We’re proud to announce the newest addition to our growing list of lightweight casual fashion games on StyleHop — the Fashion Memory Game.  Borne out of our API program,  the premise of the game is simple – test your memory by matching pictures of similar styles in varying levels of difficulties.  The faster you solve the puzzle (least number of moves and fastest time), the higher you’ll be on the leaderboard.  Rate the styles you just solved and knock-off 5 seconds of your time. Additionally, you earn StyleHop Rewards when you rate styles which you can redeem for style items available on StyleHop.

In the next few weeks, we’ll extend the Memory Game onto Facebook and the J2Play platform, so stay tuned.  So give it a try and let us know your feedback here or on StyleHop Feedback Forum.

- Froilan Mendoza

Fashion Cents has been recently added to the J2Play social game network. J2play is a game portal with 50 games serving about 500,000 players on 8 different social networks.  Besides playing Fashion Cents on the StyleHop website and Facebook, you may now play Fashion Cents on Hi5, Bebo, and Friendster.  Also, when you play any of the MySpace, Ning and Orkut games that are available on J2Play, such as Texas Hold’em and Daily Sudoku, click on the Fashion Cents logo on the Featured or New Releases section of the J2Play bar.

Other exciting features on this platform include real-time chat with your friends across all networks, redeemable game credits, and a Fashion Cents game Friends list.  Upcoming version of Fashion Cents should allow you to earn game badges and send challenge your friends (any friend on any social network) to play along (or top) your Fashion Cents score.

Froilan

As we build StyleHop and create exciting, fashion applications, we have been encouraged by the interest shown by developers to create their own casual games using the StyleHop platform. With the help of NYU students* in Dr. Jean Claude Franchitti’s IT Projects class, I am pleased to announce the development and release of the  StyleHop API.

The StyleHop API  allows developers to leverage existing community-driven fashion review, social shopping, and recommendation features on StyleHop in their casual games and applications.  Using any programming language that “talk” REST, developers using the API have access to hundreds of thousands of filterable style ranking output either as JSON or XML.

Concurrent with this new API release, we are holding a create-a-game contest for the developer community to develop lightweight, social fashion games.   Think poker, solitaire, and other lightweight games, only in fashion.  Think mashup of fashion ecommerce and casual gaming.  If you need inspiration, check out our vibrant college community and our Fashion Cents game on Facebook.

You can develop using any language and on any platform (mobile, Facebook, Open Social, etc.).  The only rules are as follows:

- return a 5-star style rating for every style you use in your game

- use StyleHop data via the API

- apply for an API key and submit game idea by February 12

If you want to join the contest, or you want to try out the API, signup for an API key here.  The top three winners will receive equity grants in StyleHop Corp and will also  have a chance to demo their application at a meetup scheduled early March.

- Froilan

*kudos to Andy Kung, Aditya Sureka, Ivan Wah, and Vipul Gupta

Social Media expert, Noa Gafni, recently covered us in her blog, Webutantes.