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No early Google-style growth here. Facebook's payments revenues barely budged for a third quarter as gaming activity increasingly moved onto mobile devices. The company also hasn't really started taking revenue share from apps in other verticals like music and media yet either, so that means there aren't any new engines for platform revenue growth -- yet. The company's $192 million in payments revenue is barely an inch above the $186 million it made last quarter or the $188 million it made in the holiday quarter. On top of slowing advertising revenue growth, this means that the second pillar of Facebook's monetization strategy isn't really showing much momentum either.

Just a year after selling his mobile-social gaming network OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million, Jason Citron is at it again. He's starting a new company called Phoenix Guild and has pocketed $1.1 million from YouWeb, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst Partners. The goal is to be the "Blizzard of the post-PC era." After months of playing video games and traveling, he decided to have another go at it. "I knew that I wanted to do another gaming company," he said. "So I took a nice, deep breath and did it. I love making games." He added, "I'm a core gamer and it's just weird to me that I didn't find much on my iPad to play. Early on, it became apparent that there was a lot of action in free-to-play Farmville-style games. So there are still a lot of fairly low fidelity titles. We want something that's more like what you would see on consoles and PCs but re-imagined and built with modern monetization mechanics."

Eruptive Games, a Vancouver-based developer that's shortly set to launch a zombie-killing game called Citizen Grim, just picked up $1 million in funding. Investors include Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook's first 10 employees, Guitar Hero creator Kai Huang and Nadeem Kassam of Zynik. A Russian social game developer called Plarium is also putting funding in and will act as an adviser. Mayfield Fund's Tim Chang is also an adviser. Like Kixeye and Kabam, Eruptive isn't targeting casual gamers, but rather more hard-core players. These types of games may not attract the sheer number of users that Zynga games might, but they tend to monetize far better because they attract a more selective audience that is more willing to pay for items in games.

Over the last several months, we've seen a slew of casino game launches from indie developers to the behemoth in the room, Zynga. The issue is that while it's easy to create a casino-style game, it can be difficult to monetize one because of very fragmented and complicated regulations around online gambling globally. Enter Betable, a social betting company that's being reborn as a platform for social game developers to add real, working gambling mechanics to their games. It's backed by an enviable slew of investors including Greylock, CrunchFund, Yuri Milner's Start Fund, Founders Fund, True Ventures, Path co-founder Dave Morin, former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, Delicious' Josh Schachter, StockTwits' Howard Lindzon and LOLApps former CEO Arjun Sethi. The company's not disclosing the amount of funding competitive reasons.

Refer.ly, a Y Combinator-backed startup that makes it easy for people to earn affiliate revenue every time they recommend a product or book, is now allowing its users to donate their earnings to charity. The company, which only just launched six weeks ago, is syncing up with about 100 charities or so including the March of Dimes and American Heart Association. All proceeds can go to a user's charity of choice. Refer.ly takes no cut. The company also started a summer reading campaign on behalf of Room to Read, which builds libraries in the developing world. The company is donating $1 for every book purchased through Refer.ly this month.

Now that there's Google Compute engine, there is yet another infrastructure service that IT managers and startups have to consider. So how do IT managers decide to how to efficiently spend on cloud services? A Dublin-based startup called Cloud Vertical is stepping in with analytics that measure everything from everyday spending to EC2 instances, Amazon S3, Elastic Map Reduce and more. "With the old model, you never had to track flexible capacity," said chief executive Ed Byrne, who sold his last company Hosting 365 to Sungard for an undisclosed amount in 2010. "But in the new model, you can always add more capacity. Capacity can be infinite."

Fiksu, a Boston-based company that helps mobile developers efficiently find new users, just picked up $10 million in a new round led by Qualcomm Ventures. Previous investors including Charles River Ventures also participated. "Qualcomm is wonderfully strategic for us in the mobile space," said Craig Palli, who is the company's vice president of business development. "They're so well tied to a variety of mobile handset manufacturers and that's the one area where Fiksu can really benefit from new relationships." The funding is going to go toward international expansion with more offices in the U.K. and Asia. The company currently has more than 100 people and plans to double its headcount in the next year.

The cost to acquire users for mobile apps declined last month as ad networks and other channels scrambled to find a replacement for UDIDs, according to Fiksu. Unique device ID numbers were a way that Apple used to tag users by their devices. This was a foolproof way to make sure networks were targeting the same users as they moved from app to app, but it raised privacy concerns because UDIDs couldn't be cleared from a device. Apple said they would deprecate them and didn't unveil a replacement until earlier this month. What that has meant is that targeting and marketing spending has become far less efficient on mobile platforms over the past few months. Fiksu said the cost to acquire a "loyal user," or one that opens an app three times fell to $1.26 in May, from $1.46 the previous month.

Blue Jeans Network, a video conferencing company founded by a serial entrepreneur who has sold two companies to Cisco, is adding another $25 million to its coffers from NEA, Accel and Norwest Venture Partners. Interestingly enough, quite of bit of that capital will be going toward a marketing campaign meant to woo enterprise customers away from other video conferencing providers. The company's already got a billboard in San Francisco (pictured above) and the goal is to get more companies to switch from pure audio conferencing to video conferencing.

Some big numbers for Google's Android platform out of the company's developer conference today in San Francisco: Android has seen 400 million device activations and is adding 1 million per day. That's up from the 100 million number the company announced last year around the same time. That's 12 new Android devices every second, said Hugo Barra, who serves as a product management director of Android at Google.