Orange Israel: Initial Statistics

After a week and a half of "babysitting" our first production site, I can now breath some air and resume writing here... It has been a very interesting experience going over the logs of the site activity, and fine-tuning our GUI according to users' behaviour. And now for the initial statistics:

The users response to the site is phenomenal. Over 400 personalized/user-generated games are created each day! And this keeps on going for the 10th day in a row now. Also 400 faces are "grabbed" and uploaded each day into games, as the game's hero or one of its many villains.

We have many thousands of unique users every day, which is not that surprising since we have a massive internet ads campaign (See the picture in this post - it's our huge banner in the homepage of Nana, a portal owned and operated by Netvision, Israel's biggest ISP), but we do see that over 25% of the traffic is getting to the site directly, which is a sign that we made a buzz in a very short time (We also have a feature that allows sending a direct link to the game via email, so that helps to the viral effect - a user creates a game with his own face inside, wants to show it to his friends, they get to the site etc.)

Most of the games are created with our simple Game Wizard and FaceGrabber which allows people to upload their faces (Or friends, family, celebrities, politicians, pets etc..) But we also see that about 10% of the games are made using our more advanced editor.

Users are also enjoying playing online (we allow previewing the game in the same way as it would look on your specific handset). Each user plays 2-3 games on average per session.

Game downloads are also going great, I cannot expose the exact number since it's confidential, but I can say that a third of the people who download our free client, continue to purcahse a game, and this is a great conversion rate.

Once people have the client they can use it to manage their games. For example, people use our Share feature to send games to their friends and also use our Rate/Send high scores features, which generate additional data traffic on the operator's network.

In short, things are going great so far, but we know that this is just the beginning. I'll update more as the story develops.

P.S. - For comparison purposes, you may want to know that Orange Israel has about 2.5 million customers, and there are about 7 million citizens in Israel.

GamearraY launched in Orange Israel!

Today we have officially launched our user generated mobile gaming platform with Orange Israel under the brand name "MyGame".

This is very exciting to the entire team here at GamearraY, we have worked a long time to make it happen. The company was founded about a year and a half ago, and we have developed the platform from the basic prototype I brought into a real product, with sophisticated user interface, support for multiple handsets and our own delivery and transcoding platform.

In the past 3-4 months we have been working in overdrive re-skinning the product to fit to the Orange brand, adapting to Orange's handsets, integrating the system to Orange's billing and SMS systems, localizing the platform (Hebrew is not very easy to work with...) and of course adding new features along the way...

The launch is accompanied by a massive internet campaign here in Israel including banners inside ICQ messenger, in the main pages of Nana, a portal of one of Israel's biggest ISPs, Tipo, a very successful portal for kids and teenagers and also some coverage in the fun/games zone of Walla, the leading portal in Israel (And of course a lot of Google adwords...).

Orange is also throwing a game creation competition - the person who will make the most popular game will get a Nintendo Wii console. This is rather cool and can spice things up...

This is truly a new experience offered to users, and we are looking forward to see how they would take it. And even though this is the first day, we are already starting to see some real traffic in the site today, and it is good to see that people are using the entire array of tools we provide.

They use our "FaceGrabber" that allows users to upload their faces onto an existing character and become a part of the game (The results are usually very funny). Also our game editor which we thought would take some time to "grow" on users is getting a lot of attention.

Since the site is in Hebrew (And also doesn't have great bandwidth/latency outside of Israel), I guess many of you won't be able to fully enjoy it, but you can go instead to our beta site or simply watch our demo video and also read some more about our concept here.

But if you do speak Hebrew or think you may find your way, you are welcome to go to http://www.orange.co.il/mygame and create your first mobile game... Good luck!

The digital camera is dead... Long live the cameraphone!

3GSM 2007 was the first conference I went to without my digital camera. Since there are so many things to see at conferences such as 3GSM, I like to take pictures of things I found to be interesting to remember them later (And write about it in my blog, like my post on 3GSM 2007).

This year, I left my camera at home and took my SonyEricsson K800i with me. It has a 3.2 Megapixels camera, a huge improvement from the 1.3MP camera in my previous phone (K600i). In addition it has a real flash (I am emphasizing "real" since the first mobile phones that came with flash actually came with flashlights, that aside from irritating the person being photographed had no significant effect...)

Now, there are those who try to make the mobile phone a super all-in-one device, and their vision is that in the future you will carry only one device that will be your phone, camera, MP3-player, gaming console, PDA, Laptop, TV and even your alcohol-level tester... (See my 3GSM 2007 recap below...).

It should be mentioned that this dream of an all-in-one device is not a new one, and according to several experts it should have already happened by now... but it didn't. This is due to the fact that in order for the handset to serve as another appliance 2 rules must be met:

(1) It shouldn't damage the usability and portability of the handset for its primary use which is talking while you are on the move.

(2) The experience on the handset should match the one on the original appliance, or make sense when adapted to the handset.

So, for example those who want to make the handset an ultimate on-the-road TV/DVD-player/VOD device might find a need to enlarge its screen, which would affect the total device size, and render it less convenient to carry around, thus not adhering to the first rule. Also, one can debate the experience of video on a handset vs. on the TV at home (You can read more about that in one of my previous posts).

Now, cameraphones almost never had a problem with rule #1. Miniaturization techniques enabled cameras to be embedded within the phones without adding too much to their size or weight.

However, up until about 2-3 years ago the cameraphone had a problem with rule #2. For example when cameraphones just got out with VGA resolution (and even below) and poor lens quality, it was more of a gimmick. You could take pictures for fun, but it was really no match for regular or digital cameras. These phones were then followed by cameras with SVGA resolution and then 1MP, but this was when the standard in digital cameras was already 4MP.

But today the situation is entirely different - A 3.2MP camera produces images with a resolution of 2048x1536. Is it a high-enough resolution? Well, most chances are that the entire screen you are watching now can fit in that image 4 times. You can also print 3.2MP pictures in the standard photos prinitng sizes without any quality loss (And 4MP will get you to a full A4 page).

And if you think that 3.2MP is cutting-edge in the cameraphones world, you are way out of touch. For example, LG announced back in 2005 a 5MP cameraphone, and Samsung exhibited its 10MP cameraphone at the last CeBIT show.

The great thing is that aside of the camera quality, the modern handset also has all the other facilities a digital camera has: A high-quality digital screen, memory cards for storing pictures, and with buttons on the side of the handset, it can mimic the form factor of the newest slimmest digital cameras (and most importantly without making the form factor any less convenient for carrying it around).

The only missing thing left in today's mainstream cameraphones is optical zoom, but as you can see in the link above, Samsung (and probably other vendors as well) has it already covered, and I am sure these handsets will make their way to the market and become mainstream sooner than we expect.

And the best thing is that the handset already features convenient cables-less communication with the PC via bluetooth, which is a relatively new feature in digital cameras...

So, I don't know about you, but I bought my last digital camera about 2 years ago, and I have the feeling I won't be needing a new one anytime soon - but a handset upgrade is definitely on my "roadmap"...

P.S. - Another appliance that is getting assimilated into the handset is the MP3 player. The handset has all it takes, memory cards, convenient communication with PCs, great GUI for navigation between songs etc. The only missing thing is providing a normal headphones jack instead of the proprietary headphones interfaces currently used.

P.S.2 - And when was the last time you wore a hand watch?...