- What do gamers and bodybuilders have in common? A lot, it turns out. And sites like Fitocracy are taking advantage by applying gaming mechanics to reward people for their fitness achievements — so fitness becomes as addictive as gaming. We view this as a big opportunity around achievements taking flight beyond gaming. *hint*
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And for when you want to make some in-game purchases, Rixty can provide personalized and reloadable gift cards for online games. Publishers can brand them and sell them to gamers, and gamers can even design their own to give as gifts to friends. And when it comes to creative forms of mobile payment, everyone from LevelUp — using QR codes — to PayPal is getting in on the action.
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Don’t want to give your friend a gift card? Well proximity-based gifts service Repudo lets you leave them a gift in the form of text, video, or audio — and they have to come find it. And now Repudo will let you gift apps, too. For the launch of the iPhone 4S they’re actually leaving free apps as gifts at Apple Stores worldwide!
- And you may be getting some more proximity-based deals in the very near future. Several companies are close to offering instant location-based deals — as in the classic example of walking by a Starbucks and getting a coupon on your phone as you do so. But companies should move slowly into this form of mobile advertising or risk annoying consumers.
- Although not a surprise, this helps confirm: people are now spending more time inside mobile applications than they are on the web — and that includes web browsing on both mobile devices and desktops. Apparently, most of that in-app time is spent gaming and social networking. Gaming and networking have taken over our online lives and we couldn’t be more happy.
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Kiip Up #5: Chicago
Very excited about Chicago. Had a great time last week spending time with our CPG clients and I can’t wait for our latest rewards to be deployed. The true online-to-offline element of what we’ve created is a full circle of a conversion funnel - and now we’ve made it turnkey for brands to activate.
I was honored to take the stage at iCitizen in Columbus a couple weeks back. They’ve since posted my talk on their website. Hope you get a chance to check it out. Our moments-based model has helped us learn a lot around emotion - around how happiness in numbers can power a true affinity play with a brand. Uncovering happiness in existing pools is a much more efficient process than to attempt to create it.
Although I feel incredibly out of place, and that the honor is completely my team’s and not mine - BusinessInsider had included Kiip into their “Top 25 under 25 in Silicon Valley” list. Onward and upward! And lastly, for those of you in San Diego next Tuesday at the CEA 2011 Forum event - see you there!
Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:
Thanks for reading!
Brian Wong, CEO
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Our Weekly Update: Kiip Up #4
I want to extend a heartfelt congratulations on behalf of Kiip and Guinness World Records to Philipp Schneckenburger, our world record holder! He scored 6,133,889 points to achieve this amazing feat. For reference, the second place holder had scored 5,328,110 points. Huge congratulations. Wired wrote a great piece about the world record and the results. We couldn’t be more excited.
Shortly after last week’s Kiip Up was sent, the world learned of Steve Jobs passing. I just wanted to share a few comments about how much Steve Jobs and Apple meant to our company and our collective entrepreneurial drive. Beyond what everyone around the world has praised Steve for embodying and accomplishing in his life time, I’ll remember him most by his raw view of the world (knowing that we all die leaves us naked - what more is there to lose) and his fearlessness in uprooting industries and redefining them all on his own. Steve was less concerned about anything but the vision and purpose of what he was doing, and Apple was his means of doing these things. We have lost our generation’s Da Vinci. Rest in peace, Steve.
I’m also looking forward to heading out to Chicago later this afternoon to spend some time with our partners in the midwest, and our Director of Sales in the Midwest, Chris Ruder (cruder “at” kiip-corp.com). If you haven’t met with Chris yet, you may be missing out =). If you’d like to catch up while I’m in town tonight and tomorrow, let me know.
Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:- Mobile ad spending is forecasted to come in at $1.23 billion this year, up from $743 million last year. And it’s expected to keep going up, reaching $4.4 billion by 2015. Still not convinced that mobile is where it’s at? Check out more “proof” that mobile is on the rise.
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On the flip side, as mobile advertising continues to mature, the novelty is wearing off. In order to keep up performance, creativity in mobile advertising is crucial.
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Regardless, mobile activity is booming… Mobile shopping is on the up and up this holiday season, even as overall sales are expected to slow. Maybe it’s because 56% of smartphone users think it’s useful to get product information, coupons and sale alerts on their phone. And another 32% find buying products on their phone helpful.
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And there’s a multitude of ways for mobile shoppers to get that info and buy those presents. Mobile apps are one way, and app downloads are expected to reach 98 billion by 2015! Location-based based coupons are another, and 67% of consumers find them convenient and useful.
- Speaking of coupons and rewards, Perkville is making it easier to keep track of all the store loyalty cards and frequent buyer cards in your wallet by letting brands turn their customers’ email addresses into virtual reward cards.
- And that’s not the only thing your smartphone can do. You can use it as a controller — thanks to Joypad — to play your favorite games on your iPad, Mac or PC. You can even use it to regulate your heartbeat — thanks to the game I Heart Jellyfish.
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Announcing the Official Kiip / Mega Jump Guinness World Records Holder
We’re also very excited today to announce the results of the 5-day long kick-off competition we had with Guinness World Records to celebrate our partnership. Hundreds of thousands of scores were posted around the world, and we had a heated competition leading right to the end. We couldn’t be more excited about this kick off. Quoth Wired:
21-year-old Swiss gamer Philipp Schneckenburger is the winner of Guinness and Kiip’s inaugural contest. He set a record-breaking score of 6,133,889 on the popular iPhone game Mega Jump, which qualifies him for inclusion in the 2012 book.
We’re very excited to jump into this partnership with Guinness World Records with such an awesome splash. To many more world records to come! Cheers!
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Our Weekly Update: Kiip Up #3
Note from the CEO: This is the weekly update that we send out to our clients. We figured it held some exciting content from the space we all swim in and so I’m excited to share it on our blog. We appreciate any feedback so feel free to ping me at kiipup ‘at’ kiip.me. We read all the responses. To subscribe, head on over to our main page and scroll on down to the bottom.
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We’re excited about sharing a little slice of how we think back at Kiip HQ. I just got into Columbus, Ohio, earlier this evening for the iCitizen Symposium run by Resource here in the city. I’m excited to spend some time here in retail-central. What we talk about internally as driving the customer from the “phone to the aisle” is what gets us pumped to share some of our new products to this audience. As I had teased last week, we had finally made our partnership announcement with Guinness World Records. We’re really excited about this. First, as an ongoing integration this makes our entire network even more robust, and sets us along a path that shows how our value proposition has become that much more unique. We can’t wait to hold the world record for producing the most world records. =)
While more details around our launch competition with Guinness will be announced in the coming days, it was an incredible launch success. Hundreds of thousands of scores posted. We can’t wait to share with you what we’ve been working on. Concentrated engagement in periods of time is an incredibly powerful thing. Stay tuned.
Without further ado, here are our favorite links from the past week:1. In this day and age, consumers no longer separate a company in its divisions and its product from its marketing, which means we all have to be conscious of marketing. Companies as a whole — from the marketers themselves to the senior executives — have to work together to reach consumers in this era of engagement.
2. And what better way to engage with consumers than through the devices they can’t live without? In a short span of time, mobile devices have eclipsed the desktop experience. People who two years ago would have had a hard time choosing between their phones and computers now whole heartedly put their phones and tablets first.
3. With games, apps, messaging, web browsing and more, mobile devices provide the richest, feature-filled experiences — all on the go. And people are clamoring for more… nearly half of the mobile users in North America are currently planning to buy the iPhone 5 once it’s released! Note: at time of writing, the iPhone 4s had not been announced yet. I am very curious to see how this has changed because of the high expectations attributed to the elusive iPhone 5.
4. With smartphone penetration having tipped over 40% this summer, and about to reach 50% any day now, the future of mobile advertising, and maybe even marketing in general, is in connecting online mobile behavior with offline consumer activity.
5. One way to make that connection is through rewards. Achievers, which recently raised $24.5 million in funding, is one company that recognizes the power of rewards to motivate people. In this case, they inspire employees through online social recognition and points that can be traded for real-world items. The loyalty and rewards model is evolving to become extremely applicable across many verticals. We continue to be inspired by these applications.
Thanks for reading!
Brian Wong, CEO
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Bringing The Ultimate Recognition to Gamers: The World Record
Today I am excited to announce our partnership with Guinness World Records. This is hot on the heels of our partnership with Verizon Wireless and their developer community. We’re constantly working on building amazing partnerships that enhance our network and help it grow at an accelerated rate. With this, we’re just getting started.
Guinness World Records has built an amazing brand that is well known around the world with folks of all ages. They’ve captured our imaginations across generations by showing what the human race is capable of doing at our magnificent heights.
At Kiip, we’ve seen phenomenal growth to our network in the past months. We’re tracking just under 2 million rewardable achievements per day across 20 games. As new inventory grows, this is staggering to us. That we can find that many smiles every day across the country that brands can reach - gets us extremely excited. We’re adding new brands and rewards every week, and we’re proud to say that we have touched millions of people around the US with the unique value proposition around rewards in achievement moments.
But we wanted to make this special. We wanted to make this fun. We also wanted to build onto an already unique value proposition with something that no one else could match. The question was: what makes us unique is also what other networks have found it difficult to harness and to even make sense out of? What is the achievement moment? What can we do with it? And at Kiip, we decided to leap even further ahead by cementing ourselves as a brand that not only was able to create that layer that enabled rewards, but to make the entire concept of achieving something even more rewarding. The question was, what is the ultimate recognition for some of these amazing daily feats? The answer was simple: a Guinness World Record.
And so now we’ve created a deep ongoing integration with our friends over at Guinness World Records that will see all current and future game and app partners potentially able to contribute scores and achievements into the record books, and officially. This will be an automatic process that will happen at various points throughout the year where we will be able to work with our partners to highlight.
But to kick this all off we wanted to celebrate with an immediate competition that wouldn’t just contribute directly into the record books, but would actually show in print in the 2012 Gamers Edition that will come out in January. Starting today, anyone can download one of our favorites: Mega Jump, and will automatically be entered into an instant competition to submit a score worldwide over a 5-day long competition.
A mega jump indeed. Friends, let’s kiip rocking. Can’t wait to share even more in the coming weeks.
Cheers!
BHere is some of the press from our launch:
Mashable: Want to Get Into the Guinness Book of World Records? Play Some iPhone Games
Techcrunch: Guinness World Records Hooks Up With Kiip To Let Anyone With An iPhone Have A Shot At A Record
PCWorld: Play a Mobile Game, Set a Guinness World RecordAnd much more!
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Kiip Teams Up With Verizon Wireless
Today, we’re very excited to announce our partnership with Verizon Wireless in helping bring access to Kiip’s platform and SDK to their VDC Community. With our network’s growth, we’ve quickly realized that many other companies are also harnessing the exponential growth of an independent developer community. By combining forces with companies that we complement well, we’re able to achieve bigger milestones in helping developers build their businesses. Developers, being extremely important to us, can now benefit from wider and more distributed access to our platform. It’s relationships like these, especially with the VDC, that are symbiotic in nature - and we’re only just getting started.
Verizon’s long standing relationship with the developer community is one that we also respect a lot. Many developers that have become a part of our family have already spent time working with Mark Hickey, who leads our developer relations efforts. Mark himself was recently a part of one of the most successful mobile game publishers of all time - Gameloft. It’s with his leadership and experience that we’ve been able to create a network that we can be proud of.
With so many options to monetize and retain, the challenge now is to build value with your players over time. We can’t wait to work with you to bring real rewards to your players.
We’ve been humbled by the messages we’ve received across the country from people who have had a chance to experience a Kiip reward:
“Getting monetarily rewarded for playing a computer game is some people’s idea of a dream come true!”
It’s been a true honor having the opportunity to make this dream a reality.
Kiip it real,
Brian Wong Founder & CEO
See the press release link here: Verizon Wireless Encourages and Enables Mobile Application Development with Tools for Developers
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Our CEO, Brian Wong, speaks to Kevin Rose about the early days of kiip and his past.
Many thanks to Kevin and Foundation for the awesome opportunity to share kiip’s story and vision.
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Out of Thin Air
Today’s a big day at Kiip. We’re putting forth an idea that we truly believe will change the landscape of mobile advertising and engagement.
The achievement moment in games evokes feelings of accomplishment and happiness, and speaks directly to pillars of human emotion. The pride that one feels in rising to a challenge – and beating it – is unmatched when we play games.
So we thought to ourselves…what if we could deliver a reward, a genuine, authentic, tangible gift - right at that moment? We’d like that. You would too.
And so we did. We created a network and the technology to help enable brands to reach you when you win - at the achievement moment - with a reward. It helps brands build a one-to-one connection with you, while thanking you, and it brings us all closer through the authenticity of a value exchange.
This is us. We’re Kiip. Reach them when they win.
