It has been a month since Facebook released Home, the company’s take on a socialized operating system built atop Android. And at a press event this week, Facebook talked about how the app has done in its first weeks on the market.

The verdict thus far? Not exactly a home run.

Consider this: Home’s project leads Cory Ondrejka and Adam Mosseri said the app was nearing a million downloads as of this week.

Sound impressive? Look at it this way: One million downloads of Facebook Home is less than .1 percent of Facebook’s entire monthly active user base, now topping 1.1 billion people every month. And as the company disclosed in its last earnings call, more than 750 million of those people visit Facebook regularly via mobile device.

Put simply, one million downloads is a drop in the social ocean.

Not that that matters to Facebook, which insists that it’s not that concerned with low numbers, even if some think they should be. “[The number of downloads is] not really important to us,” Mosseri told reporters. “What’s important to us is if people are liking the apps a lot.”

Update 3:15 p.m. PT, with further release context: User satisfaction, in this case, is the thrust of Facebook’s rollout strategy for Home, according to the company. Though Home is available for download globally, right now only five Android devices are capable of installing the software — a small amount compared to the hundreds of available Android handsets on the market. Facebook frames this as intentional; release slowly to select devices, and you can listen and fine-tune the product in future software updates, ultimately making the users happy. (That’s the goal, at least.)

While it might be unusual for Facebook to dismiss download numbers — particularly in the long term — it’s fair for the company to put user experience and uptake first. The problem is that Facebook didn’t break out how many of those downloads actually resulted in installs and prolonged use of the application. Downloads, after all, do not imply continued or even occasional usage. And as many negative Google Play reviews point out, there’s nothing keeping an unsatisfied user from immediately deleting Home shortly after installation.

Facebook did provide some encouraging data: Those who have downloaded the software spend 25 percent more time on Facebook as a whole, and users’ favorite features, they said, were Chat Heads and Cover Feed.

But the latter point is probably moot, considering that Chat Heads and Cover Feed are pretty much the key features of the software. And downloads and even engagement across Facebook as a whole don’t give us a clear picture of how many people are actually using and enjoying Home.

In fact, it’s exactly like Amazon’s continued unwillingness to disclose its actual Kindle sales numbers, or Google’s history of doling out cloudy Google Plus stats. It’s hard to take a new feature seriously if any company is unwilling to provide meaningful metrics on engagement and usage of the product in question.

But, as we’ve argued before, it doesn’t really matter how many folks inside the U.S. are going for Home, because it’s more important as an international play, a way to invade the phones of the myriad people whose primary computing devices are palm-sized. But project lead Mosseri wouldn’t give me the breakdown of international versus domestic downloads.

So, it’s fine that Facebook is listening to user feedback and is willing to improve the product on a regular monthly basis. But until Facebook drills down on just how many folks are actively using and enjoying the product, it’s probably best to postpone any victory lap.

As has become customary for such events, Apple is prepping a giveaway for whoever downloads the milestone app — in this case, a $10,000 gift card to the App Store. The next 50 customers will get a $500 App Store gift card.

Cheapskates (and Android users) can even enter without downloading an app by going here.

Apps, meanwhile, have become big business for Apple and Google, generating billions in revenue. Software sales, meanwhile, have helped transform iTunes from a near-break-even business to a significant profit generator.

Apple has also paid out more than $9 billion to app developers, up from more than $7 billion as of January.

And app downloads continue at a torrid pace, with Apple having reported in October 2012 that it had just crossed 35 billion downloads.

On Tuesday, they were No. 3, by Thursday they were No. 400. It was mind-blowing how fast some of these supposed “hit apps” fell quickly to obscurity. Given what happened — and Apple’s response — the question remains, why did app developers use these tricks?

The main reason is that it is hard to get discovered in the App Store. Without some advantage, users might never find your app — and the amount that you can spend to get there above board is limited. Another reason is that when you hit the Top 25, then the Top 10 and then the Top 5, the exposure in the App Store generates significant organic downloads. In other words, people see you on the charts and they decide to download your app. In some ways, it’s not unlike how record labels manipulated the SoundScan charts in the 1990s to make seemingly unpopular records become hits.

But it’s hard to keep the schemers down. When Apple smartly moved against the bots last year, there was a brief gap in the market. Into that gap stepped a new breed of companies to help market apps. Sure, the scamsters always had their tricks. Notice an app pop up at No. 1? Look for hundreds of reviews that only have one word (amazing, incredible, awesome), or look for a shockingly low number of reviews for an app that’s No. 1. These are indicators that folks are doing something shady to make it to No. 1. And Apple, to its credit, tirelessly shuts them down and closes loopholes. It’s a thankless task.

But there are known, above-board companies whose mission it is to help also market apps. AppGratis, until getting booted for violations of the App Store rules, was one of those companies (Free App of the Day is another). In some ways, Apple’s halt to AppGratis is a big deal. Many of the games and apps that are at the top of the charts recently engaged AppGratis, which uses its large audience to drive large download volume. They do this by offering their members discounts on paid apps. This is particularly important to small or independent developers who lack the cross-promotion networks and marketing clout of established companies, and who can rely on a deal with AppGratis to expose them to a large audience.

While it is a big deal — to both developers and consumers — for Apple to remove AppGratis, in many ways, in the long-term view, it does not matter. And that is the key point.

There is no doubt that Apple’s vigilance makes the app store a friendly, clean and amazing place for consumers. But the fight to keep it that way is tireless and never-ending. As long as there is money to be made, app developers and app marketers will find new angles to lay siege to the charts.

But the win for Apple, and ultimately the loss for the app developers, is that in the end, the App Store really is a democracy, and no amount of cheating ever truly wins. What I mean by that is that there is a hidden meritocracy in the App Store charts. By hook or by crook, you might find a new angle to drive your app to the top, but at the end of the day, if consumers don’t like it, your app is going to fall.

What matters more than hitting the Top 10 is the ability to stay in theTop 10. That is the secret. There is tremendous movement in and out of the chart rankings, but the apps that stay there day after day and month after month — games like Candy Crush or Words With Friends, or apps like Instagram — they are the true winners. And staying there just cannot be gamed. The other apps are like shooting stars. They hit the charts via AppGratis, but there is ultimately something not sticky or fun or compelling about them, and they quickly slide back down.

So AppGratis may be gone, but companies like it will continue to crop up to take the app developer’s money. A hit is always going to be a hit, and that can only be achieved by creating an amazing product that people truly love.

Dan Porter is the former CEO of OMGPOP.

Apple said Thursday that since it debuted in 2007, iTunes U has served up more than one billion downloads. That’s a nice big number (Stanford University alone has seen more than 60 million downloads). But a perhaps more impressive figure is this: Apple says that some iTunes U courses boast enrollments of more than 250,000 students.

Even accounting for Apple hyperbole, the idea that there are virtual lectures being attended by anything close to 250,000 students is pretty astonishing. Also of interest: 60 percent of iTunes U downloads originate from outside the United States. Apple now offers the service to more than 155 countries, including Brazil, South Korea and China.

It’s worth noting that the last time Apple disclosed iTunes U metrics — back in 2010 — the service was desktop-only, and the big number of the day was 300 million downloads. So, in less than three years, downloads have more than tripled. What’s driving that growth? The iTunes U app for iOS and the iPad, most likely. Apple tells AllThingsD that, to date, more than 4.5 million iPads have been sold into U.S. education institutions.

Now, nearly a year and a half after launch, Google Plus is taking major steps to better integrate its platform with developers across the rest of the Web.

The company opened up the “sign in with Google Plus” feature on Tuesday, a fairly simple authentication method that allows Plus users to connect with integrated third-party applications by entering their email address and password information. That method of authentication is already ubiquitous for the big guys like Facebook and Twitter; Google Plus wants to be an option as well.

Sort of late to the party, no? Why, now, would users be compelled to sign in using their Google Plus ID?

The pitch there is fairly straightforward: First, Google Plus product manager Seth Sternberg tells me, it’s a simplicity and security thing. Folks who use Gmail and Google Plus know their password well, and trust that authenticating through Google will get them where they need to go easily and securely enough. (I guess that’s fair, though I can’t say I have trouble remembering my Twitter or Facebook credentials.)

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Google Plus sign-in allows users to target how apps are sharing to friends in a more granular way. From the permissions page upon sign-in, you’re able to specify which circles you want a particular app to share to, while excluding the folks you think won’t care about that particular app activity. So for example, if you connect Plus with the Fitbit app, you may only want to share your exercise activity with a select group of particularly athletic friends. Google Plus sign-in lets you do that.

Unpack this feature. In theory, half of it appeals to the privacy-minded users who want strict control over what they share and to whom. But the other half of the appeal is perhaps the more important group at launch: Developers.

“When you’re building platform products, you really have two customers — developers and users,” Sternberg said. “And you need to make sure you’re doing a great job for both of them.”

If all goes to plan and users share their app activity with particular relevant groups, Sternberg said this is great for app developers who want to reach directed audiences more likely to be interested in their apps.

In other words, think of it as a user-guided form of ad targeting for app developers.

“If the right people see it, and I know they’re seeing it, it gives developers a better targeting system for delivering their apps,” Sternberg said. And if users don’t have the application in question, trying to sign in with Google Plus will send them out to the Google Play app store to download the app (sorry, iOS users, that’s Android only for now).

“It’s extra work, but it’s definitely worth it,” Kristin George, director of product at launch partner TuneIn, told me. “This increases the amount of discovery channels that we can have.”

Which is really Google’s best value proposition for third parties. It’s the same charge Facebook has trumpeted for the past year, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself leading a call to arms for the developer community at nearly every speaking opportunity. Twitter too, although to something of a lesser degree.

The issue as I see it, however, is that a lot of Google’s value proposition depends on very specific use cases from users that, frankly, I’m not convinced is something they’re itching for. My gut is that the masses on the whole don’t pay full attention to their sharing, blasting out updates and activity to all at once, and the granular approach is more of a power user thing.

But Google Plus users could prove me wrong. That would be great for participating developers, and of course good for Google, which wants to grow its platform and the activity inside, however slowly but surely.

Here’s a statement from the company on the move, first noticed by Pocketlint: “We recently updated Spotify to further simplify the service and pave the way for new features announced at the end of last year. In-app purchases aren’t part of this update but we’re not ruling out their return. Credits/gift cards already purchased are still redeemable.”

In plain English: Spotify has shut down its MP3 store, which has never been an important part of the company’s strategy. At one point, it might have seemed like a good idea for the company to sell music a la Apple’s iTunes, but Spotify never pushed downloads, and its users were happy to ignore them.

Meanwhile Spotify’s U.S. users won’t notice the change, since they’ve never been able to buy tracks from the service at all.

Photo: Kitch Bain / Shutterstock.com; Illustration: AllThingsD

According to analytics firm Flurry, at least 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, up from the average of 4 million devices that Flurry saw between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20 and from 6.8 million device activations on Christmas 2011.

What’s more, while smartphones make up 80 percent of activations on a typical day, Christmas saw a roughly even split between tablets and phones.

“On this Christmas Day 2012, more iPhones, iPads, Galaxys, Kindle Fires, and more, were activated than on any other day in history,” Flurry said in a blog post.

Overall, a record number of devices were activated on Christmas, and a record number of apps downloaded as well. Flurry estimated that 328 million apps were downloaded, up from an average of 155 million per day earlier in the month and more than 250 million last Christmas.

Xbox Music will start rolling out tomorrow on the game console, replacing the Zune marketplace, and on Oct. 26 it will be baked into more devices as part of the Windows 8 launch.

Xbox Music will be familiar to consumers who use other streaming music services, like Spotify and Rdio. From the start, it will have access to more than 30 million songs globally and 18 million in the U.S. It’s launching in 15 countries.

A free ad-supported version will allow users to manage their entire music catalog from their PC and supplement it with an online catalog that is streamed over the Internet. Users will be able to skip from track to track, create playlists or listen to an album without restrictions (at least for the first six months). A premium version will cost $10 a month and will work across PCs, the game console and Windows 8 phones.

Both services will allow the user to purchase songs a la carte for about 99 cents each, or use the Smart DJ feature, which will let consumers discover new music based on their interests.

Xbox Music was first announced last June and, since then, a lot of the details have been spilled, but nonetheless, this represents an important launch for Microsoft. It is the first significant investment it has made in music since the launch of Zune five years ago, and this time it hopes it has come up with a winning formula, given the company’s intense interest in owning the home entertainment space. Digital music is something that Apple has so clearly dominated that others, like Amazon, can be fairly successful and still only make a small dent in its market share.

Next year, Microsoft will also launch apps for iOS and Android devices, which will require the premium version, but obviously will extend the potential consumer base beyond those who are only willing to own Windows devices.

In an interview, Scott Porter, Xbox Music’s principal program manager, said over time, “music became work, and we wanted to make it an enjoyable experience again.”

From a Windows 8 tablet, Porter showed me how you can easily play music after searching for an artist, or how you can create playlists without a lot of dragging and dropping. The free version, he estimated, would play advertisements every two to five hours, which is the standard created by other music servies. With the paid version, though, Porter said users will be able to stream or download songs, and back up their entire music collection to the cloud, which can then be accessed on the phone or other devices.

In the new game, released today on iOS, Android and Mac, players build elaborate vehicles for their pigs before sending them through elaborate obstacle courses. The goal is to collect as many eggs as possible.

The 99-cent app has already risen to the No. 1 spot on the iPhone and iPad paid charts in the U.S., according to AppData, which tracks user downloads. The game is not yet registering on Google Play. A company spokesperson did not immediately return emails seeking comment.

There’s a lot riding on Bad Piggies for the Finnish game maker Rovio, which attempted to move beyond its core Angry Birds franchise this summer with the release of a game called Amazing Alex. However, while the game initially zoomed to the top of the charts in 54 countries, it failed to stay there. After less than two months, Amazing Alex ranked as the 73rd most-popular paid app worldwide.

As Reuters noted, the stakes are high for Rovio to get this one right:

A hit on app stores would give the Finnish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion, nearly on par with another top Finnish tech name, phone maker Nokia Oyj.

Rovio was founded in 2003, and became a global phenomenon after it launched Angry Birds for Apple’s iPhone in late 2009.

The highly-addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump tenfold to $100 million last year, a fraction of the 38.7 billion euros ($50.2 billion) that Nokia chalked up.

What Rovio has proven with Amazing Alex — and now with Bad Piggies — is that it has the network power to get a game to No. 1 on the first day, a skill any mobile game developer would covet. But whether that alone is worth as much as $9 billion, it’s hard to know.

Will a return to its original hit franchise help justify its sky-high valuation?

The San Jose-based company says its mobile app has been downloaded 100 million times since its launch four years ago. That’s equal to the number of the service’s active users — those who bought, listed or sold something on eBay last year. The company is not saying how many of those downloaded apps are used regularly, but by at least one measure, activity is fairly high — users have now listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the eBay app, by taking a picture of the item with their phone and uploading all the data within minutes.

While many other companies are fretting about how they will make money from mobile, roughly 16 percent of eBay’s revenue this year will be coming from mobile devices. While that’s still a fairly small percentage, that number has doubled in just the past year.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay’s mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000.

Yankovich says they see the most sales coming from the iPhone out of all the smartphone apps, and a lot of transactions are also coming from the iPad and the mobile Web.

Yankovich calls mobile commerce “situational shopping.” Maybe you’re admiring a friend’s fancy new espresso machine, and you buy it on the spot from your phone, he said. Or you’re on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer game, or stuck on the train, or in a meeting, with some spare time for a bit of shopping. “I could be a consumer just for that moment,” he says.

So far this year, the most expensive item that was listed and sold on eBay via mobile was a $22,500 framed Peter Lik photograph. But if that sounds ridiculous, Yankovich has a plausible explanation: “There’s all kinds of things that are bought on mobile that are six figures. People who have lots of money are also busy,” he said.

EBay previously forecasted that it would hit $10 billion in revenue on mobile this year. Based on last year’s gross merchandise volume of roughly $60 billion, that works out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue. The main app, which gets a five-star rating on the iPhone, is available in eight languages and in more than 180 countries. The company has a separate app for cars and parts, called eBay Motors. It also operates Red Laser, which provides bar-code scanning technology, and an eBay Fashion app, which focuses on clothing. There are versions for a myriad of smartphone operating systems and tablets.

Among private companies that discuss mobile revenue, some are seeing even higher percentages, albeit off a much smaller base. Fab.com, which sells trendy home decor and apparel online, said recently that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile. One Kings Lane, which is projecting $200 million in revenue this year, reports that mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales.

A more direct comparison would be to Amazon or Walmart, but neither breaks out mobile revenue, although Amazon does allude to positive metrics, such as selling more e-books than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

Here’s the eBay infographic with all the fun facts:

But for most consumers, the concept of cloud storage and music “matching” services are still confusing, even as these services aim to streamline your music-listening experience.

For this week’s review, I tested Amazon’s Cloud Player, a Web and mobile app that automatically recognizes the music files you’ve already purchased, adds those same tracks to your Amazon cloud account, and then lets you stream those files on up to 10 devices, even if you got the music from iTunes, from a CD, or some other source.

Amazon is able to do this in part because it recently obtained the music rights from the four major record labels in the U.S. The service is now more comparable to iTunes Match, Apple’s cloud-based service, which similarly scans and matches non-iTunes music files on up to 10 devices.

The Cloud Player will also store and play the music you’ve purchased via Amazon, and consumers might be surprised to know that some newer, popular songs that cost $1.29 in iTunes are only 99 cents on Amazon.

I found Amazon’s Cloud Player easy to use, despite the fact that I admittedly didn’t “get” scan-and-match services before. I liked the user interface of the Amazon Cloud Player mobile app, and after more than a week of testing, I was regularly using it as an alternative app to iTunes on my iPhone. I even felt compelled, for the first time, to purchase music files from Amazon.com. But users are restricted from buying songs through the Cloud Player app on Apple devices, which means I might continue using it for listening to and streaming — but not buying — music.

A third player worth noting here is Google Play, which lets you keep up to 20,000 songs in a Google cloud “locker” for no charge. But Google Play requires you to upload all of the songs to this digital locker yourself, since Google doesn’t yet have the rights to scan and create a match of your library for you, so I didn’t thoroughly test this service.

Amazon’s Cloud Player app is free to download, and users can buy or upload up to 250 songs from their computers to the Cloud Player at no charge. After that, the service costs $25 a year, the same price Apple charges for iTunes Match. The paid version of Cloud Player offers storage for up to 250,000 non-Amazon-purchased songs, whereas Apple’s iTunes Match has a limit of 25,000 songs.

These two services are able to automatically scan and match your songs for you, but only if the songs can actually be matched within their libraries. The Amazon MP3 store sells more than 20 million songs, compared with the iTunes catalog of 28 million songs, though some of that music may not be available to match, due to license agreements.

With that basic understanding of how it works, I downloaded and used the Amazon Cloud Player on three devices: On my iPhone, on an Android-based Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, and on the Web. I also downloaded the Cloud Player app onto Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, and from there was able to wirelessly stream music to a Sonos speaker.

Using it on the Web involved scanning my computer for music files and importing them into the Cloud Player. Of my 622 current iTunes files, Amazon was able to match and import 415 of them.

I also installed a download manager that would push my newly purchased songs on Amazon.com to my Cloud Player — as well as iTunes — immediately. In my experience, this process was pretty speedy, taking about 15 minutes total.

While the Web-based Cloud Player could use a design refresh, I liked the look and feel of the mobile app. There are two tabs at the top of the app — Cloud and Device — and by toggling between the two tabs, I got a clear idea of where the music files were coming from. The Cloud songs were the ones uploaded to my Amazon Cloud Player account, and the Device songs were the ones that Amazon recognized from the iTunes on my iPhone, which are stored on my device. (On the iTunes app, the file origins are identified by a cloud symbol next to some files, which might have a line through it or an “X” through it, if the file can’t be matched or is inaccessible.)

Within the mobile app I opted to auto-download Amazon MP3 purchases, so the app would constantly update with new files I purchased — just like it did in the Cloud Player Web site. It would also refresh my Cloud library every 10 minutes. These features require a cellular or Wi-Fi Internet connection in order to work.

Even with the auto-upload feature activated, I would still have to go into my list of songs and press a little orange arrow to download and play the purchased song through the Cloud Player. When I was in a place without a strong Internet connection, like the lower level of my gym, this could take awhile, or not work at all. One of the songs I purchased on Amazon.com seemed to get “stuck” in the mobile app, and wouldn’t download even when I had a strong Internet connection. Amazon didn’t have an explanation for this. I also experienced some delays in song starts when trying to play matched iTunes songs from the Cloud side of the Amazon app.

But once you’ve downloaded the purchased songs into your Cloud Player app, you can listen to them later, even if you don’t have a network connection. To test this, I occasionally put my iPhone on Airplane mode, and I was still able to listen to songs.

I could easily buy Amazon MP3s from the Web and through the Cloud Player app on Android devices, including the Kindle Fire. Not surprisingly, though, I wasn’t able to purchase music from the Cloud Player app on my iPhone, my primary device. So when I was on the go and really wanted to download a song, I’d default to iTunes, even if some songs were cheaper on Amazon.

Despite that restriction, I found Amazon’s Cloud Player to be a worthwhile, easy-to-use cloud service and music-playing app, one I’ll likely continue to use even if I purchase and acquire music elsewhere.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120903/demystifying-amazons-cloud-player/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20120829/hoteltonight-achieves-three-million-app-downloads-covers-50-destinations/ http://allthingsd.com/20120829/hoteltonight-achieves-three-million-app-downloads-covers-50-destinations/#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:00:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=245957 While online travel companies like Orbitz are claiming that 20 percent or more of their hotel bookings are coming from mobile, here’s one company that has all of its revenue coming from mobile: HotelTonight, which allows consumers to find last minute-deals through an app, says it has reached three million app downloads in slightly more than a year. It is now live in 50 destinations, with recently added locations including St. Louis, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Salt Lake City. No word on the company’s revenue.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120829/hoteltonight-achieves-three-million-app-downloads-covers-50-destinations/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120724/big-fish-launches-streaming-game-service-partners-with-roku/ http://allthingsd.com/20120724/big-fish-launches-streaming-game-service-partners-with-roku/#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2012 19:11:48 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=233328 Big Fish Games officially announced its streaming game service this morning at Casual Connect, an annual games conference in Seattle.

While some of the details about the service had been announced earlier, it was not clear when it would launch or how much it would cost. Big Fish said today that the service, which will allow consumers to play games across a variety of devices — including phones, tablets, PCs, computers and TVs — will be called Big Fish Unlimited and that it went live this morning.

Subscriptions will cost $7.99 a month for unlimited access to more than 100 games. Or an ad-supported model will provide players access to 20 games for free. Big Fish also announced onstage that the service will go live on Roku, the streaming TV service, in the fourth quarter.

Big Fish’s VP and general manager of cloud gaming, Will O’Brien, demonstrated onstage how a player’s game progress can be saved in the cloud, allowing users to pause a game on the PC and then pick up exactly where they left off on a tablet.

The service represents a big switch from the company’s current model, which requires users to download large files to their PC or mobile devices for a fee.

During the keynote, CEO Paul Thelen said while there’s a lot of attention on social games, the market for paid games in such casual genres as hidden objects and strategy games is really strong. According to AppAnnie, he said Big Fish Games is the fifth largest publisher on the iPad, one notch above Zynga, and that it aspires to be No. 1, a spot currently held by Electronic Arts.

“Premium casual games is a good business to be in,” he said. “Let me pause and let that sink in for awhile.”

The launch occurs today on PC and mobile devices, including Android devices. The one big notable exception is the lack of iPad capability.

In November, Apple suddenly removed Big Fish’s subscription service from the App Store after it had been live for a couple of weeks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120724/big-fish-launches-streaming-game-service-partners-with-roku/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120720/as-shares-trade-higher-kayak-ceo-says-the-ipo-went-exactly-as-planned/ http://allthingsd.com/20120720/as-shares-trade-higher-kayak-ceo-says-the-ipo-went-exactly-as-planned/#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:53:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=232355 After a long-delayed public offering, Kayak co-founder and CEO Steve Hafner said he wouldn’t have done anything differently.

“In terms of the IPO, no,” Hafner said in an interview with AllThingsD, after ringing the Nasdaq opening bell. “It went exactly like I wanted it to.”

Kayak originally filed to go public nearly 21 months ago, and while it kept its registration up to date, the company put the offering off due to a poor economy and direct influences in the travel industry.

“Google purchased ITA Software and that caused some consternation, but now that they’ve been in the market for 18 months, you can see for yourself our financial results,” Hafner said. “There were never any starts and stops with the IPO. When we thought the time was right and the story would be well-received, we were ready, and that day was today.”

While waiting for the right window, Kayak was indeed able to disclose strong operating results, including four consecutive quarters of profitable growth.

In the first quarter of 2012, it reported a profit of $8.1 million, reversing a loss of $12 million in the same period a year earlier. (The loss was mostly attributable to a $15 million impairment charge related to the discontinuation of the SideStep brand name.) Revenue in the first quarter totaled $73.3 million, compared to $52.7 million a year earlier.

In the offering, the online travel company raised $100 million after selling 3.5 million shares for $26 apiece. The shares priced slightly above the $22 to $25 range that Kayak disclosed last week. In early trading this morning, the stock climbed higher by $6.68, or roughly 26 percent, to $32.68. UPDATE: At the end of the regular session, Kayak’s stock was up nearly 28 percent, or $7.18 a share, to close at $33.18.

Both Hafner and the company’s co-founder and CTO Paul English (pictured right and left, respectively), said now that the offering has been completed, they are eager to get back to work.

On deck, English said, is a continued focus on the mobile sector. To date, Kayak’s applications have been downloaded 17 million times, but English sees it as a big opportunity, unlike Facebook, which is having a hard time monetizing as its user base shifts to phones and tablets.

“Our view on mobile is very different than Facebook,” he said. “Kayak is an e-commerce site, and whether they have a vacation coming up or a business trip, they need to make a purchase and they are increasingly making purchases on the phone, or sometimes in combination on the phone and the Web. We don’t really care what platform they use, but they are using [mobile] a lot.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120720/as-shares-trade-higher-kayak-ceo-says-the-ipo-went-exactly-as-planned/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120517/mobile-gaming-is-hot-but-pocket-gems-wont-sell-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20120517/mobile-gaming-is-hot-but-pocket-gems-wont-sell-out/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 16:26:13 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=209143 Pocket Gems, which routinely hits the top of the charts with its mobile games, says it isn’t for sale, even though it must be tempting right now.

Recently, Funzio sold to Japan’s Gree for $210 million, and Zynga acquired OMGPOP for $180 million; not too long before that, Electronic Arts paid $750 million for PopCap.

In an interview, Pocket Gem’s COO Ben Liu said that mobile game companies are hot commodities right now, but to sell is shortsighted.

“We feel like it’s the early days of mobile,” Liu said. “There’s a decade-long shift occurring from PC and the Web to mobile, and games is only the first vertical to take off. There’s so much opportunity. We need all of our attention on that to be successful.”

Liu would not disclose the company’s revenue, but said that it has been growing extremely fast. Over the past year and a half, the company has moved its offices five times to accommodate the growth of its staff — from 10 to 120 employees.

And as of a few months ago, the company recorded 60 million app downloads since its founding in 2009. Its hit title Tap Zoo generated 20 million downloads alone.

Pocket Gems’ games fall into the “casual” genre, and are focused on building products that have fairly addicting play; they attract a predominantly adult female audience. The games normally have “tap” in the name — Tap Zoo, Tap Pet Hotel and Tap Jungle allow players to build, respectively, their own zoo, pet hotel and mystical rain forest.

Last week, Pocket Gems released its first game exclusively for Android, called Tap Dragon Park, which allows players to train dragons to defend their kingdoms.

Pocket Gems has been able to rise in the rankings without having to tap investors too much. (Maybe their next game will be Tap Bank?) It has raised $5 million in capital from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors, and is profitable.

Here are Liu’s thoughts on some of the issues facing the mobile games industry.

On making acquisitions versus being acquired:

Liu says Pocket Gems isn’t entertaining offers at this time, but will consider making acquisitions of its own. “We’ve been completely focused on organic expansion, but I think as we continue to grow, something we’ll look at is acquisitions, as well. We are focused on building a great team organically, and are opportunistic.”

How many games can you release in a year?

“Last year, we launched 10 games total. Some of them are new IP that requires a larger team and can be franchise-sustaining, and others are seasonal titles or extensions.”

Is there an issue with copycats in the space?

“Yes, all of our games have been cloned extensively by most of our competitors. But that’s one of the prices of success. We’ve always prided ourselves on being an innovator. The thing that is difficult to clone is creativity. … We have a saying: Pocket Gems is a leader and not a follower. And many of our competitors have a fast-follower strategy.”

What are your thoughts about third-party distribution platforms, like Gree and DeNA, which are trying to create mobile social networks?

“We haven’t opened our games to third parties. It’s in our interest to develop our own platform. Their businesses are really compelling, but there’s no winning platform yet in the mobile space. We have our own loyal community, which is a powerful game engine. We don’t want to be dependent on someone else’s platform. Our own great platform is a powerful source of marketing, and it is good at letting our users know about the games. That’s the most effective.”

Is summer a good time for people to play and discover new mobile games?

“It’s a good time. People are on vacation and in transit, and it’s a natural device to use during those times. And people have more downtime and free time. We’ve found historically for it to be good. Holidays are another.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120517/mobile-gaming-is-hot-but-pocket-gems-wont-sell-out/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120405/zyngas-draw-something-slingshots-past-angry-birds-in-app-store/ http://allthingsd.com/20120405/zyngas-draw-something-slingshots-past-angry-birds-in-app-store/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:00:57 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=193357 OMGPOP’s Draw Something is once again the top-selling iPhone application, after being knocked off just two weeks ago by the launch of Angry Birds Space.

The top ranking will go a long way in quieting the critics who believed Zynga was foolish to acquire OMGPOP for $180 million on the day of Rovio’s big launch, only to see it fall to second place the next day.

In addition to climbing its way back to the top, Zynga also disclosed that the game has now been downloaded more than 50 million times in 50 days, making it the fastest-growing mobile game ever — or so it believes.

In other words, that would be like everyone in England downloading the app in less than two months.

While it still may end up being true that Zynga overpaid for OMGPOP, there is little doubt that the game is an overnight success.

If you are one of the few people who haven’t already played it, Draw Something challenges players to use their finger to draw a picture of a person, place or thing; for example, “hoodie,” “golf cart” or “Rihanna.” The completed picture is handed off to another player, who must guess what is being drawn, sort of like Pictionary.

Inside the game, players can pay for additional features, such as new colors that can help make the illustrations easier to guess, new words if they don’t like the choices that are presented to them, or bombs that will eliminate some of the letters to make guessing an illustration easier. The free version has ads; users can pay 99 cents to get rid of them.

Zynga also said that since the game launched, more than six billion drawings have been created (that’s 120 for every resident of England), and that at the game’s peak hours, it generates 3,000 drawings per second. The most popular words are “starfish,” “pregnant,” “six-pack,” “Hangman” and “boom box.” The least popular word is “latrine.”

The mobile game also registers as the most popular game on Facebook, because it allows people to log in to the game on the phone using their credentials.

However, people do not have to register using Facebook, so the number of players using it is actually bigger than what’s being reported by AppData, which tracks application usage on Facebook.

Still, AppData reports that the game has 14.4 million daily active users, where it has plateaued for the past week. The next most popular game, also owned by Zynga, is Words With Friends, which draws about eight million daily users, slightly more than half of Draw Something’s crowd.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120405/zyngas-draw-something-slingshots-past-angry-birds-in-app-store/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120306/smugmugs-camera-awesome-app-sees-two-million-downloads-in-first-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20120306/smugmugs-camera-awesome-app-sees-two-million-downloads-in-first-week/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:57:08 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=180929 Camera Awesome, the new photography app from Mountain View-based SmugMug, is getting an awesome response, according to the company’s CEO and “Chief Geek,” Don MacAskill.

In its first four days on the App Store, Camera Awesome was downloaded more than one million times; it hit two million in less than a week.

More than 10 million photos have been taken with the app already. Currently, it’s ranked the No. 1 photography app in 55 countries. In the U.S., it’s currently ranked No. 2 on the free apps list in iTunes, behind Draw Something, which my colleague Peter Kafka wrote about last week (and which I’ve since become addicted to — I blame him).

For comparison’s sake: That’s faster than the initial download rate of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which crossed the two-million-download mark in two months, and comparable to the two-million-in-two-days feat of Angry Birds on Android.

“We’ve struck a chord with photographers around the world, from soccer dads to mom-tographers and high-end professionals, and we’re only getting started,” MacAskill said.

The popularity of mobile photo apps comes as smartphones capable of taking decent photos — and sharing them quickly — munch at the market for digital cameras. Late last year, a report from the NPD Group said that the percentage of photos taken with a smartphone grew 10 percent year over year to 27 percent in 2011, while its Retail Tracking Service found that the point-and-shoot camera market had dipped 17 percent year over year in terms of units shipped, and 18 percent in terms of revenue.

Camera Awesome became available in the App Store last Tuesday. Despite the app’s somewhat intimidating 297 presets, filters, textures and frames, my colleague Katie Boehret wrote in her review of the app that “it is by far one of the most full-powered camera apps I’ve used, marking an exciting advance for smartphone cameras.”

As Katie reports, Camera Awesome is free, but it is only available for iOS devices; an Android app is in the works.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120306/smugmugs-camera-awesome-app-sees-two-million-downloads-in-first-week/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20120207/can-there-be-another-rovio-outfit-7-wants-to-give-it-a-shot/ http://allthingsd.com/20120207/can-there-be-another-rovio-outfit-7-wants-to-give-it-a-shot/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:00:04 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=171950 Outfit7 says its games on the iPhone and iPad have hit more than 300 million downloads since launching a year and a half ago.

At that size, it claims to have outpaced Rovio’s Angry Birds, which took 20 months to hit 300 million.

If you haven’t heard of Outfit7, it’s probably because it hasn’t raised any institutional venture capital, it wasn’t founded in the U.S., and much of its application usage is spread across 120 countries.

But the company’s franchise of apps called Talking Friends, which are sort of like a modern-day Neopets, is gathering a large base of users.

The characters include Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog and Talking Harry the Hedgehog — in other words, many more brands than Angry Birds alone. Of the 14 in existence, Talking Tom Cat is the most popular, having been downloaded 100 million times.

The animals serve as a virtual pet, which responds to your touch and repeats everything that you say. You can pet him, poke him or grab his tail. A popular activity is to record videos of the pet and send them to friends.

The number of users who come back to the app is impressive, with more than 90 million monthly active users worldwide. The company also averages more than 25 million downloads per month.

Executive Chairman Narry Singh believes Rovio and Outfit7 have similar growth trajectories; and like Rovio, which was able to create a strong brand from Angry Birds, Outfit7 is angling to create brands, as well.

Today, Outfit7 has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., as well as Slovenia, Cyprus, London and Seoul, South Korea. Its apps are primarily free, but users can make in-app purchases to buy virtual goods.

The company is also announcing today that it is partnering with Iconicfuture and Digital Artists to bring branded virtual goods to Talking Tom Cat. In a testament to its international pull, the merchandise will represent six of the world’s most popular soccer clubs, from Spain, Italy, England, France and Portugal.

Of course, Outfit7 is not the first company to want to replicate Rovio’s successes.

In the end, it won’t be important which company got to 300 million downloads the fastest, but which one was able to build a more long-term and sustainable company.

When you look at it in those terms, the jury is still out on Rovio, as well.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120207/can-there-be-another-rovio-outfit-7-wants-to-give-it-a-shot/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/nintendo-to-bring-online-game-network-nfc-to-new-wii/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/nintendo-to-bring-online-game-network-nfc-to-new-wii/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:19:13 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=168340 Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told investors today that the Wii U, the company’s long-awaited successor to the Wii gaming console, will come equipped with NFC capabilities that will be used to transfer gaming data and will open the potential for micropayments through the gaming system. Satoru also said the company was readying an online game network for the Wii U system, citing lessons learned from the tepid launch of the 3DS.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/nintendo-to-bring-online-game-network-nfc-to-new-wii/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120125/will-there-be-more-plush-toys-rovios-former-branding-exec-lands-at-big-fish-games/ http://allthingsd.com/20120125/will-there-be-more-plush-toys-rovios-former-branding-exec-lands-at-big-fish-games/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=167006 Big Fish Games, a casual-game maker that has been flying under the radar, has hired former Rovio executive Wibe Wagemans to head up mobile.

During his tenure at Rovio as SVP of global brand advertising, Wagemans oversaw the rise of Angry Birds from a phenomenally popular mobile game into a merchandiser’s dream come true. Consumers clamored to purchase plush toys, key chains and backpacks based on the characters in the games.

In his role as VP and GM of mobile, Wagemans, who lives in Seattle, will be working a little closer to home: Big Fish Games is also based in Seattle; Rovio was based in Finland.

AllThingsD caught up with Wagemans to hear about his new job at Big Fish, where he will focus on helping to build a stronger brand, especially for the company’s rapidly growing mobile business. Historically, many of the company’s games were sold through a monthly subscription online, but the audience has been shifting toward downloading the games on the iPhone and iPad.

To date, Big Fish has launched 231 games on the iPhone and iPad, and has achieved 1.5 billion downloads across all platforms, including mobile and PC, since the company’s start in 2002. Half a billion of those downloads have occurred in the past year and a half alone, Wagemans said.

Some of the games include first- and third-party titles, such as Mystery Case Files, Awakening, Dark Tales, Doors of the Mind and Haunted Manor.

The company, which is a potential IPO candidate this year, previously reported that it generated $140 million in sales in 2010.

Here’s a video with Wagemans, who explains why he left Rovio to join Big Fish, and talks about the opportunity for more plush toys at the company, including its mascot, Felix:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120125/will-there-be-more-plush-toys-rovios-former-branding-exec-lands-at-big-fish-games/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120112/ebay-predicts-mobile-commerce-will-grow-60-percent-in-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20120112/ebay-predicts-mobile-commerce-will-grow-60-percent-in-2012/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:24:08 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=163281 EBay’s John Donahoe has drawn his 2012 mobile predictions line in the sand.

He is forecasting that mobile commerce — purchases made from apps or the browser on a phone or tablet — will hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume this year, up 60 percent from $5 billion in 2011.

Donahoe made the predictions last night in Las Vegas, where he gave the keynote at a technology dinner for leaders of the Consumer Electronics Association.

Additionally, the company predicted that PayPal will reach $7 billion in mobile total payment volume this year, increasing from $4 billion in 2011.

He made the bold predictions despite the recent unsettling departure of PayPal President Scott Thompson to join Yahoo as CEO, indicating that he is still confident about PayPal’s mobile future.

During the keynote, Donahoe also announced that Best Buy was its newest partner to use the RedLaser barcode scanning app to offer local in-store pick-up services. Other companies that offer it today include Toys “R” Us.

Other big data figures: 

• EBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of its mobile applications across all platforms.
• More than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113 percent increase year over year.
• PayPal’s original prediction for 2011 was that it would achieve $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for 2011. Instead, it hit $4 billion. A year earlier, it totaled only $750 million.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120112/ebay-predicts-mobile-commerce-will-grow-60-percent-in-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120103/americans-played-anything-but-social-games-during-the-holidays/ http://allthingsd.com/20120103/americans-played-anything-but-social-games-during-the-holidays/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:30:18 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=159097 The number of people playing games on Facebook tanked last week, as some game makers were unable to capitalize on people’s downtime during the holidays.

The drop-off in players affected almost all developers, but did not hit all titles equally.

For example, Electronic Arts saw 1.2 million fewer monthly users over the past week for its top title The Sims Social; Zynga’s Empire & Allies game lost one million monthly users, and its newest game, CastleVille, lost 900,000, according to AppData, which publishes such information.

On the flip side, many of the games that performed well were old favorites; these logically would have longer-term, more-committed players, who would make a point of returning during the holidays to take advantage of seasonal promotions.

The games that benefited from the holidays include Zynga’s Words With Friends and FarmVille, which gained 1.3 million and 800,000 monthly active users, respectively, according to Inside Social Games. Other gainers rounding out the Top 5 were Tetris Online’s Tetris Battle; Wooga’s kingdom-building game, Magic Land; and Men vs. Women, a role-playing game by Social Point.

Still, the general direction for the week was heading down.

That contrasts with other game platforms, such as consoles, PCs and mobile, which largely benefit from the holidays and from more free time in general.

Console games often skyrocket in popularity as kids and adults unwrap new titles for Nintendo, Xbox or PlayStation on Christmas morning.

PC gaming also typically surges during the season. EA timed the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic ahead of the holidays, in hopes of drawing new players who would be sold on sticking around for months, after spending time on the game during their time off.

But perhaps the biggest competitor came from mobile, which benefited from breaking records for the number of new Android and iOS devices that were gifted during the holidays. Flurry reported that more than one billion apps were downloaded worldwide during the last seven days of 2011, breaking the all-time weekly record. Games are often one of the most-downloaded categories of apps.

So the more important question to ask is, why would Facebook be an exception, if other platforms performed well?

Clearly, all of the platforms are competing for a limited number of minutes in the day, and so are other forms of media, like the Internet, TV and the movies. But when it comes to Facebook, a larger driver may be the environment — after all, it’s no big secret that a lot of social networking and social gaming is done in the workplace.

In a study conducted last summer, advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi found that 47 percent of respondents said they play social games at work during a typical day, and that 28 percent play for at least 30 minutes. Without that dedicated time in front of the computer every day, people may have had the opportunity to be more obsessed with other screens, such as phones or TVs.

Another potential reason that Facebook and social games did not see a lift from the holidays is because they have not yet figured out how to capitalize on the Christmas economy.

For years, console games have been timed with the end of the year, so they could be wrapped up and placed under the tree. More recently, smartphones and gift cards for music and apps have helped mobile prosper. Perhaps there wasn’t enough hype and promotion for social games to compete for people’s dollars.

Regardless of the reasons, the drop may ultimately be a small a blip on the radar screen for most game developers, who also see several spikes in activity during the year.

The bigger impact may be felt at Facebook, which takes a 30 percent cut of all virtual goods sold inside social games, and would feel the cumulative impact across all of the games.

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