Art by Zee

Seattle based technology firm Spoon specialize in technology that lets games run instantly from the web without installations. Today they announced the immediate availability of the online IGC and IGF Sandboxes.

The IGC, or Indie Game Challenge, is an annual competition for aspiring game developers to showcase their skills, pitch their games to top publishers and win cash. This year’s winners, Cogs by Lazy 8 Studios in the professional division, and Gear by Team 3 in the non-professional category, each won $100,000 grand prizes.

The Independent Games Festival is an annual event that allows indie game developers to meet, show off their games, learn from and network with their peers and compete for cash prizes. This year’s IGF kicks off March 13 in San Francisco.

Spoon allows users to access these hot new games with a single web click.

“Spoon is pleased to support the independent game development community by offering online versions of the IGC and IGF game competition finalists”, said Spoon CEO Kenji Obata. “These sites demonstrate how Spoon can bring the benefits of instant, single-click launch to full DirectX- and OpenGL-based download titles.”

The IGC and IGF Sandboxes are available free of charge on the web at http://spoon.net/igf and http://spoon.net/igc, respectively.

Rather work on your own games than play someone else’s? Spoon offers a free Spoon Studio tool which allows developers to quickly adapt existing apps for deployment on Spoon.net and Spoon Server. Spoon Server allows enterprises and publishers to host apps on internal servers, manage users and licensing, and view detailed usage analytics. The Spoon.net online app portal, powered by Spoon Server, offers free hosting of hundreds of virtual apps on the web.

Dear Zynga:

You don’t need me to tell you how successful Farmville is. After all, you already know that it’s the most successful application on Facebook with over 82 million users and over 22 million fans. Farmville users represent more than a fifth of all Facebook users and (at least per The Guardian) one percent of the (real) world’s population. That’s huge.

So huge, in fact, that it can be hard to put a human face on it. Let me help by giving you one: my sixty-something year old mother is a woman who previously left all of her computing to her assistant until she retired, at which point she used her old, slow computer (on dial-up, no less) primarily to look up airfares. Until she discovered online casual gaming, at which point she promptly bought a shiny new computer with all the bells and whistles, signed up for Facebook and started adding apps.

She now calls me on a regular basis to remind me to harvest my crops.

The Independent Games Festival, which opened today in San Francisco, bills itself as a sort of Sundance Festival of independent game development.

Now in its 12th year, the IGF allows indie game developers a chance to get together with professional peers and aspiring applicants into the industry to show off their skills, learn new techniques and technology advances, network and compete for prizes. Highlights of the festival include the Independent Games Summit which includes discussion on such topics as indie game distribution and guerrilla marketing techniques and the IGF Awards, honoring an outstanding set of finalists from all over the world with over $40,000 of prize money for categories including he prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the Audience Award, and the ‘art game’-centric Nuovo Award.

This year’s IGF Awards ceremony will be streamed live for anyone not able to get down to the festival in person. The ceremony begins Thursday, March 11, at 6:30 pm Pacific time and is available on GameSpot as well as TV network G4.

A complete list of finalists can be seen on the IGF website.

If, like me, you’re in the market for a new TV, you may want to hold off on buying a new one for a while: Philips and XpanD have hooked up together to provide consumers with co-branded versions of XpanD’s patented pi-cell active 3D glasses with Philips 3D television sets. Gaming and movies are going to be just that much more entertaining now.