Saturday, June 20, 2009

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Offerpal Adds Custom Analytics Platform to Virtual Economies

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 11:00 AM PDT

Virtual goods has become one way in which to monetize social media applications, and entire marketplace has cropped up around this. Services such as Offerpal have established monetization solutions for such socially inegrated virtual economies, from games to mobile applications.

Months after raising $15 million in funding, a new update from Offerpal extends more customization capabilities for clients. In what appears to be an enhanced dashboard option, Offerpal is launching a virtual currency analytics package for social applications and destination sites. Participants can track activity as well as monetization performance for their specific campaigns.

Custom options enable publishers to break down their data based on User Levels, character type, install source, account age, and more, ranging from basic to more complex demographics. This new tool is offered free to publishers using Offerpal Media’s Managed Offer Platform for their monetization purposes.

This all goes for tracking actual ad behavior, including revenue, impressions, unique visitors, offer clicks, completions, eCPM, click-through and conversion rates, and revenue and earnings per click. It’s a lot to think about–Offerpal has over 1,000 separate parameters by which you can drill down into your user data. Given the growing need to utilize multiple methods for advertising and revenue-generation, so many parameters along with added custom options are increasingly important for socially integrated applications.

Of course, the largest benefit of being able to customize so much of this metrics data is the fact that a publisher is more readily able to improve their virtual goods economy. From the placement of certain offers within a virtual environment to other targeting methods, the ability to self-regulate and modify aspects of the monetization platform is the next major trend for services like Offerpal.

To a certain degree, such customization options present themselves as forms of recommendations, empowering publishers with a set of tools necessary to continuously tweak their implementation of Offerpal’s solutions. A handful of other major monetization platforms, including Twofish and Super Rewards, have added custom options for their publishers as well.

Trapster Updates Reflect Developer Benefits of New iPhone

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 10:20 AM PDT

Trapster, the mobile application that lets you search and report speed traps on the road, has revealed two major new updates for its iPhone app, both of which take advantage of the new iPhone OS 3.0.
The first new feature is the loading time for Trapster’s maps. Instead of the old maps, which took a full 28 seconds to load, the updated maps take only 8 seconds for launch. This is because Trapster is able to use the native maps API for the iPhone, as opposed to having to use a Safari web view for maps, which took up a great deal of JavaScript, lengthening the load time.

This may seem like a minor update, but let’s think about this. Who wants to wait nearly 30 seconds for anything to load? And if you’re already an iPhone user then you’ll appreciate an application’s ability to use the device’s maps directly. More specifically, we’re talking about a speed trap application. The faster you can search for speed traps, the better off you’ll be. And for those that actually contribute to Trapster, there’s nothing more discouraging than a slow load time when you’re ready to report a new speed trap.

The second update for Trapster’s iPhone app is the option to receive push notifications, which means you can better focus on the road while you drive. Kind of. The biggest benefit of Trapster’s push notifications is the ability to receive them without running the actual application. For the iPhone, this is kind of a big deal since the device doesn’t support background running applications. With this particular update Trapster no longer has to rely on using text messages for alerting drivers without having the app running, which is more cost effective on Trapster’s end.

For the iPhone OS 3.0, the biggest changes from a platform standpoint include the added support for integrating developer’s applications. While not immediately recognizable to many end users, the ability to mor readily create applications and distribute them on Apple’s mobile platform creates a great deal of value to end users when it’s all said and done.

Given Trapster’s recent updates, which include integration with Facebook Connect as well as Twitter. Such ongoing updates have helped Trapster gain 400,000 traps in its worldwide database, with over 1 million users. As over half of Trapster’s user base consists of iPhone users, it’s also easy to see why the company is so excited about the new iPhone OS 3.0 and its new feature set.

Playdom Hires New CEO, John Pleasants

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 10:20 AM PDT

Playdom has added a new executive to its core team. The social game development company announced this week that John Pleasants is Playdom’s new CEO. Coming from Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA), Pleasants has a wealth of experience in the gaming industry, and has been brought on board in part to help Playdom achieve the high growth scaling the company is currently seeking.

At EA, Pleasants acted as the President of Global Publishing and Chief Operating Officer, giving him a very high level perspective on the gaming industry as a whole. Some benefits of EA are its established presence in its respective industry, as well as its involvement with multiple aspects of gaming overall. Having witnessed the recent changes to the gaming industry over the past several years, EA has managed to shift along with the times, even trying its hand at online social gaming.

While EA hasn’t always had the best success in the online social gaming realm, the experience for Pleasants as well as the whole of the gaming industry offers a lot to learn from. Playdom, formerly known as You Plus, launched as a social gaming organization and has been heavily involved within social network application platforms as part of its business model.

Having since expanded from MySpace to Facebook, Playdom is clearly seeking a great deal of growth and visibility. Integrating with social networks on this level presents access to an established user base and the cross-network approach that Playdom has moved towards is a necessity for many applications, and can be particularly beneficial for social gaming.

For a more in depth look at Playdom, the company’s business model and monetary approach to integrated social gaming, see here for Nick’s interview from earlier this year.
Posted by Unite To Solve @ United Techno at 5:07 AM

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