Inside Social Games

Gowalla and Loopt Use Check-Ins to Help Haiti – Last week, the roundup mentioned Loopt and its desire to promote check-ins for its location-based, mobile social network in the form of deals at real world locations. Now, every check in at Chipotle, Panera Bread, or Whole Foods will lead to a donation of $1 to the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders to help in the Haiti earthquake relief.

In line with Loopt’s charitably, another location-based app, Gowalla has also launched a check-in charity campaign dubbed “Hearts for Haiti.” The event will take place on Monday, February 8th in the San Francisco Bay Area, and whenever someone checks-in at one of three specific locations (noted below), at specific times, Gowalla will donate $50 to the American Red Cross in that person’s name. The goal is to raise $20,000.

• 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Emeryville at 5959 Shellmound Street, Suite 85
• 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Mill Valley at 88 Throckmorton Avenue
• 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Barenaked Ladies concert at Infusion Lounge

AppFund To Seed iPad Apps – CNET and E! Online co-founder, Kevin Wendle has partnered with MusicNation to form the AppFund, with the sole goal to help fund entrepreneurs and startups that wish to launch applications on the new Apple iPad (or any other tablet, for that matter). The investment amount will range anywhere from $5000 to $500,000 depending on the complexity of the app. However, proposals for funding are encouraged to be made immediately in order to be part of the first wave of iPad applications this summer.

[via TechCrunch]

Celebrate Valentine’s with Wizard101 – The free-to-play MMO, Wizard101 will be bringing some special Valentine’s virtual goods to the wizarding world this month. The goods will be purchased via the game’s virtual currency from a non-player character, Valentina Heartsong, but as a special promotion, the developers will be hosting a special contest that will give away some of said items for free.

All players have to do is follow @Wizard101 on Twitter, and each weekday, until the 12th, a random follower will be contacted through the social network to claim their free virtual gift.

Civilization on Facebook – Though it was announced in October, Sid Meier’s Civilization isn’t quite ready for Facebook yet. Publisher, Take Two, told Variety that it’s going to still be a little while until the popular franchise makes its way onto the social network. But fear not, as they also said that the game’s open beta ought to be “sometime in June.”

Star Trek Online Virtual Goods – The highly anticipated MMO, Star Trek Online launched with an interesting surprise: Apparently, developer Cryptic Studios and publisher Atari are bringing some very hefty virtual goods to the table. Currently, players can purchase two special races from the game’s in-game “C-Store” using the virtual currency, Cryptic Points. For 240 Cryptic Points – $3.00 – players can purchase the Federation Klingons race, and for 80 Cryptic Points – $1.00 – the Federation Ferengi race. Currently, however, the virtual currency can only be purchased in increments of 500, or $6.25.

TrialPay Gets in on Valentine’s Day – Offers company TrialPay is running a little something special for Valentine’s Day as well. Currently, the company is offering new and existing partners a $250 Amazon.com gift card. In order to qualify, new partners must complete 30 transactions via TrialPayduring the month of February, while existing partners must launch a new Valentine’s Day Campaign and complete 50 transactions.

Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer Coming to the iPhone – While an iPhone rendition of Assassin’s Creed II has been noted to come out in early February, word is that Ubisoft is to release another, online version, Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer. Soon, players will be able to use Wi-Fi to compete with up to three other players in a deadly game of hide-and-go-seek as each assassin tries to kill the others before being killed themselves. What is most interesting, however, is that the game will feature not only a built-in friend’s list but Facebook integration as well that will allow the posting of up to 24 achievements to their social networking feed.

[via Kotaku]

For a year now, game developer Ohai has been working on a Flash-based massively multiplayer online game called City of Eternals. After having gone into testing last fall, it has just gotten an upgrade and gone into public beta. Here’s a closer look.

This well-designed, Flash-based game is especially notable for pushing boundaries between social and traditional online gaming. It not only tasks players with the MMO-style goal of bringing order to a chaotic vampire-run city, it also has players doing less intense activities, like building and caring for their avatars, and decorating a living space.

To begin, just go to the game site and click play. You’ll be asked to log in using Facebook Connect. This means you don’t need to go through a separate, cumbersome sign-up process. This is the first of many ways that the game uses Connect.

Each player starts out as a new vampire in a city called New Valencia. You and a friend have just been attacked and killed  by a group of vampires while walking through “Central Park.” You’re immediately asked a multiple choice question that will determine which of five themed vampires houses you will become a part of. Like many other role-playing games, each theme provides you a different set of options throughout the game.

Once past this introduction, you begin the game: you crawl out of your freshly made grave and are promptly greeted by a vampire quest giver that teaches you the basics of combat and gives you the task of slaying a zombie.

Combat is simple enough with a mere point and click interface. The avatar transforms into a fiercer-looking creature and a combat menu with various abilities appears. As players fight, they use basic attacks until bigger and better ones become available (i.e. after the player does three bites they might be able to drain blood), and as they level up, they unlock more advanced techniques for later encounters.

As far as progression goes, it follows the standard World of Warcraft format of choose quest, do quest, deliver quest to garner experience; also like Warcraft and other MMORPGs, players can eventually level up various professions such as anatomy, gathering, and so on to make items for use.

Early on, most of the quests are tasks that merely have you talking to objects and people to learn the premise of the story and how to use various basic features. This is wonderful on many levels, because it not only lets the user ease into the game world, but there is a lot of lore going on in New Valencia. If you’re interested in knowing more, you can always look at Ohai’s lore and backstory pages, but in a nutshell, over the ages in which New Valencia has existed, various bloodlines have formed, eventually turning into the modern day houses that the player joins. The issue, however, is that for the longest time, the vampires lived off of “hema,” or artificial human blood, and now, this tradition of not feeding off of humans is fading (hence the introduction), and the city faces civil war.

Like virtually all MMOGs, this game has equipment that can be used to better your character’s performance in battle. However, you can also purchase clothing simple for aesthetic expression, and as an added bonus, your friends will see what you buy as well.

Beyond clothing, City of Eternals even gives you the option to fully redecorate the house you are given at the start of the game. This isnt’ to be confused with the “Vampire House” (your chosen faction), but is actually a virtual space that you can not only customize, but your friends can visit as well. In fact, this is yet another pleasant addition since our first play. Perhaps it hadn’t been added yet, or it had a level requirement, but early renditions did not seem to allow redecoration (or at least not in a manor we could decipher).

Items are purchased in one of two ways, either using an in-game currency called Rubies or a purchased virtual currency called Ohais.

The city is pretty sizable, so it does take some time to find the vendors you’re looking for. Note that there’s an instant teleport to the housing vendor, part of the new update to the game that the company rolled out recently. Most items costing Rubies require an abundance of them, while those costing Ohais are relatively cheap. Useful items such as health potions and bags for inventory space also follow this rule, coaxing players to advance themselves faster at the cost of real money.

The last major feature worth mention is yet another social one: Minions. Yes, you can employ your Facebook friends as your personal minions. What sort of jobs can they do? Oh this is good: Why, they can be your accountant, a bodyguard, or oh yes, a concubine or boy-toy. Once hired, your minions can then go out and do little missions for you at the cost of Rubies. Each mission will take X amount of hours to complete but will earn you special items and double the money back or more. As you play and level up, more minion slots open up for further jobs, which is good, because they are then placed in what’s called the “Tower of Tribute.” In short, as they play, they earn you points that are put towards special rewards that you can use yourself.

This Minion feature, too, is new and improved. In our previous look, it was significantly simplified to just drop lists and basic menus (sort of like a basic Mafia Wars-type of game). Furthermore, the Tower of Tribute did not exist (which really is a great addition). Unfortunately, it did look like the best minion job had been removed: We could no longer make our Facebook friends succubi. Luckily, our disappointment was short lived when we were informed that it was merely just moved to a level four minion job.

With no downloads, no accounts, and personalized Facebook integration, there really is nothing to complain about with City of Eternals on the game play end. For a free MMOG, it is actually a lot of fun and got in the way of finishing this review. Honestly, the only gripe that can be had is that the visuals are a little simplistic. The animations are a little stiff and awkward looking, and more visual variety within the city would be more than warranted.

In the end, City of Eternals is a lot of fun and very deep for a free – not to mention social – MMO. Whether you play through networking, combat, or through crafts, this is something to feed everyone’s social dark side.

April 20 | San Francisco

2007 was the year social applications were born. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, and soon after similar platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible. Three years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry.

Now, in 2010, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Who Is Speaking?

We’re excited and honored to announce the following initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Register Now

A limited set of 20 “early announcement” tickets is now available at a special announcement price of $149. This price will change when these first 20 tickets are sold out. Space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

Square Enix May Go Social: With Japanese developer, Square Enix, this week, raising $400 million in funding, a recent analysis by Screen Digest suggests that a major acquisition may be in the company’s future. The belief is that the mainstream developer will be following in the footsteps of Electronic Arts, in reference to its recent purchase of social developer Playfish. At the moment, the speculations are all merely rumors, but based on past confirmations from President and CEO Yoichi Wada, the company has looked into social gaming before, and according to analyst Ed Barton of Screen Digest, Square also has a total of $880 million, on hand, and ready to spend.

Zynga Players Help Haiti: Though it is not possible for everyone to head to Haiti and help out, Zynga game players are doing their part, having raised $1.5 million in five days. More than 300,000 individuals contributed to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) by purchasing limited edition virtual goods within FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker. 100% of all proceeds went directly to WFP, with $1 million coming from FarmVille alone.

TAITO Chooses OpenFeint for Social iPhone Apps: TAITO Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Square Enix and major Japanese mobile game developer, has chosen Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint platform to empower its mobile titles with social capabilities. TAITO is also a major partner to one of Japan’s mobile social network operators, DeNA- creator of Mobage-Town – with whom Aurora Feint also partnered with last October.

$1.38 Billion Invested into Online Game and Virtual Goods Firms: The downtrodden economy didn’t hurt everyone as a recent report, the 2009 Virtual Goods Investment Report by Engage Digital Media, is stating that the past year tallied somewhere around and over, $1.38 billion in investments for online games and virtual goods-based businesses. The number of companies said to have received investment is at 87, but of that total, 29 did not disclose the amount of money involved. These values were not actually included in the $1.38 billion estimate.

gWallet Launches Early-Stage Venture Fund: Another announcement this past week came from virtual currency monetization company, gWallet. The company will be launching a new, early-stage venture fund called gWallet Ventures to invest in social gaming companies as well as attempt to drive new innovations within the social gaming realm. Currently, investments are said to range from $100,000 to $1 million per company and will also be tied with the monetization options gWallet already provides.

ISN Virtual Worlds Announces Oasis Foundation Virtual World Project: Thursday, ISN Virtual Worlds announced the first steps in rolling out the Oasis Foundation Virtual World Project (the Oasis Foundation is an Italian nonprofit organization focused on the medial care of the elderly and disabled). The virtual world will be built on top of the Second Life Grid and will be intended to provide the elderly with a form of community interaction.

According to ISN CEO, Mattia Crespi, the project already has $3.5 million in funding, which will not only pay for the development, but management as well that will consist of staff from ISN, Oasis, and even the community. Furthermore, the world will contain learning sessions for the “Oasis Virtual University” and will hold content such as producing virtual goods, culture and releigion, machinima, and even family assistance and help from psychologists.

AppStoreHQ Uses Twitter for App Discovery: With over 100,000 applications, AppStoreHQ is looking to help people discovery new and interesting iPhone applications. via Twitter. By looking at Twitter’s public stream, it will actually make recommendations based on who is tweeting about what in regards to iPhone applications. In a nutshell, every time anyone links (in a positive light) to an app it is treated like a vote, thus the more apps are tweeted about, the more recommended they become. Unfortunately, for the system to work properly, keywords such as “iPhone” or “AppStoreHQ” must be within the actual tweet to find it.

To further prune down recommendations, the system also looks to see what games you might be tweeting about. Based on how many apps you tweet about, the recommendations become more specific to what it determines as something you might like. Moreover, clicking app links as well as favoriting them on AppStoreHQ will also affect  how recommendations are made.

CrowdFlower Raises $5 Million: CrowdFlower, a provider of “labor-on-demand,” announced that it has closed a $5 million Series A round led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company makes use of what it calls “machine learning algorithms” to provide quality control to crowdsourcing, making it easier and less expensive for companies to find online labor. With the new funding, the company is looking to expand its repertoire of client solutions as well as provide its services worldwide.

The tech world has been talking a lot about augmented reality lately, but for all that buzz, it really hasn’t touched too much within the social gaming space. Until now. Last week we took a look at an assassination game using the iPhone camera called NinjaHit, but the technology goes one step further in the form of iPhone app GunMan, from Shadowforce. It brings a whole new meaning to the term “first-person shooter.”

GunMan is a game that makes direct use of the iPhone’s built in camera, superimposing a gun scope and minimalistic interface, and combines these with color recognition technology to take the concept of shooter games out of the virtual world and into the real one. Players can choose from three different game modes: One vs. One, Multiplayer (four players via WiFi), or Pro. When playing either of the first two, participants select a time duration of either two minutes, five minutes, or unlimited and the shirt color of your enemy. This is where the magic really begins as the game can actually recognize the colors of red, green, blue, gray, and white.

This is easily the coolest part of the game. If you claim that your enemy is wearing red, for example, if you pull the proverbial trigger with them in sight, you get a hit. Moreover, and despite our initial skepticism, this feature actually works phenomenally well with good lighting. What makes it even more fun is that every time someone gets hit, their iPhone vibrates and at the end of each game, players are able to not only see their accuracy and final scores, but it saves all of your shots and lets you Tweet your favorites.

The game also makes use of other iPhone technologies as well including shaking the device to reload and using pinch zooming to snipe distant opponents (though the game doesn’t actually inform you that this is possible). GunMan comes with a “Pro” mode that lets players run around and shoot 30 random shots at anyone around. Of course, this really only pans down to shooting random pictures, so it does get a bit old.

If there are any complaints to the game, it is that the color recognition is a bit sketchy in without really good lighting when indoors. It does still work most of the time, but not nearly as well as outside. Furthermore, if you don’t have the iPhone 3GS, the frame rate of the camera is a bit choppy and the image can become rather blurry when you’re whipping about trying to make a shot.

Nonetheless, the game is still a ton of fun if you have friends that own an iPhone, and seeing as how it is currently a free download, it is quite the bargain as well. Furthermore, according to the Shadowforce website, even cooler features are coming soon including location based features (like Foursquare), badges and achievements, leaderboards, and semi-automatic weapons and grenades. Whether or not such new features will be free is, of course, yet to be determined, but it certainly sounds fun, all the same.

Zynga Expands on its Sweet Seeds Program – Back in October, Zynga raised money for children in Haiti through FarmVille. The program was called Sweet Seeds; since its inception, it has raised over $800,000. Now, the program is expanding to include a Haitian drum for Mafia Wars and a premium chip package in Zynga Poker. Together with non-profits FATEM and Fonkoze, the revenue will be used to further feed families and build school kitchens.

Habbo Adds Facebook Connect – The teen virtual world known as Habbo has long been popular among its target demographic. Now, users that also have a Facebook account will gain access to the social network through the virtual world. Players will be able to broadcast their Habbo activities and accomplishments through their Facebook feed, regardless of which of the 31 Habbo communities they are part of.

Sony’s Winter Charity Drive – Also in the giving spirit is Sony Online Entertainment. Until January 17th, players of the MMOs Free Realms, EverQuest, and EverQuest II may purchase a Triceratops pet, an Anklebiter doll, and a Bouncing Baby Panda Cub in each game respectively. Each item costs 500 Station Cash, and for each transaction $10 will be donated to the pediatric charity, Child’s Play.

[via Massively]

How Social Games are doing in Latin America – While the past few months have shown notable influxes from the Asian demographic in social gaming, we have also been seeing, on Inside Facebook, growth from Latin America. Though it is unfinished, a study from a Brazilian university is showing that in its first survey, of 250 Brazilian users (ages 18 – 35), has shown that 26% of those that joined Facebook did so because of its social games. Moreover, another 30% joined due to friends being on the social network. Of everyone, however, 86% stated that the games were what they enjoyed the most, and of said games FarmVille made up 35% of all Brazilians playing Facebook titles while Mafia Wars made up 26%.

[via DMLcentral]

Civilization On Facebook – Sid Meier’s masterpiece, Civilization has been expected on Facebook for some time now. Leading up to its release, we’ve been kept up to date on its progress by the developer himself, and the game’s Facebook page (Sid Meier’s Civilization Network). Thus far, the page has garnered over 50,000 fans, and to their elation, the wait may be coming to a close. Just this Tuesday, the fan page stated that an open beta may be expected sometime early in the new year.

Zynga Tests Mobile Notifications – According to TechCrunch, it looks like Zynga is going to expand the usability of its games collection by allowing mobile notifications via SMS. Players will be able to track what is happening in any Zynga game without having to log onto a social network like Facebook. It is currently only available for about 10% of the Zynga player population.

Become a Facebook Fan and Win Fabulous Prizes – Looks like mainstream MMO titles are making even greater use of the social graph these days as developer Funcom is looking to give away prizes to people that become friends, fans, or followers of their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The company will have two accounts for each of its major titles including Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, The Secret World, and Funcom itself. For each one that a user signs up for, they will be entered into a drawing to win prizes such as free game time, beta access to new expansions, and other, unannounced items.

gWallet Launches gLTV Platform – Going live this week was ad offer platform gWallet’s brand new gLTV. The new product is intended to add greater insight and accuracy in the measurement of social media analytics by allowing publishers to “measure and increase their lifetime value of users on their applications.” According to statements from the company, the gWallet platform can generate a gLTV metric on individual users. From here it is able to demonstrate exactly how to increase a “lifetime value of a user based on prior usage and transaction history.”

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin – Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What is one possible reason that gaming applications have seen slower growth in the past couple of weeks? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Xbox Suits Up for the Holidays – Microsoft has laid out its holiday plans for Xbox Live, and they include a myriad of deals, including new avatar items. The specials are starting out with new holiday and tokidoki outfits for sale in the Avatar Marketplace, with some special Disney Classic items coming on Christmas Eve. Furthermore, December 18th will kick off twelve days of special holiday deals in which Microsoft will host one-day sales for Xbox Live Marketplace items including games, movies, add-ons, and themes. [image via Gaming Angels]

MOL Global Buys Friendster – While rumors about some sort of sale have been out there for awhile, Friendster has now officially been acquired by MOL Global, a division of online payments company MOL AccessPortal Berhad. The purchase price has not yet been disclosed but MOL is looking to combine its services with the existing Friendster platform to create a content distribution and e-commerce platform for the Asian market. Currently, MOL holds a network of 500,000 payment channels across 75 Asian countries, while Friendster has over 75 million users of the same demographic.

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million – Location based mobile game/app, Gowalla looks to be doing well as it has just raised $8.4 million in a Series B round led by Greylock Partners. Other investors include Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Veynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis, and Chris Sacca. This brings the investment total for Austin-based company, Alamofire, to $10 million.

PlaySpan Releases VGMarket Digital Goods Study – PlaySpan and VGMarket recently completed its virtual goods study on user buying habits. The study surveyed 2,425 random individuals that made use of either the PlaySpan Marketplace, Spare Change, and/or the Ultimate Game Card. In a nutshell, the study noted that 80% of users make virtual goods purchases for themselves to use in game, with the other 20% gifting them. Furthermore, roughly 66% bought virtual goods once per month while 25% did so once a week. Of everyone, however, 7% made daily purchases and 12%, yearly.

Another curiosity was that most users will not purchases virtual goods from third parties. 42% refused to do so out of fear of getting their account closed while another 42% were afraid of scams. 9% just didn’t know they could.

The full report can be found here.

Sony Offers Players Virtual Goods Rewards – Sony Online Entertainment has launched Facebook pages Twitter accounts for its three big MMORPGs, Everquest (FB, Twitter), Everquest II (FB, Twitter), and Free Realms (FB, Twitter). In order to get players involved in these new pages, they have created the program, ConecDING, that will reward users with virtual goods when the social media pages reach a certain number of fans or followers.

There will be three milestones of 5000, 10,000, and 25,000. At each one, players of each game will be eligible to receive 250 in Sony’s virtual currency, Station Cash (SC), 250 SC and a virtual good worth10,000 SC, and 500 SC and an item worth 25,000 SC respectively. For Free Realms, the goods will be a House Frog and Small Dance Floor; for Everquest they will be The Tome of Friends and The Magic Lute; and for Everquest II it will be The Cloak of Pie and an unannounced item.

Virtual Currency Used to Fight Health Care Reform? – This past week a health insurance group called Get Health Reform Right was apparently sponsoring ad offers that were actually paying social games players in virtual currency to send letters to Congress that opposed the health care reform.

The Business Insider describes the act as “virtual astroturfing,” with astroturfing being the act of orchestrating a campaign yet disguising it as spontaneous public opinion.

YouWeb Invests into Social Gaming – YouWeb, founded by Oracle Internet executive Peter Relan, announced Friday that it is going to begin heavy investment into social gaming in 2010. The focus will be to jump start an entire “ecosystem” centered around its social gaming companies of CrowdStar, Aurora Feint/OpenFeint, and Sibblingz. All ready the “ecosystem” has many entreprenurial startups involved, but by the looks of things, they intend to concentrate the “efforts of entrepreneurs around the real opportunities using its perspective gained” from the aforementioned big three.

YouWeb also plans to host a Social Gaming Eco-System Summit at some point in the near future. It is here that it will clarify and outline these “plans” and “opportunities” for its companies.

Tonchidot Gets $4 Million for Augmented Reality Virtual Goods – Augmented reality, the combination of real world objects with virtual ones, is a growing space in the mobile field, but a Japanese startup by the name of Tonchidot is taking a new perspective on the matter. The company just landed $4 million in funding from DMC and ITOCHU Technology Ventures for a very diferent monetization concept. Based on early demonstrations, the technology could allow brick and mortar locations to sell virtual goods using the “Sekai Camera System.”

Mochi Media Surveys Flash Game Developers About Monetization – Among other results, 20% of developers said they make more than $1,000 a month on games. More here.

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin – Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What type of game mechanic is being favored by a large game developer these days, to the exclusion of still-popular titles? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Way back in April, German company Scoreloop launched a social gaming platform of the same name, for the booming iPhone/iPod Touch developer platform. Today, roughly eight months later, the company is expanding that service to another rapidly growing, and similar, mobile platform: Android. With this announcement, social developers for the Android platform will not only receive all the perks iPhone developers have seen, but also get access to the white-label platform, Core Social and its Premium Integration Services.

Current features of Android’s Core Social include online high scores, achievements, player challenges, profiles, cross promotions, wall postings, and virtual currency. As with the iPhone rendition of Core Social, all of these can be implemented directly into the game’s interfaces without breaking the game’s brand consistency with something that screams “Core Social Was Here!” Moreover, if anyone needs help in the use of the white-label elements, then Android users will also be welcome to utilize Scoreloop’s free Premium Integration Services.

The biggest part of the announcement is that players using Scoreloop-enabled games will actually be able to play across the two mobile platforms. This means that if one player plays a game on the Android that also exists on the iPhone, they can issue a challenge directly to the Apple user. That person will receive a push notification to play, and both scores will then be posted on a server-based leaderboard viewable by both parties.

Android’s Core Social also keeps true to some of the oldest Scoreloop features, as well, retaining its social analytics, game recommendations, and free server operations. Unfortunately, the one thing that the platform does not have is Facebook and Twitter integration. Not to worry, though. When we spoke to Scoreloop chief executive Marc Gumpinger, he assured us that this is the next feature on the agenda and will be going live in the next couple of weeks.

Android was not only selected because of its growth and similarity to the iPhone, Gumpinger said. The company had been receiving a number of publisher requests for it as well. While he did not tell us specifics, he also said that the Scoreloop technology was intended to be cross-platform capable since day one and that the company is actually working on releasing their services for three other platforms.

Currently, there are all ready a handful of developers signed up for the new Android Core Social, but the only announced one, at this time, is Indiagames with Android renditions of Cricket T20 Super Sixers and Godzilla – Monster Mayhem. However, developers and publishers alike are invited to check out the Scoreloop-made demo, Bug Landing, which is also now available in the AppMarket.

Core Social Android feature details can be found below:

• Online High Scores
• Achievements
• Player Challenges – Players challenge friend or foe on social networks like Facebook, by email, or using Scoreloop’s auto matching system which pairs opponents with like skill
• Profiles – Track a buddy’s standing and brag about Challenge records
• Social Network Integration – Publish scores and achievements to a wall and invite friends to join in on the fun
• Cross Promotions – Discover what friends are playing by intelligent cross-promotions based on their gaming activities
• Virtual Currencies – Reward players with Coins for attaining achievements or completing Challenges and let them use these to unlock or extend game content

Harbor Havoc is one of the more recent in a genre of iPhone (and Nintendo DS) titles known as “path-drawing games.” These games have been around since the early days of the iPhone, and primarily have you drawing a path for a selected object to get from Point A to Point B. In the beginning, they were indeed as basic as A to B, but as time wore on, more finesse has been adopted in the form of added challenges (i.e. enemies or power-ups). Harbor Havoc 3D falls in the latter category.

Developed by Backflip Studios, this game puts you in the harbor master chair of some of the world’s busiest ports, full of ships steered by quite possibly the worst helmsmen ever. The primary objective is to guide ships of one color to their corresponding dock color by touching the vessel and drawing a path to get there. However, as the game progresses, more and more ships arrive, and it’s up to the player to keep them from running into each other.

The core game play is an extremely easy concept to learn, but quickly becomes quite difficult to master. The easiest level is “Far East,” a tropical sort of environment, where there are only boats. After that, comes “Atlantis” where underwater rovers and submarines come into play, moving on a “bottom“ and “middle“ tier respectively. Then comes the “Artic” where you get the subs, the boats, and one more, on a “top” tier: The helicopter.

Managing three tiers of vehicles on three different planes is quite difficult. Of course, Backflip didn’t think that was hard enough, and thus added a forth, unlockable, level called “Lighthouse” (score 25 or higher on the other three maps to access it). This level is everything the previous levels had — only in the dark. The only light stems from a spinning lighthouse, and thus leads to many frustrating attempts trying to guide ships nearly blind.

Despite the aggravation invoked by Lighthouse, it was quickly forgiven by the game’s social features. This game is actually powered by ngmoco’s Plus+ platform. So players are able earn achievements, view leaderboards, issue push notification challenges to friends, and score postings to Facebook and/or Twitter feeds.

To be honest, most everything out of Harbor Havoc is positive, and the game is only made sweeter by the Plus+ integration. Everything looks and sounds great, and the only real complaints lie within the difficulty of Lighthouse and that some harbor/boat colors don’t always match up exactly (leading to a few crashed ships). Overall though, this is really only picking nits, so if you are looking for a newer path-drawing type of game, this one certainly comes recommended.

Back when iPhone developer Booyah released its first title, Booyah Society, most of the buzz was about the creators behind it. With a number of the team coming from strong backgrounds such as Blizzard Entertainment, there were high expectations for the game that allowed players to “level up in life.” Unfortunately, it looks as if the game is no longer in the AppStore, as the company kicks off a new rendition: MyTown.

The game keeps some of the old features of Societies; namely the robotic-looking avatars. Users can interact with them by tapping the screen, earn items and clothing, and post updates via Twitter or Facebook. What is different, however, is that the game has gone the route of location-based game/social networks such as FourSquare and Gowalla. As a reminder, those are games that have users “checking in” from real locations around their town to earn points.

While lack of users in an area may still be an issue for MyTown, there does seem to be more initial rewards as well as places that are all ready tagged. Here’s how it works. Players log in, from wherever they are, and check in. A list of locations will appear, and after selecting one, a player checks in again and not only earns cash, power-ups, and wearable gear, but also has the option to purchase the location.

This is where the game starts to feel like a real-life Monopoly. Purchasing an area allows the player to earn rent, which is, perhaps, the most interesting feature. You see, each location has a set value. As other users check in at that location, you get virtual rent money. So, the more of your town you own, the more you earn.

As players check in to locations, they will also earn points towards new levels. This, in turn, allows them to upgrade any location that they currently own, thus increasing rent values (like making hotels in Monopoly).

On the social end too, beyond Facebook status updates and tweets, users can view the entire national society and see comments from around the country. A personal favorite is a user named Shawn who is apparently stuck at Target, up in Michigan, “still drinking.”

Frankly, the only significant complaint is that the game seems to be fairly easy to level up. In the span it took to write up this review, “check-in,” for the only nearby location, has been pressed over a couple dozen times, and a great deal of coin and power-ups have been earned. Nevertheless, it does seem like a pretty fun game, and certainly a nice time killer if you are traveling. Sure, there are some dents to hammer out, but overall, MyTown does feel more solid than Booyah Society. We look forward to seeing this title evolve and grow.