Virtual goods remain a promising alternative to advertising, and even to subscription revenue for many games and social networks. As mobile games continue to play an important role in gaming revenue, I would expect to see the sales of virtual goods continue to skew toward mobile devices as users seek instant gratification and bite-sized chunks of high-quality gameplay.
The follow-up to last year's survey reveals that buying habits aren't … Read more
Gaming on cell phones has long promised to be an important revenue generator for mobile carriers and game developers, but it took quite awhile for it to drive real revenue in the U.S. But worldwide, especially in Asia, mobile gaming has been emerging as an important revenue generator for a number of years.
Last week, research firm Gartner predicted that worldwide mobile-game revenue will grow 19 percent, reaching $5.6 billion in 2010 with an expectation to more than double to $11.4 billion in 2014.
Mobile gaming is a very broad classification which also includes new and interesting … Read more
With more applications being built for the Web, performance testing is critical to determining the proper approach to scaling both applications and infrastructure. But for many years performance testing was largely a rich-man's game, primarily because of the expense of setting and maintaining a large server infrastructure that can simulate real-world traffic.
Hosted testing solutions make a lot of sense from both the user and provider perspective. Considering the vast computing power available at your fingertips there are few reasons why you would want to own the infrastructure, or not take advantage of the latest offerings from providers both … Read more
IBM on Wednesday is set to announce a new portfolio of solutions and services to help enterprises analyze large volumes of data. IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is based on Apache Hadoop, an open-source technology designed for analysis of big volumes of data.
IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is made up of a package of Hadoop software and services, BigSheets, a beta product designed to help business professionals extract, annotate, and visually uncover insights from vast amounts of information quickly and easily through a Web browser, and industry-specific frameworks to help clients get started.
IBM has been aggressive in consuming and repackaging open-source projects … Read more
Mobile phones exclusive to Japan have long been more sophisticated than those in the rest of the world. And while smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry have changed the way U.S. consumers use mobile devices, the Japanese market continues to roll out new features and functions that can make the rest of feel a tad behind the curve.
Softbank, the third largest carrier in Japan, announced on Tuesday what are effectively "Twitter phones," using the app as a key marketing and sales driver. Twitter will be preinstalled on all 13 models rolling out this summer, either as … Read more
National Public Radio, which produces popular programs such as "All Things Considered," "Talk of the Nation," and "JazzSet," was an early adopter of Web technology, making its content available through a standards-based API, or application programming interface.
APIs are at the heart of many cloud services that provide for two-way, or read-write, communication such as Twitter or Salesforce.com.
A firehose of content (meaning read-only) is all well and good, but having the ability to integrate and tweak content into new forms makes it much more interesting.
Earlier this year, NPR announced API Ingest, … Read more
Invitation-based, private sale sites like Gilt, Vente-privee, and Ideeli have become all the rage over the last two years as entrepreneurs and investors have looked for new ways to reach customers who have more disposable income than the recession-burdened masses.
On Thursday, Thrillist, a provider of daily e-mails highlighting cool things to do, see, and buy, announced it would acquire JackThreads, a guy-oriented shopping site that runs daily specials for invitation-only members. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. (Note: in this case, invitations are given to pretty much anyone who asks, and are used as more of a … Read more
The number of followers a Twitter user has doesn't directly correlate as an indicator of influence, new research by Meeyoung Cha of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany demonstrates.
After looking at data from 52 million Twitter accounts including a more detailed look at the 6 million "active users" (or roughly 8.6 percent of the user base), Cha found that popular users with large number of followers "are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions."
The data in the paper also provides a number of interesting points related to how followers interact with the Twitter service, and how influence and fame don't always match up.
The most-followed users span a wide variety of public figures and news sources. They were news sources (CNN, New York Times), politicians (Barack Obama), athletes (Shaquille O'Neal), as well as celebrities like actors, writers, musicians, and models (Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears). The most retweeted users were content aggregation services (Mashable, TwitterTips, TweetMeme), businessmen (Guy Kawasaki), and news sites (The New York Times, The Onion). The most-mentioned users were mostly celebrities. Ordinary users showed a great passion for celebrities, regularly posting messages to them or mentioning them, without necessarily retweeting their posts. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. The top Twitter users had a disproportionate amount of influence, which was indicated by a power-law distribution Mainstream news organizations consistently spawned a high level of retweets over diverse topics. In contrast, celebrities were better at inducing mentions from their audience. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort. In order to gain and maintain influence, users need to keep great personal involvement.
New data from PlaySpan, a provider of payment and monetization solutions for online games and virtual worlds, shows that digital and virtual goods purchases are going global, and that revenues can be tracked to better ascertain the size of the market.
It's estimated that virtual goods will generate $1.6 billion in the U.S. in 2010. Some predict that sales of digital goods will account for 20 percent of gaming revenue by 2011.
As part of analyzing which players and geographies drive the most revenue, PlaySpan has settled on a metric of average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), … Read more
Companies are not only aware of the number of enterprise architecture designs but will soon embrace their diversity, according to a new report from analyst firm Gartner.
Gartner analysts predict that 95 percent of companies will support multiple approaches to enterprise architecture (EA) by 2015 and that the majority of clients will need to support a mixture of more than one of these approaches based on their business needs.
The important thing to note is the realization that enterprises will have no choice but to blend these architecture types into one larger strategy. Gone are days of attempting to strictly … Read more
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