Virtual currency monetization continues to grow at a torrid pace around the world and the US, and the space is getting only more competitive by the day. Just within the last month, we were the first to cover new virtual currency monetization firms SponsorPay, gWallet, and TokenAds. Today, we have a first look at another new entrant in the virtual currency market – Chicago based Firecue.

Firecue, which is a division of mobile lead generation company Viveli, was founded by Jason Rodriguez, AJ Archibald, and Nick Griffith, who originally started the company intending to build a display network for social developers. However, the team then switched to focusing on virtual currency monetization solutions for social app and game developers. Shortly thereafter, the company became a part of Viveli. Why go that route?

“Over the past four years Viveli has grown to be one of the largest advertisers in the mobile acquisition space. Much of the appeal to joining Viveli was in their track record for outperforming in international markets,” co-founder Jason Rodriguez tells us. “We’ve been fortunate enough to leverage Viveli’s experience, in-house offers, and extensive advertiser relationships to benefit our publishers with premium payouts and custom offer integrations.”

Today, Firecue has a team of five and is hiring.

While Firecue says it is working with about 30 developers, 2/3 of which are on Facebook, Rodriguez says the “majority of our success” has been concentrated in US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, and Germany. In addition, Rodriguez says the company is equally splitting its efforts between social app and game developers – and some others.

“We’re seeing an increasing amount of interest coming from non-game related publishers looking to build virtual currency into their business,” Rodriguez says.

For now, Rodriguez says Firecue is focused on iterating the user experience for offers. “Ultimately we’d like to create a standardized format for advertisers to allow deeper integration into the game to improve user-experience without disrupting the net effect for advertisers.”

We’ll keep tracking the company as it expands and competes with larger players already operating in the field like Super Rewards, Offerpal, Sometrics, Peanut Labs, AdParlor, Gambit, TrialPay, SponsorPay, TokenAds, and SupersonicAds. More players coming into the space is only going to mean good things for developers and users, and it’s sure to be an interesting year ahead.

If you’re looking to increase your knowledge, and really crush at games like Trivial Pursuit, you may want to check out a new Facebook app called Brainspeed. It’s made by Smart.fm, a company that tailors learning programs to best suit your memory ability.

The app, which launched yesterday, is at its most basic a way to test your knowledge of your friends against their knowledge of you. It quizzes you and your friends about each others’ profile information — hometown, favorite movies, etc. Whoever gets the higher score “owns” the other person until another friend gets a better score than the winner. The goal is to own the most people.

However, the app also prompts you to click through to Smart.fm’s home site, a sort of structured knowledge service where people can share their expertise and learn from others. For example, one user provided a list of German irregular verbs and their English translations. The site lets you create a mini-course to help you study and review these verbs, through a feature called iKnow! You can also turn this information into a sort of quiz where you can compete to try to score higher than other users. Also called Brainspeed, it’s the game concept technology behind the Facebook app.

Smart.fm’s home site initially launched in Japan has already been used by half a million people in the country. Partly as a result, the bulk of the existing content is mostly about language learning, a popular topic on Japan. The Facebook app is a prelude to a fuller-scale US launch the company has planned for October, where the company will also introduce a range of new features and a broader content focus.

Here’s a video from the company, with some more details about the Smart.fm Facebook app, developed by Context Optional.

Smart.fm Facebook Application — Demo from Josh Dilworth on Vimeo.

Achetez ce rapport Le Meilleur et le Pire du Marketing sur Facebook PDF: 99 €

With well over 250 million people around the world and 70 million Americans active on Facebook every month, big brands are beginning to market on Facebook. But how effective are they?

We set out to find and evaluate the best and most innovative Facebook marketing efforts  over the last twelve months across a variety of industries, and recently launched of our most comprehensive review of the state of the industry to date: Inside Facebook’s Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009 Report.

Purchase this report Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009 Buy PDF: $149 USD

Today, along with our Paris-based partners at Sociabliz, we’re excited to announce that this report is now available fully translated into French. “Le Meilleur et le Pire du Marketing sur Facebook” is now available from Inside Facebook France. The price is 99 €, or USD $149 for the English version.

We’ve spent hours reviewing hundreds of campaigns and speaking with dozens of brands, agencies, and service providers. Inside, you’ll find our detailed analysis of what worked and what didn’t – as well as best practices and our expert suggestions for improvement. Each review also details the key metrics achieved.

Each of the twelve brands we selected are innovators in their respective spaces. While their efforts weren’t always perfect, they are certainly instructive for online marketers, who should use our report as a benchmark for future Facebook Pages, Facebook application sponsorships, or custom Facebook applications.

Campaigns Reviewed:

• Adidas
• Barack Obama
• Ben & Jerry’s (Application Publisher: Causes)
  
• BMW (Application Publisher: Graffiti)
  
• Burger King
  
• Coca Cola
• Coldplay
• New York Times
• Papa John’s Pizza
• St. Martin’s Press (Application Publisher: Living Social)
  
• Travel Channel (Application Developer: Context Optional)
  
• U2 (Application Publisher: iLike)

Achetez ce rapport Le Meilleur et le Pire du Marketing sur Facebook PDF: 99 €

While the majority of this report focuses on brands that have leveraged Pages/public profiles, applications, and virtual gifts on Facebook to drive their advertising campaigns, Facebook Connect is important emerging part of the Facebook ecosystem that should not be left out of the picture.

Purchase this report Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009 Buy PDF: $149 USD

Inside, we also review four early Facebook Connect implementations that illustrate how brands can make the most of Connect:

• Netflix
• Citysearch
• TechCrunch
• Xbox Live

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above.  As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic – or to nominate campaigns for future editions of the report.

English table of contents:

The Google-led Android mobile operating system is getting a new Facebook application today, according to a number of Android-focused blogs. Facebook has been planning a mobile-themed event for this evening, so it appears word got out early. While I’m not currently seeing the app in the Android Market app store, screenshots (including the ones you see here) are already public. Update: You can find it on Facebook here, although it still isn’t showing up in the Market.

Facebook has confirmed the launch of the new app with us. Here’s what the official blurb about the app says, according to Android Guys:

Facebook for Android™ makes it easy to stay connected and share information with friends. You can share status updates from your home screen, check out your news feed, look at your friends’ walls and user info. Share photos from your phone and can even look up up to 125 friends’ phone numbers from the home screen.

We’ll be taking a closer look at it tonight.

Rumors have been going around for months about a Facebook-Android app; some have wondered about the partnership given the competitive positions of Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, Facebook has also been upping its mobile effort. Last week, it released Facebook Connect for mobile web services — and soon, apps. Through Connect, third parties will be able to access user data from Facebook and enable two-way interactions so users can communicate back to the site. At least one third party, social game developer Playfish, has had their own, unofficial implementation of Connect for months.

Facebook has also been building apps for a wide variety of phones and operating systems, including for Nokia’s N97 and the extremely popular iPhone application.

Other desktop applications already let you read Facebook news feeds and send status updates back to the site, but it’s interesting when a big company turns on that feature. AOL’s AIM instant message service recently has, as TechCrunch spots today, in new versions of its Windows and Mac desktop clients. You can now read your friends status updates, view their photo albums, comment on them, and leave a status update from within AIM.

The move follows on AIM owner AOL’s earlier moves to create a new breed of social services, including a Meebo-style chat toolbar that let you talk to friends on web sites around the web. More recently, AOL released versions of its desktop app that let you read information from Facebook and Twitter but not send information back.

Both your comments and your status updates from AIM will appear within Facebook. However, AIM has not currently integrated Facebook’s own chat service, so you cannot chat with Facebook friends via AIM, unlike other desktop chat clients like Adium.

Still, with AIM’s ten of millions of users, perhaps these clients will help AIM become a sort of desktop portal to some of these other web services. And every new application that implements Facebook’s Stream APIs only increases the amount of content flowing through Facebook’s system.

Vitaminwater, the beverage brand that has become nationally-known this decade through clever marketing efforts, is making another innovative move today — on Facebook. It has launched its own application, called “flavorcreator,” that appears within its Page and intends to get users creating their own virtual vitaminwater beverages.

While the app has all sorts of games, contests and other features, what it really is trying to do is gather market research about the sorts of flavors that Facebook users like. More on that in a second.

On its face, the app is a notably complex effort by a big brand to build a meaningful experience on Facebook, even as many others are still experimenting with basic Facebook page functionality like wall postings.

The app is actually a three-step game, and it has not gone fully live yet.

The first step asks Facebook users to vote on their favorite drink flavors, although voting only goes live on the 14th of this month. The app currently shows a list of top ten flavors, along with a swirling virtual cloud with names of different flavors. To generate the list, vitaminwater is scouring Google, Twitter, Flickr and a food site called foodgawker to try to track top flavors that people are talking about across the web. Facebook is not a part of that mix, presumably because most information about popular flavors on Facebook is not publicly available.

However, to get fans involved in this step before the voting starts, vitaminwater lets you click on the name of any flavor in the cloud. You can see a close-up view of automated information about each flavor pulled from the sites it searches around the web. So, for example, when I clicked on “mint” I could see a virtual bottle with a list of mint-related stories on Google News. Scrolling through, I could also see the latest on “mint” from Flickr and the other sites. There’s also a feature to “like” any given flavor — when you like a flavor, the app asks permission to post the flavor on your Facebook profile wall.

Even though the first step is not fully functional, you can already access the second step. “Through a series of fun and easy games we will test your skills, physical health, mental state, and your potential earning power,” as the company explains this step on the site. These games are very simple. In the first one, you try to run through a street dodging obstacles like lightning bolts and snakes. In the second one, you’re in a gym, racing on a treadmill against a bodybuilder type to try to win the affections of a girl. In the third game, you try to run through a maze-like park while dodging weirdos. The fourth game is actually a health quiz. Once you’ve played all four, vitaminwater gives you a recommended vitamin. In my case, it was “everything but the kitchen sink,” including caffeine. I’m not sure where my potential earning power was factored in. Once you were done playing the game, the app also asks if you want to share your performance on your Facebook wall.

Once you’ve played around with the voting and the games, you can see a dashboard detailing your game performance and the types of vitamins that vitaminwater thinks you need.

The third step, however, won’t be live until the 5th of October. It will be a label contest, where you design a graphic, a name and a blurb for your drink. And, the prize for the top label is $5,000; to raise the profile of the contest, vitaminwater is having celebrities Carrie Underwood and long-time business partner 50 Cent help choose the winner. You can have up to three Facebook friends to help you create a label — presumably, if you win you’d split the money up to four equal ways.

In sum, the game looks very slick, although the user experience is not quite at the same level. In testing the app out, I was confused to discover that step one wasn’t fully live, yet I was already able to go and play step two. I have to wonder how many users will think that step two is not yet available, and not bother accessing those games as a result.

Conceptually, however, the integration between other web sites and Facebook was perhaps the most striking part of the app. Vitaminwater is essentially testing out internet-wide buzz versus the specific preferences of each Facebook user. The in-app features for sharing information with Facebook friends, including the “likes,” the wall postings and the comments, all are on the surface about getting more people using the app.

But what vitaminwater seems to really have in mind is a massive market research project. By combining web-wide information with as many Facebook users as possible, the company is gathering new insights into what sort of new flavor users will want the most, in terms of flavors, vitamins and bottle design.

Coca Cola-owned vitaminwater will announce the new, crowd-sourced flavor in December, with the product slated to hit the shelves next March. If the company can use this app to figure out a popular new flavor, this market research could translate to lots of new revenue next year.

As virtual currency monetization in social apps and games continues to grow both in the US and the world, the competition is getting more fierce by the month. Just last month, we were the first to cover SponsorPay’s emergence from stealth mode, as well as the relaunch of gWallet. Today, Tel-Aviv based TokenAds is revealing new details on its plans to build a virtual currency monetization platform for the first time.

Founded earlier this year by Chaya Saggot and Or Ben-Naftali, TokenAds has been focused on virtual currency monetization for social app and game users since it began. Today, the company has built a staff of 15 with a small round of funding, translated its solution into nine languages, and claims 2,700 campaigns in its network. Unlike other virtual currency platforms, TokenAds is focused on monetizing non-English speaking users in Latin America, Asia, and Europe above users in North America, the UK, and Australia.

“We’re putting our emphasis on expanding geographical coverage to all international markets,” founder Chaya Saggot tells us. “The goal is to provide users from all over the world with an enormous variety of familiar brand-name offers and locally translated descriptions. Advertisers are hand-picked to display brands which are well known to the end users [in the local markets where we operate].”

TokenAds got its start by monetizing Facebook applications, and the company says that social apps and games are still the majority of its business. However, like others in the space, TokenAds is expanding its network to include other online game developers.

Saggot says the company is working with dozens of advertisers and ad networks in a variety of countries to build a high quality offer network for international users. Traditionally, international audiences have been more challenging to monetize than North American users for a variety of reasons, including the challenges associated with product localization and building a network of advertisers in each country. Now, new virtual currency monetization companies are emerging to compete specifically in international markets. For example, SponsorPay and SupersonicAds are specifically focused on Europe, though North American companies like Offerpal, Super Rewards, AdParlor, Sometrics, Peanut Labs, Gambit, and TrialPay are increasingly localizing their service and building international advertiser relationships to compete in local markets.

Saggot says that so far, TokenAds has seen the most success with publishers who have a majority of users outside the United States. We’ll be tracking the company as the global virtual currency market on the Facebook Platform continues to expand in the months ahead.

Social games continue to dominate Facebook’s developer platform, according to our most recent statistics from AppData. But well-tuned applications for other verticals also continue to grow, as do Facebook’s own mobile applications.

Here’s the latest look at the top 20 fastest growing applications on Facebook, ranked by total number of monthly active users they’ve added in the last seven days.

Leading game developer Zynga has the top two titles. Number one is the FarmVille phenomenon, which grew by 4.21 million in a single week to reach 37.7 million monthly active users. It’s a virtual farming game that Zynga has been promoting across its already-large network of apps, as well as through advertising. The results have been record-breaking.

In addition to holding the top spot, Zynga also holds the second-fastest growing app: Mafia Wars, its long-time hit role-playing game. The game managed to grow by almost exactly 2 million users in the last week to reach 20.7 million MAUs.

The next four fastest-growing apps this week are notably not games. Number three is Causes, the Facebook app made by the company of the same name, that helps people organize Facebook user around any sort of cause. It grew 1.74 million over the past week to reach 27.6 million MAUs. Number four is RockYou‘s Birthday Cards, which lets you send and receive specialized birthday cards. While far smaller than most other apps near the top of the list, it grew a relatively large 1.23 million to 8.46 million MAUs.

Coming in at number five is movie fan app Movies, made by Flixster, which grew 1.13 million in the last week to reach 19.1 million MAUs. Number six is We’re Related, the family-connecting app from FamilyLink.com. It grew 938,000 users to pass the 20 million MAU mark, reaching 20.3 million as of today.

From then on out the list is all games, or other game-like apps, such as the the poke-style apps in the “Just For Fun” category of Facebook’s app directory – with a couple of interesting exceptions. Facebook’s web app for the iPhone, hot off of a newly-released 3.0 version, grew by more than half a million users to 13.3 million MAUs. It is the 12th-fastest growing application, and well ahead of Facebook’s more general “Mobile” mobile web page app. The latter, in 22nd place, grew 384,000 to reach 10.5 million MAUs.

Finally, while international applications have thoroughly cracked the lower rungs of the app leaderboards, only one is in our top 20 list today. It’s called Senin İçin, which means “For You” in Turkish. Similar to the larger genre of poking and gifting applications, it lets you send virtual flower bouquets to Facebook friends. In a testament to Turkey’s overall position as one of the largest Facebook countries in the world, the app has managed to grow from around 22,000 at the end of August to more than 587,000 today.

Distribution dominates many discussions about the future of journalism on the web. Should newspapers charge for content? Should they link to each other? The list goes on. But at the same time, especially with the rise of social sites like Facebook, journalists now have a new range of free, easy-to-use tools to help them do their jobs better.

Today’s journalists must be everything they once were but also tech savvy. Students in college journalism programs are already being trained to navigate the social web. In the list below, we offer tips on using social features like Facebook fan Pages to help journalists find new stories, check facts and interact with readers.

1. Join Pages to get instant updates about your beat.

While not every organization has a live and active Facebook Page, thousands do. When you become a fan of a Page, updates from it appear in the Pages section of your news feed. At Inside Facebook, we use it to track news from Facebook itself and other technology companies with active pages, such as in this case last week. But tech journalism is just a small segment of the media. Say you’re a writer for the fashion section of the newspaper or magazine. “Fanning” brands with Facebook Pages is one way to effortlessly stay on top of their activities. Wall updates are usually accompanied with feedback from fans. As a journalist, you can easily track what kinds of updates appeal the most to fans and read how fans are personally thinking via the comments they leave. Before you even write a single word, you can better gauge how readers will react to your piece.

2. Verify the facts and make sure the source of your leads are actually reliable.

A major problem with gathering data on the web has been that people can easily hide their identities. Owing to Facebook’s origins as a site for real-life relationships on college campuses, the site’s users tend to share information about their real lives with each other. For a journalist trying to, say, do a background check on a source, this “real life” aspect means they can use Facebook to learn more about the person and establish their credibility. Features like “mutual friends” are especially valuable. If a source is a friend of your friend, you are more likely to assume that the source is legitimate — and if you have any questions, you know you can ask your friend for more information.

Questions remain about some practices of using information gleaned from Facebook. Most of it is considered private. Yet information put on Facebook can be easily leaked to journalists, as a number of recent scandals have shown. Media laws in this area very between countries, as do editorial policies in newsrooms, so journalists looking to use private information gained on Facebook should consult their editors and lawyers. For some, see this special report on social media for newspapers by Editor & Publisher.

3. Publish content and reach your audience in a social context.

News organizations can also create Facebook pages to reach fans on the site, then cross-promote their pages and their web sites (for example, here’s Inside Facebook’s fan page). Some users may not want to spend a lot of time on a news site but will want to read the occasional article in their news feeds, so use your page to publish posts throughout the day. As posts go live, fans interact by liking and commenting.

News is a hot topic on Facebook. The number of links shared on Facebook has doubled from 9 million in April to 18 million last month; Facebook links account for 19 percent of visits to news site The Huffington Post, and are the top traffic driver to Perez Hilton’s gossip site. With 500,000 fans, The New York Times Facebook Page is one of the gold standards in the business. It generates multiple Wall posts, covering breaking news across various topics and industries, and includes visually arresting photos and videos.

Note that the “Like” feature can make for some awkward moments. In the example below, it’s not entirely appropriate for fans to “like” the recent fires in Southern California, although this may not be their intention.

4. Participate in the conversations you initiate on your Facebook Page.

Building an online fan base extends beyond user acquisition. Continue to engage fans by publishing rich content to your Wall. Respond to fan comments when it’s appropriate. Offer special promotions and sneak previews of what’s to come. To build a successful and dynamic community around your product, think about how to maximize the fan-to-page experience.

5. Also allow your audience to interact among one another.

Creating an online community is not just about listening and responding to your audience. Enable user-to-user conversations whenever possible. In July, CNN integrated Facebook Connect so that users could watch Michael Jackson’s memorial service online while discussing their thoughts with their Facebook friends and other Facebook users around the world. During the service, 759,000 Facebook users watched the live broadcast by logging into Facebook Connect. Combined, they generated 733,000 status updates at a rate of 6,000 posts per minute at the peak.

See also:  HuffPost Social News‘s Facebook Connect implementation.

Social journalism is very much a nascent trend, but it’s one to watch and to think about carefully. What ethical policies should be put in place? How do journalists keep their work and private lives separate on Facebook, a place where the boundary is blurry for most users? What will happen to the quality of news content ? Will the most widely read and circulated stories help readers think responsibly or will entertainment and humor sites rule? As the newspaper industry loses profits, will it figure out a way to monetize online traffic? There’s a social media revolution going on and more questions than answers for now.

Blogged is making reading and commenting on your favorite blogs more of a social experience, with some new changes that include Facebook integration for sharing comments and posts in your news feed. There’s also the ability to “like” blog posts, much like the same feature in Facebook for status updates or feed entries.

The new Blogged interface looks very similar to a Facebook news feed, with profile photos accompanying likes and comments just below the blog previews. The new layout gives the site more of a community feel, as opposed to the previous site which was more of a traditional news site. According to Blogged co-founder Gladys Kong, this was one of the main goals of the new features.

“Traditional news media has been one-directional. and while blogs elicit reader comments, they’re typically scattered across the web for a fragmented experience. With Blogged, we’re pulling together all these stories and their insightful discussions into a single social hub.”

Another included feature is a widget for adding the new comments and likes on Blogged back to your own personal blog. This can help bloggers better track who’s commenting or liking their posts, as well as posts for blogs with similar content or interests. This can be especially beneficial to businesses when looking for industry trends and how content is being received in key demographics.