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Join Us for SF TechCrunch 5th Birthday Meetup This Friday

Posted June 10th, 2010 by MikeQ

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/

Posted in Events, Jambool, Social Gold, Startup, Tech | Comments Off

Deconstructing Facebook’s Open Graph for Virtual Goods

Posted April 23rd, 2010 by Reza

At Facebook’s F8 conference, they announced a number of striking new features that will change the way game developers can up their game to increase distribution. Here we take a look at the top few features that would be useful to increase monetization of virtual goods.

Like Button – get this Social plugin now

The Like Button provides the biggest bang for the buck for increasing visibility. Within a single line of HTML, the Like Button is a quick way for a developer to place a widget on a web page that will allow any end user to share a story on Facebook about that web page to his newsfeed. You can customize the content of the Like Button by adding meta-tags in the HTML that customize the description and title of the object. In the context of virtual goods, since this works at the page level, it’s best to describe have a page dedicated to a single virtual good. When the story gets published to the end user’s newsfeed it will contain the specific names of the properties of the virtual good, including the name, description and image. Games that are running off-Facebook using Facebook Connect can take advantage of these viral channels that draw attention to the item being sold. Previously, developers who wanted to accomplish the same thing would have to make more difficult calls to Facebook’s API servers.

Other Social Plugins

The Recommendations plugin would be useful for users to see what web pages are most liked. Just like the Like Button, this works best if each web page “object” was a single virtual good. The rest of the Social plugins range from being cute such as “Facepile”, to being practical with “Login with Faces”. There’s a lot of great potential here for future plugins that will take further advantage of the social graph.

Graph API

Facebook hasn’t wasted anytime in quickly deprecating the “Old Rest API” and replacing it with the Graph API. There are a number of gems bundled in this product, specifically (1) programmatic access to Analytics, (2) the use of JSON, and (3) the use of OAuth. For the first time, Facebook has allowed developers to programmatically retrieve data about an arbitrary web page that has been populated with events from Social Plugins. The types of “Insights” available are relatively limited at this time, but you can quickly gather basic stats about page views, users who shared pages, etc. With respect to virtual goods, some other metrics that are important include pricing, conversion, total revenue, cohort analysis, and many more around actual ecommerce behavior. These visual analytics are available through Social Gold’s virtual economy analytics and complement the analytics that Facebook provides.

What is innovative about these new APIs is not about the content they expose, but how simple it makes it for a developer to interact with Facebook programmatically. Previously, developers had to make more complex REST API calls to Facebook’s servers. The Graph API defines a nicely partitioned object name space that returns results in JSON format that makes it easy for Flash, JavaScript and backend servers to parse. It’s great to see Facebook promoting the standard OAuth standard first popularized by the Open Social consortium and also adopted by other identity providers such as Twitter @anywhere. We hope to see more innovations come out of Facebook in the coming months.

Posted in Analytics, Engagement, How To, Payments, Social Games, Tech, Virtual Goods | 1 Comment »