Miniclip Forms Mobile Division — Online game portal Miniclip.com has formed a new mobile gaming division under former Skype product manager Antonio Sergio. The company will publish and distribute its most popular titles to the iPhone and Android platforms.
Acclaim Shuts Down Games — Playdom/Disney acquired game company Acclaim has shut down its online titles, according to the company’s homepage. Acclaim is also reimbursing its players’ virtual currency.
Bubble Island Wins European Games Award — A little bit of news from last week: German social developer wooga won an award for its social title, Bubble Island. The simple arcade-like app won the European Games Award for Best Social Game.
Foursquare Hits 3 Million Users — The popular location-based mobile application, Foursquare, reached, and surpassed a new milestone last weekend, breaching 3 million users.
Steve Boom Joins Loopt as President — Location-based app developer Loopt announced the hiring of Internet industry executive Steve Boom as their new company president. Boom’s prior experience is 10 years as senior vice president for Yahoo.
Loopt & Virgin America See Huge Revenue Day — In other Loopt-related news, Virgin American and Loopt teamed up and offered anyone that checked in at the SFO or LAX airports, or the various taco trucks milling about San Francisco and LA, within a four hour window, two-for-one tickets to Cancun or Los Cabos. The promotion earned Virgin America’s fifth highest revenue day ever, according to TechCrunch.
VChatter Raises 0,000 — Facebook app VChatter raised 0,000 in seed funding this week, says VentureBeat. The video chat application is not terribly different from Chatroulette, but states that it avoids some of the online lewdness problems plaguing its predecessor by checking screenshots of chats to ensure that they’re “family-friendly.”
Aurora Feint Working on Synchronous Mulitiplayer — Aurora Feint announced that it will be releasing a real-time multiplayer SDK for its OpenFeint platform, says Virtual Worlds News, called PlayTime. Along with cross platform support between Apple and Android platforms, the new SDK will also feature voice chat. The slated release date is sometime later this year with OpenFeint 3.0.
Zynga Releases FrontierVille Game Bar — Zynga has released a new web browser tool bar for its growing Facebook game, FrontierVille. The add-on works for both Internet Explorer and Firefox and will allow users to see both when their crops are ready and when friends visit their virtual space.
Doubloon Announces New Partners — Virtual goods pricing platform Doubloon has announced a new partnership this week with developers Fusion Creative Studios and BigVoice Unlimited, creators of the story-driven Facebook app, Inheritance.
Southern Enterprises to Make Gamer Furniture — Professional video gamer, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel has signed a license agreement with furniture company, Southern Enterprises. Using his advice and insight, the company will develop customized furniture tailored specifically for gamers.
Digital River Announces New Social Partners — The e-commerce solutions company Digital River announced a number of new social partners this week, including wooga and Vikings of Thule creator Gogogic. Digital River will help manage and monetize some of their games. Other new partners include several free-to-play MMOs and the virtual world, WebbliWorld.
Christopher Mack Read more: Inside Social Games
