Inside Social Apps 2013 is happening June 6-7, 2013 in San Francisco. If you’re a manager, developer, marketer, or investor in the social and mobile app industry, you won’t want to miss this event. Early bird rates end this week, so register today.

Explore key trends and issues in the social and mobile app space, including:

• Cross-Platform Development
• Understanding Analytics: Platforms, Services, and Stats
• Going Social with Entertainment and E-Commerce Apps
• Monetization and Payments in Apps
• Investing in Social Apps
• Gambling Games: The Promise of Real Money

Check out the full program.

Newly-added speakers include:

• Jan Beckers, CEO of HitFox Group
• Chris Cunningham, CEO of appsavvy
• John Dobrowski, Games GM of Nanigans
• Emily Greer, Co-Founder of Kongregate
• David Kim, CEO of Animoca
• Erik Lundberg, VP and GM of W3i

View our full speaker list.

Early bird rates end Wednesday at midnight EST. You’ll save more than $400 off onsite prices, so get your pass soon.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in June!

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.

If you’re a gaming professional in the San Francisco Bay Area who wants to connect with peers and learn about emerging browser-based gaming technologies, we invite you to join Inside Network and KIXEYE this Thursday, Feb. 28 for our panel and networking event. Event details can be found on the Eventbrite Page.

The focal point of the evening will be a panel on the topic, “The Next Generation of Browser-Based Games: Unity, UDK and Beyond.” Inside Network’s AJ Glasser will moderate the panel, and participants include:

• Anthony Pecorella, producer for virtual goods of Kongregate
• Jordan Patz, lead game designer of nWay
• Dan Rubenfield, executive producer of KIXEYE
• Scott Howard, executive producer, KIXEYE

The KIXEYE recruiting team will also be available to discuss hiring opportunities with qualified candidates.

Don’t miss out on this free event: Sign up before Thursday and share your thoughts during the event on Twitter using hashtag #InsidePanel.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Want to network with like-minded peers while learning about key market trends and best practices from leading industry professionals? Join us at the Inside Social Apps Conference & Expo, June 6-7 in San Francisco. Register early and save.

The two-day event will consist of panels, presentations, and workshops led by the brightest minds in the social and mobile app arena.

Topics include:
- The Challenge of Mobile App Discovery
- Maximizing Audience Engagement with Real World Incentives
- Monetization and Payments in Games
- Trends in Social and Mobile Advertising
- International Opportunities: Asia, Europe, and the Middle East

View the full agenda.

We’re bringing together an incredible lineup of speakers, including: Brandon Barber of KIXEYE, Giordano Contestabile of PopCap, Jussi Laakkonen of Applifier, Tommy Palm of King.com, Josh Williams of Kontagent, and Andy Yang of PlayHaven. Check out our full list of speakers.

Want to know more about Inside Social Apps? Take an inside look at our recent New York City event on YouTube.

Save more than $400 off onsite pricing when you register before March 14.

Are you a gaming development guru in the San Francisco Bay Area? Do you want to learn more about Unity, Unreal, or other engines that can push the boundaries of what web-based games can offer players? Are you interested in networking with other tech professionals to discuss solutions to some of the challenges faced when using these tools? Then join us for this technical games panel where industry experts will provide insight on such frameworks for browser-based games. Event details are as follows:

What: Free drinks/food + gaming panel + networking

Panel topic: The next generation of browser-based games: Unity, UDK and beyond

When: Thursday, Feb. 28, 6-9PM

Where: KIXEYE headquarters, 333 Bush St., San Francisco CA

Cost: Cost is free, but KIXEYE policy for visitors is that you sign their NDA. Sign beforehand and bring for quicker check-in.

Panelists will include:

• Anthony Pecorella, producer for virtual goods of Kongregate,
• Jordan Patz, lead game designer of nWay
• Dan Rubenfield, executive producer of KIXEYE
• Scott Howard, executive producer, KIXEYE

The panel will be moderated by AJ Glasser, managing editor of Inside Network.

Additionally, the KIXEYE recruiting team will be present to discuss hiring opportunities with qualified candidates.

This event has limited spots, so sign up on our Eventbrite Page and join the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #InsidePanel. We hope to see you there!

The mobile push notification service Urban Airship today announced that it raised $25 million in another round of funding. The latest funding round was led by August Capital, which joined as the newest investor. Existing investors including Intel Capital, True Ventures, Foundry Group and Verizon also joined in on the new funding round.

The Portland-based mobile push messaging provider’s last round of funding came in late 2011, raising $15.1 million from Salesforce and Verizon. Urban Airship’s total funding now stands at $46.6 million.

The new influx in cash flow will be used to expand its existing teams, especially marketing, in the company’s various offices and to speed up the launch of its mobile push messaging and Apple Passbook management services to major brands. Urban Airship will also use the new funds to grow its push notification platforms and expand its operations internationally.

Urban Airtship co-founder and CEO Scott Kventon said in a statement that the company quadrupled both its revenue and push volumes in 2012.

Lastly, August Capital’s co-founder John Johnston will join Urban Airship’s board of directors.

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.

Mobile and web analytics platform Mixpanel today launched Revenue Analytics, a new product that helps its customers drill down into their revenue data in a way that CEO Suhail Doshi believes wasn’t possible before.

Today, websites or mobile apps use payment processors like Stripe, Braintree or Amazon Payments to handle billing for their company, while engineers from a given company build an in-house database that stores all the transactions. In order to get any information about how much money a company is making, an employee would have to write a structured query language (SQL) query that would fetch data like the total amount of revenue. Revenue data more complex than the total amount of revenue requires more work.

“One of the things that Revenue Analytics does is it lets you dive deeper in an advanced, sophisticated and flexible way,” Doshi says. “One metric that we help companies understand is lifetime value.”

LTV is an important data point for mobile app developers, especially mobile game developers. Developers want to understand the value of customer segments such as males versus females or whales versus non-whales. Basically, if a developer invests $5 to acquire a user, will they get $6 back from the customer through something like in-app purchases of virtual goods? Developers already know how customers are using their product via metrics, and with Revenue Analytics, app developers can figure out revenue data that’s just as deep.

“If you can dig down deeper into your revenue, it means you can make a decison about whether improving your product made you more money, whether your marketing is actually working — something more valuable than ‘that’s how much revenue I made this month,’” Doshi says.

Revenue Analytics allows customers to see LTV of customers for a website or mobile app, which can be broken down by any kind of segment imaginable such as male versus female, Android platform user versus iOS platform user, which Android device, by number of ropes cut in Cut the Rope and more. This is all helpful for marketers who can now gain insight into who their most most valuable customers are and if they want to go acquire more of them, and if their marketing spend results in a positive return on investment.

“It’s not stock data, it’s specific data specific to that business,” he says. “This is something that doesn’t exist in the world right now.”

Any website or mobile app can use Revenue Analytics because its an API that can be integrated into any platform.

Mixpanel recently released its Activity Feed feature, which is an events-based timeline of a customer’s actions in an app, helping developers improve their app by analyzing individual customer behavior to see what features they highly engage in or where they churn.

Revenue Analytics is available starting today and is free to existing Mixpanel People Analytics customers. People Analytics, which launched in July 2012, lets customers view profiles of each user that uses their website or app as well as view aggregate data.

Once incubated by Y Combinator, Mixpanel has raised $12 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Keith Rabois, Max Levchin and Michael Birch.

The hectic weeks around the Christmas holiday brought on a boost in app downloads and marketing costs, according to Fiksu. The user acquisition and marketing company today reported that the cost per loyal user jumped 21 percent, with a loyal user being defined as a user who will open an app at least three times.

The 21 percent increase in user acquisition costs moved the price from $1.38 per loyal user in the Boston-based company’s November Index data to $1.67, a $0.29 increase. Compared to Fiksu’s holiday 2011 data, user acquisition cost was at $1.81 per user, 8.4 percent higher than holiday 2012′s $1.67.

The company also reported that mobile app downloads rose from 4.57 million in November 2012 to 5.32 million in December 2012, an increase of 16 percent month-over-month. Fiksu cited consumers receiving new tablets and smartphones for Christmas as one of the reasons for the spike in downloads. Competition, which is always fierce during the holidays, wasn’t as fierce from November to December in 2012, with 2011 figures possibly looking more inflated from bot install tactics.

According to Fiksu CEO Micah Adler, mobile app marketers applied a more conservative, sophisticated strategy to their Q4 2012 campaigns after what they learned from holiday 2011.

“As a result, marketing dollars were spread to the long tail of apps outside the top 200, and the peaks in volume and cost per loyal user, while still significant, weren’t as extreme as they were in 2011,” he says in a statement.

Mobile rewards platform Kiip today announced it entered a strategic partnership with global advertising holding company Interpublic (NYSE: IPG). The partnership includes an investment by IPG during Kiip’s latest $11 million round of funding, which included additional investments from Relay Ventures, Hummber Winbald, True Ventures and Digital Garage.

Kiip already works with more than 45 top-tier brands like American Apparel, McDonald’s Best Buy and more, and IPG Mediabrands says it will help introduce more top-tier marketers to Kiip’s mobile and gaming advertising platform.

Kiip made its debut just in 2011, offering advertisers a better way to engage with mobile app users by allowing them to incentivize in-game achievements with real-life rewards. Since then the service has expanded to non-game apps and introduced limited-time reward tournaments called Swarms.

CEO and co-founder of Kiip Brian Wong said that this is a major moment for the company and that they expect the partnership with IPG and the IPG Media Lap to accelerate its global growth.