Product

< < <

Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees

Single and multiplayer modes

The first million people who bought VCRs bought them before there were any movies available to watch on them. They just wanted to “time shift” TV shows – what we use DVRs for today. Once there were millions of VCR owners it became worthwhile for Hollywood to start selling and renting movies to watch on them. Eventually watching rented movies became the dominant use of VCRs, and time shifting a relatively niche use. Thus, a product that eventually had very strong network effects* got its initial traction from a “standalone use” – where no other VCR owners or complementary products needed to exist.

Need Game Mechanics?

[In the first of a two-part series, design veteran Tadhg Kelly draws from his What Games Are blog to explain the rise to power of Zynga's massively successful social game CityVille . ( UPDATE : Part 2 now posted .)] Check out the latest Appdata graph for Zynga's Cityville - that's right, it now has nearly 70 million monthly active users, and the Facebook game only launched in early December. <a href="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adlink/3.0/5242.1/2382763/0/0/ADTECH;alias=Gamasutra_Social_Online_IMU1_300x250;loc=300;key='+adkeys+';grp='+adrand+'" target="_blank"><img src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adserv/3.0/5242.1/2382763/0/0/ADTECH;alias=Gamasutra_Social_Online_IMU1_300x250;loc=300;key='+adkeys+';grp='+adrand+'" border="0" width="0" height="0"></a>

CityVille Explained

Smart Gamification

The perfect viral social app

Lately, I've been putting together a list of things that make social apps viral, mainly looking at the startups that inspire me most in that area (social). So this is loosely gathered from looking at Hashable , PlanCast , Quora , Foursquare , LikeALittle and the likes. It's just a candid look at those - and others in the same space - startups to extract what might have been part of the essence of their viral growth. In other words : they all include some or all of the following points. What this list is : my thoughts on the (killer) ingredients that can make your startup viral if you have the first mandatory ingredient : an interesting concept .

Cool post, but there is one thing I disagree on: focus on just one use. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more recent servives such as Instagram (not to mention pearltrees) all have different uses. That's precisely what make those services social. Of course, this trade-off with simplicity, and that's why making a great social app is so difficult. by Patrice Jan 11

The Presentation That Inspired Google+

http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/08/quarterly-earnings-2q-1q-mobile-gaming/

Quarterly Earnings for Gaming Companies

We’ve created a little cheat sheet for industry observers summarizing smartphone earnings and growth for the second quarter (or first quarter, depending on the company’s fiscal calendar). We also put in privately-held freemium gaming companies for which you can guesstimate earnings based on top-grossing titles. Given how publicly-traded companies are performing with both freemium and paid app monetization on a quarterly basis, we’re looking at a few privately-held companies that will probably comfortably cross $50 million in annual revenue this year. Also keep in mind that everyone’s market capitalization is down significantly because of the global stock market rout.