This is the latest blow to offer companies in social gaming. Zynga “has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with,” chief executive Mark Pincus wrote on his blog today. The company has previously said it works with six offer providers, with offers making up around a third of its revenue overall.

“[We] are removing all CPA offers across Zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves,” he says. ” This will be effective by end of day today. This move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and myspace.”

Zynga launched FishVille last Friday, and when we covered it we noted the presence of mobile offers. The ones we saw looked legitimate, but TechCrunch found some that weren’t. Offer provider DoubleDing said it had included these offers by mistake. But the mistake came at a terrible time, as the entire industry has been already tarnished by the presence of scammy offers in games.

The result is that Facebook has taken FishVille offline. While Zynga has been running these offers in its games for many months, it is no surprise to see the company decide to take all its offer providers offline now. More, from Pincus:

Yesterday’s mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund DoubleDing earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on user experience. We intend to influence them and others to improve their ad content and be long-term focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking industries.

Cyworld gives up on U.S. — Apparently North American and South Korean gamers are slightly different. Cyworld, a virtual world owner, spent three years and $110 million trying to crack the U.S. market, and now it’s closing its operation. The service also warns that current U.S. users better not use their acorns.

Ngmoco picks up Miraphonic — Miraphonic makes “Epic Pet Wars” for the iPhone, in which players level up pets to fight each other. More on touchArcade.

Storm8 sued for collecting phone numbers – The developer of iMobsters and Vampires Live is accused of illicitly pulling user’s phone numbers, according to a class action suit filed in Seattle by one Michael Turner. Storm8 said in August that a “bug” was causing it to collect numbers; the suit says that doing so requires “very specific and specialized software code.”

Glu Mobile still working on iPhone monetization — Glu Mobile reported $500,000 in revenue from next-generation cellphone platforms for its third quarter, out of total revenue of $19.6 million. The company lost $4 million.

Spore, the PC game, not the Facebook app, already has social elements, allowing users to connect to other players’ universes and incorporate their races into your worlds. This, in turn, would allow interaction with the different player species based on how each race was evolved, and it is this same concept that hinges together Spore Islands, except the Facebook app has a much more social focus.

Players begin by selecting the type of environment their island should be, followed by a simple creature creation screen that allows them to pick a different physical attributes such as mouth, eyes, body, legs, etc. Sadly, the level of customization is nowhere near as enticing as the full game, but it’s still not too bad, all things considered.

Each physical feature also has survival attributes associated with it such as ferocity, speed, stamina, and so one. This makes the player choices a little deeper as the best looking creation may not be the most efficient one when it comes to Darwinism.

Once a creature is born, it appears along with two other, randomly generated, “wild” creatures, and the evolution game begins. The primary currency in Spore Islands is, well, DNA (which is generated passively every couple of hours, but is also purchasable). By clicking on the “Evolve” button, players can redistribute a creature’s statistics to make it faster, sturdier, add abilities, and more. In order to discover just what stats are needed, there is actually a feature that allows you to observe how your island’s residents interact.

This view actually works like a science observation, putting the player in a top down view that automatically plays out all the happenings on your island. From here, you can see how long your creature lives, how many times it gives birth, how it hunts, and so on. Each time you observe, you earn points that can be used to open new creature slots so you can make more creations, as well as move yourself up in the leaderboards.

As is to be expected of Maxis games (they are the developers behind The Sims, after all), Spore Islands really is a nice and well made app. If there is any one complaint, it is that the customization was one of the most fun elements in the original game. Nonetheless, Maxis does do their best to circumvent the limitation by adding a few new concepts such as nifty hats and animations (at the cost of DNA), in an attempt to create greater personalization.

It remains to be seen if users will want to play this lighter version of the PC game. As with any social game, the challenge now is to continue improving the game based on how users respond to it.

Here's what Zynga told him in response: We asked all offer provider networks to remove the mobile category. Upon learning today that one provider was still showing 6 ads, we asked them to remove these too. They told us they hadn’t realized this was still in their testing queue and immediately removed them.”]

Zynga, the largest developer on Facebook — and one that has come under increasing scrutiny recently for its use of scammy advertising offers in games — has just soft-launched a new title called FishVille.

The company trademarked the name “FishVille” recently, so the launch is perhaps no surprise. But the move was very quiet, as the app currently has 61 users — and no, we didn’t forget a few zeros in that number.

The game is what you get when you cross the very popular new genre of Facebook apps built around the virtual aquarium idea, together with Zynga’s ruthless ability to take popular genres and create its own hit to compete against entrenched leaders.

The company has done the same with Mafia Wars among role-playing games, with FarmVille among virtual farming apps, and most recently Café World among virtual restaurant apps. Those titles are now at or near the top of our leaderboard of the largest apps overall on Facebook’s platform.

FishVille, in particular, is taking aim at recent winners like Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar. That game has recently surged past a number of big Zynga titles to reach 24.0 million monthly active users, and it is now the fifth largest app on the entire Facebook platform, according to AppData. Others, like Fish World, have also gotten millions of users. In fact, we’re not quite sure how many big fish games there are on Facebook — there are a few significant ones made by Asia-based developers, for example. Virtual aquarium games, from our understanding, first got big in China, before they got big as apps on Facebook.

Fishville itself is pretty straightforward. You start with a virtual aquarium, with a few fish in it. You harvest the fish, sell them, use your earnings to buy fish eggs, then feed the fish. If you’ve played FarmVille, you’re probably familiar with this dynamic. Other features include the ability to invite friends, and earn additional coins and experience by visiting their tanks. As with other games, Zynga has users wait certain amounts of time as their fish grow — a good method of keeping people coming back for more.

And, of course, if you need some extra coins in order to buy more fish, you can purchase them through the usual variety of direct payment methods, or earn them through offers. A look at Zynga’s offer wall shows that things are pretty clean now — yes, there are mobile quiz ads, for example, but these are actually allowed by Facebook if the offers do not mislead users about what they’re getting into.

Growth to come?

Zynga, no doubt, plans to cross-promote this app with its other popular titles, as well as buy ads on Facebook to help get it in front of more users. Those two strategies have been key to how it has grown other games.

But Zynga has also excelled at optimizing “viral channels” to reach new users,  Before Facebook changed its news feed from a raw stream to a slower, algorithmically-tuned one a couple weeks ago, Zynga had mastered the art of getting users to share information from games into the stream. This means users were seeing massive amounts of stories about FarmVille, etc. — and now they’re not, so much. Zynga’s games seem to have done fine since the redesign rolled out on October 23rd, from the little data we have available to work with (see more, here and here).

	Name	MAU
1.	FarmVille	63,304,313
2.	Causes	35,209,300
3.	Café World	28,477,669
4.	Mafia Wars	25,782,246
5.	Happy Aquarium	24,002,808
6.	Pet Society	21,468,688
7.	FamilyLink.com (formerly We’re Related)	20,522,599
8.	YoVille	19,735,219
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	18,757,583
10.	Farm Town	18,380,105

So we’re very interested to see if Zynga can pull off a repeat of Café World, which launched at the beginning of October and since then has grown to be the third-largest app, with 28.5 million monthly actives as of today.

The wild card — or actually, a lot of wild cards — will be the changes that Facebook is planning to introduce to its platform this month. Features like notifications will shortly be folded in to users’ inboxes. For example, the app currently uses the one-line feed item story to automatically share user actions back to their profile walls — a practice that users sometimes find surprising, and one that won’t be available for too much longer.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	JibJab	896,201	+190,506	+21.26
2.	what are you born to do?	913,576	+189,108	+20.70
3.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	707,949	+153,073	+21.62
4.	Do you think…?	208,255	+98,426	+47.26
5.	Tarjetitas	958,169	+85,017	+8.87
6.	Word Island	207,995	+52,987	+25.48
7.	Moment Of Truth	299,248	+48,263	+16.13
8.	Halloween Pumpkins	253,923	+42,134	+16.59
9.	Fairyland	538,711	+39,807	+7.39
10.	Write In Pictures	632,279	+36,230	+5.73
11.	Name Analyzer	682,290	+34,008	+4.98
12.	Kamu cocoknya punya pasangan orang mana ?	169,586	+27,534	+16.24
13.	Status Cloud	288,300	+25,327	+8.78
14.	Çete Savaşları	770,856	+23,877	+3.10
15.	Ma Ferme	375,230	+22,639	+6.03
16.	Manda un Beso Sexy!! Besame!	249,158	+21,594	+8.67
17.	Gift Creator	450,421	+20,627	+4.58
18.	World Poker	966,448	+20,166	+2.09
19.	Hatching Eggs	279,968	+17,999	+6.43
20.	Benim Çiftliği	304,933	+17,700	+5.80

At the top is animated e-card creator JibJab, sort of. The app lets you create and share these cards with your Facebook friends — although the company has apparently taken the app offline, because when you try to add the app you’re taken to a landing page telling you to visit JibJab’s main site. JibJab has been big on using Facebook Connect, and apparently it decided its home site was a better venue for its business. We’re not sure how the app is continuing to post growth: It gained 190,000 new users to reach 896,000 monthly actives.

Other notables include Word Island from MetroGames, a Scrabble-style game that gained 53,000 users to reach 208,000 monthly actives this past week. The next two apps have appeared on the up-and-coming list in the past, and have continued to inch their way up. One, Fairyland, is a simple sort of virtual gardening game; it grew by 40,000 to total 539,000 monthly actives. Poker game World Poker grew by 20,000 to reach 967,000 monthly actives — it’s about to hit 1 million and graduate from this list.

There are a couple other games not on the list, apparently because the creators don’t identify the apps as “games” in Facebook’s app category directory (the directory that we use to index games in AppData). But we noted them over on Inside Facebook this morning. One, Icy Tower, an Ice Climbers-style game we covered recently, grew by 135,000 new users to total 735,000. Another game we recently reviewed, called Goobox – Free Games, is also seeing a solid surge. It grew by 85,000 to end the week at 526,000. The game is actually a collection of mini-games, with each one having a goo theme.

This week’s list saw the usual mix of simple quiz and gifting apps as well, that for some reason identify themselves as “games.” We’re ignoring them, especially as some look spammy and maybe scammy.

This free to play game, of sorts, puts young players into an alien world full of talking, humanoid aliens, but what makes it most interesting is that it is a curious mix of MMO (massively multiplayer online) features, exploration, customization, and innovation.

When starting up, players are able to customize their own personal avatar, which can look either human or alien. Customization is a big part of Planet Cazmo. As one might expect, a myriad of clothing exists, a lot of which is branded (such as Dwight Howard from the pro basketball team Orlando Magic). Obviously, this alone adds a great deal of user creativity, but is something further embellished by the ability to also decorate a virtual home, purchase a pet (for paying members only), and even get a personal vehicle.

Rhe first vehicle users start out with is a skateboard, moving about the world in point and click fashion. Which brings up another point. Everything within Planet Cazmo is saturated with the underlying premise of being “hip” and “cool;” everything from how an NPC (non-player character) speaks, to the style of clothing and hair.

Hip or not, everything in the game costs a bit of in-game currency. Each day, players earn a small allowance for logging in, but are also able to earn the in-game coins through competing in a myriad of in-world mini-games or completing World of Warcraft style quests for the memorable denizens of this alien planet. As a means to entice players to convert to paying users, however, many of the virtual goods are limited to only full members.

Perhaps, it is left to wonder what is so special about Planet Cazmo at this point. Frankly, the virtual world is a bit simplistic, and the controls a bit obnoxious, but this isn‘t why it caught our attention. In the past, virtual worlds have made generic claims along the lines of “throw a party.” However, Planet Cazmo very much has this, in the form of virtual concerts. Yes, concerts.

The most recent was on Halloween by the band Weezer from Geffen A&M Records. Evidently, such virtual shows have been going on for some time as Cazmo has hosted a number of arists such as Sean Kingston, Jay Sean, Jordin Sparks, Kristinia DeBarge, Ciara, and more. The concert is hosted in a rather sizable virtual in-game arena with the artist appearing and singing in an avatar format. The avatars are synched up to streaming music mixed in with recorded, personalized shout outs from the performers.

As it turns out, this features has shown to have been exceedingly popular among the users of Planet Cazmo. They very literally pack the space with there avatars, chatting, dancing, spinning, and… well… having a good time, with each “instance” of the concert fitting hundreds of avatars. In fact, it has become popular enough that the average time spent at them is well over 30 minutes, and Cazmo has recently added a backstage area for members, allowing them to virtual meet the celebrity and get their “autograph.”

In regards to a business perspective, the events are often riddled with virtual, as well as real, goods for sale. The concept might be working well, as the site has also recently made a deal with Tommy Mottola, in the hopes that they will bring more celebrity content into virtual worlds as both a form entertainment and virtual goods monetization.

We actually got a chance to briefly speak with founder, Mike Levine who, while not being able to give specific metrics, stated that “hundreds of thousands of kids have come to the concerts and love them.” As a matter of fact, he also said that they are currently “planning a major holiday benefit event with a major charitable organization, with some very big acts.” A relatively small but growing virtual venue, Planet Cazmo hopes to make this show their biggest yet.

Ubisoft, PopCap, USA Networks, and Konami have all been busy building for Facebook and Facebook Connect. However, these companies have created titles or game portals that were fun in and of themselves, or at least tried to be. And their integration with Facebook added simple social components, with the exception of Ubisoft who designed TickTock so it specifically required social play — the games were intended to see how social features could work, and they were done well. Unfortunately for Indie, the same can not be said.

Bluntly put, this app feels like nothing more than a quickly thrown together “game” meant to garner a little bit of extra advertising for the LEGO Indiana Jones series. Were it not for the name of the title, it wouldn’t even have the 27,000 monthly active users it currently does.

When the game is first loaded up, it looks fantastic, carrying that LEGO art style the series is known for. Players jump in, and are prompted to create an avatar. Okay, sounds cool thus far — everyone likes customizing avatars. You can change the head, body, and legs to something worn by one of the Indiana Jones characters or even George Lucas himself. It’s simple, yes, but it’s LEGO. How much customization can you do with a LEGO person? Right? Once you finish, you save the avatar, then get prompted with the question about whether you want to post it to your feed. All fairly standard.

This is where the real game starts! Right…? Nope, you get to see your avatar and Indie standing on a bunch of crates that make up the first scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That’s it! That is all this game is! Sure, you can invite more friends and they stand still in the scene too, and if you invite enough you get a new scene from the movie, but there is nothing else to do.

There have been a lot of bad games on Facebook, this much is true, but never before has one been so… anticlimactic. Change three things! Look, you have a custom avatar! Now tell all your friends about our “awesome” game and advertise for us.

Maybe that’s just the point of the game — and we suppose that’s okay. But it seems like a real social game built with this theme would be a far more compelling advertisement for the franchise.

It’s an unfortunate truth of business that where there is money to be made, there are people trying to do bad things to get their hands on it. If you’ve taken payments from customers then chances are you’ve encountered some of these risks. Cash and checks can be counterfeit, checks can bounce due to insufficient funds, credit card numbers can be stolen, etc.

I’ve managed risk and fraud teams at PayPal, eBay and Amazon, and now at Boku; I’ve seen countless fraud attempts from around the world. Mobile payments are a new, rapidly growing form of payments and like all forms of payments they come with risks that need to be understood and managed. Based on my experiences in the industry, here are my top 5 merchant risk and fraud tips for mobile payments. Note that some of these are useful for all types of payments.

Tip #1 – Know the rules

There are two types of rules for mobile payments. The first set of rules are legal requirements (which may vary by jurisdiction), such as ensuring that:

• payments are not being processed for online gambling or otherwise illegal activity or content (such as child pornography)
• payments that indicate potential money laundering are reported to the proper authorities
• any licensing requirements or payment regulations are complied with
• there is proper consent and disclosures under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)

These rules should come from a lawyer (I am not one) and will vary by business. For example, whether or not you need to comply with COPPA will depend specifically on the type of primary customers for your business.

The second set of rules come from the carriers and include things such as:

• Spend limits – each carrier has varying restrictions on how much a user can spend on a particular mobile service. These limits may be applied to transaction amounts or spend amounts over a given timeframe. Additionally, spend limit notifications are also sometimes needed.
• Terms and Conditions – specifics on what needs to be disclosed, how it needs to appear in the payment flow, etc.
• Payment flow experience – where the pricing should be displayed, what size fonts should be used, proximity of information (e.g., price near phone number entry field)
• Customer support – what hours need to be supported, what methods of support must the service have (email, phone, etc.), local language requirements, voice mail requirements, etc.
• Compliance – what kinds of businesses and content are allowed and the caveats for specific services (for example, disclosures that state when a service will have ongoing messages delivered)
• Dispute/Refund rates – process for handling and associated fees and penalties

These rules can vary not only by country, but also by the carrier within a country and the list of rules goes on and on. If you’re interested in learning more about mobile compliance, a great place to start is with the MMA Best Practice Guidelines, which can be found in this PDF.

Since the rules are very specific and they change over time, you should not assume that what’s okay for one web site or service is okay for another; make sure you check with your payment provider before offering mobile payments on new features or businesses.

Tip #2 – Set user expectations and provide good customer service

One of the common complaints from customers is that they don’t receive the product or service they were offered or that it was not as expected when it was received. When either happens, like credit cards, it can result in a “chargeback” (reversal of the proceeds from the transaction, possibly with some fees added on, too!). To avoid chargebacks, make sure that you set clear expectations on what is to be delivered and when, and ensure that you provide timely customer service to resolve complaints quickly.

• Be clear about timeframes on fulfillment. If it normally takes several hours before a user might see a credit in their account, let them know that up front
• Specify any restrictions on the product being purchased. For example, if credits are being purchased that can’t be used on all products or be transferred if a user “upgrades” their account

You can also avoid issues by educating your customers on how to prevent fraud. If you need help with this, you can reference this blog post (link) with some helpful tips for customers.

Chances are that no matter what you do, though, you’ll still have some number of issues that arise over time. When you do encounter them, particularly chargebacks, make sure you carefully track them in as much detail as possible. Which customers charged back? How many times? What percentage of their activity resulted in a chargeback? Why did they issue a chargeback? You’ll see why in a bit.

Tip #3 – Know who has the liability (and if you do, then make sure you mitigate it)

Whenever anyone asks me about risk, one of the first questions I ask in response is “who has the liability?” In the payment space liability often lives with the merchant; in mobile payments this can vary significantly depending on the market and the carrier. For example, in most European countries refunds are not often issued and when they are, the carrier is not passing these back as chargebacks; in most Asian markets, chargebacks come in the form of “discrepancies” which include bad debt, refunds and billing system issues and no details are provided; in the United States, refunds from almost all carriers are charged back and the details behind them (MSISDN, amount, date, etc.) are typically provided.

Make sure you know if you have liability and how it’s structured and do this at the point you’re setting up a mobile payments service, not when the liaiblity hits you. Are there chargebacks? When should I expect to see them? What information is provided? Are there any penalties or fees in addition?

Once you know about the liability, you now need to know about mitigation. Your mobile payment provider may have fraud systems in place to help you reduce risk and if they do, that’s great. But, if the liability lives with you then it’s probably a good investment of time to create your own systems and rules (and don’t wait for your first chargeback to do it).

Developing a complex risk engine isn’t simple, but one basic thing you can do is to utilize negative files. If accounts have too many chargebacks, if there is evidence of fraud or any other abuse (such as abuse of a promotion), don’t just close the customer’s account – instead, add all the information you have on that customer (name, email, account information, etc.) to a negative file and look for matches to that file when new activity occurs. Be careful, though…you don’t want to blacklist an entire IP address just because one customer who used it was bad. You also don’t want to decline John Smith just because another John Smith abused a promotion. Instead, use this data as a strong indicator of potential risk. Also, if you can, look for similarities among negative files and not just exact matches, particularly with string variables; wouldn’t it be nice if the computer could find a match between “123 Main St #1” vs. “123 Main street, apt 1”, for example?

Tip #4 – Secure your systems and your password

Okay, so we’ve all done it before but using a password of “password” or using the same password on many web sites simply isn’t secure, especially if you are the merchant. Imagine that someone was able to break into your merchant account, change the bank account to his bank account and start receiving your funds!

Select your password carefully. Don’t use a word from the dictionary, your company name, your birthday, your kids’ names or anything that could be easily guessed. Instead, choose one that’s relatively long (at least 8 characters) and that contains numbers or special characters

Keep your password safe. You might have multiple people in your business that need access to the account, but share it only on a need-to-know basis and change it often. You don’t want a disgruntled or former employee accessing or changing sensitive information for your business.

In addition, make sure you understand what security is in place when communicating with payment providers and be sure to follow their guidelines carefully. Also, make sure you keep your anti-virus software up to date and that you run regular scans of your systems. Of course, depending on your size you may not have a security expert on staff, so consider hiring a security consultant to assess your systems’ vulnerabilities of being attacked.

Tip #5 – Watch out for social engineering

Look out for (and train your employees to look out for) unusual requests, as these might be attempts to “socially engineer” you to provide information that you wouldn’t normally give out. A few examples: requests for customer data, any information related to your account or login or any sensitive information about your company (e.g., “I’m looking for the CFO”). If someone calls you and claims to be from a partner or authoritative agency then get evidence of that before you release anything sensitive.

Also, it’s important to note that these requests can come in any form. You may be familiar with spam that points you to spoof web sites but what about calls to your customer service department, SMS messages to your employees or chat applications? Bad guys are using a variety of techniques these days and some of them are quite convincing!

Summary

Keep in mind that risk management is not about having 0% fraud rates; it’s about being aware of what the risks are, tracking them regularly and carefully and taking the necessary steps to mitigate them on an ongoing basis. Don’t let your first chargeback scare you and cause you to take drastic actions such as shutting out an entire country; instead, use the scalpel approach. Also, make sure you look at all aspects of cost when evaluating your business and choosing providers to work with; don’t just look at the surface cost and payout rates but also take customer service, risk management, tools, refund rates and other “back office” functions into consideration as they could have a big impact to your bottom line.

The customer base for mobile payments is huge, really huge… over 1 billion people already, around the world. Following these tips can help you take advantage of this market for your own business.

Martine brings over fifteen years of experience creating and leading risk management, fraud prevention, and analytics for payments leaders across the web. Prior to Boku, she spent over five years at PayPal and eBay, where she managed the team responsible for proactive detection of fraud, credit risk and policy compliance. She joined Amazon.com in 1999 as part of the Accept.com acquisition and thereafter was an instrumental player in the design and development of Amazon’s risk detection engine, covering payments for both the company’s retail site and its payments platform.

For five years now, players have grinded experience to reach the maximum levels of power, but no matter how many times level caps are raised, no matter how many bosses fall, and no matter how many times lunch gets skipped, millions fall in love with the collection of the simplest of features: the collection of non-combat vanity pets. That’s right, whether you prefer epic dungeons or bloodthirsty player vs. player combat, virtually every user has at least some of these, and thus the Pet Store has come to be.

Currently, there are only two pets available (with more likely to come soon), the “Pandaren Monk” and “Lil’ K.T.”The Monk is, very literally, a “Kung-Fu Panda,” touting Chinese garments, a gourd of brew, some very fancy kung-fu moves, and ab excellent sense of courtesy, bowing to anyone that bows to him first. K.T., on the other hand, is a miniaturized, and significantly cuter, version of the most recent expansion’s (Wrath of the Lich King) first major bosses: The lich, Kel’Thuzad. In league with its lich powers, this pet randomly freezes those nasty level one squirrels and mice all while belting a diabolical laugh.

Each mini-pet costs $10 and is actually bound to a player’s World of Warcraft license. Players are given an in-game pet key, and it will apply to all characters on that account regardless of faction (Horde or Alliance), server, or even existence, meaning that any character you create in the future will also have access to this pet.

Curiously enough, it looks like the pet sales will be going to a good cause as well. Between now and December 31, 2009, half of all proceeds made through Pandaren Monk purchases will be donated to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. According to the copy, this is to “further [demonstrate] his benevolent nature.”

Likely, this is only the first step for Blizzard (and not merely in regards to adding more pets). For a long time now, the company has skirted around whether or not its upcoming rendition of Battle.net would support virtual goods, saying that they were not going to “rule anything out.” Furthermore, the company has suggested it would emulate, at least to some degree, Xbox Live’s Avatar Marketplace. We’ll see what comes next.

The California-based company is founded by Phil Shenk, the co-founder and Art Director of the former Flagship Studios. However, he is perhaps best known as one of the lead artists for the ever popular Diablo 2 from Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard, he was Studio Director for Wild Tangent where he is also credited with helping big name companies such as Microsoft and Sony with the creation of online casual games.

Considering his experience, Gravity Bear is looking to focus on the latest in graphical technologies as it is applied to social networks. Nonetheless, Shenk does point out, in a brief interview with Games.com that his experience at Flagship moved him far more into a management and design realm and that it will be a combination of these two areas – top notch visuals along with with innovative and engaging design – that will give the new company an edge.

Most successful social games have simple graphics, compared to most console titles. Part of the reason for this, however, is that your average casual or social player is intimidated or uninterested by visuals seen in mainstream games. Remember, that most of these users do not consider themselves gamers, thus something that looks like a “game” may not see as much use as it deserves.

Nonetheless, that stigma feels to be slowly dissolving. Shenk, in fact, seems to be aware of this as greater numbers of Facebook titles become more sophisticated (simply compare the older Mafia Wars to newer FarmVille). To that end, Gravity Bear is looking to “push the bar higher, and provide a more compelling, more immersive experience,” Shenk tells Games.com.

Currently, the startup only has six employees and has yet to state the amount of angel funding it holds. However, Gravity Bear has already formed its first alliance, partnering with analytics company SQLstream, allowing it to bring “real-time analytics to games for social networks.”

What makes the partnership more significant, is that SQLstream is the first to actually provide this service using the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard SQL language. What this means, simply put, is that information transfer between products and their providers is significantly faster, and virtually real-time.

Unfortunately, beyond the SQLstream announcement, no further light has been shed on the going-ons at Gravity Bear. All the same, Shenk seems quite confident in this undertaking: “We’re just at the beginning of this industry,” he says, as players will expect better and better game quality.