Heyzap raises seed round for casual game widgets
Showing there is still investor interest in games, startup Heyzap is announcing today it has raised a round of in seed funding from Union Square Ventures. The amount was $500,000 to $1 million.
Heyzap creates widgets that allow any web site operators to embed casual games on their sites. The San Francisco company launched the widgets in January and the widgets are now embedded on more than 20,000 sites. There are more than 12,000 free Flash… Continue Reading
Swinefighter game spreads like a virus
A casual web game dubbed Swinefighter is catching on like a virus.
The game’s popularity comes on the heels of a global panic about the spread of swine flu around the world in an epidemic that has killed hundreds from Mexico to the U.S. to Europe in a matter of days.
Evidently, the department of questionable game topics is quite busy this week. In the exploit ‘em while you can genre, Games2win created a Somali pirate sniper… Continue Reading
Y Combinator Demo Day: Simple cloud management, real-time energy monitoring, and more
If anyone’s feeling depressed about the future of Silicon Valley innovation, I’d suggest sneaking into the demo day tomorrow at incubator Y Combinator’s Mountain View, Calif. office. Watching a bunch of smart, ambitious entrepreneurs show off what they’re working on is a good cure for the “nothing cool is happening” blues — and I saw a strong batch of startups at today’s event. (The same presentations repeat tomorrow.)
For the most part, there weren’t many “wow”… Continue Reading
Heyzap shows fast growth with its embeddable casual game widget
Heyzap announced a month ago that it was launching a widget that web sites could use to embed casual games on their sites. More than 3,000 web sites have installed the widget so far, with gamers playing about 5 million minutes a month with an average game session lasting 17 minutes.
Today the company is launching a game database that can be sorted into categories like sports or puzzles. By organizing the games, Heyzap says it’s… Continue Reading
Heyzap creates widgets to put casual games on any web site
Casual games are multiplying like weeds. But Heyzap can embed them on any web site via a widget (a light web application).
With a few clicks, you can embed the code in your site and “gameify” it. Games are sticky. They’re engaging and often a lot more fun than most business-oriented web sites. Heyzap’s widgets are fairly democratic — big brands can use them, but so can your average user who wants, say, a favorite flash… Continue Reading