Sibblingz Launches New Version Of Multi-Device, Social Gaming Platform

Multi-device social gaming platform Sibblingz, announced a new version of its cloud-based platform, codenamed Spaceport.

Sibblingz allows developers to create games on Facebook as well as iOS and Android devices, allowing players to continue the same social game as they switch between devices. The platform also offers the developers the ability to monetize free-to-play games with virtual goods.

Spaceport allows game developers to build a game once, using Javascript, and have it play across all smartphone operating systems, with a native app-like experience and fast performance. The games run as a hybrid HTML5 – native app, and the code for the game is written once, in a simple scripting language, so that they ca then run on any device. The updating process is also relatively simple for developers using the platform. With Spaceport, developers just need to revise the JavaScript code for their game in the HTML page once. After doing so, they will see immediate updates take place in their game across every device.

The Spaceport platform, which is a server-side solution in the cloud, will initially roll out with Sibblingz’s own synchronous role-playing game, MiniQuest which demonstrates the technology. MiniQuest, which has been developed once in Javascript/HTML5, will be available in Nokia, Apple, and Android app stores this year and playable across 1 billion smart phones says the company

Sibblingz is part of the YouWeb family, a social and mobile company incubator that created global brands such as OpenFeint and CrowdStar. Over the past year, Sibblingz’s first generation multi-device gaming engine powered two of the top Facebook games, Happy Island and It Girl.

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RIM Acquires Social Calendaring Application Tungle.Me

RIM has picked up another company today—social calendaring application Tungle.Me. The startup taps into your social graph and simplifies the process of finding and connecting with friends and colleagues.

Tungle.me, which we’ve previously written about here, offers users a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with a number of calendar applications, including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal.

Since Tungle’s launch in 2009, the company’s scheduling offering was being used at 800 Universities around the world, by 40% of Fortune 1000 companies, and users from over 150 countries.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but on Tungle’s website, the company states that entire Tungle team is joining the ranks of RIM. Tungle.Me has raised $6.36 million in funding.

RIM has been making a number of acquisitions in the past few months, including HTML5 mobile developer TinyHippos, professional contact manager Gist, and UI development team The Astonishing Tribe.

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PapayaMobile Raises $18 Million For Mobile Social Gaming Network

PapayaMobile, the developer of a plug and play technology that incorporates social gaming elements into iOS and Android games, has secured $18 million in Series B funding led by Chinese venture firm Keytone Ventures and DCM. This brings Papaya’s total funding to $22 million.

PapayaMobile hosts mobile games on its social network, which is comprised of over 15 million users and offers mobile developers the tools to build social gaming apps on Android and iOS. Since launching the gaming platform last year, 350 applications have integrated PapayaMobile. PapayaMobile has experienced over 375% growth in its user base since opening its social gaming network in June of 2010.

And Papaya has placed a big bet on the Android platform specifically. The company was one of the first developers to integrate Google Android’s in-app billing on its social gaming network to enable microtransactions.

The new funding will be used to help expand PapayaMobile’s developer ecosystem in both the U.S. and Europe and to improve serve infrastructure so that the company can scale. Papaya is also looking to expand its platform to the Chinese market.

Joe Zhou, founder and managing partner of Keytone Ventures said in a statement: Android growth in China over the next 2 years will be staggering…Couple this growth with the monetization potential of mobile games in China and we believe PapayaMobile is well positioned to be the leader in social gaming platforms for the largest mobile market in the world.

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Adaptly Raises $2.7 Million To Facilitate Cross Platform Social Ad Buys

Social ad buying platform Adaptly has raised a total of $2.7 million in seed and Series A funding from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Kirschenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners and Lerer Ventures. Angel investors also include Gary Vaynerchuk, Invite Media founder Nathaniel Turner and Interclick CEO Michael Katz .

Adaptly, which caters to clients like Pepsi’s Lipton/Brisk, makes it easier for brands to advertise across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Plentyoffish by thinking outside of the display ads box. “Social is NOT display,” co-founder Nikhil Sethi tells me. “What’s really important for us is to socialize the evolution of display ads. Those two dots don’t get connected and they need to be.”

Adaptly has two components: A white-label ad platform as well as a fully managed service where a team member helps brands through the process, “Imagine spending $5 million dollars on StumbleUpon ad. It’s not an easy thing to do, that scale is what we bring to the table,” says Sethi.

The ads space right now is dominated by Facebook specific-buying agencies like Blink, AdParlor and the companies that apply search metrics right next to social like Efficient Frontier.

What Adaptly does differently than the other players is that it understands that integrating ads into a site like Twitter or LinkedIn is an entirely different process and extends beyond Facebook, “Our bet is that social is not just Facebook, but that it will evolve into other sites like LinkedIn and Tumblr. Facebook is roughly 47% of the pie.” 

Adaptly recently moved its headquarters to NYC, and currently operates with a team of seven who mostly come from engineering backgrounds. Sethi tells me he will use the $2.7 million in recent funding to “build the most badass team” and has as an overall goal to put the “tech” in AdTech by building a really strong engineering-focused company.

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Social Influence Measurement Startup Klout Passes 2K API Partners

Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, has hit a significant milestone today—2,000 developers using the startup’s API. That’s up from 250 developers last year.

Klout evaluates Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals and topics around the web. On Twitter, Klout’s influence score is based on a user’s ability to drive action through Tweets, Retweets and more. On Facebook, Klout will examine how conversations and content generate interest and engagement, via likes, comments, and more, from the network’s 600 million-plus users.

Companies using Klout’s API include Radian 6, About.Me, ExactTarget, The Huffington Post, Seesmic, Gnip, Gist and StockTwits. Currently Klout is doing more then 500 million API calls per month and is adding more than 5 API partners per day. For some perspective, Twitter sees more than 6 billion API calls per day.

And armed with $8.5 million in new funding from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft and others, Klout is trying to build a big company out of measuring influence online. It looks like the startup is on the path to accomplishing this goal.

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

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Japan’s GREE And Mobile Community mig33 Sign Deal To Bring Social Games To Asia

Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in Asia, have just announced [PDF] a cooperation with the potential to change the social gaming market in the region.

Under the agreement, mig33 adopts the “GREE platform for smartphone”, which means that smartphone games that have been created using the technical specifications of GREE’s Japanese platform can now be easily ported to mig33, and vice versa.

The cooperation isn’t only a win for the two companies but should also be a big deal for mobile social game makers, as GREE and mig33 combined have over 70 million users – mostly in markets where the mobile web is bigger than the fixed web.

As background, GREE is a social gaming network that can so far only be accessed through Japanese feature and smart phones (roughly speaking, it’s like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one). The company is listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange since December 2008 and currently boasts a market cap of $3.6 billion.

In January, GREE inked a deal similar to the one announced today with China’s Tencent. An American entity, GREE International, was launched earlier this year, which means we will probably hear more from the company about its plans in the US soon.

mig33, on the other hand, is focused on the Middle East, the Asian and African markets where it currently counts 47 million members. Last November, Project Goth, the California-based company behind mig33, sold a stake to GREE in its series C venture round.

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

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VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Flipboard-Like Social Video App For iOS

Online video startup Vodpod is launching a new app today, Showyou, which is essentially a Flipboard for videos. Launched as a free iOS app for the iPad, iPhone and iPad touch; Showyou allows you to access all the videos your friends and contacts share on social neyworks.

Once you sign into the app with your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts, Showyou will displau videos from your friends on Facebook, people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, and from channels you subscribe to on YouTube and Vodpod on one screen, called the Showyou Grid. Videos are presented in a grid-like format, allowing you to easily view all of the content that is shared by your friends.

You can also follow people on Showyou, comment on videos, and share videos to your social networks and within the app. The feed itself will only contain Tweets, Facebook updates and other messages that include videos. To start, Showyou will include and allow viewing of videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and TED (you also won’t be able to access licensed content like TV shows from the app). In the coming weeks and months, the startup says that users will be able to share and view videos from many publishers so long as they’re HTML5 and iOS compatible.

Mark Hall, CEO of Remixnation (the company behind Vodpod and Showyou), tells us that the app is trying to add a social layer to video viewing. YouTube and other video sites lack this element and it can be difficult to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams to focus purely on viewing video. Hall also believes that users want to access this content on a mobile device, like an iPad, and does not plan on extending the application to the web. As for making money, Showyou plans to display cost-per-view, click-to-play ads within the app and may experiment with a subscription service.

Hall adds that the company used much of Vodpod’s core, underlying technology to build Showyou. Launched in late 2006, Vodpod has over 1 million registered users who have collected videos from over 20,000 different video sites.

ShowYou’s interface is sleek, especially on an iPad, but I’m curious if consumers will want a dedicated app for social video. I like apps like Flipboard because it aggregates content from all of my news feeds and social networks in one place.

View the original article here

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