HitFox today announced that its mobile game marketing platform AppLift raised $13 million from venture capital and growth equity firm Prime Ventures. This is AppLift’s second round of funding, after recieving its first round of funding from HitFox, an incubator focused on investing and acquiring game distribtuion and user acquisition startups.

AppLift co-founder and U.S. general manager Hanno Fichtner told Inside Mobile Apps that AppLift is generating more than one million installs per game a month for their top publishing partners. He adds that one game in the top three on the top grossing apps chart from a particular publisher, which wasn’t named, is receiving the most installs from AppLift, even more than from Facebook or Google referrals. When we last heard about install figures from AppLift, the service was driving 10,000 installs per game a day, which is approximately 300,000 a month. (more…)

WeChat now has 190 million MAU – Tencent’s deputy general manager Hou Xiaonan revealed on the final day of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Bejing that the company’s messaging app WeChat now has 190 million monthly active users (MAU). This put’s WeChat on par with U.S. messaging app competitor WhatsApp, which reveled in April that it has north of 200 million MAU.

Viber reaches 200 million user mark, launches desktop client – Mobile communication app Viber recently reached the 200 million user mark, up from its last reported user figure of 140 million in December 2012, and launched a desktop client. Viber’s main competitors are messaging apps like WhatsApp and VoIP services like Skype.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 launching this July – Electronic Arts’-owned game studio PopCap revealed that its upcoming Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time will launch sometime this July. No platforms have been revealed yet.

Gameloft announces movie tie-in mobile game for Blue Sky Studios’ Epic – French mobile game developer announced a new game based on the upcoming animated feature Epic from Fox Digital Entertainment and Blue Sky Studios. This is the second game partnership between Gameloft and Fox Digital Entertainment for a Blue Sky Studios, with Ice Age Village as the first title, which launched in April 2012. The game will launch in May to coincide with the film’s theatrical release.

Amazon launches Appstore in China – Amazon launched its Android in Appstore in China this week. Amazon becomes the first western company to offer paid Android apps in the county, beating Google to the punch since Google Play only offers free apps in China, not paid apps.

Gameloft launches Blitz Brigade for iOS and Android – Gameloft recently launched its free-to-play team-based shooter Blitz Brigade, which is takes place in a World War 2 setting. Look for our review of the game sometime next week.

Sunstorm Games currently sees 10M MAU, 1M DAU, 140M downloads – A relatively unknown mobile game developer and publisher called Sunstorm Games announced that its user base has grown to 10 million monthly active users (MAU) and one million daily active users (DAU) along with seeing 140 million downloads of its titles. The game studio’s most popular franchise is its “Maker” series, while the company has also built long-term partnerships with brands like Icee and SuperPretzel.

Game Insight brings 2020: My Country to iOS and Amazon – Russian mobile game giant Game Insight released its city builder 2020: My Country, which was first available for Android, on the Apple App Store and Amazon Appstore. The title is the follow up to Game Insight’s other city-building strategy game My Country.

Kamicat raises a round of funding from iVentureCapital – German mobile-social game maker recently raised a round of funding for an undisclosed amount from iVentureCapital. The Hanover, Germany-based Kamikat is most known for its game Kamicat Football for Facebook, which currently has five million registered users.

TenFarms raises $2.7M in a round of funding – Mobile startup TenFarms, which is working on two products — Photopoll and Adtile — recently raised $2.7 million in a round of funding from an undisclosed angel investor. The funds are going toward the deployment of Adtile, a new mobile advertising product that allows native integration with apps and websites, and to support the contiuous development of Photopoll, a multi-photo polling app.

Folks from Paltalk, MessageMe and Tango will be speaking about mobile messaging at our Inside Social Apps conference June 6 to 7 in San Francisco. Learn more here.

Kik Interactive today announced another round of funding at $19.5 million to support its rapidly growing user base and hire more employees.

“[The funding] is a sign that we are trying to build a big, sustainable company,” Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik Interactive, told us in an interview. “This round gives us the resources to support the infrastructure and hire the right people to do that.”

Livingston says the new funds will help the company buy more servers to keep up with Kik Messenger’s quick growth and hire more talented people to build out its HTML5 web-based platform for its Kik Cards.

The Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based company’s third round of funding was led by Foundation Capital, with continued support from original investors including, RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Kik also announced that it’s added Foundation Capital partner Anamitra Banerji to its board of directors. Banerji is most known for previously serving as Twitter’s first product manager and 30th employee. He also drove monetization efforts while at Twitter, where he created Promoted Trends, Promoted Accounts and more.

“Not only was he at this huge social company from early on, but was also instrumental in monetizing it,” Livingston says. “You couldn’t ask for a better guy.”

Kik’s latest funding round now brings its total funding to $29.1 million.

“We now have the resources to lead the mobile web revolution, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he says “We had the team, we had the technology, we had the user base, we had the money. Now we get to go for it.”

NARR8 gains monetization and auto play features – Motion comics app NARR8 for iPad (review) added a virtual currency called NARRs tokens, which can be used to unlock new episodes from the variety of different content series that are available. Users can acquire NARRs by just using the app as well as by purchasing the currency with real money. NARR8 also added a auto play feature for its motion comic series, which lets users continuously stream content with a one tap. In the future, NARR8 plans to turn its app into a platform, allowing third-party publishers the ability to publish and sell their content through NARR8.

Tapjoy partners with Popcornflix, launches freemium movie streaming app PopcornflixGold – Mobile advertising and publishing platform Tapjoy partnered with movie streaming service Popcornflix to launch a new mobile app for Android, named PopcornflixGold, that lets users watch movies for free on their mobile devices by engaging with ads. Similarly to a monetization model seen in mobile games, the app allows users to match movies by earning a virtual currency called FlixPoints, which can be earned by interacting with ads from the Tapjoy Marketplace.

Playnomics adds behavioral targeted push messaging feature to its PlayRM platform – Predictive analytics company Playnomics added a new behavioral targeted push messaging feature for mobile games to its PlayRM platform. This new feature may increase user engagement for developers by sending targeted, real-time messages to individual players based on in-game behaviors.

Gameloft launches Dungeon Hunter 4 for Android – French mobile game developer Gameloft launched dungeon crawler Dungeon Hunter 4 for Android this week. Click here for our review of the iOS version of the game.

Former Zynga Boston employee raises $2.25M for new game studio Proletariat – Seth Sivak, a former lead designer from the defunct Zynga Boston office, raised $2.25 million for his new game studio Proletariat. The raised amount in equity funding appeared in an SEC filing. Proletariat’s first release came back in March, with word game Letter Rush for iOS.

Appolicious launches educational app discovery service appoLearning – App discovery service Appolicious launched appoLearning earlier this week, which is a new service geared toward helping parents, teachers and others find the best educational apps for children.

Supercell confirmed to Forbes that is had raised another round of funding at $130 million in February on a valuation of $770 million from Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.

Index Ventures invested $52.5 million of the total $130 million, with participation by Institutional Venture Partners and Atomico. Accel Partners, an early investor of Supercell, and all shareholders, sold 16.7 percent of their holdings to new investors.

Supercell also shared some revenue figures, telling Forbes it generated $100 million in gross revenue last year and $179 million in just Q1 2013, which translated to $104 million for the first quarter, after Apple’s standard 30 percent cut.

Supercell was once reportedly generating $1 million in gross revenue a day from just its two iOS games — casual farm game Hay Day and village-building title Clash of Clans. Now the Finnish startup makes double that, seeing $2.4 million a day, which places the company at a run-rate of more than $800 million for 2013, with the potential to reach $1 billion, according to Forbes. Supercell also sees about 8.5 million daily active users playings its two titles, who play an average of 10 times per day.

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Kabam launches $50 fund to help bring Japanese games to the West – Mobile-social gaming developer Kabam told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that the company has established a $50 million fund to help bring Japanese games to Western markets. The money provided by Kabam to Japanese game developers will help with localization, translation, analytics tracking, marketing, user acquisition, retention and more. Other major gaming giants like DeNA, GREE, Zynga and Pocket Gems have all invested more and more into the publishing of third-party titles.

PlayJam delays GameStick shipments by two months – PlayJam informed Kickstarter backers of its Android-based games console GameStick that it’s delaying the shipments of the device from April to June. The delay is due to an unexpected amount of units to produce and the company’s apparently-low bank balance, which led to PlayJam changing its shipment plans for the units from air-freight to shipping via boat. Inside Mobile Apps last got its hands on the GameStick a few weeks ago during the 2013 Game Developers Conference.

Plain Vanilla lands $2.4M in second round funding – Plain Vanilla, the Icelandic game studio known for its trivia games such as Twilight QuizUp, landed $2.4 million in second round funding, which brings its total funding to $3.4 million. With the new influx in cash, Plain vanilla wants to build out its trivia games into a platform.

Wooga releases mobile-exclusive title Pocket Village – Wooga released Pocket Village this week, its first exclusively mobile title, for iOS. Inside Mobile Apps first learned about the village building sim back in February.

GREE updates MLB: Full Deck with 2013 rosters and new features – With the start of the 2013 Major League Baseball season, GREE updated its MLB: Full Deck with the 2013 rosters for all 30 MLB clubs. GREE also added new player-versus-player features, including the ability for users to accumulate points with each PVP win and gain rewards from multiple tiers. Other updates include re-designed player profiles, an improved tutorial, new live events and a fresher user interface.

Mobile-social game developer Storm8 today launched tile-matching game Fruit Blast Mania for iOS from its casual social label TeamLava, the third social arcade title from the Redwood City, Calif.-headquartered company.

“When we decide to enter a genre, we decide not to be a one-hit wonder and will create multiple hits over time,” Perry Tam, co-founder and CEO of Storm8, told Inside Mobile Apps. “This is a great example of how we strategize our game launches to conquer a game genre to expand our footprint within the genre, and gain a user base by launching more titles.”

Fruit Blast Mania features two new modes for the tile-matching genre on mobile — Color Mode and Digging Mode. In Color Mode, players are tasked with matching a particular type of fruit, while in Digging Mode, users are challenged by navigating through the puzzle, unlocking hidden charms. Also, the game comes packed with 100 levels to play, and unlike many tile-matching games where players are pitted against the clock, Fruit Blast Mania features hand-crafted levels that were designed for users to solve each puzzle by strategically moving around tiles. Fruit Blast Mania also remains fresh for players by adding new obstacles to each level. Lastly, the game features asynchronous multiplayer gameplay where players can compete against their friends or family’s high scores for each level.

Storm8 launched its first social arcade game Bubble Mania in June 2012, which reached one million downloads in three days thanks to Storm8′s network it’s built up over the years. The game studio’s second social arcade game Jewel Mania launched in November 2012, and it’s constantly reaching the top 25 on the top grossing iPhone apps charts, according to our traffic tracking service AppData.

Speaking of Storm8′s gaming network, Tam says the benefits of a network include lower user acquisition costs because Storm8 can cross-promote games on its network, and the ability to extend a user’s lifetime, while reducing churn. Tam adds that a user who plays multiple games on its network are three-times more likely to continue playing Storm8 games compared to users who just play one Storm8 game. The network also allows Storm8 to monetize its users from multiple games. As an example of Storm8′s platform effect, the company spend zero dollars in marketing on Bubble Mania’s launch, despite the title generating more than one million downloads in three days.

“When we first started the company, we started with this network approach, which is different than a lot of other developers,” he says.

At the 2013, Game Developers Conference, CEO Perry Tam revealed deep insights as to how Storm8 grew without taking VC funding or plans to go public anytime soon. Although Tam wouldn’t disclose Storm8′s financials, he did point to app store analytics company App Annie’s recent report, which listed Storm8 as the No. 6 top grossing app publisher worldwide (No. 1 private company since the top five are all public companies). Storm8 was one spot above Supercell which is reportedly pulling in $1 million in revenue per day from just two games — Clash of Clans and Hay Day. He says App Annie’s report can give people a benchmark as to how well Storm8 is doing.

Storm8, which was founded in 2009, now sees more than 10 million daily active users across its gaming network, which consists of about 40 titles across five genres. Storm8 also accumulated 400 million total downloads across 200 million devices. Storm8 publishes games under its own game developer labels including TeamLava, casino label Shark Party and hardcore label FireMocha. Some notable titles from Storm8 include social casual titles like Pet Shop Story and Restaurant Story, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World War and iMobsters, and social casino games like Bingo! and Slots.

For the rest of 2013, Tam says Storm8 plans to continue making games in the causal and mid-core genre, while expanding into the hardcore genre — all of which he sees as having potential for continued growth.

Mobile advertising and publishing platform Tapjoy announced the launch of its Tapjoy Australia Fund, a program which aims to foster and grow mobile app developers in Australia.

Tapjoy’s consultation teams will offer select iOS and Android developers marketing, distribution support, funds and optimization support.

Defiant Development, which have released titles like Heroes Call and Ski Safari for both Android and iOS, is the first developer accepted into the program. “There’s an incredible depth of indie talent in Australia, and Tapjoy offers an ideal way to monetize their applications and take advantage of the free-to-play opportunities in the mobile market,” co-founder of Defiant Development Morgan Jaffit said. “It’s very forward thinking to focus on enabling Australian developers to reach further with their games, and it helps to take the [user acquisition]  and monetization questions that all developers are tackling at the moment.”

“With the help of Tapjoy’s marketing strength and free-to-play consulting experience, as well as Australia’s $20 million Interactive Games Fund, Australia’s indie developers will find the road to success a little less bumpy,” CEO of the Game Developer Association of Australia Antony Reed said in a statement.

Developers in Australia that have released at least one iOS and Android app can find out more about the program here.

Mobile game publisher Mominis today announced that it is rebranding as PlayScape, a name based off the company’s existing platform PlayScape, which offers cross-game experience points and currency.

“We’ve grown exponentially and evolved significantly, and we want our name and brand to reflect that,” said Eyal Rabinovich, co-founder of MoMinis in a statement. “PlayScape represents our vision of providing a fully integrated ecosystem, from development and distribution, to optimization and data analysis in one holistic offering.”

After five years as Mominis, the company will be not only change its logo and website domain name, but also all of its existing products under the PlayScape name — PlayScape Studio, PlayScape Platform and PlayScape Center.

PlayScape, has acquired 40 million users to date, with six million monthly active users and one million daily active users. The publisher plans to launch 100 games in 2013, ranging from arcade games to action games to puzzlers.

The Israeli company recently secured $6 million in Series B funding from Gemini Israel Ventures as well as from previous investor BRM Group. The company plans to land another $4 million in equity to complete the latest round.

The mobile push notification service Urban Airship today announced that it raised $25 million in another round of funding. The latest funding round was led by August Capital, which joined as the newest investor. Existing investors including Intel Capital, True Ventures, Foundry Group and Verizon also joined in on the new funding round.

The Portland-based mobile push messaging provider’s last round of funding came in late 2011, raising $15.1 million from Salesforce and Verizon. Urban Airship’s total funding now stands at $46.6 million.

The new influx in cash flow will be used to expand its existing teams, especially marketing, in the company’s various offices and to speed up the launch of its mobile push messaging and Apple Passbook management services to major brands. Urban Airship will also use the new funds to grow its push notification platforms and expand its operations internationally.

Urban Airtship co-founder and CEO Scott Kventon said in a statement that the company quadrupled both its revenue and push volumes in 2012.

Lastly, August Capital’s co-founder John Johnston will join Urban Airship’s board of directors.