SGN has just given us a peek at Skies of Glory, its upcoming dogfighting game for the iPhone that's the followup to its hit game F.A.S.T., which was released last June. That app proved to be a run-away success, pulling in over a million dollars in its first six weeks of release. Skies of Glory takes the gameplay that made F.A.S.T. a hit and builds on it, adding much improved graphics, more missions, and a World War II setting. The company is targeting an early December launch date. Here are some of the details;

• Battle up to three human opponents around the world or up to seven locally over Wifi connection
• 10 Campaign Missions to complete (Battle over Britain or the Pacific)
• Skirmish Mode, including single player Teams, Free For All and Capture the Flag.
• 100 missions to perform in Training exercises.

Last week Apple surprised the iPhone's developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we've already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement's effect on SGN's upcoming games, as well as its impact on the market in general. Pishevar says that he was estactic when he heard the news — he almost immediately recorded a video sharing his elation that he sent to all of SGN's 100+ employees worldwide. He explains that this is really the announcement that he's been waiting for, but that he had no expectation that Apple might do it so soon. Now the company is working at a brisk pace to take advantage of the change: it will soon be releasing a new free version of its smash hit game F.A.S.T., which has done over $1.8 million in sales before Apple's cut.

Social Gaming Network (SGN), the startup that creates popular games for iPhones and social platforms like Facebook, has been seeing significant growth, with SGN's games now on one out of every three iPhone and iPod Touch devices. To compliment this growth, SGN is adding several seasoned gaming execs to its employee roster. SGN, which is led by CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar, has named gaming industry veteran Randy Breen as the company's new COO, whee he will be managing game production, business development and finance. Formerly, Breen was Executive Producer and Creative Director at Electronic Arts, Vice President Of Product Development at Lucas Arts Entertainment, and Chief Product Officer at Emotiv Systems

ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar, fresh off his TechCrunch50 debut, apparently wasn't too pleased with my post yesterday calling him and his company out for not dreaming big enough. My chief complaint - that ToyBots should be building the next multi-billion dollar superhit toy, not messing around with an unproven platform solution that no one may ultimately use, but that many may ultimately copy. So he stopped by today to tell me that ToyBots will indeed build their own toy or toys, and to show me his super double secret stealth prototype - a very lifelike dog-type thing, only smaller. And it's certainly cuter than this scary thing. Pishevar says of the device: "We'll be bigger than Facebook." The video is below:

One of my favorite startups at TechCrunch50 earlier this week was ToyBots, a spinoff of the popular Facebook/iPhone game developer Social Gaming Network. ToyBots has created technology that they'll license to toy manufacturers that will make those toys Internet connected and controllable. Our launch post on them is here. I think ToyBots is the future, where all toys (and just about everything else) is Internet-connected. But I don't think the company is dreaming big enough. There are obvious similarities between ToyBots and Teddy Ruxpin, an 80's superhit toy that moved and lip synched stories via a cassette tape player hidden in the back. 1.4 million of the toys were sold in the first year it was on the market in 1986, and it was the number one selling toy in 1985 and 1986. Worlds of Wonder Inc., the company that launched the toy, had sales of $93 million in its first fiscal year. Now imagine Teddy Ruxpin with an Internet connection. Upload stories (even ones that you read yourself) over Wifi. Then the toy talks them back to you. There's a website that acts as a remote control and mirrors your movements, possibly even via a webcam that detects and understands your movements. Make and share a choreographed set of movements. Add in the huge virtual and physical merchandising opportunities as the toy gets stuff in the real and virtual worlds. ToyBots done right is a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity. And CEO Shervin Pishevar knows it. But there's just one problem. "We don’t want to build the toys ourselves. We want to be the gaming cloud," he told the judges at TechCrunch50.