Jambool

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Jambool was an ecommerce company. It operated Social Gold, a virtual goods monetization platform. Social Gold enables developers to create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency, to provide an in-app payments experience to their users, and analytics to monitor their virtual economy. Social Gold powered the virtual currency and payment solutions for thousands of online games and virtual worlds. Jambool was acquired by Google on August 13, 2010, for approximately 70 million dollars.[1][2] After the acquisition, Social Gold was scheduled to close on May 31, 2011.[3][4]

History

Jambool, Inc. was co-founded by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein, and has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore. Jambool started out as an online collaborative research tool. The company created several popular social applications and rose to among the top 10 application developers in 2008.[citation needed] In September 2008, Jambool launched Social Gold, an in-game payments platform for virtual currencies. In December 2008, Social Gold introduced its virtual currency platform in private beta. In February 2008, Social Gold launched a self-service payments widget for Facebook application developers. Following that, in March 2009, Social Gold launched an in-game payments system. In October 2009, Social Gold added a support for in-Flash payments. This allowed players to securely make micro transactions within Adobe Flash, obviating the need to go to a separate website to enter payment credentials. This increased ease-of-use increased customer monetization rates.

According to TechCrunch, Social Gold was "hit hard" by the introduction of Facebook Credits, Facebook's official way of offering in-app payments for Facebook widgets.[1] Facebook declared that all Facebook game developers would be required to only process payments through Facebook Credits beginning July 1, 2011, killing any possibility of Social Gold continuing as a platform for Facebook apps.[5] Social Gold relaunched as Google Payments for the web[6] and was scheduled to close its independent operation on May 31, 2011, the last day before Facebook Credits become obligatory.[3]

After Google's acquisition, Jambool employees worked on Google's in-app payments platform for web applications.[7][8][9] Jambool's founder and CEO Vikas Gupta joined Google as Head of Consumer Payments, and eventually left Google in January 2012.[10]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Another Piece To Google’s Social Puzzle: To Acquire Jambool For $70 Million
  2. ↑ Google’s Jambool Acquisition Confirmed
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Changes for Social Gold (Archive)
  4. ↑ Jambool closes Social Gold, prepares Google's in-app payments system for Android
  5. ↑ Facebook Sets July, 1, 2011 Deadline to Make Credits Sole Canvas Game Payment Option
  6. ↑ Chrome Web Store Goes Global Unveils In-app Payments
  7. ↑ Google's New In-App Payments Product Set For Launch In May 2011
  8. ↑ Inside in-app payments with Vikas Gupta
  9. ↑ Chrome Web Store Goes Global Unveils In-app Payments
  10. ↑ Google's Head of Consumer Payments, Vikas Gupta, Resigns

External links

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