Lisa and Itamar will be attending Casual Connect in Seattle next week. Come check out Lisa’s panel on Tuesday afternoon, or corner Itamar for one of the first demos of our new ItemStarter (ssh – it’s awesome)! Contact them directly at itamar@twofish.com or lisa@twofish.com. And tell them not to go to the fishmarket!!!

Justin Smith, the opening commentator, gave a great overview on what’s happening in social gaming, on platforms and off. Hard to believe the concept of ‘social gaming’ is only 2 years old. Justin showed a nice screenshot of the TwofishAnalytics dashboard in his presentation – we’re slide on 25. http://www.slideshare.net/justinsmith/justin-smith-inside-social-games-social-gaming-summit-talk-slides





Siqi Chen of Serious Business and David King of (lil)GreenPatch did an awesome job of covering the importance of using data and metrics, though their focus is totally on web analytics and very basic commerce data. We loved what they had to say and the only thing we’d add is: yes, but once you’ve done that, take it to the next level with post-conversion analytics. Slideshow available here: https://files.getdropbox.com/u/1006370/Metrics.pdf

Turns out on-platform payments are just not a priority for Facebook and Myspace. Payments, and other platform issues, were tackled during the social game platform panel, moderated by Michael Arrington, with Jason Oberfest of MySpace, Gareth Davis from Facebook, Andrew Sheppard from hi5 and James Liu of Oak Park (Xiaonei and may other China-based social properties) at today’s Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco.

Jason Oberfest listed the important things a platform provides. In his “second tier down”, he included payments. The panelists concurred that payments were important, but Facebook agreed with Myspace, not very important.

Arrington was surprised and asked the developers in the audience if they agreed. In a crowd of about 250, 3 people raised their hands for “payments were very important.” Arrington was still surprised and asked the panel again.

Facebook’s rep, Gareth Davis, agreed: the ecosystem, with so many successful 3rd party payment gateways, is already healthy. So it’s not obvious that Facebook Credits are important.

Hi5 demurred a little, pointing out that the real value of Hi5 coins is that it enables developers to monetize Thailand without thinking about the appropriate money or currency; you just accept Hi5 coins. Andrew Sheppard also stated that hi5 ‘wants to help developers build sustainable businesses’ and allowing direct payments is one way they see that happening.

Xioanei already has a payment gateway, billing services and partners with developers, so while China may be behind in e-commerce, their platforms are ahead in allowing direct payment to developers. Especially to the developers in whose business they have a direct interest.

Here at Twofish, we think that global branded currencies supported by the platforms will be an important part of the future of virtual currencies and v-wallets, but that they’re not the whole picture, or even the most important part of it. We were a little surprised that the major platforms agreed with us, though!

Twofish Director of Engineering Greg Doane will be speaking on Wednesday June 17th talking about our favorite topic: innovation. How do startups switch gears, reverse engineer and grow, all at the same time? Greg tells all.

Java SIG: “Innovating Within an Established Startup: A Story of Groovy
and Grails”

6:30pm – 9:00pm June 17, 2009
Reed Smith Law Firm
1999 Harrison St
Oakland, CA

Innovating Within an Established Startup: A Story of Groovy and Grails

Suppose you had an enterprise class, soap-based, EJB-based financial
application made for java clients and servers. And suppose your CTO
suddenly told you that the company was going to focus on social
networking applications, and that you needed to build out an API that
was friendly to PHP developers. What would you do?

Speaker: Greg Doane

Greg Doane is the Director of Engineering for Twofish, Inc,
responsible for development of the Twofish Elements virtual economy
platform. Prior to Twofish, Greg served as an Engineering Manager at
Yahoo!, where he oversaw community platforms and avatars. Prior to
Yahoo!, Greg co-founded Fogbreak Software, where he designed and built
a supply chain liability analysis and management product. He also ran
the web development group for iVendor, a private-label e-commerce
infrastructure provider, and has worked at OnDisplay, Verity and NEC
America. Greg studied Computer Science at The University of
California, Berkeley.

REGISTER NOW: https://www.123signup.com/register?id=jfphy

Free for eBig Members, Guests $10 for pre-registration or $20 at the door.

Yesterday’s DevJam at MySpace HQ in San Francisco hosted multiple sessions that focused on getting started with building and running MySpace apps. The most interesting session we attended was a presentation by Andrew Trader, EVP of Business Dev. at Zynga entitled ‘A Case Study on Monetization’.

Zynga certainly has lead the way on a number of monetization channels; they pioneered selling poker chips online and were one of the early leaders in A/B testing. Today, their revenue comes from three roughly equal sources: CPA, CPM, and virtual goods.

Besides poker chips, most of the other virtual goods earned and purchased are of the “invest and express” variety: décor for spaces (in YoVille) and limited edition items (in Street Racing).
Andrew also shared some interesting experiences:

• Early on, Zynga games used ‘gating’ which forced people to invite friends or monetize somehow to get to levels or special properties. Gating made for a horrible user experience and removing those requirements showed a significantly positive long-term impact.
• After acquiring YoVille, Zynga introduced a new, second currency that confused users and caused more problems than it solved. Looking back, they aren’t sure they’d use a second currency again.
• Scarcity pays off. In Street Racing, new limited edition items are introduced every week to keep the content fresh. Typically, these items sell out within one or two days. For example, when they introduced Silver Knuckles, they sold 4200 pairs in 36 hours (generating over $25K in revenue).

But, most importantly, as we’ve heard from other social game and virtual goods apps, the drive to gain and retain users is more important than actual monetization, and Zynga shares the belief. ‘Making games that are socially engaging’ as a mission statement is a common theme for successful social gaming companies.

Twofish CTO Bill Grosso will join execs from New Relic, Offerpal Media and Share This for a panel discussion “Using Business Intelligence to Manage the Performance of a Startup.” The topics – capturing and using Business Intelligence to fuel startup growth and success – are near and dear to the Twofish heart. What BI can you not live without, how do you make sense of it and why does it matter? We’re happy to have the opportunity to share our thoughts and hope you can join us as well. Details below:

6:30 PM – 9:00 PM May 19, 2009
SAP
Building D, Southern Cross Room
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
http://www.sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Calendar.eventDetail&eventID=13363

The upcoming SDForum Developer Conference, ‘Shaping the New Age of Application Development’ is hosting a panel discussion called New Business Models, featuring Twofish’s own Lisa Rutherford along with Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, K.V. Rao, Founder and President of Zuora and Andrew Chen of Futuristic Play, to be moderated by Chris Yeh of PBWiki.  The panel will address the future challenges and successes in monetization strategy. Lisa will be on hand to share her experience and insight on creating sustainable business models and what virtual economies can do to help drive growth and retain users.

SDForum provides a resource for Bay Area developers, engineers, investors and business leaders to network and exchange information on emerging technologies and best practices. And it just so happens that Bill Grosso, CTO & VP of Engineering at Twofish, plays an integral role in these informative events, as a member of the SDForum Board of Directors.

So for all of you developers, engineers and Twofish fans looking for insight into the present and future of the industry, be sure to attend, and don’t miss Lisa’s panel. We hope to see you there!

Location:
8:30AM April 17 – 3:00PM April 18, 2009
The Tech Mart
5201 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA
95054