Mobile commerce is in it’s early stages, and figures vary on the size of the market. However one thing is for certain, it is getting big and growing fast. The ability to shop and make purchases from apps will transform how we think about and use mobile devices. Games are the Number 1 category at 93% . 

Video games are big business and business is good. It’s also growing—the number of gamers around the world has grown more than four-fold over the past decade to reach about 1.2 billion, according to some estimates. Gaming has also become much more social. Or rather, it’s returned to its social roots in the physical arcades of the 1970s and 1980s, where scores would gather to play...

In the past video games came on cartridges, you played them on a big fat tube television in your parents basement and you told your friends about the level you reached at school the next day. Now you might still be living in your parents basement but the future of gaming is solidly mobile. Anywhere, any time – high quality gaming, that fits nicely in our pocket, is yours to have (at least on non...

Is there a tech bubble or, is it really a boom? Ask a thousand people and you are going to get a thousand answers. In,fact — as noted investor & commentator Paul Kedrosky points out — there is a bubble in bubble-oriented commentary. For our part, we thought it was best to talk to survivors of the last bubble and learn from them — what they did they right and how they made it through the storm....

It’s official, Foursquare has passed 10 million users, making them the first location based social network to reach the major milestone. In celebration of their achievement the company posted an Infographic on their official blog which celebrates their accomplishments. Among the sites coolest facts: It took five months to reach just 100,000 users and in the last seven weeks one million people...

Global Internet traffic is expected to quadruple between 2010 and 2015, according to data provided to Mashableby Cisco. By that time, nearly 3 billion people will be using the Internet — more than 40% of the world’s projected population. On average, there will be more than two Internet connections for each person on Earth, driven by the proliferation of web-enabled mobile devices. Internet...

Add another big figure to Apple’s list of accomplishments in the world of smartphones and tablets: the company has approved half a million apps for its mobile platform iOS. Apple has not officially announced the figure, and the number of apps you can actually download and install is considerably lower due to some apps being pulled or rendered obsolete. But if you strictly count the apps Apple...

Thanks to Jesse Thomas of interactive design agency JESS3, we now have an updated look at the structure of the geosocial universe as it exists in anno domini 2011. It wasn’t so long ago that the International Astronomical Union booted Pluto out of the solar system or that MySpace was overtaking Yahoo! and Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. Well, a few rotations around the sun later, and...

Those who use social location-based apps such as Foursquare or Facebook Places represent just 17% of the mobile population, according to a study commissioned by digital agency Beyond and exclusively shared with Mashable. Of those opting out of participating in the checkin craze, or any other social location behavior for that matter, 48% cited privacy concerns as their primary reason for not...

Andy Wibbels of Get Satisfaction produced an infographic on the Social Network Games industry. Total spending on social gaming is projected to increase by 67% from $726 M to $2.8 B by 2012. Some games have bigger audiences than prime time TV with more people playing Zynga’s Farmville (33 M) than top network TV show Dancing with the Stars (21 M). More Women play Social Network games...

It’s amazing to look at the evolution of PlayStation Home and see how much it has changed since we launched in December two years ago. From our humble beginnings in 2008, we’ve become a world filled with hundreds of games enjoyed by 17 million users worldwide and given PlayStation Network users a unique and dynamic gaming experience that can only be found on our platform. The idea of what games...

Where in the World is the Money? Our virtual goods monetization platform is used by developers around the globe. Over the past four months we have been gathering data and analyzing how our users are interacting with online games and virtual goods. This data was first released on Mashable last week. Yesterday we shared part of our recent research findings in a blog post on virtual goods spenders...

Original Article: http://ow.ly/2Wl8v The virtual goods market is delivering big business! Here at Social Gold we have been tracking the spending habits of users who play online games. Our research found that users across the global Social Gold network are spending big bucks, with the average lifetime value (LTV) of paying users in games globally totaling $55. This data was first released on...

Recent estimates value the global games business somewhere in the range of $50 billion. But if you factor in the booming online gaming sector and look at the total market caps for all public companies, the global games industry is actually worth about double that, according to investment banker Paul Heydon of Avista Partners. During a talk at Edinburgh Interactive, Heydon outlined the video...

Dave McClure: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/07/moneyball-for-startups.html In summary, you should be thinking about stages for risk-reduction & company value creation that look like this: 1) Product: $0-100K, 3-6 months to develop basic MVP that’s functional & useful for at least a few customers. Get to small product/market fit. 2) Market: $100K-$2M, 6-12 months to...

Jermey Liew http://mashable.com/2010/08/17/social-games-business/ These are interesting times in the social gaming industry. Two weeks ago Disney acquired Playdom, and last week Google acquired Slide. Just like that, two of the largest social game publishers have become part of larger companies. This activity all comes on the heels of EA’s acquisition of Playfish late last year. Social...

Google is widely expected to soon announce a new social network service to compete with Facebook’s runaway growth. But CEO Eric Schmidt says Google’s social effort, widely rumored to be dubbed “Google Me,” won’t be a Facebook knock-off. Instead, Schmidt has described Google’s evolving social strategy as more about using games and other social features to make...

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in hisrecent talk to...

Start-up Marketing Blog: http://startup-marketing.com/deconstructing-startup-growth/ After product/market fit, driving sustainable growth is probably the most important/difficult part of creating value in a startup. For most of the last 15 years of my startup experience, I’ve been the point person responsible for primarily one thing: driving growth.  Even after two IPOs, I didn’t really have...

By 2011, Sales of virtual goods will amount to 20% of U.S. game software revenues. This forecast is predicated on the expectation that virtual goods will grow faster than overall gaming software industry. In 2009, U.S. retail sales of console, portable and PC game software generated revenues of $10.5 billion, an 11% decline over the $11.7 billion generated in 2008. While figures from virtual...

In the 12 months to March 2009, Jagex generated revenues of £38.4 million and profits of £18.0 million (approximately $58m and $27mm, respectively). That’s an operating margin of 47%, despite spending “tens of millions of pounds” on the failed Mechscape project. 94% of that revenue comes from subscriptions. Naysayers may scoff that ads don’t pay, but the company is still making over £2 million...

My old company closes its Manchester studio resulting in 26 job loses.  Monumental Games,  the developer behind sports-themed virtual worlds Football Superstars and Hunter’s World, has closed its Manchester office. The studio was brought in when Monumental acquired Activision’s Swordfish Studios in 2008. At the time, 26 people worked there.