Ayogo Games are an independent social games shop from Vancouver, Canada.  They’ve worked on some high profile titles like Mob Wars, and have some interesting insights into the social games community.  I sat down with CEO Michael Fergusson to discuss the social games environment, monetization and the Vancouver social gaming scene.
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Richard Garriot, creator of the famous Ultima series, has started a new social games company called Portalarium. Portalarium will be creating a social games platform that will allow games to increase their production quality and be easily publishable to various social networks. The company’s focus is on publishing higher-than-Flash quality games, and Portalarium also has interests in “open learning, open health, open science/environment, open government and more”.
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Taito Corporation – legendary creators of the famous Space Invaders and more recently, publishers of the Space Invaders Infinity Gene iPhone port – have entered into an agreement with Aurora Feint Corporation to utilize OpenFeint technology to power social integration in Taito’s iPhone games.
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When it comes to major social networks, open platforms seem par for the course. What we haven’t seen as a standard yet, is an open platform specifically for mobile developers. Bebo is announcing its platform called Bebo Open Mobile today, which consists of partnerships extended to most facets of the mobile industry. From mobile developers to operators and manufactures, Bebo is putting forth a concerted effort to promote, distribute and monetize mobile social media.

It’s an important move for Bebo to make, especially as mobile social networking is helping to drive overall use of mobile web access. While mobile Internet has yet to make up even half of the web usage on a global scale, it’s a growing area of interest for most parties involved.
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Israel-based Snaptu is a new mobile phone platform that bundles various mobile applications into an easily managed series of catalogs for your phone. There are two main problems that Snaptu is trying to solve with its mobile platform, and that’s the automation of web content to remain user friendly in the mobile environment, and create a seamless experience for end users seeking to access applications through their mobile device.
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In private beta until today, the MixedInk collaborative writing platform has launched the public beta version of its product. This is a democratic writing and publishing platform that takes the Creative Commons license to the next level, enabling entire communities to work together on a single document or publication.

While this isn’t the first time this concept has been approached with an online tool, D.C.-based MixedInk is using a new angle for automating much of the process, essentially eliminating the need for wikis in the traditional sense, or even editors. As MixedInk promotes a democratic process, each document submitted by a member of the community can be voted upon, which pushes that document up in rank.
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LinkedIn launched its Intelligent Applications (InApps) developer platform on October 28th, 2008. InApps is widely considered to be LinkedIn’s “answer” to the Facebook Platform. AllFacebook covered InApps from its initial rumors. We have eagerly followed InApps’ evolution as an important member of the OpenSocial initiative whose successes would also help Google, MySpace, Hi5 and others in their efforts to compete with Facebook’s third party developer platform.

As 2008 comes to a close, we don’t believe that the current incarnation of InApps will help LinkedIn truly compete with Facebook user engagement and third party developer participation. OpenSocial developers who created applications for InApps did not innovate based on LinkedIn’s core strengths relative to Facebook, and LinkedIn itself seems hesitant to truly follow Facebook’s lead based on potential conflicts between InApps and its established business model.
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