As we hurtle towards the holiday season, the news still continues to roll in for PG.biz, where we cover all the action and views from the business of app stores, smartphones, plus developments in mobile game making and assorted technology.

This week, I was down at the Evolve in London conference - sister event to last week's Develop in Liverpool.

Covering the games digital download business, there was a keynote from Facebook's games platform manager, Gareth Davis, providing a glimpse into how the 800 million-strong social platform was looking at its future. Conclusion - it's hot for mobile.

Indeed, this week, the company hired James Pearce, from HTML5 and JavaScript framework specialist Sencha, as its new head of developer relations.

The mobile channel

Back to Evolve. Another big tech company pushing into games and mobile is Google, with developer advocate Paul Kinlan arguing why iOS and Android developers should be targeting the Chrome web store too.

Other parts of the mobile ecosystem to be discussed at the event included the ethics of freemium, with Tag Games' Paul Farley considering various rights and wrongs, while Paul Flanagan of mobile publisher/platform Tequila Mobile was keen to talk about how it was opening up to third party developers.

Also at the conference, was Philip Reisberger, the Chief Games Officer of huge browser portal Bigpoint.

It's been trying to get into the mobile space during 2011 - "We're in the process of understanding the market," he told us, when we met up the following day to find out more about why mobile and tablets will be very important for Bigpoint in 2012.

Breaking nuts

Two companies that have already made their mark on the mobile business are Rovio and Zynga. With the latter looking to get its somewhat delayed IPO completed before the end of 2011, it seems to be caught in a tidal system of bad news.

The worst stuff to-date came from the New York Times, which discussed its internal problems, the abrasive style of CEO Mark Pincus, and its metrics-driven game making style: all of which are thought to have resulted in failed attempts to buy PopCap and Rovio.

Meanwhile, Rovio continues to take advantages of its current commercial opportunities, releasing browser game The Hunt for the Golden Pistachio: a reskinned version of Angry Birds with cash and real world rewards, made in conjunction with US nut company Wonderful Pistachios.

Money from free

During 2011, the need for better app and game monetisation and distribution has driven much innovation. Even Gameloft is getting in on the action, releasing its popular UNO card game for free on Android, backed by in-app ads and incentivised downloads.

And this is something that seems likely to continue into 2012, with US outfit W3i announcing its $10 million AppX game developer fund for user acquisition on iOS and Android.

W3i's vice president of corporate strategy Ryan Weber told us, "In-app purchases present an incredibly lucrative source of revenue but we are most excited by the opportunity to help developers become more sophisticated about the business models".

Indeed, the market is so lucrative that rival Tapjoy is rumoured to be looking for a trade sale, with cash-rich companies such as Zynga, GREE and DeNA said to interested. Previously, it had been thought Tapjoy might be considering an IPO, but perhaps Zynga's difficulties have encouraged it to explore other avenues.

There remains plenty of cash in the VC world for such companies though. US ad mediation company Burstly has raised $5.5 million for Burstly Rewards, its new mediation layer for offer walls and incentivised actions.

In other funding news, the AppNation conference will start an app incubator thanks to a strategic investment by Black Ocean, Rumble Entertainment - formed by executives from EA, BioWare and Zynga - secured $15 million of funding, while Russian publisher Nival has invested an undisclosed sum in HTML5 specialist Bytex.

Given me free-dom

One company moving fast in this space is Kiip, which offers real world rewards through its achievement system. Following on from its integration with game making tool GameSalad, we caught up with CEO Brian Wong.

He explained the advantages of its approach as being 'non cannibalistic' in terms of existing solutions, so generating additional cash, while also boosting gamer engagement and retention.

US outfit PlayHaven has been working on its marketing platform for some time and now it's opening up, both to content companies and other monetisation and engagement networks, including Tap.Me and Telesocial.

Another provider it's hooked up with is PressOK. We spoke to CEO Ryan Morel about its hyper-local ad network PlacePlay, which he revealed offers eCPMs of up to $8.

With 27 million monthly active users on iOS, publisher Backflip has plenty of ad inventory. It's signed up with network Nexage - and its real-time system - to make the most efficient use of those eyeballs.

Meanwhile, in Korea - which now has an official games category on the Android Market to go alongside the one on Apple's App Store - Japanese platform DeNA and Korean web portal Daum have revealed they want 10 million users of their Daum Mobage social platform by the end of 2012.

Not all moves in this space are business to business, however. With Christmas approaching, the original free app promo site Appvent Calendar has launched for its third year running, while the company to really commercialise the business model, FreeAppADay is preparing to launch a standalone iOS app that uses the FunChat platform to make the most of social and viral promotion.

Uppers and downers

When it comes to the most significant hardware releases of the year, Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire is sure to be in the reckoning. Despite only being available in the US, the company says it's been its top selling product for eight weeks in a row.

Nokia - and Microsoft - would love that to be the case for new Windows Phone Lumia handsets, and despite some skepticism from analysts, in the UK at least, Nokia is claiming the Lumia 800's first week sales are its best ever.

Things continue to look good for HTC, which despite a share price collapse, says it expects smartphone shipments to jump 80 percent to 45 million in 2012.

It's a similar situation at Samsung, which has just launched its metal-cased, 1.4 GHz processor-packing, 4-inch Super AMOLED-boasting Wave 3 in France, with Germany and Russia to follow. It expects to beat its original smartphone sales target for 2011 thanks mainly to the Galaxy S II.

But bada isn't being forgotten, with one spokesman predicting that 17 percent of its UK handsets shipping in 2013 will run the proprietary OS.

Poor old RIM. Its market capitalism has collapsed to $9 billion - basically its book value - and its Q3 figures are not going to be good, as it's having to write off $485 million pre-tax with respect to unsold PlayBook tablets.

Looking forward, not back

But let's end this week's roundup with technology. We had a long talk with MobileBits' CEO Karsten Wysk on why its .NET Delta Engine - the only tech of its kind to support Windows Phone as well as iOS and Android - is the most efficient for mobile game making.

Not to be left behind, development framework Marmalade has added support for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), Kindle Fire and bada 2.0 to its SDK (not Windows Phone though because of its use of C#).

Unity underlined its position as the leading technology across web, PC, console and mobile, announcing it has 750,000 users, although CEO David Helgason said that while the company is looking at HTML5, he's not convinced the web technology is yet game ready.

Ensuring its devices are future proof, Sony Ericsson has added support for browser-based 3D hardware acceleration tech WebGL to Xperia handsets, while new owner Sony is doing a similar deal, and in negotiations with Adobe to add Flash support to its forthcoming PS Vita device.

The last word goes to Nintendo though. Notably quiet of late, its US boss Reggie Fils-Aime popped up to argue for the success of the 3DS because its eight month sales were higher than DS's 12 month total.

It's a lovely present for all analysts who - no doubt - will now spend 2012 comparing the sales of the two portables; likely hoisting Fils-Aime on his own petard.