Kiip it Real

Hello Kiipers!

Let’s dive right in. Hot on the heels of our fundraise announcement – we had briefly mentioned the existence of a rewards wallet we were planning to launch later in July. We did just that – finishing off July with a bang as we launched Kiip app, which we have endearingly nicknamed “Kiipsake”. Kiipsake comes as no big surprise to many of the users that have redeemed Kiip rewards – it’s a convenient place to store all your rewards in one spot. We also made it a delightful way to discover new apps and games within the Kiip network as well. Kiip app launched for Android on July 24th, and iOS is coming soon. We’ll kiip you posted in real-time.

The implications for brands and agencies from this wallet are very exciting. It enables a lot more possibilities around redemption as our real rewards product continues to gain traction with major CPG’s and retailers. It brings both of these parties together in an even more seamless way. If you’re interested, please reach out. What we were imagining a year ago is now very much so a reality.

Speaking of brands - USA Today featured Kiip in a nice piece profiling our partnership with Popchips in how we’ve worked with them in helping them grow their brand on mobile.

Here’s some favorite pieces from the app launch:

Fast Company: How Kiip Ties Brand Rewards to Game and Life Achievements to Make Mobile Ads Engaging

Forbes: Kiip Launches Kiipsake App for Real-World Rewards

TechCrunch: Kiip Debuts Standalone App To Find & Redeem Rewards From Over 400 Mobile Apps & Games

USA Today: Kiip builds on its timely video game ad strategy

TheNextWeb: Kiip launches its own app to help you keep track of the rewards that you’ve earned

If reading isn’t your thing, you can watch me talk about the app on Bloomberg TV and USA Today, and for our friends up north in my home country (Canada), here’s our BNN and CBC segments.

A lot to kiip up with, and we’re not slowing down anytime soon. Stay tuned for some exciting things happening overseas. I’m in London this week for an exciting announcement and I’ll be hopping up to Edinburgh for Edinburgh Interactive. Come say hello!

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

1. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Facebook’s stock drop and their difficulty in monetizing their mobile network. More than half of Facebook’s 955 million users are using a mobile device to log in, yet Facebook hasn’t been able to connect that vast network with brands in a way that benefits users, advertisers and Facebook all at the same time. Unfortunately, until they understand that applying old advertising methods will not monetize mobile, I see this problem persisting. Facebook’s lazy way out would be to try to jam their social banner advertising model into their mobile presence. I think they have a huge opportunity to tap into existing behaviors on mobile. They do have a secret weapon. Facebook recently acquired a company called Karma – an app that makes it super easy to send gifts to friends and loved ones. Facebook may be on the right track with that one if they know what to tap into properly. Here at Kiip – we built this business fundamentally on being a part of existing consumer behavior on mobile phones – why try to generate so much activity when all of that activity already exists in these moments?

2. Our mobile behavior is evolving, and the leading category in daily app consumption is…guess what…games! 34% of U.S. mobile users are now playing games on their phones, and most of those aren’t “traditional” gamers. Imagine how much that will shoot up when people find out they can win rewards for playing!

3. The mobile app economy is positively massive. It’s prompting a shift – people are now spending more time on their apps than online, yet only 1% of U.S. ad spending is on mobile. It’s an estimated $20 billion opportunity for advertisers – we are starting to see traction in our “moments of happiness” model and companies are starting to see that their investment will have great return. It’s a good time to be in this industry.

4. Your cereal box has more than just a toy inside it now. Kellogg’s started a consumer loyalty program that allows customers to redeem codes found in their cereal boxes for rewards. It’s a great idea, except for the part where you can only enter the codes online. Most people bring their phones to the breakfast table. Could be an easy tie in!

5. Why Mobile Beats Social: the title speaks for itself. Digiday has an interesting dialogue with Jay Henderson, Strategy Program Director at IBM, about how this holiday season, the massive traffic growth in mobile will drive sheer numbers in retail through mCommerce – a growing trend that will only become more and more palpable over time.

Let us know what you think about the Kiip app! I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. We’re always working hard to make the experience better and better.

Thanks for reading!

Brian Wong, CEO

Today Kiip is excited to announce a ‘moment of happiness’ of our own – an $11 million Series B round of very smart and influential money, far and away our largest funding event to date.

We are honored that Relay Ventures has decided to lead this round. This is a firm that knows the mobile world extremely well and has an uncanny track record for identifying and turbo-charging winning ideas, and we are thrilled that Relay Ventures managing director Kevin Talbot will be joining the Kiip board of directors. This B round also enabled us to further reinforce our relationship with our Series A champions Hummer Winblad and True Ventures. As a part of this round, various strategics also participated. These companies are multinational brands with an amazing history in the advertising space. We will be sharing more about these companies in the weeks to come.

This major infusion of capital and influence is a tremendous validation of our game-changing mobile rewards model. We’re excited to continue to bring even more rewards to your everyday lives and to also build products that are a joy to use by our developer partners and our brand advertisers. Even better, this funding provides us with the juice to widen our lead in the space that we created, and to establish moments-based rewards as a mainstay of how people everywhere engage with games, apps, brands – and above all, moments.

Kiip playing,

Brian, Courtney, Amadeus & the Kiip Team

We’re happy to announce our involvement in the first-ever eCommerce Hack Day in New York City!

When: August 4-5, 2012
Where: The Hatchery (500 7th Avenue- 37th street, 17th floor)
URL: http://www.ecommercehackday.com/

Our friends at Dwolla have partnered up with Etsy to organize a day of hacking focused on anything eCommerce. They are looking to bring together all touch points of eComm and stoke the flames of creativity! So if you’re a developer and think you have what it takes, not so fast… First, you have to solve a special puzzle. The first 200 hackers to solve will get free tickets. (Click the “Developers” button for instructions)

Other companies involved are Constant Contact, Ordr.in, Sincerely, Zappos, Twilio, BustedTees, Kiip, Gumroad, and Stripe. More partners expected to join.

Prizes and judges will be announced before the event so stay tuned. You can follow @EcommerceHackNY for updates about the event.

Click here for Dwolla’s official announcement.

Think you can bring rewards to eCommerce? Go Hack!

We have been absolutely humbled by the responses we have received from independent developers, service companies, and mentors who have volunteered to participate.

When we launched our Build Fund, our goal was not only to support independent developers, but also be part of a larger initiative to jumpstart the creative process. We hope that we were able to inspire the community to developing innovative apps that may change the status quo some day.

With over 250 applicants, the Build Fund wouldn’t have been the same without the tremendous amount of positive support from the independent development community. So from all of us, thank you.

With that said, we’re excited to announce the winners of our inaugural Build Fund!

Massive Finger

Pinball Maniacs

Montreal, Canada

An original mix of Pinball and Breakout, Pinball Maniacs is a pinball-inspired adventure game.

Tiny Hearts

Instamatch

Toronto, Canada

InstaMatch is a clever twist on the traditional card matching game. Using the popular iPhone Instagram app, your goal is to match two similar photos of the same kind.

Mutant Games

JetBee

Palma de Mallorca, Spain

JetBee is a casual arcade game, where players take control of a bee by tilting the device.

Pictorious

Pictorious

New York, NY

Pictorious is a photo-sharing app with a twist - users can create competitions and challenge friends to take awesome photos.

Fufu Labs

Tinygram

Davao City, Philippines

Tinygram lets anyone create 8x8 tile art, with limited color tiles, which they replenish by gifting their artwork to friends, creating a viral loop.

LOCQL

Discoverful

Redmond, WA

Discoverful is a social travel discovery app. Using geo-tagged and community-rated photos with comments, users can decide on their next travel destinations through browsing photos uploaded by the community.

LVL6

Lost Nations

Palo Alto, CA

Lost Nations is a fantasy-based MMORPG, where two warring factions are destined to fight for dominance in a post-apocalyptic world.

Kahnoodle

Kahnoodle

New York, NY

Khanoodle is a part game, part date night planner, and part relationship tool to build intimacy between couples. Couples can earn “kudos” for showing their partner love to get inspired to try new experiences.

LovblGames

Unnamed

Arad, Romania

Asteroids are falling and your hero is a pterodactyl whose mission is dodge objects, survive volcano eruptions, and fly over fields of magma to safety.

Zeenoh Games

Balloon Getaway

Mandaluyong City, Philippines

Balloon Getaway is a flying game, where an aviator named Jetro must flee from the bandits who intend to keep him captive.

Estudio256

Iron Jack

La Caruna, Spain

Iron Jack is a space pilot who is in charge of harvesting and delivering valuable fuel from outer space to the world. Wearing only his emergency jetpack and space suit, Jack flies around the arena, collecting dispersed valuables over unfriendly territory.

Alphanoize

CheeseMan

Hennigsdorf, Germany

Inspired by Super Meat Boy, CheeseMan is an action platformer game where the player must guide Cheeseman through blades, spikes, and cannon balls to defeat the evil Professor Mousky.

Boiled Goose

Merlin’s Marble

Minneapolis, MN

Merlin’s Marble is a visually appealing medieval marble roller game featuring 18 levels of ledges, bridges, twists, turns, moving platforms, and elevators.

EnsenaSoft

Mahjong Deluxe

Mazatlan, Mexico

Mahjong Deluxe is based on a classic Chinese game where your goal is to eliminate all the tiles from the board.

Mobuku

Monpon

Glendale, CA

MonPon is a freemium social game that allows users to grow, nurture, and battle their unique monsters. Players can earn virtual currency for buying different armory, tonics, and potions for their monsters.

int13

ARDefender

Paris, France

ARDefender is an augmented reality game where your goal is to defend your tower on your desk from nasty opponents. The game uses your phone’s camera to imprint an imaginary “tower” on your desk.

Lab 927

Toy Adventures

Natick, MA

Toy Adventures is a 2D endless runner type game, where a toy is trying to escape a toy store.

Zone 5 Interactive

Tiny Nova

Rego Park, NY

Tiny Nova is a face-paced, arcade type game in which the player’s goal is to combine nova seeds, make as many tiny explosions (novas) as you can before the screen is full of nova seeds.

Floppy Entertainment

Lil Sherman

Orange Park, FL

In Lil Sherman, the player controls a WWII tank that must protect its Command Center and the incoming Convoy of Supplies. It’s a twist on the classic tower defense type game.

Sealman Studio

VelociBoard

Budapest, Hungary

VelociBoard is an endless runner mobile game, in which the player takes the role of a velociraptor named El Mariachi who plays a guitar while riding on his skateboard.

Hello Kiipers!

First thing’s first: we are going to be at Cannes starting today in the afternoon. This is the first time that Kiip is presenting on the world stage at this capacity and we’re super honored and super excited (to say the very least). Kiip will be on stage on Wednesday morning alongside Jim Trebilcock, CMO at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and Nick Pahade, President and CEO of Initiative North America. We’ll have a chance to share the results of our successful launch campaign with the client on stage - the first time we’ve ever done this.

Talking about firsts, Kiip is also holding a very limited-space yacht reception Wednesday evening at 6pm. Space is limited so if you’re in town and would love to drop by, please e-mail eamonn@kiip.me as soon as you can. We’d love to have all of you, but the limiting factor will definitely be space. Apologies in advance if we fill up, we still love you =)

Here’s some recent press about Kiip that we wanted to share along with a few tidbits:

• Business Insider named us one of the most important figures in mobile advertising. I personally don’t feel like I belong on this list (we’re amongst amazing company) but nevertheless, certainly an honor, and we wanted to share it with you.

• Adaline Lau from ClickZ Asia caught us in Hong Kong and posted a really awesome piece about our thoughts on a potential Asian expansion.

• After speaking at Echelon 2012 in Singapore, e27 posted up a nice summary piece of our main talking points on incorporating emotion into user experience.

• Venturebeat has a preview article about our panel at Mobilebeat on July 10-11th in San Francisco.

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

1. For all the hoopla about people streaming video content on their smartphones, tablets, PCs and gaming consoles, gaming is still the preferred activity for all these devices, according to new research from PwC U.S. What’s most interesting is that people across the board spend more time playing games on the various devices than they do watching TV or movies on them.

2. Whatever the activity, mobile is a dominant presence in many of our day-to-day lives and isn’t showing signs of waning anytime soon. Which means mobile advertising should also be capturing more ad spend as it relates to the increase in time spent on various devices, but that’s not always the case. Many people think mobile advertising is a huge opportunity in part because it is the medium where ad spend is lagging the most behind time spent. Business Insider explores the opportunity for mobile advertising with Nexage’s CEO Ernie Cormier and CMO Victor Milligan, who understand that billions of people will soon carry smartphones on them 16 hours a day and that ad spend doesn’t have to catch up to time spent for mobile advertising to be a huge opportunity.

3. All of this momentum and activity on mobile clearly demonstrates that consumers are moving beyond the stage of just checking emails or browsing for deals on their mobile devices. Instead, according to new research from CouponCabin.com, consumers are more interested in instantly acting on deals and offers that they can use right on the spot. For marketers, the study backs up the need for brands to deliver targeted, relevant deals to mobile shoppers. Of course, as expected, we’re huge fans of this over here at Kiip. We believe that instant gratification and hyper-targeted rewards yield the most effective results.

4. One of the ways we’ve been able to effectively introduce native advertising vis-à-vis rewards to the mobile gaming world, was to work with indie game developers from the start to bake in Kiip rewards. We also recently launched an indie developer build fund as well. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget the little guys when we’re often bombarded with news from big guys like Zynga and Electronic Arts. But All Things D’s Eric Johnson recently made a compelling case for remembering the independent game developers.

5. With all of this activity in mobile and mobile advertising, it’s important to find effective ways to measure all of these moving parts so you know where to put your brand and advertising dollars. To that end, comScore recently released Mobile Metrix 2.0, its next generation mobile behavioral measurement service. Analysis of the share of time spent across apps and browsers revealed that even though these access methods had similar audience sizes, apps drove the lion’s share of engagement, representing 4 in every 5 mobile media minutes.

6. Mobile gaming is no longer niche, according to a survey of adults conducted by the Information Solutions Group. 44% of the surveyed group mentioned that they had played at least one mobile game in the past month - up from 29% from the year prior. This is great news about adoption - and not a surprise to any of us over here.

7. Coca-Cola exec Tara Scarlett spoke at the MMA Forum recently and had this gem of a quote: “Plan with mobile as the first screen. The fact that the lowest common denominator offers the highest possible engagement is a big opportunity.”. We couldn’t agree more, and can’t wait to see that pushed into reality with the various vendors that you’re working with ;)

See you in Cannes!

Thanks for reading!

Brian Wong, CEO

We’ve got some exciting news to share about letting prospective users know your game is Kiip enabled. We’ve made available Icon Assets for your applications icon, so you can put a K on it.

Here’s an example:

By having the K on your icon, you’re letting users know that they can win rewards just by using your application. We’ve included PNG’s and Photoshop templates for all necessary sizes.

You can download the Kit and read about the specifications on Github: https://github.com/kiip/icon-assets.

The submission deadline (May 30th) for the Build Fund is just around the corner.

After May 30th, we’re going to spend some time with our team and advisors deciding who will be selected for the 20 slots.

We’ll be publicly announcing the winners in early to mid June.

Since launching our Build Fund initiative, we’ve received a tremendous amount of excitement from mentors, service companies, and developers. We’re excited to review all of our applicants and begin the next steps!

Check out the fund page here to apply (if it’s not after May 30th!) and to see the advisors and mentors list.

We’re excited to announce the release of our PhoneGap plugin for Android.

PhoneGap allows rapid iteration and deployment of your application, and in a continued effort to support all platforms possible, we’ve added support for Kiip.

We currently only support Android for PhoneGap, An iOS version is on the way!

Feel free to checkout the source on Github. Pull requests encouraged!

Hello Kiipers! Since we last chatted, Kiip’s world tour went off without a hitch and has brought several massive new developments that we’d love to share with you. First of all - hope you all had an amazing Mother’s Day. We were proud to repeat our well-known Mother’s Day campaign with the one and only 1-800-Flowers.com the week before. We were glad that we were able to thank our Moms with something a little extra and we couldn’t be more happy about it. Here’s a bit more of what happened below:

As well, on the clients side, we’re stoked that we recently brought on American Apparel onto our platform. Ryan Holiday, their Director of Marketing, recently wrote this contributing piece about Kiip in Forbes. We’re very humbled by it over here and are amazed at how well it touches on most of the points as to why we are all treking hard towards this vision over here at Kiip. We wanted to share it with you:

Forbes: Online Advertising’s Greatest Missed Opportunity? Kiip.me Founder Brian Wong Answers

Speaking of more rewards - as I had teased in the last Kiip Up, our developer fund’s deadline was extended from April 30th to the end of this month. We also added on Amazon Web Services, Crittercism, Urban Airship, Stackmob, and Localytics onto our pallette of goodies. As a result, every one of our 20 winners will walk away with much much more than just $5,000. Roy Bahat, President of IGN, and Perry Tam, Founder of Storm8, have both also agreed to join a group of advisors that will be spending time with the winners as well. We couldn’t be more pleased by how the fund has evolved. Here’s some more coverage on the extension:

TheNextWeb: Kiip extends deadline for its Build Fund, adds mentors and services to the program Techcrunch: Kiip Extends Developer Fund Deadline, Sweetens Pot With Services And Advisors

This month, you’ll be able to find Kiip at:

• May 22, 2012: iMedia Agency SummitiMedia Agency Summit, Colorado Springs, CO (we’re a featured SoLoMo company!)

• May 23-24, 2012: Social Gaming Summit, Berlin, Germany

• June 11-12, 2012: Echelon 2012, Singapore

• June 15-16, 2012: Nonick 2012, Bilbao, Spain (meet Courtney Guertin, our co-founder and CTO)

• June 19, 2012: ICT Spring, Luxembourg

• June 20, 2012: Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, Cannes, France

This past month, we were able to share some stage time with other amazing companies at #BigOmaha. I was really happy I was able to share my message around getting lucky. It was fun to have a chance to reveal a lot around the process of luck generation. If you’re curious, there’s more in this wrap up article here: [11]Brian Wong: ‘Kiip Getting Lucky’

Almost done! Our last update is around our coninued intiatives with the Guinness Book of World Records - this past month we crowned several mobile world records through our “triathlon” of sorts with the games Slam Dunk Basketball, Mega Jump, and Monster Shooter. More on the kickassery that occured, here:

MSNBC: Guinness to recognize achievements in iOS and Android games

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

1. Our friends at Pocketgamer examined the revenue generation issues many app developers face. According to the story, which looks at research from App Promo, 6 out of 10 mobile developers don’t generate enough revenue to break even. The message as a whole is that developers need to be prepared to spend money to earn money, with top earners spending an average of $30,000 on marketing. But that’s not the only way for developers to make money if they monetize their apps with baked in revenue opportunities that create stickiness and brings value to end user. This is definitely an issue close to our hearts at Kiip as well and also one of the driving forces behind the launch of Kiip’s $100,000 Build Fund.

2. Maybe these developers’ fortunes will change for the better as Madison Ave. is finally jumping on the social gaming bandwagon according to a recent story in Reuters. Their interest can certainly be tied to the number of people who play social games ballooning to hundreds of millions globally. But, for advertisers it’s not just the size of this audience that’s so enticing, more so it’s the fact that they can geographically and demographically target this hyper-engaged audience with brand messages in new and interesting ways beyond the banner. We’ve been spreading this gospel at Kiip since Day 1. Welcome aboard, Madison Ave. And, not a moment too soon since display ads are becoming irrelevant according to Percolate’s James Gross.

3. Gross gets real about the future of display advertising or lack thereof with his latest contribution for Advertising Age’s DigitalNext. Why? Because there is no such thing as display advertising on most of the platforms where consumer attention is flowing from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to Pinterest, G+, Instagram. This new world with no special display unit box to buy is a big shift from a brand perspective and these platforms will all force companies to act more human and interesting in nature. All I have to say is, it’s nice to see the rest of the industry starting to come around to our way of thinking here at Kiip.

4. Dan Greenberg from Sharethrough shares this exact sentiment. “Native advertising” is growing in prominence and high-trafficked destinations are beginning to figure out ways to create integrated advertising that is thought through in the product from the ground up - and not simply an add-on that’s managed by external code. Business models are thriving on creating new units. We believe it’s still less ideal to rely on traditional display and repurposing it for various platforms. It comes down to picking the most prominent sites and destinations that you realize your target market is spending the most time in. That’s the best starting point to being able to use resources wisely to make the most out of whatever native solution can benefit you the most - and mobile apps and mobile gaming could be it.

5. Frankly, there’s no turning back now anyway. The era of AppNation (and Gamer Nation) has arrived, or so says All Things D and Nielsen, which chronicles the rise of “AppNation” across Android and iOS between March 2011 and March 2012. The research proves that Mobile is now the ‘first’ screen with high engagement numbers and audience and should be a priority for marketers and not an afterthought accounting for just 5 percent of total ad spend or just $1.6 billion in 2011. Kiip innovating!

Excited to catch up with all of you wherever you’ll find Kiip around the world in the coming month. We really appreciate all your support getting here. Here’s to much more magic to come.

Thanks for reading!

Brian Wong, CEO

We just released translations of iOS and Android SDK documentation for Simplified Chinese. This is part of an ongoing effort to adapt to the evolving development ecosystem.

If you’re interested in seeing a translation in your language, or feel we could improve the existing translations in some way, please email support@kiip.me.

Check out the translation - for iOS or Android.