Zynga Nets $150MM Investment, Is Turning Japanese

Drawing further attention to the white-hot social gaming sector, Zynga on Thursday said it raised $150 million from Japanese wireless carrier Softbank. The partners also announced plans to develop and distribute social games in Japan via a new Zynga Japan joint venture.  Along with the obvious opportunities to expand its user-base, the Asian enterprise will allow Zynga to “gain insights from the Japanese market,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga.  Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will attempt to tap into the country’s renowned passion for gaming and technology, while leveraging Softbank’s mobile and Web technology to produce new social games. “We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse,” Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank, said in a statement.  San Francisco-based Zynga creates games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” which have thrived on social networks like Facebook, as well as among early mobile app adopters.

Read More: MediaPost

App Store Not Named iTunes Heads To a Billion Downloads

Today, GetJar, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company, announced it is delivering over 3 million downloads a day to more than 2,000 different phone models. Adding support for Google Android devices last year has helped boost the daily downloads, as Android is already the second-most-used platform for GetJar customers. The company says it has seen tremendous growth over the past year, with downloads up 300 percent from the prior year.  GetJar bills itself as the “second largest app store,” boasting over 73,000 software titles. With roughly 225,000 apps, Apple’s iTunes App Store is the largest. But Apple’s store only supports a single platform in iOS4 devices, so GetJar goes after the remaining market, which is magnitudes larger. GetJar is a centralized software store for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Java devices. With such a wide variety of supported platforms, the company is on pace to deliver 1.1 billion mobile applications over the next year.  GetJar’s app store is intelligent enough to determine what device a handset owner has, and only shows applications compatible with that device. And as a central repository, GetJar gains useful metrics and data on what consumers are downloading, which in turn can help developers. Today, for example, the company says that customers in India are downloading more productivity apps than consumers in Europe or North America. Armed with that type of information and support for multiple platforms, developers can target different types of software in regions where consumers are likely to buy it and thus earn per-download revenues.

Read More: Gigaom