible variations.

All of these qualities that made the browser rendition attractive are still intact, This includes the ability to purchase the virtual currency, Bux, for spending on rare or limited items such as holiday goods or the gene food, as well premium memberships that grant large amounts of Bux per month and a greater cap on how many Fauna a player can create.

Last week, we took a look at a social sports web site called NFL Canada Social Games, powered by Playaction. Making use of Facebook Connect, its collection of social, prediction-style games created a friendly competition, of sorts, complete with the opportunity to win prizes. Playaction now has a Canadian sports sequel of sorts, a gaming app for 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics!

With the Opening Ceremonies beginning just this weekend, our NFL Canada friends have released, in tandem with the Vancouver Olympics, an official, social, and bilingual prediction game called Race for the Gold or Visez L’or.

Empowered through Facebook Connect, players are able to seamlessly sign in to the site and make predictions on upcoming events. Each list is based on the games scheduled for that day (though you can view previous days), and users can see a basic gauge next to their votes representing how others are voting. And, of course, all of this can be published to your Facebook feed.

Unfortunately, unlike NFL Canada, there are no prizes to be won here. However, based on your Facebook profile when you connect, the site assigns you to your home country, and your profile picture is accompanied with the corresponding flag. As one might expect, the game has leaderboards (which can be sorted by overall, Facebook friends, or just by country), and the inclusion of flag icons creates a small sense of national pride. Considering it a virtual Olympics for those of us that can’t ski… or just hate the cold.

In line with this digital competition, the site also awards the top three pickers each day with interactive medals – obviously gold, silver, and bronze – that is displayed in a separate, leaderboard-like section aptly named “Medals.”

The social implications for Race for the Gold are simple, but as with the NFL Canada website, it does create a sort of environment reminiscent of friends making predictions in a living room. Only this time, it’s international.

To that end, that international prowess is what is most important. Again, Race for the Gold was created directly with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Not only does this mean that the overall site has information about the events themselves, but it represents the most recent social, international, and official use of Facebook to connect people.

World of Warcraft Used to Protest Chinese Game Censorship – While it is not unusual for popular games to have fan made movies made using their in-game resources (dubbed machinima), a recent video called “War of Internet Addition” has come about that is both entertaining and a bit political. Using visuals and avatars from World of Warcraft, the 64 minute video almost directly represents the ever increasing Chinese restrictions of the web in a very satirical fashion.

The Chinese version can be found at Youku’s Buzz blog. English subtitles can be found in seven parts on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

MyTown Hits 1 Million Users – Though it was one of the most recent of the location-based titles to appear on the iPhone, the social title, Booyah’s MyTown has passed 1 million registered users before competing location games Foursquare and Gowalla. Playing the game means checking in at real world locals, but while Foursquare and Gowalla encourage check-ins with achievements and badges, MyTown focuses on a more Monopoly-like approach, allowing people to actually “buy” locations” and earn money based on who checks in there.

Gavin Newsom Claims Social Gaming Companies Will Help Economy – San Fransisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom says, in a report from ABC, that the city is on its way to recovery, with the creation of more jobs and better economic conditions coming from a more diversified collection of industries — especially social gaming. In fact, Newsom specifically mentions social gaming companies with offices in San Francisco, including Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish.

City of Eternals Sees Strong Starting Metrics – Ohai’s Facebook empowered MMO, City of Eternals looked impressive from the start, but initial metrics are showing just how many are agreeing with that assessment. Within the first 30 days, players that spend money on virtual goods have spent an average of $16.50, and that, of all players, an average of 65 minutes is spent, a day, playing the blood-sucking title with the 10,000 most active playing for 87 minutes.

Although the company hasn’t released overall user traffic numbers, it says 1% of active users play for seven hours a day (note that the game logs you off after 20 minutes of inactivity) and 42% play for multiple sessions a day. 60% of active users returning to play within seven days. Furthermore, of all these users, 60% are male and 40% female with 70% of the games most active members being women.

[via VentureBeat]

Bejeweled Turns 10 – PopCap’s ever popular casual game, Bejeweled has sold over 50 million units, making it one of the top selling video games of all time. In fact, the company states that a copy is sold ever 4.3 seconds. In order to celebrate, PopCap will be hosting its first-ever community-wide competition for it’s one minute, Facebook version, Bejeweled Bitz. The contest is called “Show Your Bejeweled Love” and will feature a myriad of promotional activities and, more importantly, rewards for the best Bejeweled Blitz players. The contest and details will launch next month at Bejeweled.com.

Apple Getting Nicer? - Anyone following or dealing with the Apple submission process for apps, knows how unhappy a great many developers became with the company last year. However, that was 2009 and in the new decade, it looks like Apple is trying to make amends with new and improved services for its application developers. Not only did submissions become faster earlier this year, but the company is now issuing surveys asking a myriad of questions in the hopes of improving their services before the next big boom for the Apple’s mobile platforms comes again (iPad anyone?).

[via TechCrunch]

Mochi Media Partners with USA Network- Earlier in the week, Mochi Media announced its new partnership with USA Networks. Along with the announcement came a week of Valentine’s Day promotions as a celebratory event. Obviously, this team up also means USA’s Character Arcade will integrate all of Mochi’s titles, and to that end, players that play the featured game, Mochi’s “Twin Shots 2: Good and Evil” will be registered to win a Wii Starter Bundle or $25 Best Buy gift cards. The winners will be announced Sunday at 11:59 pm.

Apple Patents a 3D Virtual Apple Store – In other Apple news, the company recently made a big win as it was approved the patent for a 3D virtual store. The concept is to create the more personalized and living feel of shopping at a brick and mortar location, but still have all the benefits that come from everyday online shopping (searches, always open, etc.). The store would be a virtual world with icons representing time of day and color schemes/decor representing the seasons indoors. Curiously, the patent also covers details such as outdoor lighting and settings to reflect time and seasons as well.

[image via Patently Apple]

Electronic Arts Says Digital Business Will Reach $750 Million in Revenue – Earlier this week, Electronic Arts proclaimed that the gaming giant’s digital business was “growing” and is “profitable.” It projected its digital business to reach around $750 million in revenue by next year; a substantial growth over the $575 million this year. Executives say that this is currently the most profitable portion of the company, and they do not expect much growth in regards to their traditional games (i.e. console box sales). Beyond its own online games, it is one of the top mobile developers, holding seven of the top iPhone apps), and big on Facebook via the acquisition of Playfish last fall (granting two top 10 Facebook games). Expect more to come online games to come from the company soon, like Madden Football for Facebook.

Mixpanel Raises Funding – Analytics company Mixpanel is active on and off Facebook, with clients including Kiva, HotorNot, Slide and UserVoice. It has now raised $500,000 in angel funding from PayPal cofounder and Slide founder Max Levchin and Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. For more on the company, check out the recent Inside Facebook guest post on social gaming metrics from cofounder Suhail Doshi.

Though the big game is over, international usage of Facebook and its features are always something to keep an eye on. The latest find is a compilation of four simplistic titles called NFL Canada Social Games. Powered by Playaction and integrated with Facebook Connect, this football oriented portal brings everything from pools, to memory, to free cars to the table.

Despite what many seem to think, NFL popularity is hardly limited to just the United States, and NFL Canada is just the site to help sate that international thirst. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to be Canadian to make use of the portal, but it couldn’t hurt considering that the registration to win a Nissan Pathfinder asks for your province. To be clear, this site is not for the Canadian Football League, which is a variation of American football.

For the record, this registration is just for the car, as the primary login is through Facebook Connect. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning, as the more players play the collection of applicationss on the site, the more times they are entered to win (though there are limited entries per game per day or week).

The first two games featured on the site are fairly similar and are dubbed NFL Confidence Pool Playoffs Edition and NFL Live. Each game is about predictions as you and a slew of other Facebook users try to predict what will happen in a game. What is interesting, however, is while Confidence poses questions before a game (i.e. “Which team will register more passing yards in the game?”), Live actually updates in real time with questions such as “What will the next play be?” In fact, you can even be notified via email before a game starts.

The other two games are more game-like – Quiznos Trivia and NFL Concentration – and are your basic quiz and memory type of games. In the former, players test their NFL knowledge with quirky football puns appearing based on your answer, while the latter is merely matching up team logos.

All the games are amusing, but what makes them better than their descriptions is the Facebook integration. Through Facebook, players can not only publish results to their feed, but view weekly and overall leaderboards as well. More than this, however, one has to consider the social nature of the two prediction games.

Through Connect, Confidence is more reminiscent of an office pool (which may or may not be very social, depending on the people involved), and Live feels more like a bunch of buddies at a bar or in the living room guessing what will happen next. Granted, it’s not the same without the din of noise or 50 hot wings, but the prizes players can win from either of these games (beyond the Pathfinder), more than makes up for that (i.e. an NFL prize pack for Confidence).

Yes, the NFL season has come to a close, but the world is still turning as more and more international sites, apps, and developers empower, socially, themselves through Facebook. Unfortunately, it will be some time before NFL Canada sees heavy usage again, but until then perhaps it would be wise to brush up on your NFL trivia knowledge. After all, who knows what prizes they’ll be offering next season.