Passover and other stuff...

It is a holiday season here in Israel (Passover), so most things are going slow since everyone (including myself) are on vacation. Nothing exciting to report so this post won't be long.

One event worth mentioning is the Israeli Games 2007 conference which is about to take place this Wednesday (April 11th). There's a great lineup of speakers, so if you're interested in the gaming space and in the Israeli gaming industry - it's the place to be. There's a lot going on nowadays in this industry in Israel (you can read my previous post on that subject).

Anyway the whole vacation thing actually works in our advantage here in GamearraY, since our recently launched mobile user generated games portal with Orange Israel is getting a lot of traffic throughout all the hours of the day (and not just int he after school hours, as there's no school...). Conversion to paid downloads is also great and exceeds our expectations, and we are thinking forwards about replicating this model to other countries and other operators.

Anyway that's all for now - see you after the holidays!

P.S. - If you don't recognize the weird object in the image above, then you are truly blessed... What looks like some kind of a wallpaper is actually edible (in the broader definition of "edible"). It is called a "Matza" and it is a special "bread" (Again, broader definition...) that is eaten in the week of Passover...

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.

Soon to come...

I haven't gotten around to post too many posts lately due to the fact that we are in the midst of the integration process of GamearraY in Orange Israel. We are going live there soon, and there's a lot to do, so even though I have a lot of issues I would like to adress here, these might be somewhat delayed.

Working with an operator is a very demanding process, lots of coordination between R&D team, project managers, IT/Security personnel etc. (And that's after passing all the legal/commercial stages way before the actual work begins).

One of the major tasks is of course skinning the entire platform to fit the operator's brand. As you can see in the picture our opening screen for our mobile application was painted orange (I wonder why?...) and our platform will be whitelabeled as "MyGame" (which I think is quite a good consumer name).

When we go live, I promise to update here. We have worked a lot for this project to happen and I can't wait to actually see it on the air. Then I will be also able to elaborate on the business model, and of course give the link to the skinned site.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, there are many issues I would like to address in the following posts, and among them are: Mobile cameras, Mobile TV business models, What makes mobile applications useful, The rising and falling handsets vendors, Operators and their walled-gardens (not for long?...), Operators vs. Gateways/Brokers and more; I am writing all of this here so I won't forget...

So "stay tuned", I'll try to "squeeze in" some of these despite all that's happening (And I promise to lower the dosage of double quotes; I have used too many of those in this sentence...)