Posts Tagged ‘Mobile Gaming’

Foursquare goes primetime

February 1st, 2010

Foursquare announced today a new partnership with Bravo TV which will integrate a number of Bravo TV shows with the site.  The partnership is designed to engage viewers after they turn their TV’s off in leveraging Foursquare’s rapidly expanding location-based gaming presence.  Foursquare will begin integrating various show personalities and their city tips, as well as a Bravo badges, into the game experience.

This new deal will include the introduction of a number of new Bravo-themed badges to Foursquare will also turn some of Bravo’s top personalities behind its hit reality TV shows like The Millionaire Matchmaker, Top Chef, The Real Housewives, Top Chef Masters and Shear Genius into content creators.  These personalities will share their tips and to-do’s with users effectively adding a plethora of new city-specific content to venture.

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Posted in Gaming, Mobile, Startups

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2010′s breakout star? Foursquare

December 29th, 2009

It seems this time of year every publication, online and offline, rolls out their predictions for the new year.  Well, we thought we would jump on that bandwagon and make our 2010 prediction as well.  Instead of coming up with some list like top 10 ‘fill in the blank’ of 2010, we chose to be more bold and pick a solo social media star for the new year.  And the winner is….Foursquare.

Founded in 2009 by the team that brought us Dodgeball, the mobile social network that was acquire by Google in 2005 and later shut down, the rapidly growing location-based startup has a simple purpose by letting users share their location with a group of friends.

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Posted in Startups, Twitter

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Gowalla’s 10 and a half days of Christmas game

December 17th, 2009

gowallaLocation-based game and social networking company Gowalla has announced its push for the holidays with their “10 and a half days of Christmas” game (because the 12 days of Christmas is too predictable).  Foursquare competitor Gowalla recently closed a Series B investment round from an all-star Silicon Valley cast earlier this month in an effort to unseat Foursquare in the buzz-worthy location-based game/social network race.

While we have covered Foursquare in the past, we haven’t yet profiled Gowalla’s service.  Similar to Foursquare, the Austin, Texas-based Gowalla game is all about checking into various places, sharing them with your friends and competing for prizes.  Gowalla does have a slightly different spin on their game platform such as enabling virtual goods at different location points.  You can see a brief demo of the service in action below:

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Posted in Mobile, Startups

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No smartphone? No worries. HipLogic brings smartphone functionality to the masses.

December 2nd, 2009

hiplogiclogo_200x135HipLogic announced today they have have closed a $7 million in Series B round from Benchmark Capital, Stage 1 Ventures, Bay Partners, and Accrue Sports and Entertainment Ventures to bring smartphone intelligence to mass market phones.  Don’t have an iPhone, Droid, Blackberry or Palm – no worries.  HipLogic’s platform enables smartphone-like applications to work on non-smartphone’s.  With all the attention on the many rich applications hitting the smartphone market, its important to note that smartphones are still the global minority when it comes to cell phone usage.  HipLogic’s solution targets that large mass market segment, bring cool apps to the masses.

This new round of financing follows a Series A round the company raised back in 2008 when it was called Numobiq.  With new round, HipLogic is looking to accelerate their rollout of their easy-to-use application platform for lightweight mass market phones.

hiplogphone

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Posted in Mobile, Startups

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Foursquare aims for world domination – one pub at a time

November 19th, 2009

foursquare_logoOnly a few days after their announcement of a new API, Foursquare is at it again.  The location-based mobile application and game has announced 50 more cities to its highly addictive and rapidly growing service bringing the global total to over 100 different cities worldwide.  A little over a month ago, Foursquare announced 15 new cities to its service all of which were in North America.  The 50 new cities announced today definitely have a more global theme to the Foursquare service.

The list of the new cities are outlined below.  As you scan through the list, you quickly see the significant part of today’s announcement.  This time, the highly popular service includes cities from South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.  This rapid global expansion, super addictive gameplay and intensely dedicated user base has led some anoint Foursquare as 2010′s next Twitter (via Mashable).

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Posted in Gaming, Startups, Twitter

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Scoreloop announces social gaming platform

October 20th, 2009

Scoreloop announced today the launch of their CoreSocial ‘white-label’ social gaming platform.  This new platform is designed to enable iPhone game designers to put social networking features into their games.  Some of the social features the CoreSocial platform delivers are; high score leaderboards, achievement medals and awards, cross promotions and virtual currency.  The net is meant to drive more game usage and viral distribution amongst friends.

scoreloop

Some of the games using Scoreloop’s platform include Parachute Panic, Astro Boy Flying Action and my favorite by title alone – Pee Monkey Jungle Fire (see screen shot below courtesy of VentureBeat):

scoreloop-2

The platform has been available to game developers for some time now.  Now Scoreloop is giving these game developers the ability to completely integrate these features within their games.  This new platform should enable rapid social gaming deployment for the iPhone platform.

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Posted in Apple, Gaming, Google, Mobile, Startups

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Rock Band hits the iPhone and iPod Touch

October 19th, 2009

The super popular Electronic Arts title, Rock Band, was just released for the iPhone and iPod Touch and is available on iTunes for $9.99 (iTunes link).  The newly released game features a multi-player mode (via Bluetooth), which allows up to 4 players to jam together.  Another cool feature of the game is its integration with Facebook Connect which allows users to invite their friends to play – building on the social gaming craze that’s hit all gamemakers.

rockband

In addition to the multi-player functionality and sync capabilities with Facebook Connect, the new game also comes with the ability to purchase additional tracks from within the game – which was just announced by Apple last week.  Users can choose between vocals, drums, bass or guitar and have 20 tracks to play upon download (song list below):

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Posted in Apple, Facebook, Gaming, Mobile

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Big news for iPhone developers, Apple announces ‘In App Purchase’ capability

October 15th, 2009

Apple announced today that it will now allow the capability to purchase virtual goods in its free apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch.  This is a huge deal for app developers worldwide.  The new capability will enable free apps to be created leveraging the wildly successful virtual goods model that social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace have enabled.  This move will certainly start a wave of new iPhone app innovation as now developers can upsell virtual goods within their free apps.

iphoneapps

This move should have a huge impact on all the free games that live off of the sale of virtual goods.  Up until now game developers had to offer ‘Lite’ versions of the games on the Apple app store and try to up sell their users to the paid-for more robust games – typically with low conversion rates.  Now game developers can release their titles and enable their in-game virtual goods engines to build revenue as they have been able to do in the social network world.

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Posted in Apple, Gaming

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Foursquare expanding fast!

October 15th, 2009

We recently highlighted a unique new social networking startup called Foursquare.  It’s  the location based social network startup that incorporates elements of gaming.  Foursquare is expanding fast and asking users to suggest their city to help build demand for the service.  They recently announced they have launched to following 15 cities:

UNITED STATES
Baltimore, MD4square
Cleveland, OH
Indianapolis, IN
Kansas City, MO
Milwaukee, WI
New Orleans, LA
Omaha, NE
Pittsburgh, PA
Raleigh-Durham, NC
Richmond, VA
Salt Lake City, UT
San Antonio, TX
St. Louis, MO

CANADA
Montreal, Canada
Toronto, Canada

The cool new service is growing an international following to go along with its US growth with recent launches in Amsterdam and London.  Foursquare is currently available in the following cities:  Amsterdam, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Montreal, New York City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington D.C.

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Posted in Gaming, Startups

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Zynga’s new social game hits 10 million users in one week

October 10th, 2009

Zynga, the leader in social games with over 40 million daily active users, has a new hit on their hands.  Cafe World, their latest release, has grown to 10 million users in just one week on Facebook.  This is a remarkable feat – to launch a social gaming app and add over 10 mzyngaillion new users in one week.  This continues Zynga’s momentum from its flagship title, Farmville which has over 56 million registered users.

Cafe World is not just copy of Zynga’s major social gaming application provider Playfish’s 16 million member Restaurant City game.  In Cafe World users create restaurants, market them through their social networks and sell virtual good.  While some of the features are comparable across both games, Cafe World does have some unique elements, like restaurant expansion.  For a review of the two games, check out this link from Inside Social Games.

cafe-world-1

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Posted in Facebook, Gaming, Startups

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