Facebook has just announced a few more details on its 3rd f8 conference coming up next month in San Francisco, and officially opened registration. It’s been a while since Facebook last held an f8, so it’s sure to be a big week. Already, developers are wondering what announcements Facebook will make regarding Credits, location, and the Open Graph API.

Here are the details:

• Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
• Location: The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center
• Address: 635 8th Street, San Francisco, CA (Map)

Mark Zuckerberg will be giving the keynote at 10am, followed by breakout sessions in the afternoon on “New Tools,” best practices for building “fast scalable, and engaging products,” and Facebook’s open source products. On Thursday, there will be an “intimate post-f8 Hackathon” that developers can express interest in attending here.

This year, tickets cost $325 for professionals, and $50 for students. Here’s the registration page at Eventbrite, and the Facebook Page for f8. We’ll keep you up to date as more information becomes available.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

For developers interested in digging deep into monetization inside social apps and games on the Facebook Platform and beyond, we’re holding our inaugural Inside Social Apps 2010 conference the day before f8 in San Francisco. At Inside Social Apps, executives from all the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, including Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts), Playdom, CrowdStar, 6 waves, Slide, RockYou, Five Minutes, and Lolapps will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective.

For a full agenda of our day’s events, click here. Space is very limited, so we encourage you to register soon.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

While RockYou already provides offers, banners, and other forms of advertising to application developers, it’s added another: a form of engagement advertising, that it’s calling “Deal of the Day.”

The company provides advertisers — especially big brand advertisers — with banner ads that cost based on different engagement actions. These might include a user downloading a coupon, taking a poll, becoming a fan of a Facebook Page, and more. The ads appear within applications from RockYou and developer partners on Facebook and other sites.

Facebook itself offers engagement ads directly linked to Facebook products like events, Pages, and videos.

The ads will be part of RockYou’s various monetization services; earlier this week, it announced others, including virtual currency and local ads.

Growth slowed down in February for most Middle Eastern countries, especially the smaller and more affluent nations that have the most monthly active users on Facebook. We’re taking a look this month at the Arabian Peninsula, plus Egypt.

Three countries in the Peninsula stand out for a high market penetration of over 30 percent: Israel, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. As you can see below, both Israel and the UAE are continuing to pick up significant numbers of users. We don’t expect that trend to continue for too many months more, as most countries have so far topped out at roughly 40 percent penetration.

On the other hand, growth is also slowing a bit for some much larger countries that have low penetration — both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are well under 10 percent. The dip may only be temporary, especially with Facebook putting more resources into the Middle East.

However, there are clearly also some demographic trends at work. Most of the region is sharply defined by income disparities; the citizens of the UAE, for example, are fairly rich on average, while even a wealthy country like Saudi Arabia has only a small upper class. As in other parts of the world, it’s likely that broad swaths of the population in some of these countries are too poor to be online yet.

Note that Facebook counts all the countries from Morocco to Pakistan in its measurement of the Middle East. We’ll be covering the African countries next week, while Pakistan and its neighbors go along with our coverage of Asia. There’s also the matter of Turkey, which we’ve included in Europe. Although quite large, Turkey also has over a quarter of its population on Facebook, making it a force in the region.

Breaking out the Peninsula on its own, there are only about 9 million Facebook users in the region, but about 15 percent market penetration overall. As Facebook expands its advertising efforts in the region, many will be watching growth data to see if Middle East growth is slowing for the long-term, or if this is just a temporary fluctuation. More data  and specific country breakdowns can be found in the full Facebook Global Monitor report.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now only a few weeks away. On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Inside Social Apps 2010 will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map).

In addition, today we’re excited to announce 7 new speakers for the event: Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom and active social gaming investor; Jens Begemann, CEO of Wooga; Alex Rampell, CEO of Trialpay; Steven Goh, CEO of mig33; Jim Bobowski, Director of Online Partner Marketing at Netflix (who manages Netflix’s social network offers); Eric Goldberg, Managing Director of Crossover Technologies; and Benjamin Joffe, Founder of +8*.

They will be joining our full list of 34 speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Jeremy Liew, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Finally, a limited set of “early general admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $329. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early general admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $329. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

In the frozen void of space, a now derelict mining vessel has had a communications failure. Unfortunately, for engineer Isaac Clarke, the USG Ishimura isn’t quite so derelict after all, as its inhabitants are now the skittering, the lumbering, and the things that hail from the deepest corners of the galaxy.

This, of course, is the basic premise behind the sci-fi, survival horror game, Dead Space from Electronic Arts’ studio, Visceral Games. The folks over at Visceral are looking to spark up some buzz for their next deep space adventure. To do this, the company has worked with Wildfire Interactive Promotions to make, well, an interactive promotion for the upcoming game, Dead Space 2, on Facebook.

The idea is two-fold. The app page contains a contest that is not only intended to get more people talking about the game, but also give players the opportunity to design their very own melee combat move. Essentially, in Dead Space, every little critter wants to eat you and when the player character gets locked into a grapple, they have to use some form of melee move to save themselves and hopefully kill the baddy before it gets back up.

To this end, Visceral Games is looking for player input as to what would be the coolest attack poor Isaac could use. Fans will be able to submit descriptions, photos or drawings, and even video (3D animation or live action) to show what they have thought up. These can all be done through the Facebook app itself after a short registration, and the top 10 will be chosen. From here, the fan-base will vote on which one gets put into the final game.

Traditionally speaking, contests have always been a strong marketing way to get people involved in something. However, with it now on Facebook, players that discover the app will be able to invite their friends to check it out as well. Obviously, this use of the social graph will increase the spreading of this promotion significantly, and hopefully the upcoming game’s buzz as well. Of course, even if you friends don’t want to participate, they can always view everyone else’s submissions. Maybe they’ll even find that video of you making a fool of yourself grappling that invisible lurker!