August 13, 2010

We are excited to announce that Jambool is becoming a part of the Google family today.

Jambool started as a social collaboration platform in 2006. In 2007, we shifted our
focus to build applications on social networks. Along with success, we found
fun and lucrative ways to monetize our apps – specifically virtual currency and
goods. That led us to create a platform to help developers create, host, manage and
monetize their virtual economies.

Social Gold has grown by leaps and bounds since it went live in 2008. In the first half of 2010, we’ve processed more than double the entire payment volume we processed in all of 2009. And we’ve welcomed hundreds of developers to our platform. The fact that our highest revenue day was in the last week attests to the continued growth of online gaming.

Our vision is to build world-class products that help developers manage and
monetize their virtual economies across the globe. When the opportunity arose to join forces with Google to execute against this vision, we couldn’t pass it up. We are thrilled to bring the Social Gold platform to Google’s global users. And we invite you – our customers, partners, and friends – to continue on the journey with us.

Over the last few years, we have had the great fortune of working with an incredible
team. Every day, we are amazed and humbled by what they have accomplished.
We have had terrific support from our partners, investors and advisors; and we are
lucky to have worked with each of them. Thank you!

As a team, we remain passionate about innovating on behalf of our customers. We aim to deliver the most frictionless, seamless transaction experience inside applications and games on every platform. We are thrilled to be part of Google, and we look forward to the exciting road ahead.

The game has only just begun.

Vikas & Reza

At the Casual Connect 2010 conference in Seattle, the Social Gold team hosted our second Cha-Ching! roundtables series. Our inaugural Cha-Ching! session launched back at GDC 2010 in March in San Francisco, CA. In an effort to continue analyzing and breaking down key topics related to online monetization and virtual economy management, attendees at Cha-Ching 2! broke into separate discussion groups with key senior leaders from Social Gold to cover four areas relevant to game developers:

1. Monetization 101
2. Manage Your Virtual Economy
3. Managing Fraud and Enabling Upside
4. Monetization in Flash

Social Gold's Brian Sharon (Senior Software Engineer) & Chris Houtzer (Sr. Director, Business Development) lead session on managing your virtual economy at the Cha-Ching 2! Monetization Roundtables

We’re excited to share the Executive Summary from these roundtables. Whether you joined us for one of the four breakout sessions in Seattle and want to see highlights from the other three sessions, or you simply didn’t make it to the show this year, then read on!

We are proud to share the news that we have been selected as one of the AlwaysOn Global 250 winners. The winners were chosen from among thousands of technology companies worldwide nominated by investors, bankers, journalists and industry leaders. We are honored to be recognized as an innovative, market-changing company with high-growth opportunities ahead.

Social Gold/Jambool was nominated under the “Enabling Tools and Devices” category, which stands to validate our leading virtual goods monetization platform. We provide an unparalleled payments experience to users and our in-Flash payments solution boosts monetization for developers.

AlwaysOn is a top business media brand in Silicon Valley and is hosting the Summit at Stanford this week in Palo Alto.

We are extending a big congratulations to our partner, Greenopolis, for launching the beta of social game, Oceanopolis, at Casual Connect in Seattle. Oceanoplis is a new game that offers real-life rewards for playing online. In Oceanopolis, players maintain their environmental surroundings and build a sustainable community. We are proud to be powering the game’s virtual economy.

Vikas Gupta, CEO, Social Gold, showcases the Oceanopolis beta during his Monetization Keynote at Casual Connect in Seattle

This week at the Casual Connect conference, we are releasing several updates to the Social Gold platform. Social Gold has established itself as the premier virtual economy monetization platform with hundreds of game developers leveraging our offering to monetize their games. The addition of a new Inventory Management API, improved Flash solution and updated Analytics features will make it easier for developers to improve optimization of their online virtual economies.

Flash Payments Solution

Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard on incorporating all the feedback we have received from hundreds of game developers around the world. The updated flash solution is packed with new features. Highlights include:

• Enhanced performance: We have optimized our caching support and redesigned the client/server interaction resulting in a Flash library that is 300% smaller than before.We have also reduced the load times by almost 200%.

• Smoother user experience: Users can now navigate through the payments UI with a tab button. With our focus on connecting users with the most relevant choice of payments in any region worldwide, we now support 27 international currencies via the Flash payments UI.

To test it out firsthand, you can sign up for a developer account at www.socialgold.net and download the new Flash client here.

Inventory Management API

We are proud to announce the release of our new Inventory Management API. This API will enable game developers to monetize their games more effectively. They will be able to track the highest-selling virtual goods and drive demand for individual virtual items by creating seasonal merchandise and limited-time discounts.

Game publishers often ask us to help them manage their virtual store and economy better. With the inventory management, we are bringing the “retail” world model to a virtual store with all the benefits of merchandising and optimizing revenue.

• Developer Console: Allows a game developer to manage their inventory, SKU and virtual items.  Additionally they can create discounts, filters and manage user backpacks (equivalent of a shopping cart) from one unified console.

Developer Console

• Filtering: Availability filters can be used to control the availability of items both by region & date

Filtering

• Analytics: provides merchants with insights into their virtual economy. They can look at the top selling virtual goods and assess how the goods are performing across various regions.

Product Analytics

The inventory management API is simple to use and integrate. You can get started with the inventory API here.

Analytics

We have revamped our analytics offering from the ground-up to help game publishers glean better insights into their monetization metrics and state of their virtual goods.

New features include

• Date/time picker (hourly, daily)
• Export raw data to csv
• New reports for payments and virtual currency
• Integration with Google visualization framework

Check out some screenshots below:

Conversion Rate

Summary View

Payment Methods

Revenue by Country

We hope you enjoy the new features we are releasing today. As always, send us your feedback and comments… We are listening!

Social Gold will be at Casual Connect in Seattle from July 20-22. Casual Connect is the leading casual games conference and we are excited to meet all the many talented minds, entrepreneurs and experts in the industry who will be in attendance over the next few days. If you are in Seattle, feel free to shoot us an e-mail at bd@jambool.com and we can meet up for some coffee or an after-conference cocktail.

You can catch Social Gold CEO, Vikas Gupta, speaking this Thursday, July 22 at 1pm at the Triple Door (216 Union Street). He’ll be sharing tips and insights on creating, managing and optimizing a virtual economy during the session, “Creating a Bull Market: How to Manage a Successful Virtual Economy.”

The Social Gold team will also be leading an interactive forum with the Cha Ching! Monetization Breakout Groups on Thursday, July 22 at 4 pm at the Triple Door. We’ll be leading discussions on four different topics so choose the one that interests you most and we’ll brainstorm, ideate and share ideas in a real-time community-driven incubator.

Track 1: Monetization 101

Learn the core fundamentals of monetizing your applications, including payment and currency options.  Discussion led by Mikhail Seregine, Principal Engineer, & Amit Fulay, Director Product Management.

Track 2: Manage Your Virtual Economy

How to manage inventory, analyze user data and monitor your core metrics.  Discussion led by Brian Sharon, Software Engineer & Chris Houtzer, Sr. Director Business Development.

Track 3: Managing Fraud and Enabling Upside

Learn best practices in fraud management, including how to distinguish big spenders from bad actors.  Discussion led by Dan Zink, Principal Engineer, & Vikas Gupta, CEO.

Track 4: Monetization in Flash

For developers who want to focus on technical implementation of payments in Flash-based games.  Discussion led by Luke Bayes, Software Engineer & Mike Haswell, VP Business Development.

We’re looking forward to the next few information-packed and fun-filled days. Hope to see you there!

We get asked all the time, “Why would anyone pay for virtual goods with real money?”

Having built a leading virtual economy monetization platform, the team at Social Gold is at the forefront of helping game publishers and developers monetize using virtual goods and micro-payments. In the past we have written on our blog about the reasons why experience-driven virtual goods succeed. Users buy virtual items for social, hedonistic and instrumental benefits in the context of a game play. The reasons for virtual consumption behavior have been talked about in the past, but it is important to step back and take a look at a larger shift taking place on the Internet today.

The history of the Internet can be divided into three distinct innovation eras. Each era consists of innovations not only in technology but also in the accompanying business model.

Let’s take a look:

The shopping wave

This was the first wave of innovation on the internet. eCommerce websites catering to both B2B and B2C needs built platforms that were scalable, offered users convenient payment options and shipped real goods. New companies like Amazon and eBay with products features like “One-click payments” and PayPal became the giants of this wave.

The advertising wave

Overture (originally GoTo.com which was later bought by Yahoo!) pioneered the CPC advertising model, but it wasn’t until Google’s amazing implementation of search ads — including their contextual ads product — did online advertising become a compelling way for entrepreneurs to monetize their services. There was an explosion in ad types and ad serving networks, all helping publishers and web service owners make money on their properties. “Blogs,” “user-generated content” and “crowd-sourcing” became the buzzwords of this era. Blogging sites like TechCrunch and GigaOm and Web 2.0 hits like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have all relied on revenue generated from advertising to fund their growth.

The micro-transactions wave

When Apple launched iTunes and started selling songs for $0.99 we formally entered the third era of monetization on the Internet:  micro-transactions.  While the concept of micro-payments wasn’t new (many Asian markets led the world in driving this online business model), Apple had the right implementation that ignited users’ appetite for individual digital goods and small payments. I call it the era of “snack-sized” content where digital goods are consumed in increasingly smaller chunks at very low prices. Whether it is eBooks, songs, premium newspaper articles, video on demand, applications on the phone, or tractors in Farmville, content and the accompanying payments are becoming miniaturized. Companies like Apple, Zynga and Hulu have made a strong start but we are still in the early days with much more innovation ahead of us. We’ve already started seeing interesting new business models like flattr. Who will ultimately be the big winners of this era?

Social Gold’s trusted micro-payments platform and the transparent UX is well-positioned to ride this third wave of monetization. We provide the most relevant payment options for users worldwide, which create a more seamless transaction experience and ultimately boosts monetization. As this micro-transactions wave begins to rise and swell, users around the globe will be expecting more convenient and localized payment options and we will be positioned to help developers deliver.

We are proud to announce the launch of new payment partnerships with Boletos, iDeal, Pago Facil, IPS and sofortüberweisung.de/DIRECTebanking.com. Now developers using our Social Gold platform can customize payment options for users in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, Argentina and Brazil, making it easier and cheaper for users to perform transactions in their local currencies. We are expanding to offer developers a wider range of localized payment options worldwide.

When developers are able to offer the most relevant payment methods for users they can deliver a more seamless transaction experience which ultimately boosts monetization. We also are able to monitor exchange rates and local fees in regions around the world so publishers can be on top of complicated regulations that vary by locale and can cut into profits.

In addition to these most recent partnerships, we have been expanding payment options with companies such as Cherry Credits, Ukash, GASH and MyCard to provide relevant payment options in more key regions including, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. As social games continue to go global, it is important for developers ensure their payment providers cater to local markets.

Social Gold will be at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in Los Angeles this week. E3 is the renowned trade show for computer and video games as well as related products.  Our Social Gold business development team will be at the expo and would love to meet up with you!

You can take a look at our virtual economy platform which powers thousands of online games and virtual worlds. We’ll show you how you can customize the transaction experience to allow for frictionless in-app and in-Flash payments. You can also explore our analytics tools, including conversion, reach and price elasticity that let you manage your virtual economy.

We are proud sponsors of the BIG/WIGI party  and hope to see you letting loose after a day of exploring the show floor on Wednesday. It’s sure to be a fun time with WIGI (Women In Games International)!

To meet up with the Social Gold team for a demo or a much-needed cup of coffee, please contact business@jambool.com.

Update: The party was fun and we had a great turnout! Congratulations to Armando Garcia, Editor in Chief of Smoke Or Die Entertainment in Long Beach, who won our iPad giveaway! To see photos of the BIG/WIGI party, check out our Flickr.

Happy 5th birthday, TechCrunch! This Friday, Social Gold is co-hosting the San Francisco TechCrunch 5th birthday celebration along with Twilio here at 501 Folsom Street. We’ll have food drinks, games like TechCrunch Jeopardy, Powerpoint Karaoke & Halfbaked, and a conference call with other TechCrunch meetups from around the US.

This event is one of over 300 meetups taking place around the world in celebration of TechCrunch’s 5th anniversary, and we anticipate the San Francisco event will be one of the largest. Thanks to Rob Ross, who stepped up as the SF event organizer and reached out to us to provide a place to party. We can’t wait to have all of you in our office!

RSVP for the event here

Special thanks go to the our sponsors for stepping up to help us make the event a success and supporting the community:

Social Gold

Social Gold™ is an industry-leading virtual goods monetization platform owned and operated by Jambool, Inc. The Social Gold platform enables developers to create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency, provide an unparalleled payments experience to their users, and optimize their virtual economy using robust analytics. Through an innovative in-Flash payments solution and direct integrations with the most relevant payment methods in global markets, the Social Gold platform streamlines the purchasing experience and drives conversion. Jambool, Inc. was co-founded by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein and has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore. For more information, please visit http://getsocialgold.com.

Twilio

Twilio is reinventing telecom by merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. Twilio hosts a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web programmers to integrate phone calls and SMS messages into their applications. Twilio’s simple, powerful API minimizes the learning curve required to build advanced, reliable communications applications, and its Pay-As-You-Go pricing model means customers pay for capacity only when they need it, not before. The company is funded by Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, Mitch Kapor and other prominent investors, and has offices in San Francisco, CA. http://www.twilio.com/

IMVU

IMVU Inc. (www.imvu.com) is an online community where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create and play with their friends. IMVU has reached 50 million registered users, 10 million unique visitors per month and a $40 million annualized revenue run rate. IMVU has the world’s largest virtual goods catalog of more than 4 million items, almost all of which are created by its own members. Founded in 2004, IMVU is backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Bridgescale Partners and Best Buy Capital and is located in Palo Alto, CA. The company was awarded a Best Places To Work 2010 by the San Francisco Business Journal and was named an OnHollywood Top 100 company in 2009.

Mashery

Mashery is designed to make it cheaper and easier for companies to build and control channels for web services than it would be to do everything in-house. Mashery offers all the ingredients needed to get APIs widely distributed and successfully used – an API marketplace, tracking, metrics, usage/access management, commerce, security and performance tools. http://www.mashery.com/

Charles River Ventures

Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that takes a value-added, hands-on approach to support its portfolio companies. Portfolio companies include Blippy, Yammer, Zendesk, Twitter, Scribd, and many more. http://www.crv.com/

TriplePoint

TriplePoint is the leading agency serving the interactive entertainment and digital lifestyle industries. Founded in 2002 as Kohnke Communications by Erica Kohnke Kain, the agency has grown to be the market leader in public relations, marketing, business development, and product consulting within the games and digital media market. http://www.triplepointpr.com/

Battery Ventures

Battery Ventures invests in technology-driven companies run by exceptional individuals and management teams.  For more than 25 years, we have partnered with great entrepreneurs across stages, sectors, and geographies.  Our mission is to support these entrepreneurs as they build extraordinary companies. Portfolio companies include GroupOn, TrialPay, LiveIntent, and Omniture. http://www.battery.com/

Vivu.tv

Multi-participant desktop video…on top of Skype. http://vivu.tv/

iamhello

Badges, greetings and more – all for your next event or meeting. http://imhello.posterous.com/