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

August 13, 2010

Today we’re excited to announce that we are joining the Google family.  You can read details about this announcement on our home page or here on our blog.

The following is an FAQ for our existing and potential new customers to answer their key questions about our platform and services.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have any additional questions at contact@jambool.com.

Google / Jambool FAQ

1. Will there be any impact to the core payment processing capabilities of Social Gold?

A: No. We will continue to process all relevant payments for our customers. All of our local payment methods, transaction clearing in local currencies and fraud management systems will remain intact.

2. I am a developer/merchant that currently uses your service to monetize my product. Is there any impact to how I get disbursements and its frequency?

A: No. There will no change to our disbursement process. We will continue to pay developers Net 15 on the 1st and 16th of every month (or the first business day of the week if the 1st or 16th of the month falls on a weekend or holiday).

3. I am a developer/merchant that currently uses your service to monetize my product. Will there be any change to my revenue share / deal terms with your company?

A: No. There is no change to any of your deal terms.

4. Will Social Gold’s customer service remain available to answer end user inquiries?

A: Yes. We will continue to provide 24/7 customer support on all end user billing inquiries as per our Terms of Service (TOS).

5. I am a developer/merchant and currently have an open ticket request in your system. Will it be answered in a timely manner?

A: Yes. Our customer service team will continue to provide 24/7 support on all developer inquiries and process them in a timely manner.

6. I am an end user (consumer) and currently have a billing inquiry in your system. Will it be answered in a timely manner?

A: Yes. Our customer service team will continue to provide 24/7 support on all end user billing inquiries and process them in a timely manner.

7. I’ve recently signed up for a Social Gold Developer Account and am about to create offers and do test transactions in your sandbox environment. Will your system still allow me to do this?

A: Yes. Our Developer Sign-Up registration and sandbox test environments will continue to operate 24/7 for your continued convenience.

8. I have a Social Gold Developer Account and have completed testing the service. My next step is to go live. Should I wait to do this or can I move forward?

A: Yes, you can move forward whenever you are ready to go live with our monetization platform. There is no reason to wait once your product is ready, as our service will remain live 24/7.

9. I am a developer/merchant and would like to continue using Social Gold to monetize my game(s) on Facebook? Will there be any impact to using your service on the Facebook platform?

A: No. We will continue to offer our monetization platform across the Facebook platform for those developers who are live with us today or want to use us to power their transactions going forward.

10. Is the promotion with MySpace still active?

A: Yes. The MySpace developer discount program is still in effect and will be through the official expiration date of August 31, 2010. We will pay out the discounts to those developers that drive transactions on the MySpace platform by the original date highlighted in the promotion terms of October 31, 2010. Details can be found here: http://www.jambool.com/myspace

11. I’m a fan of your blog and newsletter and the insights they provide. Will both of these remain live / active? Will you continue to actively post to your blog?

A: Yes. Our blog will remain live for the forseeable future and we will continue to actively post on it. We will also continue to issue our monthly newsletter for the forseeable future and summarize key industry, product and event news for our subscribers.

12. I am a developer/merchant and I want to close my account with Social Gold. What do I do? Who do I contact?

A: While we place a very high value on your business, we will continue to make it very turnkey for you to close your account. Contact us directly to assist with this at developers@jambool.com.

13. I have additional questions that are not answered above?  Who should I contact?

A: For technical questions, please email developers@jambool.com.  For business-related questions, please email business@jambool.com.  For press inquiries, please email press@jambool.com.

Casual Connect, the leading casual games conference, was held in Seattle in late July and we both observed and helped deliver some great content at the three-day event. If you weren’t able to make it to Casual Connect yourself, read on for the key highlights of the event with this segment of Social Short-Cuts:

Playdom CEO, John Pleasants, kicked off Casual Connect and spoke in detail about the growth and trends of social gaming. He predicted that revenues from virtual goods would grow from $1 billion to $5 billion over the next few years. Pleasants also stressed the importance of increasing conversion rates in social games and creating more paid players. He notes that virality comes from retention, which comes from the quality and innovation of actual gameplay. To see a clip of his talk, check out this video from Social Times.  And in case you missed the news, it was just days after Casual Connect that an official announcement was released about Disney’s acquisition of Playdom.  Congrats to John and the entire Playdom team!

John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom

Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners called out the top social gaming trends of the past year and talked about what we can expect for the rest of 2010. Chang noted that Facebook’s removal of notifications makes it much harder for new games to make it big on the platform. Chang explained how iPhone developers are benefitting from in-app purchases. He also noted that social gaming companies are hot right now with many being propositioned for acquisitions. Dean Takahashi posted video excerpts of Chang’s chat on VentureBeat here.

It seemed that everybody at Casual Connect was talking about social games. Jon David, Director of PC and Online products at PopCap discussed how Facebook’s changes to their news feeds earlier this year affected downloads of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. Developers who create games for various social networks and platforms must be able to adapt quickly to changes in the platform. For example, Jon discussed how PopCap created a medal system in their game to bring back user growth in spite of the news feed changes. To read more on the “power of show and tell” and the importance of encouraging users to share their experience with friends, check out the Inside Social Games post by Soyon Im.

Jon David, Director of PC and Online Products, PopCap (Credit: CasualConnect)

Mari Baker, CEO of PlayFirst, spoke on “The Business of Building Engaging Brands” and the importance of focusing on the customer. Building a brand that fans love offers great rewards for a business, as customers — and even salespeople — recommend a particular product to other people. Mari identified three key attributes that signal a strong brand:  Likability, Trusted Quality and Engagement. She emphasized that having a strong brand will become even more important in the gaming market to stand out among the competition in the weeks and months ahead. Mari also pointed out the launch of Chocolatier: Sweet Society on Facebook as an example of how the game added social features while still staying true to the brand.

Mari Baker, CEO, PlayFirst

Recipe Book from Chocolatier

Mobile gaming also had a voice at the conference as a panel of key execs shared tips, trends and data surrounding the iPhone. Bart Decrem of Tapulous—also recently acquired by Disney—told attendees, “We set out to get a million users in a year, and we got a million users in ten days.” Gui Karyo, Executive Vice President of Operations at Majesco, noted the importance of distinguishing features on the iPhone versus the Nintendo DS when designing a game. Karyo also shared his insights on development costs, citing a range of $30,000 – $150,000 for porting DS games to iPhone depending on game design. To read more chatter about the Mobile games at Casual Connect, check out Evan Van Zelfden’s post on Edge.

The Monetization Track at Casual Connect was a popular series among developers given the importance of driving revenue and optimizing profit for online and mobile games.  From payment models to analytics to customer service, multiple industry leaders weighed in on the current state of the business and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.  Some of the featured speakers included Matt Shea (Wild Tangent), Bill Grosso (LiveGamer) and Josh Larson (Mochi Media).  One insightful session featured data-heavy presentations from four monetization leaders:  Sometrics (Ian Swanson), PlaySpan (Lex Bayer), Tapjoy (Lee Linden) and Doubloon (Eric Gonzalez).  All four speakers shared data from across their network that was intriguing and useful for developers.

We were also pleased to be contributors to the Monetization Track at the event.  Our CEO, Vikas Gupta, shared his tips with attendees on creating, managing and optimizing a virtual economy. You can view his presentation here: “Creating a Bull Market: How to Manage a Successful Virtual Economy.”

Vikas Gupta, CEO of Social Gold, shares monetization metrics from the Social Gold platform

We also hosted the Cha Ching 2! Monetization Roundtables with four different tracks that allowed attendees to have in-depth, interactive discussions with senior members of the Social Gold team.  You can review the Cha Ching 2! Executive Summary of these sessions on our blog.

Social Gold’s Luke Bayes (Sr Software Engineer) and Mike Haswell (VP, Business Development) lead session on In-Flash Monetization during the Cha-Ching 2! Monetization Roundtables

Finally, a few lighter notes:

• We’re happy to formally announce our Casual Connect 2010 iPad winner, Mark Friedler of San Francisco.  Congrats Mark!

Mark Friedler, iPad Winner, and Social Gold CMO Mike Quigley

• You can check out more photos from the event on our Flickr gallery.
• Dean Takahashi’s post on VentureBeat also has some great pictures from the conference, including Hi5 President, Alex St. John, challenging a huge sumo wrestler representing giant social network, Facebook, in a battle royale.

Overall we thought the conference was a spectacular event.  Jessica Tams and her team put together a star-studded line-up of content and events that was both informative and entertaining.  The Casual Connect website will be posting all of the conference’s presentations in mid-August and we encourage you to check them out.

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 released hard data today reaffirming the potential of using subscriptions to complement virtual goods sales via direct payment.  An ever-increasing number of top online companies, from social networks to online games, are using our subscriptions platform to power and/or supplement their core virtual goods monetization solution. Subscriptions are a great way to both reward, engage and monetize your most engaged audience. The data from Tagged’s subscriptions confirms that, and points to the strength of Social Gold’s platform: higher conversion, better retention, more revenue.

Tagged, a large social network with over 80 million members to date, implemented the Social Gold subscriptions platform in May and in a few short months, documented very positive results. The network has driven 10% higher conversion rates with Social Gold compared to its previous payment options. With our recurring payment offering, Tagged has driven active members to upgrade to paying subscribers—reporting that 15% of their engaged user base signed up for the service.

Leveraging Social Gold’s platform, Tagged has seen a rise in participation in its popular “Top 8” feature, which places members’ profiles in featured rotation on the main page to gain visibility among their peers. Tagged also reported that users who subscribed to be VIP Members, the subscription service, were 40% more likely to pay to be in the Top 8 than non-subscribers.

And the floodgates are opening. In addition to Tagged, other partners including Games2Win, Playdom and Avatar Reality implemented Social Gold’s subscriptions platform to boost revenues and complement sales from microtransactions. With a flexible and effective platform, we help companies to tailor payments offerings to best optimize any virtual payment system – game, virtual world, social network and beyond.

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!

It is no secret that people are paying for virtual goods. What surprises people, and even game developers sometimes, is that people will even commit fraud for virtual goods. As Facebook admitted as the biggest challenge for their Credits is their inability to control and manage fraud. Managing fraud is a critical element to building a successful, profitable virtual goods business.

What however makes the problem of managing fraud for virtual goods both more challenging and more interesting is its nature. This weekend I had a chance to catch up with an old friend who had worked on preventing fraud in a very different field: medical claims. When they started working on that problem, they had no data. As a result, they had to build models from ground up. Typically, these models would look for anomalies based a variety of parameters. The rules would evolve, and the anomalous elements would go through review.

What was interesting about the anomalous elements was that the doctors that surfaced in this set were either fraudsters or exceptionally good doctors (e.g., specialists). The biggest challenge in solving the problem was to discern the really good doctors from the fraudsters.

This was interesting because it has a parallel to how we look at true fraud. It is easy to reduce fraud by simply identifying anomalous behavior and disallowing it. However, the goal we aim to achieve is how to maximize revenue, and not simply reduce fraud. What we find repeatedly is that behavior of users who spend considerable amount of money comes across as very similar to those of fraudsters. The problem therefore really becomes trying to let these high spenders through while blocking real fraudsters.

This week at Casual Connect in Seattle we will be hosting our next Cha-Ching working sessions on Virtual Goods. These Cha Ching! Monetization Breakout Groups will be at 4pm on Thursday, July 22 in the Triple Door. One of the sessions will focus on managing fraud, where we will cover this topic in a lot more detail. We hope to see you there!