Wizcorp has more going for it than HTML5 expertise as far as GREE is concerned — the Tokyo-based startup can reduce social game development costs by a third, giving GREE’s developers an edge in the North American market.

Founded in 2008 as a service company developing open-source web-applications, Wizcorp switched to game development in 2009. The company released its first game, the HTML5-based Majuu Wars, for GREE in January 2011. As one of the first smartphone games on the network, Majuu Wars wasn’t a success, but the experience did motivate the Wizcorp team to improve the way social games were made.

“One of the things we realized after managing our own game was there was a lot of work that was actually very generic, particularly around events and campaigns,” explains Wizcorp’s co-founder and CEO, Guillaume Hansali.  “If you want to implement those events and campaigns quickly, you start to need a lot of people. We decided to develop a game engine that would shorten development time and make the management more efficient.”

According to Hansali, most game development engines tend to focus on front-end development. Wizcorp’s Mithril engine, which uses HTML5 and Node.js, was specifically designed to optimize the back-end infrastructure of a social game. The company has also developed its own database management system to improve scalability and cut down on server costs.

“What we believe is that [by using Mithril, you] should be able to spend less on server and development costs, so even if your game is not making much in terms of revenue, you’ll still be profitable,” he explains. “We can run games and cut out a third of the usual costs.”

With GREE about to expand into the North American market — where users are far less likely to convert and return much lower ARPU than the company sees in Japan — cutting back-end costs is a simple way to help its games stay in the black.

As part of GREE’s investment, Wizcorp will be both making new HTML5 games and helping other developers manage their games. The company is already involved in technical exchanges, teaching other GREE developers how to use HTML5 and to optimize their games back-ends using web application development techniques.

[Update:  Wizcorp would like to clarify some factual inaccuracies in the above paragraph. Under the terms of GREE’s investment in Wizcorp, GREE may utilize Mithril - Wizcorp’s proprietary HTML5 game engine - and enlist Wizcorp’s technical expertise. However, Wizcorp is not involved in technical exchanges with any other third-party game developers - GREE investees or otherwise - but remains committed to sharing knowledge as an active member of the open-source community. You can find Wizcorp on GitHub here.]

GREE announced its investment in Wizcorp in early April, but has not revealed the amount of the funding or the terms involved.

50 percent of U.S. smartphones are Androids — According to ComScore’s latest mobile subscriber report, Google’s Android is now the most popular platform with 50.1 percent market share, up from the 46.9 percent it held in November. iOS was second with 30.2 percent, up from 28.7 percent. RIM and Microsoft declined to 13.4 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively.

ODIN looking to set new UDID replacement standard –  Following Apple’s move to begin rejecting apps that use UDIDs to track users, mobile advertising companies Velti, Jumptap, RadiumOne, MdotM, StrikeAd, Smaato, Adfonic and SAY Media are teaming up to create a focus group called ODIN. According to TechCrunch, the companies are hoping push the mobile advertising industry to quickly decide on a UDID replacement. The group currently favors using a secure, hashed version of the iOS MAC address.

Zynga’s Draw Something cloned in China — With the blockbuster success of Draw Something, its not surprising others are looking to get in on the social-Pictionary action. According to Tech in Asia, the game has been cloned in China by Tencent as Guess What and MelonZone as Draw I Guess.

Diamond Dash hits 11 million downloads — The iOS version of Wooga’s Diamond Dash has been downloaded 11 million times in four months. 64 percent of iOS players log in with Facebook.

Angry Birds coming to the small screen – Rovio has revealed it is working on an Angry Birds animated series. Each of the 52 episodes will be about three minutes long, according to VentureBeat.

Indie hits coming and going from iOS — Indie games are crossing to and from mobile. Team Meat is working on a brand-new iOS version of punishingly difficult platformer Super Meat Boy, and Canadian studio Capy Games is bringing its award winning iOS game, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP to the PC via Steam.

Glu Mobile buys Deer Hunter brand – Glu Mobile has bought the trademark to Deer Hunter from Atari. Glu has been releasing mobile Deer Hunter apps for seven years, earning more than $21 million in revenue from the brand.

Windows Phone Marketplace up to 80,000 apps – All About Windows Phone reports that the Windows Phone Marketplace now has 80,000 apps, some of which may have been directly financed by Microsoft itself, according to the New York Times.

Latest version of Android OS only on 2.9 percent of Android devices — According to the latest update from Google’s Android developer platform data, Android 4.0 — aka Ice Cream Sandwich — is installed on just 2.9 percent of Android devices. The most popular Android OS is still 2.3, aka, Gingerbread, with a 63.7 percent market share.

Flurry ditches UDID in latest SDK, adds more features – Flurry has updated its iOS SDK to version 3.1.0. According to the Flurry blog, the SDK no longer collects the iOS UDID. The company has also added Funnels, Alerts and Custom Dashboards to its iOS, Android, HTML5, BlackBerry and JavaME analytics products.

Halfbrick gets in on GetJar Gold — Halfbrick is the latest developer to integrate GetJar’s GetJar Gold virtual currency. The currency, which is only available in GetJar’s independent Android app store, is based off advertising, but players can use the currency to purchase premium in-game items.

Kontagent adds new data mining tools — Kontagent has launched a new kSuite DataMine platform. The cloud-hosted tool allows developers to create detailed, custom queries in order to mine user data.

Samsung launching own mobile ad network — Samsung is partnering with OpenX Technologies to create its own mobile advertising network, reports the Wall Street Journal. The as-yet-unnamed network will launch in the second half of the year.

[Funding] The Tap Lab untaps $550,000 — Cambridge-based The Tap Lap has raised $550,000 in investment funds to work on location based games and its own location-based game engine.

[Launch] MocoSpace debuts HTML-based True Night — HTML5 gaming platform MocoSpace has launched its thirty third HTML5 game, the vampire themed True Night. It was developed by New Game Town.

Facebook has open sourced Ringmark, its browser test suite for building apps on the mobile web, according to a post on the company’s HTML5 blog today.

The effort is part of Facebook’s push to promote HTML5 development. One of the major challenges with HTML5 development right now is fragmentation in mobile browser capabilities, but Ringmark lets developers see instantly whether their apps will be able to run on a given mobile browser.

The social network has an interest in helping HTML5 become a more viable platform for developers to build upon since it cannot monetize native iOS or Android apps. Many developers see HTML5 as inferior to native mobile experiences, but as HTML5 improves, there is more likelihood that developers will adopt it and then Facebook can benefit from the use of Credits in these apps.

Promoting HTML5 is also Facebook’s way of supporting a potential new wave of mobile development.

“For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote in the blog post announcing the news. “We hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”

When the company introduced Ringmark at Mobile World Congress in February, there were more than 400 tests available. Now that the project is open sourced, any developer can contribute tests and provide value for others in the community. The company hopes that over time this will help mobile browser vendors build browsers that better serve developer needs and bring better apps and games to consumers.

“This is the beginning of a process, starting with open sourcing the tests,” Kelly wrote. “As we continue to build, we’ll continue to open source even more of this work.”

Facebook also says it will soon contribute Ringmark tests to the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group in the W3C. The group is an industry-wide consortium including manufacturers, carriers and developers that aim to push HTML5 forward with a single set of standards.

Developers can view and contribute to the Ringmark code here and here. The test suite can be found here.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

With today’s OMGPOP acquisition, Zynga New York is split firmly into two studios: Zynga New York Social and Zynga New York Mobile. OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter now heads up the latter as vice president and general manager.

The Zynga New York Mobile studio is made up of both OMGPOP and Astro Ape, which Zynga acquired late last year to work on Dream PetHouse. The OMGPOP team will continue to work on Draw Something for mobile and other future projects — one of which Business Insider confirms as crime-themed game The Street. Draw Something will also officially arrive on Facebook as a playable game sometime “soon,” though it’s clear the developer is waiting for fan feedback before making the complete cross-platform jump.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if it’s going to be Draw SomethingWithFriendsVille?” Porter demanded during a 10-minute follow-up call scheduled after today’s media briefing. “I’m going to answer you anyway — if you don’t like the direction of the game as a player, then hit me up on Twitter and tell me what you think. I read every single thing people write about the game. We want to make games people want to play.”

OMGPOP has a history of trying various game types on different platforms to see what gets traction. On Facebook, its games have ranged from restaurant sim Cupcake Corner to the more arcade-y Pool World Champ. On mobile, it’s been pet sim Puppy World, puzzle game Boom Friends and now, most recently, Draw Something. The developer even has a true cross-platform HTML5 game, Gem Rush. Though each of these titles may have achieved traction in their respective markets at one time or another, only Draw Something stands out as a real hit.

“Every game you release you think is going to be massive or you wouldn’t waste your time making it,” Porter explained. “The only thing you can do to be successful in this space is make a lot of games. Every game we’ve made on Facebook — we basically [took] assumptions, put it out there, learned a ton…  The kinds of things you learn are so subtle. You see what doesn’t engage people. Draw Something has something from literally every game you’ve mentioned.”

As for what will happen to OMGPOP’s other games on mobile and social, Porter said he hadn’t thought about it yet. In the past, Zynga has sunsetted the games of its acquired studios unless said studio was specifically acquired for a particular game — like Newtoy and Words With Friends. Draw My Thing presents Zynga a unique challenge as it both is and isn’t the “same” as its mobile and much more successful sibling, Draw Something.

“We’re still trying to figure it out,” Porter said. “Draw My Thing can be really fun, but we nailed it more [with Draw Something]. All the things that work in the mobile version would [ideally] work in the Facebook version.”

Joining in on the call was Zynga Chief Mobile Officer David Ko, who wasn’t able to tell us much given that the company is in another quiet period during its secondary offering. He did say, however, that Zynga will soon opening up publishing to mobile titles — thought he wasn’t able to say if that would just be for native platforms, for Facebook’s HTML5 platform or for the Zynga.com platform, which currently doesn’t have a mobile games component.

“Our goal is to offer our players our games anywhere,” Ko said. “Due to the nature of the game and how popular it’s become, if they want [Draw Something] on HTML5, we’ll bring it there. We do that with all our games. We launched CityVille on HTML5 as well, but I don’t think anybody picked up on it. We push on that platform even if we don’t make a big splash on it.”

New York-based Cellufun is pairing its shift to HTML5 with a renaming contest that puts the company’s name in the hands of users.

Formed four and a half years ago, Cellufun got its start creating games accessed from a central website and played in feature phone browsers. While most of the companies making games for feature phones switched to developing smartphone apps, Cellufun kept its platform approach, focusing on creating a destination for players. Although Google Play lists 22 results for Cellufun apps, they are actually just launchers that redirect users to the company’s mobile website.

The company is now in the process of switching to HTML5 development. So far, it has transitioned about a quarter of its catalog of 33 games. According to CEO Lon Otremba, despite the challenges of working with an evolving technology, feedback has so far been positive.

“We live solely on the mobile web,” he says. “This gives us an opportunity for our games to mimic the experience you’d have in an app, but not have the downside of an app.

The company is backed by $7 million in funding from Longworth Capital, and is described by CEO Lon Otremba as being “modestly profitable.” Between 10 and 15 million monthly active users visit the Cellufun site, which has 9.1 million registered players — all of whom now have a say in what the company will be called, thanks to the company’s Re-Name Game.

“It was the result of some deep thinking about what we wanted to accomplish as a company over the next 12 to 36 months,” Otremba explains when asked why the company decided to rename after four and a half years. “We all concluded the existing name was looking backwards. As we go forward and rebuild our titles in HTML5, we can do a lot more. If we’re doing a lot of new and innovative things, it’s a good chance to really take a much more comprehensive approach to how we do business, including marketing, brand identity and even our name.”

Last month, the company challenged its users to come up with a new name for the company, promising the submitter of the winning suggestion a $10,000 cash prize.  Cellufun whittled down more than 17,000 submissions to 16 names and opened up the voting to registered users. The final name will be unveiled on April 4, and the company will relaunch with a new website shortly after the contest closes. The names still in the running are: Wirebolt, Zoynks, Tylted, Bamterra, Ahsylum, Groovoo, Uforiya and Gahoots.

Cloud-based games platform Spaceport released a report today rating HTML5‘s performance on different mobile devices like iPad and Kindle Fire. Unsurprisingly, HTML5 images rendered better on iOS than Android.

The study created benchmarks for HTML5 performance using advances from the HTML5 Consortium’s RingMarks test suite, announced last week at Mobile World Congress. Through a series of tests using different animation techniques, Spaceport found that the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 scored the highest in HTML5 image rendering, supporting more than 200 and 300 moving objects, respectively. The Galaxy Nexus was the highest-scoring Android device, but it was the only one in the family that could maintain more than one moving object on screen at a time.  Android phones besides the Galaxy Nexus could “barely handle a single image” at 30 frames per second. Specific animation techniques, like css3dbackground and css2dimg, performed fairly well on the Galaxy Tab and Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet.

For the sake of comparison, Spaceport throws in the little gem pictured above (click to see the rest of the infographic). The oldest device tested, the iPhone 3GS, clocked in at 53 moving objects at 30 frames per second.

Though most mobile and social game developers prefer creative native apps for each platform, many are still hoping HTML5 will grow into cross-platform shortcut it promises to be. Right now, the technology is limited in several ways — like low frame rates and a lack of tools — that discourage most developers from investing resources in it. Even early adopters like wooga, which built Magic Land as a launch title for Facebook’s HTML5-based mobile platform, have backed off on it somewhat. CEO Jens Begemann telling us at Inside Social Apps last month that HTML is still a good three years off from being a viable platform on which to release a game across Facebook and mobile.

“HTML5 is getting faster over time, as seen in the latest OS updates across Android and iOS,” Spaceport founder Ben Savage said in a press release. “There is still a long way to go.”

Facebook announced a new industrywide consortium including manufacturers like Samsung and carriers like AT&T and Verizon meant to push HTML5 forward with a single set of standards. It also announced a test suite called Ringmark, that will help everyone from manufacturers to developers test to see whether their mobile web apps work uniformly across devices and platforms.

Called the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, the new industrywide consortium includes players like:

Samsung, HTC, Sony Mobile Communications, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, TCL Communication, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Telefónica, KDDI, SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp., Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., NVIDIA, ST-Ericsson, Intel Corporation, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, Adobe, Netflix, VEVO, Zynga, @WalmartLabs, Electronic Arts, Sencha and Bocoup. You can read more about the group, and how to join, here.

Apple and Google are conspicuously absent.

Over the past year, Facebook has turned to HTML5 as a way to circumvent a mobile ecosystem that is increasingly dominated by Apple and rival Google. Because Facebook does not own the lower levels of the mobile stack with a proper mobile operating system like iOS or Android, the company’s options for deriving revenue from third-party mobile apps like payments or fees are more limited. If HTML5 improves, Facebook will have an easier time convincing developers to build for the web instead of focusing on native iOS or Android applications.

Facebook’s chief technology officer Bret Taylor said that the company had to address three pain points in fixing HTML5 for developers: 1) discovery 2) fragmentation and 3) payments.

“There’s no app store for the mobile web, so there’s no easy way to have users discover mobile web apps,” he said. “Secondly, technology fragmentation means developers don’t know which parts of HTML5 work on which devices. Thirdly, there’s no easy payments solution for the mobile web.”

Addressing the discovery problem, Facebook launched new viral channels for mobile apps late last fall. That lets activity from mobile apps appear in notifications and news feeds. If users click on links from apps in the news feed, that will take them either to the app store where they can install the app or to the relevant part of the app.

Facebook pointed to a couple case examples where the mobile platform has been able to drive serious traffic. Taylor said Facebook is the top referrer of traffic to Spotify, bringing the social network 7 million users in its first month. Those users are twice as likely to pay. He also said that 20 percent of Pinterest’s users come from Facebook.

The problem, however, with many of Facebook’s example mobile apps is that they’re ones that already have a strong competency on the desktop version of the platform. Or they are preferred partners that get special treatment from the company. Spotify, which shares a key investor with Facebook in Sean Parker, got a spot on-stage at Facebook’s last developer conference while many other music apps were mentioned in passing. So it’s unclear whether Facebook’s mobile platform performs for brand-new developers that do not already have a strong footprint on the desktop version of the social network.

The new industrywide group, created with the involvement of W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium, is meant to address the second problem with fragmentation. It’s meant to speed up improvements in mobile web browsers so that HTML5-based apps works uniformly across devices.

The new test suite, Ringmark, can be found at http://rng.io. It includes more than 400 tests to help developers see whether their web apps will work properly in different mobile web browsers. The tests run the gamut from ones that examine basic features for mobile web apps, to more sophisticated ones that will eventually allow developers to access features like a phone’s camera. Ringmark was built with the help of Bocoup, a Boston-based open web technology company.

Facebook’s mobile platform may be starting to live up to its promise, with more than 60 million monthly users engaging with mobile applications via the social network. The company today officially released statistics it first revealed at our Inside Social Apps conference earlier this month.

The company’s new head of mobile developer relations James Pearce says that single sign-on and the open graph have boosted traffic for developers with more than 60 million users visiting Facebook-connected mobile apps each month. He adds that the average user engages with mobile apps five times per month.

But the thing is that many of the example apps Facebook points to aren’t necessarily top performers on the iOS or Android charts. The rule of thumb we suggest, is that if a lot of your web-based traffic arrives via viral or social channels, an HTML5 and Facebook-enabled approach might be the best way to come to mobile. But if you derive a lot of traffic through direct visits, a native app is superior and a Facebook integration may be less important.

The company highlighted several success stories like BranchOut, which was a launch partner for Facebook’s mobile platform on HTML5. It receives 350,000 visitors every day through Facebook mobile. Wooga’s native iOS version of Diamond Dash has also been popular with Facebook’s mobile users, receiving more than 1.9 million visitors a month from the platform. It’s currently ranked around #100 on iOS’ top free charts in the U.S.

Apps that have integrated Facebook’s Open Graph are typically seeing the most benefit according to Facebook. Foodspotting’s native app has seen the number of visits and shares increase threefold, and traffic to the Yahoo! News web app has increased by three and a half times since implementing the Open Graph. The app now receives 1.6 million visitors a day.

Interestingly, Facebook didn’t highlight the performance of any HTML5 games, which got off to a a slow start on the platform due to technical issues.  When Inside Mobile Apps looked at the performance of HTML5 apps on the platform a week after launch, uptake was slow, and so far HTML5-only titles like Moblyng’s Word Racer Live and Social Poker Live haven’t been big hits, with current monthly active user counts of just 30,000 and 75,600 according to AppData.

In October, Facebook brought many of the viral channels from its website to its mobile apps, incorporating bookmarks, requests, the News Feed, authenticated referrals and Facebook credits to its mobile apps, opening the way for greater discoverability on the platform.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

Kim-Mai Cutler leads a discussion on “Monetizing Mobile Games on iOS and Android,” joined by TinyCo’s co-founder Suleman Ali, Storm8′s CEO and co-founder Perry Tam,  Pocket Gems chief operating officer Ben Liu and Game Insight’s VP of Business Development Darya Trushkina.

The following is a paraphrased transcript of the discussion.

Kim-Mai: When we first put this panel together, the charts were more predictable. You guys had the top grossing game or a number of titles on iOS and Android. Over the last couple of months, it’s become more volatile. How is that affecting business?

Ben: It’s a different time now. There’s more competition. That’s a challenge and something that’s good for consumers. Lots more choice. It’s an opportunity and a challenge in a sense that developers have to innovate and make new titles.

Perry: We observe and monitor the top grossing chart closely. We don’t make predictions. We’re more in reaction mode. We look at the charts and improve on ourselves. If we see that our app is up top, we double down on marketing and in-house effort, adding new content or features. On the other hand, if we see the app not doing as well, we’re going to scale back.

Kim-Mai: What kind of spending do you need to do to keep it there?

Suleman: I think the volatility of the charts is natural based on where we are and where the market is. There’s tons of fragmentation and people are launching new games all the time. I think what will happen over time is there will be a bunch of people who can generate a large quality of users and generate better games. Companies that can do that will be able to keep their hold on the top grossing charts.

Kim-Mai: We had people say the rankings game doesn’t make sense anymore. What do you think of that? Can you have a lower ranked game and still have a viable business?

Suleman: What I’ve seen from the top grossing charts is that there’s significant revenue growth. An app in the top 25 grossing now is generating 50% more revenue than it was generating 6 months ago. I think what will happen is that fragmentation will increase over the next 2 to 3 months and then consolidation.  The folks who will drive the consolidation will be the big winners.

Kim-Mai: Are we going to see a Zynga of mobile?

Suleman: It’s a really difficult feat. There are few markets dominated by a single player like Zynga. I think it’s more likely that there will be a handful of players — companies like Coke and Pepsi that each hold 25% of the market. It’s much more likely that mobile won’t be a winner takes all market.

Kim-Mai: What about on Android? How important are the charts?

Darya: For us, on Android, we want to be on the top of the charts. For us, it’s not about marketing. It’s about quality of content. For example, we launched Paradise Island as our very first game [on Android]. Without any input into the marketing Paradise Island became the top grossing app and was No. 1 for 26 weeks. When we launched our next title we cross promoted with our own games. Quality of content and loyalty of users was the prime focus of attracting the audience. Unlike iOS, work of mouth is important on Android.  Word of mouth on Android is actually generated by our user base. A lot of younger audience members will say “hey I have this game you need to get” and you cannot buy that with marketing money. Top charts generate higher revenue, but we don’t need to put any significant marketing money behind it because once the content is good, once you have a reputation on the platform and as a developer, your user base will follow you and will grow. We look at it from a long term perspective – we don’t want to be Zynga and grab a huge market share – but we’d like to be more like World of Warcraft.

Kim-Mai: On Android, for a given ranking, how much more are those games seeing in revenue now compared to three months ago?

Perry: We’re seeing more growth on Android. We actually launched our first game on Android in 2010 and there weren’t that many games there. In-app purchases didn’t exist back then. Over time as the platform has developed, we’ve seen a huge uptick on the revenue for Android. As they keep growing — they’re at 700k activations every day — we’re seeing faster growth on downloads and faster growth from the revenue side.

Kim-Mai:  Is Checkout helping? Bionic Panda said they’ve seen a 25% increase in user payments over the last six months. Are you seeing that?

Perry: Obviously we started on iOS so we have more users there, so we’re still making more money on iOS in absolute terms. On a per user basis, the two platforms are very comparable in ARPU.

Suleman: We see something different. We launched our first Android game in January called Tiny Village and it’s in the top grossing charts today. We’re seeing ARPU on Android is about 25-30% of iOS.

Perry: So either we’re under-performing on iOS or over-performing on Android.

Kim-Mai: What about tablets? Do they monetize better?

Suleman: We see that ARPU on for iPad users is 2x to3x higher than iPhone users.

Darya: Our content has very different genres in it. Tablets generate a little bit over 30% more.

Suleman: All of our metrics are higher on iPad than on iPhone – ARPU, APPU, retention…

Kim-Mai: When you think about those numbers, are you changing your strategy and thinking about designing games for iPads?

Suleman: I do believe developers will emerge that will be iPad first, iPhone second.

Darya: We launch on iPad first on iOS. On Android it’s completely different. Android smartphones have much higher global penetration so we launch Android smartphones first.

Kim-Mai: We talked to Zynga earlier today about their entry into the market. Are you feeling pressure from that?

Suleman: Zynga is a great company and they made a bunch of great games like Dream Zoo. I think there’s a lot that they need to learn in mobile. I think the reason they’re out there cloning games made by folks like us is because they just don’t know that stuff yet and they’re really aggressive about learning. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes them to learn how different mobile gaming is from Facebook gaming. I said mobile wouldn’t be a winner take all market. Zynga will not be the Zynga of mobile.

Kim-Mai: NimbleBit has been very vocal about being cloned. You guys haven’t said anything – why?

Ben:  Our strategy is pretty clear — its to continue to innovate and continue to evolve our titles and keep them fresh and new for as long as possible. The key to competing with any company – Zynga is no different – is to continue to innovate and bring first of its kind experiences to mobile.  We’ve seen great results from that. With respect to developers that have made very similar games, as developers that pride ourselves on innovating, it does honestly bother us. We feel the market will judge what is fresh and new and we feel like what’s best for that is to continue to create new ideas and be first on mobile. Individual products can be copied, but the thing that’s hard to copy is creativity. We’re proud of our team and we showed it by bringing the first zoo game to iOS. And there’s more genres like that that we’re working on. I think the facts are obvious. We built Tap Zoo in 2010. There have been four zoo games since then. It’s clear that we’re the innovators. We understand people wanting to share in that success, but we’re going to be ahead of them. By the time the similar game comes out, we’ve gone on to something new.

Suleman:  True innovation in mobile will happen in 2012. I’m optimistic that us four will drive that. I disagree with Ben that Zynga is a company like any other. It’s unlike any other. I don’t worry too much about startup competitors, I worry about Zynga.

Kim-Mai: Will fast-follow be an effective strategy on mobile compared to Facebook?

Suleman: It’s effective for a short period of time but I think true innovation will soon be driving things. We’ll be launching a bunch of new games over the next few months.

Ben: We disagree because our strategies are different. We have a different competitive set than fast-follows.

Perry: The mobile space is growing like crazy. We have over 1 million devices being activated every day. All of us are benefiting from this and we can all win together. After growth has gone away, the true determining factor will be the quality of the game. And we’ll have to see what users choose at the end of the day. But there’s room to grow right now. It’s not the case that if so and so wins, we lose.

Ben: Focusing on what competitors are doing is not helpful building the best product. Being focused on building the best product is the winning strategy.

Suleman: In order to build a long term sustainable business, you have to look at where the market is going and drive toward that. We’ll continue to push the envelope in 2012.

Kim-Mai: So your next game will be something we’ve never seen before?

Suleman: I wouldn’t go that far. [laughs]

Kim-Mai: Let’s talk about the bot purge. How will that change rankings?

Suleman: Bots are generally very bad for the industry in the long term. If you focus on great games and user acquisition, you are more likely to build a long term sustainable business than if you’re doing things that are eventually going to be shut down by the platform operator. We use something like 40 or 50 sources to go acquire users, we spend millions every month acquiring users. We’ve reached out to all of them and stopped doing user acquisition with any company that we didn’t know what the source of their traffic was. We are now focusing on networks like iAD, Admob and chartboost where there’s real visibility to where the traffic comes from. In 2011 we had a real problem with ad networks providing visibility and getting data out of ad networks. They just don’t provide visibility or data we can use to optimize. We’re expanding the networks where we can see the LTV from this source versus that source and then we double down and spend more money there.

Kim-Mai: Have any of you tried any of these services?

Darya: This is why I like Android – there is no such thing as bots. It’s more fair for the user experience and in terms of judging how good your game content is. No, we never used these services and we’ll never use them.

Perry: As a developer, I’m glad Apple issued a warning. It shows that they’re dedicated to maintaing the integrity of the App Store. The ultimate goal is to get the best content to users. All these changes they’re making to the market are going to be positive. We talked to many many companies, but [we don't know for sure if we did use them].

Suleman: I think what’s great about apple is that they’re trying to create a level playing field. We want to compete in a market like this.

Kim-Mai: Suleman, I know that TinyCo signed with Mobage, what are they bringing to the table?

Suleman: DeNA and GREE are coming to the market with a different business model than companies like us. I have mixed opinions. If they can achieve significant scale like what they do in Japan… I’m not sure what their plans are or when they could achieve that scale. We took two of our games to Android via DeNA and it’s too early to tell what the results are.

Kim-Mai: They’re profitable in Japan. Are they at least teaching you how to better monetize?

Suleman: We’re huge fans of what they do in Japan. We hired somebody who speaks Japanese to play those games and help us understand how they monetize in Japan with their games.

Darya: We’re working with Mobage right now, we launched Paradise Island with them a while ago. The experience was good, and I’d recommend them for entering the Japanese market. On the other hand, they’re trying to penetrate the market here with their philosophy, but it will depend on their ability to scale. I don’t see how any Western company can integrate within their culture without their help because it’s so different. We launched our games on Yahoo with Mixi in Japan before. You don’t just change the monetization, you need to redesign everything in the game — a lot to take out and a lot to add. So somebody local is extremely helpful.

Ben:  I think one big factor will be how people connect and play with their friends. The ability to play with friends and what their playing will help – DeNA and GREE have great businesses. But they’re one of many competing businesses that want to be that network. In the future, you’ll see more people playing with friends. I think we’re really excited about is Zombie Takeover’s upcoming update is a mode where you can find and play with your friends. We see that as something that’s coming this year as well. The future gaming will be portable worldwide.

Darya: I would like to add — to the younger developers in the audience — trust me, you want to get to Asia as fast as you can. ARPU in Korea and Japan is huge. Korea is number one in the world. We launched My Country there and it was the number one free game after three days. Asia’s market is different – a lot of specifics to get down. Once you’ve got it, you can monetize an audience in Asian on a higher level than you can in the West. The audience is also more loyal than it is here. Retention rates in Asian markets are higher after 3, 6 months and a year than here. Maybe because of the content, maybe because smartphone growth is ridiculously high over there. But if you want to make money, go to Korea, go to Japan.

Kim-Mai: What are the most attractive markets outside of the US?

Suleman: Our biggest markets on iOS are generally English speaking countries. We’re bullish on Korea, Japan and China this year as well. Korea is the number two market after the US.

Perry: Japan has been a top grossing country for us even without localization or changes. We do expect those countries are going to do well.

Ben: I think one interesting thing for us is that the global territories are becoming a larger and larger percentage of our users and that’s really interesting.

Kim-Mai: Is it important to use a partner when you launch in an international market?

Darya: We use a partner. The insurance that a partner gives you in making sure your game is a success is huge.

Kim-Mai: So let’s talk platforms. Facebook has a huge presence here. How can HTML5 be more attractive for mobile developers?

Ben: We’re watching HTML5 closely, but our games are built on an engine optimized to run graphics and animation. That isn’t available in html5 yet. We’re really excited about more advertising opportunities. We’re excited about Facebook coming to the space.

Kim-Mai: What have you seen with HTML5?

Perry: Last year we launched some HTML5 games by partnering with Facebook — after the launches we saw some good numbers of organic new users. I don’t have the specifics but we do see a good number of new users coming to our games in HTML5, even if we offer a native app. The biggest opportunities here is social interaction.

Suleman: One of the reason I bought an iPad after they came out was a game called Galcon. My friends and I would sit around with iPads and just beat the crap out of each other in that game.  I think that shows how much better games that you play with friends are better than games you play yourself. Our games have been mostly single player, but we want to do more social. I’m really bullish on Facebook. They’ve been talking to companies like us and they’re receptive to our feedback.

Kim-Mai: What kind of feedback did you give them? What have they done?

Suleman: They’ve added feed stories and more visibility in the Facebook app and that will allow us to get more users to play with their friends.

Kim-Mai: What about Google — it has all the pieces. What do you want them to improve about the Android market?

Suleman:  I’m bullish on Android — we built a cross platform engine called Griffin just so we could have users play on both iOS and Android. I think they’re working on improvements and I’m optimistic they’ll approach the market in a fundamentally different way than Apple does. I hope Google will build a bridge between mobile and web by enabling Adsense in the Android marketplace.

Darya:  For me I think the best way to discover games is a good catalogue. If Google creates something across all these spaces — Android, its social network, the search engine — that could synchronize a catalogue of all games it would be great.

Ben: We’re in favor of anything that can help consumers find the best content and then figure out what their friends are playing. There are opportunities around notifying people about what their friends are playing. Highlighting real content and letting people know what’s coming to the story.

Perry: If Google can allow developers to bid on Adwords for searching in the Android market, that would be an interesting feature that would help developers get distribution out. Search would be a really logical thing.

Kim-Mai: I’m wondering about the cost of user acquisition. What kind of costs are you paying for users and if there are any channels that are working for you.

Ben: It’s gone up 2 or 3x over what it was six months ago, roughly. We’re lucky that we have a community that loves our games – our number one channel is cross-promoting new games to them. It’s paid off for us. They tell their friends and they download it.

Perry: We’re also seeing that costs are going up. But because we have a huge user base and DAU that come to our games every day, we can get people to notice our games from within the internal network. On the Android side, we see it starting up there. Now we’re starting to spend money on the Android side to get users, but for a long time we didn’t and it was just organic from the internal channel.

Darya: For us, iOS user acquisition costs are up. But we’re not very focused on iOS anyway. We have a good position there because our Mystery Manor iOS title is already up there. We didn’t spend any money on Android in the beginning either even though the cost was around $3 for us when we started. Now, though, it’s actually going down.

Perry: I think user acquisition costs on Android and iOS are even.

Ben: For us it’s a different kind of problem. The problem is a little more pronounced on Android because there’s a lack of inventory. We’d like to buy more traffic, but there isn’t traffic available.

Kim-Mai: Any of you considering Amazon or Windows phone?

Suleman: We follow the users. We’ve seen users adopting Amazon, so we will as well. When we see an uptick on Windows Mobile we will adopt.

Darya: We have one game on Amazon and a couple of other games in other Android markets. We try to cover those other stores, but we can see that compared to the official Android market there is a much lower user base.

Kim-Mai: Crowdstar told us the Amazon market monetizes 5x better. Is that the case?

Darya: Revenue-wise yes, but the user base and the discovery is different.

Ben: I think its an issue to compare a next generation tablet to the entire Android market.

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

Day two of the conference begins with “Cutting Edge Mobile App Product Development: iOS, Android, and HTML5,” moderated by Kim-Mai Cutler. She joined by Zynga’s SVP of mobile Travis Boatman, Bionic Panda Games’ CEO and co-founder Charles Hudson, Karma Science co-founder Lee Linden and Red Robot CEO and co-founder Mike Ouye.

The following is a paraphrased transcript of the discussion.

Kim-Mai: Mike, your company has this thesis about how location enhances gameplay…

Mike: We ran some numbers and saw some gains in both retention and monetization. We use real life locations in our game and we looked at how many location players had. People who had 20 or more locations had a 3x rise in retention and monetization was 1.5x. We feel it’s a sticky thing to interact with real life locations in gameplay not necessarily check-ins.

Kim-Mai: Charles, your games are exclusive to Android and you were one of the first developers on there. How has the market place changed?

Charles: A year ago, there weren’t that many high quality games compared to iOS. but the quality of games has really gone up over the last year and so has the quality of devices. The hardware market has come a long way and developers can just now take advantage of it.

Kim-Mai: What about payments and conversion rates?

Charles: The good news on payments for developers is that we have a standardized thing to  shoot for with Google Checkout instead of hacking together our own solution. It’s still in its early days and they’re still working out some of the kinks. Google is new and not 10 years old like iTunes.

Kim-Mai: How many more users are converting as a result of Checkout improving?

Charles: I can give you some sense. On per-user monetization, it’s up. Since we’ve switched from a combination of Paypal and Checkout to just Checkout, monetization is up about 25% in the last 6 months since we switched.

Kim-Mai: Lee, How has the space evolved since you left Tapjoy?

Lee: There’ s a ton of opportunity in mobile apps and gaming. You’ll see companies taking a mobile first approach. I’m excited about that. In terms of gaming and all other spaces, the quality bar is going up by a good margin. People realize they only have so much of people’s attention span and its an extremely competitive market. You have to have a high quality bar and be focused on providing value right away to users. The folks that are focusing on the experience right from the beginning are going to do pretty well.

Kim-Mai: Travis, we noticed Zynga has caught up on mobile despite a late start.

Travis: The zynga mobile team is a relatively new team, but Mark [Pincus] has a vision to translate Zynga’s success on Facebook into mobile. We’re focusing on a long -term strategy and not just quarter to quarter. Part of the investment is on cross-platform iOS and Android infrastructure and allowing people to play together, as well as supporting the amount of players that are playing our games at once and all players we’re going to have.

Kim-Mai: You have several franchises on mobile right now. Is that how you’re going to be organized this year, or will you add new genres?

Travis: We’ll change over time. We listen to what our players want. We don’t have games in some of the genres they want, like physics based games. We’ll continue to listen and try to bring great social games to those folks.

Kim-Mai: How do you decide which genres to enter?

Travis: We look at what our users are playing. We have a wide network and if we feel like there’s gaps in the games they’re playing or what their friends are playing, we try to look at those markets.

Kim-Mai: You’ve gotten flack from the indie community for too-similar games to games already out there? Where’ the line between a fair, innovative game and a copycat?

Travis: The most important thing is differentiating products. Value differentiating is super-important. When you have a free market and the switching cost is essentially zero, so if players find the games have no differentiation, there’s no value and they’ll stop playing. The players can test the game for free and if they find it’s fun, they’ll keep playing it. One of the key things about being differentiated is being social and letting you play with your friends.

Kim-Mai: What about the crime-based games you develop, Mike, Charles? Where’s the line?

Mike: We felt we needed to figure out location. With our next game, we’ll push limits on the genre and go really deep on location. I think it’s going to be interesting in the next couple of years. In regards to Zynga, like Travis said, it’s a free market economy. I think there’s a limit, but it’s important to make games that people like playing.

Charles: I look at it as a problem we’ve seen before. If you have two games that start off looking similar and one company has better distribution, that game is going to get better. It’s not about where you start, it’s about where you finish. Aqua Pets was a unique mash-up so we felt good about – but trying to “out-Ville” Zynga is probably not a good strategy. If you’re going to be an indie developer, focus on things like Mike’s doing. Try new genres, try new mechanics. If you build a company that’s easy to copy, easy to clone – expect competition.

Lee: I generally agree that its an extremely competitive market with very low switching costs. There’s three pillars: retention, distribution and monetization. If you can get a set of users that love your game, your apps and your service there’s a lot of value there instead of having users swap in and out every day. People are working on building more personal experiences and targeting specific demographics. I’m very excited about that.

Kim-Mai: There are different kinds of games that are starting to get freemium right that aren’t really social. How does that change your thinking about the kinds of games you’re developing?

Travis: I think for us, we’re focused on social games. We believe they’re strong retention drivers. For us, we’re trying to invest in how you play with others and different methods of finding friends and engaging with them.

Kim-Mai: Your games are all ranked well on Android. What do you have to do differently on iOS?

Mike: It’s not that different. Producing a good game that monetizes well. It’s all about creating really awesome games that people want to play and pay for.

Charles: We don’t build for iOS. But every time you improve the quality of your app, players stick around longer. My sense is that file size matters more for your Android than it does for iOS. So a big game on Android is going to be at a slight disadvantage when it comes to downloads.

Travis: For us it’s about parity. Fair competition between the platforms so people want to play with their friends and feel like it’s fair.

Kim-Mai: Facebook didn’t have a business model hammered out at the start, in contrast to Apple. Is it possible for a single company to have the same kind of market share on mobile that Zynga has on Facebook?

Travis: Clearly, we hope so. [Laughs] At the end of the day, it does come down to scale and social density. We’ve seen it in Words With Friends where’s there’s a buzz factor and an economy of scale where people all want to play with their friends. That gives you the size advantage. We hope to see that some day.

Mike: I think it’d be interesting. The main difference between Facebook, Google and an Apple is that Facebook has cross promotion, Apple is a product company and Google is an engineering company.  It’s still really early on. It remains to be seen who is ultimately able to take most of the traffic.

Charles: I think you’ll end up with a couple of really large networks that have massive reach like OpenFeint and ngmoco:). But I don’t know that you’ll have one that reaches everyone like Zynga thinks. I think as a player, you don’t care about your friends, you care about who’s playing the game. It’s about aggregating like-minded players. There are different archetypes.

Kim-Mai: Facebook is trying to build a strong mobile platform. In the last couple of months, they launched their HTML5 platform. What do you think the opportunities are there?

Mike: I think they’ve gone on record saying 80 percent of the company is working on mobile. We haven’t gone into HTML5 yet. We’re all [objective C, java]…

Charles: We allow players to publish things to Facebook and populate their game with their Facebook friends. We find that our player to player connections have more velocity. Unless you have really good multi-platform support there are limits to what you can do on Facebook and there’s a limit to what a player wants to publish to their feeds. It doesn’t work as well as connecting our existing network.

Kim-Mai: How is Zynga doing on mobile? You’ve got your Dream apps and some others.

Travis: We’ve got a couple of “express apps” where players can play games on Facebook via mobile. We’ve seen traction there, but there’s a vast difference between the PC and the mobile experience. In terms of how our players connect with each other we’re trying to give them access to their friends in any way necessary. I think they find their friends through FB.

Lee: I’m a believer in this direction. I think the pieces haven’t aligned to create a channel for distribution through Facebook, but they’re getting close. They’re asking users questions about what they use and what they like, so there’s motivation to share. It’s hard to share outside of really basic content right now, but if you unlock that and unlock friction, it will create cool opportunities.

Kim-Mai: What about the Japanese mobile social networks? Do any of those interest you?

Mike: We maintain our own social graph. We’ve talked to them. The big opportunity there is partnering on distribution and discovery. It’s harder on iOS than Android. We’re into self-publishing.

Charles: We have a similar view, but we’re user-driven. If a ton of them wind up on another network, we’ll support them.

Kim-Mai: What’s your Android versus iOS development resource allocation going to be?

Mike: It’s 50/50. We’re going to do a simultaneous launch for our next game with a shared back end. There’s some challenges there, but it adds a lot for persistent RPGs. Front end mobile engineers are hard to hire. There’s some challenges there and adds a level of difficulty but its worth it.

Kim-Mai: What about Android versus iOS revenues?

Mike: iOS is higher as a userbase, but we’re seeing really good revenues on Android. We’ve been as high as top 5 [on the top grossing Android app charts].

Travis: We see meaningful businesses on both and we invest in both. We’ll listen to what our players do and invest where they go and we’re seeing growth on both platforms. We’re going to invest where our players are.

Audience Question: How confident are you in the future of Facebook’s HTML5 platform?

Mike: We’ve met with them. We’re taking a wait and see approach. There’s a tremendous opportunity for distribution there. We’re not putting HTML5 resources on it now, but that could change rapidly if a distribution channel comes up.

Travis: We look at HTML5 in two parts. One is value add for development teams — it makes it easy to go cross platform. The other side is value add for users — does it work, is it free? We’re waiting to see there.

Kim-Mai: How many of you are on the Amazon app store?

Charles: We were on Amazon early but we took our apps off. Fragmentation is an issue on Android and the Kindle is Android-like, but it is a pretty different platform and it appears to be heading in a different direction. It’s not just can you afford to support it, can you afford to support it through its iterations? We’ve decided as a small team that we want to stay focused on Android.

Mike: We ran into issues early with payments, but there’s a lot of Kindle Fires out there.

Travis: First we look at users on those devices, how quickly we can communicate with them, then how compelling games are on the platform and then social connections. The way we approach these platforms is how many devices are sold, how we can access our user base and how is the game experience in the the platform. As they get stronger in each of these areas, we invest more.

Kim-Mai: Earlier on in iOS, we’d see games launch and have a lot durability. That’s changed, and some say the peak is shortening because of competition. Are you seeing that? What can you do about it?

Mike: It’s definitely extremely competitive. There’s a lot of investment and a lot of developers. Fortunately, there’s the Temple Runs, which is awesome for the whole ecosystem.  I think there’s going to be a lot of change and ultimately players will decide.

Travis:  It’s one of the most competitive markets out there. How it changes over time has to do with shifts in technology. The current shifts in business models and technology have made it more turbulent.

Kim-Mai: Does that change how much you want to invest in the platform?

Mike: Our advantage is that we’re smaller and faster so we try to move with speed at all times and get quickly to market. I think that’s an advantages of a start up versus a Zynga. You have to release when you understand distribution and what will work and not work.

Travis: The reality is that one giant team isn’t doing the whole thing, we have a bunch of small, innovative teams working on different things, so they can move fast.

Kim-Mai: How long do you spend on development?

Travis: Ranges extend or shorten based on complexity. One thing I would add, the more socially connected games take longer to see if they can handle so many people playing together.

Kim-Mai: What is the lifetime curve of a game on iOS and Android compared to Facebook?

Mike: It’s definitely shorter, but I think the lifetime of a Facebook game has shortened as well. It’s so competitive and there are so many studios pushing games out every day and there’s no switching cost. We’ve seen some good longevity with Life as Crime.

Charles: There was a huge push on Facebook to get the game out to test it and then iterate. You can force all your players on Facebook to update when they load your game, but on mobile the first version of your product must be better. If you invest up front, you spike early and the tail is much more gentle compared to Facebook. We’re trying to figure that out.

Kim-Mai: Is that maybe because Android isn’t as competitive right now?

Charles: Android is already pretty competitive — I think its a myth that it’s not. If you have a game that’s on your phone, you get so many different decision points, you have all these times during the day where players can engage. On Facebook, it’s just those 15 minutes you spend on CityVille and that’s it. You can play many games for three minutes at a time on mobile. I think we see more short sessions and that drives playtime.

Kim-Mai: Now that the bots are going away on iOS, how does will that affect user acquisition? Any thoughts?

Lee: Like any other form of content, advertising plays a huge role in who gets out there. In other mediums 30-40 percent of budgets go to advertising. Good mobile advertising and better marketing will be a great channel for folks. Retention and new social channels to share what players like will be innovated upon. At the end of the day it’s a really competitive, extremely transparent marketplace and I think there’s still a huge demand for advertising.

Kim-Mai: In the early days of TapJoy, did you have to contend with these bots?

Lee: Yeah. There are different ways to engage with mobile users. We’re fans of presenting the ad to real human who could try an app. Anything that doesn’t do that seems weird to me. In markets, there are gray areas where people get around the rules. Ultimately, good advertising and services will prevail.

Audience Question:  This is a question for Zynga. Some of your mobile games monetize really well, others not so. Are you going to develop new methods of monetization to make up for games on mobile that don’t monetize as well, or just absorb those users into your greater population?

Travis: Obviously we’ve had different forms of monetization and mechanics and success with different apps. We’ve seen in-app purchases work well in other games. We’ll invest where it makes sense.