I just went through the latest Muzui stats and I must admit, I was impressed:

- 7.8 million mobile downloads

- 9.2 average plays on each mobile game

- amounting to 71.7 million plays all in all

In that respect, I also did some research on how mobile ads did on gaming platforms. I always had an idea that the OTS (opportunity to see) was very high on mobile ads, so they had to be great at building brand awareness. I stumbled upon, the results from Radioshack’s campaign with Greystripe, which was very positive, to say the least:

1. The RadioShack campaign resulted in a significant increase in unaided brand awareness, which rose from 15.8 percent to 24.2 percent (+8.4 points)
2. There was a directional increase in the percentage of respondents who agreed that RadioShack is a “Top Wireless Store” (+ 5.9 points at an 86.5 percent confidence level)
3. Among the 25-34 year old target age group, unaided brand awareness increased 10.9 points, while the “Top Wireless Store” metric jumped 16.7 points
4. The campaign outperformed mobile norms for unaided brand awareness by 2.2 percentage points.

Why should you care?

1. Greystripe’s mobile ads outperformed other advertising categories, such as online banners
2. This case study is valuable for planners looking to build a case to commit funds to this channel

At the end of this month, we’re rolling out a new ad platform to support upgrades as a revenue stream. It will be exciting to see how the media and advertising agencies will welcome it. The key factor in the avertising business will always be, whether we can target the ads or not.

Berlin, April 3rd, 2009 – Red Herring announced that Muzui was named a WINNER of the Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

“During a difficult year, Red Herring still received an impressive list of submissions from companies across the EMEA region, clearly demonstrating Europe’s role as a major center of innovation in the global technology sector,” said Red Herring Managing Director, Farley Duvall. “The exceptional accomplishments of European technology startups and entrepreneurs are a testament to the rapid advancements being made in building the European innovation ecosystem.”

Red Herring’s lists of top private companies are an important part of the publication’s tradition of identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Companies like Google, eBay, and Skype were spotted in their early days by Red Herring editors, and touted as leaders that would change the way we live and work.

Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development.

“We are delighted to see that the jury of the Red Herring Award has selected us as one of the top technology start-ups in Europe”, says Andreas Borch Hansen CEO and co-founder of Muzui, who also sat on an expert panel on social gaming at Red Herring. “It’s been an exciting year, despite the financial downturn. With our upcoming international roll out, we believe the next year will be just as thrilling.”

Red Herring has honored the Red Herring 100 Europe Finalist companies at its Red Herring Europe 2009 Conference, which was held March 31- April 2, at the Berlin Radisson Hotel. This intimate, 2 1/2 day event will explore how European firms are leading the charge in many technology sectors, gaining a competitive advantage, and driving entrepreneurial success in ways that create business opportunities for challengers and incumbents alike.

About Red Herring

Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available on the Internet at www.redherring.com.


This video was a central part of Muzui’s conference presentation:

Only one out of ten mobile games titles becomes profitable, due to the high development costs and the greedy publishers and operators. Consequently, not even the best mobile games make a profit.

Fishlabs express some of the frustration that most indie-developers feel:

Fishlabs led the international charts for the best mobile games in 2008. Not bad for a small company with just 30 employees. Naturally, we were tremendously pleased with all of this recognition and are very proud of it.
Unfortunately, none of this guarantees that high quality and innovation will earn back the expenses of the costly production of such mobile games on the open market, to say nothing of making a profit – the purpose of every professional company.

In consequence, Fishlabs are offering a free trial of their games – a model that has been unsuccessful many times before.

Some key players are doing well, however. Moconews reported that Gameloft’s revenues increased by 15% in 2008. I talked with the Danish business developer from Gameloft, a while back. With the typical French nonchalance, he explained to me that Gameloft’s business strategy basically was to make exclusive deals with the operators; a strategy that had been very successful.

Indie developers don’t have a chance to push the operators in the same way, so they go to Gameloft and ask them to distribute their games… Gameloft snatch 25% for merely passing the games to the operators. After the operators take their 40-50%, the developers are left with a few pennies that makes it impossible to run a rentable business.

So with this tremendously strong market position, you may wonder how I can stipulate that Gameloft will fall and the indie-developers will rise. This is caused by 3 factors that are (almost) out of Gameloft’s hands:

1. The Socio-cultural Factor

Games are becoming social. The stereotypical lonesome gamer that sits alone playing is being replaced by gaming as a social expression, where the game play and the impressive graphics are of less importance. In social games, you want to showcase your artistic skills, technical skills, or knowledge to your friends, family, and co-workers. We see this on Facebook where social games are exploding and taking huge bites of the casual games market (or are social games the new generation of casual games?). Mobile games are going in the same direction but Gameloft is still missing this point. Gameloft’s best attempt to socialize their games is high scores, which shows a fundamental lack of capability to think innovative.

2. The Structural Factor

The bigger Alpha Male is dissatisfied. I have talked with American, European, and Asian operators and they all have the same outcry – the earnings in their games sections aren’t good enough. TeliaSonera has tried different models in collaboration with Gameloft, inter alia offering the games as a free trial version where you only pay for the full game. None of the models have worked, so the operators are desperately looking for new, innovative models that can boost data traffic and revenues. Indie-developers are providing great new takes on the mobile games business that are already catching the eyes of the operators. A good example is Cellufun.

3. The Technological Factor

Iphone applications are exploding. And unfortunately, Gameloft doesn’t have the same strain on the Iphone App Store as they’ve had on the operators. In consequence, they have to compete on the same premises as the indie-developers.

As William Blake said, the foundation of every empire is art and science. As indicated, the structural, socio-cultural, and technological progress is eroding Gameloft’s foundation, and this allows the indie-developers to contribute with their great ideas, which in the end will provide higher value for the end users. I don’t want Gameloft to go bankrupt but I do think they have been part of what has held the mobile games market back. The emerging openness on the mobile content market has already created an exciting dynamic where new innovative ideas can flourish. The Iphone App Store is the first step in the right direction.

Here’s my take:

Click inside the flash window, and use SPACE to rotate

For a while now, the three brothers, have discussed Twitter and its succes quite vividly. We all like Twitter and we use it ourselves to publish thoughts and links. So as users we see the obvious benefits of the service. But, and there is always a but, we also see some problems in regards to Twitter as a business.

Twitter vs. Status Updates

Plainly speaking Twitter is a social network stripped of all social features, except for the status updates. This is probably also one of the key ingredients in its succes. So, why is Tweets any different from FaceBook status updates? Well, I have given this alot of thought and the obvious reason that came to mind, was that Twitter is a service for professionals while FaceBook is a community for friends, as they demonstrate time and time again. Being an avid twitter user myself I have noticed that almost every single update I see, is from a professional who uses Twitter to gain awareness, make money or brand themselves. So, a Linkedin comparison would probably be more appropriate than a FaceBook. Instead of friends you have followers. Is Linkedin really about more then profiling yourself and your network? Twitter ads the value of blogmentality, which Linkedin have blatantly overlooked as statusupdates there are as rare as revenue in web 2.0 startups (I’ll get back to that).

So to summarize, twitter equals business output/branding while status updates equals mostly pathosfilled notes targeted at friends.

Service or Platform?

I remember the first time I heard about Twitter, I thought, and in a sense still think, that Twitter is no more than a feature. Om Malik had an interesting take on it, as he contemplated whether or not it would be smart of Twitter to cash out now, or hold out for the really big pay-day. He simply asked if Twitter considers itself a platform or a service. If you ask Evan Williams or Biz Stone, the answer will undoubtedly be that it is, or at least it is turning into a platform. Yet I do not see the justification in calling it a platform. If you do, please write me or make a comment telling me how and why.

The fact that twitter itself admits that most of its traffic and updates come from other sites/apps does not speak well for monetization. I will dig a little deeper into the subject as we march ahead.

Too Open?

Here at Muzui we are firm believers of openness, but I think in the case of Twitter they really haven’t considered the consequences. If, let’s just say, 60% of their users are active off-site, that means 60% that are not ever going to bring in revenue of any significant size. How will Twitter reach that audience? It will not be enough just throwing in an ad or two a day into the twitter stream. So, I state the obvious and conclude that although their open strategy has worked in terms of user increase, they have themselves created future obstacles that will make Twitter feel like Sisifos. No matter how hard they try, their revenue will never surpass their expenses. And if they do, they need to su they rpass it in a way that justifies 250 milion smackerones.

Monetization, really that easy?

As many bloggers, pundits and evidently investors have recently resonated, monetizing Twitter will be a piece of cake as long as they see growth and have loyal users. I beg to differ. I truly believe that Twitter has not yet attempted to monetize, not because they want to gain a much larger following first, but more importantly the fact that once have tried monetizing and failed, 250 million dollar valuations will be about as likely as me shaving my moustache. If it was really that as easy, and they don’t think it will alienate their users, why not use the good old trial and error approach?

My advice to Twitter: DON’T TRY TO MONETIZE! Hype is a hell of a drug.

SEO is a cost effective way to get quality traffic to your website. So your SEO experts get to work, right? They fix all the minor errors on-page, find great long-tail keywords, and start linkbuilding. And it’s working; the cash starts flowing, and you’re making a decent chunk of change. You can lean back because this is a cash cow! But one day your SERPS have dropped, and the next week they’ve dropped again. You’re losing revenue. What happened is that your competitors realised how high your SERPS were and copied your on-page and off-page optimization. Damn it.

You see, through different SEO tools the transparency online is huge. Your competitors can see what keywords, you’re using, which links you have, how you optimised your pages, and how your traffic has improved as a result. And they start doing the exact same things and you see your SERPS drop. You counterstrike with more aggressive linkbuilding. Suddenly, the SEO is time consuming, your revenue is decreasing, and new competitors start competing on the same keywords everyday.

This happens all the time. SEO can be frustrating. Consequently, some companies cheat. We’ve noticed a competitor using black hat tactics. If you search for mobile games on Google, you’ll see a website ranks higher than all the mobile behemoths, like Gameloft and EA games. Mobilclub.org scrapes content from other news sources with the keywords, they want to rank high on, and posts the articles on the bottom the frontpage, they use keyword stuffing, and link farms. It’s sad to see such a porly made website rank high.

In these financially harsh times, companies can get desperate in an attempt to survive. Fact is that, SEO is not the blue ocean everybody believes; the competition on good keywords is tough. Like in business strategy, if you’re doing something right, and earning a pile of cash, your competitors WILL imitate you.

Put in the situation, where competitors are competing hard on the same keywords, we believe many companies will look to the dark side of SEO. This is damn unfortunate, since it degrades the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines, which has become the single most important access point to the information on the Web.

We’ll never turn to the dark side!

We’re Web 2.0 fanatics/geeks - we admire the simple innovations. Yesterday, David stumbled upon a site called 25lines.com that promulgates simplicity. The idea is this: Create whatever you want in 25 lines of code. Just code. No library assets, nothing loaded in. Just code. This requires a resourceful and innovative mindset. Just see what this guy came up with (Alvaro Videla ported it to JavaScript, perhaps someone can port this to J2ME?). He won the contest in December. Kudos to Marius from Muzui! This would be a great project for job interviews - make them create whatever they want in 25 lines of code. Often, this will show how disciplined and creative, the person is.

This week an interesting discussion broke out on innovation. It started when Om Malik wrote a Tweet saying  “think google has no big ideas. this morning they announced a to-do-list. FGS. [For God Sake] Remember the Milk MUCH better.” This ‘invoked the spirit’ of Matt Cutts, Ol’ Google vet, who indignantly replied with a series of comments in his Friendfeed, now posted on his blog. Subsequently, Om Malik wrote a post about his perspective on Google’s big ideas.

As the opinionated people we are, we disagree with both Cutts and Malik. It’s not about incremental versus radical innovation, big ideas versus small ideas, corporations versus start-ups. They both assume that big ideas are huge, sophisticated projects. But fact is that the domino effect that Google started, came from search in its simplest form and ended up disrupting a whole industry.

Similarly, when Sydney (Australia) was building its opera house the structure of the shells was a puzzle for the engineers and mathematicians. They made complicated mathematical formulas and scientific test but simply couldn’t get their heads around it. Finally, Utzon came up with a simple solution: He replaced the original elliptical shells with a design based on complex sections of a sphere. Utzon says his design was inspired by the simple act of peeling an orange: the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere. (Wikipedia) He took a simple form to solve a complex problem.

An idea isn’t big because of the amount of resources it takes to actualize it - an idea is big when it has widescale consequences to society, technology, or culture. And often these ideas are very simple in their nature. Google should headhunt people like Marius Heil who can create a game in 25 lines… that’s a big idea!

1. Japan finished 2008 with 110 milion mobile subscribers, TCA says. That means that 87% of the nation has a mobile subscribtion. DoCoMo sits on 49% of the market share.

2. According to Impress R&D 28% of subscribers access blogs from their phones! That adds up to 30 million people. To all the social networks out there (who can most likely only dream of penetrating Japan), I can tell you that 15% access social networks through their cellphone.

3. One of our most popular games are Kamikaze, where you actually have to shoot down enemy fighter planes from Japan. (The last one is just for shows)

Seth Godin, marketing guru, entrepreneur extraordinaire, action figure and perhaps a bit overhyped, has come up with seven pieces of advice in the financial crisis. For the people, who don’t know Godin, he came up with permission marketing where the audience opt in to your marketing ploys. He holds that since TV ‘died’ the audience has to choose to follow you - you can’t demand attention. Secondly, the consumers have the power, so you have to show respect. Finally, he asserts that the only way to catch the consumers’ attention is by having a remarkable message.

Now our skinny Budha has come up with seven magic pills to get your start-up through these harsh times. It’s not too original, in our opinion, but heck most often it’s the clichees that are most acute.

1. Recognize that you’ll have less competition

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You should know that this is the best thing that ever happened to you because it makes it easier to be the winner when so many people are dropping out.

The dip is closer and shallower then it would be if these were the boom times.

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2. Focus on building value

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The emphasis should not be on “how do I raise money and hire people.” The emphasis should be on “how do I build value today.”

Because, every day you’re doing this, you’re building value, connecting with people who find you irreplaceable, then you will become irreplaceable.

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3. Expect your costs to go down

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Understand that in a down economy, not only is there less money for people to spend on you, but you have to spend less money to make stuff that’s worthwhile.

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4. Don’t hire like it’s 1999

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It makes me sick to see organizations that race out to hire 50 people, because they think that get big fast matters. And then “it’s not their fault” when they lay off 20.

Well sure it is. It’s totally your fault Mr. entrepreneur, because you shouldn’t have hired 50 people to start with.

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5. Focus on the irreplaceable

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The goal is NOT how fast can you hire as many people as you can. The goal is how irreplaceable are your people. How much can you boil down the essence of what you’re building?

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6. Get lean to beat the behemoths

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When we look at the home runs online. They are not the Daily Beast with $18 million and hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re Twitter, with a tiny team of people who have a very fine focused, vision.

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7. Be disciplined about what you’re building

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One of the things the guys at 37signals say is, if you want to be on budget and on time, what you have to do is, the day you hit the budget, or the day you hit the deadline, you have to ship. And it’s a race.

As Andrew Warner (who did the interview) concludes: You don’t say how do I get more money to match the spec? You say, how can I get the spec out there for the money I have?

1. All-in-one SEO Pack

Optimises your blog for search engines

2. TweetSuite

Integration of your tweets (from twitter.com) on your blog. Just a neat, little plugin that handles all your Twitter activity.

3. Global Translator

Translates your blog to 34 different languages. And who gives a damn? Well, that means 34 times more indexed pages that are also included in your sitemap. Uhh the search engines will love you.

4. Social bookmarks

Adds all the major social bookmarking buttons to your blogposts.

5. Sitemap generator

A simple Google XML sitemap generator. A bit dull, we know, but it gets you indexed much faster.