Author: Chris Albrecht

Togetherville, a new social network created for parents and kids, launched its public beta this evening. A tough challenge lays ahead for the startup as it tries to balance creating a safe environment for kids, building trust for parents, and — oh yeah — making it fun so that people will actually want to use it.

Mandeep S. Dhillon, Togetherville CEO, gave us a video demo of how his service works and talked about:

• How the company will use virtual currency to monetize
• Leveraging parents’ existing Facebook social graph
• The precautions the company is taking to be COPPA-compliant
• Using real-world — not anonymous — identities for children

Togetherville has been in the works for three years and received an undisclosed amount of funding from Floodgate.

For more on the social network landscape, read Liz’s in-depth piece There’s No Stopping Facebook over at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

Outside of Pixar, PopCap Games may have the best track record for pumping out hits. From Bejeweled to Peggle, it’s hard to find a dud in the company’s lineup. But the casual games world is evolving from a downloaded, solitary experience to a social one. Can PopCap keep its hot streak going in the age of Facebook?

To find out, we did a quick video interview with PopCap Co-founder John Vechey and CEO David Roberts last week. Some highlights:

• PopCap launched a one-minute version of Bejeweled called Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. According to the company’s fact sheet, more than 100 million games of Blitz are played each day, and separately, Vechey told me that the average game session lasts a whopping 43 minutes (remember, that it’s a one-minute game!).
• In the future “All of our games will be somewhat social,” according to Vechey.
• PopCap is excited about Facebook’s Open Graph movement and believes it will be a powerful recommendation tool for people who might not be familiar with PopCap’s lineup.
• According to Roberts, if a game isn’t fun with just programmer art and no sound, there is no amount of “spicing it up” that can make it so.

For more on the social web, check out our in-depth piece, There’s No Stopping Facebook over at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

Jeremy Liew, a managing director with Lightspeed Venture Partners who focuses on consumer Internet companies in sectors like gaming and social media, is a big believer in virtual goods.

Liew recently stopped by GigaOM HQ for a quick chat about the explosive growth of that market and where it’s headed. Liew believes:

• There is still a lot of growth left in the virtual goods space as mechanisms come online that allow people to trade time for money (for more on this, see Om’s interview with CrowdFlower’s CEO).

• The iPad won’t be a game-changer in the virtual goods space at first, but could be, depending on adoption of the device.

• Buying virtual goods in games is not cheating, but rather is akin to a golfer purchasing a better putter.

• Companies looking to his firm for funding should realize that games are a hits-driven business. Creating one really expensive game is less appealing than the ability to affordably take “multiple shots on goal.”

For more in-depth analysis on MMOs, check out the report Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

A new study from DFC Intelligence and Live Gamer shows that gamers in North America and Europe are now “largely comfortable” with purchasing digital content such as virtual currency and in-game goods.

According to the survey of roughly 5,000 gamers, 60 percent of respondents said that “they had purchased an in-game good that was not a full game.” (It should be noted that Live Gamer provides a product to conduct microtransactions in places like games, so factor that into the overall assessment of the data.) Last July, a Magid study commissioned by PlaySpan found that roughly 12 percent of Americans had purchased a virtual item.

Additionally, DFC Intelligence says that many of the games that use a virtual item model fall under a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) Lite category. These are games that have a persistent environment and allow you to build characters, but don’t have the monthly fees associated with large MMOGs. DFC predicts the so-called MMOG Lite market will grow to $3 billion by 2015 from roughly $800 million in 2009.

Riding that wave of virtual goods growth is Kongregate, a free online gaming site that aggregates independent games from across the web (including its new MMOG Lite game, Remnants of Skystone. Kongregate says that it’s seen its virtual goods sales rise 30 percent per month and that they represent a third of its total revenue now (the company wouldn’t provide any more specific numbers).

Kongregate CEO Jim Greer came by GigaOM HQ last week for a quick video chat where he talked up such topics as the role of virtual goods in Kongregate’s business, the issue of chargebacks with virtual goods, and how he plans to keep Kongregate as a destination site and not shift to a more Facebook-centric model.

For more in-depth analysis on MMOs, check out the report Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming with the sharks today — yes, literally — in an extreme effort to woo Google and land that sweet fiber network the company plans to dole out to some lucky town. And he’s not alone. Cities across the country have Google fiber fever, pulling off stunts like renaming their city “Google” (formerly Topeka, Kan.) or having the mayor jump into a frozen lake (Duluth, Minn).

My city of Alameda, Calif.? We’re passing a city council resolution!

Heaven knows I want a 1 gigabit-per-second connection, too — so why isn’t my mayor wrestling an octopus (or sharktopus)? Is Sarasota (or Duluth, or Topeka) on to something?

“We don’t have a burgeoning tech and creative industry,” explained Richard Swier (see disclosure below), who is spearheading Sarasota’s attempt to get Google fiber. And without such an industry, he felt his town had to do something “crazy” in order to get on Google’s radar. In addition to the shark tank, Sarasota declared one of its islands “Google Island,” and its I Want Google Fiber in Sarasota page on Facebook claims some 5,300 fans.

Alameda’s more sober approach certainly lacks flair, but that, too, is by design, according to Deputy City Manager Jennifer Ott. She believes the message Google sent out in its call for participation was that the company wanted speed, efficiency and regulatory assistance, which the city council’s resolution, with its task force and one point of contact for the entire project, was specifically designed to do.

Jim Meyer, who founded the non-profit WireAlameda.org, echoed Ott’s all-business approach. “We have a strong application,” he assured me.

Since an active community behind the project was another one of the criteria set by Google, I asked Meyer about our paltry number of Facebook fans and the dearth of big, showy community events. Meyer pointed out that Facebook is a competitor to Google, so the group didn’t want a big presence there, and in terms of big events, WireAlameda is organizing a community chalk-drawing event this weekend. Chalk drawing certainly won’t attract mainstream media attention (unless it’s laser chalk), but it’s not meant to — the point is to showcase townsfolk that come out in order to pitch in.

In the meantime, an unexpected benefit has emerged: The actions of Swier’s group, WireAlameda and others around the country have become a rallying point for towns beaten down by tough economic times. Amidst the constant news of layoffs and general bad times, Google’s gambit is giving people something they haven’t seen in awhile — hope.

**Disclosure: I went to high school with and played 9th grade basketball with Swier. We haven’t talked really at all since high school, but his relentless efforts and recruiting on Facebook clogged up my news feed and provided inspiration for this story.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RRaiderstyle

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