Cha-Ching!
Virtual currency workshop opens today.
SAN FRANCISCO - March 11, 2010
Social Gold, the leading virtual currency and payments solution for thousands of online games and virtual worlds, today launched the first-ever Cha-Ching! Workshop: Realizing Revenues Through Virtual Economies. The workshop will provide a platform for industry experts to discuss the opportunities and critical issues facing this rapidly growing billion-dollar industry.
“We designed the Cha-Ching! Workshop to be both informative and collaborative,” said Vikas Gupta, CEO of Social Gold and host of the Cha-Ching! Workshop. “Our goal is to encourage business leaders to engage in conversation about the virtual goods space, analyze past successes and brainstorm how to tackle future challenges in this innovative virtual marketplace.”
The first Cha-Ching! Workshop will provide insight from a number of the virtual goods industry’s leaders, kicking off with a panel discussion led by Charles Hudson, host of both the Virtual Goods Summit and Social Gaming Summit. The panel, which will be focused on the evolution of the social gaming, casual gaming, and virtual worlds industries, will include:
• Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate
• Lee Clancy, Senior Vice President of Product Management and General Manager of Direct Revenue at IMVU
• Susan Wu, CEO of Ohai
• Prakash Ramamurthy, CTO of Lifelock and former SVP of Product, Engineering and Operations at Gaia Online
Later in the day, Markus Weichselbaum, CEO of TheBroth, will be sharing insight into the game mechanics behind their addictive new casual title, Hoop Fever Live. The game is one of nine titles featured on MySpace’s new Games Gallery, launched earlier this week at GDC.
“With Hoop Fever Live, we’re aiming to bring both synchronous and asynchronous gameplay to social gaming,” said Weichselbaum. “The next generation of titles will need to combine the best qualities of casual gaming with socially meaningful interactions if they want to stand out and be successful in the social gaming market."
Finally, keynote speaker John Zdanowski, CFO of Blue Mars and former CFO of Linden Lab, will provide his insights into the growth of the virtual economy. In addition to the speakers and panels, attendees will participate in interactive forums to discuss the rapidly expanding virtual goods market and learn strategies for optimizing dynamic virtual economies from top business leaders.
For more information on the Cha-Ching! Workshop, please contact Social Gold at chaching@jambool.com.
Follow updates from the workshop on Twitter: http://twitter.com/socialgold
About Social Gold™
Social Gold™ is an industry-leading virtual economy platform owned and operated by Jambool, Inc. The Social Gold platform enables developers to create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency, provide an unparalleled payments experience to their users, and optimize their virtual economy using robust analytics. Through innovation in Flash-based payments solutions, a sophisticated fraud management system and an easy-to-integrate API, Social Gold has received recognition as an outstanding platform for powering virtual economies. Jambool, Inc. was co-founded by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein and has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore. For more information, please visit http://getsocialgold.com.
© Jambool, Inc. All rights reserved. Jambool and Social Gold are the trademarks of Jambool, Inc. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Kate Pietrelli, TriplePoint
415-955-8500
katep@triplepointpr.com