Today's Most popular News

Source:CenterNetworks

For all of you looking for a triple-word score, rejoice! Scrabble is now officially on Facebook in the U.S. and in Canada. SCRABBLE from EA on Facebook Platform will be the first EA Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social networking site. Scrabble is a very complicated game - not just on the board but with regards to the property rights as well.

Jordan over at Marketing Pilgrim has a look from April into who owns what. Basically Mattel owns the Scrabble rights outside the U.S. and Canada and they launched a Facebook version in April. Today’s announcement brings Scrabble to the worldwide Facebook audience. What’s silly is that two development teams built the same game - what a waste of company resources.

Back in January, Erick looked at Scrabulous and how the Facebook community came together to attempt to save the game. He noted that the  “Save Scrabulous” group has over 46,000 Facebook members.

Amit has a good look at how Scrabulous developers Jayant Agarwalla and Rajat Agarwalla, monetize their casual game using Google AdSense to the tune of $20,000 a month. Today’s announcement certainly will hurt - to what extent is still unknown.

EA and Mattel have also announced that Scrabble is available on the Pogo games network. The Pogo version will have additional hidden features that aren’t available in the Facebook version.

Partner Links
– Free Online Budgeting Software

Source:CenterNetworks

Microsoft and Internet Gold have decided to break up and go their separate ways. The companies had been operating the msn.co.il portal under a cooperative agreement - they established MSN Israel Ltd. in 2000. MSN Israel Ltd is 50.1% owned by the Internet Gold Group and 49.9% owned by Microsoft Corporation.

Both companies have announced this morning that the msn.co.il portal site will become an independent property of Microsoft. Microsoft operates portal sites in 44 countries around the world. Most of the 44 sites are directly owned by Microsoft, sometimes (like in Israel) Microsoft partners with a local Internet company to grow adoption and usage.

Internet Gold has been changing their Internet strategy and they report that in 2007, MSN Israel accounted for less than 3% of Internet Gold’s total revenues.

It looks like there might be some employee and advertiser transition into the new structure.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 7:50 am and is filed under microsoft, Quick News, Israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.