Tech Now: social

MindJolt’s SGN Studio Launches Social iOS Game Mini Cafe

Only two months after buying Social Gaming Network (SGN), MindJolt, the game distribution company led by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, is churning out its first mobile social game today with the launch of SGN’s Mini Café. As its name indicates, the free iOS app allows gamers to design, decorate, and manage a restaurant.

As chef and manager on Mini Cafe, you cook dishes, choose your cafe’s decoration, and try to build a following of loyal customers. The social element of the game comes in when you invite your Facebook friends to visit your cafe, and they can then decide whether they like your restaurant. From the app itself, you can share a picture of your café on Facebook, or choose to post your achievements to your wall.

SGN says that as you gain a better reputation, you are able to unlock more virtual items for the cafe. The game is similar in a lot of ways to SGN’s Mini Tycoon Casino, which allows you to build and run a 5-star casino.

As we’ve written in the past, MindJolt bought SGN to create a cross-platform game distribution empire, and SGN brought a solid set of mobile titles and technology and a number of talented engineers. SGN’s founder Shervin Pishevar recently announced that he is joining Menlo Ventures as a partner and MindJolt appointed seasoned mobile vet Ulf Waschbusch as the new head of SGN’s social mobile game development studio.

Mini Cafe is just the first of 5 to 6 mobile titles that SGN will release in the next six months, says MindJolt COO Colin Digiaro. While Mini Cafe is available only for iOS, the company expects to develop companion Android app for all of its mobile games in the future.

So why iOS first? Digiaro explains that the majority of SGN’s userbase and installs are on iOS devices so it made sense to target these users initially.

As for how SGN’s games will leverage MindJolt’s distribution platform, Digiaro says that across all the games that MindJolt operates, the company will recommend mobile games to players who have similar interests on Hallpass games (another MindJolt buy) and vice versa. Right now the company has 25 million unique monthly visitors across all its games and it plans to leverage this traffic as a distribution platform, he explains.

The mobile and social gaming space is heating up with Zynga, EA, and a number of international players all vying for traffic. For now, the company, which is profitable, is not planning to raise any more capital but does plan to make more acquisitions in the coming year to expand reach, add game titles and technology talent.

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Now You Can Unsubscribe.com From Social Apps Too

When Unsubscribe.com launched last October, the premise was pretty simple. You install it in your email, and any time you want to unsubscribe from a marketing email, you just hit the “Unsusbcribe” button and the service takes care of the rest.

Now the service is expanding to social apps. If you are like me, you have dozens of both Web and mobile apps that you’ve signed into with with your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn ID. Some of these you keep using, some you forget about, but they still have access to your data unless you remove them.

Unsubscribe shows you all the apps with access to your data via those three platforms (Google and Yahoo logins are coming next). It also shows you the relative level of access each app has to your data, along with color-coded reputation shield and a recommendation to remove the app, be cautious, or keep it. And then with one unsubscribe button, you can revoke access to any app. By default, if you haven’t used an app in more than 90 days, it suggests you remove it. I have a lot of those: Clicker, IntoNow, Aardvark,

Unsubscribe adds an extension to your browser (Chrome, Firefox, or Safari) that pops open an information box every time you add a Facebook app or other app, telling you how safe it is, it’s access level, and some other information. The service will expand to browser extensions next.

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LinkedIn To Leverage User Follows And Recommendations In New Social Ad Formats

Taking a page from Facebook’s ad formats, professional social network LinkedIn is launching new social ad formats today that will leverage members’ actions on the site to serve more targeted ads.

So if you follow a company, or recommend a product or company, LinkedIn will use this data in display ads to give you a more targeted advertisement. For example, LinkedIn could put up an ad for a Google job posting (sponsored by Google) that will show people in your network who work at Google and could refer you.

Another format could feature a display ad for a company, and LinkedIn will show how many of the network’s users have followed or recommended the company and/or its products.

LinkedIn will also track any information and actions taken through its plug-ins as well. Starting in August, LinkedIn says that you can opt-out of any information (such as impression data) that may be sent to LinkedIn via these plug-ins.

LinkedIn says the personalized LinkedIn Ads will start rolling out today to a small set of members as part of a limited release. Of course, privacy is always an issue when leveraging social data on networks. LinkedIn says that y name and image is never shared with any advertiser and you can choose to opt out of these personalized ads.

LinkedIn recently changed its privacy settings, which hinted that the company could be rolling out more Facebook-like ads in the near future. While some may find the ads invasive, serving highly-targeted, more interactive ads is better for the network ad dollars. It’s probably wise for LinkedIn to start thinking more like Facebook in terms of advertising.

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