The latest big company acquisitions of social gaming startups points to a maturing of the market, as reporting from eMarketer today suggests. While the social gaming market’s "explosive growth will moderate in coming years," major media influences Google and Disney have become interested in incorporating these new business models into their own.

Google will be working with Zynga, who brought Farmville to Facebook years ago. According to eMarketer, Google has a social gaming property in the works and acquired social app maker Slide to help in this venture.

Similarly, Playdom was acquired by Disney, a sign that the animation and entertainment conglomerate is putting faith in the continual success of social-type gaming.

These types of gaming companies have two revenue streams - ad support adding up to $142 million this year, and virtual goods sales will make even more revenue, the combined total which ThinkEquity predicts will reach $2 billion by 2012. In their industry report from 2009, daily active users for the top ten social gaming companies has increased over five times from April to October of last year.

The popularity of gaming on social networks is demonstrated in the top-performing applications - twenty of the top 25 Facebook apps are games. A significant growth area remains in converting active playing users to active paying users - only three-to-five percent of active users directly pay for games. Newer payment methods may assist with this conversion in the forms of credits, prepaid cards and mobile payments.

Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst further explains the dual role of social gaming as culture and revenue. "Facebook was on the ground floor of this trend with Zynga, and other top companies such as Google and Disney are now jumping in," he says. In addition, this trend of consolidation is not over. Verna adds, “I expect other social networks, internet portals and entertainment companies to shift resources toward the social gaming space while they still see it as a potential money-maker.”

Windows Phone 7 will be released this holiday season, and Microsoft is trying to stir up excitement about it by maxing out its budget. TechCrunch coverage estimates that the Redmond-based company could "spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing costs and payments to developers and handset manufacturers to subsidize the expense of building phones and apps, so that the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem is well-seeded at launch."

Deutsche Bank telecommunications analyst Jonathan Goldberg estimates $400 million on marketing for the launch. Quoted in TechCrunch, he explains that the OS could succeed by capturing market share from feature phone users instead of stealing from current iPhone or Android handset users. Another source in the same article says that the company will spend $1 billion at the launch on marketing and development costs.

A spending comparison from PC World puts the Microsoft plan into perspective. While $400 or $500 million sounds like a lot, just as much was spent on marketing for Windows XP, the first Xbox, and Vista.

After some initial confusion, Engadget reports that Dell is not a launch partner for Windows Phone 7, but will be collaborating on the system as partner. While Dell has released Android devices recently, it will continue its longtime relationship with Microsoft. Device or release information was not currently available in their coverage.

The future mobile operating system has received mixed reviews on new features. As PC World reports, with a direct link to Xbox Live accounts, gamers can access scores, avatar and friend lists. The phone will have its own game titles with free demos and ports of Xbox 360 franchises such as Halo Waypoint and Crackdown 2L Project Sunburst.

A study released this summer from King Fish Media showed that an overwhelming proportion of companies have social media strategies. The study, titled "Social Media Usage, Atttitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think?" covered US marketers and managers, over half of which were in the publishing, media, advertising and marketing industries. Most of the respondents’ customers were B2B or B2C or a mix of the two.

72 percent of these companies have a social media marketing strategy, and if they do not, eighty percent will in the next year.

Three-quarters will increase social media investment in the next twelve months. Of that majority, around a third have tied the budget to a specific project or custom media program, another third will add an incremental increase to their marketing budget.

Social media is categorized as a marketing responsibility - seventy percent delegate social media campaigns to that department, and only 23 percent to management. Very few consider managing such campaigns to be a full-time job within itself, and ninety percent add it to an existing job. Very little outsourcing is done by companies - 85 percent handle social media internally. Of the thirteen percent that outsource, 41 percent of work goes to freelancers, 26 percent to an ad or marketing agency, another 26 percent to a social media agency and nineteen percent to a PR agency.

Companies have different goals when it comes to what they are promoting using social media. 67 percent focus on the company as a whole, and 41 percent spotlight individuals who work at the company. Less than a quarter showcase a specific brand of the company. These efforts strive to promote both new customer acquisition and customer retention.

Most often strategies currently include LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. The most popular sites that these companies plan to add are YouTube, news aggregate sites and bookmarking sites.

A New Zealand study published yesterday shows a significant presence by tobacco brands on YouTube as pro-tobacco videos proliferate as indirect marketing. Contributors collected and analyzed global data by searching the video site “using five leading non-Chinese cigarette brands worldwide.” Themes and content were scrutinized to assess the resulting list of videos that contained tobacco brand images or words.

Since there is no global governing party that controls content on the Internet, the study found that it an ideal place for tobacco marketing, though the tobacco companies denied advertising on the Internet. But the majority of tobacco-themed brand-related videos contained pro-tobacco content - 95 percent of content was pro-tobacco versus under four percent anti-tobacco.

Further analysis of the pro-content brand-related videos found that most contained “tobacco brand content (70.6%), the brand name in the title (71.2%) or smoking imagery content (50.9%).” A pro-smoking music video had over 2 million views. The four most popular themes of these videos were celebrity/movies, sports, music and “archive.” The first three themes are very youth-oriented, while the fourth refers to material aired when TV ads were legal.

While this material is not covered by the legislation that originally took tobacco ads off of television so many years ago, a means of retaliation is built into YouTube itself. As the study suggests, content can be removed from YouTube if it is found to contain copyrighted or offensive material. By flagging the videos mentioned in the study, public and health organizations can request the removal of such content. The authors suggest extending the tobacco advertising control legislation requirements to the Internet to prevent further abuse.

As ReadWriteWeb reports, tobacco ads were banned from TV and radio over forty years ago, and this summer tobacco companies were prohibited from sponsoring events.

Google announced a new feature for their online chat service Wednesday morning - not only can Gmail users make voice calls between personal computers, they can now make calls to regular phone lines. Calls made to US and Canada numbers are free, and per minute rates apply to other countries. These rates range from two to nineteen cents per minute, depending on country or line type.

The outdialing service integrates with Google Voice, and those using the service will display their GV number when making calls. Talk and Voice already are closely integrated with Android phones and Wired’s Ryan Singer predicts there will also be a Chrome extension. The same article reports on this service, previously available for users of Google-acquisition Gizmo5, a former Skype competitor.

Singer opines that because dialing out will encourage even more time spent on Gmail and Talk, the service aims to compete not with Skype, but with Facebook. The workflow keeps Google Account holders within the network of its services for longer periods of time, which is how Facebook uses its features to keep users on its site.

Many responses, including CNET’s, have questioned how this new development will affect Skype. The release of this feature is predicted to result in a burst of Google Voice sign-ups, and Skype does charge for domestic calls, and nearly all of per minute charges exceed Google’s rates on their comparison chart.

The convenience of Google’s new functionality primes it to not only to be used often by millions of Gmail account holders, it will spur growth in connected services - Voice and Talk, as well as future updates for Chrome and Android. Another CNET post reports that Google plans to promote this new development by installing phone booths in select US airports and universities where people can make phone calls for free.

Yesterday, the San Francisco 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) gathered the emerging social media expert crowd from the Bay Area. The topic of the day was “What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?”

The 140 characters conference objective follows Twitter spirit: “One can change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” @Jack (Jack Dorsey, co founder of Twitter). The subjects were diverse: from Agriculture to Telco or Spirituality. I will just highlight some pearls of the conference.

Peter Hirshberg, chairman of the Re-Imagine Group, talked about the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) last exposition MIT SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures. He wanted to demonstrate that Arts can bring a lot to understand technology and its future which is precisely GAFFTA idea. “Visualization can help us realize what’s going on”, stated Hirsberg, taking the example of the NYSE visualization picture exposed at the NYC MOMA.

Dom Sagolla, helped to create Twitter back in 2006, writer of the 140 characters book and more recently founder of the iPhoneDevCamp took the stage to share his tweet per capita invention. According to him, “tweet per capita” answers the question “how to best measure technological and cultural progress”. One funny fact about Twitter: it was first called “Status” internally at Odeo.

Just after, Google and Twitter Geo experts were talking about the future of LBS and last Facebook Places announce. For Leorn Stern from Google New Business Development: “Facebook Places is the mainstreamization of checking”. But the real question about LBS is Local Merchant interaction with customers, something that is the next big opportunity for the Internet players and has been already leveraged by some like Groupon.

Deborah Schultz from Altimeter Group began her “Etiquette in a RT world” speech with a clear statement: “Twitter is blogging on crack” (repeating what she said in the early day of Twitter). “Social media is a teenager figuring out what is elegant” added Schultz mentioning that it was reshaping the social contract between people like nothing else before. Taking the example of the “no device diner” mentioned by Jeff Pulver previously, she explained that it was really hard to figure out what was okay or not to do and there was a growing gap between techies and non techies as well as between generation.

Last but not least, Twitter was also part of the conference with a dedicated panel. Twitter team has grown like crazy in the last two years: from 22 people in early 2009 to 70 in October 2009, 250 people in July 2010 and more than 350 people expected by the end of 2010. They are experimenting a lot of things and said that what was “glue for the people” to stay on Twitter was a good mix between following celebrities, real life friends and some experts from a community and/or hobby.

Update: Twitter list of Speakers at the San Francisco 140 characters conference http://twitter.com/atelier_us/sf-140conf

The spinning wheel, the ticking clock or the hourglass - a familiar icon for waiting is now a pervasive theme for a culture that increasingly relies on digital processors in daily activities. The Intel Corporation has coined a new term in technology: the “Hourglass Syndrome,” not a real syndrome or medical condition but “a term coined by Intel to describe the situation that many consumers face while waiting for their technology to keep up with the speed of life,” as covered in PCB007’s coverage of their new findings.

A July 2010 technology online study conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel, documented just how commonly computer users lose their patience:

• eight out of 10 (80%) U.S. adults get frustrated waiting for technology
• about half (51% have done something out of character when frustrated while waiting for technology
• of those who admitted acting inappropriately while waiting, 62% of U.S. adults admit to yelling or cursing out loud when their technology can’t keep up with them, while others hit their computer mouse (29%) or bang on their computer screen and keyboard (24%)
• of those who have acted or seen someone act inappropriately in public due to frustrations with technology, 70% saw strangers, 46% have seen family or friends and 33% have seen co-workers act out in frustration while waiting for technology

Not only does uncooperative technology increase stress, frustration, and even violence in users, it causes people to miss out on non-digital activities. Because they were waiting for their computer, more than one third of U.S. adults (35%) said that they missed out on something, such as losing an opportunity to participate in an online sale (13%), or purchase an airline, concert or sporting event ticket.

Intel ties this study into the launch of their 2010 Intel Core processors, which promise to assuage the Hourglass Syndrome with the promise of smarter technology, higher speeds and saved energy. Intel’s psychology expert Cooper Lawrence also recommends taking stress-management measures.

Bank of America and Visa Inc will launch a smartphone purchasing test system next month. As covered by Reuters Thursday evening, the largest US consumer bank and the largest payment processor in the world will run a system in the New York area that will allow customers to use cell phones installed with near field communication chips to use the handsets at point-of-sale devices in stores instead of using credit cards.

A big step in bringing mobile phone purchasing to the US, the program will run from September to December, after which the “digital wallet” will be assessed for national deployment. Visa spokesperson Elvira Swanson said in Reuter’s coverage that “the Bank of America pilot was not larger than the company’s other mobile trials, but she said it could have a more powerful impact on the market than some previous pilots.” She added, “It’s a way to accelerate mobile contactless payments in the U.S. market.”

An obstacle to wide deployment in the near future is the fact that near field communication (NFC) has not been installed standard in many popular smartphones, as ReadWriteWeb explains. This lack may be made up for in future iterations of the iPhone as evidenced by Apple’s hire of an NFC expert, as well as Android handsets.

Reporting from IntoMobile in April promised NFC integration soon: Apple has a patent for NFC for purchasing event tickets, and NXP Semiconductors general manager Henri Ardevol predicts that “First phones will be available this year and some more first half of 2011.”

Additional applications for NFC besides payments and e-tickets include bluetooth alternatives for headset pairing, file transfer, wireless network access, and augmented reality applications.

The success of virtual goods has enabled innovative business models in the categories of social networking, virtual worlds and free online game sites. This phenomenon was analyzed with its relationship to companies and celebrities in the “Branded Virtual Goods Market Report” for July 2010 from social gaming platform Viximo and virtual goods platform Virtual Greats. Revenue for branded virtual goods (BVG) is predicted to rise to $318 million by 2015, a stark increase from the current $16 million industry it is this year. While only a subset of the general virutal goods market, BVG is positioned as a more lucrative option for marketers and virtual platform developers.

A case study contained in the report covers the performance of items that were Snoop Dogg-branded. These items have appeared on WeeWorld, where they perform 2.5 times higher than the highest-selling, non-branded, similarly priced items. As quoted in the report, Snoop Dogg explains, “My virutal items are off tha chain jacc! It’s a world and a movement that I have been down with since day 1 and we are gonna continue to hit u with hot products and virtual items until tha wheels fall off. Be on da lookout for more items in an internet hood near u - ya dig?!?”

Growth as illustrated in the case study will be driven by super brands into the market, such as Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin. Increased media interest will improve visibility for unconnected audiences, improving adoption. Another trend will be functional virtual goods. These items will need to have some sort of game-enhancing functionalities, or preferred behavior. “For example, Nike partnered with Gaia Online and offered Nike-branded sneakers that not only acted as a status symbol or avatar enhancer, but also enabled the wearer to run faster than other players in the virtual world.” As the market matures, these goods must stay relevant by having some effect other than as vanity items.

Facebook announced a geolocation feature on Wednesday evening called “Places.” The feature allows users to check themselves and their friends in on the mobile application or browser. Those familiar with location-based apps like Foursquare and GoWalla will be familiar with the procedure, but may be disappointed with the lack of in-game perks, such as mayorships, stickers, etc. earned in gameplay.

Upon check-in, the update will show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place, as well as in the friend feed. “People Here Now” is a section on the location page, which is visible only to people who are currently checked into that spot. When tagged by a friend, a member is either checked-in or updated, depending on privacy settings.

The friend check-in function in Places brings up privacy concerns, as do many new Facebook features. The first time that a friend tags someone on places, Facebook asks them to set their privacy preference. Places also has its own privacy setting for who can see these updates. Despite criticism that Places cannot be turned off covered by TechCrunch today, the settings do control sharing on Facebook, friend check-ins, and data accessible to applications.

The same coverage includes Facebook’s standing on residences. A primary privacy concern for other location apps is user practice of making private residences into places to check into. Publicly broadcasting addresses and when an individual is home or not home is a poor combination for privacy and safety. Facebook addresses this issue by enabling a complaint system to flag addresses that should be removed from Places.

Third-party applications will have access to Places users and their friends if the related privacy setting is not changed from its default enabled position.

The popular check-in apps Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown are being utilized by Places’ launch. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley predicted yesterday on VentureBeat that Places will more likely complement than compete with his app. While Foursquare is a game, Places aims to only augment functionality on the already popular Facebook platform.