THE SOCIAL TIMES — Sometrics is today launching GameCoins.com – a community and virtual currency marketplace website targeted at social game players. GameCoins.com focuses on highlighting sometrics’ partner games, such as War Rock and Sorority Life, and then providing a marketplace and community site around those games. Gamers can chat with other players about the games, but using the marketplace they can also earn their favorite games currency using Sometrics’ offers and standard payments. GameCoins has already signed up 20k users who have used the community elements of the site to post several strategy guides to each of their favorite games...

TECHCRUNCH — gWallet, a recently launched company that partners with both brands and game developers to bring users virtual currency offers, is launching a new format for offers. Called the Brand Bar, the offers to earn virtual currency appears in a bar across the top of a social game. gWallet says that the conversion rate of users who choose to pause and leave a game to earn virtual currency is so low, that offers and advertisements need to be engaging...

VENTUREBEAT — To date, online games -- from Facebook games to massively multiplayer online games -- have been monetized not through ad revenue but through sales of virtual goods and subscriptions. WildTangent is announcing a new ad platform today that it hopes will add some balance to the business models of online game companies by giving them other revenue options...

MEDIAWEEK — The increasing number of women who play games on social networks do so with a regularity normally associated with hardcore gaming. But according to a recent study conducted by the lead generation firm Q Interactive, most women don’t associate themselves with a gaming lifestyle like the PlayStation and Xbox lovers do—and don’t care for the label "gamer." According to executives at Q Interactive (which owns CoolSavings.com), the study was conducted in January among 770 women who were likely to be familiar with online gaming and virtual worlds. It found that while 36 percent of respondents said that they play games on sites like Facebook and MySpace, 54 percent of those who do so admit to playing social games every day...

ALL FACEBOOK — In the leadup to this week’s launch of Dante’s Inferno for XBox 360, Playstation 3 and the upcoming launch of the PSP version, EA partnered with LolApps to successfully launch the Dante’s Inferno Facebook game. Looking at the numbers, the game has accumulated 4 million Monthly Active Users since its launch, and had had 1 million users in the week before the release of the console games. Lolapps was most famous for their Band of Heroes game, a Mafia Wars-style RPG with over 1,000,000 MAUs and a strong story component, but this has been eclipsed by the success of Dante’s Inferno, and represents a step forward for the company. We’ve been able to get some key statistics about the game from LolApps, and share them here...