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American Express is teaming with Zynga on a reward program that will link offline spending on its Serve pre-paid cards to in-game rewards in Farmville. It’s an ambitious attempt at boosting the reach of AmEx’s Serve product and tying real-world spending to online virtual rewards. Read More »

Berlin-based developer Wooga, whose gem-clearing game has already made it one of the most successful Facebook app-makers, says the linked-up iOS version has seen 11 million downloads so far. Read More »

 
 

What Zynga acquired from OMGPOP isn’t just a hit game or the team that built it. It’s not buying ad or sales revenue from Draw Something users. What Zynga’s really buying is a huge engaged audience that it can funnel into its other social gaming properties. Read More »

The good thing about being a parent is that it’s okay to be an old fart. Your kids will keep up with tech, and they’re already exploring it in fundamentally different ways. Observe them closely, and you’ll learn quite a bit about the future of technology. Read More »

Zynga may be best known for its hit online and mobile games, but the company has its eye on a much bigger prize. On Tuesday, Zynga unveiled a major new “Zynga direct” platform — codenamed Project Z — showing that its ambition goes well beyond single … Read More »

6waves Lolapps, the newly-merged company that develops and publishes games for Facebook and other social networks, has launched a $10 million fund to invest in independent game developers. The 6L Fund is part of 6waves Lolapps’ play to become the”clear number two” to Zynga. Read More »

Social gaming giant Zynga is the subject of a new patent infringement lawsuit, the latest in a string of such claims. Now that Zynga is under a microscope as it moves toward an IPO, will its legal troubles be too much for potential investors to handle? Read More »

Zynga grabs mobile developer Astro Ape Studios

Zynga is expanding its mobile ambitions by apparently picking up New York City-based developer Astro Ape Studios. The gaming powerhouse, which is preparing to go public, has been increasingly looking to shore up its mobile efforts, which has not be as successful as its Facebook business. Read More »

As Google+ tries to compete with Facebook and Twitter, the prospect of social-media fatigue becomes a real possibility — and some argue that we are spending so much time amusing ourselves on these services we don’t have time for the real world. But is that true? Read More »

Google is cautiously optimistic about its roll out of games on Google+, calling it the first steps in an ambitious plan to turn the social network into a powerful platform. Google is content to move slowly as it builds for a bigger future for Google+. Read More »

Exent is launching the first subscription mobile gaming service for Android called GameTanium Mobile, which allows users to gain Netflix-style all-you-can eat access to more than 75 games for $4.99 a month. It’s another sign that gaming on Android is improving. Read More »

More Must Reads

Zynga, the social gaming company recently filed to go public and raise a whopping $1 billion in its initial public offering. The folks from Namesake have put together a graphic that tells the story of Zynga, the people behind the company and how it got here. Read More »

Free-to-play games, which monetize through in-app purchases, now account for 65 percent of revenue among the top 100 games in the App Store, overtaking paid downloads, which were the most successful revenue model six months ago. It’s another sign that freemium rules for many developers. Read More »

It looks like Zynga is polishing up the proverbial silver in the run-up to its planned IPO. The social gaming company has launched “PrivacyVille,” a new game-like tutorial that rewards users with zPoints, Zynga’s virtual currency, for learning more about the company’s privacy practices. Read More »

Zynga on Friday filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $1 billion. The IPO filing comes just one day later than many people expected — reports have been bubbling for weeks that Zynga was planning to file its S-1 sometime in June. Read More »

Zynga continues to expand way beyond the farms that made it famous. The San Francisco-based social gaming company on Tuesday announced the launch of its first strategy combat game, Empires & Allies, the first title to debut out of its Los Angeles development studio. Read More »

Gamification startup Badgeville expects to book $10 million in sales for 2011, its first year in business, according to CEO Kris Duggan. He claims that being the new kid on the gamification block is an asset. “We’ve built this over last year with modern approaches.” Read More »

Intel Capital is loading up on its social gaming bet with a new investment in top Facebook game developer CrowdStar, which is taking $23 million in its first major funding round. The investment underscores the growing momentum in social gaming as it expands to mobile devices. … Read More »

For Silicon Valley startups, good timing can be just as crucial as good technology. Just ask Bunchball, the six-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based, social gaming, software startup. In 2005, when the company debuted its software platform, the current industry buzzword “gamification” hadn’t even been coined yet. Read More »

Less than a week after OpenFeint was bought for $104 million, and six months after DeNA picked up Ngmoco for $403 million, social game platform operator PapayaMobile announced it has raised $18 million, further highlighting the momentum in the social mobile gaming space. Read More »

Last week’s stories said that social game maker Zynga was raising $250 million at a valuation north of $7 billion. By week’s end, the company was close to raising twice that, at a $10 billion figure. But why would anyone think Zynga was worth that much? Read More »

For third-quarter social media and real-time technologies, most of the action was in consumer services, and much of it — from social gaming to location-based services and advertising dollars — was influenced by Facebook. Here is a brief look back at the NewNet action highlights from … Read More »

A startup called Uken Games makes social games that allow you to synchronize your player profile and other game-related data across platforms, so that when you shift from playing on the PC to playing on your phone, you can pick up right where you left off. Read More »

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus invited social game developers to band together to create an “app economy” at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. Maintaining the structure of applications built on top of platforms will be key to Zynga and its competitors’ success, he said. Read More »

Here’s some good news in a particularly troubled time for Internet startups, and it’s especially piquant for anyone who’s been following the rise (and challenges) of social gaming: Offerpal Media is announcing today that it has secured $15 million in Series B funding led by … Read More »

While it may temping to lump every game that has chat or a shared leaderboard under the social gaming umbrella, to do so muddies the water of a category that just may be the natural progression from social networking. It’s time to define what we mean … Read More »

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