Use Bing to find what you’re looking for on the web? If you searching for online games, Bing just made your life easier: you can now play flash games directly within Bing’s search results, without having to go to Bing’s Game site or the publisher’s website.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
I recently had a chance to chat with several leading executives from top social gaming companies for my first Social Times Pro report, “Virtual Goods in Social Games: What Sells Best, Who Buys Most, and How Your Company Can Profit”. This is a must read if you’re in the industry.
With their eyes on the prize, the top tier social gaming companies are competing for the best talent in order to secure their vision for growth. We’ve come across a variety of news in the social gaming industry disclosing the shift vice presidents from large gaming companies have made to up and coming organizations like Playdom. The latest news comes to us from San Francisco based Crowdstar who announced the addition of four new veterans to their management team. Read more after the jump.
CrowdStar has entered into a five-year relationship with Facebook that sees its games use Facebook Credits as their exclusive in-game currency. There are over 50 million users currently playing CrowdStar’s “Happy Aquarium,” “Zoo Paradise” and other Facebook games, and CrowdStar is hoping that this move will help its expansion into international markets and maintain gamers’ trust in the purchasing of its virtual goods.
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A series of mobile gaming companies have been branding their upcoming games as ‘mobile social games’, and it prompted me to take a look at some top mobile companies and see just how social these new products are. Specifically, companies like Aurora Feint and ngmoco have recently released platforms and games that are considered mobile social. I take a look at how these mobile platforms and games compare to today’s popular social network games, and analyze whether they’re truly social.
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Crowdstar, makers of Happy Aquarium and other multi-million MAU social games, has released the Alpha version of their newest game, Hello City. The game is a city-building game where you build businesses, have them do business, tax them and use the money to further build your city, thereby increasing population and, with the right businesses, please the population. It’s a standard take on Sim City with a series of ridiculously cute twists and has extremely high production values.
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CrowdStar, a leading social games company with nearly 50 million monthly active users, recently broke off talks to be acquired by Microsoft Corp. The deal was rumored to be in the $200 million range, according to a report by BusinessWeek. CrowdStar is said to be actively looking for new companies to work with on a deal.
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Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft Corporation is in talks to acquire Crowdstar, the third largest Facebook Application Developer, for $200 million. This follows the recent acquisition of competing social game developer Playfish by Electronic Arts for up to $400 million. The Social Gaming space has been heating up most recently with Zynga expanding their application distribution through a partnership with Microsoft-owned MSN .
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