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.

Editor’s note: Arcade action game Nimble Quest is the latest offering from Tiny Towers and Pocket Planes developer NimbleBit. Kevin Oke, Lead Designer at both Adrian Crook & Associates, a social-mobile game design consultancy, and PlayRank, a second screen startup, analyzes the stickiness in Nimble Quest. He previously wrote a guest post for Inside Mobile Apps that analyzed engagement in Supercell’s Clash of Clans.

NimbleBit, creators of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, released their latest title the aptly named Nimble Quest at the end of March. While it’s a fun game, I’ve found four key issues described below that I believe limit its stickiness and in turn, its ability to monetize.

According to AppData, after a strong start peaking at No. 6 on the top free iPhone apps chart for the games genre, it has slid to No. 217 as of this writing. Its rank on the top grossing iPhone apps chart for the games genre is at No. 190. These positions may be at least partially attributable to the issues I found.

The Compulsion Loop

This is the biggest barrier for Nimble Quest to overcome. The nature of its compulsion loop makes for a very grind heavy experience that hinders its stickiness.

It’s a rule of thumb in game design that the shorter the loop, the more addictive the experience. By analyzing the loop (diagram above), one can see that unless the player is willing to spend hard currency, they have to restart from the beginning every time. The variable session length nature of the game means that as the player and their friends improve, it takes more and more time for them to challenge their ever-increasing high scores.

Essentially Nimble Quest is banking on players getting invested enough in leaderboard competition to start paying once the grind becomes too much to bear. This is a risky hook to rely on here, as it’s one that is much better suited to games with more of a sense of permanence and ownership, like city builders and strategy games such as Kingdoms of Camelot by Kabam. The reason being that without such permanence, it’s much easier for the player to decide to quit when the grinding gets tiresome.

As in any freemium game leveraging the player’s time for money, if the player tires of the grind too quickly and churns out, they can’t be monetized. However Nimble Quest is especially at risk here because of their compulsion loop. Fixed session lengths with level progression and difficulty determined by a party XP level would have provided more stickiness. (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile app developers can now add social engagement features, two-way messaging, a real-time news feed and more to their apps in minutes with Scringo. The new product provides mobile app developers with those features to help them increase user engagement, distribution and monetization.

The product was described by Scringo co-founder and CEO Ran Avrahamy as “one place for developers to simply choose what they want to do and add to their app.” Basically, a developer can add a slide-in and slide-out handle UI that can be implemented on the righthand or lefthand side of their app. In this sidebar hub, developers can add features like a news feed or messaging system to their app.

Developers can manage features in their app via Scringo’s dashboard called the Developer Zone, featuring drag-and-drop customization for all the features that appear in the sidebar, without having to update their app via an app store. The Developer Zone also provides insights gained from users using Scringo, including the ability to see user metrics like location, platform, device and more.

Scringo’s main feature is its real-time activity feed. Basically, a developer can add an in-app social network to their app, which in turn, may increase user engagement. Developers can call for an activity inside of their app to appear in the activity feed. E.g. a developer can add a line of code to an app like Shazam, so when a user listens to a song, that action will be added to the activity feed. Developers can also implement a favorite button into the feed — e.g. a like, high-five or heart.  Avrahamy adds that Scringo is suitable for content-centric apps such as music, video or picture apps.

Scringo also adds a messaging layer to an app. Users can message other people using the same app or even the app developer. The ability for developers to directly contact their users could help developers with quickly responding to feedback, reporting bugs, fielding suggestions for new app features and more.

Scringo also developed its own contextual and content-based algorithms, which suggests to the user people to follow based on a user’s gender, age and location. Users can log in to Scringo with their Facebook or Twitter credentials, which will create a personal app profile for the user within Scringo. Users can also find and invite friends through Scringo to use the app they are using. In essence, users would be doing the work for the developer to spread their app virally.

Before officially launching today, Scringo was in closed beta testing for months. More than one thousand developers participated in the beta, with Scringo integrated into more than 250 apps. Data from the beta showed that its product increased the average user time spent in an app by 97 percent and the average number of recurring sessions by 89 percent.

“[The beta] gave us amazing information about those users and seeing what’s keeping them inside the app,” Avrahamy says.

Avrahamy says the eight-month old startup received an undisclosed amount of seed round funding from an unnamed venture capital firm from Israel.

Developers can download Scringo’s free iOS or Android SDK here, which can be implemented in minutes, Avrahamy says.

AppGlu today released its new mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) that aims to help mobile app developers and business people with speeding up development time and post-launch operations. AppGlu is a San Francisco-based company, which spun out from ArcTouch, a mobile app developer that makes apps for other companies like the Chatter app for Salesforce, the Star Trek PADD app for CBS and the native mobile app for Walmart.

To help steer an app to success post-launch, the company developed a dashboard for its AppGlu product dubbed Control Center, which has three components to it. First, is the Control Center’s content component, allowing anyone, such as business people who work on a mobile app, to update and publish new content for an app without going through mobile app developers. Content is updated dynamically, meaning the mobile app doesn’t have to be updated in the app store and re-downloaded by consumers in order to make changes. Second, is the engagement component, where business people can see their user engagement metrics via graphs, reports and more to understand how content is performing. For example, in ArcTouch’s Star Trek PADD app, business people can see which captain from each of the Star Trek series is most popular among users. Lastly, the insights component allows business people to segment their app’s user base, so they can target and then send personalized content or push notifications to customers to improve things such as engagement and retention.

“What we found in our experience at ArcTouch is that companies spend a lot of time thinking about the development and the launch phases of their app’s lifecycle, but they don’t spend much time thinking about what happens after they launch it,” says Adam Fingerman, co-founder and CEO of AppGlu. “The post-launch management and maintenance is where apps truly succeed or fail.”

For developers in particular, AppGlu’s Content Sync Engine feature, which is patent-pending, allows developers to speed up development time by creating what AppGlu calls a “connected app.” Basically, developers can sync and integrate their app’s locally stored data — from either Core Data for iOS apps or SQLite for Android apps — to a managed backend database in the cloud run by AppGlu, creating a connected app in the same way a developer would create a non-connected local app.

“The real magic and the heavily lifting is done through the Sync Engine,” Fingerman says. “When you’re building an app, you have a local data model. We’ve mirrored the cloud data model to your local model using the Sync Engine.”

There are competitors to AppGlu that provide the same solutions for mobile app development on an individual basis. Competitors like Flurry, Google Analytics and Mixpanel provide business insights for mobile apps.

“The difference between us and traditional analytics is that we’re not capturing taps and page views,” says Eric Shapiro, co-founder and chief technology officer of AppGlu. “Instead, we are capturing how users are using the content. We call that content analytics. It’s automatic and it’s based on the actual content that’s being delivered through the dynamic content aspect.”

Shapiro says he doesn’t suggest that mobile app developers replace their existing analytics with AppGlu. He adds that AppGlu is a complimentary solution that gives people different and useful information. There’s also competitors to AppGlu in the user engagement space such as Xtify and Urban Airship, which handle push notifications for mobile apps. AppGlu’s differentiator with push notifications is its ability to analyze a particular push notification that’s driving a user to a specific piece of content, and how that all directly relates to the ROI of the push notification. Lastly, there are many cloud-based CMS companies for mobile apps, but none of those companies allow its customers to modify content without the help of a developer, Fingerman says.

Fingerman says AppGlu is meant specifically for content-centric apps — such as product catalog, sales brochure, marketing, HR, event apps and more — for the B2E, B2B or B2C space. Apps already using AppGlu include the previously mentioned Star Trek PADD app.

Developers interested in the service can go here to learn about the service’s cost and to download its lightweight, open-source (under the Apache license) SDKs for iOS, Android or HTML5 apps or pre-written sample apps with full source code.

Editor’s note: SessionM has a term for users who are constantly using their mobile device. The rewards-based ad network calls them power users, which are defined as users who generate the most in-app activity — including interacting with mobile content, social activities and in-app ads — across all app categories. The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer Scott Weller — formally of MDI, GameLogic and Gamesville.com — lays out five tips on how developers can turn average users into power users, resulting in a higher potential for the success of an app.

1. Be a guide

Don’t expect casual users to “figure out” the app features. Instead, guide users through the most important features on their first visit and show them exactly why they should use the app. Walkthroughs help reduce the chance a user will become frustrated navigating the app and increase the chance a user will take full advantage of all the app has to offer.

2. Offer personalization

Your features should be meaningful to users, that’s why they downloaded the app, right? One of the best ways to provide a valuable experience is through personalization. Make sure to provide settings that users can change to customize features and content to their liking. Not only will this provide a better experience for users, but will also give you more insight into the types of people using the app and how to boost conversions down the road.

3. Add reminders

Often the reason a user doesn’t return to an app is just a matter of the app not being top of mind, so adding push notifications is a great way to remind users to come back. A study by Urban Airship even showed that users who receive push notifications in an app have a 26 percent higher retention rate after one month. Supercharge the usefulness and response rates of push notifications by delivering valuable content and tying the content to personalization options previously initiated by the user. Be measured, though — random and repetitive notifications can lead to a quick delete of the app.

4. Reward for good behavior

Humans innately like to be rewarded, so providing something of value to a user when they complete an activity or milestone is a great way to encourage them to come back. Not only are rewards a way of saying “thanks” for a user’s time, but they can also go a long way in providing users a pathway for discovering other features they would have otherwise passed-by. Daily rewards are key to staying top of mind and becoming part of a user’s daily routine.

5. Get with the in-crowd

Your users are social creatures, and most love having the opportunity to share their in-app experience with others. When you build social features into your app, you reduce the risk of users leaving to socialize outside of the app. Of course, social features can help drive users’ friends into the app, too. To help promote this, provide suggested Twitter and Facebook messages that speak to the feature set of the app, not just the app itself.

Editor’s Note: Each week, Inside Mobile Apps’ Kathleen De Vere delves into evolving trends in mobile games and apps. The current topic, games as a service, is part of an ongoing effort on the part of mobile and social game developers to maximize engagement and maintain dominant positions on app rankings charts.

Some of the most profitable mobiles games available today aren’t games at all — they are entertainment services.

If that seems strange, consider the average review of mobile card battle games. The genre seems to defy all the lessons developers have learned about what makes a “good” game: graphics quality is low, the user interfaces are unintuitive or cluttered, and the battles (such as they are) don’t require any user input beyond pushing a button.

Despite all that, these “core games” titles earn incredible amounts of money. At the height of its popularity in Japan, GREE’s card battle game Driland was earning more than $26 million a month through in-app purchases. DeNA’s hit Rage of Bahamut has spent 10 months at the top of the Android top grossing chart, generating average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) in excess of $1.00. Card battle games like Zynga’s Ayakashi Ghost Guild, ATeam’s Dark Summoner and Applibot’s Legend of the Cryptids are also immensely profitable.

These games are popular and addictive because what they are selling is not the basic gameplay, but an ongoing service that keeps players returning. A game-as-a-service provides endless additional content, a player community and a persistent competitive environment. Financially these titles are supported by microtransactions or monthly subscription fees.

Always something to do.

MOBA games like League of Legends, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and paper-based collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering all have two things in common. They are all extremely popular and are all ongoing entertainment services. Mobile card battle games like Rage of Bahamut offer the same experience on a simplified scale.

The real “gameplay” for many these mobile games today is in the extras: the free bonuses, daily levels, multiplayer raid bosses and limited time special events. For dedicated players, there is always something new to do and it’s easy to become addicted — not to the game, but to the never-ending stream of content and the diversion it provides. Just introducing service components to an existing game can create a huge boost in monetization and retention.

Last summer, Big Fish Games added a Daily Mode to its hit game Fairway Solitaire. Every day, the company puts out two new levels. One is free, the other is bought with in-game currency. On the weekends, the levels that need to be bought might be longer, or offer extra completion bonuses. If a player completes enough of these daily courses, they can use their completion bonuses to unlock even more content.

According to the Fairway Solitaire team, Daily Mode was explicitly created to give players a never-ending feed of new content. Big Fish Games tells us Fairway Solitaire’s engagement and retention are “outstanding.” The game’s daily active user (DAU) count has doubled since Daily Mode was introduced.

Previously, game developers have placed a lot of importance on adding social features to games, but these games aren’t popular because their players can share their high scores on Twitter and invite their Facebook friends to play. Games like Fairway Solitaire inspire great loyalty because their players can always find something to new to do in them.  

The goal of a properly designed game-as-a-service should not be to make the best, or most social game possible, but to create a game where it is nearly impossible for the player to become bored with it. That is the “secret sauce” that makes Magic: The Gathering, League of Legends and Rage of Bahamut so profitable.

Mobile game developer TinyCo’s monetization data finds that Google’s Nexus 7 tablet generates 50 percent higher ARPU than the average Android tablet.

“It’s encouraging for us,” says Mike Sandwick, TinyCo’s manager of strategic partnerships. “We have a reputation that’s pretty unique in terms of our commitment to Android. It’s continuing to pay off for us and Google is making these really great devices that have great user experiences like the Nexus 7 in terms of hardware. Jellybean is just awesome. We’re very, very pro everything that’s happening on Android right now, and we’re very psyched to be able to keep developing for the platform.”

Not only that, TinyCo says users are 50 percent more likely to make in-app purchases on the Nexus 7 compared to users of other Android tablets. Although the Nexus 7 only represents 15 percent of TinyCo’s Android tablet user base, 30 percent of TinyCo’s Android tablet revenue is generated by Nexus 7 users. Lastly, Nexus 7 users tend to demonstrate about 20 percent higher 7- and 30-day retention rates.

TinyCo didn’t take into account Kindle Fire data, which is a device that’s powered by the Android operating system, because there’s monetization system differences between the Amazon Appstore for Android and Google Play that affect metrics such as ARPU on TinyCo’s end.

There is the common thought in the industry that iOS monetizes better than Android, but that hasn’t always been the case for TinyCo, previously citing free-to-play game Tiny Village as an example of seeing higher levels of monetization on Android versus iOS.

“We see monetization that’s surprisingly similar,” says Nick Ross, TinyCo director of analytics and user acquisition. “If you just look at it across everything, there probably are some slight differences, but those are all due to known factors like the number of Singaporean users is different from one platform to the next.”

Google manufacturing it’s own first-party tablet allows developers to test and monetize better, Ross adds.

“It’s going to encourage other people to develop on the platform, which is awesome,” he says. “We’re pro more games on the platform.”

In a recent Q & A, W3i’s general manager Erik Lundberg told Inside Mobile Apps that since tablets are a luxury item, consumers monetize on tablet better than they do on smartphones. Google itself is even helping developers create better Android tablet apps, with Google’s Tablet App Quality Checklist, seeing as it’s in Google’s best interest to push Android tablet development now that they have their own tablet device on the market.

TinyCo analyzed it’s most recent Android game Tiny Monsters for the Android tablet data it shared with Inside Mobile Apps.

Mobile game developers that allow ads for games of the same genre can increase revenue by up to 196 percent without loss in retention when compared to only displaying ads from games of different genres, according to a report from PlayHaven.

Mobile game lifetime value (LTV) maximization platform PlayHaven said one of its partners increased net eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions) on iPhone by 85 percent and iPad by 174 percent by allowing same genre ads, while still maintaining the same level of retention. PlayHaven vice president of business operations Brian Doxtator couldn’t name the game in question, but he did add that the game fell under the casino genre — slots, bingo or poker. For PlayHaven’s “largest” games in its portfolio, ad performance for same-genre advertisers was 166 percent higher, with user retention remaining very much the same.

Overall, same genre ads increase ad revenue by 105 percent, while ads of different genre games increase ad revenue by 39 percent. Retention-wise, ads of the same genre was at 83 percent and 80 percent for different genre.

Doxtator told Inside Mobile Apps that mobile game developers have two fears when it comes to allowing ads for games of the same genre in their games. The first is that developers don’t want to send their users to any competitors. The second is that their user base will be cannibalized by a game of a similiar genre.

“This report is what were trying to refute — that second part,” he says. “There will always be competitive advantages or disadvantages to promoting your competitors’ games, but the relationship to actual retention and the data we’re seeing, a lot of it doesn’t really play out.”

PlayHaven also gave some insight into the best time to place ads promoting other games of the same genre, while still keeping retention high. Doxtator said the best place is typically whenever a developer can qualify an engagement such as after a tutorial or a particular level, not at the beginning of a game or when a user first opens an app.

In contrast, one particular game on PlayHaven’s network displayed ads immediately on game launch, without waiting for users to pass any engagement threshold, so retention was 36 percent lower than that of similar games that place ads after engagement markers. According to the report, non-engaged users have a 58 percent retention rate while engaged users have a 91 percent retention rate.

“At the beginning, you don’t know if this is a retained user or if this an engaged user, but at certain points throughout your game, you do know,” says Doxtator. “It really varies too much to state specifically where, but just that you are having that behind action of engagement or retention. We’ve shown that because it’s a pre-qualified user, they end up coming back a lot more often.”

Data from PlayHaven’s report comes from more than 50 advertised games within 10 “major” games from top publishers on PlayHaven’s platform. PlayHaven chose six different genres and took the top two genres that either overlapped or converted. They analyzed the retention rate of users that saw, clicked or converted on the two genres taking the majority of the two genres’ ad inventory. PlayHaven currently has more than 70 million active users on its platform coming from 4,000 games by publishers including Pocket Gems, Glu Mobile and Digital Chocolate.

“We’ve proven here that we can generate a lot of revenue while sending users to your competitors because you get them back at a higher rate than otherwise,” says Doxtator.