Ann Burkett knows a thing or two about games. She’s a game developer who has worked with Macromedia Shockwave.com, Crafted Fun, Quizmonster and Zynga. Burkett also founded the HTML5 Developers Conference, Bay Area Game and App Developers Group, Games.js, SF Mobile Dev and chairs the Silicon Valley IGDA. And, she’s also also starting development on another game.
Now she’s spearheading Game Dojos, a San Francisco-based game start-up accelerator which offers a three-month mentor program to game start-up entrepreneurs. Through Game Dojos, you’ll meet many of the movers and shakers in the industry, learn how to optimally monetize your games, and even get help with funding, if that’s what you need.
We recently spoke with Burkett about what you can learn from the program, and how you can take advantage of the thousands of connections from Game Dojos’ staff and mentors. She compares developing games to driving a car, and here are her thoughts: Continue Reading…
Can social gaming influence the presidential election?
Big data needs data scientists, or quants, or Excel jockeys
No wonder big data is hot in venture capital this year. Forbes has been running a series on big data, and many of the business leaders it has interviewed say “people underestimate the degree to which big data can fundamentally change their business.”
What was especially interesting is that while technology has made storing and aggregating data much faster and more affordable, some of these experts say “keeping the data in its raw form can provide insights into long tails, allowing firms to identify and target relatively small cohorts that fall outside the normal distribution… when you get down to the everyday work of data scientists and analysts, in a very quiet average work-a-day way, they are finding a lot of insights that are becoming increasingly critical to the way companies are doing their business.” Read full article.
We’ve seen this firsthand. At Kontagent, our data scientists have been instrumental in providing insights to our hundreds of social customers. (We process millions of messages daily.) We believe, while data is awesome, you need domain expertise to make sense of it all. That’s Moneyball lesson #3: Look at the data that really matters; it may not be obvious at first. Continue Reading…
Mobilewalla found that mobile apps released on Sundays statistically performed the best.
Launch your mobile app on Sunday
According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app; however, Wednesday appears to be the most popular day among developers. Find out the worst day to release your app. (Hint: It’s different for Android and iOS.)
A tiny gaming company has Zynga in its crosshairs
Rumble Games wants you to “swing your sword or fire your gun, not decorate your castle and spam your friends with invitations.” It was a big enough idea to prompt investors from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures to drop $15 million into the company in its first round of funding after it was founded less than a year ago.
Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego discusses the lessons he learned in social app development that Gaia is applying to mobile.
Happy New Year!
Here at Kontagent, we’ve helped hundreds of social customers win by helping them gain better insights into their users’ behaviors. And, we have even more exciting product features planned this year. (Sign up for our newsletter for the latest Kontagent news and updates.)
We’re always improving our already-powerful, best-in-class analytics platform. We’ve been leveraging our knowledge and experience to help many of our social customers make a successful transition into the mobile space, too.
Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a mobile application, or you’ve already launched it and have a substantial user base, looking to social app developers for a history lesson on how to do it right can give you a huge head-start, and greater chance at success.
Kontagent Konnect Interview:
Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego
Gaia Online has been able to do this with Monster Galaxy–a hit on both Facebook and iOS. In the first installment of our Kontagent Konnect Executive Interview Series, we spoke with CEO Mike Sego on how the company is applying many of the lessons it learned in social to mobile, including:
The metrics that are most important to succeeding on mobile
How to monetize on the F2P model
How to successfully split-test on iOS (yes, it is possible!)
Other tactics used to keep players engaged and coming back for more Continue Reading…
Big week in mobile app downloads
According to Mobilewalla, as of this week there are more than a million apps in the market. And, Apple’s developers are adding about 1,000 new apps a day while Android developers are uploading about 1,400 a day.
It was a big week for Google, too. The company announced that the Android Market had passed its 10 billionth app download. Apple may have hit that milestone first (and faster), but Business Insider says that Google is hot on Apple’s heels. Should Apple be concerned? Continue Reading…
Mobile app developers want visibility and actionable insights.
The mobile ecosystem is like the wild, west West. This space is still in its infancy. There are so many opportunities for us, but also a ton of growing pains we need to get through.
It does make sense though; the competition is fierce. Mobilewalla, a search engine for mobile, announced that the number of available mobile apps in the marketplace is approaching the million milestone. Faced with the issue of “app fatigue,” what can developers do to make sure that users are:
1) Finding and installing their apps;
2) Returning to the apps–and eventually spending money
through in-app purchases.
Most of them are using ad networks to drive user acquisition. But, there’s a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks. Developers aren’t really getting great insight into which specific ad network users are coming from. They need clear marketing attributions. And, once the user has entered the app, what are they doing within the app? Those are the missing links between installation and monetization. Continue Reading…
Data Science and the Art of Winning (and Wedding?) in Las Vegas
Data is big—and getting bigger. Thanks to modern technology, we’re facing “data deluge.” And, this access to big data is opening doors for a new (crucial) role in the new economy: the data scientist.
Forbes’ Dan Woods has a great series on data scientists. A couple recent spotlights are Monica Rogati and Daniel Tunkelang, data scientists at LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s data scientists “turn big data into big value, delivering products that delight users and insight that forms business decisions.” It’s this type of “big value” that leads to innovative products like the professional networking company’s “People You May Know” feature.
From medical researchers to social and mobile app developers, we’re all trying to interpret data as fast as we can, to make better business decisions as fast as we can. That’s why people like Rogati and Tunkelang are imperative to bringing much-needed order to the information chaos.
Data scientists give you more focus on the massive amounts of data now available—what slice(s) of data you should be honing in on, what the data is telling you, how to predict what’s going to happen next based on historical data. Data is useless without science.
Many of us are trying to crack the code on building a killer mobile app business.
“If it doesn’t feed one of the seven deadly sins, it will not be addictive,” Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang told an audience of mobile developers and marketers at Open Mobile Summit.
Chang was leading a panel discussion on the exploding app market, and all the opportunities yet to come. In the past four years mobile apps and advertising has gone from a $700 million market to an estimated $12 billion market this year. We all want a slice of that pie. While Chang’s advice is good, as you develop your app, here are some other things to consider:
Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is a collaboration between the University of Washington's departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Biochemistry.
Much to the satisfaction of teenage boys gamers everywhere, playing online games can pay off in the real world.
Gamers have used Foldit, an online video game created by the University of Washington in which players compete to design the most accurately folded proteins, to help advance research in the cure for AIDS. Foldit players were challenged to figure the structure of a protein that causes the virus in monkeys. Playing the game, they were able to do in 10 days what had stumped scientists for more than a decade.
On the surface, probably not much. But, when it comes to analytics, Beane changed the game for baseball. Colaco could be doing the same for business.
Moneyball is based on Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Faced with a relatively meager budget, Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) uses a groundbreaking, sabermetric approach—the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence that measures in-game activity—to recruit a competitive baseball team. (Read more on how sabermetrics works.)
Beane goes against convention, taking advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to build a team that could successfully compete in Major League Baseball. He analyzes stats that are not generally considered top priority in the traditional scouting process. While most managers pored over stats like running speed, stolen bases and batting averages, the sabermetric approach, developed by baseball statistician Bill James, predicts other factors are better indicators of a player’s offensive success, e.g., on-base and slugging percentages.
Beane basically stared the “old guard” of baseball recruiting in the face and said, “Suck it.” And it worked.
Using sabermetrics, the Oakland A’s were able to put together a competitive team on a $41 million salary; by comparison, the New York Yankees spent more than $125 million in payroll in the same 2002 season. It paid off: the Athletics led a 20-game winning streak, and Beane shifted the paradigm of baseball scouting forever.
When it comes to Web business analytics, it’s not a bad idea to take a page out of the Moneyball book. Sometimes you have to look at data through a different lens in order to better make predictions and optimize opportunities. In baseball, Beane approached player stats differently and got different results. In business, data scientists like Colaco say there’s a similar shift happening in the world of Web 3.0.
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Ann Burkett knows a thing or two about games. She’s a game developer who has worked with Macromedia Shockwave.com, Crafted Fun, Quizmonster and Zynga. Burkett also founded the HTML5 Developers Conference, Bay Area Game and App Developers Group, Games.js, SF Mobile Dev and chairs the Silicon Valley IGDA. And, she’s also also starting development on another game.
