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Veteran Mobile App Marketers Launch Grow Mobile, A Way To Systematically Get Users
Although it still seems opaque, the top mobile game companies have honed the art of spending millions of dollars per month to bring in new users through ad networks and dozens of other channels over the past few years.
Now a couple of veterans in this space are launching a platform that should make it easy for any app maker — brands and game developers alike — to acquire users. Co-founded by Zynga’s former head of mobile marketing A.J. Yeakel, Storm8′s former head of business development Brendan Lyall and Ming-Lei Xu, who sold Wild Needle to Zynga, Grow Mobile is a dashboard that incorporates about 75 different marketing channels from ad networks to cross-promotion networks and other exchanges.
It makes it easy for app makers to see which ones perform the best.
“This would have been amazing if both of us had this at our respective companies before,” Lyall said. “We each put in our own personal touches in what we wanted in the product.”
There’s a media planner that helps developers choose the best ways to get traffic based on their historical performance, a campaign wizard that makes it easier to syndicate campaigns without a lot of hands-on involvement and user retention and monetization reporting that shows where the most highly engaged users come from. Then there’s lifetime value reporting, which tells a developer how profitable users might be as long as they use an app.
There are basic app rankings reports for how an app does on the charts in Google Play or the iOS app store, basic analytics on where users come from geographically and what types of devices and OSs they use
Then there’s cohort ROI reporting, which tells a developer how much they’ve spent versus how well a group of users who joined at a certain time did in engagement and spending.
Lyall says while there are similar tools for web-based performance marketing from companies like Adobe and Marin Software, the mobile ecosystem is way more fragmented.
“Your average mobile advertiser has a budget that is spread across north of 30 different sources,” Lyall said.
The company, which has raised a $1 million seed round from Signia Venture Partners and Bessemer, had about 16 companies in its beta. They included bigger buyers like GREE, Zynga and K-Lab. Lyall said one publicly traded company managed their entire budget on the Grow Mobile platform.
The 11-person startup takes a small percentage of spend every month. That percentage declines as the spending volume increases. Grow Mobile declined to share its rate card.
“Once you scale into the multiple millions of dollars per month, we go down to a single-digit percentage of spend,” Lyall said. “What we’re trying to do is to make it so easy that it’s like a no-brainer. If a company likes our solution, they would just allocate more of their spend through us instead of hiring a larger team.”
The Xperia Z Ultra, Sony's Mini-Tablet Sized Phone, Wants You To Talk Less & Watch More
Sony is steering its mobile ship into deeper waters with the Xperia Z Ultra. The 6.4-inch device (above, left) slots in the size gap between its former flagship handset, the 5-inch Xperia Z (above right), and its 10.1-inch Android slate, the Xperia Z Tablet. The Xperia Z Ultra might have more sensibly been named the Xperia Z Tablet Mini. Instead, Sony has hedged its bets with a name that doesn’t exclude either possibility: for some people this is a really big smartphone, for others it’s a highly portable small slate.
I got hands-on with the newest addition to Sony’s line up at a press event this morning. First impressions: there’s no getting away from the sheer size of this beast. The Xperia Z Ultra is a mammoth. It’s huge, crazy huge. It looks more like a mini tablet than a phone when you see it wielded in anger, which likely explains why Sony has felt the need to make a dummy handset accessory (powered by Bluetooth) so you don’t have to hold this slab up to your face. Doing that is going to invite ridicule unless you’re one of those Ballmer-sized business men with hands the size of dinner plates.
Even holding the Ultra in one hand feels a little ridiculous if you have smaller hands than average, like myself, but its slender profile (just 6.5mm) helps — meaning it doesn’t feel too palm-stretching. The main offsetting factor is a very lightweight feel. It’s surprisingly light in the hand (212g) for such a large device. You could happily hold it in one hand and not worry about getting wrist-ache. And if you can find a pocket on your person big enough to accomodate the Ultra it won’t feel like a drag, even if it drastically reduces your ability to bend.
Sony says the Ultra is about a third bigger than the Xperia Z (and has a third-extra in battery capacity too, so it’s still good for about one day’s use before needing a charge). And at 6.4-inches it’s considerably larger than Samsung’s 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II, and fractionally larger than Samsung’s newer phablet, the 6.3-inch Galaxy Mega. Rumours around the Galaxy Note refresh suggest Samsung is contemplating adding a 5.9-inch pane on the next iteration. Sony has evidently decided its worth making an even bigger splash with its own phablet foray. But with the Xperia Z already sitting on the cusp of phablet sizing, with its 5-inch pane, supersizing the sequel is the natural next step.
Sony talked up how consumer demand for bigger screens is growing — apparently as fast as the screens themselves are swelling. The likely reason for that, as I have previously argued, is that people are using smartphones for more rich media consumption and visual computing uses more of the time – fuelled by apps and high speed connectivity — rather than for talking on the phone. Screen size is therefore inflating to adapt to shifting use. And Sony reckons it’s well placed to capitalise on the momentum powering media consumption — thanks to its sprawling entertainment empire.
As with its other Xperia devices, Sony’s Android skin foreground access to this media content. Sony is hoping its content empire can become a differentiating force in the mobile devices space — and help it stand out in the crowded Android OEM segment. As with Sony other current Xperia devices, the Xperia Z Ultra is preloaded with its Walkman app providing access to music downloads and its Music Unlimited streaming service; Movies for video content, including access to Sony’s Video Unlimited store for renting or buying films; and PlayStation Mobile for accessing its games app store. There’s also Sony Reader for browsing and downloading ebook content.
Elsewhere, Sony has kept its Android tweaks to a minimum so there’s little getting in the way of enjoying Android 2.2 Jelly Bean as Google intended. The device felt slick and fast during my brief hands on, with no obvious signs of lag. The phone’s engine is a beefy 2.2 GHz quad-core chip (Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processor) — possibly the first device to pack that CPU. It also includes 4G/LTE for high speed cellular connectivity.
The hardware design of the Xperia Z Ultra follows the same mold as the Xperia Z and Xperia Z Tablet. There are no showy embellishments. What you get is a clean, relatively blunt-sided high gloss slab (or at least it’s clean until you touch it, when the high gloss becomes a fingerprint magnet). The user’s eye is clearly intended to fall squarely on the screen — where Sony gets to really strut its stuff, by pulling in IP from its Bravia TV division to amp up the colour clarity and video playback experience on the handset. The Ultra is also the first device in Sony’s Xperia line-up to be badged with its latest Triluminos TV tech, which it said supports a greater range of colours.
The screen looked plenty bright during my hands on but as with other Sony mobile screen it’s not as saturated as Samsung’s high end AMOLED screens typically are. Sony opts for more true-to-life colourings with its display tech. The Xperia Z Ultra’s big, bright full 1080p HD pane obviously comes into its own for consuming video content. You can image the device being a handy travelling companion for watching TV shows and movies on the go, assuming you don’t want to lug around a full-fat tablet. Or for watching TV in the bath — being as the Ultra is waterproof. Gaming is also likely to work well with so much screen space for mashing virtual buttons.
The Ultra’s large physical size (179.4 x 92.2 x 6.5 mm) does mean typing can require two fingers to reach all the keys. But Sony has a software fix for that. It’s added a one-handed keyboard option which allows the user to switch from a screen-filling QWERTY to one which compacts into the right or left hand corner, depending on your choice (so that both right- and left-handed people can use it). So that’s pretty neat. You can of course further augment the Android keyboard experience by downloading alternative third party apps.
Sony has also added support for stylus input on the Ultra — presumably taking another cue from the Galaxy Note — for taking notes, sketching and for handwriting recognition. In a laudable move — especially for Sony, once the king of propriety accessories — there’s no specific stylus required here. You can draw on the screen with a pencil. Or even a fingernail.
To sum up, the Xperia Ultra Z feels like it has a lot going for it. Sony is refining its Android play to zero in on media consumption. And if it’s content you want to consume, then a 6.4-inch screen is exactly the sort of thing you’ll want in your pocket. Or, more realistically, in your handbag/manbag. Flagship smartphone screens aren’t getting any smaller either, so even if the Ultra feels like it’s pushing the screen size envelope a bit far right now, it’s unlikely to remain the biggest phablet in phablet-town for long.
Firefox 22 Launches With Built-In Asm.js And WebRTC Support
Mozilla today launched Firefox 22, the first stable version of the popular browser that supports the WebRTC protocol and includes support for the organization’s asm.js JavaScript subset that offers near-native performance for web apps.
For the most part, browser releases have now become routine, especially since all the major vendors – with the exception of Microsoft – have switched to a rapid-release schedule. Both WebRTC and asm.js, however, have the potential to change how developers create web apps, so even if you usually ignore Firefox releases, this one is definitely worth a look.
Built-In WebRTC Support
WebRTC allows developers to create web apps with built-in video and audio calls, as well as file sharing without the need for any plugins or third-party software. A number of companies, including, for example, Tokbox, are already betting big on WebRTC. Until now, however, only Google’s Chrome supported the budding standard in its mainstream browser releases. Now that Firefox also supports it in its stable branch, we will likely see a large number of startups and established companies examine this technology far closer. Microsoft, so far, remains the only major vendor who has decided to go ahead with a different standard for the same functionality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Internet Explorer, too, would support WebRTC out of the box in the near future.
Asm.js
Asm.js is another technology that has the potential to be game changer. As we explained in more detail in March, asm.js is a subset of JavaScript that runs with near-native speed in the browser. It is, as Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich explained it to me back then, a sub-language that “effectively describes a safe virtual machine for memory-unsafe languages like C or C++.” Thanks to tools like Emscripten, which can compile C and C++ code asm.js, developers can also use it to convert their C and C++ programs to run in the browser. Asm.js currently gets to within 2x of native performance and the team is working hard to speed it up even more.
You can test all of these new features with Mozilla’s BananaBread game demo, which uses WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and WebRTC to “show how you can deliver high-end 3D multiplayer games while still maintaining a fast and stunning experience.”
Other small updates in version 22 include improved WebGL rendering performance, a download progress bar in the Dock application window on Mac OS X and support for display scaling options on high-res displays on Windows. You can find the full release notes here.
Android-First Mobile Messenger Invi Raises $3 Million For Its SMS Replacement App
Invi, a mobile messaging app for Android which lets users search for and share photos, YouTube videos and more, is today announcing $3 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Alpha Investment, UpWest Labs, and Silicon Valley angels from Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Groupon, Spotify, SRI, Cisco, Chegg and others.
The new funding comes on the heels of an earlier $750,000 round from Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and various angels announced back in November. This $3 million round includes that previous raise.
“Messaging hasn’t been evolved much,” explains invi co-founder Iddo Tal of his company’s inspiration. Even though users are now sending out dozens if not hundreds of texts per day, the majority of those communications still take place over SMS.
Co-founder Lior Gonnen says that the idea with invi is to integrate every app on a user’s phone into invi’s chat. When you share a piece of content – whether an Instagram photo, YouTube video, song from Spotify, and more – the link (URL) for that content is transformed into a “virtual widget” inside invi displaying the rich media. Sort of like Gmail’s “preview” feature, recipients can then view that content right in the invi app.
In its original incarnation, invi was more of a private mobile messenger which offered users the ability to communicate with other invi users for free over data or Wi-Fi connections in order to avoid SMS fees. This is a model which has proved successful for a growing number of messaging startups worldwide, but still one that limits an app’s potential user base. So today, invi is attempting to expand its user base by also introducing the ability to text with other, non-invi users at regular SMS rates.
However, despite adding this new ability, users attempting to share a photo or video from their Camera or Android Gallery app, are still be met with an “Invi Only” flag in the messaging app. They can search and share YouTube videos, but other options like “Contact” or “Music” are listed as “coming soon.”
With the additional funding, the plan is to grow invi’s now six-person team with more engineering talent, including those who can help bring the app to iOS, Windows Phone, and the Chrome web browser, too. Longer-term the plan to monetize the free app involves letting users send each other gifting that are more transactional in nature.
And no, for once, a messaging startup doesn’t plan to make selling sticker packs its business model.
Instead, the founders explain that the company, once it has established a big enough user base, would help users send more meaningful items to their closet friends, like perhaps presents, cards, or even money.
In the near term, however, the plan is to add support for other user requested items like group chat and landscape mode, for example.
First launched in October 2012, invi has seen several hundred thousand downloads so far, with over 50 percent of those in the U.S. Today, the app is being localized in a dozen more languages, and is available worldwide in Google Play here.
HipChat Brings Mac Client Out Of Beta, Offers Up Overhauled iOS App As Trials Triple With Free Tier
HipChat has done a whole lot of overhauling when it comes to its desktop and mobile clients over the past year, and now the native Mac app, which was released as a beta on February 14, is getting its full 2.0 launch today. Alongside that, HipChat is also launching version 2.0 for iOS, another native overhaul, and both show ample evidence of the progress the group chat and collaboration app has made since its acquisition by Atlassian last year.
HipChat co-founder Pete Curley told me all about the changes made to both apps, which include a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements focusing on stability and performance, as well as totally new user interfaces that offer things like vertical tab navigation on the Mac for active chats, Notification Center support and more. The HipChat for iOS revamp adds quick switching between open rooms via a lefthand sidebar; file, link and chat history plus search; new swipe gestures like those you’ll find in system apps in iOS 7; and much more convenient photo sharing.
The update should also drastically improve performance, and will be especially welcome for users of HipChat on iPads, according to Curley. Those who’ve used the previous versions of HipChat for iOS are definitely in for a pleasant surprise. And for Android users, the update that arrived mid-month in April is still a huge improvement, though Curley says now the HipChat mobile team is working on bringing the improvements from this iOS release back to that platform, too.
“I’m extremely surprised at the number of enterprise people using chat on their tablets these day,” Curley said, talking about the need for an iPad-specific overhaul in particular. And the rest of the decisions made were also geared around trends that are changing in terms of mobile app usage. Interfaces on the new app are much better tailored to control systems that have gotten more common. Design language for apps has changed considerably since the advent of iOS, and the new apps feel much more at home as a result. And as for going native on the desktop, it was a case of necessity to suit the changing needs of its customers.
“From the business side of things, Air was really good at getting us, from a three-person team, a product out the door that was running on every operating system, which is crazy to think that we had one guy program that and had 10s of thousands of paid users on that,” Curley said. “The product was able to be used by teams much larger than we’d anticipated, like Netflix, which has switched almost entirely to it, Air wasn’t designed for that and started leaving a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”
HipChat also recently decided to open up a free trial tier for teams of up to five users, and I asked Curley about the progress of that project. New sign-ups have tripled, he says, and there are now 2,500 teams using that free service level, all of which are opportunities for paid conversions down the road if they grow beyond their current size. Curley said that while they offered a free tier in the past and got rid of it because people seemingly didn’t use it all that much, this time around the offer is driving plenty of new business, which may be a factor of HipChat’s intervening maturation as a platform.
Pokki Partners With Acer To Offer Zynga Games On PC Desktops
Pokki is partnering with Acer and Zynga to offer a new game arcade, featuring the full Zynga.com library of games, on new Windows 8 PCs. The arcade, an extension of the Pokki Game Network, will be preloaded on Acer PCs, along with the popular Pokki Start menu for Windows 8 and hundreds of free apps in the Pokki app store.
Pokki, which is made by SweetLabs, previously won over fans with desktop versions of popular apps like Angry Birds, Pandora and Pinterest, an app recommendation system, and a start menu for Windows 8.
SweetLabs cofounder Chester Ng showed me the Zynga games on an Acer machine, and the arcade looks appealing. Users can install games in one click and start playing games immediately; the interface is pretty and everything loads very quickly. Most of all, the games have the feel of an authentic tablet experience.
Ng says the smart arcade features real time notification badges and banners, and starts tailoring games to what the user likes and doesn’t like.
“Pokki is trying to make the PC better for users, developers to help them get distribution, and now device manufacturers,” Ng tells me. “There are plenty of problems to solve for all three of those constituencies.”
For developers like Zynga, Pokki offers a new distribution as they try to get their games into users hands beyond Facebook and mobile devices; these games are promoted right out of the box when a user opens a new PC. And it works for Pokki and equipment manufacturers, as Ng says it is a revenue opportunity for them to drive users to these games.
Pokki enables manufacturers like Acer to offer the newest, hottest games in real time, rather than preloading machines with a game months before the point of sale.
Ng said working with Acer is “a big win for us,” and that it’s “good validation that we’re not only making the pc better but also helping them on the business side.”
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