GigaOM » mobile developers

PaeDae offers game developers new way to get money and users

Ryan Kim — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:00:51 +0000

Mobile game developers trying to crack that persistant monetization gap are getting a new tool called PaeDae that combines a reward network with tools to cross-promote titles. That takes PaeDae into competition with services like Kiip, Chartboost, PlayHaven and Tapjoy. But the company believes it’s got a unique offering that relies heavily on smart targeting of users.

On the surface, PaeDae’s withPrizes tool competes first with Kiip (see disclosure below), allowing brands to hit game users with real world rewards at key milestone moments when they’re feeling good. But PaeDae is a white label tool, so the rewards look like they’re made possible by the developer.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based PaeDae also tries to give out fewer rewards and really make its mark by offering brands effective targeting so their rewards go to the right people. PaeDae CEO and co-founder Rob Emrich told me the company uses an array of online, offline and location data to help target the right users without using cookies or UDIDs. He said advertisers only pay for performance, not impressions.

So far in early results, PaeDae has been able increase time played in apps by 90 percent and give developers eCPMs of more than $20, much higher than typical eCPMs. PaeDae said for most casual games, it can boost average revenue per user by more than 100 percent. And advertisers are seeing click-through rates of more than 9 percent and redemption rates for prizes of up to 28 percent with some brands.

PaeDae CEO and co-founder Rob Emrich

PaeDae also works as a way to distribute apps with its withUsers tool. Developers who install the PaeDae SDK can turn around and take some of the money they make and use it to promote their apps. So a user in another game can get an invitation to download an app from a PaeDae developer for free. PaeDae will still apply its targeting technology to go after the right users.

PaeDae is working with about 20 developers right now including Kronos Games and Doppelgames and has hundreds in the pipeline. It’s also working with more than 20 brands including P&G, Omaha Steaks and online fashion retailer Beachmint.com.

With monetization lagging usage on mobile apps, developers can use all the tools they can get, if they can really deliver. If PaeDae’s results hold up over time, it might be another viable way for developers to make some real money and also drive more usage of their apps. The company, which launched in August 2011, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angels.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Kiip and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Nokia launches ad exchange to lure in developers

Ryan Kim — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:42:59 +0000

Nokia is in a tough spot these days, falling out of the top five in smartphone sales for the first time while it pins its hopes on Windows Phone 8 and new hardware to revive handset sales again. That’s not a recipe for success in attracting developers.

But Nokia is trying to cozy up to developers with the launch of a new ad exchange that it hopes will help developers make money and get their apps discovered on not just Nokia devices but all mobile platforms.

Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX), which is built off of Inneractive’s technology, will allow developers to access 120 ad networks in 200 countries and target Windows Phone 8, Series 40 and Symbian phones but also hit iOS, Android and BlackBerry from one dashboard. Developers can rely on NAX to automatically optimize in-app ads or run their own campaigns. And they can take revenue from one platform and invest it in another.

The deal is part of a larger effort by Nokia to become a better business partner to its app developers. With Windows Phone 8 still trailing Apple’s iTunes Store and Google Play by a big margin, Nokia is focusing on making sure it can offer monetization tools for developers. It’s also offering a new premium developer program, that allows developers to get $1,500 worth of services and support for $99.

But, until Nokia can promise developers a big and growing addressable market, I don’t know if NAX will be that much of a lure. Having one tool that simplifies in-app advertising across platforms is helpful but most developers are already doing what they need to do to advertise on various platforms.

Offering NAX may be attractive for existing Nokia developers but, for non-Nokia and Windows Phone 8 developers, many, I imagine, will wait until Nokia device sales grow enough that it makes sense to use a tool like NAX.

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Freemium app revenue growth leaves premium in the dust

Ryan Kim — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:00:14 +0000

The mobile app world took to the freemium model with a passion last year, as revenue from freemium iOS apps eclipsed 50 percent mark in the US about a year ago. But in the last year, the momentum behind freemium apps has only grown stronger, according to new data from app analytics firm App Annie.

App Annie Intelligence, which tracks more than 700,000 apps, found that global revenues for freemium apps on iOS have quadrupled over the last 24 months. And for Google Play, worldwide freemium revenues have grown 3.5x in 2012. Now, freemium apps generate 69 percent of the worldwide iOS app revenue and 75 percent of global Android app revenues. Meanwhile, premium app revenue from paid download apps have remained relatively flat over the same periods.

The numbers confirm the trend we’ve been noticing but the fact that there’s been no let up shows just how app developers continue to embrace the freemium model and how those apps continue to bring in more money. We reported two years ago that the 1/3 of the top grossing apps on iOS in the US had moved to the freemium model. By the end of 2011, Distimo reported that about half of the revenue from the 200 top grossing iPhone apps came from freemium app while 65 percent of the revenue from top apps in the Android Market came from freemium apps. Here’s a look at some of the charts worked up by App Annie Intelligence:

In January, IHS said that in-app purchase in freemium apps brought in $970 million in worldwide sale last year, or 39 percent compared to paid downloads. And freemium app revenue was expected to grow to $5.6 billion by 2015, representing 64 percent of the total market. The App Annie data, which is limited to iOS and Android, suggests we may be on a faster pace than IHS predicted.

It’s not just in the US, where the figures generally mirror the world stats. App Annie said countries like China and Japan have rapidly adopted the freemium model in the last year. Japanese freemium revenues grew by 24x in the last year on Google Play and Chinese freemium revenue grew by nearly 25x on iOS since January 2011.

Not every app needs to go freemium. As Flurry recently pointed out, some apps are better suited to that model. For example, apps with high intensity of usage in a short window creates an opportunity for developers to make money though in-app purchases that users can binge on. And for users who come back repeatedly over a long period of time, there’s also a chance to keep selling them on more content and add-on functions. Apps that don’t necessarily hold on to users over a long period of time might monetize better through one-time paid downloads, said Flurry.

I suspect we’ll see paid downloads remain as a viable option for some developers. Instapaper’s success, for example, has shown that consumers will pay up front for a good product. But increasingly, the bigger money seems to be found in letting people in for free and then monetizing a smaller group of users over time through in-app purchases, subscriptions and other added features.

Image courtesy for Flickr user 401 (K) 2012

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Meet YouConnect: Maybe carriers and developers can get along

Kevin Fitchard — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 21:50:20 +0000

Mobile carriers are like feral cats. Throw them in a bag and they’ll fight with one another rather than work together to escape. That attitude has been one of the biggest obstacles toward carriers coming together to offer a set of common network application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers. And that’s why developers have pretty much ignored the operators when they design their apps.

But there are signs that at least some carriers are willing to play nice with one another. In France, the big three national operators Orange, Bouygues Telecom and SFR have formed a consortium called YouConnect that exposes an API that allows m-commerce apps to auto-fill in purchase information (name, address, credit card, etc.) from carrier subscriber databases.

Developers don’t have to tap into three separate APIs. They don’t have to negotiate three separate business deals with each operator. They build to a single API and they single set of revenue share terms.

Three carriers aren’t 400. Universal carrier APIs was the Wholesale Application Community’s goal before its inevitable demise, but those three carriers represent the vast majority of France’s mobile subscribers. So far YouConnect only has one partner, online overstock retailer Vente-Privee.com, but the consortium is bring on other e-commerce companies soon, according to Alcatel-Lucent, the vendor who manages YouConnect’s APIs.

Achieving a truly universal carrier API framework is going to take a lot of time, but that doesn’t mean that smaller groups of carriers can’t band together, said Laura Merling, Alcatel-Lucent SVP of application development platform and strategy. Country-wide cooperation in particular makes sense as there are many developers that are only thinking within the confines of national borders. Think regional retailers or national airlines and rail providers.

“You’re going to see earlier results with a more focused strategy,” Merling said. “Three other countries have already expressed interest in joining YouConnect.”

The Alliance of Telecommunications Industry Solution is another organization trying to come up with a set of core network APIs for developers. While I initially questioned whether ATIS could succeed where WAC failed, the Alliances’ marketing VP Lauren Laymen told me that the ATIS’s ambitions are much smaller – and far more realistic — than WAC’s. As a North American focused institution, ATIS isn’t trying to create a global API framework for consumer development. It’s trying to develop useful APIs for vertical business markets like healthcare and government, which don’t need to cross borders and span carriers as much as they need to access reliable and highly secure interfaces.

This week Alcatel-Lucent launched its own API consultancy and professional services business with the aim of helping carriers develop and manage common interfaces. Like API specialists Apigee, Aepona and Locaid, Alcatel-Lucent is yet another option in an increasingly fragmented carrier development market, though the Franco-American vendor has the advantage of actually building the network infrastructure it’s trying to expose to the outside world.

Merling, however, said that those separate companies aren’t necessarily working at cross purposes. No matter whom a carrier selects to manage its APIs, technically they’re all gravitating toward standards established by organizations like the Open Mobile Alliance. Alcatel-Lucent is already in discussions with U.S. operators – each of whom work with different API enablers — to develop frameworks like YouConnect, Merling said.

Phones image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin

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Flurry buys Trestle to get into mobile backend market

Ryan Kim — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:00:23 +0000

Flurry has become a prime resource for app developers to measure and monetize their mobile apps. But it hasn’t been a tool for actually building apps. That’s where the San Francisco company is going, however, with the announcement today that it has bought Seattle-based Trestle, a provider of mobile backend services.

Flurry has incorporated Trestle into its SDK and will offer new developer services under the name Flurry AppCloud. These services include push notifications, user account management and scalable storage. This bulks up Flurry’s developer offerings, which currently include analytics and tools for monetization, app distribution and re-engagement. AppCloud will start in beta for both iOS and Android apps and will be generally available later this summer.

Buying Trestle pits Flurry against other backend service providers like Kinvey, Parse and Stackmob. And it’s another sign of how the mobile developer services market will consolidate over time as providers look to offer a wider array of cloud services: Development tool provider Appcelerator bought mobile backend startup Cocoafish in February while Urban Airship (see disclosure below) in November bought SimpleGeo.

Flurry co-founder and CTO Sean Byrnes said Flurry’s developer backend offering will differ from competitors because it will be enriched with data from Flurry analytics. So developers will be able to segment push notifications by their audience using customer usage data. They’ll also be able to build apps that customize the experience for users based on analytics data. And having one less SDK to deal with will also be easier for developers, said Byrnes.

“I think you’ll see more consolidation in general in mobile services as the market matures,” Byrnes said. “The new currency is developer attention and there is more SDK fatigue now.”

Developers will pay for Flurry AppCloud based on monthly transactions. The first one million transactions each month will be free with every thousand transactions after that priced at 5 cents. Flurry is currently used by more than 70,000 developers, who deploy it in more than 200,000 apps.

As we’ve said before, the mobile app boom is creating a big market for mobile developer services. And mobile backend support is really popular because it helps developers easily connect their apps to cloud services. But increasingly it looks like many of the different tools for monetization, performance monitoring and other cloud services will likely get rolled up into larger offerings for developers.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Qualcomm wants to sell developers, consumers on Snapdragon Inside

Ryan Kim — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:13:09 +0000

Developers historically haven’t thought about writing for Qualcomm chips directly. And consumers don’t hunt for the name Qualcomm when they buy a mobile gadget. But the company is working toward a future where the Qualcomm name becomes the go-to brand for both groups.

I recently sat down with Liat Ben-Zur, Qualcomm’s senior director of software strategy and business development, and talked about the development moves the chip maker has been making of late. She said traditionally Qualcomm worked with manufacturers primarily, letting them have access to the expanded features of Qualcomm’s technology. But now the company is appealing directly to developers through things such as its new Snapdragon SDK for Android, previewed last month. And that is opening up the potential for Snapdragon-equipped phones to ultimately provide more feature-rich and powerful apps, something Ben-Zur hopes will ultimately sell the Qualcomm and Snapdragon brand to consumers.

“That’s the point I want to get to where you hang out with a buddy and you have a Snapdragon phone and he doesn’t and you both have the same app. When you use the app, you have extra options and features and your buddy starts wondering why he doesn’t have that. And the next time he buys a Snapdragon phone,” Ben-Zur said.

She admits that strategy, akin to the Intel Inside campaign, is still a work in progress. But that’s where Qualcomm is ultimately going as it expands developer access to its technology. The Android SDK, which will be released next month, offers a slew of features and benefits that developers can access for the first time.

There are imaging APIs that do advanced facial recognition, down to calculating the degree of a smile or where a person’s eyes are looking. There’s better location support for low-battery geofencing and indoor location positioning. Developers can take advantage of more gesture inputs, and there’s improved audio, including support for stereo recording and noise cancellation.

Ben-Zur said developers have traditionally not thought of writing for anything but a mobile platform like iOS or Android. But with the flood of mobile apps available on the market, developers are now looking for any edge they can find to push the envelope and stand out.

“Developers are now concluding that tight hardware and software integration matters and things like graphics, security, video, they all matter,” Ben-Zur said. “They’re now coming to us with open hands asking for help.”

She said this kind of deep access to Snapdragon could be the next big moment for developers, akin to opening Pandora’s box. She said during a hackathon last week, in which Qualcomm let 200 developers use the Snapdragon SDK, the winning team came up with a video app that helps detect autism in children by watching the way their faces react.

Qualcomm is now in the position of being a difference maker for developers, not only with the SDK but also with its connections to carriers and OEMs, said Ben-Zur. Qualcomm said it is in talks with OEMs and carriers to get Snapdragon-optimized apps preloaded on phones and tablets. That can be a big boon for developers, who have cutting-edge technology but may struggle to get noticed in the app market, she said.

Of course, this can all be viewed cynically as an attempt to leverage Qualcomm’s advantage in the market and lock it down by focusing on the proprietary aspects of its technology. That would make developers more dependent on Qualcomm and wean them off competitors like Nvidia, which also has its own Tegra Zone SDK that provides Android developers with expanded access to features and better gaming performance through the company’s Tegra chips.

Qualcomm’s Liat Ben Zur

And Qualcomm and Nvidia’s efforts can also mean more work for developers and can potentially create a fragmented app environment. Ben-Zur said Qualcomm has worked to make it easy for developers to write an app once and have it run on different hardware. Developers can take advantage of Qualcomm’s extended APIs, but if their app runs on another chipset, it can just fall back to a base set of features. Ben-Zur said Qualcomm is leading the pack in mobile device wins, with 370 Snapdragon devices available and 400 in design.

Another question down the road is, Will consumers bother to check for the Snapdragon brand when they purchase? It seems like a stretch, considering most consumers shop by carrier or manufacturer. Or worse yet, will it create even more confusion for consumers? Ben-Zur thinks consumers will be open to buying based on the Snapdragon brand if it means better performance and features. “People are used to a lot of selection types, they already handle a lot of complexity,” she said.

I don’t know if Qualcomm will initially play as pivotal a role as Ben-Zur believes for both consumers and developers. A lot of the stuff in the Snapdragon SDK isn’t necessary for most apps today or is already handled by other chips and sensors in our devices. And it does mean more work to take full advantage.

But I’m intrigued by the possibilities of developers creating a lot of apps that might not have been possible before. Getting this type of access really does reveal new opportunities, especially if Qualcomm keeps opening up more features in future chips. But in the larger picture, this is a savvy move by Qualcomm to make more groups dependent on its chipsets. If it can get a lot of developers onboard, it can help maintain its lead and prevent other competitors from getting in tight with OEMs.

Here’s a little rap video Qualcomm put together to talk about its new Snapdragon SDK.

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Facebook takes the like button to mobile partners

Eliza Kern — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 15:55:29 +0000

Facebook announced Thursday that mobile developers using the company’s API will now be able to cleanly integrate Facebook’s iconic like button into their design, allowing users to perform the equivalent of a “like” within another app and then cross-posting that action to Facebook.

The development, announced in a press release on Facebook’s blog, makes sense as the company has grown and begun acquiring other mobile apps such as Instagram, and the tech world doubles down on mobile as the most exciting area of growth in social technology.

While it seemed like only a matter of time before an Instagram “heart” turned into a Facebook “like” posted to a news feed, this development will allow any mobile app using Facebook’s API to integrate just as seamlessly.

Apps that require a user to rate something — like a five-star rating for a restaurant, for example — will not be able to transform those actions into likes. And apps that do take advantage of the “like” feature will require a user’s permission to post that news to the person’s Facebook news feed, Facebook explained.

The development represents just another step in Facebook’s continuing integration into the mobile and social technology spheres. Just recently, Apple announced that Facebook would see integration with the iPhone in iOS 6, allowing users to more easily cross-post items to Facebook from their iPhones.

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The mobile Web isn’t dead; it’s sleeping. And it’s about to wake up

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:00:13 +0000

New data from comScore indicates apps are driving traffic on the mobile Web far more than browsers. Despite claims that the mobile Web is dead, though, HTML5 is finally beginning to breathe life into Web-based mobile apps.

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Google should abandon Android (the brand) to save Android (the platform)

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:00:40 +0000

Android’s long-term prospects are increasingly threatened by fragmentation problems and developers’ struggles to monetize the platform. So Google should take a page from Apple and build an entirely new ecosystem it can control atop Android under a different brand.

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Augmented reality glasses teem with promise — and pitfalls

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:00:07 +0000

Augmented reality glasses are getting a lot of attention lately thanks largely to Google, which has demonstrated how AR could change our everyday lives. But the promising space must address a wide range of challenges before “Terminator”-type specs become mainstream gadgets.

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