Oh, how times have changed for Addmired team. The Y Combinator startup first debuted in 2008 with an Hot or Not-esque social network plugin, but eventually found their footing after pivoting to become a developer of freemium multiplayer mobile games like iMob and its recently released sequel.

Now they’re looking to do a bit of rebranding by renaming themselves Machine Zone, and to celebrate, they’ve also announced that they have raised a cool $8 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Their board of directors is being bolstered to boot — Menlo Ventures managing director Shervin Pishevar will be joining the board, as will Anthos Capital managing director Bryan Kelly.

Pishevar’s new role with the team is quite the boon for Machine Zone, and for co-founder and CEO Gabe Leydon in particular. Pishevar’s own roots as founder of Social Gaming Network occasionally saw the two companies come into competition, as seen back when the first slew of mafia games started to take hold of iOS. Somewhere along the line, the two developed a mutual respect, and Leydon began to see Pishevar as “best VC in the valley when it comes to understanding what we do.”

What they do, specifically, is develop games that are big on uniting users and in-app purchases but are generally low on graphical intensity. Machine Zone’s oeuvre consists of games like iMob 2, Global War, and Original Gangstaz, and while none of them pack whiz-bang graphics, they all rank among the iOS App Store’s top 50 highest grossing apps (iMob 2 currently leads the pack at number 24). That by itself is pretty impressive, but they also stand as a testament to Machine Zone’s knack for creating games with some serious staying power. Original Gangstaz (which I’m really enjoying typing, by the way) was first released over two years ago, and Global War is something like 15 months old.

Leydon attributes this staying power to their specific approach to designing games, which, oddly enough, emphasizes crafting a engaging social environment ahead of actual game design.

“Video games are terrible at retention,” Leydon said. “We don’t look at them for inspiration. Look at the top apps in the App Store, and the ones that last are social communication apps. What we’re doing is creating a more social experience and then wrapping a game around it.”

Being the sort of gamer that prefers to play alone, I don’t know that I buy that philosophy, but the formula certainly seems to be doing the Machine Zone team well. With a fresh infusion of capital to play with, my conversation with Leydon naturally turned toward what’s next on their horizon.

As far as new game concepts go, Leydon smartly kept quiet when it came to specifics, but noted that the team is currently “kicking a lot of ideas around.” I can’t blame them for taking their time here — they’ve launched a total of 13 games since 2009, but they’re not just looking to slap together a new property and push it into the market for some short-term gains. In order to make these nebulous new projects a success, Machine Zone is also looking to use some of that new-found funding to bolster their ranks with savvy developers.

Last January, Y Combinator startup Addmired released the game iMob for the iPhone, tapping into the immense popularity of text-based mafia games on Facebook and other social networks and bringing them to Apple’s hot mobile platform. That game has fared quite well, peaking as the App Store’s fourth most popular game (other companies like Zynga have since released their own mob-based games). Now the Addmired team is looking to capitalize on the craze by building clones like iVampires, which swaps out the Mafia-themed gameplay for one that focuses on the creatures of the night. And today they’re launching a version that is focused on an entirely new demographic: the tween girl crowd.

Dubbed Girl Wars (iTunes Link), the game replaces the gritty guns and knives of iMob with stiletto heels and handbags. Founder Gabriel Leydon says that the gameplay is similar to Addmired’s other games, but that it has been made significantly easier (presumably to appeal to a younger audience), allowing gamers to unlock items much more quickly.

Let me make one thing clear: after playing Girl Wars for five minutes, I have no intention of ever touching it again. The game’s ridiculously colorful interface gave me a headache almost immediately. And frankly, I won’t be surprised if some women find the game’s focus on clothing, malls, and ‘cat fights’ to be sexist.

But Girl Wars does exactly what it sets out to do, offering the addictive gameplay of iMob and its ilk in a form that will appeal to tweenage girls. And Leydon believes that it is the first MMO on the App Store that is geared towards the tween crowd, which may help it reach the explosive growth iMob achieved three months ago, though we can certainly expect knockoffs if the game fares well.

Mob Wars – a largely text based strategy game that throws users into a virtual underworld of organized crime – has become a Facebook phenomenon, with 2,680,129 monthly active users and monthly revenues rumored to exceed $1 million. The game isn’t the first of its kind (in fact, similar text-based games have been around for many years), but it is among the first to go truly mainstream.

Now Y Combinator startup Addmired is looking to capitalize on the popularity of Mob Wars and its ilk by developing a new game for the iPhone dubbed iMob Online. And while it would be easy to cast this aside as just another wannabe, the game is actually very well done, sporting a great looking interface with an intuitive menu system, as well as nifty features like GPS functionality and real-time messaging.

The game itself is too complex to fully describe in a few paragraphs, but the gameplay generally revolves around doing ‘jobs’, attacking other players to earn cash, and spending the proceeds to buy more powerful weapons and other items. It might not sound like much (especially given the lack of flashy graphics), but it can be incredibly addictive once you’ve gotten a grip on the basics.

One unique feature of iMob is its ability to use the iPhone’s GPS to find nearby players, who you can invite into your mob family (or presumably declare battle against). To increase the likelihood that you’ll run across iMob players in your region, the game has a ‘memory’ of your position for up to 24 hours, so you don’t necessarily have to be logged in for a friend to find you.

My biggest gripe about the game is the lack of a notification system – something that the developers have little control over. Despite promising background notifications months ago, Apple hasn’t made any mention of its progress for some time. Without notifications, you’ll need to repeatedly reopen the application to see if there are any urgent updates you need to attend to. The developers say that SMS or Email updates may become available in future updates.

iMob is free to play, but also offers a number of premium versions that include points that can be spent in-game (Zynga’s Poker app has a similar model). Unfortunately the App Store still doesn’t support in-game purchases, so developers are forced to rely on this less-than-elegant solution. Try the game out with the free version, and if you’re dead set on becoming a kingpin (without any of the hard work) then spring for a paid app.

The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months.

Chatterous

Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week.

Addmired

Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here.

Snaptalent

Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here.

RescueTime

RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here.

MightyQuiz

MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions and embed them on their sites. The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Tipjoy

Tipjoy is an easy micropayment system for the web. It has been designed to cut out the steps necessary for website visitors to leave small amounts of money for content publishers, such as bloggers. The Tipjoy button placed on a website asks for only an email address and by default registers a donation of 10 cents. The service is nearing 70,000 impressions per day and the founders are exploring different models for micropayments, such as employing them to finance high definition video on the web. We wrote about Tipjoy here.

8aWeek

8aweek promises to save you hours of time wasted each week on time-drain websites like Facebook and Drudge Report. The 8aweek browser toolbar will track your website usage, remind you of how much permitted time you have left on each restricted site, and even block you from particular sites once you’ve spent too much time on them. See our review from February here.

WebMynd

WebMynd provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. The founders draw comparisons to Gmail – just as Gmail obviated the need to sort messages into folders by providing effective search and tagging, WebMynd renders it unnecessary to manually bookmark sites and organized them into folders because it’s easy to search and visually flip through the pages you’ve visited. WebMynd operates as a Firefox toolbar and has already indexed 8M page impressions. We wrote about them in January.

BaseShield

BaseShield will protect Windows PCs from malicious viruses and attacks by leveraging virtualization software. Its methods improve on existing anti-virus solutions by preventing all types of attacks, not just the recognized and documented ones. The service has yet to launch.

Insoshi

Insoshi is an upcoming white label social networking platform. It will differentiate itself from many of the other social networking platforms by taking a completely open source approach (think: WordPress of social networks). The software has yet to be released.

Mixwit

Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious long-term plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through the MP3 search engine Seeqpod.

Omnisio

Omnisio will help you annotate and share videos from any website. It will also add structure to the existing video content on the web. The service has yet to launch.

Deluux

Deluux aims to become a distributed Facebook, or an inverted Ning, by relocating the center of people’s online identities to their websites, which exist outside of any one social network. The service will facilitate the distribution of personalized content around the web and help drive traffic to these personal websites. It has yet to launch.

Wundrbar

Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.

YumDots

YumDots wants to be the go-to mobile application for finding places to eat when out on the town. Its emphasis on using interactive maps to display information about local restaurants makes it more efficient than other mobile review services like Yelp’s. The service has yet to launch.

280 North

280 North will debut with a web-based PowerPoint clone called “280 Slides” that strives to mimic the desktop experience and features the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint format. The founders’ longer term goals consist of providing a JavaScript-based development framework for building desktop-like applications for the web. None of these services, however, have been launched yet.

Kirkland North
Kirkland North wants to take an infectious campus-wide game popular at Yale and Harvard last year and spread it to other campuses around the country. The Risk-like game pits sections of campuses against each other in a virtual battle for university-wide domination. While the founders have plans to roll out an integrated solution that can serve many institutions at once, they are currently rolling out individual versions of their online service, such as one for Stanford that launched only two weeks ago and already involves 20% of the campus.

Joberator
Joberator will help employers find developer talent by encouraging computer science students to refer their developer friends, of whom they have more intimate knowledge than any professional recruiter. Incentives for personal referrals are created by employers who list the bonuses they will pay to pay those who recommend candidates eventually hired. The service has yet to launch.

Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman – I didn’t pick that picture though).

Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details.

This is the first product of Addmired, Inc., which is a Y Combinator startup. More on the Addmired CrunchBase page.