App monetization platform Burstly today announced that it has restructured the company into an end-to-end mobile app development solution for developers. Now Burstly, which was founded in 2009, will be offering its app testing platform TestFlight, app analytics tool FlightPath and app monetization service SkyRocket (formally the Burstly monetization platform) to all developers, not just for some of the largest apps in the world.

“For the first time, we are our opening up our monetization platform to all mobile developers and publishers through the launch of SkyRocket,” said Evan Rifkin, CEO of Burstly, in a statement. “With Burstly, developers now have the option of using a full suite of integrated services which are incredibly powerful when mixed together, or the flexibility to use each service on its own.”

With the opening of its products to all developers, the Santa Monica, Calif.-headquartered company, which is used by some of the top mobile publishers including Electronic Arts, Rovio, Zynga, and more, will be allowing developers to now create custom segments of users in FlightPath and then using those segments to create different monetization experiences in SkyRocket. For example, developers can choose to not display ads to valuable users, or apologize to users which have experience an app crash by giving away virtual currency in a game. Burstly is now becoming a service that can possibly compete on a level with the likes of Tapjoy, PlayHaven, Millennial Media and more.

Before today’s announcement, Burstly was last making news when it opened its TestFlight for Android private beta to all users, and in just 45 days of closed beta, 5,000 developers uploaded 4,500 apps which have seen more than 50,000 downloads. Burstly also recently announced the private beta launch of FlightPath, its mobile analytics service for mobile app developers, featuring real-time data that can be customized and segmented to the developer’s liking.

Mobile advertising and publishing platform Tapjoy today announced a partnership with South Korea’s largest social mobile platform Kakao, which will allow developers on the Kakao Games platform to monetize with Tapjoy’s advertising and monetization tools.

The Kakao Games platform allows users to play with KakaoTalk users, share game scores, and compete on leaderboards in real-time. Games on the platform now gross more than $40 million per month, the company revealed in a statment.

In March, Tapjoy revealed that approximately 100 million unique viewers who come through its network per month are international, which equates to about 75 percent of its overall unique viewers per month coming from outside the U.S.

The partnership provides Tapjoy the opportunity to deliver premium content within titles on the Kakao Games platform.

KakaoTalk currently has more than 90 million users around the globe, more than 30 million users visiting the platform every day and is South Korea’s practically ubiquitous mobile messaging app. SundayToz was the first developer to get its match-3 puzzler Anipang on KakaoTalk’s game platform. At GDC 2013, SundayToz founder and CEO Kevin Lee told us he spoke with the founder of Kakao, and proposed the idea to turn the messenger app into a game platform, which led to the launch of Anipang for Kakao. Today, Anipang is generating around $500,000 in revenue a day.

Recently, KakaoTalk also demonstrated growth outside of its native South Korea by surpassing the 10 million download mark in Japan on March 24.

Fiksu today reported a steady landscape for daily download volumes and mobile app marketing costs in its March 2013 Index. The user acquisition and marketing company also announced that its Fiksu Mobile App Marketing Platform has now registered 100 billion app user actions and driven more than one billion app downloads.

Fiksu reported a cost per loyal user increase of 5 percent, or $0.07, to $1.36, from $1.29 in February’s Index. Marketing costs are up by approximately 5 percent year-over-year when compared to costs of $1.30 per loyal user in March 2012′s Index. The Boston-based company, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free iPhone apps in the U.S., noted a 4 percent decline in daily mobile app downloads, moving from 5.20 million daily downloads in February to 5.02 million downloads in March. Although daily download volumes remained steady month-over-month, volumes were up 12 percent year-over-year from March 2012′s figure of 4.45 million daily downloads.

“The ‘new normal‘ continued in March, which was good news for mobile app marketers,” says Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu, in a statement. “Inventory has increased but costs have held steady, reflecting a maturity in the overall quality of apps and their ability to engage users. Despite the last few steady months, marketers must always be prepared for the ebbs and flows that inevitably happen in the complex app ecosystem.”

For the purpose Fiksu’s Indexes, the company denotes a loyal user as a person who open an app three or more times. These reports are meant to help mobile app marketers gauge their performance against industry trends.

In an effort to work more closely with its European publishers, mobile game cross-promotion service Chartboost today announced that it has opened its first international office in Amsterdam, with a team of five led by Dutch game development veteran Ilja Goossens.

“Chartboost has been global since day one, and probably the fact that I’m European makes the whole company be more international,” Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost, told Inside Mobile Apps. “Right now probably one-third of our developers are European, so it made sense for us to have a team there and be closer to them.”

Alegre says the company chose Amsterdam because of the convenient airport connection between the city and San Francisco, where Chartboost is currently headquartered. Amsterdam is also the city that has easy access to locations where many of its top European game development customers reside including Supercell, King, Wooga, NaturalMotion and Rovio.

“Europe is a leader in mobile gaming,” she says. “I don’t know why it took us so long to get there.” (more…)

China’s largest web company Tencent recently launched a TV commercial campaign for its messaging app WeChat which targets the Singaporen market.

The TV commercial features two Taiwanese celebrities — Alan Luo Zhi-Xiang and Raine Yang. The commercial, which can be seen here, shows the two stars demonstrating some functions of the app, including a voice recognition functionality and stickers, a special emoji. The same TV commercial was used in Taiwan. The TV spot will air on free-to-air channels including Channel 8, Channel U, W drama and E-City starting this week.

Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s international business group for Malaysia and Singapore, said the Chinese web giant hopes to increase the app’s presence and market share in the country.

“Singapore is a very strong market like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand,” he says. “We are witnessing a sturdy growth in mobile application platforms.”

At the 2013 Boao Forum For Asia in early April, Tencent president Martin Lau revealed that WeChat now has more than 40 million overseas users. In total, WeChat last reported that its user base was more than 300 million. Compared to other messaging apps in the Asian markets, Line Corp.’s Line currently has 120 million users, up by 20 million since January, and South Korean KakaoTalk has 70 million users. In the U.S., messaging app giants like WhatsApp haven’t released user base figures, but its estimated to be as high as 300 million, and Kik Messenger has officially said it now has more than 50 million registered users.

As Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston recently told Inside Mobile Apps, “messaging is the killer app in mobile.” Adding that whoever wins messaging will win this era of computing. While the messaging market remains very fragmented, WeChat making a market play in Singapore is another sign of a company wanting to spread its reach and become a global player in messenging.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post comes from James Lamberti, vice president and general manager of AdTruth (he was formally of mobile ad network InMobi and ComScore), a technology that enables audience identification through anonymous device recognition. In this post, Lamberti discusses why Apple and Mozilla making the decision to block and reject cookie tracking is a good thing.

You can bet that privacy advocates across the digital industry were celebrating recently. In response to Mozilla’s intent to block all third-party cookies by default and Apple’s decision to reject apps that use cookie-tracking, digital advertisers are wondering what this disruptive news means and how they should respond.

If anything, these changes should be applauded. While this news may come as a surprise to marketers and digital advertisers, it should be seen as an opportunity for the industry to address a problem that’s been an issue for years. The audience-identification options are limited; but this is a critical function that marketers depend on every day.

With cookies quickly falling by the wayside, the industry needs an alternative that is universal in nature, functions across all devices, on all operating systems and across every use case including desktop, mobile and apps. Apple’s push toward identifier for advertising (IFA) is a step in the right direction but is limited to iOS devices and doesn’t support all use cases.

Second, a universal alternative needs be based on the concept of privacy by design. This means privacy has been factored in from the beginning, not added as an afterthought. It also means providing the flexibility to recognize and respect privacy protection mechanisms, such as online behavioral advertising (OBA) and Do Not Track.

While keeping privacy in mind, a solution must also be effective. Performance and longevity are of great value to marketers and must reach an acceptable rate for a solution to even be considered. The key is for advertisers to understand and recognize their audiences well enough to provide relevant content: no more and no less.

And finally, with the number of mobile users and devices in world, we need a solution that has the ability to scale. Digital marketing is delivered and measured in billions of impressions and fractions of seconds. If this speed and scale can’t be supported the approach isn’t going to be adopted.

The news from Apple and Mozilla has caused many in the ecosystem to wonder how they will continue to reach customers in a time of diminishing options. They shouldn’t worry. As the ‘deterministic’ cookie approach continues to fade out, there is an opportunity for a more ‘probabilistic’ approach – one that meets the criteria outlined above – to be adopted. Don’t fret; it’s time to thank Apple and Mozilla for helping reframe the audience identification conversation.

In-game product placement advertising company MediaSpike today announced it’s making its services available to mobile developers and that it has hired Manny Anekal as Chief Revenue Officer. Anekal, who formerly led in-game advertising sales at Zynga, EA and Microsoft, will also “initiate” the company’s presence in New York City

MediaSpike is geared towards letting developers and advertisers work together to put product brands into games with a minimal amount of fuss. The way the system works is developers can apply two-dimensional images with product advertisements to parts of their game.

MediaSpike allows advertisers to use lightweight SDKs to target specific user groups while the company’s background servers do the lion’s share of the work. An advertiser selects the target audience’s demographics (which determines which partner game the content will appear in) and the length of the campaign. From there, the SDK lets a user select what type of item would sport a brand image, with arbitrary sizing being automatically supported.

Now iOS and Android game developers can join MediaSpike’s platform lineup alongside offerings for Flash and javascript developers. Mobile game developers can add this new revenue stream by dropping in the appropriate library and declaring which objects can become placements. MediaSpike then works with major brands to place the appropriate ads.

MediaSpike also revealed that a recent campaign for Pepsi which placed virtual vending machines in Gaia Online had players interacting with the machines and even complaining when the campaign was finished and the machines removed.

Director of Digital Brand Marketing at PepsiCo Beverages Andrea Harrison said “We love seeing these kinds of results.”

Director of Sales & Business Development at Gaia Interactive Christopher Castagnetto was also pleased with the service. “For a small, one-time integration effort you get a new, on-going revenue stream that also enhances the user experience,“ he said. “We’re looking forward to many more product placement campaigns.”

Director of Sales & Business Development at Gaia Interactive Christopher Castagnetto was also pleased with the service. “For a small, one-time integration effort you get a new, on-going revenue stream that also enhances the user experience,“ he said. “We’re looking forward to many more product placement campaigns.”

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.

Mobile ad platform Pontiflex today announced that leading coupon apps on Google Play are seeing CPMs in excess of $10.

Pontiflex allows mobile ad networks and developers to serve sign up ads to their customers. The sign up ads are for deals and newsletters from brands and other business. Advertisers using Pontiflex’s sign up ads platform include brands like Hasbro, Fisher Price and Kimberly-Clark, as well as small businesses such as Paper Hat Press and Dunhill Vacations.

Although Pontiflex didn’t break down which coupon apps were seeing CPMs above $10, Android apps that were performing well with Pontiflex’s sign up ads include The Coupons App, GeoQpons and Coupon Sherpa.

Xymob CEO and developer of GeoQpons Sunit Lohtia tells Inside Mobile Apps that the reason the company is seeing higher CPMs is that the ads from Pontiflex are relevant ads to the users of GeoQpons.

“The sign up offers are related to shopping, so people end up signing up for those offers because it’s in their interest to sign up,” he says.

Developers interested in using Pontiflex’s sign up ads to monetize their mobile apps can go here to download the native Pontiflex AppLeads SDK or by using its HTML5 API.

Mobile advertising and publishing platform Tapjoy today revealed data it gathered during Christmas, Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day, showing that ad revenue grew by as much as 54 percent. This demonstrates an opportunity for developers to generate more revenue during holidays.

Compared to the seven-day average for app revenue, developers saw ad revenue increase 54 percent for Christmas, 44 percent for the Chinese New Year and 34 percent for Valentine’s Day. “Major retail brand” advertisers that ran Valentine’s Day-themed ads on Tapjoy’s network on iOS and Android experienced an increase in its click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate around Valentine’s Day. Other companies like Google, witnessed a spike in ad clicks around particular holidays, where the company saw ad clicks on smartphones jump 61 percent during Black Friday last year and by more than 100 percent on tablets.

In the U.S. between the iOS and Android platforms, conversion rates on Android were generally higher than that of iOS. Both of the platforms saw its conversion rates fall after Feb. 10, most likely due to consumers having already completed their Valentine’s Day shopping by then. The CTR was also higher on Android, though the CTR for iOS spiked significantly in the first week of February.