By Wade Roush Xconomy Follow @wroush

Whatever you do, don’t tell Kiip CEO Brian Wong that he’s in the advertising business. Yes, if you’re playing a mobile game that uses Kiip’s service, you’ll see pop-up screens offering rewards from big brands like Pepsi, Disney, and Best Buy. But these aren’t ads, Wong insists. They’re moments of reciprocity prompted by an achievement on your part, like shooting the boss zombie. And they might just signal the end of an era for traditional online marketing.

Wong is one of several startup founders striving to blow up the whole traditional banner-advertising model in Web and mobile commerce and replace it with something that’s more effective for brands and more appealing for consumers. That something, for Kiip, is the achievement—the “happiness moment,” in Wong’s terminology. “It’s this amazing moment that every good game in the world has—a natural pause in play when you are happy. Dopamine rushes to your head. You feel like you’ve accomplished something.”

The hypothesis Kiip and other companies are testing is that this dopamine-rush moment is the perfect time to reach out with a brand message—say, an offer of a free burger at Carl’s Jr., or some virtual currency to spend in an online store, or a discount on a game rig. For mobile game developers, showing players these reward offers—and earning a slice of the revenue in the process—is now simply a matter of plugging in some code from a reward network such as Kiip or its competitor Beintoo, an Italian-born company that just relocated to San Francisco. Builders of console or PC games can now tap into a similar rewards system from Raptr, the San Mateo, CA-based community for gamers.

The entrepreneurs at all these companies are convinced that gamers are far more likely to respond to an offer if it comes at a natural pause in a game, in response to an achievement, than they are to interrupt themselves by clicking on a banner ad. Wong says he grasped the seed of the concept on a long plane flight back in 2010, when he noticed how many of his fellow passengers were amusing themselves with smartphone games. “That was the epiphany,” he says. “What if I could harness these moments and do something with them?”

Wong, a 21-year-old business graduate from the University of British Columbia, got his start in Silicon Valley doing business development at Digg, the social news aggregator. After getting swept up in a round of layoffs at Digg, he traveled for a while, had his epiphany, connected with co-founders Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi, and raised $300,000 in seed capital from Transmedia Capital, True Ventures, and a small group of other investors.

Gamers no longer respond to the banner ads distributed by Google’s  and other ad networks, Wong argues. An ad on the Web is essentially a billboard shrunk down to the size of a PC or laptop screen, he points out; on a smartphone screen it’s smaller still. “You are taking a model from an old platform and trying to jam it into a new one,” he says. “There is no innovation there. We decided to throw that all away and figure out what we would create if we were to invent the entire concept from scratch.”

Using a self-service platform that Kiip introduced two months ago, game developers can download a software kit that allows them to specify which achievements in their games should trigger a reward offer from Kiip. Then, at the appropriate moment—say, between levels, or when a game is over, or when

the player has achieved a new high score—an offer appears in a pop-up window. Kiip’s clients include names like 1-800-Flowers, Best Buy, Disney, Kodak, Pepsi, Sephora, Starbucks, and ticket agency ScoreBig; offers range from a free coffee to a free Xbox 360 game console. To redeem offers, players just enter their e-mail addresses.

Engagement rates are vastly higher for Kiip rewards than for traditional banner ads, Wong says. Some 10 to 13 percent of offers get redeemed, compared to banner-ad click-through rates far below 1 percent. The difference, Wong says, is that the offer is arriving at the right time, when the player feels good about finishing something. “I am not taking a piece of the screen. I am not ruining the experience. I am not changing the user interface or the user experience. I am using a particular moment and reciprocating,” Wong says.

Developers—and more importantly, gamers—seem to be responding to the model. About 300 developers have joined the startup’s network, and the number of monthly active users seeing reward offers doubled every month between November and March. Kiip earns $0.25 to $3.00 per reward redemption, and shares an undisclosed fraction of that revenue with the game developer, according to Wong. Some developers earn “five figures or more on a monthly basis,” he says.

Because it has actual revenue, Kiip has been able to expand to 27 staffers on just $4 million in Series A money (collected in early 2011). “Funding, to so many companies, is like a ticking time bomb,” Wong says. “To us it’s not even close. We started generating revenue from the day we launched.” And it’s building a brand that game developers are going out of their way to promote: some companies actually boast on their iTunes App Store pages that their games are Kiip-enabled. “People won’t say ‘I love AdMob,’ but they will say that they love Kiip,” Wong boasts.

Transmedia Capital general partner Chris Redlitz, a mentor to Wong and one of Kiip’s earliest investors, calls Wong’s idea an “everybody wins” scenario. “For game developers it’s incremental revenue. For game players, it’s an added bonus—beyond the good feeling of achieving something you are getting a reward. And for advertisers, it’s one of the best new opportunities for them to engage with their audience.” Redlitz says it took someone as young as Wong to “understand the demographic” and predict how mobile gamers would respond to new types of brand messages.

If achievement moments are so powerful, could they be exploited outside the realm of mobile games? And if so, is there a concomitant danger of overcommercialization—of bombarding consumers with reward offers until they’re numb?

Wong has thought about both questions. On the one hand, he’s bullish on the idea of the happiness moment. Fitness apps such as MapMyRun are already using Kiip toreward users for logging exercise sessions. And from listening to Wong talk about the company’s larger vision, it sounds like it’s only a matter of time before offers mediated by Kiip pop up in new contexts such as Web or console games or even live sports events. “We want to own every single achievement moment on the planet,” Wong says. “That will be a billion-dollar business.”

But at the same time, Wong says he views the happiness moment as a “natural resource” that has to be “mined responsibly and sustainably.”

“You don’t want to hit the bottom of the well early on,” He says. “That would just be greed.” To make sure game players don’t tire from over-exposure to offers, Kiip limits the frequency of its pop-ups, Wong says, and it employs a tracking system called a preference graph to make sure that it doesn’t show offers to people who don’t want them. “We are very good at policing ourselves,” he says.

Kiip isn’t approaching the saturation point yet, in Wong’s view. In fact, the startup set aside $100,000 in March for a “Build Fund” to encourage independent developers to come up with games that have Kiip-mediated happiness moments built in from the beginning. The startup plans to hand out the money to 20 developers in $5,000 chunks.

If you’re trying to replace traditional advertising with reward-based messages, after all, every little seed helps. “I try to drill it into everyone’s head that the minute you describe something as an ad, there are connotations and the market responds differently,” Wong tells me at the close of our interview. “You can definitely say in your piece that ‘The founder of Kiip seems very obsessed with describing this as a moment and a reward.’”

Liz Gannes, All Things D, April 25, 2012

People search start-up Ark.com has led a bit of a charmed existence. Part of Y Combinator’s winter class, it debuted to the public shortly after YC leader Paul Graham posted an essay about “frighteningly ambitious ideas” — with No. 1 on the list “a new search engine.”

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day a short Ark pitch delivered in the midst of 64 other start-up presentations got the company commitments for $2 million in funding in a single day. And more than 250,000 people have signed up for Ark beta invites.

Less than a month after Demo Day, Ark now tells me it has raised a $4.2 million seed round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Salesforce, Tencent, Transmedia Capital and a bunch of individual angel investors.

That’s the largest seed round ever raised by a Y Combinator company. It benchmarks Ark as a clear frontrunner in the most recent batch of the program’s closely watched start-ups. (Though to be fair, I’ve heard other top companies in the winter class are also cleaning up.)

Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.

And it actually is too good to be true — right now Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.

Ark co-founder and CEO Patrick Riley

But Ark CEO Patrick Riley, who was previously working on his PhD UC Berkeley’s School of Information, is clear about his ambition. “Google seems so out of touch without the rest of us,” he told me last week. “They’ve lost their neutrality.”

The rift between Google and Facebook leaves social search dramatically underdeveloped, Riley said (and it’s a point I’ve argued as well).

“Politics have left open this enormous opportunity,” is how Riley put it.

Part of what’s hard about social search is that Facebook prohibits outside crawlers. But Riley said he’s confident that he can get Facebook data, because he’s gotten advice from Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and worked with Facebook’s legal team to make sure everything’s kosher.

So why should anyone care about “people search”? Beyond the age-old attraction of researching and stalking people, Riley described Ark as an automated “About.me of everyone,” that collates various social profiles.

Riley also said Ark is planning to beef up its social discovery tools, so users can find new activity and interest partners inside and outside their networks. There will also eventually be an Ark equivalent of Google AdWords, where users can pay to promote themselves, he said.

Riley wants to develop a reputation and validation tool that fingerprints a person by comparing their social graphs on different networks. Because many sites and apps improve with a better sense of who is using them, he plans to provide social data plug-ins to other companies.

After being founded just last summer and coming into focus during the three-month YC program, Ark already has a team of 16 employees, including co-founder Yiming Liu, also from Berkeley’s iSchool. And now it has a bunch of money to hire more.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Read more…

While driving along the other day I had an epiphany as I studied the FedEx logo on the side of a truck as I passed (specifically the cleverly hidden arrow in the negative space that I assume is meant to imply forward progress). I realized that, no matter how well-conceived the logo concept may have been, it’s a bit flawed because, depending on what side of the truck you are on, the arrow can be pointing forward or backward. In a similar fashion it struck me that despite good intentions, an entrepreneur, especially in the tech industry, can find it hard to know what direction to point in order to make forward progress. My hope is that this post, and DailyTekk in general, will be a great resource for tech startups everywhere and a one that will help get them pointed in the right direction.

To that end, I’ve compiled a huge list of tools that I think could be useful to a tech startup, especially those just getting started (at least they are useful to me). From getting inspired to hiring an awesome team to moving out of your garage into a more functional workspace, this post is designed to be a bookmark-able resource (that we’ll keep updated over time) to help you get a good start. While I did include some crowd funding resources, I purposefully left out venture and angel sources because I feel that it’s really about who you know and your own personal network when it comes to raising that kind of capital. Just build a great product and focus on making the right connections. Along those lines, I did include some great tools for  researching and testing your product and pitching your ideas once the time is right.

All said, this list is really just a starting point. There was no way I could roundup every valuable startup resource and include it here (either because I don’t know about everything, the list would have been too long or I just had to be finished at some point). If I did miss something good though, please leave a comment below so we can get it added or at least so people can reference it.

Read more…

“When it comes to iOS, Android and Blackberry push notifications, Urban Airship is driving incredible volume through a messaging platform that is simply head-and-shoulders above the rest of the market,” said David McLauchlan, co-founder and CEO, Buddy. “We’re delighted that all of our iOS, Android and Blackberry developers will join our Windows Phone developers in having access to a world-class notification system all managed through a single portal.”

The premise is simple, developers can create unlockable achievements in their games, and Kiip will reward those players with physical items from its advertising partners. With about 100 games using Kiip’s platform, its CEO Brian Wong told me on the phone today that is has opened up over 500 million new inventory spots for advertisers.

There is no shortage of advertisers looking to spend money, only shortage of spots to insert advertising. By building a relationship with top-tier advertisers like Disney, Pepsi, Popchips, and Sears, Kiip provides a way for game developers to make their players happy and rewarded with really cool stuff that they can even pass on to their friends.

Today, Kiip has announced that its platform is open for all developers to use, lifting its selective beta-like gates. The company has been selective in choosing developers to use its platform so that it could control growth and properly scale the product for this public launch. The time is here and now any developer can start including Kiip rewards with just a single line of code.

It’s a win, win, win situation

Kiip has found itself a fantastic niche for providing advertisers with new real estate, developers with a way to make money from their games, and take a cut of the action for itself. Wong told me that out of its 100 games using Kiip, 10 of them are in the top 100 games on Apple’s App Store. That means that the games themselves are sticky and Kiip is rewarding those gamers for coming back. In fact, Kiip currently displays 4 rewards every second in the apps where it is included.

To make it easy for developers to get started with Kiip, Wong says that the company worked really hard to create an onboarding experience that “walks the talk” when it comes to easy:

The most impressive thing about Scan is that it, as a humble QR code app, has raised over $1.7 million in seed funding from, wait for it, Shervin Pishevar via Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, Social + Capital Partnership, Transmedia Capital, Ludlow Ventures and angels Ariel Poler, Naval Ravikant of AngelPool, Jim Pallotta of Raptor Group and Gaga manager Troy Carter.

Provo, Utah-based Scan co-founder Garrett Gee finds QR codes as distasteful as the next person, but he believes in exceptions. He thinks Scan can go beyond its modest ambitions as a QR code and 1D barcode scanner and make those awkward squares that now serve as hopeful addendums to things like movie posters and conference badges ubiquitous and user-friendly. To this end, the Scan web interface allows normals to generate QR codes with no prior development experience. With Scan.me businesses or individuals can create QR codes representing a person’s online presence (sort of like an About.me for QR codes) or a QR code for any website.

“In our 3 step process…the actual QR code is last (on purpose),” says Gee “We first focus on what the person is trying to accomplish. Then content…” Gee views his closest competitor as being QR code generator Paperlinks, but says that his company differentiates itself by focusing more on brand and consumer experience, straddling the line between reader and generator in an easily accessible way. ”Although [Paperlinks] also has a consumer facing app, it does not nearly have the adoption, user-base, or name that Scan has with our 10 million in one year.” Oh and did I mention that it already has 10 million downloads?

“We understand that there is a negative connotation around QR codes,” Gee, who insists that QR codes do actually work, says,”That is why we focus on the content and experience. The QR code and other mobile transaction technologies are simply the medium.” Gee tells me that he purposefully named the company Scan so as not to limit it to QR codes and has already started to expand into 1D barcodes, NFC and image recognition. Social media friendly features like ”Scan to Follow”(Twitter), “Scan to Like”(FB), and “Scan to Check-in”(Foursquare) are also in the works. Gee also tells me that Scan already had the skills in-house to build everything they needed (skill based founders)…but will use the money to grow bigger/better/faster. Like that Daft Punk song.

SEATTLE – February 20th, 2012 – Buddy Platform, Inc. today announced a partnership with popular image editing and processing platform Aviary, Inc. that will enable a new generation of applications to support user-generated image editing on any mobile device or web platform.

In addition to the photo album support offered by Buddy today, developers will be able to have app users perform image manipulation, apply photo correction or special effects across all OS platforms overlaid with Buddy’s analytics. Best of all, developers need only manage a single administrative account at Buddy.com.

“We’re delighted to be joining with Aviary to deliver this functionality to users across all mobile platforms”, said David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy. “One of our most requested features is the ability to support photo editing in-app. By working with Aviary to deliver this solution, we’re powering this feature with the best mobile photo editing engine in the business.”

Aviary provides SDKs for web, iOS and Android with Windows Phone coming soon.  The Aviary SDK allows developers to support inline photo editing as a seamless component of their apps. The partnership with Buddy brings that powerful technology to developers who also need support for other common connected-app scenarios such as user accounts, location services or messaging/chat.

“We love the ease and simplicity Buddy brings to building cloud-connected and engaging apps, and we believe that the most engaging apps let users reach their creative potential”, said Paul Murphy, VP at Aviary. “With photo editing powered by Aviary soon available to Buddy developers worldwide, we look forward to the creative results from developers and users alike, as this new generation of apps emerges.”

Support for image editing powered by Aviary in the Buddy Platform is expected to be available to developers mid-Spring.

About Buddy Platform, Inc.

Buddy Platform, Inc. is a Kirkland, Wash. based company that provides publishers of mobile applications high fidelity analytics, and developers of mobile apps a fully hosted and managed toolset of web services to power the cloud-connected pieces of those apps.

Buddy’s high fidelity analytics for mobile apps are powered by the “Buddy Platform”, a set of hosted cloud services mobile developers can use to quickly and easily add cloud-connectivity to their apps. Developers on any platform build their apps using Buddy Platform APIs that support such scenarios as user accounts, friends & group lists, messaging & chat, geo-location services, photo albums, metadata, push notifications and crash reporting. Simple usage of the platform auto-generates amazingly detailed analytics for the publishers of those apps. More information is available at www.buddy.com orholler@buddy.com.

About Aviary, Inc.

Aviary’s mission is to power the world’s creativity. More information is available at www.aviary.com, or email contact@aviary.com.