Engage Digital Wrap-Up For The Week Of April 1, 2011

By On April 1, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Engage Digital Wrap-Up for the week of April 1, 2011. The Wrap-Up is where Engage Digital spotlights stories that we didn’t get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the business of user engagement.

Applifier Launches A Portal To Discover Social Games On Facebook: Applifier is launching Games on Applifier, a Facebook app that acts a portal leading a user to many different games on Facebook and other platforms. Games on Applifier will feature anonymous user recommendations and other features that smaller app developers usually can’t integrate into their games.
Get Started With Augmented Reality In Poistr: A new app called Poistr lets users quickly generate and place augmented reality objects viewable through Layar. Users can add images, video, and audio through Poistr.
Hats For Help: Valve has raised over $300,000 for survivors of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami through sale of charity virtual items in its Team Fortress 2 game.
Mark Cuban Teams With Qualcomm To Bring Augmented Reality To Mavericks Tickets: This year’s season tickets for the Dallas Mavericks will let users play an augmented reality game when viewed through an Android phone’s viewfinder. The AR ticket content goes live on April 16th, the day the playoffs begin.
Mumbai-Based Games2Win Raises $6 Million: Casual and mobile social developer Games2Win has raised a $6 million Series B round of funding lead by Clearstone Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. Games2Win says it has developed over 350 games and an in-game ad network that reaches over 20 million players per month.
Papaya Mobile Integrates Android In-App Billing: Mobile social gaming network PapayaMobile plans to integrate Android’s new in-app payment system directly into its games.
Playing 3DS Augmented Reality Games With A Whiteboard: Developers at the software firm Refactr have discovered that the 3DS will recognize a hand-drawn whiteboard duplicate of its AR card, provided the shapes and contrast are correct.
The Financial Life (And Death) Of An East European Gold Farm: A World of Warcraft gold farmer using the pseudonym Goran Podolski has released documents detailing how his business operates. Gold farming has become progressively less profitable over the years in WoW, as the game’s currency continues to depreciate. The virtual gold is sold primarily through merchant portals at mark-up that can be as high as 100%. Goran’s daily profits are ultimately only slightly higher than minimum wage. Goran has since left the business due to several depreciation of WoW gold.