Twitter yesterday announced a couple of new functionalities for its Twitter Cards platform that are of particular interest to mobile app developers. The two new functionalities allows mobile app developers to add links at the bottom of their Tweets featuring Twitter Cards that either prompt users to download their app from a mobile app store or deep-link into their own app (for users who already have a particular developer’s app installed).

Both of these new Twitter Card functionalities — app installs and deep-linking — work across iPhone, iPad and Android. Developers can implement Twitter Cards with these functionalities by adding a new set of markup tags, which Twitter details here.

Twitter Cards, which more than 10,000 developers already use, allow developers to embed rich media — videos, images, story summaries and more — in Tweets that are generated from the link within a Tweet’s text.

First, mobile app developers can add these new footer tags to their markup, so they can specify to users who haven’t downloaded their app to do so. The Twitter Card will have a link that reads “Get the app.” For developer’s that have an iPhone app that’s not iPad optimized, they should include the iPhone app ID, name, and URL, for both iPhone and iPad related tags. When no value is provided for iPad, the Cards will render a “View on web” link directing to the value in twitter:url.

Second, If a user has a particular developer’s app installed, a developer can specify a deep-link into the relevant resource within their own app. The text prompt in the embedded Twitter Card in a Tweet reads “Open in app.” If a user taps the link, Twitter will send the user out of Twitter and into a developer’s app. For example, instead of viewing a photo from Flickr within the Twitter app, a user can click the “Open in Flickr app” link to hop out of the Twitter app an into the Flickr app to view the photo.

“With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed,” explains Twitter’s Jason Costa in a blog post.

These new functionalities tear down the barrier between app-to-app communication. Instead of pulling up an in-app browser like Twitter used to do, which the Facebook app still does, a user can hop out of Twitter and to another app. These new Twitter Card functionalities also provide a huge potential for app developers to drive downloads and app discovery. Since many developers promote their apps on social networks or implement social sharing features within their apps, they can now use these new Twitter functionalities to encourage users to download their app or re-open their app to increase retention and decrease churn.

Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson said in a blog post that the deep-linking functionality is helpful for ecommerce apps. Instead of directing a user to a mobile web page where they may not be logged into a particular ecommerce company’s website, they can now be sent to an ecommerce company’s mobile app where a user is generally logged in with their payment credentials. Essentially, ecommerce businesses can use this new Twitter Card functionality to help with driving transactions rather than just page views.

For developers interested in learning more about how to enable app install prompts and deep-linking, head here.

Monetization and user acquisition provider W3i today announced that it has rebranded the company, changing its name to NativeX.

The company’s name change comes alongside its other announcement, pivoting the business to providing native ad units for its customers, a form of in-app advertising where publishers can integrate ads into their mobile game or app itself. NativeX claims its native ad units from its new NativeX Platform out-perform “standard” display ads by 150 percent, often doubling or tripling revenue for app developers.

The image below is an example of a native ad for the app Agnitus – Games for Learning from kids’ education app developer Agnitus, which is integrated into iWin’s Deal or No Deal game.

W3i also announced that game industry veteran and founder of Electronics Arts and Digital Chocolate, Trip Hawks, will be joining the company as a senior advisor to its board of directors. Hawkins stepped down in May 2012 from his last position as CEO of Digital Chocolate. NativeX also revealed that its business grew more than threefold in the last year, and it opened a San Francisco office, expanding the staff of the entire company to 165.

“Native advertising is the future, and I am thrilled to get involved with this forward-thinking company,” Hawkins said in a statement. “Every major publisher on mobile and web has their eye on native advertising right now. NativeX is proving that we as an industry can do better than banner ads.”

Developers can learn more about NativeX’s native ad platform here. NativeX will also be present for mobile game developers to check out at the 2013 Game Developers Conference.

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, will be acquiring news aggregation app Pulse, according to a report from AllThingsD.

Sources familiar with the negotiations say that the price of the acquisition is between $50 million to $100 million. AllThingsD had already reported earlier today that Pulse was in talks to be acquired by a “major platform company.” Pulse is one of many news aggregator apps on mobile, with competing apps in the space like Flipboard, Zite, Feedly and more.

According to traffic tacking service AppData, Pulse is ranked No. 19 on the top free iPhone apps chart for the news category.

Pulse is developed by San-Francisco-based developer Alphonso Labs, which raised about $10 million in funding to date from Redpoint Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Lightspeed Investment Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners and Lerer Ventures.

Mobile game developer Rovio today announced that Angry Birds Toons, an upcoming cartoon series based on the company’s popular game franchise, will be accessible within all Angry Birds mobile games.

After installing an update, any of the Angry Birds apps will be able to get access to a new channel button in each game’s home screen, which is where users can watch episodes of the show.

The cartoon series is scheduled to begin airing this upcoming weekend (March 16 for broadcast TV and March 17 for on-demand services) on a dedicated channel within Rovio’s game portfolio, and on Comcast’s U.S. video platforms like Xfinity on Demand, Xfinity.com.tv and in the Xfinity TV Player app on Samsung Smart TVs. Rovio plans to add support for Roku and other platforms in the future. In other parts of the world, the Angry Birds Toons will air on FOX8 in Australia, JEI TV in South Korea, ANTV in Indonesia, Cartoon Networking in India, MTV3 Juniori and MTV3 in Finland, the Children’s Channel in Israel, 1+1 networks in Ukraine, Gulli and Canal J in France, SUPER RTL in Germany, TV2 in Norway, Canal 13 in Chile and Gloob in Brazil. Rovio has also partnered with Activision, Paramount Pictures, BlackBerry and Sony Pictures for the launch of the Angry Birds Toons channel.

So far, Rovio has planned 52 episodes for the cartoon series, with a new episode scheduled to air every Sunday. Rovio hopes the cartoon show will help with increasing installs as well as its engagement and retention rates for its Angry Birds games.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts, which has seen years of success on console, PC and handheld, is seeing more and more success in the burgeoning mobile games market. The company released the highly-anticipated driving game Real Racing 3 yesterday and will launch Command and Conquer: Tiberium Alliances soon for mobile.

Nick Earl, senior vice president and general manager of EA’s All Play label, recently spoke with Inside Mobile Apps about EA’s transition to free-to-play, its relationships with the mobile platforms (Apple and Google) and the core gamer market on tablet.

Inside Mobile Apps: What has EA learned so far from some of its freemium titles like The Simpson: Tapped Out and The Sims FreePlay?

Nick Earl, senior vice president and general manager of EA’s All Play label (pictured right): We’ve learned a lot. Top of the list is how open this model is in terms of the number of players and how big the audience can be when a game is free-to-play, even though there are a lot of opportunities if you’re willing to spend money inside these freemium games. Having [games] as this model means it’s completely open and free for millions to play on a daily basis. We’ve learned that we have to be able to support a large audience and that’s the infrastructure of the game. The operations has to be able to support large audiences and we’ve learned that on games like The Simpsons, for example, which now has now more than five million daily active users, and when we started it, we struggled. We rebuilt the infrastructure to support and maintain large audiences.

We’ve learned that the design of a free-to-play game is different from a premium game or console game where you pay upfront and get all you can eat. It requires a different style of design, that’s a core compulsion loop, that the user experience as well as the sinks where the game tends to monetize. You need to construct a game that’s going to work for the majority of people that are not going to pay at all but is still going to make sense for people who have the disposable income and desire to speed up and experience or get access to a premium item, and that doesn’t really upset the balance that exists for the entire community that are playing the game. There’s a real art to creating and designing these games.

IMA: With Real Racing 3 recently releasing, which is a free-to-play game, could you talk about the decision or the process of making the change from Real Racing 2′s premium model to the freemium model?

Earl: From the beginning, we made the decision, both EA and Firemonkeys to go freemium from the beginning for a couple of reasons. One, is that the market was moving and voting for going freemium, even though this it’s not supported by everyone because some people don’t like change. We acknowledge that and understand it. The vast majority like that there is no barrier to download a game and to start enjoying it and be a part of that community and experience. It’s clear to us that the way we we’re going to make this the most accessible and get the audience to appreciate what we believe to be a high-quality experience — free-to-play was the way to go. Secondly, we came up during the course of development with this unique, innovative multiplayer mode called Time-Shifted Multiplayer, which allows you to compete with your friends but do it in an asynchronous manner. Once we came up with that, we realized that this game is going to be more fun if there was a large audience. If there wasn’t a limit of people willing to spend $5 or $7 or $10 dollars on a game. We wanted to open it up and make it free. As we were developing, it was validating the decision to go freemium and that’s why we went all in at that point.

IMA: On the flip side, you still have premium titles in your portfolio on iOS and Android and you’ve seen some success with games that are premuium with a price upfront and in-app purchases as well, like Need for Speed: Most Wanted and FIFA Soccer 13. Is EA still seeing success with premium mobile games?

Earl: We have not made the decision to focus exclusively on premium. There’s a place for premium with in-app purchases — we call that “paymium” to make it more confusing. There’s a place for those games and we’ll continue to evaluate each game by a franchise by franchise or game by game basis to figure out what’s the optimal way to construct a game and construct a business model for that game. The majority of games are going to be freemium going forward unless something radical shifts inside the industry. I don’t see it departing from this model any time soon.

IMA: In EA’s last earnings call, the company mentioned again how much revenue The Simpsons: Tapped Out generated. Distimo recently put out a report, which showed EA at the top spot among all top grossing cross-app store publishers. With mobile development having better margins than console development, will EA be focusing more of its business on the mobile platform?

Earl: We can’t talk about our gross profits and gross margins from system to system, but what I would say is this — we are enormous believers in the mobile platform and we’re excited about the future. If you take a look at the numbers and the trajectory, there’s no argument against how fast these devices are being adopted. We’re seeing unbelievable activation rates on a daily basis. We saw enormous numbers over Christmas. We’re seeing a whole market spring up in front of us. We’re excited about mobile. There are potentially millions of people that will upgrade from feature phones to smartphones and tablets in the years ahead. So there’s just no denying that mobile is enormously exciting to this company. And, our goal is to make the greatest highest quality games we can in front as many people as possible.

With all of that said, the company is invested in the future of consoles, and now that there’s some announcements about the next gen, we’re excited about the possibilities there and we’re also big players in the PC business and have some big franchises like The Sims that make sense for the PC — both online and offline. We’re a large publisher that has the ability and the resources to go after multiple markets and find a way to tie these franchises, so that you can play and interact with them across any device at any time, anywhere. That’s the Holy Grail here — to have the ability to access a given franchise from multiple devices, and your data moves seamlessly across sessions. That’s something EA believes in.

IMA: We recently spoke with the developer working on Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, which will launch on mobile soon, featuring cross-platform play between mobile and PC. Will more EA games feature cross-platform play?

Earl: That’s something we’ll push toward. There’s a lot of intricacies around design. I don’t think you can necessarily stop playing on web and then pick up where you were on mobile, but I do think you can interact with it. I like to use FIFA as a good example of that. On your phone, you can act more like the manager and switch positions — who your players are on the starting eleven and later you can take that new roster and play a new game in all its 3D glory with your 5.1 surround sound on a beautiful HD screen. And then the next time you can open your iPad and look at all the stats that you generated from that game. We love the notion of having your data in the cloud and being able to interact with it no matter where you are and when. (more…)

User acquisition and marketing company Fisku today reported a cost per loyal user decrease of 7 percent from $1.67 in its December 2012 Index to $1.56 in its January 2013 Index. The Boston-based company defines a loyal user as a person who will open an app at least three times. Compared to January 2012′s average cost of $1.14 per user, January 2013′s user acquisition cost is up 37 percent year-over-year, but the drop from December 2012 to January 2013 by 7 percent was not as dramatic as the drop from December 2011 to January 2012 by 59 percent, which fell from $1.81 to $1.14 per loyal user.

The company, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, saw mobile app downloads increase by 13 percent from 5.32 million daily downloads in December 2012 to 6.01 million downloads in January. With monetization company Flurry which saw 50 million iOS and Android device activations and 1.76 billion apps downloaded during Christmas week last year, Fiksu says the high trend of user activity and app discovery continued into January.

CEO Micah Adler says Fiksu’s January Indexes are early indicators of the “mainstreaming of mobile advertising,” meaning marketers emphasizing value over volume by spreading their budgets out for maximum profit, especially to mobile advertising campaigns.

“We expect brands to allocate more dedicated spending to mobile advertising campaigns in 2013 and to only get savvier about aligning seasonal spending to the ebbs and flows of user acquisition costs,” he says, in a statement.

Japan’s leading mobile game recently pushed its registered user count to nine million, according to industry watcher and analyst Dr. Serkan Toto. The free-to-play game, which is currently estimated to generate between $54 million to $75 million a month in Japan, reached the nine million mark 21 days after it reached eight million registered users.

A chart from Social Game Info shows how Japan’s current top grossing mobile game acquired nine million users since launching on the Japanese Apple App Store on Feb. 20, 2012. The explosion in growth for the game occurred when game company GungHo launched a TV ad campaign on Oct. 15, 2012.

The chart details how the game moved from three to four million users in 19 days after the TV spot began airing. Comparatively, it took the game 94 days to go from two to three million users. Toto points out that other mobile companies including DeNA, GREE and Line are using TV ads to promote games.

A new report by Distimo finds that dropping the price of an iPhone app increased revenue by 95 percent three days after the price drop, while lowering the price of an iPad app increased revenue by 51 percent. Distimo’s debuted its analytics product AppIQ in October 2012, which allows its customers to see how many downloads and how much money almost any Android or iOS app makes, aiding in the pricing strategy process most mobile app developers deal with.

Distimo said that the effect of a price drop on revenue is significant, amplifying the longer iPhone and iPad apps remain on sale in the Apple App Store. Seven days after a price drop, revenue increased by 159 percent for iPhone apps, and by 71 percent for iPad apps. Distimo also cited increased revenue from one-off fees and in-app purchases as contributors to the increase in revenue in the long run.

On the other hand, when the price of an iPhone app was increased, download volumes fell 46 percent over five days, with download volumes dropping by 57 percent on iPad. Dropping the price of an app not only effects revenue, it effects downloads. Dropping the price of an iPhone app increased downloads by 1665 percent five days after the price drop, while lowering the price of an iPad app increased downloads by 871 percent.

Distimo then took a look at price elasticity, a number that stands for the change in revenue caused by a one percent price change. The Dutch firm found that iPhone apps show the lowest price elasticity on revenue, meaning that revenue reacted most heavily on any price change of a particular app in the Apple App Store. A one percent price drop for an iPhone app led to a 1.2 percent increase in revenue within five days. On iPad, price elasticity is -0.07 percent, indicating that a one percent price drop caused a 0.7 percent increase in revenue.

After noting that 850 apps for iPhone and 930 apps for iPad changed its prices at least once in the Apple App Store in December 2012, Distimo discovered that the majority of price changes fall within the $1 to $3 range, with the largest price changes occurring on iPad apps where 20 percent of all price changes moved the needle more than $4 in the Apple App Store.

The effects of price changes on download volumes and revenue for apps in the Apple App Store is similar on Google Play. However, Distimo said the effect in the app store for Android devices was less powerful compared to the Apple App Store. Distimo cited the higher difficulty to reach the top of the Google Play charts as the explanation for the difference between the two stores. Distimo also listed the top 10 iPhone and iPad apps that benefited from price drops by revenue, in which the majority of apps on both lists were games.

All the data from this report came from the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad during December 2012, in the 10 largest countries consisting of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. This report is only based on mobile apps that have reached the top 400 overall and had at least one price change in the month of December last year. Also, keep in mind that all this data was collected in December, a time when the holidays dramatically boost app downloads as noted by Fiksu, Flurry and others.

Distimo will host a free webinar on the impact of price changes subject, which this report analyzed, on Feb. 7 at 5:00 p.m. CET. For those interested, register here.

Monetization and user acquisition provider W3i announced that it has partnered with affiliate marketing company HasOffers. More specifically, W3i will be integrated into HasOffers’ third-party tracking service MobileAppTracking, which allows app developers to track ad networks, and see exactly which network, like W3i, resulted in acquiring users, for example.

“We were first to market in this category and really serve to equip advertisers to work with whatever distribution partners they want, however they want,” says HasOffers CEO Peter Hamilton. “We do not use their data for any sort of retargeting or separate ad network monetization. We simply charge as a software as a service model to the advertiser or app owner.”

With the MobileAppTracking product, mobile app developers can essentially figure out which ads are working or not. Cookie tracking, which is how web advertisers effectively reach its target audience, is limited on mobile, making it more difficult for app developers to track app installs and determine their cost per install (CPI). Without accurate tracking, app developers can’t attribute app installs back to an ad network or publisher responsible for driving a download. With the use of device fingerprinting, which allows the identification of a user or device without cookie tracking, MobileAppTracking can determine which user installed a developer’s app after clicking an ad and where they came from.

Essentially, mobile app advertisers can now follow their app marketing performance in detail, thus getting the most out of their budget by putting their money in the right places as well as track the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer they acquire.

Hamilton says W3i went the extra mile to reconcile their findings with HasOffers’ to provide mobile app advertisers with the most insight possible in real-time. Services that W3i offers its customers include an offer exchange, freemium game expertise and advanced ad optimization technology which includes A/B testing, heat-mapping and predictive analytics.

“Online advertising is about relationships, and we simply work to help those relationships grow through transparency in technology,” he says.

Mobile app developers generally work with more than one ad network to promote their app to generate installs and acquire users, so MobileAppTracking supports more than 85 ad networks like Tapjoy, Mojiva, InMobi and now W3i.

Customers can track anything such as distribution partners like ad networks, publishers, and affiliates, or by tutorial completions, which countries performed best and more.

App developers can install the MobileAppTracking SDK into their iOS or Android app, choose the publishers they work with and use the tracking link generated in their campaigns, which serves as the destination URL.

Restaurant website OpenTable has already launched the definitive mobile reservation app and now it’s acquired the food photography app FoodSpotting. According to AllThingsD, OpenTable paid $10 million in cash.

Best described as an Instagram for food lovers, FoodSpotting is a mobile social network that connects user photos with specific restaurants and locations. Since launching in 2010, the app has more than three million photos and raised just under $4 million before this acquisition.

The purchase is just OpenTable’s latest push for the mobile space. It released a strong smartphone reservation app last year and, through this month, will be offering free mobile menu websites to OpenTable restaurants through DudaMobile. OpenTable has also partnered with others such as Yelp and the travel site Gogobot.

If controversial sells, then OpenTable’s timing could hardly be better. The New York Times just ran a short feature on people taking pictures of their food in Manhattan restaurants. The reactions varied from supporting consumers to banning them from restaurants.

You can read our review of FoodSpotting here.