We are excited to announce a new, self-serve feature that allows developers to create a customized look and feel for their in-game payments experience. Think of it as a way of creating customized skins on the fly that match and blend with the colors of your game. This, in turn, helps to extend your brand and to increase user engagement and conversion rate.

So, how does it work? Simple. All you do is share the hex code of your game’s primary highlight color, and we do the rest. We generate a color palette and gradient that matches and blends with your game’s look and feel, and you are ready to go.

Here is how you instantly customize the payments flow for your in-game payment.

Log into your Social Gold account to configure your in-game payments offer.

Edit your Account Settings

Choose the integration (offer) you want to edit (or create a new one). Next, go down to the advanced settings. Go to the customize highlight section and add the hex code of your game and hit enter. Hint: You can always change the hex color if you are not satisfied with your original choice.

Edit your integration settings

Set up the Primary Highlight Color

Save, and voilà! You have a a new, customized skin that matches and blends with the look and feel of your online game.

Colors to match your game

The new, customized in-game payment window appears in the context of your website/online game and blends in with the flow of the game. As much as we love our color schemes, they can sometimes appear jarring to the user playing your game, especially as they are about to open their wallets and send you money.

Why would you want to customize the in-game payments experience? There are three simple reasons. First, you can now control the look and feel of your website. Second, you can improve your conversion rate. Our initial tests have shown an improvement of around 10% across several applications. Third and most importantly, by deploying a natural, blended looking in-game payments experience, you provide your users with a natural way to pay without interrupting the flow of their game. The payment window appears in the context of the game and blends in with the flow of the game. This ensures that the user stays engaged in the game.

So, go ahead and give it a spin. Take control of your game and effectively increase user engagement, increase conversion rate, increase your revenue, and most importantly extend your brand. Skin your Social Gold in-game payments flow now!

Don’t forget to let us know what you think and ping us. We want to hear from you.

There are moments at every startup when the vista suddenly expands before you. Today is one of those for Jambool. We’re announcing a $5 million financing round that will accelerate growth of our virtual currency platform, Social Gold.

The timing couldn’t be better, as the virtual goods space has exploded to become the de-facto monetization strategy for social games and applications. So, more developers are going to need to create currencies and accept payments seamlessly within their applications. Social Gold is poised to provide the solutions that these companies need to take advantage of this market opportunity.

Our startup journey: it’s all about the team
It’s been a long and winding road since Reza and I started Jambool more than 2 years ago. Although we were incredibly naïve about life as a bootstrapped startup, we never compromised on assembling a top-notch team or building a superior product, which allowed us to weather more than our share of rough patches. Today’s announcement is a reflection of what you can achieve with a dedicated and incredibly-talented team.

The original idea for a startup is rarely the one that sticks, and Jambool is no different. We started as a destination site for collaborating with friends on travel itineraries. And when Facebook opened its platform in 2007, we shifted our focus to social applications, generally. We had some initial flops before finally gaining traction with a virtual gifting application called Send Good Karma, which still boasts nearly 400,000 monthly active users.

An idea is born: it should be easier to get paid
By early 2008, we had several popular applications, all of which incorporated some form of virtual currency. We started spending more and more time analyzing the “micro economy” within each app. We tinkered a lot with ways to bring money into an app without breaking the flow for users, and we couldn’t find an existing solution that met our needs. The more time we spent on it, the more we realized how critical an in-app payments experience is.

We also realized that building a sustainable virtual economy at scale requires deep analytic insights. But, unlike traditional ecommerce or even online advertising, there were no analytic tools available for virtual goods. So, payments and analytics represented pain points for us as app developers. This realization quickly led us to the next step in the evolution of our company.

Social Gold: building a virtual currency and payments platform
We decided to refocus Jambool on virtual currency, payments and analytics, so we began to assemble a dream team to tackle these issues. During our time at Amazon, Reza and I worked with a handful of dynamic, high-performing engineers, most of whom were successful entrepreneurs in their own right. We wanted to get the band back together, and we found that the opportunity to build the next great platform for social networks made it pretty easy to recruit. In October of last year, Social Gold was born.

Social Gold is a turnkey solution that manages all aspects of a virtual economy and, by extension, frees up developers to focus on the more creative (and fun) aspects of app development. Specifically, Social Gold enables developers to

* create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency
* provide an unparalleled, in-app payments experience to their users, and
* optimize their virtual economy using robust analytics

Some of the largest social games and applications use Social Gold, but our easy-to-integrate APIs allow even the smallest applications to launch a virtual economy in a matter of hours. We have, by far, the most seamless in-app payments experience, especially for returning users. We also provide the most detailed and insightful analytics to developers for their virtual economies.

Growing through collaboration
We are very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the last 10 months, and we are even more excited about the road ahead. A recent eMarketer study estimates that virtual goods will become a $1 billion business in the US in 2010 (and $2.5B in 2013). We’ll be right there collaborating with any developer, publisher or platform that considers virtual goods as a key component to its go-forward strategy.

-Vikas

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.

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!

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).