hi5, a gaming-focused social network that most people forgot about long ago, has just closed a new round of funding of over million led by Crosslink Capital. This brings the social network’s funding to over million. The new funding will be used for hi5′s continued expansion into social gaming and virtual goods. Hi5, which has [...]

Last year, Aurora Feint launched a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that has seen success in attracting independent iPhone game developers to its rapidly growing community. But Android also has potential as a vibrant social gaming platform with its growing community of gaming developers. Today, OpenFeint is announcing a soon to be released platform [...]

Fresh off a million funding round, Playdom is making its fifth acquisition of the year today. The gaming giant is buying social gaming startup Hive7. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Hive7, which is backed by True Ventures and was founded in 2005, develops social games for Facebook and MySpace. The startup is best [...]

In terms of the hardware, one of the only completely new features on the iPhone 4 is the gyroscope. It’s so new, in fact, that third-party developers haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet because they didn’t have access to the iPhone 4 hardware until today (or at least two days ago). [...]

It’s been no secret that social network platform Ning has been going through a significant transition in both its leadership and business model in 2010. In March, longtime CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal. And in April, Ning’s bubble burst — the company laid off 40% of its staff and killed off [...]

On the heels of Zynga’s 0 million investment from Japanese media firm Softbank Capital, Japanese gaming company DeNA has announced a .5 million fund to make investments in the social gaming community. DeNA holds an 83.3 percent stake in the new fund, which is called Incubate Fund No. 1 Limited Partnership. Other investors include a [...]

OnLive, the cloud gaming service designed to allow you to play almost any game over the Internet is going live on June 17 and, thanks to a partnership with AT&T, the service is free the first year and .95/month after that. You can attempt to sign up here. OnLive has also released a roster of [...]

Can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. Well, Nintendo themselves announced that there was a 3D version of the DS in development a few months back. But it’s finally official with a E3 2010 debut and it’s just about what everyone imagined. TechCrunch

Back in fall 2008 — an eternity by mobile standards — I wrote about a fun little iPhone chess game called Chess With Friends. The game hit the App Store at a time when there were at least fifteen similar apps on the market, but it had one key differentiator: it tapped into the iPhone’s network effect to [...]

Yesterday, we reported that Zynga was possibly setting up shop in Beijing and making a few notable hires in China. It looks like we were on to something because today, the social gaming giant is announcing the acquisition of Beijing-based social gaming company XPD Media. Along with the acquisition, Zynga is also announcing the opening [...]