The Top Mobile Games Are Grossing More Than 4X What They Were A Year Ago, GREE’s Dharni Says
After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. Initially set up after the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming network OpenFeint, the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games. It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built its business in astonishingly short eight years through being a major feature phone gaming platform. (Yes, eight years is short in Japan where the culture can be averse to risky, new entrepreneurial ventures.) They aimed to replicate that success as a dual game developer and platform in the West with a few big-ticket acquisitions. But now it appears that the U.S. arm is just doing games for now. “We’re pretty singularly focused on content,” said Anil Dharni, GREE’s senior vice president of studio operations, in an interview from the company’s Mission Bay offices. “The platform — whenever ...
acquisition
android
anil
attrition
bay
billion
business
ceo
citron
dharni
environment
eros
ex-funzio
funzio
gree
guidance
ios
japan
japanese
jason
million
mission
office
openfeint
operations
opportunity
resmini
responsibility
san francisco
west
yes
OpenFeint’s Eros Resmini Leaves GREE For EIR Role With Peter Relan
Eros Resmini, who oversaw developer relations for mobile-social gaming network OpenFeint through its $104 million acquisition by GREE, just left the Japanese gaming company not long after it transitioned its platform building strategy back to headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. He’s taking an entrepreneur-in-residence role with Peter Relan, who created gaming-centric incubator YouWeb and was a co-founder of mobile game developer Crowdstar, OpenFeint and HTML5 gaming startup Spaceport. Resmini couldn’t share any details on his next project, except that it won’t be in gaming and it will be something that will “reshape the startup growth landscape.” “I had a real great opportunity to learn about building and scaling companies. Now, it’s about trying something new,” said Resmini, who was most recently a senior vice president of marketing and developer relations at GREE. “The gaming industry is going through a period of maturity and consolidation, but that didn’t have any bearing ...
acquisition
apple
billion
consolidation
crowdstar
decision
dena
development
eir
eros
facebook
funzio
gree
html
ios
japan
japanese
maturity
million
office
openfeint
opportunity
peter relan
relations
resmini
spaceport
tokyo
west
western
youweb
The Surprising iOS Games That Saw The Most Active Usage In The U.S. Last Month
Because of the rankings, the top-grossing games and the ones that get the most downloads are known. But Apple and Google are much more conservative with what they reveal about apps and their active usage. And active usage is a far more important metric than the download, because the more retention and engagement an app has, the more opportunity there is for users to transact inside of it. Onavo, a Sequoia-backed company that tracks active app usage for millions of users through its data compression products, took at a look at the most used games in the U.S. in December. What Onavo calls “market share” below is the percentage of U.S. iPhone owners that used the game that month. Some of them are surprising. The top few like Zynga’s Words With Friends and Imangi Studio’s Temple Run are not. But the next one is — Touch Hockey from Flipside5. Flow by Big Duck Games comes after that. Following that is Rovio’s Angry Birds – an obvious candidate for one of the top 10 apps. If we look ...
android
apple
arts
billion
birds
birds-maker
business
ceo mark
compression
dirtybit
duck
engagement
funrun
google
hobbyist
imangi
ios
iphone
million
multibillion
norway
onavo
opportunity
pincus
retention
rovio
run-makers
science
sequoia-backed
trondheim
west
yes
zynga
A Look Into Japan’s Burgeoning App Economy
Japan, long called the “Galapagos Islands” of the mobile industry for its cornucopia of sophisticated and unusual feature phones, is finally transitioning to Android and iOS in a serious way. Given the country’s historically high levels of spending on mobile apps and games, it’s becoming a market that Android and iOS developers can’t ignore. For one, it surpassed the U.S. as the most lucrative market for Google Play last fall. App Annie, a mobile app intelligence firm that started out of Beijing, took an in-depth look at the Japanese market. Ironically, Japan has had a relatively slow transition to smartphones if you consider how advanced handsets were throughout the last decade. At the end of 2011, only 23 percent of handsets being used in the country were smartphones. That’s because the carriers like NTT DoCoMo, Softbank and KDDI are extraordinarily powerful. They, like their counterparts in the rest of the world, have historically been the gatekeepers for content. They took ...
android
annie
apple
beijing
business
dena
galapagos
google
gree
intelligence
ios
iphone
ironically
itunes
japan
japanese
kddi
ntt docomo
population
softbank
transition
west
Surfing Robot Tracks Great White Sharks
ackthpt writes "A network of fixed buoys and solar powered surfing robots called Wave Gliders are set to track Great White Sharks in the Pacific, off the California coast near San Francisco, between Monterey Bay and Tomales Point. According to PhysOrg, 'The self-propelled wave and solar-powered glider is part of a new network of data receivers on fixed buoys will pick up signals from acoustic tags on animals passing within 1,000 feet and transmit the data to a research team on shore, led by Stanford University Marine Sciences Prof. Barbara Block.' Related to the project is 'Shark Net,' a new iOS app 'available free of charge at the Apple app store, created by Dr. Block and her colleagues with developers from TOPP, EarthNC and Gaia GPS to enable a direct, personal connection between the public and wild marine animals and to raise public awareness of the ocean wilderness teeming with life just off North America's West Coast.'"
apple
awareness
barbara
bay
california
connection
earthnc
gaia
gps
ios
marine
monterey
north america
pacific
physorg
prof
san francisco
science
stanford university
tomales
topp
west
white
wilderness
Found more than 1 month ago on channel
Slashdot