Heyzap, a Y Combinator-incubated social platform for mobile games, is releasing a software development kit today allowing developers and publishers to introduce Heyzap ads to their games.
Basically, it’s turning Heyzap’s social network into an ad network too. Developers can use it to make more money, or to promote their games in other Heyzap games. You can see a sample ad to the left… → Read More
Heyzap continues to build out its social platform with the addition of player leaderboards that developers can add to their mobile games.
Other companies have released their own leaderboard options, most notably OpenFeint — except that the OpenFeint service is closing down on December 14, following its acquisition by GREE in April of last year. So there’s a bit of a vacuum. Plus, co-founder… → Read More
Heyzap has added a cool new feature to its social platform for mobile games — the ability to actually start playing games with other users.
The app already allowed users to check-in to games that they were playing (either manually in the Heyzapp app, or automatically through its many SDK integrations), to earn badges, and to find other players and games. However, in order to actually start… → Read More
Mobile game discovery platform Heyzap has come a long way since its first foray into the mobile space, and today the company hopes to shake things up again with a new update to their Android app.
For the uninitiated, Heyzap allows players to check-in to their favorite games, and discover new ones by sharing and connecting with other players. Players can also win badges after hitting certain… → Read More
Here’s your chance to let your kitten help other animals, using nothing other than its feline reflexes.
You may be familiar with ‘Game for Kittens‘, an iPhone game developed by Little Hiccup that’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s a game for your kitten (okay, so the title is slightly misleading — cats of all ages can play). And starting this week the game’s developer has teamed with HeyZap… → Read More
Heyzap, the social discovery platform for mobile and online games, has been hard at work adding pieces to its mobile experience. The startup recently brought check-ins to its mobile platform, allowing users to check-in to their favorite games to share scores and achievements on Facebook and Twitter. This also included, a la Foursquare, a badge rewards system, in which gamers can become the “boss”… → Read More
Heyzap, a social discovery platform for mobile and online games, announced today that it’s zapping its way onto the iPhone just in time for WWDC 2011, Apple’s developer conference. The startup will be extending its fast-growing Android community (which launched in March) and has been doubling in size every month since.
The startup’s new iPhone app will detect recent gameplay and lets users… → Read More
In general, the key driver of social networking so far is games on Facebook. But most of those games aren’t social in the way that playing Monopoly or cards with your friends and family over the holidays is social. MyYearbook, which is a small but profitable social network focussing on younger teenage users, is going to try to make online games more social by getting its members to play together… → Read More
HeyZap, a startup that offers game developers a distribution platform and a variety of social tools, is looking to stay ahead of the curve: the company, which has been focused exclusively on Flash games until now, is adding support for HTML5 games.
HTML5 is still something of a novelty when it comes to gaming — we’ve seen demos like Quake running in the browser, but the vast majority of popular… → Read More
Many publishers want to add social games to their sites but widgets aren’t customizable enough. And tapping into an API may be too complicated for less tech savvy publishers. Heyzap, a startup that distributes casual and social games across the web through a set of APIs, applications, and widgets, is launching a new product today, called Heyzap Arcade, that allows anyone to add games to their… → Read More
HeyZap, a startup that distributes casual and social games across the web through a set of APIs, applications, and widgets, has closed another $3 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, with participation from Naval Ravikant (Hitforge) and Chris Dixon (Founder Collective). Ravikant and Albert Wenger of USV will be joining the board. HeyZap previously received funding from Y Combinator… → Read More
Web publishers looking to capitalize on the growth in social and casual gaming just got an easier way to integrate them into their sites. HeyZap, a platform that helps syndicate social and casual games and also offers expanded features like achievements, has just launched its Social Games Bar. The bar is similar in appearance to the Meebo Bar — it sits at the bottom of the browser window and… → Read More
HeyZap, the startup that makes it easy for publishers to integrate casual games into their sites, is entering a very hot new territory today: social gaming. The company has partnered with fifteen social game developers, and will be integrating their games into the HeyZap widget over the next few weeks. That’s significant, because it means that these games will be available on the 150,000 sites… → Read More
One of the long-standing problems with Flash games is that they often have a very short shelf life: you may play for a few minutes when you’re bored, but there’s nothing to really keep you coming back for more. Today HeyZap, the startup that offers a platform for monetizing and distributing Flash games, is looking to help developers with that problem by bringing the achievements system… → Read More
Social gaming companies like Zynga and Playdom have proven that casual/social gaming can be an extremely lucrative business. But their success can’t be solely attributed to the quality of their games — they’re also finely tuned to maximize their virality. Users are often asked to invite their friends to join them, or publish stories to their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other services. … → Read More
It’s well known that casual games are popular among mainstream Web users. However, when you’re a publisher maintaining a community, you want to go beyond engaging each user separately and increase total engagement in bulk by connecting users with each other. Enter multi-player casual games.
Israeli startup Come2Play, which we’ve described as the Ning of social gaming networks, has provided this… → Read More
Last June, Heyzap, the Y Combinator-funded startup that builds products around Flash gaming, launched a new micro-transaction platform for Flash that looked to offer developers a way to monetize their highly viral but difficult-to-monetize games. The platform is off to an encouraging start, and today Heyzap is taking it one step further with a new payout system that offers publishers a chance to… → Read More
Heyzap, the Y Combinator startup that offers an easily-embedded widget containing thousands of Flash games, is launching a major new product today that introduces the company to an entirely new source of revenue. Dubbed HeyZap Payments, the platform offers developers a way to easily integrate a microtransaction system into their games, which could be a boon for both developers and Heyzap… → Read More
Heyzap, the Y Combinator startup that’s looking to become a “YouTube For Flash Games“, has closed a seed funding round led by Union Square Ventures, with independent investors Naval Ravikant (Hitforge) and Joshua Schachter (delicious) also participating. The exact size of the round was not disclosed, but it was “above $500k and less than $1 million”.
Rather than focus on building a portal… → Read More
There are countless Flash games on the web, but weeding through them to find the one you’re looking for can be a challenge. Heyzap the first company out of Y Combinator‘s latest batch of startups, is looking to offer users a comprehensive database of the web’s best games, along with the ability to embed those games wherever they’d like. In short, they’re looking to become a YouTube for Flash… → Read More
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