At the beginning of March, we told you about a new $100k developer fund from real-life rewards platform Kiip, and so far the response has been amazing.

The excitement about the fund isn’t coming only from the developers who hope to get selected, it’s coming from other companies who are enjoying what Kiip is doing to build a strong developer ecosystem. Today, the company has announced that it is extending the application deadline until May 30th, as well as the addition of some other interesting benefits for developers.

Kiip’s CEO Brian Wong tells me that hundreds of teams have submitted applications thus far. In fact, Wong tells The Next Web that the company plans on doing this again:

We’ve gotten more feedback and support than we thought we would. This is an ongoing initiative, we’ve seen so much interest and it’s important that this thing continues. This is the first batch, and there will be more to come.

To “sweeten the pot” a bit, Kiip has partnered up with some amazing resources for developers who are chosen to join the Build Fund. Along with $5,000 from Kiip, these companies will also get $5,000 worth of services:

Amazon Web Services: $2,000 credit
Urban Airship: 6-month Pro License
StackMob: 6-month Pro License
Crittercism: Lifetime Enterprise License

If you think about exactly what a developer needs to build out a world-class application, the above tools are the essential items in their arsenal. To be able to get these things for free gives the application enough runway to snag a following and start generating some revenue using Kiip’s reward platform.

The Build Fund is looking to select some of the best teams smaller than 10 full-time people to create great applications that leverage the Kiip platform. The company itself is taking no equity in the teams that it selects, which it says it “wouldn’t dream of” doing.

Along with guidance from Kiip and some great technical assets, the Build Fund companies will also be able to tap into a pretty impressive list of mentors, including:

Scott Kveton, Founder & CEO, Urban Airship
Roy Bahat, President, IGN
Perry Tam, co-founder and CEO, Storm8
Lee Linden, co-founder of Tapjoy

These are the type of folks who have been involved in mobile applications for some time now and will be able to lend a helping hand to developers who want to take their application to the next level.

Applications to participate in the Build Fund are coming in from places like the Ukraine and China, which means that all of the interaction with mentors will happen virtually, something Kiip wasn’t prepared for at first.

As more advertisers get comfortable with using mobile applications as a vehicle to promote its products and brands, only good things will continue to happen for Kiip and its legion of developers. It’s not just gamers who are enjoying real rewards for virtual success, Wong tells me that fitness apps are getting into it as well.

Creating a sticky game that keeps players coming back for more is trick in and of itself. Once you’ve made the app and released it into the wild, finding a way to make money with it is even trickier. That’s where Kiip saw a need and came to the rescue with its genius real-world rewards platform.

The premise is simple, developers can create unlockable achievements in their games, and Kiip will reward those players with physical items from its advertising partners. With about 100 games using Kiip’s platform, its CEO Brian Wong told me on the phone today that is has opened up over 500 million new inventory spots for advertisers.

There is no shortage of advertisers looking to spend money, only shortage of spots to insert advertising. By building a relationship with top-tier advertisers like Disney, Pepsi, Popchips, and Sears, Kiip provides a way for game developers to make their players happy and rewarded with really cool stuff that they can even pass on to their friends.

Today, Kiip has announced that its platform is open for all developers to use, lifting its selective beta-like gates. The company has been selective in choosing developers to use its platform so that it could control growth and properly scale the product for this public launch. The time is here and now any developer can start including Kiip rewards with just a single line of code.

It’s a win, win, win situation

Kiip has found itself a fantastic niche for providing advertisers with new real estate, developers with a way to make money from their games, and take a cut of the action for itself. Wong told me that out of its 100 games using Kiip, 10 of them are in the top 100 games on Apple’s App Store. That means that the games themselves are sticky and Kiip is rewarding those gamers for coming back. In fact, Kiip currently displays 4 rewards every second in the apps where it is included.

To make it easy for developers to get started with Kiip, Wong says that the company worked really hard to create an onboarding experience that “walks the talk” when it comes to easy:

You can literally type in your app name or game and we’ll automatically pull in all of the details about your app and prepopulate everything.

Here’s a taste of what developers can expect when they sign up for Kiip:

The walkthrough takes developers through every step of the process including setting up their achievements and spitting out the necessary code for their app.

Rewarding the developers

While Kiip is building a huge niche for itself with its rewards platform, the company wants to give back even more to developers and reward them for using its offerings. In that vein, the company is also announcing a new $100,000 developers fund called “Build”, which will provide $5k to 20 app developers that the company will announce on April 20th. Developers can register for the Build program now in hopes of being one of the lucky $5k recipients.

Wong tells me that this fund is for developers who don’t have the capital to keep a game going after seeing success when it launches:

Some developers are really good at generating a lot of downloads on the first day of launch, but what about the days after? All of these developers have incredible passion for what they do and the indies are finally getting their chance.

Games that use Kiip are happy to use the platform, as Mega Jump developer Derek Van Vliet shares:

Kiip has helped us add a consistent incremental five-figure revenue stream to Mega Jump that was extremely easy to integrate without affecting our existing user experience and our game design canvas, while providing a genuine opportunity to thank our players.

By providing advertising opportunities that gamers see as welcomed rewards, Kiip has cracked open a new opportunity for brands to build relationships with consumers in a way that they haven’t been able to before. Now that the platform is open to all developers, expect more and more popular games to incorporate rewards like a free bag of chips for beating a boss at the end of a level.

➤ Kiip registration for developers

In the age of evolving technology, video games are starting to look more and more like movies. The last game I picked up for Xbox had a ten minute theatrical intro that looked like something I’m accustomed to seeing in a movie theater. One site wants to get us back to our roots with text-based games that have zero graphics whatsoever.

Tech writer and tech entrepreneur Andy Baio decided to not only build a site where you could play these games, he wanted to give you the tools to create your own text adventure.

Playfic started out as a side project with his 15-year-old nephew and Baio decided to introduce it to the world.

Here’s how Baio describes Playfic:

Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka “text adventures”) entirely from your browser, using a “natural language”-inspired language called Inform 7.

While it might sound difficult and overly geeky to create a game on the platform, Baio has included some tutorials to help you along.

Walk West

If you’ve played any RPG or MMORPG games on the web, you’ve probably been presented with a command line interface that asks you to type in your next move. While it’s not meant to be pretty, it can be extremely addictive and it’s good exercise for the mind.

There is an entire community of these types of games on Playfic complete with tools to build your own and share it with your friends and other gameplayers on the site. All you have to do is start playing around with the official tutorial and you’ll get the idea immediately:

The technology used to power the games is called “Inform 7″ and something as simple as the following text is turned into a fully functional text-based game using it:

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup. In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box.

There is an official manual for Inform 7 that you can get completely lost in as well as a recipe book that gives you examples of text that can be turned into an awesome game.

This style of game is familiar to anyone who has ever read a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book and is an extremely interactive way of telling a story. In fact, the site’s tagline is “Play me a story”.

Baio hopes to start a trend of fiction writing and gameplay with the site, hoping to inspire younger people who might not have grown up with this style of games or storytelling. It’s a brilliant idea and for those who have the time and imagination to spend on it, I would highly suggest having a play with the site to see if it grabs you. Try out this game to get started, it’s called “A Maze of Twisty Passages”.

➤ Playfic

Thanks to HTML5 bundled with either CSS3 or Javascript, developers are starting to put more of their code on the client-side rather than making people install plugins like Adobe’s Flash does. However, according to the infographic below from gaming site One More Level, not all popular game makers are making the jump yet.

Why you ask? Most likely it’s because HTML5 is currently only supported by 40% of web browsers, while Flash is supported by 99% of them. Even though HTML5 provides an increase in performance for gamers and requires fewer CPU cycles, it’s not quite “there” yet.

Popular Facebook game creator Zynga is tinkering around with both technologies, with its most popular game Cityville available in Flash, and its second most popular game available on HTML5 and Flash. It looks like the company is doing a bit of A/B testing and seeing how users react. Companies who are eying a move to HTML5 will do so because of the cross-platform capabilities of HTML5 as well as support for mobile. You can’t play a Flash game on an iOS device though, remember?

You can find a full size version here.

Created by: One More Level

Wikia is a popular content sharing site that lets its community create Wiki’s on any topic for free. What you might not know about Wikia is that it has quickly become the number two destination on the web for gaming content based on traffic stats reported by comScore. The site just hopped past GameSpot and now sits behind IGN.

Overall, the site saw pretty impressive growth in 2011 and sports some eye-catching numbers:

Nearly 50 million global unique visitors/month
Over 850 million page views/month
42% traffic growth year-over-year

If you haven’t heard of Wikia, you’ve probably landed on one of its sites while googling something. In the same way that Wikipedia lets its community create and collaborate on content, Wikia does the same with more of a focus on entertainment and pop culture. In fact, the company is the for-profit arm of Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales. What the company couldn’t have seen coming is the massive usage it gets for gaming content covering every platform from Atari to Xbox.

In December 2011, Wikia’s gaming traffic jumped 50.7% and totaled 25.7M unique visitors. Those numbers were good enough to put it into the number two spot for gaming networks on the web. With IGN sitting at number one, Wikia decided to poach two of its top editors.

Hilary Goldstein and Eric Moro are joining Wikia to focus solely on its Gaming property. The two are big losses for IGN, as Goldstein served as Editor-in-Chief of IGN Games, and Moro was Editor-in-Chief of IGN’s Movies site. Combined, the two have fifteen years of experience at IGN and should help turn Wikia into the number one gaming destination on the web.

Wikia’s CEO, Craig Palmer, sees content partners being its top focus right now:

Eric and Hilary are visionaries with a finger on the pulse of these highly engaged audiences. We’re just beginning to really scratch the surface on how brands and our users can work together, and they will be instrumental in curating and surfacing these new experiences for users and industry partners.

When it comes to community generated content, curation is the key to make the content available to visitors. Wikia has done a fantastic job of curating the content that its community has made, and my only knock on them is that the ads on the site can sometimes be a bit obnoxious. I completely understand that you need to make money when having a free site, but I’m hopeful that the two new hires will help build relationships with advertisers who don’t want to buy flashing banners.

$4.3M in funding, 20 employees, and 70 apps using its platform. What’s the key to Kiip‘s success? Happiness, says founder Brian Wong.

I sat down with Kiip’s founder and CEO today to discuss his reward platform that is making real waves in Silicon Valley. With companies looking for new ways to acquire customers, Kiip has found itself a sweet spot that is making gamers, developers, and partners extremely happy.

If you’re not sure what Kiip is, it’s a platform that developers can use in their games that get users real-world rewards from well-known brands like Best Buy, Sears, and Vitamin Water. Most games have some sort of leader-board or achievement functionality, so Kiip fits in quite nicely.

2011 was said to be a $1.2 billion year for mobile advertising, but Wong doesn’t refer to his reward network as pure display advertising. Kiip sees itself as a hybrid opportunity for advertisers, utilizing tried and true display ad methods along with promotional and marketing opportunities.

Here’s a demo and explanation of Kiip:

Kiip didn’t come out of nowhere though, having spent almost eight months in stealth mode while it built its network. Wong explains:

We launched the network in April of 2011, and we spent a good 6-8 months building the network. The reason why is because I was trying to build up enough traction before we revealed the network. We wanted to be like a raging pitbull. The positioning was nailed on day one.

While mobile advertising is an over billion dollar industry, Wong doesn’t see the reward replacing it:

Ads will always be there, there will always be a time and place for ads. But I also feel like we’ve extracted a new layer of value. I view the world as being a very reciprocal place.

This reciprocity aspect is key for Kiip, as the company allows gamers to unlock rewards as it plays a game, and lets them give that reward away to anyone they wish. It was a feature that the company accidentally stumbled onto Wong told me. Emotional context has become a powerful way for a brand to gain lifetime customers moving forward in the digital age and rewards give advertisers that emotional context that display ads simply can’t touch.

The power of emotion is a marketing technique employed for years by companies like Coca Cola and Red Bull. If a brand can engage a customer at their happiest moment, like an achievement in a game, the customer will always remember that brand in that context. It’s quite brilliant, actually. The partners that Kiip works with seem to get it too, as Wong revealed to me:

Most brands calculate their spend with us based on the lifetime value of the customer.

How happy are these customers? Wong showed me a piece of fan mail that the company received, asking them to get its reward system placed in their favorite games. That’s impressive affinity for a reward system that only launched in April of last year.

The company recently released a new feature on its site, called Kiip Spotlight, which features popular games that use its reward system. There are currently 70 games using Kiip, and they’re pretty popular ones.

The key to Kiip’s success could be the happiness that gamers feel when they unlock and achievement and receive a reward like a cup of coffee or $5 Best Buy gift card. Wong says the company unlocked something powerful when it launched and allowed gamers to send their rewards as a gift.

It was an afterthought and not much of a strategy at the time, but after digging through some of the messages that went along with those rewards, Kiip has found that this type of advertising makes brand affinity tangible. Not only are gamers earning rewards, they’re sending the rewards to their girlfriends, boyfriends, and moms.

These aren’t phrases you would normally associate with a “regular old ad”:

Thanks to this analysis of an accidental hit, Kiip now incorporates its learnings with potential advertisers. Wong shared these presentation slides exclusively with The Next Web:

In 2012, the company is focused on brings its reward system to international customers, bolstering its destination site so gamers feel more comfortable cashing in rewards, and looking at different areas than gaming that are ripe for rewards. This could be anywhere from uses in schools, the workplace, or fitness programs.

It looks like Kiip has been successful in bringing the “happy”, and it’s turning into a real boom for the company, which saw its network of games unlock 31,544,566 achievements in December 2011 alone.

➤ Kiip

There are quite a few games for iOS that make your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad feel like a pretty hip version of a Game Boy. You don’t play them for hours on end, but they’re good for wasting time now and again. Having said that, calling an iOS device a “gaming console” still feels like a reach. Gaming consoles like XBox and PS3 give you more a lean back experience, meaning you’re probably plopped down on the couch playing them and not touching a screen.

A company called 60Beat aims to change that with the release of its new iOS accessory, the GamePad.

There’s no doubt that gaming consoles are a massive market, with 1.7 million of Microsoft’s Xbox flying off of the shelves last November. I’m actually quite surprised that Apple hasn’t come out with its own controller, but that could very well be something it’s working on for 2012, along with new iPads.

The 60Beat GamePad plugs into the headphone jack of your device, and can only be played with compatible games. Unfortunately, 60Beat only lists two games that are compatible with its GamePad, Aftermath and Bugdom 2. While that might scare you away from its $50 price tag, the company does promise more of a selection by February.

Check out this demo of the GamePad:

As it goes for any device, the library of games compatible with the add-on will make it or break it. If you’re wondering how you’ll be able to hear the sound from the games with the GamePad plugged in, it comes with an audio splitter that will require headphones or an external speaker.

While the GamePad does negate the coolness factor of the touchscreen features on iOS devices, the fact that you can put your slim iPad in a stand on a table and sit back for video game playing is a neat look towards Apple’s future. You can’t put your Xbox in a backpack and easily set it up on the go, can you?

➤ 60Beat GamePad

Paprika Lab is a South Korean gaming startup which has developed several mobile and social games over the past four years. The firm has targeted the global market right from the beginning with its titles, which are developed by a strong team that includes staff who’ve worked at major Korean game companies such as NCsoft, Nexon, Neowiz and NHN.

Although Paprika Lab is a game developer, that is not how it originally started out. The company’s first service — ‘FaceWorthy’ — was a social discovery network, which launched in December 2007. The site allowed users to showcase themselves by uploading photos and getting other users to vote for them. Interestingly, the site was developed with language support for Portuguese which saw it become popular in Brazil.

Focus on mobile gaming

The company then turned its focus to developing games for mobile platforms, and specifically iOS devices. In 2009, it teamed up with NeoLAB, another startup which has offices in Korea and Japan. The two companies decided to work together to build a quiz game for smartphones aimed at the Japanese market; NeoLAB provided the content while Paprika Lab developed the app. The app does not have an English name (it roughly translates to ‘Love-Attracting Wisdom 2000′)  it reached number six across of all app categories on the Japanese App Store.

Another mobile app launched earlier the same year was HenHouse: Count Attack, a simple but difficult game to test one’s reflexes by touching eggs in numerical order as they appear, in as little time as possible. Players can share their times with others around the world.

Social gaming

As users all over the global continued to embrace social media, Paprika Lab moved into the social game space. Its most popular title Hero City, racked up an impressive 3 million users worldwide thanks to a range of social networks including Facebook, Korea’s Cyworld and Russia’s Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte.

The game sees players build their own city while taking charge of a superhero and sending him on missions to gain experience. Users can also interact with each other to form alliances and exchange gifts and ‘energy’.

Another game which the company released on Facebook, Pirate Legacy, is a turn-based RPG in which players control a pirate ship and use the help of their friends to advance in the game.

CEO of Paprika Lab John Kim explained the company’s plan for the new year.

“We are currently preparing for our next release and recruiting more staff to work in our mobile social game team. We look forward to using our knowledge from developing web-based social games to create synergy when working on our mobile-based social games.”

Though the company has previously only developed mobile games for iOS to keep a consistent developing environment and reduce the number of versions, the company is preparing to make the move to Android to match its rapid growth.

Paprika Lab is currently working to develop a new unique game using its experience with mobile and social platforms. The company is keeping tight-lipped on the content of its new product which is currently in the closed beta stage of testing, but it maintains that the game will provide a high-quality and new gaming experience. 

Previously, things had not been easy for game developers in South Korea due to the mobile game categories being blocked over concerns about ratings. However, since the recent opening of the game category on iTunes, Korean game developers can now easily market their games to both domestic and global users.

With many Korean mobile game startups now hiring staff who have worked at major game companies, there is a high possibility that we can look forward to more exciting games appearing on the mobile market in the near future.

➤ Paprika Lab

Facebook has released its top 10 most popular games of 2011, and shockingly Zynga didn’t take the top prize. The list was assembled using data based on which game had the most active users and had the highest recommendations, and includes games built all over the globe.

It wasn’t a complete failure for the company that just went public, though. Zynga had four titles in the top 10, with Cityville in the #3 spot. Playdom, now a Disney company, took the top spot with Gardens of Time.

Most popular Facebook games in 2011:
1. Gardens of Time (By Playdom)
2. The Sims Social (By EA)
3. Cityville (By Zynga)
4. DoubleDown Casino (by DoubleDown Entertainment)
5. Indiana Jones Adventure World (By Zynga)
6. Words With Friends (By Zynga)
7. Bingo Blitz (By Buffalo Studios)
8. Empires & Allies (By Zynga)
9. Slotomania-Slot Machines (By Playtika)
10. Diamond Dash (By wooga)

Along with the top 10, the social network shared some statistics showing that Facebook gamers are engaged and come back for more, almost daily:

• Over 25% of monthly gamers play games at least every other day
• The average gamer plays games on over 50% of the days they visit Facebook
• The average gamer plays over 3 different gaming titles on Facebook each month

Zynga has quite a few executives who are extremely competitive, so not hitting #1 has to have some of them fuming. Better luck next year!

The 7th annual German Game Developer Awards have recently concluded in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Vienna based Socialspiel’s Tight Lines Fishing has walked away with the Best Social Game 2011 award.

Facing stiff competition from some of Europe’s largest names in gaming, including Wooga’s “Diamond Dash” (recently spotlighted at LeWeb), and Bigpoint’s “Skyrama,” the angel funded startup snagged the hearts and minds of both audience members and Academy of German Game Developers judges with it’s immersive fishing village story.

The game has been live on Facebook for the past 8 weeks, and counts approximately 50,000 Monthly Active Users, and 3,000 daily active users, according to App Data. Tight Lines Fishing’s story centers around players receiving a small plot of land from a now missing uncle, who also happens to be the local fishing legend. With the assistance of the loving family friend Marv, a.k.a the in-game guide, players must try their skill and luck at a wide variety of angling based challenges, resulting in a progressive series of rewards and village customization options. Admittedly, there are some heavy FarmVille overtones, as there appears to be a lot of catch this, share that, ask friends for… But if social challenges, collecting, and gaming together are your bailiwick, Tight Lines Fishing puts a creative twist on the familiar game format.

“The incredibly positive feedback we’ve received from gaming fans and the press has shown that we have touched a nerve with Tight Lines Fishing. By creating highly-immersive, quality experiences on social platforms around the World, we’re showing the World that Vienna’s game development industry is alive and well, in addition to proving stiff competition to some of the largest social games developers around the World.”

-Socialspiel CEO Helmut Hutterer

And if you’re wondering exactly where this talent is coming from, you’ll only need to look at Vienna’s video gaming history, as Socialspiel is comprised of team members from both the former Rockstar Games Vienna studio, as well as Deep Silver Games Vienna.

The awards ceremony was held in the historic Altes Kesselhaus in Düsseldorf, and had well over 1,000 video gaming fans in attendance. The German Developer Prize seeks to showcase and the reward the best and most successful video games developed in the German speaking market.

The full list of German Game Developer Award 2011 winners:

• Best Games Technology – Crytek
• Best Browser Game – Drakensang Online
• Best Soundtrack – Crysis
• Best Mobile Game – The Great Jitters: Pudding Panic
• Best Game Design – Zeit²
• Best Casual Game – Runes of Magic – Lands of Despair
• Best Console Game – Crysis 2
• Best Handheld Game – Demolition Dash
• Best Graphics – Crysis 2
• Best Publisher – Travian Games
• Best Art Design – Harveys neue Augen (Harvey’s new eyes)
• Best Story – Harveys neue Augen (Harvey’s new eyes)
• Gameforge Newcomer Award – Tiny & Big – Grandpa’s Leftovers, Neodrome, G.E.A.R.
• Best Simulation – Landwirtschafts-Simulator (Farming Sim)
• Best Children’s – Living Stories – Das verlorene Herz (The Lost Heart)
• Best Strategy – Patrizier IV – Aufstieg einer Dynastie (The Rise of a Dynasty)
• Best Learning – Crazy Machines Elements
• Best RPG – Drakensang Online
• Best Sports – Mein Fitness-Coach Club
• Best Serious Game – Ludwig
• Best Teen – Harveys neue Augen (Harvey’s new eyes)
• Best Adventure – Harveys neue Augen (Harvey’s new eyes)
• Best Action – Crysis 2