metarand

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

Scrabble Officially On Facebook

Electronic Arts has teamed up with Hasbro to bring SCRABBLE to Facebook and Pogo.

Launching later in July, SCRABBLE will be the first EA Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social networking site. EA has plans to release a number of other Hasbro properties later in the year.

The SCRABBLE Facebook app will allow head-to-head challenges and players can choose between a real-time turn-based game or pause and pick up the play later. Scores and stats wil be tracked and players can be ranked. In addition, players will have access to built-in chat, dynamic animations and be able to access world lists.

Tags: Electronic Arts, Hasbro, Scrabble

Venturewrap: GameDuell Gets $17M From Wellington Partners

Berlin-based skill games company GameDuell has secured over $17 million in Series B venture funding from Wellington Partners.

With a current user base of 10 million members in Germany, France and Spain, the company will use this funding to expand into the United States and other European countries.

The last funding round for GameDuell, which is headed up by a team of experienced Internet entrepreneurs (Kai Bolik, Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth), was in 2004.

The company’s skill-games include Mahjong, Pool, Solitaire and Sudoku and they are Germany’s third largest online advertiser with more than 200 media partnerships and 80 staff.

Tags: GameDuell, Wellington Partners

Announcing MySpace devJams across Australia

Following on from an awesome devJam in Sydney on June 5th, I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to be hosting a further three events in Australia in July.

These events are a must attend for everyone who codes and has an interest in building social media apps.

There will be door prizes and the opportunity to head over to San Francisco and/or Tokyo - read more about these opportunities and each of the events from the following links:

• Sydney July 12
• Melbourne July 19
• Games July 26

We are working on rolling out similar events in other major cities across Australia.

I’d like to thank the guys from Mitchellake for providing us with their uber cool offices for these events.

Tags: devJam

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

The Science Behind Spore

It’s only a few weeks until the Spore Creature Creator is released, so to whet your appetite for this highly anticipated game, creator Will Wright shares with us his thoughts on the science behind it.

We’ll have to wait until September for the release of the full “personal universe in a box” Spore game.

Tags: Spore, Will Wright

Appspace: $15M First Round Funding For Social Gaming Network

The creators of social network game apps like Warbook and Jetman, Social Gaming Network has raised a weighty $15M in first round funding. The previous highest first round in this category was $10M, which went to Mark Pincus’s Zynga Networks.

Spun out of Freewebs, SGN has located itself in Silicon Valley and is led by Shervin Pishevar. He’s secured this round from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

This funding comes on the back of some healthy installs and DAU rates across Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and hi5. To date, SGN has attracted over 1 billion page views, 54 million installs and almost 1.1 million daily active users.

Wagner James Au spoke with Shervin:

While Social Gaming Network’s low-graphics games aren’t likely to be confused with a next-gen title, he told me, they’re successful enough. “Small is the new big, right?” Games like Warbook can be made with a low budget, he noted. “Even having a 100,000 daily active users is good revenue.” (At peak usage with a sponsorship deal, he said, Warbook was making $100,000 a month.) “We’re much more about engagement and retentions than virality,” Pishevar told me.

Over the next few months, Shervin Pishevar and his small team will be working on several top secret games that’ll leverage advertising and virtual item sales for revenue. While still relatively low budget, he’s working with developers to give these new titles more polish. The goal, said Pishevar, is to transform Social Gaming Network into “the Pixar of social games.”

[Disclosure: metarand's Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace’s parent company, Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of app developer, Creative Enclave, which has released the massively multiplayer game, Imperial Galaxy on Facebook]

Tags: Columbia Capital, Founders Fund, Greylock, Novak Biddle, Shervin Pishevar, Social Gaming Network, Zynga Networks

Appspace: MySpace Opens App Gallery, Zynga Opens API

The world’s largest social network, MySpace, has officially opened its Application Gallery.

Every application gets its own profile, from where its developers can directly interface with those users who friend the app.

Truth Box by Suren Markosian tops the app install leaderboard with over 560,000 installs. The app promises to let you find out the “truth about yourself” and discover what others really think about you.

Not far down the chart at No. 4 is Ace Texas Hold’em Poker with 86,000 installs. This app is part of the Zynga Game Network, which is one of the companies to have embraced the MySpace Developer Platform since it became available in February.

Zynga Game Network is named after CEO Mark Pincus’s favorite pooch - Zinga, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently over at his favorite San Francisco kennel, ahem…office.

The company has launched a Game Center, an open API that will allow developers to connect into a network of game apps. This will effectively create a channel and enable a network effect or viral loop to grow.

What’s the meta take on these two moves? The appspace is a rapidly evolving environment and brand owners and developers are well advised to watch closely as both the MySpace platform matures and Zynga tests out various mechanisms like their Game Center and Social Bar.

[Disclosure: Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace's parent company, Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of app developer, Creative Enclave]

Tags: apps, developer platform, Games, metarand, MySpace, open API, Social Media, Truth Box, Zynga

Atari Releases Roll Your Own Game Adventure Editor

Atari has released the D’jinni beta adventure editor, which will allow users to roll their own adventures within The Witcher, a role playing game based on the universe created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.

Players are put into the role of Geralt, a professional monster slayer who exists on the fringes of a complex society troubled by the kind of problems more commonly found on the front pages of newspapers than in a fantasy universe. Taken as a child, mutated, and trained in the arcane ways of the witchers, Geralt is a reluctant hero, who nonetheless finds himself all too frequently in the heat of battles that are not his own. In this world there is no right or wrong, only decisions and consequences.

Users can create new stories, cut-scenes, graphical effects, dialogue and gameplay actions.

Very cool stuff. Kudos to game creators CD Projekt.