Social networking gaming company Zynga has raised $15.18 million as an extension to their second round of funding. The company has 196 million users on Facebook playing their games. Zynga previously raised $40 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins, Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group, Institutional Venture Partners, and Union Square Ventures.

Zynga’s most recent game FarmVille is the most played game on Facebook as of today. Zynga is believed to be making $100 million in revenues this year. However the company had offers within the games that were often scams as admitted by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.

For example, users could get more poker chips if they downloaded the Zwinky toolbar. “We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable,” stated Pincus.

About 20,000 people have signed a petition to have the Indian flag added to Zynga’s Farmville game. Farmville is a popular game on social networks that allows users to manage and build a farm in a similar fashion as Sim City. After building a farm, players will be able to mark their farm by adding a flag. The United Kingdom and United States have flags available for planting, but nothing for India yet.

Indian people on forums and blogs said that they were disappointed that their flag was not available. One user said that they were even willing to pay to have the option. The petition even inspired people of different origins to start their own petitions to have their own flags added.

Farmville has about 56 million users. By adding a link to another Zynga game called Café World, about 10 million people have joined that game in a week.

Many people believe that Facebook applications are losing appeal, but games made by Zynga are a major exception. Zynga has already banked on games such as Texas Hold’Em, Mafia Wars, and FarmVille. Now the social gaming company has another hit on their hands called Café World. Café World hit 10 million users in just one week.

How did Zynga do it? Cross-promotion. They linked Café World through FarmVille, a game that already has 56 million users according to AppData. Zynga has been making money by selling virtual goods in their games. Zynga will be making about $200 million in revenues this year alone according to Eric Eldon of Inside Social Games.

While Zynga is making a lot of revenues, one of the ways that they are making games is by taking ideas from others. FarmVille is considered to be a replica of FarmTown and Cafe World appears to be similar to Playfish’s Restaurant City.

Zynga is currently in a legal battle against another social gaming company called Playdom over company secrets. Four former Zynga employees are being accused for giving secrets to Playdom.

As I sit at home on a Saturday afternoon watching my team Michigan State University take a beating from Mac team Central Michigan University, I thought about the competition that Playdom and Zynga are having.  Instead of taking it to the football field, Zynga and Playdom are taking their competition to the court room.

This past year, Zynga sued Playdom over misleading advertising.  Zynga claimed that Playdom was comparing their game Mobsters to Zynga’s Mafia Wars game.

This past year, Zynga sued Playdom over misleading advertising.  Zynga claimed that Playdom was comparing their game Mobsters to Zynga’s Mafia Wars game.  Playdom changed around the advertising campaign since then, but now this past week Zynga sued Playdom and several other defendants again.  This time it is over breach of contract, stealing trade secrets, intereference with contracts, etc.  Four former Zynga employees were named as the defendants along with several other Playdom of secrets.

Supposedly Playdom hired some of Zynga’s employees and those employees took some trade secrets and other proprietary documents.  One of the documents was the Zynga Playbook which has a list of techniques, game behavior, customer behavario, etc.  Another ex-Zynga employee stuck 70 files on a USB storage device a couple of weeks before joining Playdom.  More details as the story develops.

Social network game designer Zynga has announced earlier this week that they have bought out MyMiniLife.  MyMiniLife allows users to design virtual homes, similar to the style used by EA game The Sims.  Zynga said that they are planning to integrate MyMiniLife into the game company’s services and technology.  MyMiniLife staff will also be working for Zynga going forward.

An example of how MyMiniLife’s technology could be used in social gaming is exampled in the form of a game called FarmVille.  FarmVille is a game that is less than 2 months old but receives over 6 million unique visitors per day.  FarmVille was actually designed by Zynga and is very similar to The Sims.  However instead of building homes, FarmVille allows the user to build a farm and set up avatars to work on them.  Online farmer players can visit each others’ farms through the game.

MyMiniLife CEO Sizhao Yang said that his company never raised venture capital money, but they did raise funding from individual investors such as Payman Pouladdej and Michael Powers.  Powers was an early employee at YouTube and was the first employee at Slide.  Pouladdej was Etsy’s first investor and also was an early investor of IMVU.

The financial details were not disclosed.  But Yang revealed that MyMiniLife has about 4 million registered users that have bought 130 million virtual goods.

[via VentureBeat]

Zynga is a company that develops games for social networks and most recently, the iPhone.  Zynga primarily focuses on multiplayer games such as Texas Hold Em’ on Facebook and MySpace.  In 2008, Zynga made about $50 million in sales.  The startup is due to make about $100 million this year according to people close to the company.  This was reported by Sarah Lacy on BusinessWeek.

Zynga was founded in June 2007 by Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron, Andrew Trader, and Steve Schoettler.  The company raised $39 million in funding from several VC firms.  Bing Gordon, EA’s former Chief Creative Officer is also on the board of directors at the company.  As of March 2009, the company had about 46 million monthly active users and about 71 million registered users.

Where does the money come from?  About 2%-10% of the users pay $1 per hour to play premium games or purchases virtual goods.  Considering that many third party developers have been complaining about the design changes on Facebook that gives them awkward web real estate on the social network, Zynga seems to be the exception.  Zynga acquired social network gaming company YoVille in July 2008.

Zynga is a social network game-making machine.  The company has just raised $29 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Avalon Ventures, and Foundry Group.  Union, Avalon, and Foundry were all previous investors.  Zynga is based out of San Francisco, Calif.

Zynga was started by Mark Pincus.  Through this round of funding, Kleiner Perkins partner and former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts Bing Gordon will join Zynga’s board of directors.  Zynga’s last round of funding was $10 million in January 2008.  Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel of the PayPal mafia were a couple of investors involved in the last round of funding.

Zynga currently has about 18 million uniques per month.  Zynga’s revenue model is advertising and selling game add-ons.  Zynga’s top games on Facebook are Poker, Blackjack, Scramble, Word Twist, PathWords, Sudoku, Sea Wars, Mafia Wars, Dragon Wars, Triumph, Attack!, My Heroes Ability, Ghost Racer, Dope Wars, and YoVille.  Zynga recently acquired YoVille.

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Zynga Game Network is a company that builds online games for social networks like Meebo, Bebo, Friendster, and Facebook.  The Zynga Game Metwork was created by Mark Pincus.  Mark Pincus also started Tribe.net and Support.com.  Currently, Zynga has 27 employees and the team have created games like Poker, Black Jack, Risk, Battleship, and Boggle for social networks.

Some of the games that Zynga has created stick out more than others.  For example, Texas Hold Em’ has thousands of users.

“People already love to play casual games,” stated Fred Wilson, partner at VC firm, Union Square Ventures. “But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting. This is like pouring gasoline on fire.”  Union Square Ventures recently led a $10 million investment in Zynga.

Zynga generates revenue by selling ads to creators of the games.  Everytime a user installs an advertiser’s application, the advertiser is expected to pay 50 cents.  Or game players are given incentives for installing advertiser applications such as increased funds for games of Black Jack.