GigaOM

What began last March with Warbook, a no-frills Facebook fantasy strategy game first conceived by an intern, has lead to today’s announcement: Social Gaming Network, a startup still based in a Palo Alto garage, is getting $15 million in Series A funding from a VC team comprised of Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Partners [...]

A few months ago we made note of the public beta of GameLayers’ Passively Multiplayer Online Game, the immensely clever MMO that turns web browsing into a game. Now with 20,000 registered beta users, it’s finally open for public play — go here to check it out.
It debuts with a cool kicker: [...]

The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an Internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status, according to the latest issue of Harvard Business Review.
“Leadership’s Online Labs” by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll is based on the authors’ research into the leadership [...]

Finally, another game widget worth adding next to Scrabulous. Last week came news that Jeff Bezos invested $3 million in casual game site Kongregate; I just noticed that CEO Jim Greer and his team have added a Kongregate Facebook widget to their service, too.

Update, May 4: Can Grand Theft Auto IV defeat “Iron Man”? The weekend box office results are in, and as I predicted yesterday, the answer to that question is a resounding “No”. In its first weekend, “Iron Man” grossed $100 million, far more than industry expectations (and mine), which pegged it at $70-80 [...]

Here’s the metaverse mystery of the week: This strange new private island with a very familiar name recently emerged on the server grid of virtual world Second Life. Spotted yesterday by Second Life blogger Tateru Nino (and confirmed when I checked the world’s dynamic map today), we have to assume it’s an official Nintendo [...]