One of my fave peeps is Owais Farooqui, North America Managing Director of King.com.  He’s smart, nice and belly-achingly funny (no joke – he even appeared at the famous Laugh Factory in LA).

Owais is hoping to lead a panel at SXSW 2011, but he needs your vote in order to make it happen.

The panel he’s proposed will explore how TV networks are keeping fans engaged between episodes and seasons with quality online games that extend the show’s brand and interactivity – taking TV entertainment to the next level.

Panelists are voted in by popular demand so we’re really hoping you might take 1 minute and 43 seconds to complete these 2 steps:

Step 1 – create a SXSW account by clicking here:

Step 2 – vote for the ‘TV Networks Extending Interactivity for Fans’ panel by clicking here:

Voting ends on Friday, August 27, thus if you could help us out between now and then, we’d be forever in your debt (well, okay, maybe not forever, but at least for 1 minute and 43 seconds).

Owais is a great speaker and won’t let you down.  Please vote for him as Your Next American Idol (oops, wrong show).

King.com, the world’s leading social games company, has just been identified by The Daily Telegraph as having high growth potential in their “Telegraph 100 Growth Companies Index.” The index picks companies that are a different points in growth and places them according to their impact on the Internet and importance.  King.com has come out 2nd in the ranking of 100 companies, out doing Moo, SpinVox, WAYN, Joost, Dopplr, TruPhone, and 94 others.

Last night we descended upon Bar888 in the Intercontinental Hotel to greet movers, shakers and opinion makers in the gaming, virtual world and technology scenes.  Monday was the first day of the Game Developers Conference which took place in the Moscone Convention Center, and as far as I could tell, it appeared that gamers were recession proof as throngs of games developers, producers, publishers and reporters filled the rooms to hear speakers talk about every aspect of gaming you could imagine.

One of the speakers was our very own Raph Koster, President of Metaplace.  Raph is a superstar amongst gamers – so much so that he can’t even walk down the streets of San Francisco without people snapping his photo.  I quipped it was like walking with Sean Penn (not that I’d know what that really felt like… but I can imagine).

At 5:30pm, we joined together with Riccardo Zacconi, Robert Norton and Matthias Schmidt-Pfitzner of King.com to greet the guests that ranged from start-up entrepreneurs, to games bloggers, mainstream reporters to execs from the biggest games companies in the world.  We noshed on crab cakes and goat cheese puffs, sipped wines, and talked about the past, present and future of games.  A good night of casual conversation indeed.

If you want to see the full details behind the event and who was on the list, check out the link here:  Keeping it Casual – Monday Night Mixer.

P.S. If you want to see who’s in the photos, just hover your mouse over the pic and the details should appear – but here’s a quick synopsis:  Top photo: Summer Richards, official bouncer and name checker; 2nd photo:  Robert Norton, King.com and me; 3rd photo; good friend Tomio Geron, Dow Jones VentureWire, BFF Shireen Piramoon, TumbleCloud, Riccardo Zacconi, CEO of King.com, and me; 4th photo: journalist turned Consort,  Mark de la Viña, casual games queen and founder of the Casual Games Association, Jessica Tams, and me; 5th photo:  Mark de la Viña, Sunil Vemuri, co-founder of reQall, Chris Bauman, US Head of Swoopo, and me.

And yeah, I guess you can tell I had my photo arm stretched and ready…

Related articles

• Boing Boing Video (and Offworld!) coming to Game Developers Conference 2009 (boingboing.net)
• GDC 09: conference to reflect a more global game industry (venturebeat.com)
• GDC Cometh [Note] (kotaku.com)
• An Early Glimpse at GDC [Gdc09] (kotaku.com)
• GDC 09: Team CrunchGear invades San Francisco (crunchgear.com)

Yesterday I read that EA will be joining the ranks of companies that are laying off staff in droves.  But while others are shedding employees and revenues, King continues to beat the recession by delivering fun, relaxation and stimulation to millions of people around the world through their collection of unique and addictive games – including hits like Bejeweled, Sudoku, Cake Mania II and Hunted Forever.  They also offer exclusive online versions of TV game shows such as “1 vs 100“, “Deal or No Deal” and “The Biggest Loser.”

The world’s leading online social games company today announced that 350 million games a month were played on the King.com platform, nearly doubling the number of games played on the site a year ago.

King’s 84 percent jump solidifies three consecutive years of growth: In 2007, the number of games played per month increased 138 percent, from 80 to 190 million, surpassing the momentum of 2006 which saw growth double from 40 to 80 million games played per month.

King’s growth consistently ranks above the industry average: industry-wide traffic swelled by 27 percent in December 2008 from the same month the previous year, while American consumers spent more time than ever on gaming sites; up from 3.7 percent in December 2007 to 4.9 percent in December 2008, according to market research company comScore.

Related articles

• EA cutting 1,100 jobs (news.cnet.com)
• Revenue Rose, but Loss Deepens for Game Maker (nytimes.com)
• Intel profits dive 90 per cent (computing.co.uk)
• King.com user numbers jump 84% (casualgaming.biz)
• Gamers play 350 million games a month on King.com (casualgamerchick.com)
• King and Mochi Media Partnership (ubergizmo.com)

While many have talked about the video gaming industry being recession proof, we’ve seen cracks in that assumption as EA‘s shares have been slumping as their holiday sales are falling short of their goals.  People definitely love to play games, but asking them to pay $40-$60 for a game, plus a console, plus monthly subscription fees can add up to a lot of hard earned cash.  What if there was a free game that was just as addictive and fun.  What if a 21-year old university student cobbled a game together in six weeks from his bedroom, using the wallpaper from his PC to serve as some of the graphics, then partnered with King.com to distribute the game.  That did indeed happen and in the first month the game went live, it was played 2 million times on over 1,000 sites, earning him a tidy sum while providing free fun for players worldwide.  The game is Hunted Forever and the developer is Evan Miller and last week, Hunted Forever was named one of Time Magazine’s top video games of 2008.  Others on the list are the usual suspects – Grand Theft Auto IV was ranked #1, Rock Band 2 was #4 and Spore was #10.  But ranking at #8 was the hottest game you’ve never heard of:  Hunted Forever.

Related articles

• 21-year-old creates one of the best games of the year on his home PC
• Time Magazine lists ‘Top 10 Video Games’ of 2008
• Canadian homemade video game makes Time’s Top 10