My Little Suitcase

Sent my first iPhone app over to Apple for approval yesterday. A game I wrote in large part to create some little neat thing for my kids, like Caractacus Potts. Had fun developing it as a spare time hobby, and I'm starting another one now while I await the Judgement of Cupertino.

In the meantime, a good article on how Pocket God became such a success.

Quis Incubatiet Ipsos Incubates?

Ah, the Good Old Days

SV Android Developer Meetup Notes - AdMob and Flurry

I went to the Silicon Valley Google Android Developers meetup last Wednesday, not so much for Android development (although I did get a trivial hello app running on the phone simulator on my laptop during the start of the meeting), but for the 2 speakers. I was spurred somewhat by the minor Pinch Media privacy controversy.

Assume any errors are mine in scribing, rather than in the speakers' content. Sean Galligan, VP Biz Dev for mobile analytics company Flurry, spoke about their service:

• iPhone is #1 - In terms of analytics events gathered in their system, Android is (a distant) #2 behind iPhone. Depending on the analytic category, iPhone is 64 to 87% of the data, while Android phones are 7 to 22%. J2ME based phones are 3rd. Blackberry is currently bumping around 0%, but their app market just launched. This is ultimately representative of Flurry's community, rather than the complete mobile application market on these platforms.
• Utilization - higher than they forecast. 18 to 51% utilization across all app categories, rather than Flurry's expected 10-15%. Games are around 30%.
• Average Session Length, in minutes, for iPhone games

Days Mins (Paid/Free)

10 3/6

30 4/3

60 6/1

90 3/1

i.e. after 10 days, the average paid app is used for 3 minutes, and the free app is used for 6. If you graph it, the patterns for free and paid apps are basically inverse, i.e. free usage starts high and steadily drops in, while paid starts lower and grows. The same pattern is there for the metric of number of sessions/day.

• App Lifecycle - based on utilization, the basic application "lifecycle" seems to be about 3 months
• Effect of Cross Sellling - a correlation exists of improved sales in both apps when cross selling one app within another and vice-versa
• Freemium Model - Flurry believes that offering a free version increases paid app sales substantially, i.e. there's a fairly linear graph of paid app sales that starts higher on the left and steadily decreases towards the right, but offering the free version leads to a dramatic (85%?) increase in sales around the middle of the paid app's lifecycle, where sales start trending back upwards instead of continuing down. You can use analytics to find the optimal up-sell message placement, i.e point where user drop-off accelerates. A lot of people upsell too late in usage cycle of the free app, i.e. they wait for the user to use their free version too many times before offering the paid version.
• Platform Support - Java, iPhone, Android & BBerry. Purported easy to install "2 lines of code". Agent library is 130k on iPhone. 6-8k in other platforms
• Pricing - No current cost for developer integration. They're investing in building the community.
• Categories in Metrics Package - demographics, usage, performance. Includes frequency, conversion & loyalty metrics. Can do user path analytics (similar to "click streams" in Web analytics). You define trackable events, e.g. how user navigated thru app. Flurry doesn't know CPU or memory load of the system when the app is running.
• No Flurry API Yet - How does a developer pull their metrics over to their own tools? Its all exportable, but no API yet.
• Omniture Support - In process of executing partnership w/Omniture to integrate with SiteCatalyst Web metrics tool
• Bandwidth Use - Their library makes a call to the Flurry server every time the user opens your app. Flurry transmits data about that new session as well as the previous session. This scheme is due to the fact that many people don't logout gracefully, as well as the fact of intermittent network connectivity. They store data on phone in between transmissions. Transmission is approximately 1k (compressed).
• Privacy - UDID and PII - I asked specifically about PII, using UDID as an example. "We are not gathering private information about individuals".
• Privacy - Sale of PII - Would Flurry try to sell the data? "We'll never share individual pubisher data unaggregated"
• Privacy - Logs - You have access to the actual log data for events. You can see each session for user, w/out identifying the user. I need to reconcile this with my other note re tech support use, "can we grab data re a particular user b/c they're having trouble? yes". I can imagine a way such a system could work without recording PII, but for the moment I'll leave that as something to look at when I start testing Flurry. It should be straightforward to run some test sessions and then see what data Flurry records over on the server log.

That aside, this seems like a service worth looking into. Good presenter. No fluff. The second speaker was Mike Fyall, who runs product marketing for mobile advertising company AdMob. This was less directly interesting, since I don't see putting banner ads in the app I'm currently working on. Nonetheless, in presenting to Android developers regarding what has so far been an iPhone-centric product, it presented a useful take on the iPhone world:

• iPhone apps run 50% of AdMob's total presented ads - this is 8x the number of Android-placed ads. On the other hand, there are 8-10x as many iPhones, so the number of ads served is roughly equivalent per phone on both platforms. This suggests to AdMob that there is similiar ad usage across different types of touch devices
• Use In Free Apps - Most AdMob clients are using the service within free apps
• Revenue Example

CPM -> CTR -> #clicks -> CPC -> eCPM
1000 -> 1.5% -> 15 -> $0.10 -> $1.50

For a thousand ad impressions (CPM) with a Click-Through Rate (CTR) of 1.5%, that means there were 15 clicks, at a Cost Per Click (CPC) of 10 cents. That's an Effective CPM of $1.50 in ad revenue for those 1000 ads, which is split 60-40 between developer and AdMob. The bid market somehow determines CPC.

Continuing the example, this time re advertising value per customer:

Given 20 sessions of use of the app, in which you show 5 ads per session, that's 100 ads per user. Given the above-calculated $1.50 eCPM, that's a $0.15 avg value per customer over the life of the app. The "value per customer" calculation also might include the opportunity to upsell the customer under a freemium model, i.e. convert them from a user of the free, ad-supported app to a purchaser of the paid version of the app. Assuming a 5% conversion rate from free to paid, at a price of $2.99 price for the paid app. That comes out to just under $0.15 per customer on average. So the combined value per customer from both ads and freemium upsell would be $0.15 + 0.15 = $0.30/user. So if you have only 1M users, that's $300k :)

My note - this formula ignores the nuance of the combined value in a case where the paid version does not show ads, i.e. ad revenue portion would be lower, b/c some portion of the free app's ad-serving lifecycle would be cut short.

Ads make sense for:

• an app with a large user base or heavy repeat usage
• freemium model described above
• cases where a purely free app makes more sense than paid

Recommendations:

• place ads @ natural tranistion points, e.g. when content is loading
• use an ad background that sets the ad apart from the rest of the app

Context-Based Ads - can AdMob do Google-style context-based ads, a la Gmail, Facebook, e.g. to males 18-34. AdMob is accepting that type of data, but is not offering targeted ads yet.

Reselling Ads - AdMob doesn't run an adserver, i.e. enable you to resell AMob ads. Fyall was also a good, fluff-less rep for his company.

This Week's Sign That The Muchacolypse is Upon Me

I've concluded that online social networks are the cloud computing version of friends, i.e. virtualized versions of prior generation social contacts, where you fulfill 80% of your need for friends with abstract slices of a vaguely-understood cloud of peopletime. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Bowling night changes, sure, as the beer isn't as tasty. But the music is better.

A Low Moment in the History of Self-Reference

Note that the Security Question section of my profile on the acm.org web site will not let you enter "What is my Security Question?" as your Security Question in conjunction with an answer of "What is my Security Question?" presumably because user names and passwords should not be identical. I gently question the validity of that presumption, since this isn't supposed to be a username and password.

Your Security Question/Answer are at risk to (in highest-lowest order of my estimation of probability):

• Using Q/A pairs that are answerable via the public domain, e.g. What is your mother's maiden name? My Goofy Q/A is in this sense more secure than many more common formulations (at least it was until I published this vignette on the Internet under my name, etc, unless of course this whole post is part of an elaborate honey pot trap, including my exposure of the existence of said elaborate honey pot);
  
• Technical attacks against the client and server to recover/intercept the same information. My Goofy Q/A is as secure as any other Q/A in this regard;
  
• Brute forcing of Q and A, whether bit by bit or variants like word by word. Haven't tested whether sites like acm.org protect against this. There is presumably some set of Q/A questions - let's call them Armoured Goofy - that is more resistant to brute forcing than My Goofy Q/A, e.g. "What is the absolutely longest, highest entropy, m0st ^b!i^z(a_r(r@e #$@#$#@ Security Question ... I can construct?" followed by "longest possible combination of a highest entropy bizarreness I can construct as an answer". But I'm not going there.
  

If you'd like to steal my credit card - don't you already have that? I humbly submit that you need to work on your tradecraft if you're sniffing around the ACM for it. If - on the other hand - you'd like to steal my ACM account so that you can intercept my JACM subscription, send fake email in my name via me@acm.org, and stand in my stead to accept the Turing Award(s?) that will no doubt be one day accruing to me, to indeed bask in the magenta glow that hums in the foreground of my daily lot in life, I for one admire your dedication to the respective fields of computation, identity theft and Mike, as may be the case, and will not stand too resolutely in your way, making only handwaving attempts at defense for the sake of propriety. Not being to make myself chuckle at 3 am - on the other hand - is a risk I'm not willing to accept.

No One Ever Got Fired For Buying Amazon

I have a new post over at CloudFeed

Transitive Epitaph For Microsoft

Despite their having a corporate motto of, "Evil only looks bad if you recognize the existence of good", I used to have a ton of respect for Microsoft and the people working there. People like David Cutler, Jim Grey, Paul Allen. And a guy who drops out of Harvard to move to the tech mecca of Alburquerque in pursuit of a career in personal computers at a time when saying people would own their own computers was like owning their own nuclear submarine, that guy and the company he built deserves my respect. Well, that respect phase started to run down a decade ago, although I didn't know it at the time. It took until today to let go of the fork I stuck in them sometime earlier this decade.

From the NY Times:

Live Blogging The Ballmer CES Keynote

PS I still have numerous good things to say about the XBox division (XBox Live, Live Arcade, Game Studio Express, Halo), but they're barely keeping from being buried under the rubble.

"I dunno what the hell's out there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."

Living up in the foothills is generally awesome, but once in a blue moon I hear some bizarre sounds emanating from the hills, brush or canyons that make me rethink little decisions like, "I'll go for a run at 6 am, before sunrise." I was sitting in the big easy chair in the master bedroom, tinkering away on the Internet when I heard - emanating from somewhere within a hundred yards or so of my home - what sounded like the dogs in John Carpenter's The Thing a few seconds before they were eaten. Not the actual being eaten, dying part, but the fearful yelping of a pack of dogs in the night. I got up, went to the window, looked around, and noted that I now had a perfectly good reason for thinking it was too cold to go outside.

This Week's Sign That The Cloudocalypse Is Upon Us

New post by me over on Cloud Feed.

IE Market Share Downward Spiral

The latest numbers are - IMHO - tipping past "concerning to MSFT" to "bloodbath". Firefox over 20% for another month. Safari gaining fast. Chrome over 1% in a few months. The rising sentiment that Web developers can no longer develop solely for IE and ignore the other browsers is now simply a rule.

As for me, let me know when I can write hardware accelerated OpenGL code that runs cross-platform in 95% of browsers, in a Canvas tag, driven by JavaScript, using the default browser install, no plug-ins or Native Clients or whatnot. I'll check back some time late in the next decade.

PS Google Native Client is - for what it is - nicely packaged and fun to mess around with. Anyone who is proclaiming it a Flash/Flex killer probably hasn't actually downloaded NC and run it. It's a loooooong way from being a Flash irritant, let alone killer. It's at about the same stage of maturity that Firefox was the night Blake Ross decided to fork a Web browser instead of going clubbing on South Beach, except that Adobe is an able opponent in "rich clients", while Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel with IE.

Hello Blogosphere

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