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First, as a special holiday addition to our gift store, hi5 is offering a variety of Valentines-themed Super Gifts™. Available in 10 different designs, Super Gifts go beyond the animation of hi5's standard virtual gifts to include a special skinning of the recipient's home page in Valentines colors. Valentines Super Gifts are priced between 320 and 400 hi5 Coins and are accessible through a "Happy Valentine's Day" banner on the home page.
Second, hi5 this week is introducing BlastCards™, a customizable e-card that users can send to their Valentines sweethearts. Users can upload their favorite photo into a variety of custom frames and send them to their hi5 friends. The BlastCards appear in the recipient's Comments section on their Profile page. As part of the launch, many of the frames feature Valentines themes, but BlastCards are also available for other holidays, birthdays, and flirting as well. BlastCards are priced at either 37 or 75 hi5 Coins, depending on the design, with an introductory free card.
Check out these new premium features today!
BlastCards
Barn Buddy, one of the most popular farm-based social games, is now available through hi5 Games. Developed by TheBroth, Inc., the game launched on hi5 this week with integration to hi5 Coins, our universal currency for in-game transactions.Players cultivate their crops through an interactive, drag-and-drop interface. As they progress through the game, they expand their fields and increase their earnings. And they can even sow a little mischief, by releasing bugs, planting weeds or stealing crops from their neighbors' farms. Players can earn credits in the game through the sale of their crops, or purchase Barn Buddy credits using hi5 Coins.
Check out Barn Buddy today.
We introduced a new feature last week to help users navigate the increasing number of games on hi5. A new hi5 Games toolbar, which appears at the bottom of your browser page when logged into the site, provides quick links to your favorite games. In addition to one-click access, the toolbar also notifies you (with a little green light) when your friends are playing a game. It even shows you who is playing what with a simple mouse-over, so you can jump in on the fun. Check it out today.Ever since launching our OpenSocial platform in March 2008, developers have been eager for a unified payment platform for collecting micro-transactions on hi5. Over the past year, we have moved ahead to make such a virtual currency platform available to developers while ensuring a positive user experience for our members. Over the last few weeks, hi5 has been launching our first third-party games integrated via OpenSocial-compliant APIs to our virtual currency platform - providing a standard payment method for developers to monetize their applications through our audience of over 60 million active users around the world.
The first step in this progression was the launch of our virtual currency back in December 2008, which allowed users to buy hi5 Coins and use them to purchase virtual goods on the site. This platform was initially accessible only for hi5 premium features like Gifts. We rapidly expanded the ways that users could get real currency into the system - going beyond credit/debit cards to include payment methods, such as mobile SMS, offers and alternate cards, like Ultimate Game cards, that are popular in different parts of the world.
The next step was to make our payments interface OpenSocial compliant. In order to make our virtual currency more universal across hi5 and non-hi5 applications, our OpenSocial platform team collaborated with other containers to propose an OpenSocial Virtual Currency API as an extension to the OpenSocial specification. Our virtual currency interface was expedited due to the work started by other OpenSocial containers like Xiaonei.com, 51.com, and Netlog.com. With real use cases from Asia, Europe and Latin America, the containers quickly converged on the API specifications.
The hi5 OpenSocial Virtual Currency interface is already live in public beta with several third-party developers like RockYou (RockYou Pets), Playdom (Poker Palace) and Small Worlds, enabling them to collect direct user payments within their games. We have a number of additional partnerships that will launch soon. OpenSocial developers can now leverage a standard virtual currency spec across containers - allowing them to monetize through micro-transactions without worrying about the details of payment processing, currency conversions, localized payment methods or other logistical challenges. Our users benefit, as well, with more outlets for spending their hi5 Coins and a simplified and familiar process for making payments on the hi5 site. We look forward to continuing to work with the OpenSocial community to innovate on the virtual currency standard and to make micro-transactions between users and developers a viable and growing revenue stream.
We introduced a new feature last week in the US, UK and Canada called hi5 Flirt. Users can opt in to flirting with other hi5 users, providing an easy way to browse photos and meet new people on the site.The feature is accessed from the top menu on the user's profile page, titled "Flirt." To get started, users provide information about themselves, including an "About Me" paragraph, their relationship status, and whether they are seeking men or women. By completing the Flirt profile, the user's photo is then viewable to other users, who can easily browse photos, indicate their interest, and send gifts and compliments to people they find attractive.
hi5 Flirt is a fun, safe way to meet new people. If a user's Flirt Request is accepted, the two people are added to each other's friends list -- enabling them to send messages, IM, and get to know each other better. Check it out at http://www.hi5.com/friend/flirt/browse.do
San Francisco, CA; May 13, 2009 -- Extending its social entertainment strategy, hi5 today announced a partnership to distribute RockYou's popular RockYou Pets game to hi5's 63 million global users through the hi5 Games channel (http://games.hi5.com). RockYou will exclusively accept hi5 Coins, hi5's virtual currency, for payments in the hi5 version of the game. The partnership marks the first time a major social site has opened its payments platform to a leading social application developer, enabling better monetization opportunities for both companies.
"RockYou has been an innovator in developing engaging and highly monetizable content for social networking web sites," said Anil Dharni, vice president of products at hi5. "This deal advances our partnership by allowing RockYou and hi5 to directly monetize user engagement through hi5 Coins, the virtual currency hi5 users are already accustomed to spending in a variety of ways on our site. By providing partners with the ability to integrate our payments infrastructure into their applications, hi5 is creating a great new monetization option for application developers."
The partnership represents a significant strategic move beyond the distribution currently available to RockYou and other application developers through hi5's existing OpenSocial platform. Rather than treating RockYou Pets as a separate application that must be actively installed by users, RockYou Pets will be deeply integrated into the hi5 Games channel so new users can play the game with a simple one-click addition to their profile. RockYou and hi5 will be actively promoting RockYou Pets through preferred placement on the hi5 Games channel, promotions on the hi5 homepage, and hi5's partner-exclusive viral promotion tools. Additionally, SuperPets will leverage the hi5 Coins payment platform to drive in-game monetization.
"This partnership gives RockYou access to hi5's global user base, as well as direct access to the payments platform already familiar to hi5 users," said Lance Tokuda, CEO and founder of RockYou. "With virtual currency integration, viral marketing hooks and an expanding games channel, hi5 provides a compelling distribution channel for social application developers. RockYou Pets should do well with hi5's engaging environment."
The RockYou Pets integration is part of a larger hi5 initiative to integrate third-party content more seamlessly into the site's social entertainment experience. RockYou is the first of several OpenSocial partners to gain access to a new set of hi5 APIs that provide broader access to hi5's user base and better overall monetization potential. hi5 and RockYou will share revenue generated through the RockYou Pets game and plan to expand the agreement into other game categories in the future. RockYou Pets is available immediately on hi5 Games.
About hi5 Networks
Headquartered in San Francisco, hi5 is one of the world's largest and fastest growing social entertainment sites. Our focus is on delivering a fun, interactive, and immersive social experience online to our users around the world. With over 63 million unique visitors every month, hi5 is a top 20 website globally and the number one social site in dozens of countries across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The service is available in over 50 languages, delivering localized content, games and other applications to users worldwide. For more information on hi5, visit http://www.hi5.com
About RockYou
RockYou is the only application distributor and developer empowering advertisers to socialize their brands through its ad network. Founded in 2006, we are one the fastest growing companies in internet history. The RockYou Ads Network evolved as we recognized the value in bringing to partner publishers our expertise in the development and monetization of social networking's most viral and visible social applications. This ability led to the industry's largest application-based ad network that serves over 18B PVs/month and reaches over 130M unique users on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5 and Friendster.
Headquartered in Redwood City, California, RockYou is funded by DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and Sequoia Capital, SK Telecom Ventures and Softbank. For more information about RockYou, please visit http://rockyou.com/corp/about.php
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Since launching the hi5 Games channel, we've been busy adding new games and new features to this popular section of the site. Last week, we made our biggest improvement yet with a redesigned hi5 Games page.
Now with over 300
game titles, the new games page makes it easy to find your favorites. Whether
you're into blackjack or bowling, hi5 Games gives you plenty of ways to entertain yourself online. Our wide selection of games spans a variety of
categories, including arcade, casino, cards, sports, strategy, puzzle and
shooter games.
First
introduced in February, hi5 Games has quickly become one of the favorite sections of the site. You can challenge your friends to a 3 Point
Shootout to see who's the hoops king. Roll the bones at the craps
table. Beat your friends up the leaderboard in mahjong. Or
out-whack the pack in the mice attack game, EEK! Whatever you're into,
there's a game for everyone. And we're adding more games every month.
All our games run right in your web browser, so there's nothing to download or install. And all hi5 Games are free to play! Check out the most popular games.
This new offering is among many ways we support our Spanish-language customers. After initially translating our service into the most common form of Spanish a couple years ago (making it our first non-English language option), we began offering email-based customer support in Spanish in 2007. Last month, we rolled out two new Spanish language options: Argentina Spanish and Castilian Spanish (with more local/regional dialects of the language planned for the future). With the hi5 Help section now also in Spanish, we're delivering a complete service-to-support Spanish experience for our users who are most comfortable communicating and interacting in this language -- which is the primary tongue of 21 nations around the world and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
We’re excited to announce that the hi5 Skins Gallery has surpassed 1000 published profile skins!
The gallery has come a long way since September, when it totaled just 157 skins by 79 designers. Today, it boasts over 360 designers from 42 nations around the world.
In addition to top themes such as stars, flowers, and grunge, the skin designers are inspired by their national pride, resulting in submissions featuring Colombia, Guyana, and Portugal, to name a few. We also currently have 15 sponsored skins that connect members with their favorite brands and products, like these from Nike and Nokia.