• February 11th, 2010

    Zynga Buys Social Gaming Startup Serious Business

    Zynga, the heavily-funded social gaming company, today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Serious Business, fellow creators of social games on Facebook. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it appears to be more of a strategic purchase to bring in more experienced social game development talent.

    Serious Business raised $4 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners back in April 2008. Its apps for Facebook include the enormously popular and revenue-generating Friends For Sale and Rock Legends. → Read More

    August 25th, 2008

    Can You Guess Which Facebook App Is Making A Million Dollars A Month?

    → Read More

    April 25th, 2008

    Lightspeed Funding Turns Facebook Application Into "Serious Business"

    Less than a year ago Alex Le and Siqi Chen were working at one of the web’s most ambitious startups, semantic search engine PowerSet (Due out soon). But last December they made the tough choice to quit it all and go full time for their own side project, a quickly growing little Facebook application called “Friends For Sale”. That project has grown into a full blown venture backed startup ironically named “Serious Business“, which just raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners (double digit pre) and currently draws over 600,000 daily active users on Facebook. Steve Newcomb, formerly of PowerSet, will be taking a seat on their board. True to its name, “Friends for Sale” is an application that lets you virtually buy and sell your friends. The game is an ego driven form of “poking” (virtual nudges) that makes it abundantly clear who the most desirable players are, by listing a leader board of your most expensive friends. Every one of your friends, whether they have the app or not, can be purchased as a “pet”. Everyone starts at a base price that rises with every resale. You get more cash when you log in, are sold, or have one of your pets bought away from you. Users can spend that cash on kicking their pets, give them funny tag lines, or even virtual gifts. That one game has also been supporting the growing company’s resources (20 Ruby on Rails servers and growing) through a mix of banner advertisements and sponsorships. While the company declined to state their earnings, they estimated the company could grow to 12 engineers without raising any financing. The financing allows the company to significantly ramp up their expansion plans. But Lightspeed didn’t invest in Serious Business just for a single game. Founder Alex Le cites “Friends for Sale” as the first in a series of of games built directly around your relationships with friends. The idea is to create games for all social networks (Facebook, OpenSocial) that rely on leveraging social skills to win, instead of your twitch reflex or poker proficiency. While they’ll have some games to announce in the next 30 days, the founders briefly threw out the example of a battle game where your friends are the soldiers and success depended on your social skills. Serious Business is not without competition. Zynga and SGN are well funded social gaming startups. However, → Read More

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