Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Flash Games’

HP Slate makes an appearance to show off Flash, stays for a rock concert

It shouldn’t be any surprise that the HP Slate supports Flash, since it runs Windows 7, but we’ve seen so little of the device since Steve Ballmer first waved it around at CES that we’re still totally intrigued by this video from Adobe showing it in action. Yep, there it is, playing video, running casual Flash games, and using AIR applications. We also get a quick shot of the on-screen keyboard, which looks like a mildly tweaked version of the standard Windows 7 keyboard. We can’t say until we use it, but it certainly doesn’t look like it’ll be fun to type on. Interestingly, Flash is said to be hardware-accelerated on the Slate, which suggests something other than a bone-stock Atom setup in there — we’d guess it’s an Atom plus a Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator, but there’s a chance it’s something else entirely. HP’s also posted up a new marketing video, which bears a striking resemblance to last night’s iPad commercial — until the end, which frankly makes no sense. Check ‘em both after the break.

[Thanks, Rick]

Continue reading HP Slate makes an appearance to show off Flash, stays for a rock concert

HP Slate makes an appearance to show off Flash, stays for a rock concert originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  YouTube  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

PlaySpan Partners With Gaming Community Nonoba To Power Micropayments

Micropayments startup PlaySpan has another partnership to add to the list. The startup has signed deals with hi5, THQ and Nickelodeon, and most recently Adobe. Today, PlaySpan is partnering with Nonoba, which offers a Ning-like platform for game development.

Nonoba’s GameRise allows anyone to develop and manage customized gaming sites within a community. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. With the new partnership, PlaySpan will offer Nonoba’s 4,000 Flash games to marketplace customers. PlaySpan’s microtransactions will also be offered to Nonoba’s developers to allow Flash game developers to monetize their games.

With all of the partnerships PlaySpan is racking up, the startup is fast securing its place as a player in the micrpayments space. In December, PlaySpan revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts over the holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Read the whole story…

Cowon V5 HD set for South Korea debut on January 1

Cowon has finally made its latest and greatest PMP official, and the spec sheet does not disappoint. Mixing appealing curves with a 4.8-inch display, the V5 HD offers 720p video playback that can be channeled out via HDMI or Composite outputs. On the software front, there’s the usual litany of wide-ranging file compatibility and basic apps — cortesy of Windows CE 6.0 — as well as a world clock, RSS reader, Flash games, voice recorder, and an optional T-DMB tuner. We still don’t know what’s doing the dirty work under the hood, but you won’t be wanting for storage, with integrated memory options up to 32GB being augmented by SDHC expandability. Battery life is rated at 10 hours of video or 45 hours of music, and the Korean landing date is January 1 with prices starting at 299,000 KRW ($256). Until then, you can check out more pictures after the break.

[Thanks, The DarkSide]

Continue reading Cowon V5 HD set for South Korea debut on January 1

Cowon V5 HD set for South Korea debut on January 1 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Cowon  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Frosmo launches tournament game portal on Facebook

There are huge numbers of games on Facebook, but Helsinki startup Frosmo, hopes it can grab some attention amid all the noise by doing something a bit different. The company will provide a tournament and prize-based social gaming service on Facebook.

The company, started in 2008, makes infrastructure for staging tournaments in casual games. It has created a white-label service that is used by 30 partners, including major portals in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Now the company will do the same under its own brand name on Facebook.

The company’s app will be like a game portal embedded within Facebook, said Mikael Gummerus, chief executive of Frosmo, in an interview. Players will be able to play 70 Flash-based games on the portal. Those games have been created by independent developers who are looking to monetize their games. Tournaments generate revenue, and Frosmo shares that with the games’ developers. Depending on the region, Frosmo gives away money or prizes to tournament winners.

Frosmo holds the 70 games together by infusing them with a meta game, where you level up and progress through ages, from the Stone Age to the modern age. Players have to work together to make progress.

“We create a social game around the games,” Gummerus said.

Players can watch their overall Frosmo rank increase as they play more games and share experiences with friends. Gamers can play the Frosmo-based games by logging into their favorite Internet portals, on Frosmo.com using Facebook Connect, or through the new Facebook app, which goes live today.

Frosmo gamers can team up and interact with each other while they play. They can progress through the ranks as a team, and the team rises in rank based on how well the gamers play. Frosmo has its own virtual currency, known as Frollars, which players can win in the tournaments or purchase with real money. Users can also upgrade to premium accounts.

The company signed up its first white-label commercial service partner, MTV 3 Finland, in May 2008. It also provides tournament services for China.com, which has 10 million unique monthly visitors; Yahoo Middle East (formerly Maktoob) with 15 million visitors; Sanook.com, Thailand’s largest Internet portal with 5 million visitors; and Ekolay, a Turkish site with 3 million visitors. Frosmo’s service now has 3 million gamers worldwide, and the company is betting it can grow to 15 million gamers by the end of 2010.

Frosmo has 25 employees, and it competes with the likes of Zynga, Playfish and a host of casual game sites. Its investors include Riistos Silasmaa, a member of Nokia’s board. It raised 1.4 million euros from the Finnish government and has also raised two rounds of angel money.

Before founding Frosmo, Gummerus was managing director of E-Sports Nordic. But he spun Frosmo out of that company once he saw its potential. Rivals include Mind Jolt, which has 14 million unique monthly visitors.

Read the whole story…

HeyZap Helps Flash Games Go Viral With New API, Launches Analytics Too

Social gaming companies like Zynga and Playdom have proven that casual/social gaming can be an extremely lucrative business. But their success can’t be solely attributed to the quality of their games — they’re also finely tuned to maximize their virality. Users are often asked to invite their friends to join them, or publish stories to their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other services. Today HeyZap, the startup that helps Flash games get distribution and monetize effectively, is launching a new “Viral API” that helps developers integrate similar features into their own games.

Co-founder Jude Gomila says that up until now, developers have had to figure out how to implement these syndication features on their own — now they’ll be able to do it quickly using HeyZap’s APIs. To put the API to the test, HeyZap built a game called Balloon Boy Game (in honor of last week’s horror story-turned-scandal), which allows users to share the game with their friends via Facebook and Twitter. Over the course of a few days, the game saw 4 million game plays and 5,000 tweets. This was no doubt helped by the timeliness of the game, but it’s likely that the viral loop played a significant role.

Alongside the new viral API, HeyZap is rolling out a new Analytics feature that will allow developers to track how many times their games have been played, as well as how many times links to their games have been tweeted or shared on Facebook. Developers can do this with some other services like Mochi Media, but Gomila says that HeyZap is unique in allowing developers to see exactly how long gamers are spending during a game session. He also says that the company is working on expanding the feature to allow developers to see exactly when gamers tend to quit the games (say, at the end of a certain level), which could help them tweak the gameplay.

HeyZap is also seeing growing support from publishers, who like to use the service because it allows them to monetize Flash games that they used to host for free — whenever a developer integrates HeyZap payments into their game and someone purchases something, the publisher hosting the game gets a cut. Recent additions to HeyZap’s client roster include College Humor and ebaum’s world.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Read the whole story…

MySpace is a big gaming platform but it hopes to be more of one

Many of MySpace’s nearly 125 million monthly active users are already playing social games made by companies like Playdom and Zynga. But the News Corp.-owned social network is hoping for more, chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said today at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference happening in Pasadena, Calif.

“MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform, a space for people to meet and play games,” he said, adding that the the site looking for acquisitions to help it become more developer-friendly. He sees “opportunities to make MySpace’s gaming platform better geared to videogame suppliers who then will want to launch their products on the site and employ its user data to better develop games,” according to Reuters.

It’s not clear what that means. PaidContent speculates that perhaps MySpace would want to buy Yahoo’s games site and pair it with the “MySpace Games” flash games sub-site operated by Oberon Media.  That’s interesting — although I would expect MySpace to try to improve platform services for third parties rather than try to build everything itself. While Facebook, with more than 250 million monthly active users, has a larger user base and as well as a more developed platform, MySpace has attracted sizable developer attention. Playdom has been making millions in revenue per quarter, mostly from MySpace games like mafia game Mobsters — or so I heard a few months ago. PaidContent also points out some potential ways of bringing in developers — and making money — including “player achievement-tracking across different devices and networks, an integrated virtual payments system, or some form of unique ad-targeting.”

Indeed, MySpace has been meaning to roll out some sort of virtual currency for months, based on various reports I’ve heard over the last year. A site-wide currency could allow users to enter their credit card information once, allowing developers to run that currency within games so users could do things like buy purchases with the click of a button. MySpace could then take a small cut of every transaction Smaller social networking rival Hi5 has already started letting third parties integrate its “Coins” currency, and Facebook has started rolling out a test of its “credits” for third parties. Myspace, meanwhile, got a bunch of new managers this past spring, led by chief executive Owen Van Natta — their first order of business was making massive cuts to the staff. Restructuring, it seems, has slowed down the virtual currency product launch, although I expect it to appear eventually.

In terms of advertising in games, perhaps MySpace should go back and look at the simple, embeddable widgets that have been on the site long before it introduced a developer platform. Platform applications are able to tap into MySpace data like friend lists, and features like notifications so developers can notify people about their friends activity within games. Widgets started out as simple slideshows from companies like Slide and RockYou that didn’t include many of these social features, but they’re on tens of millions of users profiles and are often the most engaging feature on the page. However, MySpace has not allowed widget developers to run their own ads, because they might distract users from the ads that the site is separately running. If the social network can figure out an ad network for third parties where it could get a revenue cut, this might end up generating more revenue as well and incentivize developers to spend more time building for MySpace instead of other platforms.

Games are a good way to get people coming back to a site each day. MySpace has been losing millions of users in the last couple of years. When Van Natta came on board in a culmination of his desire to be CEO of a big web company, I wondered: Now what? Well, this is one move, at least, that could get users returning for more. Up next: The execution part.

Read the whole story…

Can this save the Flash game market? Mochi Media launches virtual currency

Flash games on the web started out as a hobby. Now there are tens of thousands of them that, through advertising, are generating steady incomes for their creators. And today, Mochi Media is launching a virtual currency that could extract even more revenue from those Flash games.

The announcement should be greeted with relief at the Casual Connect Summit, which is getting underway in Seattle today. Makers of casual games — those that provide short bursts of entertainment — have been under pressure because there is such a flood of free titles hitting the market as well as fierce competition for gamer attention from game platforms such as the iPhone and social networks.

Through Mochi Coins, gamers can pay real money for virtual currency that they can use to unlock new capabilities in games such as customizing avatars or buying more powerful weapons.More than 15 games are launching this week with the Mochi Coins micro-transactions.

The focus on monetizing through virtual goods represents an evolution of the game industry. The trend started with Asian online games, it has taken off in the U.S. in online games on Facebook and with Sony’s Free Realms game, and now Mochi Media is bringing the model to Flash games.

Rivals include Heyzap, which recently launched its own virtual goods system for Flash games. But Mochi Media has been testing its platform for just as long and the competition between the two companies means the technology is like to reach much of the Flash games market. Heyzap says it has seven games now using its micro-transaction platform — including this one — and it is in talks with 40 developers.

Flash games are running into trouble with the advertising model, where a gamer has to watch a video ad before getting access to a free game. As ad rates fall during the recession, the games aren’t generating as much revenue. But the early results from testing Mochi Coins are very promising. The new currency could even stop the mass migration of casual game developers from Flash web games to Facebook and iPhone games.

“Through ads, many of the game creators are making hundreds of thousands of dollars from their Flash games,” said Jameson Hsu, founder of Mochi Media and “chief Mochi.” “Now we’re hoping to make them into millionaires.”

Indeed, if the effort is successful, you’ll see a lot more companies creating Flash games, not just hobbyists, Hsu said.

Mochi Media pioneered its business in 2005 as an analytics company, collecting data on Flash games. In 2007, it launched a game distribution and ad network. It became a kind of an arms dealer, providing white-labeled game ads to any game company that wanted to wrap ads around its games. With the analytics, it tracked how many times a game got played and the ads were seen. Then it collected the ad revenue and shared it with developers. It essentially helped turn free Flash games into a real economy. The company now has 25 employees.

Now Mochi Media monitors more than 15,000 Flash games which reach more than 100 million unique visitors a month. With Mochi Coins, Hsu says, each gamer could now generate a lot more revenue. While ad-based games generate maybe 50 cents per 1,000 players, the new currency can generate $6 to $7 per 1,000 players. The average revenue per paying user is about $4 per month, Hsu said.

Users pay for the coins via credit card, PayPal, or SuperRewards, which lets people fill out surveys or accept special offers in exchange for currency rewards. You can log into your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and then pay for the Mochi Coins with a couple of clicks. One of the brilliant ways the game gets you to spend money is by letting you pay to come back to life after you’ve died in a game — it costs 1,200 coins, or about $1.50, to get up and continue where you left off.

One of the early test games is Ninjakiwi’s SAS: Zombie Assault 2. It’s an addictive two-dimensional cartoon game where you get an overhead view of a soldier trying to fend off a bunch of zombies. Hsu gave me a demo of the game and showed how you can upgrade to better weapons like grenade launchers that you can use to explode a bunch of zombies at once. I spent a few dollars in a very short time. The top selling item in the game is $5.25. The items you buy are always there for you when you come back to the game after a break.

Mochi Media takes a cut from the coins, as does the game developer. Right now, Mochi keeps 40 percent and the game developer keeps 60 percent.

Read the whole story…