“Our system is about driving user behavior with rewards, competition and status, creating an engaging experience on your site, and making sure users are personally invested in your site,” stated Rajat Paharia, founder/CEO of Bunchball. “You make money when users do things on your site. Nitro helps them do more things, and make you more money.”

Bunchball is a company that designs custom games for media companies and even has a Facebook Application that focuses on games. Bunchball is based in Redwood City, Calif. and has raised $4 million in funding from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures. Both of these venture companies also invested $2 million in 2006, bring Bunchball funding to $6 million in total.

Bunchball’s Facebook Application has games such as 8 Ball Pool, 9 Ball Pool, Alien Exterminator, Arcade Trivia, Football, Checkers, Chess, Pool, and Flower Power. Below is a screen shot (click to enlarge) of the user interface for Bunchball’s Facebook Application:

Bunchball also created a custom game for NBC’s The Office. Users can sign up to act as a fictional character working for Dunder-Mifflin. Dunder-Mifflin is the paper manufacturing company where the characters in The Office work. Below is a screen shot (click to enlarge):

Looking at the current trend, social gaming is becoming a hot commodity on the Internet.  I’m excited about the release of Grand Theft Auto IV and seeing how we’ll be able to play over the network.  It’d be great to see some sort of social network connected to it’s release.

Information Source:
[1] Tech Confidental: NBC uses site engagement specialist Bunchball to keep Web users glued by Olaf de Senerpont Domis
[2] paidContent: Bunchball Gets $4 Million in Second Round Funding by Rafat Ali

Redwood City, CA based company, Bunchball is a a hub for Adobe Flash games similar to Atom Entertainment’s Shockwave.com. The two providers of the $2 million investment of Bunchball funding was Adobe Systems Inc. and San Francisco based, Granite Ventures.

Ballbunch provides multi-player Flash games for social networks, blogs, and other websites. And what attracted the investment was that these games are multi-player, a feature that could promote a deeper interaction between game lovers on these social networks such as MySpace.

Almost all of the games that I have seen on Ballbunch remind me of the “retro” games from the 80′s that I used to enjoy and could see myself enjoying once again with the Ballbunch game twists. N-blox Evil Edition is a 2 player Tetris style game where when you clear 2 or more lines from your game, it adds lines of blocks for your opponent to get rid of. Remember the boardgame, Battleship? You can now play the Ballbunch version of Battleship, Sea Battle online against an opponent.

Adobe and Granite Ventures have limited partnership under a company called Adobe Ventures. Chris Hollenbeck and John Leckrone are the partners working on the Ballbunch investment. The founders of Bunchball are Rajat Paharia and Sunil Singh.

[Article Source: VentureBeat]