Reward Anyone: Self-service Comes to Kiip

We’ve been spending time architecting a process for self-service that we’re super proud of. Many developer platforms claim ease of integration but very few have figured out a way to show two instant benefits: tracking achievement data and activity, and being able to reward and thank your players. Take a spin for yourself here.

Here are some screenshots of our on-boarding. If you find yourself spending more than an hour, let me know. I am reachable at brian at kiip dot me. We’ll make sure to help you out. We mean it.

The Build Fund: Anyone Can Build.

We are stoked that we are finally taking the wraps off of a project that we’ve been working on for a little while. We call it the Build Fund.

In essence, along with our self-service on-boarding, we wanted to support the independent developer community with a financial buoy.

Going along with the theme - “Anyone Can Build”. Anyone can tap into Kiip to reward their users and their players. Along with that, anyone with a game idea can now start building. We’ll be accepting applications on a rolling basis into the program. There will be 20 recipients in total.

Along with the launch came with a bit more press to describe bit more in detail what we’re now up to:

Techcrunch: Rewards Network Kiip Goes Self-Serve, Announces $100K Developer Fund

TheNextWeb: Kiip opens up rewards platform to all app developers, announces $100k developer fund

Venturebeat: Kiip entices more game developers into its mobile-rewards network

Announcing Kiip Spotlight

We’re proud to announce the launch of Kiip spotlight. It’s a chance for us to share with you some of our favorite apps and games that are in our network, along with the rewards that make us proud of our partners. We’ll be rotating through our favorites regularly - and so make sure to keep tabs on this page. Best is to follow @kiip or to bookmark the spotlight page by clicking above.

Kiip Up #12 - Happy Holidays + Swarm + Spotlight

We’re back after a 2 week gap! And of course, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and happy holidays to all. We’re extremely grateful for your support this past year. 2011 was a blockbuster year for Kiip - along with launching our network to the world and experiencing phenomenal growth - we also had a chance to brighten everyone’s day with Kiip rewards from amazing brands. In many ways, there was a little bit of Christmas every day.

We’ve also been busy these past couple of weeks cooking up some holiday season magic. Yesterday, we launched Swarm, a new feature to help brands engage millions of people through massive flash competitions with big rewards - all within our existing network. You can view some of the coverage about the launch below, along with more details about the first Swarm ever with Walt Disney Studios, which is running from now until the 26th. We’ve been working hard perfecting Swarm. We can’t wait to tell many more of you about it and to have you run your first Swarms with us.

On top of all of that, we launched Kiip Spotlight, a gallery highlighting a sample of our network along with the brands participating. It’s definitely worth bookmarking too, as it will be updated constantly.

Forbes: Mobile Game Rewards Go Mass With Kiip’s Launch Of ‘Swarm’ Flash Tournaments
New York Times: Using Prizes to Reach Video Game Players on Their Phones
Adweek: Kiip Announces Swarm program, launches with Disney
Techcrunch: Kiip Swarm: Gamers Compete, Brands Sponsor Prizes, Developers Monetize

Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:

If we don’t see each other again before the new year, have a very Happy New Years.

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Kiip Up #11 - Gamesalad, Walgreens, and now we’re bi-weekly!

First thing’s first. We’re going to try moving Kiip Up into a biweekly letter. It gives us a chance to kiip things fresh while saving your inboxes!

As I had briefly mentioned in the last Kiip Up, we were about to celebrate a very special event with Gamesalad this past Monday. We were very excited last week to announce our integration partnership into their builder. You can read more about it from our friends at Venturebeat and Pocketgamer.

The partnership encompasses something that I’ve been looking forward to building into our network for some time: genre variety. What this means is that if your brand is a sports brand, and you’re looking to reach out into sports-themed games - a look into the Gamesalad network would reveal dozens. It’s a profound change in scale in how themes and genres can play into integration.

And one last note: last week we just went live with our holiday rewards from our friends at Sears. If you find Sears and some holiday joy in your games this holiday; don’t forget totell us what you bought! Stay tuned next week for some more holiday announcements; this will be a month to remember =)

Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:

Kiip and Gamesalad Level Up

The cat’s out of the bag! We’re really excited to be partnering with Gamesalad. Today has been a big day. Some of the articles that came out today paint a great picture and really illustrate well what we’re doing with Gamesalad:

Venturebeat - Kiip and GameSalad integrate ad-based rewards directly into game development platform

Pocketgamer.biz - Mobile rewards ad network Kiip integrates with GameSalad Creator

And a bit more color: When both our companies first met about this, we realized that the fit was completely natural. Gamesalad was working hard to democratize game development and making it accessible to the masses. We were creating a unique model for building a new type of relationship between top-tier consumer brands and the mobile user.

Thus started the brainstorming process. We decided that the best, albeit long-term route would be to figure out a way to integrate the platform directly into the builder, so that anyone on Gamesalad could enable our moments-based model almost immediately.

So today, we’re proud to announce that we’ll be doing just that. Pro users on Gamesalad’s platform will be the first to get access in the next couple weeks. We’re doing a limited release with a few titles that we’re excited to share really soon.

Those of you who were at the Gamesalad, Kiip, IGDA party tonight would have had a chance to play around with the actual build with the Kiip integration in it. Those of you who didn’t come out - I’ve included some screenshot previews below. We’re very excited about this.

We also wanted to thank the Gamesalad teams - especially Mark Chuberka, Jonathan Hunt, Steve Felter, Michael Agustin, and Tiffany Spencer, for helping pull everything together over the past many months.

Onward and upward!

The Kiip Developer Relations Team Mark, Steve, Jack, and Edison

Kiip Up #9

As we near closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s important to realize what we’re thankful of. I am certainly thankful of the past year and the entire family that we’ve built around Kiip, including our team, our developer partners, our brand partners, and our investors and advisors. But that’s for next week =).

This week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with our EMEA partners and with Eamonn Carey, who is heading up our presence in that region. London is big for our network because of our traffic there, and it’s not surprising to see rewards come fast and strong from that market. I’m pleased to share that our first international campaigns will be rolling out in the first week of December, in two different markets: Canada, and the United Kingdom. More details will be shared soon. 
 

I wanted to share some fun pictures from our visit out to ustwo™ in London, the guys behind the massively growing Whale Trail game. I was inspired by their studio, and their culture.  On the left is Mills, or CHIEF WONKA™, and on the right is his mobile management platform™.

 

Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:

1. In the last three years, mobile gaming apps have significantly cut into more traditional gaming consoles’ revenues. As the pie of portable gaming revenues widens and changes, the $1.9 billion mobile gaming industry’s increasing popularity and competitive pricing will keep Nintendo and Sony on their toes. 
2. And speaking of taking things mobile, Wal-Mart is launching its first iPad app and making some changes to it’s original iPhone app. Adding coupons, in-store item location information, shopping lists and voice dictation technology, the company is all set for the holiday season. Coming from one of the world’s largest retailers, we’re loving this.
3. Gap is going mobile too; they’re offering personalized location-based deals via SMS at Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic stores. The trend continues in the UK, where 30 of the top 47 retailers have mobile websites and/or smartphone apps (see why we love the UK?).
4. Part of transitioning into mobile also involves thinking about the multiscreen experience, because the majority of users multitask with several screens — phone, tablet, TV, etc. For marketers, its especially important to understand this experience, what multitaskers are attracted to and what they’re trying to accomplish. Accessing is the simplest form: what can you do beyond accessibility?
5. With thriving m-commerce and new phones constantly debuting — check out this hilarious TV spot for the new BlackBerry Torch 4G — the mobile space is hot, hot, hot. And it’s only getting hotter; by September of next year, it’s expected that smartphone penetration in the U.S. will reach 50%. How’s that for impressive growth?

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Kiip Up #8: Love

Had an amazing time earlier this week keynoting at the European Gartner IT Symposium to a host of extremely talented and diverse execs. For the first time, we also revealed a deeper look into our gifting feature and what its done for us. Beyond retargeting thousands of rewards to deserving individuals, we also did a close analysis into the messages that people were sending accompanying these rewards. What we found was fascinating. The most popular word used was of course, “love”. Right beside this is a small capture of what the word cloud looked like. There will be more details shared in the coming weeks!

I’m coming to you from Washington, D.C. this week on Veteran’s Day. Next week we’ll be at the Social Gaming Summit in London. If you’re a developer partner or a brand or agency that we haven’t had a chance to catch up with - I’d love to find some time. Our session on the “moments-based” model starts at 11am on the 14th.

Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:

1. Everyone thinks games are for kids, right? Well, even among kids, gaming continues to become increasingly popular. This year, 91% of kids and teens will play games, an increase from the 82% who played just two years ago. And what’s causing this increase in gaming amongst kids? Device access.
2. Currently, 15% of kids under 11 own a mobile phone, and that number is expected to increase to 22% by 2015. And if kids don’t have a phone of their own, their parents are apt to share their phones with them. In fact, 1 in 3 Generation Y moms grants her kids access to her mobile devices before they even turn 2 years old. And among older kids age 13 to 17, 38% have a smartphone they can call their own.
3. But the real sweet spot of smartphone adoption is among young adults aged 25 to 34, 62% of whom own such devices. And just over half of 18- to 42-year-olds and 35- to 44-year olds own smartphones too.

4. With all these mobile devices, app download numbers are rapidly rising too. The number of adult cell phone users who have downloaded an app nearly doubled in the past two years, rising from 22% to 38%. And 10% of adults also currently own a tablet. Because both of these are app-enabled devices, there’s a fair amount of overlap between the app downloading habits of smartphone and tablet owners, with many tablet owners obviously downloading apps on their cell phones too. 

5. And what apps exactly are users downloading? Well, it’s likely quite a few of them have Angry Birds on their mobile device. The popular game recently reached 500 million downloads — a new record and impressive feat, considering that the game was released only 2 years ago. So that means you may have Angry Birds on your phone, but are you looking for some other great games to play? Check out the favorites of these gaming enthusiasts for some new gaming options.

Today is a day of reflection. See you all next week!

Also - if you want to subscribe to this newsletter, do so here.

Kiip Up #7

Had an amazing time at the Dublin Web Summit last week. It truly is eye-opening to see the European tech scene come alive.

This next week I’ll be spending time in D.C. at the Digital Capital Week event held by Peter Corbin and the iStrategy Labs crew. My session is going to be around innovative mobile marketing and how it’s taken shape over the past year. It’s going to be a lot of fun - those of you who we haven’t had a chance to connect with in DC, let’s catch up!

My co-founder, Courtney Guertin, will also be taking the stage at the Dow Jones FastTech50 Event in Redwood City, CA on Tuesday this coming week to represent our spot on the coveted list. We’re honored to be there and we can’t wait to share a bit of what we have in store for the coming months.

Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:

1. Although this industry may be young, mobile ad spending in the U.S. is expected to increase six fold over the next five years by more than $47 billion! Location-based marketing, also made possible by mobile devices, is on the up and up as well. Check out these companies that have found ways to innovate in the mobile marketing world. 
2. And what will they think of next? We can already use our smartphones to interact with our TV screens, and now we’ll be able to use them to interact with movie screens. The TimePlay app will allow Android, iOS and BlackBerry users to be a part of a shared social gaming experience in theaters, playing against fellow movie-goes for prizes from various brands. It’ll debut with a trial run in the greater Toronto area, and perhaps then it will come to a theatre near you.
3. And the mobile revolution continues… 1 in 4 retailers now has a mobile app, a 24% increase from last year. For more great data on mobile apps and games, check out the blog from our friends at Flurry. 
4. But we all know that with innovation comes risk, and one of those risks is flat-out failure. Roger Dickey, of Mafia Wars, and I think you should learn to embrace failure as part of the road to bigger and better things. I talked to TechCunch’s Andrew Keen about it at FailCon; check it out here.

And with the holiday season approaching the best is yet to come from Kiip. Stay tuned.

Kiip up #6

This week has been and will be a crazy one! Had a great time yesterday in San Diego at the CEA Forum speaking on next generation mobile strategies.

This Friday I hope to see some of the European startup and web community at the Dublin Web Summit. I’m excited to spend some time across the pond (albeit briefly). Our European traffic has grown almost two-fold in the past couple months and we’re looking to deploy our first campaign there within the next few weeks. We’re very excited about how international rewards can play into our network - as we discover how other countries have adapted mobile redemption, there’s no doubt that this pace will only accelerate.

I’ll also be in NYC this coming Monday and Tuesday to spend time with our sales team as well as some of our key partners. We are planning a turnkey roll out pre-holidays that if you haven’t gotten a note on, please let us know. We’re excited to share with you access to the more than +45mm achievement moments in our network in the past month.
 
Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week: