Reflexive has announced that they have been acquired by Amazon. Reflexive is a maker and distributor of casual games and apparently Amazon will help Reflexive reach a new set of customers for their games. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker noted on the acquisition:

As I’m sure you can all imagine this is a very exciting day for us at Reflexive. It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play.

At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward.

What this means for all you developers is that it’s time to get excited about your future with Reflexive. We can’t talk about everything yet, but we’ll be in touch shortly with more information. All of the features that you know and love about GameCenterSolution will still be available to you now and in the future, and you can continue to submit games through the Reflexive site. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

I’ve created enough casual games in my career to know that they were hot, are hot and will continue to be hot. They bring together players, developers, aggregators and advertisers into a unique opportunity where everyone benefits. SellMoreGames and Gamezebo have more details on the acquisition.

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Throughout last year, Stan and Pete both reported the acquisition by Google of an in-game ad provider called AdScape. AdScape’s assimilation was described by Pete at the time as a sign of Google’s changing mission statement from “organizing the worlds information” to “cramming as many ads into the world as possible.”

Rumors have been floating ever since that the company would be put into action any minute now. Word filters down to us today that the time is now. Google says that AdSense for Games is now available, and web-based games are now invited to integrate text, image and video advertisements in “new ways” (more on that in a second)

They’ve been working, apparently, with some select game developers and publishers including Konami, Playfish, Zynga, Demand Media and Mochi Media so far, hitting many the recognizable social and casual game networks we cover fairly regularly here at Mashable.

The real question is, though, what does this do that plain old vanilla AdSense won’t do already?

If you look at most online games, both casual and flash, most of the monetization is done through on the side bars, away from where most people are focusing their attention. Couple that with the fact that when you’re playing a game, the last thing you want to do is go check out that limited time offer blinking at you, and it’s no wonder that the low ad conversion rates on gaming sites rival only those from social network.

As you can see from the video above (be patient, the money shot is towards the end), with the new AdSense units, they look more or less the same, but they show up in game instead of off to the side.  Because the user is already acclimated to bells, whistles, lasers and other noisy what-not, the video ads are allowed to auto play.

This turns the gaming experience into something a little closer to television viewing. The ads are likely going to have lower conversion rates than standard AdSense units on a content site because of folks not wanting to leave the experience, but will probably function quite effectively as a sort of brand impression unit, similar to how standard TV works (of course with the added benefit of being clickable).

All in all, not a total bust, and given the scope of the beta partners and the reach of Google, this could very quickly become a major profit center for Google, and a game changer for monetizing online games.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google To Launch AdSense for GamesGoogle AdSense on Your Mobile WebsitesGoogle Introduces Simplified AdSense ManagementGoogle’s In-Game Advertising System Coming SoonGoogle AdSense Tweaked to Show More LinksGoogle Deals A Blow To Anti-Scientology: Anonymous’ AdSense Acc CanceledFeedburner Allows Bloggers AdSense Access

A new semi-mobile game launched last week named Snapherd. The idea behind Snapherd is simple: each day they post a word and you submit photos that match how you view the word. Some of the words to-date include: ashamed, debate, empty, exact, and favorite.

Photos can be submitted via email, MMS upload, or traditional upload from your computer. They are giving out prizes to the highest rated photos. Users can leave comments on photos. What makes this interesting to me is that you can see how others view a word or topic. I could see Snapherd adding groups to allow a circle of friends to explore how their views on a topic differ through photos.

Snapherd was founded by Joshua Gross. You might remember Joshua from our review of his other startup TapeFailure (now called Vistrac). When I spoke with Joshua about Snapherd last month, my suggestion was to partner with brands which could help Snapherd grow quickly and virally along with the real possibility of a business model. I could see brands like Coke, Pepsi, Apple, Microsoft, etc. A perfect example would be the "I’m a PC" campaign that Microsoft is currently running. 

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Hitwise has noticed a trend over the last few weeks in the growing popularity of Live Search Cashback. For those unfamiliar with the service, Live Search Cashback helps users get cash back from shopping online. Similar to sites like Eversave, but integrated with the Live Search platform, the cashback program lets you shop anywhere online that participates in the program and collects your cash back savings all in one spot.

According to Hitwise reports, Live Search Cashback was at a 3.75% share of the total traffic to Live.com about eleven weeks ago, but had grown to 6.29% of the total traffic just seven days ago. The statistics delivered by Hitwise also track gender and note that many of these frugal shoppers are female with an income under $100,000 a year.

Live Search Cashback is growing its market share in a tough economic climate, and that alone says a lot about the program, but how does it work? Basically, it requires you to sign up for it, giving it some tracking information so it can follow your shopping and credit your cash back correctly. Once you have the Live Search set up with a Live Search Cashback account, you just remember to do all of your online shopping through the Live Search interface.

As you go about your normal bargain hunting, Cashback via Live Search will list products rated by price and participation in addition to shopping category. As long as you purchase items with the Live Search Cashback indicator logo on them (shown above), your cash back rebates and rewards get credited to your Cashback account. Users of the program can expect to see most rebates and rewards in their account within 60 days, a similar time frame to sites like MyPoints and other points, rewards and cash back programs.

With at least several months of economic crunch ahead of us, if not longer, every penny counts. If you haven’t already signed up for a shopping rewards program, you may want to check out Live Search Cashback and use it to save as many of your hard earned pennies as possible while you buy the items you need. Every penny counts these days, after all.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Cashback Facebook App Pays You to ShopMicrosoft Live Search Now Lets You Get Cashback Rewards on eBayMicrosoft Pays You For Using Its Search (If You Live In The US)Which Is Worth More? Product Search or Information Search….Microsoft SearchPerks to Reward Users for Using Live SearchMicrosoft Will Pay Users to Search, Says Bill GatesWoman Sues Apple For $1 Million - Over $200 Price Cut

Source:Mashable!

Company

JamsBio

20-Word Description

A new online social community where people connect with each other by sharing the music and moments that shape their lives.

CEO’s Pitch

Music is a part of everyone’s life, helps to define us and has power to unite us. This is the inspiration behind JamsBio.

JamsBio offers a rich platform on top of a database of over 5 million songs to:

- Share music memories

- Review albums, songs and concerts

- Dedicate music to someone special

- Create and debate Top-5 music lists

- Play games that test your music knowledge

- Offer original columns, podcasts, and articles from the fan’s perspective

Mashable’s Take

JamsBio looks and smells just like another social music sharing service at first, but a look under the covers reveals something different, which is refreshing these days. Yes, you can share music on the site but there’s more to it than that. Think of it more as a musical blog platform mixed with a music review service.

You can express your thoughts and feeling with a post about music in three different ways:

1. Memory - Share what you think about a specific song, when and where you heard it

2. Music Review - Write a review of a song, album or artist.

3. Concert Review - Review the actual live performance that you attended.

Here’s a music Review I did about a song from Foreigner. Notice how it includes your rating, review and even an embedded player that allows the reader to listen to the track:

There are several fun things to do on the service, such as games. For example, there’s SongBlitz which is like Name That Tune, where you try to guess the name of the song and artist. There’s also JamsMatch where you try to match classic album covers with the right artists. There’s a leaderboard that tracks all players and results.

They have a Facebook app called Memory Explorer that lets you show your latest JamsBio memories in your Facebook profile, as well as widgets that you can embed on your other social networking profiles, blogs or websites.

Another fun area is the Top 5 lists feature where members share their favorite five songs, artists or albums in countless categories. This can generate a great deal of debate and arguments, which is cool. Just as in music posts, the songs in your list can be played right from there. As with just about everything else on the site, you can easily embed your list as a widget or share it on other social networks with friends.

JamsBio does offer a different way to express yourself through your musical tastes. They present many interesting tools to accumplish this too. Their MusicFinder database seems to do a good job finding tracks. They claim that their database contains millions of songs which might be true judging from the results of all the searches that I conducted, including very rare and obscure tunes and artists. I know the last thing any of us need is yet another social music sharing site, but this one serves up an original soundtrack worth a listen and a look.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

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Ponoko’s Photomake offers a unique service. They can take any hand-drawn image you upload and turn it into an actual physical model and ship it to you. They accomplish this with their state of the art laser cut printers that take scanned images and create molds that produce the final physical object.

You can use any photo application to create a design, such as Photoshop, Gimp or even Microsoft Paint and just upload the image via their website. If you don’t want to use an application you can simply draw the design by hand on a plain piece of paper and scan it as a JPG, GIF or PNG and upload the image the same way through their website and they’ll create the physical manifestation and deliver it to your doorstep.

There’s an online Showroom that displays the types of things you can create with Photomake. You can also just purchase some of the items created by others through the same process. For example, who wouldn’t want to own this John McCain necklace?

If you create an account on Photomake’s site then you can track the entire process of your creations via email or even RSS feeds. If you’re interested in giving this unique service a try for free then just be one of the first one hundred Mashable readers and make it happen. The invite code is: mashable.

There’s no question that this is going to be a popular and successful service. The cost of creating a model via this process has drastically decreased through the years to the point where just about anyone can afford to use it. Photomake can help anyone with some creativity and just a tiny bit of artistic ability. Even if you can’t draw at all, you can still submit an image and Photomake will do the rest.

Here’s a video of what Photomake can do:

connect with this author:

Source:Mashable!

I’m like you: I get a little tired of the Facebook messages asking me to sign up for a new application. For the most part, Facebook applications are like black holes which permanently suck away some of your time. Some of these apps are altruistic, above average in design, or even fun. Lately, however, I’ve come across a new set of Facebook game apps that aren’t just good at leeching away my time; they’re clever enough to reach out to my wallet.

The World of Blood series of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are linked thematically by the world “blood.” The four games in this series of Facebook game applications are:

- Blood Lust (a vampire/horror themed game)

- Elven Blood (a standard fantasy RPG - the first I tried and my preferred game of the four)

- Skies of Blood (alternate reality where an Earth Federation tries to protect the planet from terrorists and other threats; you are part of a police squad)

- City of Blood (based on gang warfare where the gangs rule the cities)

The games aren’t gory, despite what their titles suggest. They remind me more of games like Gothador with better graphics. Each game features a character that you can use to adventure through a world by expending energy that slowly regenerates over time. You go on quests, kill creatures, and increase the strength and skills of your character through this activity. You move from area to area with some pretty images but no moving graphics. These games are prettier, cooler descendants of the text-based MUD games that have been around for decades.

Now, this being Facebook, these games attempt to leverage your social graph to get more players into their games. They offer you some incentives to recruit your friends. By sending out invitations to your Facebook friends you earn additional playing time. This is a typical strategy that these kinds of games use to recruit other players.

However, an interesting twist that the Blood games use is to hide most of the advanced sections of the games until you build up a group of players and non-player characters. Many sections of these games require a group of a minimum size. For example, the Garden of Eden in the Elven Blood game can’t be accessed unless you have a party of 9 characters. This means that you need to recruit 8 other people into your party or team so that you can play in this area. Virtually any MMORPG player will be tempted to recruit their other Facebook friends in order to increase their party size. Thus, the player pool grows: the game is tuned to the psychological profile of the typical MMORPG player, who tends to obsess over increasing the power of their character while exploring everywhere they can.

The other carrot that the Blood games use, similar to Gothador and other MMORPGs, is the use of bonuses. Each of the Blood games comes with ten bonus points when you start playing. You can use these points for:

- In-game currency, to spend on equipment

- Restoring your hit points

- Restoring your stamina points (these are the points that you use to have adventures in these games)

- Purchase a non-player character (NPC) to be a permanent part of your group

Once you use these points, they appear to be gone forever. However, you can buy more of these points using PayPal or a credit card. This is very useful to a player who has recruited all of their Facebook friends into these games but who has hit a brick wall in terms of group size. You can buy an NPC using eight of your free ten points. This leaves you with a bit of a dilemma, since you can’t buy anything for two points. Therefore, you’re going to be tempted to find ways to get more of these bonus points in order to feel like you’re not leaving money on the table, so to speak. And so, you’ll probably buy more bonus points to increase your group size. It’s a sneaky psychological tactic, but clever.

One other interesting tactic that the Blood games designers use is to offer additional bonus points if you sign up for all four of their games. Under the covers, these games appear to use a common gaming engine. By using four different themed eras, they are increasing the chance that you’ll like to play more than one of their games. Given the fact that your stamina points regenerate fairly slowly, you’re going to be tempted to flip from game to game in order to keep yourself entertained (I speak from personal experience). If you expend your playing time in all four games and you’re still not satisfied, you’re going to be tempted to spend some of your own money to keep the experience going. The first hit is free, as they say.

In summary, the Blood series of Facebook games are not original concepts: they borrow a lot from other online MMORPG games. However, by leveraging the Facebook social graph and adding ways to entice the player to spend some money, the game designers are making clever use of one of the most popular social networks. It’s a bit sneaky and exploitive, nor do I recommend these games to anyone who tends to get addicted to MMORPGs, but it is an interesting example of how companies can make money using the “free” model. I predict that more applications will follow this method over time.

Check out Broadcasting Brain, my blog about communication and social media.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:WiiTube Launches Facebook App to Review GamesCome2Play Launches Facebook ApplicationImInLikeWithYou Has a Facebook App TooSkype’s Unnecessary Facebook AppKongregate Ready To Launch Games To FacebookMusic Nation and BetsGoWild Launch Facebook AppsZynga Launches Game Center API to Help Spread Your Facebook Apps

Earlier this month we reviewed mobile scavenger hunt game platform SCVNGR. Today, via Source of Inspiration, I found GPS Mission. Germany-based GPS Mission allows you to create games using the GPS functions on many mobile phones.

Here’s how GPS Mission works: You create a mission for your friends to travel through. Each winner receives "gold" which helps them move up the leaderboard. Here’s an example of a mission from San Francisco named the Nob Hill Gold Rush.

What’s great about both GPS Mission and SCVNGR is that the games are played outside. This falls in line with my article the other day about the airplane mode function on cell phones. While the phones must be on to play the game, players are outside and away from the desk getting exercise, social interaction and sunlight.

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Yesterday I traveled to Philadelphia to attend the DreamIT Ventures Funding Day. Eleven startups presented their ideas and pitched their concepts for funding. Several hundred people attended the event and the event went off without a hitch. Most of the presentations were very good and I was actually quite impressed with many of the company ideas.

Here is a list of the companies who presented plus a link to our coverage:

• Vuzit (our coverage)
• DropCard (our coverage)
• Anthillz (our coverage)
• Sleep.FM (our coverage)
• Trendient
• Beanstockd
• Phrazit
• Tapinko (our coverage)
• SnackFeed
• SCVNGR (our coverage)

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SCVNGR is one of the companies in the DreamIT startup incubator. SCVNGR describes their service as an "on-demand interactive mobile platform". What this really means is that they help companies and other groups create scavenger hunt games.

The actual game works very similar to any scavenger hunt but with more intelligence. Because everything is sent back via text message to SCVNGR, the system can appropriately send people to the next items and make sure that different groups are doing different things. A variety of commands can be sent via the moble to get tips, hints and current team scoring. The Web application is used to setup the actual scavenger hunt.

To-date the company has generated $25,000 in revenues including over $10,000 from a deal with a Philadelphia jewelry store. SCVNGR is currently targeting the university market segment and is expanding to the museum segment. 

SCVNGR has raised $125k to-date and they are looking for $650,000 for team expansion, technology and sales/business development.

Usain Bolt bolted his way into the Olympics winning gold medals in the events he competed in. Apparently he’s like the fastest man on earth. And now thanks to Puma (his sponsor), you can attempt to beat him at his own game. Puma has created a casual game that lets you challenge Bolt in a race. You race using your fingers, he races using his feet. I was able to beat him because I am a master of the arrow keys. You see I played Track ‘n Field all the time growing up so I was prepared for this world record holder. Play the game on Puma’s site.

The only thing Puma did wrong is not allowing the game to be embedded outside of the Puma Web site. This would have easily spread the game, Bolt and Puma further than keeping the game locked up on the site will. The game is a smart move for Puma and Bolt. Now that the Olympic Games are over, Bolt will slowly fade out of the spotlight. The game can keep him top-of-mind for casual game players and Puma Shoppers.

This game should see millions of plays a day if it gets the kind of traffic similar games I produced did. It’s a quick play and is addicting to hit the leaderboard. Can you beat my time above? Leave a comment with your best score.

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