Jogonaut is a social gaming company. Its debut title, OJO AGENT, is aimed at mid-core gamers who are predominantly male ages 21 to 39. In OJO AGENT, players act as sports agents who must pitch and sign real athletes as clients. The game is built using HTML5 and serves as both an interactive platform for players to enjoy a social sports game and a marketing platform for some of the world’s biggest brands.
We spoke with Jogonaut Founder and CEO Barry Carpeon the importance of data-driven design, and how he’s using analytics to continually provide the best user experience to his players. He also shared some great game marketing and development tips. Continue Reading…
by kScope guest contributor Garrett Wilkin,Freelance Writer at ProgrammableWeb
AngelHack brings together start-up communities from around the country; participants build start-up ideas. The competition is judged by top angel investors.
I attended AngelHack in Boston over the weekend of March 3. My primary goal was to talk to developers about analytics. I wanted to see how many had heard of the new potential for deeper analysis of user behavior from service providers like Kontagent. Some of my questions included:
How were they thinking about user behavior, if at all? Had they already decided that analytics was important?
If so, which SDKs and tools did they plan to incorporate into their product strategy?
Would they partner with a specialized company or would they prefer to build an in-house solution?
These were the questions I would seek to answer over the course of the weekend. With thousands of dollars in prizes and start-up perks up for grabs, this hackathon was a bit more serious. The result was a crop of ideas that incorporated a business strategy in addition to a novel technical approach. It was the kind of intellectually stimulating environment which categorizes a great hacking event.
After a short period of idea pitches, the hackers began to mingle and form teams. Several teams came to the event with well formed and, in some cases, patent-pending product designs. Discussions in the small teams focused around which features to include in the prototype and what technologies to use to build them. The idea of how to understand the ways in which the product will be used was not a topic of conversation. After personally speaking with nearly every team in attendance I can say that in general, the idea of tracking actions taken by a user was novel to most teams.
But, in a data-driven world, why was it a relatively novel idea? Continue Reading…
We had meetings with hundreds of customers, leading industry thought leaders and prospects last week. And, we threw an insane GDC party at Vessel SF. Thanks to everyone for coming out and supporting us!
Special thanks to those of you who came by our booth, too! We’re revolutionizing the way people measure and optimize their user engagement and monetization, and we’re stoked to share our vision with you.
Finally, we’d like to thank all our customers and industry thought leaders for coming to our Kontagent Konnect roundtable. We had nearly 50 top-notch participants discussing relevant issues across the social and mobile app ecosystem. For those of you who missed it, we hope to see you at one of our future Kontagent Konnect events. Stay tuned for details!
Today’s new big-data world can be overwhelming. You have access to all that rich data; now, what’s the plan?
Using customer data to understand and optimize your social or mobile application can produce huge returns. But, there are also dangers of relying too heavily on data without the proper level of controls, data science and overall process. Fortunately, there are now tools, technology and talent available that are enabling studios and devs to be more data-driven.
Here at Kontagent, we’re all about data: how to get it; how to store it; how to query it; how to interpret it; and, ultimately, how to make the best data-driven business decisions.
Our CMO, Dan Kimball, was invited to speak at Casual Connect in Hamburg this month on what it takes to become a data-driven organization. He shared lessons learned from our experience working with some of the top grossing social and mobile game studios. It’s actually a pretty fun presentation since he compared it to learning how to ski (Dan’s an avid skier). If you’ve ever hit the slopes, you’ll appreciate this. Continue Reading…
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…
The ARM funnel shows a typical customer lifecycle, which is comprised of three stages: acquisition, retention and monetization.
Mobile app developers and marketers can gain a huge advantage by looking at the way social app developers scientifically build and optimize their games around customer data on social platforms. They use that data to learn about what is and isn’t working in their applications, and iterate quickly for increasingly stronger returns. From Acquisition to Retention to Monetization–the three stages in the ARM funnel–successful developers have created entire organizations around data-driven design at each level and across all facets of their businesses.
At Kontagent, we’ve witnessed firsthand the ARM funnel’s crucial role in the success of a large majority of studios that publish games on Facebook–and now on iOS and Android as well. Insights garnered from this model help to focus resources and marketing investment. And, having a perpetual flow of data and a supporting data science infrastructure (with the expertise to act on it), has enabled game studies to acquire users more profitably. Teams of data scientists and developers at Zynga, Popcap, Crowdstar and Gaia, for example, have measured, iterated, tested and optimized relentlessly to acquire more users at better customer acquisition cost and with higher yield ratios than most. It’s no coincidence these are the same guys succeeding on mobile platforms as well. Continue Reading…
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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Jogonaut is a social gaming company. Its debut title, OJO AGENT, is aimed at mid-core gamers who are predominantly male ages 21 to 39. In OJO AGENT, players act as sports agents who must pitch and sign real athletes as clients. The game is built using HTML5 and serves as both an interactive platform for players to enjoy a social sports game and a marketing platform for some of the world’s biggest brands.
We spoke with Jogonaut Founder and CEO Barry Carpe on the importance of data-driven design, and how he’s using analytics to continually provide the best user experience to his players. He also shared some great game marketing and development tips. Continue Reading…
