Online Games

Whoever thought a little game of bingo might interest a venture-backed San Francisco social media company? Well, RockYou Inc. liked the online growth of Bingo by Ryzing enough to buy the Center City social gaming developer Ryzing L.L.C. for an undisclosed amount last week. A statement released by one of Ryzing's investors indicated that Ryzing's team, headed by Manu Gambhir, will join RockYou, which intends to maintain and expand the Philadelphia office. Wayne Kimmel, a partner in the Artists & Instigators venture fund, said Ryzing currently has 10 full-time equivalent employees, including six in Philadelphia.

Establish a successful collectible-card-game brand, and it's like a license to print money. "We say it all the time: Card games are essentially cardboard crack," says Ken Baumhauer, the operations manager for The Roundtable Games & Stuff store in Conshohocken. "Once you play them, you can't get enough. [Players] come in and buy pack after pack, card after card. " The hard part is getting a toehold in this highly competitive field, which is dominated by the games Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!

Annette Jeffrey clicks the orange button on the lower right of the computer screen, shuffling the tiles in her vowel-plagued rack. Her sister, Beth, who lives in Seattle, is beating her 77-38, but Jeffrey has just noticed an opportunity for a three-word score that could put her back in the game. Jeffrey is playing Scrabulous, an Internet version of Scrabble that has been burning up the social-networking site Facebook. There, according to numbers visible online, the game draws more than 610,000 players a day; an affiliated Scrabulous Web site (www.

HARRISBURG - The company seeking a contract with Gov. Corbett to run the Pennsylvania Lottery may not get paid unless its plans to expand gambling are clearly legal, state Treasurer Rob McCord said Wednesday. McCord's position could be a blow to Corbett's plans to possibly hire Britain-based Camelot Global Services, the only bidder for a 20-year contract to manage one of the nation's biggest lotteries. It could also force Corbett to seek specific approval from the legislature to allow the Pennsylvania Lottery to operate keno or online lottery games.

HARRISBURG - Democratic lawmakers are taking aim at the Corbett administration's move to privatize the Pennsylvania Lottery's management, saying it is shrouded in secrecy and will result in a corporate giveaway that diverts hundreds of millions of dollars from the state's services for the elderly. In a letter Friday, Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) asked Gov. Corbett, a Republican, for a slew of documents, including the proposed management agreement between the state and the British firm Camelot Global Services, an unredacted copy of Camelot's bid, and a full explanation of the scope of expanded lottery gambling being considered.

WOULDN'T it be great to have Wi-Fi wireless Internet connectivity everywhere for our gadgets? Someday maybe we will - if big guns like Google and Comcast and forward-thinking municipalities ever decide to build hot spots to totally blanket the town. But at the moment, we can make do with freedom-breeding, Wi-Fi signal-spreading devices such as the D-Link DAP-1320 Wireless Range Extender and Novatel's aptly named MiFi Liberate mobile hot spot.   Plug 'n' Play Designed for home use, the tiny D-Link plug-in booster does a pretty decent job of extending the signal range of your current wireless router, which improves the speed and stability of signal reception at "fringe" zones far removed from the wireless router.

Police are looking for a 17-year-old Bustleton girl who has not been seen since she left a school assembly last Monday. Shaina Fried, a senior at George Washington High School, carpooled to school that morning with friends and had made arrangements for a ride home, her parents, Sue and Gary Fried, said yesterday. But she did not show up for the ride, and no one can remember seeing her after a special assembly ended at 8:10 a.m., they said. Her parents said Shaina Fried loves the Willow Grove and Neshaminy Malls, the science fiction/fantasy shelves at Barnes & Noble, and America Online games in which players from across the country adopt different roles in fantasy adventure scenarios.

Faculty and students of St. William's School, in Lawncrest, haven't had much to cheer about lately. The Archdiocese decided to close the small school and send its pupils to St. Cecilia's, in Fox Chase. But a ray of sunshine lit up flagging spirits this spring when a shy 10-year-old girl named Josephine Nguyen won first-place honors out of 1.4 million students who competed in the nationwide "First in Math" competition. When it appeared that Josephine was going to prevail, a sign went up in front of the school, at Rising Sun Avenue and Devereaux Street, to let the world know, and faculty and fellow fourth-grade students had something to cheer.

Microsoft Corp. will be taking online users to the ball game. Under an agreement between Microsoft's MSN online division and Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Microsoft will promote MLB.com products and offer exclusive free baseball content on MSN.com. It also will give users of its paid MSN services access to live online baseball games, said Lisa Gurry, director of MSN. Gurry declined to comment on the financial terms. Yankees. Reliever Mariano Rivera closed in on a two-year contract extension with New York through 2006 that would be worth about $21 million.

We hate to say Sony, Sony, Sony, but news is news. We started out the day with Sony announcing problems with its PlayStation 3 manufacturing process; then the company said Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and others would have to wait till March for the new console. Finally, we learned that there will be only 400,000 units for Christmas launch here in the States because of Blu-ray laser shortages. And this is just one day's worth of news. All these production problems raise an interesting question.