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heyzap

HeyZap’s Embeddable Flash Games Player Is Heating Up

by Jason Wilk on February 19, 2009

heyzap-gameplay-minutes

  • It has only been a few weeks since the launch of HeyZap, the world’s first embeddable flash games player for blogs and websites, yet things are taking off rapidly. Since launch, over 5 million minutes of game play has been tracked thus far, spanning 3000 sites. Founders, Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila said that there are many contributors to the success of the player thus far, but partnerships with Drag-and-drop website/blog creator, Weebly (see image below), along with web-discovery portal Cooliris, have been instrumental. Today, they are announcing two major developmental strides, which should help the duo take their product to the mainstream.

heyzap-weebly

  1. Game Channels
    • Heyzap now allows publishers to easily select contextualized casual games content. For example, a political blog like huffingtonpost.com can now easily get an embed code for purely political games, or a basketball site like NBA.com could easily tune into basketball games. Heyzap has covered most of the possible channels that sites could wish for ranging from music games to sci-fi games to celebrity games to racing games.
  2. Heyzap API
    • Publishers can now make their own game portal or pull out specific games using the simple Heyzap API (heyzap.com/publishers/api). Users of the API have access to 6000 games, game ratings, descriptions and hi-resolution game thumbnails. The Heyzap games API allows publishers to directly pull games content into their site allowing a deep level of integration and customization.  Cooliris.com is one of our API partners (this can be found in the games section of cooliris.com).


Keeping up on casual gaming news? Check out these articles:

HeyZap, The Longtail Competitor To Oberon Media

GameCurry Launches Casual Games Search Engine, But Fails to Be Effective

Layoffs At Casual Game Giant Oberon Media

Playfish Starts To Swim In The Deep End, Raises $17M More.

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HeyZap, The Longtail Competitor To Oberon Media

by Jason Wilk on January 15, 2009

  • If you haven’t heard of Oberon Media, I’m sure you’ve played a casual game or two on one of the many sites that they power. Since their inception, Oberon has become the king of casual games, providing partners like MSN, MySpace, MTV, Walmart.com, NBC and more with their game player.
  • Enter Heyzap, the latest product launch out of the Y Combinator college of startups. Founded by serial entrepreneurs, and my friends, Immad Akhund (recently sold Clickpass) and Jude Gomila, HeyZap is to become the longtail competitor to Oberon by creating an easily embeddable casual games player for use by any website or blog. Webmasters now have the ability to offer their users 4000+ casual games with a simple strip of code.
  • Immad says “Currently, publishers don’t have easy access to highly addictive, online casual games content, but HeyZap intends to change this. Heyzap will shift where users play casual games and bring casual games to a larger audience”. The player aggregates and filters casual games from major game portals, game developers and Mochi Media, recommending users with the most popular games titles in their favorite categories.
  • Some of the benefits to adding HeyZap to a site or blog include increasing user engagement, such as higher on-site time and potentially more page-views.
  • The platform also hopes to help promote new game developers who aren’t getting exposure on the major networks, offering them ad-revenue shares and a home for their games.
  • Casual gaming is now a $2.2bn market, predicted to grow at 25% this year. With the success of Oberon Media, HeyZap stands a real chance in the market for providing game tools for the rest of us. Somebody like DemandMedia, who offers tools for publishers could be setting their eye on this company very soon (Acquisition maybe?) Stay tuned….

Try it out here:

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