RSSMix.com Mix ID 34497

First Data Releases February 2010 SpendTrend Results

First Data Corporation has released its First Data SpendTrend analysis for February 2010 - finding that "same-store dollar volume was up 8.4% (7.4% excluding gasoline stations) with employment showing signs of stabilization. Average tickets were up 1.4%, the first year-over-year increase since July 2008." SpendTrend tracks same-store consumer spending via credit, signature debit, PIN debit and EBT cards at U.S. merchant locations.

Visa Updates Volume, Growth Statistics

In an 8-K filing with the SEC this morning, Visa updated some selected volume data:

February, U.S. aggregate payments volume growth was positive 12% versus the prior year period. Further broken down, U.S. credit payments volume growth was positive 2% and debit payments volume growth was positive 20%.
February cross border payments volume on a constant dollar basis was positive 11% over the prior year period.
February processed transactions grew positive 13% globally.
2011 free cash flow is expected to exceed $2 billion.

Merchant Risk Council's Annual Merchant Fraud Survey

The Merchant Risk Council (MRC), a merchant-led trade association focused on electronic commerce risk and payment strategies, has announced the results of its Annual Merchant Fraud Survey, sponsored by CyberSource Corporation. According to the MRC, "this years survey again confirms that MRC Platinum Members are best in class at reducing revenue losses due to cyber theft, while also leading the way in reviewer productivity for both domestic and international orders."

Report: 30 Percent of Gamers Cant Afford Virtual Currency

Today, Offerpal released the results of a survey that targeted social gamers monetization activities. Specifically, the report found that 29.7% of social gamers do not have the ability or means to pay for virtual currencies with cash, and 53.3% of consumers are willing to engage in alternative payments, like offers, to earn virtual currency. The report also found some other interesting statistics related to monetization behavior.

Seeing as this is an Offerpal study, the results aim to demonstrate that alternative payment methods will attract many social gamers who dont have means to pay for their virtual currency with cash. However, this is in line with other numbers weve heard from the social gaming industry, such as Zyngas claim that 33% of their overall revenue comes from social games. The survey identified alternative payments as filling out a survey, watching a video, shopping at online retailers or signing up for a subscription. The standard payment options are credit cards, Paypal, bank transfers and mobile billing.

Another interesting result was that 34.9% of gamers say they are very unlikely to part with their money in order to purchase points. Statistics like these corroborate with the observed trends about the social games industry, that a small percentage of the overall users are the ones who engage in monetization. Known as the 80/20 rule, social game developers and monetization providers are constantly trying to monetize a greater percentage of their free-playing audience, and thats why offers have been successful. Without having to give up any real cash, gamers that want the virtual currency now have an option that only costs them time, and perhaps their email address.

Here are some other interesting findings from the report:

Offerpal reports that since September, 2009when it launched Offerpal SURVEYS, the first of these incremental alternative payment optionsthe company has seen a 20% increase in the percent of users it is able to monetize
Gamers in the 25-34 age range are most likely (70.9 % very likely) to be willing to earn virtual currency through marketing actions
Most of the gamers (54.5%) report playing games online at least once a day; 26.7% reported playing several times a week; 11.5% play about once a week; and 7.3% play two to three times a month
When asked what kinds of games they play on a regular basis, 58.4% of the respondents said they regularly play virtual world/simulation games, followed by arcade games (40.3%), role playing games (33.5%), action games (29.7%), board games (26.9%), card games (25.6%) and word games (23.4%)
Of those who say they are very likely to buy points with a cash payment method, a majority of the users are men (53.4%) and a plurality in the 25-34 age range (42.8%)
85.4% of the users who say they are very likely to buy points with cash are also very likely to earn points through marketing actions

The study was conducted between February 12th and February 15th, 2010, and includes detailed responses from 799 comScore panelists. Respondents were filtered to only include users who play games on the leading social network at least once a month.

Why AOL May Just Abandon Bebo Rather Than Sell It

Newly independent Aol is still struggling with the fate of Bebo, the social network they acquired for $850 million in 2008.

No one argues that Aol underpaid for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market.

Despite that value, Aols best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts weve spoken with.

Heres why complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset. With Aols effective tax rate of around 45%, thats $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that theyd be able to avoid.

A sale of Bebo would almost certainly be less attractive. If someone were to pay them $100 million for the service, which is optimistic, Aol could still offset the remaining $750 million as a tax loss. But it could only apply against long term capital gains, and Aol doesnt have any to offset against. Theyd have to carry that loss forward and hope for future gains to offset it against.

One corporate tax attorney we spoke with wouldnt discuss Aol specifically, but did confirm the logic of the approach. Bryan Smith, a partner at Perkins Coie, says Without getting into any specific facts or companies, it will often be more attractive for a U.S. corporation to simply shut down a subsidiary and claim a deduction for the worthlessness of the stock against ordinary income instead of selling the stock at a distressed price and taking a capital loss, which may only offset capital gains.

If Aol were to abandon Bebo they couldnt pull any of the assets of the company back into Aol, say the experts weve spoken with. Otherwise it becomes a non-taxable liquidation. If Aol had debt or preferred stock on the books with Bebo, though, they could pull out assets to offset that liability.

CrunchBase Information

AOL

Bebo

Information provided by CrunchBase

"Mythical Man-Month" Supposedly Busted By MIT Startup

PlayStation Move: Everything You Need To Know [Gdc10]

Americans spend $3.8 billion on MMO gaming in 2009

LEGO Universe Beta Ready To Brick Your Computer [Beta Watch]

RockYous Deal of the Day: High-Conversion CPE Ads for Social Games

RockYou are today launching their Deal of the Day (DOTD) ad unit, which gives flash game developers the ability to offer and monetize deals on virtual goods and services. This offering is part of RockYous ad network, which reaches 280 million people across most of the major social networks. Lisa Marino, Chief Revenue Officer at RockYou, in an interview with SocialTimes, provided a bit of insight.

DOTD is based on CPE, or Cost Per Engagement ads. RockYou says that DOTD is social gamings first brand-sponsored CPE in-game ad solution. Advertisers set an action to be completed e.g., watch a video, download a coupon, fan a Facebook Page, complete a mini-poll, etc. and successful users are awarded either virtual currency or a discount on virtual goods or services.

Lisa Marino who gave a standing-room only talk about social game monetization strategies at GDC 2010 (Game Developers Conference) on Tuesday Mar 9th said that RockYou can guarantee brands certain performance levels for various user activities because of the companys cross-platform network reach.

Marino also said that DOTD, which was tested on RockYous own games, Converts at an order of magnitude higher rate than anything in an offerwall. She suggested that DOTD will work for games with any size MAU (Monthly Active Users). Offerwalls are very lower-funnel. Our take on it is, lower-funnel only gets you so far because most people have to whip out their credit card. People want to level-up in games and theyre willing to do a lot in order to make that happen for themselves.

DOTD, on the other hand, is upper-funnel, meaning users dont have to pay anything to gain some benefit, such as extra points in a game or access to another level. So it tends to convert at an unbelievably high rate. RockYou found completion rates for their DOTD sponsored ad units as high as 50%. As a result, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) for social games increased, and as much as 25% of a games user base converted, compared to a more traditional 3-5%.

Online deals are becoming a big thing, with major buzz being given to deals companies like Groupon and LivingSocialDeals, and also offered to social gamers through competitive networks such as Peanut Labs Cherry Deals Discounts.

4 Ways To Monitor Your Facebook Page Traffic

While Facebook already provides a page insights tool for Page administrators to track traffic to their page, there is still a lot of information which is unknown. So how can administrators determine how well their landing tab is performing? There are a number of techniques to monitor your Facebook Page traffic, four of which are described in this article.

Webtrends Tool

Last week, Webtrends announced the release of an analytics packages that helps users track activity on their Facebook Page. The tool, found here, enables developers to track interactions on their custom tabs. Unfortunately, Facebook does not enabled third-party services to track any interactions on the main Facebook Page. Today, Webtrends also announced the expansion of their Facebook product in order to monitor Flash applications within Pages or as stand alone applications.

Facebook Insights

As I previously stated, Facebook limits what information third-party developers can monitor. Thats why the companys Insights product continues to serve as an important tool for all Page administrators. We previously wrote about the most important things to monitor within your Facebook page insights. Ultimately, you can track demographic data, interactions by media type, and more, all of which are only accessible through the Facebook Insights product.

Core Metrics

Core Metrics, one of the larger enterprise analytics services, recently announced the launch of new services integrated into many of their existing products that enable marketers to measure their ROI from Facebook. The aim of the Facebook integration is to determine the role Facebook plays in influencing subsequent website visits, behaviors, and conversions.

Essentially, Facebook clicks are tracked and then can be connected to actual on-site business objectives, such as new subscriptions and sales conversions. This appears to be a more robust solution than many of the other products, but it may be data overload for the average Facebook Page administrator.
Core Metrics -

Google Analytics

While Google analytics is targeted at website owners, the analytics service can be used by Facebook Page administrators as well. Unfortunately Facebook has not enabled their FBML tag within Facebook Pages, so a London-based web development company decided to create their own solution. By using images, there is a workaround which enables Page administrators to track everything within the custom tabs.

Facebook Credits Now the First Payment Option in Zyngas FarmVille Game

The number of big social applications that use Facebooks virtual currency, Credits, continues to rise. The latest is Zyngas smash hit farming game, FarmVille, the largest application on Facebook with nearly 84 million users a month.

The integration is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the screenshot below. Credits is shown as the first of several payment options others include direct credit card payments, PayPal, and a variety of other payment services, including prepaid cards and offers.

Zynga has previously beenrunning Credits in some of its smaller Facebook apps, like role-playing game Pirates: Rule the Caribbean. Credits is now also appearing on some of its other big applications, like pet-caring title PetVille. However, its not on others, including Caf World.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

If You Want Traffic From Facebook, Post Content On The Weekend

According to a new report from Dan Zarrella, the weekend is the best time to post content on Facebook as articles posted then are shared the most. One explanation for the phenomenon was that more than half of companies block Facebook. While Ive noticed that Twitter is the exact opposite, this report definitely sheds some light on Facebook user behavior.

Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how accurate this report is. The primary reason is that no information was shared about the sampling data. How were articles selected when testing sharing volume? Was an arbitrary data set selected for testing against Facebooks share analytics tools? Whatever the model is, its definitely interesting.

I also would imagine that many Facebook users turn to their mobile devices to monitor content while on the go during the weekend. Then again, the same users who are blocked from accessing Facebook at work may be visiting their friends activity while in transit to and from work each day. Unfortunately this basic glimpse in to Facebook user behavior is nothing more than that: a basic glimpse.

Id be interested to see other statistics on Facebook sharing. Do notice that your friends share more information on the weekends or is there more activity during the weekdays?

App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview

When iTunes web preview pages first appeared for songs and albums the industry was abuzz with the possibility that iTunes could be migrating to the cloud. iTunes preview has so far had little impact on how we use purchased media content, but it has had a huge impact on how we find iTunes media content on the web, especially with iPhone apps. The iTunes web preview pages are an enormous draw for search engines and consistently rank high in the results when searching for the names of apps.

A Quick History of iTunes Web Preview

Previously, web links to iTunes content opened a redirect page (hosted on phobos.apple.com) that asked you to wait One Moment Please while the iTunes application was launched. This page only had a thumbnail of the cover and sparsely listed just the title and publisher.

iTunes web preview first appeared on November 13, 2009 with full pages including descriptive text (hosted on itunes.apple.com). Audio clip previews were added on January 7, 2010. These pages still launch the iTunes application, but also include the full description, select customer reviews, and links to related content. Preview pages for iPhone apps were published on February 4 and podcasts were added March 1. TV Show and Movies still have the old style pages that just launch the iTunes application.

In hindsight, the launch of iTunes 9 on September 9, 2009 with store pages rendered completely in WebKit using HTML was a sign of things to come.

iTunes Web Preview has SEO Mojo

These web preview pages have exposed text content to Google and other search engines that can now crawl and index these pages. To measure the impact this has had on search results, I did a short study on the Top 100 Paid Apps in the iTunes App Store. I chose to track the relative ranking in Google search results of the iTunes preview page and the apps homepage when searching on the app name.

For this study, I only looked at the search results for the app name. While keywords would have been interesting to track, they are not publicly available. The keywords that publishers submit to Apple are hidden content in the iTunes App Store and are not included in the web preview page. I dropped special characters that appeared unlikely to actually be typed into a search (trademark and copyright symbols, for example).

In almost all results, iTunes appeared in the first 10 results on Google. In fact, the median result was #4. In some cases, the pages were only launched only a month ago, so thats impressive. iTunes appeared above the app homepage for 68 of the Top 100 Apps.

In about 2/3 of the apps, the iTunes preview page ranked higher in search results. There is a marked difference between these two sets of apps.

For all 100 apps, the median rank of the developers homepage (as published in iTunes) in Google search results was #17. Developers should take note here because a rank of 17 means that your apps homepage is pushed off to the much less visited second page of results.

For those cases where the homepage appeared before iTunes, the median search result rank was #1. The iTunes preview page median result was #5. When we look at the other set, where iTunes appeared above the homepage, the median iTunes result was #3 and the median homepage result was #71.

We can see here that homepages that rank well for searches on the app name have a pretty good chance of capturing customers who are looking for that app. However, if the homepage is not doing well for a search on the app name, it is far more likely that the customer will end up at the iTunes store, or perhaps a review site.

Some Surprises

While I was not surprised to see the iTunes preview pages come in at the #1 result for App Store specific titles like Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, I did not expect to see the iTunes page fall near the top with some older brands that predate the App Store. Frogger, Skee-Ball, and SpinArt single word titles all show iTunes at #6. Tetris, Scrabble, Rock Band and Final Fantasy have the iTunes preview page holding a spot between #13 and #15. Playboy another single word term that I would have thought to have lots of search results shows the iTunes page for the app at #7.

Why Do iTunes Preview Pages Rank So High?

iTunes preview pages rank well in Google search results because they are very search engine friendly for app names. The URL, page title, meta description, meta keywords, and the H1 tag are all loaded with the app name. These pages also have lots of incoming links from every blog entry, review, and so on that uses the iTunes link. I suspect that the Playboy app comes in at #7 because of all the recent news and opinion articles that link to the app as an example of a big publisher that escaped the iTunes sexy app purge.

The old phobos.apple.com links are 301 redirected (permanently moved) to the new preview page which helps transfer all the links directed to the old page to the new preview page as well.

It is interesting to note that the iTunes preview page uses the nofollow attribute for links to the apps homepage, so the PageRank of the preview page does not convey any benefit to the developers site .

The Upside to iTunes Preview Ranking High for App Names

The advantage to publishers in having the iTunes preview rank high in search results for an app name is clear. It gets customers who are searching for their app to the one place where they can download your app and pay money for the privilege to do so.

But there may be times when a publisher would want someone searching for their app to get to their own site first.

What is the Impact of Ranking Below the iTunes Preview Page?

There is no easy answer to questions about what this all means for App developers. However, let me point out one key advantage of ranking higher than the iTunes preview page developers can influence what shoppers learn about their company and their app outside of the iTunes App Store.

Also if they come to the publishers site first and then go to iTunes, the publisher has a chance to see what brought them there. The iTunes Store does not provide any information about individual customers or even reporting on keyword searches that lead to apps.

David Barnard of App Cubby sees a positive side in the iTunes App Store climbing in the search results.

Its a better user experience for potential customers to land on a preview page. Im also happy to see Apple working the SEO angle on behalf of developers (something myself and many fellow developers have little experience in). It does concern me that developers do not have access to analytics on these preview pages (or anything in the App Store for that matter). With iTunes preview pages ranking so high in search results, I get an even smaller window into my potential customer base. But I do appreciate Apples efforts to help usersdiscover and purchase apps and the long term impact that has on my pocketbook.

Use URL-safe Characters in App Titles

One finding from this quick study is that apps with a special character like the trademark or copyright symbol in the name, do not get the app name in the URL of the iTunes because the algorithm to generate the URL must not be able to deal with these characters. In these case, the URL contains the app id only. There are nine apps with this issue in the Top 100 Paid Apps list. Of those nine, the median ranking of the iTunes preview page is #8, well below the #3 ranking of sites that do have the name in the URL. Homepages for this set of apps dropped in the results significantly. The best homepage result of this set was #15 by Need for Speed Undercover but six of the nine homepages did not appear in the first 100 results from Google. In the case of Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front the iTunes link is in the #1 spot, but the specially created web site for the iPhone game, brothersinarmsiphone.com, does not even appear in Google search results.

I do not think that we can say that the non-safe characters in the title are the cause of the low ranking for these homepages, but perhaps the inattention to SEO practices in the App Store are linked to a lack of effort to optimize the homepage as well. Developers should pay more attention to SEO to make sure that customers looking for their app can find their site.

What Does It All Mean?

There are two issues that most developers should look for right away. The first is the non-safe characters issue mentioned above. The second is to look closely at the app description. Previously, the app description was not indexed for iTunes searches. Only the name and hidden keywords are used for searching inside iTunes. However, the description text is being indexed by Google now. It would benefit publishers to spend more attention on crafting the right message in the app description to reach those searching on the web.

Apples move to go with HTML content in the app store and the new preview pages for the App Store and other content have had a clear effect on where iTunes content appears in web searches. More web traffic is going to go straight to the iTunes Store as this trend continues but developers can take a few steps to make sure that customers find the info that they have prepared for shoppers on their own web sites.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Needed: A Neiman Marcus for Mobile Apps

Googles Chief Economist: Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News

Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.

Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.

The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption. Here are some telling stats from Varians presentation, which is also embedded below:

About 40% of internet users say read news on the Web every day.
Time spent on online news sites is only about 70 seconds per day, compared to 25 minutes spent reading a print edition.
Online news readers tend to read at work, not for leisure, so they dont have much time to stick around and are thus worth less to advertisers.
Overall, less than 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues come from the online editions.
Search engines account for 35 to 40 percent of traffic to major U.S. news sites, according to comScore.
The cost of printing and distributing print editions, makes up about half the cost, while editorial operations only make up 15 percent.

Varian concludes: Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet. It sounds like he agrees with Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who recommends that newspapers burn the boats carrying their dying print businesses.

The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news, says Varian. They make money from special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on. The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.

So what are they supposed to do? He doesnt really have a good answer, but ignoring the realities of consumer shifts in reading behavior and news consumption is not it.

View this document on Scribd

CrunchBase Information

Hal Varian

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

The Mario of Facebook is yet to come

Gareth Davis, the platform manager in charge of Games at Facebook, delivered his keynote today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Davis focused his talk on the changes in social gaming and told the audience that, despite FarmVille, the killer social game is still out there.

Early cinema evolved into a specific language for that media, bringing about cuts and edits and certain types of shots, Davis said. Every new media brings new content and every new platform brings a killer game. There are many examples: Sonic, Halo, Mario. I believe the iconic Facebook game lies still ahead of us. The Mario of Facebook is out there. And, it will likely come from someone in this room. Pretty exciting.

The number of players is also going up. FarmVille is at 83 million users right now, but Davis predicted there will be a number of companies whose games will exceed 100 million players or even surpassing the number of people watching the SuperBowl.

According to Davis, gamers are now willing to share their real identity online after all, most people on Facebook use their actual name and this will bring about a new feedback loop between the real world and the online experience. Aside from simple stuff like having bragging rights the next day at lunch after winning a game, Davis shared some ideas about how real-life things can influence the gaming experience.

A game on Facebook can know many things about you, he said. Your age, your name, your interests, your friends. What if the characters in your game look like your friends, or the game environments are based on your interests? Or maybe you can see places from the photos youve taken. This will bring in a whole new level of immersion.

Davis also spent some time outlining Facebook as a games platform. Facebook is changing the way games are designed, because for Facebook, games are services, they live in a cloud. Developers can add things to a game after it has launched, they can change it and even do things like test new features on a limited group of people. Designing a game on a social platform is changing the thinking behind games: You stop thinking about how do you sell most games on Day 1, and start thinking about how do you build an audience and keep them coming back day after day?

In addition, Facebook is building itself with Facebook Connect and Games Dashboard to provide what Davis dubbed multi-platform social gaming. Users can play a game on whatever platform and whatever device and still be playing the same. So, a user can be on his Xbox 360 while a friend is playing the same game on a mobile phone, another one joins in from their laptop and so on. Even though different devices pose technical restrictions in terms of raw computing power and graphics, gamers can still have a shared experience.

The crowd had a number of questions for Davis, who answered them in good humor. As far as on-going things such as Facebooks virtual currency known as Facebook Credits, he remained evasive. Credits are in beta testing, and they will be rolled out later this year, he said, but didnt say exactly when they will be released to developers.

All in all Davis message was very clear. Games have been, are now, and always will be social, and this is changing the business and gaming profoundly. He pointed to the upcoming installment of Sid Meiers Civilization game on Facebook and sounded very convincing when he said: This will be another great year for social gaming.

Tags: gamesbeat

Companies: Facebook

People: Gareth Davis

Battlestar Galactica Gets Its Own Massively Multiplayer Game [Game Announce]

Can Independent Game Portals Like OMGPop Succeed Against Mindjolt?

Mindjolt and OMGPop.com represent two different types of successful game portals available on the web today. At surface level, they are both very similar: they are both free to play, they both use Flash to power their games and are both considered social gaming portals. That said, the sites represent different elements of the social/casual gaming world. OMGPop (1 million MAU) is a standalone site with a deeper experience, with in-house developed games and a multiplayer focus, while Mindjolt (20 million MAU) is a Facebook application and an aggregator that collects games from other developers and focuses on quick, short gameplay. In this analysis, we examine how the two sites compare to one another, and determine whether a standalone site like OMGPop can overtake a Facebook success like Mindjolt.

Introduction

Mindjolt.com, which was a very successful standalone web portal, transitioned its business into a Facebook application, and is now one of the largest Facebook game portals around, with over 20,000,000 MAUs. The business was recently purchased by a group of MySpace cofounders, and in this study it represents game portals that live on Facebook. OMGPop, a casual gaming destination site that attracts nearly 1,000,000 users a day, is an up and coming games site that has had steady growth for the last year, as evidenced by the chart below (provided by Quantcast).

OMGPop will represent the independent gaming site in this analysis. Pundits usually weigh in to make the unproven but anecdotally accurate statement that casual game players are leaving more targeted independent gaming sites like OMGPop and flocking to social networking sites to play social games on Facebook. If this is so, then why? By looking at the offerings available at a site like OMGPop.com and comparing it with the offering at the Mindjolt application, perhaps we can gain some insight into why players play where they do.

Games Selection and Quality

We start by analyzing the games selection, meaning the variety of games available, and the quality of games at each of the sites.

Mindjolt

Mindjolt has been around for years and it shows. With a selection of over 1,300 casual games, the site continues to grow at a great pace. The reasons for their breadth is because they encourage independent developers to submit games to their platforms for review, and they make partnerships with bigger game companies like addictingames.com to host their games on MindJolt. This does mean that the quality of some of the games can be less than stellar.

If you jump over right now and take a look at the most popular games, you can see Bouncing Balls and Solitaire, both single player games with good graphic quality. Not exactly innovative titles, but with quick loading times, you know what youre expecting and can get to the gameplay within seconds. The graphic quality is such that the games would be easily playable by players with less powerful computers, but still remain attractive to the eyes. There is almost no slowdown on any Mindjolt game, and this means the entire process of selecting a game, loading a game and starting a game occurs within a few seconds with only a few clicks.

OMGPop

OMGPop has 16 games and adds a new game every few months. Each of the games is developed in house and all games share a visual style and graphical quality. The games and their graphics are of a higher complexity, on average, than the Miniclip games. Every game on the OMGPop network is multiplayer, and the site works hard to ensure that players can get into a game in a short amount of time even despite the fact that these are connected, multiplayer games.

If you click Play Now for any game, it throws you into a random room to play against others. And with games like Jemmers (a Bejewelled clone), it can feel like youre playing a single player game, but when your eyes scan to the left, you see that other players are playing simultaneously to you, and youre in a competitive environment. The games themselves are excellent, and while most are clones of other games, the choices of originals are great.

You can play some great games inspired by Tank, Mario Kart, Bomberman, Pictionary and more. All the games have some twist and multiplayer aspect that separates them from the original, and the final result is that OMGPop delivers an extremely addictive, unique gaming experience.

The Winners

In game selection, theres no competition. Mindjolt has 1,300 games, and no matter what type of gaming mood I am in, Mindjolt can satisfy me. When it comes to game quality, I have to give the edge to OMGPop. Not only are their games original compared to other games on the web, they all have a non-intrusive multiplayer element. By non-intrusive, I mean the games are still as easy to pick up and play, but you often get surprised that youre actually in a friendly competition with other players on the site.

Game Selection: MindJolt

Game Quality: OMGPop

Social Features and Community

OMGPop

OMGPop bills it as a multiplayer game site, and as such, every game involves real-time multiplayer experiences with other players. Almost every game includes some sort of chat functionality with the other games in your room. And the ability to immediately click on a profile and see the players gamer profile means a lot for people who are interested in developing a group of casual gaming friends.

There are also innovative features like the game wall, where you get coins and points for answering the questions that players post on their own wall. So for instance, I can leave a question up on my wall that asks Who thinks Avatar deserved to win best picture at the Oscars? Players who view my profile have a great incentive to answer the question, as they connect with me and gain coins.

Mindjolt

Mindjolt is almost compeltely comprised of single player games, where you jump into a game, learn how to play and attempt to earn a high score. The system does, however, do a great job of connecting your scores with friends. For instance, on my first run of Downhill Snowboard, I scored fairly well and at the end of my run I was informed that You have just defeated the score of John Smith, and prompted to view the leaderboard, which had a large group of my friends.

I was prompted to publish the fact that I had beaten my friend on my page, which is a pretty cool option for highly competitive folk. I could also challenge any friend on my entire network.

The Winners

Now, surely OMGPop would do a great job if my entire friends list was loaded into Facebook, but the advantage here goes to Mindjolt, because of the fact that it is on Facebook and has a great audience of my friends. Its exhilarating, even with a small casual game, to have my score prompt a head to head battle with an old friend. OMGPop is not really able to match this at this point, because of their small user base. However, they are using Facebook Connect, and I was able to very easily see which of my Facebook friends were on OMGPop, and then add them as friends. Its an intermediate step but would certainly help new players have more fun at OMGPop.

Social Features: OMGPop

Community: MindJolt

Conclusion

Examining the results, we can see that OMGPop and MindJolt each won two categories each, with MindJolt winning in game selection and community, and OMGPop winning in game quality and social features. So when analyzing the original question, which is which of the two sites will come out on top, we can see that at this point, they both have their appeal to different types of gamers. If youre looking for a deeper, multiplayer game experience, OMGPop is the site for you, but if youre looking to casually spend 5 minutes exercising the fun parts of your striatum, then you probably want to try out some MindJolt games.

Important to note, however, is that Mindjolt won in the community section because of its massive Facebook audience. If OMGPop were to make a Facebook application or grow their FB userbase using FB Connect, they would likely have the edge in that area, and with their great social gaming features, they would start to encroach on Mindjolt. Well check back in a few months to see how the game portals have evolved.

Super Rewards Announces New Flash Platform

Today the ad offer network Super Rewards announced to Virtual Goods News that it had launched a new version of its ad offer platform for Flash. A demo of the new product is available here. The new platform's Flash integration would allow players of Flash games to accept any ad offer on the Super Rewards network without having to exit the application. According to Chris Smutny, VP of Social and Online Gaming at AdKnowledge, the new solution can be fully integrated into a game featuring virtual currency in as little as 30 minutes.

"We've seen an evolution in the gaming space from text based and HTML spaced to Flash and Unity.Flash games can really have much more immersive graphics and gameplay," said Smutny. "What we have seen is that by making the flow of the user experience substantially better, we can lift conversion by as much as 20%."

It was previously possible for Flash developers to integrate with Super Rewards, but integrations could take as long as a week to complete. Users might also have to leave their Flash game in order to accept ad offers and earn virtual currency. The new solution offers access to all Super Rewards features, including the the Offer Management Console.

Super Rewards on Flash is also able to act as more than just a source of ad offers, too. Super Rewards will be able to process in-app payments for users interested in purchasing virtual goods, similar to Social Gold. Smutny also says that the Super Rewards for Flash solution will be platform-agnostic, able to integrate with any Flash game so long as it supports some kind of e-wallet and virtual currency components.

Smutny expects that the most immediate uptake for the new Super Rewards Flash solution will occur with developers of Flash social games on Facebook and MySpace. The platform does not yet have any announced partners as of this writing, but developers interested in integrating with Super Rewards for Flash can download relevant documents here.

US Eases Internet Export Rules To Iran, Sudan, Cuba

Wine Tasting in TuscanyI mean, Oregon

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:28:54 -0400

IMG_2185

Originally uploaded by sdeyecandy

We haven’t taken a honeymoon yet, but over this past Labor Day weekend, Liz and I went to Oregon for a wedding, finding some valuable time for Wine tasting. One of the couples that toured the town of Dundee, OR with us assured us that the experience was “just like” Tuscany, so we could just tell people that we were in Italy. Take a look and see for yourself:

Flickr: Wine Tasting in Oregon

Our first picnic @ Humphreys

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:22:53 -0400

IMG_2149.JPG

Originally uploaded by sdeyecandy

Here is a pic from our first kayak / picnic to the Humphrey’s By The Bay Summer Concert Series. I don’t even remember who it was that we saw, but we enjoyed a fine feast of trail mix and wine-in-a-box. Next time, we are going to spend more time planning the menu.

Im Married!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:43:45 -0400

The big day finally arrived, and the wedding went off in Gloucester without a hitch. Liz and I have been absolutely humbled by the number of people that have sent us photos from the wedding. I have put together links to each of the albums below so that we can track them all in one spot. I have also included a link to our professional photos from Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester.

We owe a big thank you for everyone that took photos for us and captured this special day. Despite a few small “hiccups”, the entire day seemed to just fly by! Sorry for the non-”Business” interruption… Now its back to work!

Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester

Wedding Photos

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:18:18 -0400

We owe a big thank you for everyone that took photos for us and captured this special day. Despite a few small “hiccups”, the entire day seemed to just fly by!

Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester

Engagement Announcement

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:02:13 -0400

Although we have been engaged since September, we finally got around to discussing the engagement announcement. Here is what Liz came up with:

"Elizabeth Purdy Colangelo and Matthew Augustus Howell are happy to announce their engagement.
Elizabeth is the daughter of Kathleen Purdy of Gloucester and Leonard Colangelo of East Boston. She is a graduate of Gloucester High School, class of 1996, and received a B.S. in Biology from Tufts University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College. She moved to San Diego, CA for her position as a Research Associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Matthew is the son of John and Lucy Howell of Phoenix, AZ. He is a graduate of Brophy College Preparatory and received a B.A. in Computer Information Systems and Business Law from Loyola Marymount University.
His career also brought him to San Diego, where he is the Senior Technical Product Manager at Del Mar Database.
The proposal message was displayed on the main sail of the family’s racing boat and the couple celebrated their engagement with a dinner on San Diego Bay surrounded by family and friends. They plan a June 14th, 2008 ceremony and reception in Annisquam MA followed by a September 20th reception in San Diego."

There are pictures of the actual proposal below…

Flickr Album

Liz’ Photos on Shutterfly

Holistic Approaches to Web Reporting

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:11:50 -0400

Recently, I noticed that one of my coworkers had submitted a question to LinkedIn Answers, regarding web monitoring. I didn’t see the question until after it was already closed out by LinkedIn, but I responded to him privately. I figured after going to the trouble of outlining all this, I might as well share it with the world:

In my consulting, I have typically suggested a comprehensive plan for getting inside the head of visitors. In my opinion there is not one "all encompassing" solution for monitoring a web site, campaign, or in some cases each persona, since each organization’s objectives are different. I believe that the full view can only be achieved by reviewing a site from multiple angles:

UI Design & Content Popularity:

Frequency: Weekly
Suggestions: Google Analytics

I was a HUGE fan of Urchin’s analytics before Google bought them. Unfortunately, since they were acquired, some of the more advanced features have been removed, but they still offer an excellent package. A number of “premium” packages (ie: Webtrends) are available, but most organizations don’t know how to take advantage of the types of detail provided by WebTrends.

With Google’s latest refresh of their Analytics package, there really is no reason to use “heat map” tools like Crazy Egg or ClickTracks. Google’s package now includes similar functionality (although more basic), called “Site Overlays” making Google’s the most comprehensive of tools in its class. I am not a big fan of running multiple remote analytics tools simultaneously on the same site, because they typically rely on embedded Javascript loaded from the vendor’s server, and if their analytics environment ever goes down, it can lead to page rendering issues or perceived slowness. This threat can be mitigated by limiting the analysis to only one embedded vendor (ie: Google)

E-Mailing campaigns:
Frequency: Monthly / Quarterly
Suggestions: Constant Contact

I would imagine this is an area most Marcom reps are already well versed in but its worth mentioning, as often your mailing / e-mailing strategy will fold directly into your Conversion tracking. Along these lines, you may find the following article from a couple days ago helpful:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/senior-marketers-little-confidence-in-ability-to-track-multichannel-campaigns-3171/

Profitability / Conversion:

Frequency: Weekly / Monthly / Annually
Suggestions: Google Analytics or custom implementation

Conversion can be difficult to track accurately, on some platforms. Depending on how your site / application tracks a user’s session data, you may have to get creative in how remote applications (ie: Google) interpret the visitor’s navigation paths towards conversion. In the last 12 months, I have seen a number of web content management systems (CMS) implement internal reporting to address this; examples being Wordpress, DotNetNuke, and Plone.

Additionally, if you are planning an Adwords / Adsense campaign, there is no substitute for Google, when monitoring conversion from these services.

Reliability / Speed / Availability:

Frequency: Daily / Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Annually
Suggestions: DotComMonitor or host-tracker.com (both free / inexpensive)

This is an angle that too many people forget to consider. No one likes a slow site, and any number of factors could slow down the perceived speed of your site: Browser Quirks, slow DNS requests, a broken Javascript, etc. Solutions like host-tracker.com (I use this for my own domains) have a swarm of geographically distributed servers that can provide you with a geographically significant uptime statistic, as well as break down how much time each phase of the web request is taking (ie: 10 seconds total to load a page, of which 5 seconds is DNS, and 3 seconds is requesting the HTML, and 2 seconds is all other images). Watching these numbers often uncovers bottlenecks in the delivery and rendering of a site, and may explain erratic navigation paths in a site.

New Site! (Now hosted on Wordpress)

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:07:08 -0400

For what seems like the 100th time (more like the 5th), I have migrated my web site to a new framework. I am putting the finishing touches on my new site to take over for my previous Python / Plone-based site. Some people might think this is the absolute craziest time in my life to be taking on such a big project (I am getting married in June, among other things), but thats exactly why "now" is the perfect time to do this. In the next couple months / years I hope to have a lot going on both personally and professionally, so I have restructured things to provide a home for these different audiences and activities. The site is now broken up into two major areas:

Strictly Business
This community will serve as a home for all things related to my career and professional hobbies. I have a number of small software projects that I have kept around and I plan on releasing here from time to time. Additionally, I believe that a career-focused site is a great way to centralize my involvement in other web communities (YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.).
A Lighter Side…
Although my goal for this area of the site is similar to Strictly Business, I envision that the content and audience will be much different. I plan to use this community as a vehicle to share my personal accomplishments, hobbies, and media. My hope is to share much of the personal content that made it on my previous site that typically focused on Sailing, Labrador Rescue, and family activities.

The Geeky Stuff: A bit of history…
I have used previous re-inventions of my own site / brand as a chance to show that I "eat my own dog food", and also as an exercise to stay up on new / popular platforms. I initially bought matticus.com back when I was still working for Path Communications, in Marina Del Rey, CA. I had a coworker who constantly called my Matticus whenever I walked in, and after a while, it stuck. I hacked together a Linux server in my dorm room and didn’t really do much with it until a year or so later.

My senior year at LMU, I assisted in teaching a Senior-level Computer Science course aimed at taking students through a typical Software Development Lifecycle. The class was two semesters long, beginning with a semester for gathering requirements, and a second semester to actually develop the project. We structured the class project around my love affair at the time, Jakarta Struts (I was still employed at Path and they were exclusively Java). As Senior year came to a close, I wanted to continue experimenting with Struts, so I wrote my own Blog engine to track my progress across Europe, for a trip I took after I graduated (a great story for another time).

After returning home to the real world, and continuing my career, I spent some time exploring the .NET world, creating various incarnations of my site based on DasBlog, DotNetNuke (DNN), and briefly Sharepoint. Each platform had its own pro’s and con’s, but inevitably, each framework had a quirk that would feed my desire to experiment with something new. Most recently, I have been spending a considerable amount of time working on the Plone CMS Framework. Built on top of the powerful Zope server, I find Plone to be a very compelling solution for small and medium sized businesses. In my case, I chose to move on to Wordpress not for a lack of functionality in Plone, but instead to find features in other tools that could compliment Plone. Which brings us to the new site…

Why Wordpress Mu?
I arrived at Wordpress one afternoon while looking for a solution to rapidly prototype an idea I had for a Blog Media Plugin (now available in Projects as Media Link). The Wordpress platform has a large number of plugins already available, and since its based on PHP, that means a lot of example code. I sat down over a weekend, having never worked on PHP, or Wordpress, and had a proof of concept running of MediaLink in a matter of a couple hours. It became clear to me that Wordpress would make an ideal platform for the next incarnation of my site. I had also been playing around with the idea of having a separate career-driven and family-driven community, so the Multi-blog version, Wordpress Mu, was an ideal choice.

Regardless of whether you are a friend, family member, coworker, or random visitor that stumbled in from off the street, I hope this site will help you find answers. Also, please feel free to introduce yourself below!

Visiting Disneyland

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:02:14 -0400

Pics and video from Disneyland

YouTube Video

Flickr Album