E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of… → Read More
Messaging app Line, which recently announced it has passed 150 million users, has withdrawn a function from its iOS app that allowed users to gift paid-for stickers to each other by paying for them with a virtual currency. The change, spotted earlier by The Next Web, was made at Apple’s request, said the company in a blog post today. → Read More
Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might work.” Two years ago, if you’d have told me that an open-source, P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I would’ve told you that you were on a lonely bus headed to CrazyTown, U.S.A. But today, Bitcoin officially became a crazy idea that’s actually… → Read More
Editor’s note: Charles Edward Hudson is a venture partner with SoftTech VC and the CEO and co-founder of Bionic Panda Games.
I have been trying to wrap my head around Amazon’s decision to launch Amazon Coins as a currency. It struck me as curious because most major platforms who have offered universal, platform-wide virtual currencies have dialed back those efforts or simply abandoned… → Read More
You may know GetJar as the largest independent, cross-platform app store, and one of the largest distributors of Android apps outside of the Android Market. With more than 2 billion downloads and some 150K+ applications, the company continues to grow. This is thanks in part to its “open” model, which allows third-party app makers to distribute apps for most of the major mobile platforms. Getting… → Read More
It’s not exactly a secret that gaming has found new life on the web, social and mobile platforms. Of course, with it, especially the rise in free-to-play gaming, developers need to find ways to monetize their apps, or their browser-based games. Beyond mobile or banner advertising, there is the option of in-app or in-game purchases — the old in-game freemium model. Give your game away for free… → Read More
PayPal relaunched a peer-to-peer payment Facebook app today that some news outlets are misinterpreting as a partnership between the two companies. I’ve confirmed with Facebook that it’s not. It’s just a standard application on the platform, and Facebook couldn’t really do anything to stop PayPal. But why hasn’t Facebook built its own way for friends to send money to each other using its virtual… → Read More
It seems that Bitcoin is experiencing the same fits and starts that any new currency undergoes early in its history. Though Bitcoin is 2 years old, the mainstream press discovered it much more recently, and since then, Bitcoin has experienced some schizophrenic volatility — you can read Jon Evans’ recent diagnosis here.
Yet, absent from Evans’ post is the very latest news out of the virtual… → Read More
Editor’s note: Stan Stalnaker is the founding director of Hub Culture, a social network that revolves around a virtual currency called Ven. In this guest post, he extrapolates where virtual currencies like Ven and Bitcoins may take us.
Virtual currencies are in the news again with all the discussion around Bitcoins, which is limited in supply and can be exchanged anonymously. Our own long… → Read More
The global virtual goods industry put up some very impressive numbers this year. From special Easter eggs to virtual ad campaigns, virtual goods sales have grabbed their share of headlines over the past twelve months. Now with social gaming on the rise and everyone from your teenage nephew to your grandma to your old rugby teammate buying a “little something” to sweeten their online game, here… → Read More
If we’re reading correctly, this patent filed in March is multiplayer gaming network Zynga‘s application for the control of virtual currency and/or poker chips bought with real currency in virtual games, a.k.a a patent for “Virtual Playing Chips in a Multiuser Online Game Network.”
While at first glance it seems like the patent’s strictures only pertain to poker chips, it explicitly references… → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of gWallet, a virtual currency offers startup. Previously he founded BlueLithium, which was sold to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007.
Don’t be surprised if one day soon the must-have item of the season doesn’t even exist. Not in the real world, anyway. Then again, what did reality ever have to do with desire anyway? The… → Read More
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