DiscoveryBeat addresses one of the biggest conundrums for Silicon Valley’s most dynamic startups and developers: How to get your social game or mobile application noticed in an age of noise?

It will be held in the afternoon of Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco, a hip location with an ocean view.

We’ll discuss the “secret recipe” for getting discovered in an age when getting discovered can mean huge viral growth and the difference between profound success or prompt failure. We think there are five main ingredients to the secret recipe for viral growth: 1) Social networking and marketing, 2) advertising, 3) web design, 4) partnering and 5) measurement.

We’re inviting the masters of viral growth so that we can learn from them. Speakers include Sebastien DeHalleux, president of Playfish (above), one of the hottest makers of social games. We also have Roy Sehgal (below, middle picture), general manager at Zynga and executive producer of Cafe World, the fastest-growing social game in history. And we also have Julian Farrior (bottom picture), founder and CEO of Backflip Studios, a Boulder, Colo.-based iPhone game studio that has launched No. 1-ranked hits (Paper Toss, Rag Doll Blast) thanks to a clever combination of creativity and marketing. We’ll announce more speakers — including those from non-game companies — in the coming days.

The recent controversy surrounding the advertising offer industry (OfferPal, etc) shows there are ethical issues around tactics. There’s clearly a trade-off between getting noticed and making money. Social game platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, and the iPhone,  Android,  and other app stores are great places for app developers to get growth, but these platforms also need to maintain the trust of their users. While there are no gatekeepers, each of these platforms have their own rules or etiquette guidelines, and moving quickly to respond to changes in these rules can make or break businesses. There’s tremendous opportunity to gain momentum if you focus on the platforms best for you, but the terrain keeps changing.

Like any of VentureBeat’s events, this will be an opportunity to network. Entrepreneurs will be able to forge the relationships with advertisers, social networking companies and game developers. These partnerships are needed to succeed to survive in this competitive industry.

The event will be followed by a networking reception with key participants from the ecosystem, from investors to CEOs, developers and platform makers.

The agenda is subject to change. Here are the moderated panels we have planned:

Discovery 1.0: Starting from scratch
If you’re a two-person garage development shop, and starting from scratch, how do you create an app that can go viral? With 75,000 apps in the Apple AppStore, discovery is a huge problem. Facebook is just as tough. You’re at a disadvantage because large networks have an advantage due to their built-in knowledge of how the game works and also because of their ability to more effectively promote. How do you exploit your newness and focus, using the key ingredients of success? How can smaller developers team up with bigger brands that have name recognition? When should they go it alone? How do they build a company that bigger investors will notice?

Discovery 2.0: Moving to the next level
The social app companies — those successful application companies that came of age on Facebook and the iPhone — have created their own ecosystems with successful titles that feed on each other. Now what do they do? How many different types of monetization schemes do they need? What can they learn from the bigger companies? Should they recruit executives from the old-world companies, to help with partnering or organizational discipline? What sort of analytics process should they have in place? Can anyone catch up with them?

Discovery 3.0: Bringing in the big guys
Established video game companies and entertainment giants are eyeing the social networking and mobile platforms as a source of future growth. For success, the big guys need to apply the secret ingredients in different proportions. How much should they invest in these areas, and how should they do it? Which kinds of partners should they recruit? Which business models are the best? Who has made the transition already? What mix of social networking, marketing, analytical measurement, advertising and web design ingredients should they apply?

For sponsorships contact Andie Rhyins, andie@venturebeat.com. To sign up to attend, follow this link. Sign up by Nov. 20 and you can get 25 percent off the price. Early bird pricing is $114, and after Nov. 20 it will be $149.

Activision Blizzard, the game’s publisher, called in IPCybercrime.com, a Dallas private investigation firm that specializes in online investigations. The investigators tracked down the seller and stumbled into a scheme to pirate the game and sell a bunch of fake copies over the Internet. While the bust led to the arrest of just one hacker among many, it sheds light on the shadowy underground of the business of illegal piracy. It also offers a peak at how investigators try to head off a major piracy disaster before it happens.

“It all happened very fast,” said Rob Holmes, owner of IPCybercrime. “If these guys get their stuff out, then they can do some major damage to sales and spoil it for everybody. We plug leaks every day, but this was one of the biggest ones of the year.”

The investigators started by calling the Craigslist ad phone number and talking with the seller, who said he had two items for sale. They negotiated a deal to buy two bundles for $800 each. Then IPCybercrime dispatched its investigators in Los Angeles to perform an undercover pickup. Then another Craigslist ad appeared for the same Modern Warfare 2 bundle. A search on social networks revealed that the first seller was a friend of the second seller. And the second seller said on his social networking page that he worked as a “box boy at a major retail chain.”

IPCybercrime’s client, Activision Blizzard, approached the sellers, who then admitted having stolen a crate of the bundles from the backroom of a game retail store. Then IPCybercrime folks turned the case over to the loss prevention department at the retailer, which dealt with the thieves. This kind of inside job involving physical theft is becoming common, though it’s hard to do because retailers get a major game just a week in advance and then lock the boxes up in a high-security part of their warehouses.

On Oct. 30, the client told IPCybercrime that an individual going by the name “cedelamo” and “cdelamo815″ had posted a message on the piracy forum at xbox360iso.com. The post asked for users to donate funds to him via PayPal so that he could buy one of the above-listed Craigslist bundles and crack the anti-piracy code. Once he did that, he could distribute counterfeit copies of the game widely and make a bundle of money doing it.

There wasn’t an obvious way to track the person who made the post. But IPCybercrime checked on Facebook to see if the email address belonged to someone with a Facebook account. The search turned up a page for someone who was anonymously offering “modding services.” Modders are people who hack into Xbox 360 systems and turn them into repositories for pirated games. They stand in a gray area of the law, as it’s legal to make your own backup copy of a copyrighted disk, but it’s not OK to sell that copy commercially. To evade the law, the modders often describe their services in ads as selling “backup disks.”

The Facebook page had a cell phone number and it said that customers could contact that number via text message. Holmes’ investigators stayed in contact with the person sending text messages for four days as they negotiated a business deal. At one point, they convinced the person to call them with a cell phone. Holmes called that number back and then managed to get a business address out of the person.

Meanwhile, the person on the web forum said that he had received a copy of Modern Warfare 2 on Oct. 30. Over the weekend, the hacker went to work on the copy protection built into the DVD disk with the game on it. He cracked the code — something that isn’t that hard for hackers to do these days — and announced that he had done so on Monday. Coincidentally, pirate digital copies of Modern Warfare 2 flooded onto torrent sites, which are peer-to-peer sites for sharing software, on the same day. That has likely caused untold losses for Activision Blizzard, Holmes said.

Holmes was looking into the business address he got from the Facebook modder. The location (pictured right) was a computer business in Miami, owned by the subject’s father, Hiram Del Amo. IPCybercrime sent an investigator to the address and then determined that the cyberhacker was Christian Del Amo, an 18-year-old who was known as a modder and had a site for selling modded Xbox 360 hard disks on iOffer.com, an eBay-like site. The modder advertised 250-gigabyte Western Digital hard drives, loaded with 125 hacked games, for $150.

IPCybercrime handed the case over to the Miami-Dade police department. They conducted a buy-bust sting where Del Amo had sent a “runner” to make the exchange. The runner gave them a disk with the Modern Warfare 2 limited edition image on it. That meant that not only was Del Amo making pirated digital copies on DVDs, he was also sophisticated enough to know how to make disks that look like legitimate copies. On his Twitter account, Del Amo was in a conversation with an underground hologram maker. Holograms can be used to make the disks look like legitimate copies of the game. Those who bought the pirated game would be able to play it in modded Xbox 360s.

“This kid was in a position to sell thousands of these,” Holmes said.

Police interrogated the runner, who led them to Del Amo’s home. They then arrested Del Amo yesterday (pictured right). Del Amo’s attorney has not returned a call for comment. The whole process, from finding the first tip to the bust, took less than a week. While the operation snagged a perpetrator, it didn’t move fast enough to prevent the massive copying of the game on the torrents on the Internet.

“Hopefully it is a lesson,” said Holmes. “If you try to do piracy on a large scale, you will get caught. When you use the Internet, you always leave tracks somewhere.”

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s shares were up 6 percent in after-hours trading. Nvidia predicted that fourth quarter revenues (for the period that closes at the end of January) would be up 2 percent from the third quarter. That was also above what Wall Street expected. Nvidia’s chips are used in desktop computers, laptops, graphics workstations, servers and game consoles. It new Tegra chip is the brain of Microsoft’s new Zune HD music handheld.

The company is enjoying a recovery in the PC market as well as the overall chip sector. Consumer demand, including a strong back-to-school shopping season, helped push revenues higher. Growth was strong in every segment of Nvidia’s business, said David White, chief financial officer. Third quarter net income was $107.6 million, up from $61.7 million a year ago. Revenues a year ago were $897.7 million.

While the rising industry tide is lifting Nvidia, it faces tough competition from Advanced Micro Devices, which launched a new generation of graphics chips in September. Nvidia hasn’t yet launched its new chip, code-named Fermi. That could lead to a loss in market share. In that sense, Nvidia is lucky there’s an industry recovery now.

The company credited a good reception for its major franchise games: Guitar Hero 5, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, and its World of Warcraft online subscription game.

Revenues for the quarter were $703 million (GAAP), compared with its outlook of $680 million. On a non-GAAP basis, revenues were $755 million, compared with its outlook of $700 million. GAAP earnings per share were 1 cent, compared with its previously forecast number of 3 cents a share loss. Non-GAAP earnings per share were 4 cents, compared to non-GAAP EPS expectations of 3 cents a share.

Even with the good results, chief executive Bobby Kotick warned in a conference call that unemployment remains  historic highs and so the larger economy’s weakness makes predicting consumer behavior harder. The good thing, he says, is that the company’s line-up for the holiday season is anchored by four of the strongest franchises in the history of video games.

Analysts have been under the impression that music game sales have been weak. But in September, Activision Blizzard said that music game sales in the U.S. were up 72 percent compared to a year ago. Activision Blizzard also saw strong sales of Call of Duty World at War map packs, which extend the online playing experience of its older World at War game. To date, those map packs have sold 7.5 million units. Activision Blizzard believes it grew its U.S. market share from 13.3 percent a year ago to 16.4 percent in the third quarter.

Kotick said that the fourth quarter release schedule is strong with titles such as Bakugan Battle Brawlers, Band Hero, Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, DJ Hero and Tony Hawk: RIDE. The company said its 2009 outlook remains unchanged. Modern Warfare 2 is expected to be the biggest game launch of the year when it hits stores next Tuesday.

“It could lead to a record level of consumption in sales and hours played compared to other forms of entertainment,” Kotick said.

The Tony Hawk: Ride game has a physical skateboard that comes with it. Gamers can stand on it and feel like they’re riding a real skateboard. Kotick said the two-year product development represents the largest investment the company has made in the franchise.

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, which has more than 11 million subscribers worldwide, relaunched in China on Sept. 19. The game has more than 4 million players in China, but the fate of the game is up in the air in China as one government agency, at war with another agency, declared that the game had to shut down paid play earlier this week. Activision Blizzard said one of its risk factors is the ability for its partner, NetEase.com, to continue operating a paid version of WoW in China without interruption. During the call, Blizzard chief Mike Morhaime refused to criticize the Chinese government for its move and said NetEase.com would do the communicating on the matter with the Chinese agency in question.

Overall software sales were lower than expected due to weakness on the Nintendo Wii, whose price wasn’t cut until the end of September. For 2009, the company expects to deliver GAAP revenues of $4.05 billion and GAAP earnings per share of 26 cents.  On a non-GAAP basis, the company expects revenues of $4.5 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of 63 cents.

For the fourth quarter, Activision Blizzard expects to deliver GAAP revenues of $1.33 billion and GAAP loss per share of 4 cents a share. On a non-GAAP basis, the company expects revenues of $2.22 billion and 43 cents per share in earnings. Software sales are likely to be flat compared to a year ago in the quarter. About 50 percent of sales in the fourth quarter are expected to happen in December.

In 2010, the company expects Blizzard will account for a lot of growth thanks to the launch of Starcraft II and an expansion pack for WoW, dubbed Cataclysm. But it declined to offer a specific forecast for next year.

In August, Kevin Halpern filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Shukla. He alleges that he helped start the company in 2006 with Shukla but was cut out of promised stock ownership after a third founder, Michael Liu, joined the startup, according to the suit filed in Superior Court in Alameda County.

Offerpal declined comment. The lawsuit does not name Offerpal itself. Shukla declined to comment, and Halpern’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Shukla has been in the limelight this week because of a public battle with Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington over the ethics of offers, which are special ad deals that users of social games can accept in lieu of paying for items in a game. She also stepped down as CEO yesterday as the company hired George Garrick to replace her. In an interview, she said she will remain at the company.

This lawsuit is another headache that will keep the company in the limelight. In Silicon Valley, where the stakes in founding startups are so high, such disputes among founders are common. Facebook recently settled a founder dispute over the beginnings of the company and restored the name of Eduardo Saverin as a co-founder of the company — presumably along with a large settlement fee.

Shukla has said that the idea for Offerpal arose after she signed up for an Amazon.com credit card in exchange for an offer for $30 off her Amazon purchases. But in the lawsuit, Halpern paints the company’s beginnings differently. He says that Shukla and he formed a close professional relationship between 2003 and 2006. She even invited him to her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Shukla, who had founded Rubric, contacted Halpern in April, 2006, to tell him she was moving on from her latest startup, mybuys.com. She wanted to start a social network and wanted to know from Halpern what the latest trends among youths were.

Halpern said he began researching ideas. In May, 2006, they met for lunch at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, Calif., where Halpern alleges that Shukla promised he would get 15 percent to 20 percent ownership in the new startup, although they had no idea what they were going to do yet. In June, Shukla invited Liu, a successful entrepreneur, to join them. Halpern found that the social networking market was getting too crowded, as Friendster and Facebook were already off to a head start. Then he set up a meeting with Jonathan Abrams, a major thinker on social networks who had a lot of knowledge of MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. Abrams suggested that they set up a business to feed offers, trials and surveys to social networking users as an alternative way to pay for goods in social networks.

After that meeting, Halpern, Shukla and Liu spent several weeks conceiving the Offerpal offers platform. In July, 2006, they agreed to create a company called Offerpal. They tried to get the web address but had to settle for myofferpal.com. They met again with Abrams on Aug. 1, 2006, to seek his feedback. After that, Halpern alleges, the monetization engine concept for Offerpal was solidified. By September, 2006, Halpern says he had attended more than 50 meetings on the subject. But as they incorporated and divided up the stock, Liu told Halpern that he would not be considered a founder and was only a “friend of the company.” Halpern demanded his stock from Shukla, but she allegedly told him he would get no equity and threatened legal action against him. The company was incorporated as Offerpal Media in October, 2006. The suit alleges that Abrams was promised advisory shares but did not receive them.

If Halpern wins the suit, the damages could be lucrative, since Offerpal has since registered more than 160 million users in the past two years.

[Update: Jonathan Abrams sent this comment via email: I often take meetings with entrepreneurs who want my advice, as a favor to a mutual friend.  I'm a bit hazy on the details, since it was three years ago, but I believe in 2006 I met with Anu Shukla as a favor to Kevin Halpern, and helped them with some early ideas that may have evolved into OfferPal.  I didn't receive any compensation, and I don't expect to get stock for just some advice and a couple of meetings.  It was just a favor from my perspective.  You are correct that I'm not a party to any lawsuit involving OfferPal, and I don't really know much about this company or these lawsuits.]

In the meantime, EA continues to expand into social games on its own. Today, it launched Spore Islands, a spin-off from the create-a-creature Spore game in launched on the PC last year. It will be interesting to see if the game can get traction. Spore hasn’t set the world on fire as originally expected in the last year, though it has sold in the millions and EA is investing heavily in Spore sequels.

But the Facebook audience — as many as 300 million users — hasn’t fallen in love with brands. The top games are titles such as FarmVille, Cafe World, Restaurant Society, and Pet Society. Those games are from social game startups such as Zynga and Playfish. The games spread from friend to friend in a viral way, so advertising and brands don’t seem to matter so much — at least so far — on Facebook. The audiences, meanwhile, are huge, with more than 100 million active users among the top 10 games alone.

Spore Islands, from EA’s Maxis studio, sets up a “survival of the fittest” competition among players. Gamers can invite friends to join an island, create creatures, and set them loose in a kind of natural selection process in a two-dimensional landscape.

Caryl Shaw, senior producer of Spore Islands, said the choices of a player’s friends will directly affect the game experience that someone has. The game will remain active whether the player is logged in or not. The goal is to get your species to dominate life on as many islands as possible.

There’s a micro-transaction business model as well. Throughout the game, players can earn and purchase DNA points that they can use to modify their creature’s stats or customize their creature’s appearance with fun accessories such as hats, animations, holiday-themed items, and more. Progress is tracked on both global and friends-only leaderboards which show who is racing to the top of the food chain.

It sounds like an interesting game, but it will be a test as to whether EA can break into the market without the same kind of cross-promotion network that Zynga has as a result of having FarmVille with 62 million monthly active users. By the way, EA and Playfish both decline comment on the acquisition rumors.

Unit sales collectively fell in the U.S. and United Kingdom markets, while Japan saw an increase in the quarter ended Sept. 30, according to the Top Global Markets report from NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track Ltd. and Enterbrain. The Japanese console game software market grew 15 percent, compared to a 20 percent decline a year ago. That’s because Japan saw the launch of a couple of big titles: Dragon Quest IX and Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver. Dragon Quest isn’t as popular in the Western markets, while the Pokemon title hadn’t launched abroad in the third quarter.

Console software grew 7 percent in unit sales compared to a year ago, and portable software grew 19 percent in Japan. But year to date, Japan’s software market is down 9 percent.

The United Kingdom saw its biggest drop in unit sales, with figures down 19 percent. Portable game sales in the U.K. fell 34 percent, and console software was down 12 percent. The U.S. saw a 9 percent decline overall, with console sales down 8 percent and portable sales down 14 percent.

Year-to-date unit sales in the United States and the United Kingdom saw declines in both console software and portable game software, with total unit sales for the United States declining 8 percent and United Kingdom unit sales declining by 13 percent. Both Ubisoft and THQ reported results that were in line with or close to expected results yesterday.

Although he is working on big console and PC game projects for id (and its new owner ZeniMax) such as Doom 4 and Rage, Carmack stole time to create the iPhone game, Doom Classic. With 36 levels, this shooting game is a repeat of the original title where you play a space marine who has to wade knee deep in the dead and hold off an onslaught of demons after a mining colony on Mars accidentally opens a portal into Hell. Doom Classic is now available on the iPhone. Here’s our interview with Carmack about how he made it.

VB: Can you tell us how you got Doom Classic onto the iPhone?

JC: This is one of those cases where I’m loving the iPhone work with the classic games because it gives me some real solid ammunition for the first time on the tangible benefits of what we as a company get from having released the source code for our games all those years ago. I have always had to make the argument that we get good will and there are intangible benefits. With both Wolfenstein 3D Classic and Doom Classic for the iPhone, instead of going to find the original source code, resurrect it, and make it compile on an auto compiler, I was able to start with this well maintained cross-platform source code base that people have been improving for years. It did not take me long at all to take the work I had done with Wolfenstein 3D Classic and the open-source Doom code that I started with and get the game up and running on the iPhone in less than a week. The remaining work on it was about trying to polish the interface in terms of making the controls as responsive as I could get them on the iPhone, improving the performance and working on the networking.

VB: How long did it take, and how many people worked on it?

JC: It was just me doing the code, and I Shanghaied one of the artists to do icons and things like that. The development all told is hard to estimate. I jumped around doing other things. It was maybe six weeks of serious work. The reason it took so long was because we tried to be good businesspeople and worked around other release dates. I kind of wish we hadn’t. I thought if we rushed it out after two months of Wolfenstein 3D Classic sales on the iPhone, then that might have been a better release time. But the scheduling just wasn’t right for me to put the last couple of days into it. It was only last month where we said we had to get it done and I spent two more days on it and then submitted it to Apple.

VB: Did you take any lessons from your earlier iPhone games like Doom Resurrection and apply it to this?

JC: There were certainly technical details like running in multiple threads. I got more skilled on the platform itself. We went back and forth on the music on Wolfenstein 3D Classic and Doom Classic. We wound up sharing some code back and forth on that. Most of the technical work was learning how the iPhone plays out relative to the underlying hardware. What are the system software and hardware issues? It’s a continuous process of experimenting with user-interface design. I started with the Wolfenstein 3D Classic interface but there are a few new wrinkles. I made positive steps, but a lot of people played Wolfenstein 3D Classic on the iPhone. So any changes I made to the interface really ticked some people off. If you spent 10 hours playing Wolfenstein 3D Classic, any change in the interface means it won’t feel right to you. So I regret I didn’t have the exact same interface.

VB: Is the interface different from Doom Resurrection?

JC: It’s completely different. Doom Resurrection pulls the user through the world and you just aim at targets. It’s on rails. Doom Classic is much more like Wolfenstein 3D Classic, a shooter with free form movement. You move around, turn, change weapons and shoot.

VB: How does it work on the older iPhone and the newer iPhone 3GS model?

JC: It works fine on the older iPhone. The biggest performance glitch you have on this game is that the Apple system software handles multitouch really really poorly. Apple is aware of this now. The 3.1 iPhone system software made some improvements on it. But fully a third of the CPU time can be sucked up by the multitouch when you have two thumbs on the screen. It’s appallingly bad. They are making some steps to address that. A large chunk of the processing is completely out of my hands. A later release — I’m not sure when Apple has it scheduled — will have a direct, low-level interface into the touchscreen. That will make all of that wasted processing vanish. The bottom line is, the game plays great on every iPod Touch and iPhone ever made.

VB: Does it have better performance on the iPhone 3GS?

JC: No. There is no win on that. The other phones can still play the game at 30 frames per second. You never drop a frame on a 3GS. But there are no extra features. I am excited about doing a tech demo for the 3GS. I believe I can actually retarget some of the mega-texture content creation stuff that we are creating for the big id tech 5 games. I don’t know if I want to make a game out of it or if I want to throw it out there and say, gee, look at this. I am excited about playing with that technology when I get time on my hands.

VB: If you target the iPhone 3GS as a base platform, you could probably do something interesting.

JC: I think we could do the real Xbox Doom 3 game on a 3GS if we targeted it exclusively. That is pushing it a bit. You could probably get that kind of visual fidelity.

VB: That’s starting to get exciting, graphically.

JC: Yeah, very much so.

VB: How well have some of these games sold and, considering the time you put into them, is the trade-off pretty good and does it pay off?

JC: The classic games, where I don’t spend much time, are very lucrative. We have been very happy with Wolfenstein 3D Classic sales. Doom Resurrection was an experiment. It was the very first game that id Software funded completely out of pocket. We have always instead made publishers cough up money with a guarantee. We were doing it ourselves. We took money from our bank account and paid an outside development company. That was a bit of a gamble. It was before we saw the sales results from Wolfenstein 3D Classic. But it did earn out completely and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit and it is still earning revenue. We expect Doom Classic to be the biggest seller out of all of them. It’s the biggest intellectual property and has the biggest nostalgia factor. We have made more money in the traditional cell phone market, the Java/Brew market, where we have sold a few million units. But developing on those is so much less fun. You have to cram everything into these ridiculously small memory limits and worry about compatibility across 300 handsets. We are in the process of winding down our traditional cell phone development in favor of iPhone development.

VB: How do you feel about the iPhone platform now?

JC: There are definitely a set of system software things that should improve like multitouch handling. That’s at the top of the list. There are issues with Bluetooth support. One of the spectacular things is that Graeme Divine, who used to work for me at id, is now at Apple in their software division. I have a great man on the inside helping me get questions answered and things accomplished. It will be very good for the evolution of the platform going forward.

VB: It sounds like Apple has really stepped up the game developer support?

JC: Yes, they have. Our relationship with Apple is kind of a rollercoaster. We are very tight for periods. Then I say something negative in a press interview and then the word goes out that no one is supposed to speak to me for six months or something. But the iPhone relationship has been pretty good. They have hired some good people to support game development explicitly. They are doing a better job at that than they ever did on the Mac platform.

VB: They have had some new things like the free-to-play virtual goods model. Does that interest you?

JC: Every product we are doing is an experiment. We did a free version that didn’t make any difference on Wolfenstein 3D Classic sales. We originally wrote the setup for the in-app commerce but just made it a free update. We are still feeling our way around on business models here. Our current plan of record is to make discreet, separate apps with different price points. Probably we will have in-app commerce. We are not final on any of that. That is subject to change on a whim.

VB: Apple said there are 100,000 apps today. Others have had the problem of not getting noticed and not selling for a long period in the top ranks. You seem to have less problem getting noticed. You have brand recognition.

JC: There is no doubt that having a PR team and recognizable intellectual property helps. But the iPhone is still a vastly superior platform for an unknown developer to break into than anywhere else. If you look at the top 50 games, there are lots of quirky little games that don’t have a major publisher behind them. And they’re doing great. It’s still a great platform for a few guys in a garage to make something for.

VB: Some developers try to increase loyalty by creating social networks around their games.

JC: Those are excellent moves on their part. But it doesn’t really fit with the older catalog titles that we are doing now. I did spend time with our Quake Live team at id to figure out what experience we had with back-room infrastructure for Quake Live that we could apply to mobile titles. We didn’t really come to a conclusion. I hope to have one iPhone release a quarter, a combination of new titles and older titles. There are so many things I’d like to explore. We don’t have the time or resources to pursue all of them.

VB: So this Doom Classic game is a longer title?

JC: Yes, it’s longer. It has the original Doom with three episodes and a fourth episode created later. It is 36 levels. We have a total of 110 commercial Doom levels if we count Final Doom and all of the others. I’m not sure yet what I am going to do with all of those. We might stream them out an episode at a time. We might do a super edition with everything. We might try downloadable content. We haven’t reached a firm direction on that.

VB: That answers some of the criticism that Doom Resurrection was too short. Do you find people have an appetite for longer games on the iPhone?

JC: We intentionally did not try to make Doom Resurrection very long. It was fairly expensive as a development. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was at that point the most expensive development cost for an iPhone game. It cost quite a bit of money to develop. It was an experiment to go out at $9.99. If iPhone games are going to approach the quality of console games, they will have to support higher price points. But the market isn’t accepting that now. I don’t think we will have another $9.99 release in the coming year. That influences what we can do.

VB: Is piracy a concern on the iPhone?

JC: It could be I am reading the market wrong. But it is not a concern to us. At this point, we consider it to be like console game piracy, which is small. Only fringe hackers will pirate games and go to the trouble, compared to the casual piracy on the PC which is rampant.

VB: So it sounds like you are having a lot of fun on the iPhone.

JC: I am having a lot of fun with the iPhone and I am sad I won’t spend much time on it for a couple of months at least. We have major curnches coming up on Rage and Doom 4. But I am going to come back to it sometime next year.

Ngmoco’s Eliminate Pro shooting game moved to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s app download store after its launch on Monday. The new game uses a new business model made possible by Apple’s recent change in policy allowing purchases of virtual goods to be made from inside free games.

Previously, Apple only allowed such purchases to be made inside paid games. But that didn’t enable the “free to play” business model that has worked so well on Facebook and other social networks. In these games, players start playing the games for free. Then they buy a virtual good such as a weapon for a small price once they need it.

In Eliminate Pro, players can challenge each other in multiplayer shooting matches over Wi-Fi or the 3G phone network. The player winds up paying for time, much like putting quarters into arcade machines in the past. When you start playing the game, you can join multiplayer combat games. Each time you play, you use a portion of a “power cell.” At some point, to continue playing, you have to purchase more power cells. If you want to play for free, you have to wait a certain time for the power cell to recharge. If you want to skip that wait, you have to shell out some money. The key is that the game can generate recurring revenue.

“This business model will be transformative for our company,” said Neil Young, chief executive of San Francisco-based Ngmoco, in an interview. “We are now operating a game as an ongoing service.”

The usage-based monetization could prove to be more lucrative than requiring players to pay to download a game. On the AppStore, it’s hard for games to break into the top 100 ranks, since there are more than 100,000 apps available. And those that do make it to No. 1 rarely stay there for more than a couple of weeks. Hence, the revenues associated with even a No. 1 hit on the iPhone don’t add up to much. But if a game is popular enough and players are willing to pay for usage time, then it can generate revenues for an extended time, Young said.

Of course, it’s hard to strike the balance between generating usage revenue and annoying users who don’t want to dish out lots of money. Ngmoco tested Eliminate Pro in the Canadian market and tweaked it to get that balance for the final product. Young said the company switched to the new business model after acquiring the development studio Miraphonic. The company then began retooling its whole product line. Other titles coming soon are Touch Pets and some unannounced games.

Ngmoco also had a hand in the No. 1 free game. Freeverse’s Skee Ball uses Ngmoco’s Plus+ developer platform, which adds cross-promotion, achievements, multiplayer challenges, leaderboards and user socializing to a game. Developers use Ngmoco’s platform to publish games that can be promoted to millions of other users. Full told, Ngmoco’s games have been downloaded more than 20 million times. That means that Plus+ developers can launch games with the potential to reach lots of those users via the cross-promotion capabilities of the Plus+ technology.

Young said that more than 20 games in the AppStore are using the Plus+ platform. And the company announced two new game studios are using it today: Flipside5 and Backflip Studios. Backflip will use Plus+ in upcoming games such as Harbor Havoc 3D. The goal is to build the largest network of social games on the iPhone with Plus+, Young said.

Ngmoco was founded in 2008 and has received funding from Kleiner Perkins, Maples Investments and Norwest Venture Partners. Rivals for the Plus+ platform include Aurora Feint and Scoreloop.

These claims would be remarkable for any battery. What makes the company even more unique is that ReVolt is developing larger-scale and more reliable batteries using zinc-air technology, which has been abandoned by most energy storage companies for being too fickle for long-term recharging.

Typically, zinc-air cells give out after a couple months, making them fit only for button-cell applications like watches and hearing aids. ReVolt is hoping to turn this around, making them work through 500 and 2,000 recharge cycles. If it can, it will scale them up for electric vehicle and grid storage capacities, and offer them at a more affordable price than competing battery makers.

By combining hypercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries, ReVolt supplies the fast-discharge “peak” power in an automotive system — that “oomph” you feel when you stomp on the gas. Then it uses zinc-air cells as the general motive force that a Tesla Motors’ Roadster could use to travel over 600 miles on one charge.

If zinc-air batteries become a reality, cell phones could go unplugged for days at a time. Laptops would become more portable that ever. Black & Decker cordless blenders could be used in true wilderness conditions without backup batteries. With three times the storage potential of lithium-ion batteries of similar size, zinc air batteries could make almost any appliance imaginable more useful and reliable. On top of that, the cells use less exotic and more stable materials, making them cheaper.

This technology has been around for years. So what’s the holdup?

Zinc air cells tend to jam after you recharge them several times. The zinc branches out from the electrode and shorts out, the electrolytic solution gets drawn into the porous “air” electrode and clogs it, the humidity changes in the battery. In a word, they are fragile. ReVolt is hoping to make them less so, reaching for commercial viability with 500 to 2,000 recharge cycles. Right now, the highest number reached is 100 before the cell dies. The company seems to be well on its way.

When ReVolt announced that they were developing a zinc slurry pumping device inside its batteries to prevent clogging, people took notice. The technology is still in the midst of being scaled for EV and grid applications, and refined for long-term durability. In order to make them suitable for EV use, the cells will have to be flattened for easy packaging and installation — not an easy task in itself.

Given the progress the company has made so far, the question isn’t “if” it can make zinc-air a rechargeable energy source, it’s “when.” With an estimated two to five years left in the development phase before EV batteries and grid storage solutions become viable, there is plenty of time for competitors to release their own breakthroughs.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Get your discounted early-bird tickets before Nov. 5 at GreenBeat2009.com.

Offerpal Media has named George Garrick as chief executive. He replaces founder Anu Shukla, who has been in the midst of a fiery debate about the ethics of the business of offers, which are special ads that direct users to participate in a promotional deal as an alternative payment for a game or social app.

Shukla stirred lots of debate since Friday, when she got in a verbal tussle with Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington, who challenged Shukla about scam offers in social games. Shukla fought back, saying Arrington’s accusations were “shit, double shit and bullshit.” The debate continued this week as Shukla offered a rebuttal Q&A in reaction to Arrington’s stories and industry players reacted as well.

Fremont, Calif.-based Offerpal has otherwise been a quiet player in the ecosystem of social networks. Social games such as Zynga’s FarmVille have been huge hits on Facebook, which has grown to more than 300 million players. About 90 percent of users play social games for free. But about 10 percent will buy virtual goods such as poker chips or farm tractors to improve the game experience. Most pay with credit cards. But Offerpal has an alternative payment system for those who don’t have money or just prefer offers, such as a cell phone subscription deal.

There are a lot of competitors in the business, but Offerpal has handled transactions for more than 160 million consumers in the past two years. Garrick’s job is to keep it going and, perhaps, to make sure that Offerpal comes out on the winning side of the current debate over the ethics of offers.

Garrick (above) was previously named CEO of Mochi Media in November, 2008. But he didn’t last long in that job. He has more than 25 years of experience in tech, ad, and consumer businesses. Garrick was on a team that took Information Resources from $2 million in revenue to $300 million. And he was CEO of Flycast Communications, a direct-response ad network that had a $500 million initial public offering and then was acquired for $2.3 billion.

“I have known George for a long time,” said Shukla (right) in a statement. “After many months of searching, I believe that George is the best CEO to scale the company to new heights. I am looking forward to working with him closely.”

The timing is, of course, very interesting. [Update: I just took a call from Garrick. He said the timing of the debate and his appointment today was coincidental, as the transition has been planned for weeks. At the same time, he wasn't able to tell me what position Shukla will take or if she will remain at the company. He said that the appointment is not a surprise, but he did tell the company's 50 employees today for the first time.

Garrick declined to comment on how Shukla handled the debate with Arrington and her vigorous defense of the offer business. He did say that Offerpal as a company will be a leader when it comes to conducting an ethical offer business. He noted that the industry is young and is going through the same kind of transition that the Internet ad business went through with banner ads. Some time ago, deceptive banner ads were running and that led to the creation of the Internet Advertising Bureau to govern how advertisers should behave. The same pattern is likely to play out here and it will be good for the industry, Garrick said.]

[Update 2: Shukla said in an interview this evening that she has known Garrick for three years since he was at Wine.com. She said she plans to stay at Offerpal, which she described as a "rocket ship," but the management team has not yet identified her exact title. She said they had always planned to make the announcement today and that they didn't want to change the date just because of the debate that started on Friday. She said the board chose Garrick because of his solid reputation and experience in the ad business. Shukla remains Offerpal's largest shareholder and said she plans to continue working 60 hours a week.]

VB: How did you get involved with V?

JH: When I discovered that Warner Bros. actually owned the intellectual property of V through my co-worker Jamie O’Brien Moore, we got very excited. Jamie and I actually sat down and thought, “How could we, re-imagine what V was to make it into something that made sense for the audience that we know today.” I believe that the audience that I’m used to serving through videogames is fairly intelligent and also likes to have a certain amount of depth associated with the content that they’re viewing most of the time. Plausibility is a huge factor when it comes to science fiction for it to really stick. With V, everything needed to make sense. There needed to be rhyme and reason for everything, so we spent months creating a bible for this universe.

VB: Can you explain how other mediums will be involved with V?

JH: No, because doing so would expose and degrade the fun that I know everybody wants to have with it.  All I can tell you is I spent a huge part of my career dealing with online and interactive components. I know how powerful and effective they are in terms of helping to support and drive ancillary story, tangent story, or a main story if the integration is done well enough. But in order to actually have a television show that can support such a thing, you have to conceive of these items all together at the beginning, which is what we did. Part of the fun of V is the fact that we have thought through, with great energy, the background for things, and we’re able to create content elsewhere that works within that framework. There are some fun discoveries to be made. If I tell you exactly all the different things, then it ruins it.

VB: Will you direct viewers to websites through the show, itself, like Lost did?

JH: Well, certainly there will be those kinds of exploitations, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You have to think far more abstract, and far more plans within plans, so to speak. You will never be directed to these things. You will find these things naturally through your own interest in those things legitimately, and those things will guide and direct you to potentially have interest in V, the series, itself. These will be choices that you make on your own. It’s a very covert approach.

VB: Will a videogame be part of these plans?

JH: Well, there are obvious videogame opportunities that exist if the show is successful, and if it’s going to continue with everybody. You don’t want to get ahead of yourself. We still have to premier and prove that what we’ve been doing actually is something of interest. Yes, there’s obvious opportunity for directly related videogames. There are also opportunities for interactive things indirectly associated with the show in very creative and interesting ways.

VB: How will you solve the conundrum of creating a game based on a TV series that doesn’t seem outdated by the time it hits retail shelves – like we’ve seen with Ubisoft’s Lost game and others?

JH: The challenge you have with things like Lost or whatever is they’re telling this linear story, and you have to try to get the game out in time to match what’s going on.  That’s fine, but that’s very difficult. “V” starts off as a universe that’s been created much like the Star Wars universe. Whether or not your game tracks with the story of Luke Skywalker is irrelevant to whether or not a Star Wars videogame is viable. And you can actually do something that works in conjunction with whatever may be showing on television for Star Wars. For example, you can do a whole videogame about a random storm trooper attacking the planet Hoth. What we created with V supports that kind of exploration.  The kind of games that I would hope would be developed in the future relating to V are not going to try to track the specific narrative of the television series. If you want that narrative, watch the TV show. However, if you want to participate in what’s going on in the “V” universe, you can actually have a game that does that regardless of where you are in a season. It still will be interesting, and it still will be additive to what has been happening in the season.

VB: Having come from the games business, do you see Hollywood opening its doors to other game creators?

JH: I think that my ability to get traction in Hollywood has created a slight crack in the door on the perception. What’s going to be the biggest factor is how well V performs as a television series. If it works…if people watch and enjoy what’s being presented, then that will crack the door open a little bit further to altering the perception. Hollywood will start to look at creative people in the videogame industry as viable authors, or resources, to come in and create interesting television and film programming. I’m trying really hard to sort of represent some of the best, because I’m one of the first people to do it. But I’m certainly not the most talented, or the smartest of the people in the videogame business. If I can come in and do this, and show it successfully, I’m hoping that it helps pave the way for others in the videogame business to push their talents into this area. Because honestly, I would watch the programming they come up with.

Now the company is publishing its own multiplayer online game, Shattered Horizon, on the PC. It’s only logical. Futuremark’s 3DMark and PCMark benchmarks — which are software programs that test the hardware in a PC — were huge investments that required the work of talented game developers and engineers. The benchmark had to stress every new feature of a the latest graphics technology. Those benchmarks have now been run more than 30 million times.

The fact that the company could pull off this game is no small achievement. But it shot for a high-end graphics target and used the expertise that it cultivated over more than a decade. Everybody bemoans the high cost of making high-quality 3-D games these days. But Futuremark managed to do it on its own with venture money.

Futuremark’s 3-D benchmarks themselves were cool to look at, since they had stunning artistry. So Futuremark took the team that created those graphics and set it loose on Shattered Horizon, a sci-fi combat game where the fighting takes place in a completely simulated outerspace environment. That means that astronauts move around in zero gravity and have to worry about enemies coming from any direction. As many as 32 players can fight in one arena. The environments range from space stations to asteroids. The graphics in the game are top notch, and the simulation of outer space is among the best there is.

Tero Sarkkinen, chief executive of Futuremark, showed me the game a couple of times over the past 2.5 years it took to develop it. The company is self publishing it on its web site. Futuremark was founded in 1997 and has 65 employees. There are no serious competitors left in its benchmarking business.

The company has raised $8.8 million to date from Nexit Ventures and Pohjola Capital Partners, but it used most of that to get its benchmark business off the ground from 1999 to 2001. Now it has financed this game with $8 million of its own profits and some funding from outside sources. The downloadable game is available via digital distribution for $19.95 from Valve’s Steam online game network. Early reviews are coming in positive. Of course, I lied in the headline. Futuremark is still investing heavily in its benchmark business, with business growing fast in a number of areas and investments into new areas such as smart phones.

Linden Lab is announcing the open beta of its Second Life Enterprise product today. Companies can buy a server appliance with a secure version of Second Life for $55,000. The virtual world will be accessible via a company intranet and will be closed off from other users on the web-based virtual world. It’s sort of like opening up some private spaces in an otherwise public virtual world. The work on the technology has been in the works since 2008, when IBM and Linden Lab struck a partnership for creating a secure version of Second Life.

San Francisco-based Linden Lab has been working on the technology for the past year and already has a bunch of beta testers, including IBM, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Navy. Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor, uses its version of Second Life Enterprise to train workers how to use some very expensive equipment that can’t be used for practice in the real world.

Enterprise users will also get access to the Second Life Work Marketplace, a kind of app store for enterprises that will debut in the first quarter of 2010. About 14 companies and other organizations participated in kicking the tires of the enterprise world. Some of the companies created assets inside the public, web-connected version of Second Life. Now they can pull that behind their secure firewalls so others can’t access it. (Yes, you might consider that to be the equivalent of buying a park and making it private; but I doubt that Second Life denizens are going to complain about having fewer corporations visible in their world.)

Chris Collins, general manager for enterprise at Linden Lab, said the benefits of using the Second Life Enterprise include holding meetings, staging conferences, training people, collaborating, prototyping and simulating. Users can create their own avatars, or characters, and move about in a 3-D environment. They can talk using spatial voice technology, meaning things get louder the closer you get to someone talking. There are seven pre-packaged virtual regions for enterprise users to explore, including an all-hands auditorium, two conference centers, and a number of other spaces.

Administrators can oversee the virtual environment. The marketplace will let customers tailor their Second Life Enterprise environments with goods that they purchase from third-party developers.