Storm8 Grabs 2M Downloads In One Day On Christmas
How big is Christmas for mobile app developers? For one San Francisco Bay Area-based game maker, it meant 2 million downloads in a single day. Christmas is unsurprisingly the biggest day of the year for many app makers as consumers unwrap brand-new phones and rush to the store to test out new apps. Storm8, which is a bootstrapped casual game developer out of Redwood Shores, saw four times the number of downloads they normally experience on a Tuesday. They also saw about 2.5 million hours of gameplay that day and up to 4.5 times the level of average revenue per daily active users, as consumers spent more on in-app purchases. Holiday-themed items like virtual Christmas trees and snow globes were the most popular. The 4x increase that Storm8 saw is consistent with what other analytics companies have picked up over the holidays. Flurry, an analytics company that tracks more than 260,000 apps, reported that device activations more than quadrupled to 17.4 million on Christmas Day. They saw a similar ...
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HTML5 Gaming Gets Another Contender With Goko’s New Platform
HTML5 gaming is getting another wind this year with a new cohort of startup contenders. One of the latest is Goko, a Redwood City-based company that's trying to make it easy for game developers publish, monetize and distribute their HTML5-based work across multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Facebook and Google+. They're coming out today with a multiplayer version of a Settlers of Catan massive-multiplayer game called Dominion. They're also unleashing a software development kit for HTML5 game developers to build on the platform. "At a higher level, we're taking HTML5 content and we're distributing and publishing it out to different channels out on the web," said chief executive Ted Griggs.
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Facebook’s Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience
Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook's platform, where it's been and where it's going as a result. Although the company's stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore -- by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.
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Live Now: Watch TechCrunch’s Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp
For all its successes Facebook has yet to conquer mobile. With that thought in mind TechCrunch is hosting our 5th annual CrunchUp today at the gorgeous Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA. Throughout the day leading developers, Facebook executives and industry experts will take the CrunchUp stage and speak on the state of Facebook’s platform, products, ads and mobile initiatives. Our live stream is available below, thanks to our partner Ustream. You can join the conversation on Twitter using #crunchup.
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Zynga And Bump Delve Into Their Social-Mobile Future This Friday At The Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp
Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we'll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they're surviving in this new world. Get your CrunchUp tickets here. Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been both building and buying its way into mobile gaming to adapt for this change. It's had a few wins, like the growth of its "With Friends" franchise, and some losses, like the decline of Draw Something's traffic. Bump, meanwhile, has been mobile-first since it launched in 2009. The company started out with an app that lets you swap contact information and other data by tapping two phones together -- and it's on track to hit 100 million downloads later this summer. And the company has just gone straight to the heart of mobile-social, with the launch of a new app called Flock that uses geofencing to help you ...
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