Planting A Seed In The App Economy
October 30th, 2009
Via The New York Times, an interesting article on Farmville: “…At high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables. “It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,†Danielle Susi wrote this […]
Read more »Farmville: Keys to Success And Possibility of Planting A MMORPG?
October 21st, 2009
Two interesting articles on Zynga’s Farmville. In the first, Fabric of Folly takes a look at six reasons why Zynga’s Facebook app, a real-time farm simulation game which launched in June 2009 and now boasts over 50 million monthly active users, has been so successful: 1.) Smart leveraging of your social graph (it’s only fun […]
Read more »France To Allow Online Games Of Skill
October 20th, 2009
Via the Online Casino Advisory, news that France – in its move to regulate Internet gambling – is allowing online games of skill (including include poker, sports wagering, and horse racing), but games of luck (gambling games) are not going to be allowed. While SynWorlds is not actively engaged in the debate over online gambling, […]
Read more »Social Networks: Game On!
October 17th, 2009
Courtesy of USA Today, a report on the popularity of social games. As the article notes, the Wii democratized social gaming, but the always-on Internet & social networks took it further: “…Life on FarmVille has had a transformative effect on Laura Phillips. For 45 minutes a day, Phillips, a 41-year-old marketing contractor in the Silicon […]
Read more »Avatarnomics: Are Online Currencies Ready To Strike Gold?
October 15th, 2009
Courtesy of The Guardian, a report on the continuing development of the economies of virtual worlds and social networks. As the article notes: “…Virtual currencies like these are used for transactions in online worlds and social networking sites. While real-world currencies are on the slide, many virtual ones are going from strength to strength. In […]
Read more »Virtually Doomed To Fail: Electronic Table Games In Casinos
October 7th, 2009
We have always been fascinated by the rise (or relative lack thereof) of even moderately advanced networked gaming in the casino industry. From our perspective, there is such a huge disparity between the games that people can play online and what they can play in a casino that it is almost laughable. Today, via Vegas […]
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