Live Poker Connects The iPhone to Social Nets

Live_poker
Our portfolio company Zynga quietly released Live Poker yesterday for the iPhone. Live Poker is the same Texas Hold’em game that over 1.4mm people play every day on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5. Now you can have it on the iPhone and play against your friends who are on the web at one of these social nets. Like Texas Hold’em on the social nets, Live Poker is free but there is also an upgraded version with a larger chip package for $9.99.

The reason I am blogging about this, other than to get all of you to go download the app, is because Live Poker is the first first application to leverage Facebook Connect to allow iPhone users to play with their real friends and access social information such as real player photos. Just think about that for a second. We’ve now got apps on open mobile phones connecting with apps on open social nets. It’s only a matter of time until we see more of these live mobile apps running on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and connecting to Facebook, MySpace, and other social nets.

The social web is going mobile quickly with popular mobile apps like Loopt and Twitterific. Now we are seeing popular social apps going mobile. When we sat down at the beginning of the year to identify the biggest investable trends in web apps, we put down words like open, social, playful, and mobile. Live Poker leverages all of them and is a glimpse into our future.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. lazerow

    Congrats Fred, Mark and all. I don’t have an iPhone. I hate the iPhone actually (my fingers are too fat … trying to make them slimmer through the iPhone Fat Fingers Diet … and I can’t type on it). But I just played with the app on one of my employees’ phones. I love it. Love it. Full integration through FB Connect and cross platform – one game, tons of players on many platforms. We’re working on helping brands bridge the gap between their current marketing and CRM initiatives and the social and mobile worlds. FB Connect and other similar products will be an important part of our toolkit. Congrats once again. Zynga is on fire for sure.

  2. myway

    did you put down business model on your list?

  3. Banet

    I have to say, while I haven’t been all that pro-“social net” this integration of a phone-based game with the cloud-based social network living on Facebook is clever as hell. Essentially, Facebook is quietly letting you take your social network with you wherever you go.How long is it until you can start meeting up with your Facebook friends in Worlds of Warcraft?Or having Yelp on the iPhone tell you what restaurants your Facebook friends are eating? (ok. other services already do this, but Facebook has the critical mass that they all lack)I love it.Peterhttp://www.FlashlightWorthy…Recommending books so good, they’ll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉

  4. Brett Tilford

    Sounds like a great app and I really like the facebook/iphone integration. Congratulations on the launch Fred.

  5. kenberger

    I have a development team working on iPhone and Android development, and I’m ready to declare Facebook Connect a big success.My main issue w/ the iPhone is its closed nature (like all things Apple). FB Connect allows iPhone apps to leverage the social graph, which opens unfathomable utility. Live Poker is an excellent early example. The API that FB provides is impressive to work with, btw.

  6. Graham Siener

    I thought you could already gamble on the iphone — isn’t there an e-trade app?

  7. obscurelyfamous

    I just played my first table on Live Poker a few minutes ago. Very well done and it’s great to play with actual people. I’m pretty sure a 13 year old girl just took $700 from me though.

  8. brendan_mcnulty

    This is pretty great, the dream of cross platform coming together. I’d be interested to see how many people go for the upsell vs those who keep it free. Not having an iphone I’m not sure if there are ads on the iphone, is that the other monetization strategy?

  9. Aruni S. Gunasegaram

    I played Texas Hold ‘Em for the first time a couple of weeks ago at a local Entrepreneur’s Foundation event. It was a blast and for a good cause. I lasted longer than I thought I would in the tournament. Participants were local VCs and entrepreneurs. I was an invited guest so I played the chips I had when I started, but others who had more money to spare had no qualms buying $20K more in chips when they ran out. Guess I need to go get an iPhone now and start practicing for when I do have an extra $20K laying around!

  10. natalie

    how do u gain rankings in this game eg i am at rookie now, whats next and what do i have to do to get this title