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VentureWrap: Zynga Brings Kleiner Into Play With $29M

The Potrero Hill, San Francisco-based Mark Pincus social games venture, Zynga Game Network has closed a $29 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins.

New Kleiner partner and former Electronic Arts Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon will be joining the board and getting actively involved in operations.

This follows a recent $10 million Series A and the investors in that round (Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and Union Square Ventures) have participated alongside Kleiner and IVP in the Series B.

I suspect this funding will be used to fuel a number of acquisitions. This is borne out by Zynga’s additional announcement that they have acquired YoVille, a virtual-world app that has over 150,000 daily active users on Facebook.

[Hat tip to Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures]

Tags: Avalon Ventures, Bing Gordon, Facebook, Foundry Group, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Mark Pincus, Union Square Ventures, Zynga

Google Search 2.0 = Digg Plus Friendfeed

The following video sourced from TechCrunch outlines a possible next iteration of Google Search. It’s very interesting to note the inclusion of Digg-like vote up/down features as well as on-search comments and profiling a la Friendfeed.

Should Google go ahead and implement this new feature set it will make search an order of magnitude more social.

Tags: Digg, Friendfeed, Google, TechCrunch

Funware: Filch Photos on Facebook To Create A Prized Collection

Gabe Zichermann wants to help you create a personal gallery filled with your favorite social photos and have you compete with others to make your collection the most popular, valuable or visually interesting.

His New York-based company, rmbr, has released a Facebook application called Prized Collection so that you can play do just that. The app is billed as a virtual art trading game and it’s in beta.

You start with a small gallery space and, as a new player, with $4k. Your task is to browse your Facebook friends’ photos and buy or steal their pics to display in your gallery.

There are a number of ‘zany’ characters you are likely to meet along the way. The helpful, but creepy Dr Medici and the cunning Boy Scout - they are there to enrich your experience of the game.

I am a big fan of funware and incorporating game mechanics into social media, but this app has yet to grab me. At the time of writing it had 55 daily active users.

Tags: Prized Collection, rmbr