We presented our virtual economy analytics as a part of the Facebook garage on Analytics. Here are the slides.

You can also browse them on Slideshare.

In brief: Social Gold platform can help create vibrant virtual economies, in large part due to the detailed, insightful and actionable analytics. Specifically, you can get insights into inflation, determine whether to increase prices (or if the market in your economy is automatically increasing the prices), figure out the right pricing of your virtual goods, and most importantly decipher the items that drive your revenue.

We are always looking for comments, suggestions, feedback — email us at business -at- jambool.com.

People who’ve followed our progress as a company know this well, but nevertheless, we would like to formally also announce this on our own blog.

For the past several months, we’ve focused completely on building the platform that can power virtual economies online. We released our first payments only product in October 2008, and have made huge progress since then.

Today, we have several great partners who use our platform to build and manage their virtual economies. We process payments directly from credit cards in 100+ countries, and also enable payments from Paypal, Amazon, Google and mobile phones.

Social Gold is a leader in this space despite our short history. We have a great team, and a great line up of products and features coming up for release through this year.

Looking forward to an exciting and fun 2009!

Jambool is hiring. We are looking for rock star software engineers who love solving complex problems in record time, and love building robust web services. If you don’t but your friends do, refer them! Refer them to us at contact -at- this domain. For every engineer we hire, we will give the referrer $1500.

What is Jambool up to? We are building a virtual economy platform for social, online apps and games, and a monetization platform for these economies. Learn first hand how economies work, and see them work!

After months of working out of our homes, we’ve finally found some office space across the street from Vikas’s apartment at San Francisco’s Pier 38. We’ve definitely moved up in the world from working off the living room floor to an old abandoned warehouse that we share with a few other startups, including SocialMedia and SuperSecret.

Check out our new digs:

Who are you voting for this November?

Jambool launched a contest between the two candidates. Fans of each can now show their support and compete head to head — who gets more share of support every day, and who will get more votes?

Login today to check it out: Vote 4 Obama, or Vote 4 McCain!

Hemant Bhanoo is our employee #1. We know Hemant from Amazon.com, where Hemant did several super cool stuff on performance monitoring, web services and distributed systems engineering. As his last gig at Amazon, Hemant worked for Wener Vogels, Amazon.com CTO. Hemant has been most recently working on Reporterist — an online news exchange service for freelance journalists and newspapers. He continues to grow Reporterist while he works with us on Jambool. It is superstars like Hemant that give companies like Jambool their competitive edge.

Welcome Hemant!

I’ve recently had conversations with friends about finding the right local resource for everyday needs — plumbers, car mechanics, restaurants, house contractors.

By far, everyone trusts recommendations on Yelp for stuff like restaurants. It is one of the primary factors in people deciding where to eat. A few friends also swear by Yelp for car mechanics, doctors and plumbers.

But it gets interesting when you have to make a decision for overhauling your kitchen and paying someone $50,000 and redo your world. For one, interestingly, people feel uncomfortable in recommending any contractor even if they’ve used one themselves. And it is also extremely hard to come to trust reviews on Yelp for an investment this size. Most people go with the recommendation from their real estate agents, and with someone they get a good vibe with (or someone who gives them the best quote).

My own experience has been that I use Yelp to cross out places or services I don’t want to use. I look for the negative recommendations and even sometimes read the comments. But all said and done, if a doctor, mechanic or restaurant is recommended I’d try it because the risk is relatively low. On the other hand, for a contractor who I’d pay thousands of hard earned dollars, Yelp reviews will only go so far.

What do you think? Does Yelp help you in deciding the local services you use?

Graphing Social Patterns conference is next week, and if you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend you do — it brings together the best community of social applications developers. Going by the past conferences, the panels and speaker tracks are invariably excellent.

For readers of this blog, who are planning to come, here is a discount code that gets you 20% discount for conference registration: gspe08fos.

Graphing Social Patterns has become the premier conference in the social applications and social networking space. GSP East is in Washington, D.C., on June 9-11. Vikas is speaking on the Virality and engagement panel.

Do look for us there if you are attending.

Reza along with Ken and Aaron organized the Facebook Dev Garage in Seattle on May 5th. It was a free event, sponsored by Microsoft and Facebook. It was a great event with presentations from several developers based in Seattle who gave demos. There were also talks by Facebook and Jim Scheinman (EIR at Charles River Ventures).