Kiip it Real

Reward Anyone: Self-service Comes to Kiip

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:39:10 -0500

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.

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:32:40 -0500

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

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:17:43 -0500

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

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:32:20 -0500

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

And full coverage can be found here.

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

After only a year, Starbucks’ mobile payments app has already hosted 26 million transactons. That means users have reloaded their mobile Starbucks’ cards with more than $110 million in 2011!
Starbucks is certainly enjoying a popular app, and many other companies want in on the action. But holiday apps can be risky. Check out these considerations so your seasonal app can be a success.
If the seasonal thing isn’t for you, you could always hope for some celebrity antics. Thanks to Alec Baldwin — who recently refused to stop playing Words With Friends on an American Airlines flight — Zynga is enjoying some extra attention. Despite Baldwin getting kicked off his flight, Zynga maintains it’s “A. Baldwin 1, American Air 0.”
Words with Friends may be one of Zynga’s most popular games, but what will the next big mobile game be? Best Buy and Hooked Media are teaming up to find the best Android mobile game developers. The winner also gets a sweet bonus - a $5,000 online ad package from VentureBeat.
And speaking of mobile ads - Apple is once again reducing the required buy-in for brands seeking to advertise on their iAd platform. It started at $1 million, and this year it was $500,000. Now it’s down to $400,000!
But despite all these mobile developments and successes, we’ve barely scratched the surface of mobile potential. Mobile may capture 10.1% of our attention, but it only captures .9% of ad spending. As one continues to grow, we think so will the other.

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

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

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

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:03:55 -0500

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:

How’s the mobile space doing in terms of revenue numbers? Well, it’s definitely where the money’s at — as evidenced by impressive mobile ad and revenue numbers.
While the world’s population recently reached 7 billion, the number of mobile connections worldwide is about to hit 6 billion by the end of this year. And this holiday season, mobile devices are moving to the top of high-tech shopping lists — with mobile phones ranking No. 3 and tablets and e-eaders ranking No. 4.
Speaking of the holidays, early figures from online retailers in the US show that mobile traffic over Thanksgiving was up 160% from last year. Is it because consumers were using their mobile devices to search for deals before hitting the stores on Friday? Well, they were using their mobile devices on Friday too — with mobile driving 14.3% of online traffic and 9.8% of sales on Black Friday. That’s a serious increase from last year.
And with the successes of the mobile space come not only the challenges of mobile advertising, but also also the opportunities for ad models to get creative and interesting. Brands are starting to jump on those opportunities by embracing what consumers really want: exclusive rewards *hint* *hint* *wink*.
Those rewards could be in the form of special offers and coupons — such as those Walgreens offered their smartphone customers for Black Friday — or redeemable loyalty points and gifts — such as those Visa is offering their customers through a partnership with shopping rewards app Shopkick. We’re big fans of our friends at Walgreens and how they’ve innovated on the mobile couponing front.

Kiip and Gamesalad Level Up

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 01:34:11 -0500

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

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:42:00 -0500

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:

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.
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.
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?).
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?
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?

Happy early holidays all, and see you next week! For those of you in Los Angeles this coming Tuesday on the 22nd, we’d love to say hi. Let me know if you’d like to catch up.

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

Kiip Up #8: Love

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:08:41 -0500

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:38:00 -0500

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:17:00 -0400

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:

As if we needed any more evidence: the rise of mobile devices and apps, mobile payments, and m-commerce have all contributed to even more tremendous growth in the mobile industry.
Just look at Verizon’s numbers from the third quarter — smartphones accounted for 39% of wireless devices running on the network, and they sold almost 3 million Android devices and almost 2 million iPhones. This was all before the launch of the iPhone 4S.
Mobile advertising is similarly poised for an explosion. This year, U.S. mobile ad spend is expected to surpass $1 billion for the first time, driven by increased confidence from advertisers and the increased scale they reap from their investment in mobile ads. This is exciting news for all of us.
As the mobile ad biz continues to grow, here are 5 trends — from greater interactivity to mobile-social as the “personal cloud” — that will shape the future of the industry.
And speaking of the future, the mobile and digital revolution will leave no industry untouched. For the music and sports ticket sales business, the secondary market on the social web has already brought change; Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard discusses this, as well as the future of live events. This is not a talk to be missed.
But whether you’re selling smartphones, advertising on them or selling tickets on them, it all comes down to the ability to create an emotional connection between the brand and the customer.
It’s all about learning to think in the “mode” of the consumer, which means addressing consumers’ personal needs and their current state — biological (e.g., hungry) , environmental (e.g., playing a mobile game while waiting in line at the drugstore) and emotional (e.g., happiness at finally having beat that last level)… I guess that Carl’s Jr. reward starting to look pretty tasty now =)

Here’s the last hurrah before Thanksgiving and the holidays hit. We can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on!

Kiip Up #5: Chicago

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:14:56 -0400

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:

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*
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.
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.

Thanks for reading!

Brian Wong, CEO

Our Weekly Update: Kiip Up #4

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:31:00 -0400

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.
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.
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.
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.

Announcing the Official Kiip / Mega Jump Guinness World Records Holder

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:04:27 -0400

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!

Our Weekly Update: Kiip Up #3

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:59:00 -0400

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.

—

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

Bringing The Ultimate Recognition to Gamers: The World Record

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:06:00 -0400

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!
B

Here 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 Record

And much more!

Kiip Teams Up With Verizon Wireless

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:36:00 -0400

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

Our CEO, Brian Wong, speaks to Kevin Rose about the early days...

Fri, 20 May 2011 14:09:00 -0400

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.

Out of Thin Air

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:19:00 -0400

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.