Written on 25th June 2009
1 COMMENT Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Micropayments are a popular way for developers of online games to make money from their products. Players typically get the game for free but must pay for extra levels, upgraded items and the like.
Developers of Facebook games have been able to build micropayments into their products since earlier this year. Now those working on Flash-based games will be able to do the same thanks to a new service from San Francisco startup Heyzap.
Heyzap Payments, launched today, is a platform that allows developers to easily build a standardized payment system into their Flash games. Revenue is shared between the Heyzap and the developer. (more…)
The Iraqi who tossed a shoe to George Bush yesterday has inspired lots of Web entrepreneurs to come up with flash games. cartoons and animated gifs.
At Boing Boing they have a huge collection of The Animated Gifs but if you are really bored check out these Flash games. The games are simple but impressive when you realize they were made in less than 24 hours:
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Asmo Halinen from Playray, a social minigames community from Helsinki, Finland. People from sixteen different countries can log in to the site and enjoy games in their own language, while staying in touch with their gaming buddy’s. The service raised €1.75 million from Estonia-based venture capital fund Martinson Trigon Venture Partners about a year ago. That’s not the last part of company history that you’ll readm, as Asmo told us quite a lot about how Playray started.
How did you come up with the idea of Playray?
“Actually we started as a B2B service company, producing sites, web commercials and other stuff like that. But since all the three founders (Pasi Laaksonen, Janne Matilainen and me) had some background on online gaming, we started building our own online casual gaming service during 2002. At the beginning it was only a hobby, but as that side in our company grew, we later (in 2004) split the original company in two: I recruited a new CEO for the B2B side and all we three founders continued in the “new” gaming company.
Since that we’ve focused 100% on the development and internationalization of our Playray service. During the early days it was only about browser based online games; nowadays it’s much more about the active player community around the casual gaming experience.” (more…)
Just a quick update to show you how mature the mobile games market is becoming. And not just because of Super Monkey Ball. In the next five years, the UK mobile games market will grow with €28 million over the next five years to a total value of €103 million in 2012, concludes a study by media analyst Screen Digest. This impressive sum of money is divided in two parts:
Pay-per-play market was worth €1.9 million in 2007
Pay-per-download market makes up for €69 million, and is expected to increase to €100 million by 2012
Of all the mobile games downloads in 2007, only 0.5 million out of 13.2 million were ad-supported.
The global mobile games market is booming as well, it’s expected to increase to a €2.6 billion market by 2012.
Researchers of Screen Digest see two reasons for the upcoming growth of mobile games revenue. The rise of smartphones, which obviously create a better gaming experience, and the launch of the Apple Apps store - where more than 10 million applications were downloaded in three days. So it seems we can’t rule out the influence of Super Monkey Ball completely.
Give me four months and I’ll race against Kimi Raikonnen and Fernando Alonso. Not that I’ll practice with go-karts or anything, no, I’ll just play some Formula 1 games to get ready. You think I’m bluffing? Think again. Dutch entrepreneur Andy Lurling is working hard to make this reality. By using a sophisticated DGPS-based technology his company iOpener Media will offer players the opportunity to race against their heroes. That’s better than just watching with a beer in your hand.
BBC News runs an article today about this technology that will make many dreams come true. Lurling told the British reporter that “it’s clear that the next trend in gaming is going to be bringing real objects into the virtual world; playing not against other gamers but people doing the real thing.” So Lurling and his team have developed a patented product that imports in real-time GPS data from racing events into compatible game consoles and PC’s.
Lurling has already tested the service with a real F1 car. The only thing that is holding him back to bring it to the market is finding the right partner. He’s currently talking to six parties and aims to launch the first game as early as this September. This game will also use some AI magic. For example, if Alonso drives past you (he can’t see you in real life, he’s watching our for real cars), the game will generate a real-life looking overtake. Same goes for those spectacular collisions – although Alonso will always get away with it, you probably will be walking back to the pits.
Yet what if you’re not into racing? Well, don’t worry, Lurling told the BBC that you can also think of biking, rowing, skiing and snowboarding. “In the next three to five years, we believe that games will not be ‘triple A’ games unless they have our feature in”, the GPS-magician said.
Written on 8th May 2008
2 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
The days that a Hollywood blockbuster gets the headlines when they break box office records are over. Gaming is hot, and you can be pretty sure that gaming is here to stay. Last week Grand Theft Auto IV was released and over 6 million copies were sold in the first 6 days, coining in a nice 600 million dollars!
To give you an example, the box office sale of GTA IV exceeds sales of all movies in theaters right now. It exceeds the $407 million that Pirates of the Caribean generated in the first week. It exceeds the 255.000 sold copies of Madonna her new album, Hard Candy, in the first week (not only in numbers but also in price per item sold. A CD is $20 dollars and GTA IV $90).
“Grand Theft Auto IV’s first-week performance represents the largest launch in the history of interactive entertainment, and we believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date” Strauss Zelnick (producer of GTA IV) stated.
Last week we gave away 250 private beta invites for Blippr, a service that allows you to collect, organize and share your books, games, music, movies and tv shows. It’s definitely a nice service for people with a broad range of interests. Yet not everybody is interested in books AND music AND movies. For those people, there are specialized services, and an example is social network for gamers Vigster.com.
The London-based start-up showed a demo during Minibar, chaired by Mike Butcher form TechCrunch UK – and launched this week in public beta. Users can build and catalogue their games, create virtual game shelves to show off their games collection and do the regular social network thing: connecting, sharing and having heated discussions about game characters, scenarios and whatnot.
The interface is rather sober – not what you would expect from a gaming service – and focused too much on selling games. For instance, if you go to the screenshots gallery and click on one you like, you end up on a page that puts the ‘buy this game’-line right in your face. You have to scroll down to find a thumbnail version of the screenshot, that opens on a new blank page. There are officiously some missed opportunities there.
I think the way to build a strong community is to get users to love your service. Offer them the same features Vigster has now, but present them in a good-looking, game-like and usable interface. Show users that you love them as well by welcoming them in a warm way – learn from Flickr – and leave the Google Ads for later.
But most of all, let them know you love games too. I’m sure the guys from Vigster have a passion for games, but I can’t tell by looking at their service.
FreeRice is an interesting initiative by the founders of Poverty.com. Both websites aim to end world hunger. My guess is that the owners of the website read the excellent ‘Made to Stick‘ and decided to present their message in a new format. And this new format sticks!
It is very simple: you are presented with one word and a list of definitions. You have to pick the right definition for each word. If you get it right, you get a harder word. If you get it wrong, you get an easier word. For every good guess FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. They can do this because they display an ad under each list of definitions.
A brilliantly simple solution. I only hope the service will scale and advertisers will keep advertising here. I can imagine people doing this instead of Sudoku or Solitaire. This way you make the world a better place while you get smarter and enjoy yourself at the same time. In fact, they should bundle this with Windows instead of Solitaire!
The site launched in Oktober 2007 and has donated 10,238,535,870 grains of rice since then. How much will you contribute?
Moola has a simple but foolproof way of making millions. They give users one cent and let them play against other users in simple flash games. If you win, you double your money. If you lose, you go back to square one one cent. If you manage to win 30 times you win exactly $10,737,418.24. Not bad for winning a few flash games.
Before each Flash game you do have to watch a short video ad and that is where revenue is generated for Moola. If you want to know more about how it works read these excellent reviews on Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb.
Local versions
The company is based in Toronto, Canada, invitation only and currently only available to residents of the United States and Canada. Once this company officially launches and becomes successful my guess is we will see a flurry of localized copies.
The reason why it makes sense to start your own local Moola is because the law is different for each country in the world. In the United States it can even be different per state. The Moola websites explains as much in their disclaimer:
Moola is currently only available to residents of the United States and Canada, excluding Louisiana, Nevada and Quebec. The law on contests, sweepstakes and tournaments is not settled in Nevada, Louisiana and Quebec at this time. Until there is greater certainty, Moola will be unavailable to residents of these areas.
My guess is that within 12 months, just as it happened to the Million Dollar Homepage, we will see many localized versions of Moola all over the world. If you know of any similar local initiatives we would love to hear about it.
Written on 25th June 2009
1 COMMENT 
Micropayments are a popular way for developers of online games to make money from their products. Players typically get the game for free but must pay for extra levels, upgraded items and the like.
Written on 10th June 2009
Written on 16th December 2008
The Iraqi who 
Written on 10th September 2008
The service 
“Actually we started as a B2B service company, producing sites, web commercials and other stuff like that. But since all the three founders (Pasi Laaksonen, Janne Matilainen and me) had some background on online gaming, we started building our own online casual gaming service during 2002. At the beginning it was only a hobby, but as that side in our company grew, we later (in 2004) split the original company in two: I recruited a new CEO for the B2B side and all we three founders continued in the “new” gaming company.
Written on 8th May 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
