Have you ever wondered if what you do on a daily basis is the most efficient way to do your job? Maybe you think to yourself, “There has got to be a better or quicker way to do this!” I know I do. Here at W3i we recently had what is called a “hackathon”; an event where functional groups from throughout the company met to do collaborative computer programming. At the end of the day, the goal is to have created some new program or application. Essentially it is a bunch of people, all in one room, pounding out code and UI. This is a great way to use an open and collaborative space to gain insights into what it is that the rest of your coworkers do and, better yet, are capable of.

Through multiple collaborative events, I have been able to ask the right questions and even stumble upon fixes to daily pain points. If you find yourself in an environment that does not necessarily promote collaboration, I would suggest taking the time to visit other functional departments to see what it is that they do and if they have suggestions for fixing problems that you face. If need be, set up a meeting to work together. Not only can you increase your speed to market, but it can also make your life a little easier. Make yourself available to others to find out how your jobs intersect. You might be able to improve something that they do or alleviate a pain point that they have come across.

Communication is everything in making a collaborative environment beneficial. You may already have the ideal environment, but you don’t utilize it to its full potential. Get the ball rolling and create the conversations you think you need to have. Ask questions that promote elaboration so you get more than yes and no answers. Move beyond the years of cubicle walls and closed doors. It is up to you to attain the knowledge you wish to gain so do your best to create a collaborative environment and get conversations going.

Written by Brian Mueller, Associate Marketing Specialist

What’s New @ W3i for Mobile App Partners

App ID Creation – Create an ID for your app that you can use for integration. This will save you time speed up implementation so your app is to market faster! Forgot your ID? Do you need to know what we have set up for your currency? Can’t remember if you have been set up as a partner for a specific application? Find it all here!

Self-Service Campaign Management (Coming Soon!) – Stop and start your campaigns to optimize your return. No more waiting for someone who may be in a different time zone than you. Move quickly with the ability to pause and resume your campaigns as needed without the help of a W3i associate. Were you looking for the ability to see the campaign information for your applications? Now you can! You will be able to view your budget, remaining balances, daily cap information, country targeting, rate, start time and expiration time, whether or not your application was featured and more!

Mobile Integration Documentation – For ease of implementation you now have direct access to updates to SDK’s, sample apps, FAQ’s, etc. No more waiting, direct access to all of our integration updates immediately without having to log in.

Create and Save Custom Reports – Saves time and gives you the insight you need at your fingertips. Save your reports for immediate access to your most important reports after login.

Custom Subscriptions (Coming Soon!)– Now that you have the ability to save your reports, wouldn’t it be nice to have them e-mailed directly to you? Coming soon, the ability to subscribe to your custom reports and have them sent directly to you as you need them. Weekly, daily, whenever, you got it!

This is just the beginning of improvements we are making to improve your experience partnering with W3i.

My day job brings me the good fortune of working with the majority of the top-grossing app developers. For the AppNation conference in San Francisco earlier this month, I was asked to organize and moderate a panel, “Rants From Top Grossing App Developers.” The panel consisted of Giordano Bruno Contestabile (EA/PopCap Games), Cat Silvestre (DeNA/ngmoco), Daniel Pfeiffer (FunMobility), Jamil Moledina (Funzio), and me.

Rants from top-grossing developers might seem odd. As Jamil pointed out, why would a top-grossing app developer complain since it is, by definition, generating the most revenue? Therefore, included in my highlights are a few anti-rants.

Mirage of cross-platform. Giordano pointed out that the promise of cross-platform app development was talked about for 10 years, and we are still not there yet. From Jamil’s perspective, we are seeing some progress as interfaces and monetization solutions are becoming more consistent across platforms.

Fragmentation is still an issue. From their experience working with feature phone apps pre-iPhone, Giordano and Cat both agreed that fragmentation issues have subsided a bit. With that said, fragmentation issues are still prevalent, and we aren’t just talking Android. During Funzio’s recently released hit iOS game, Modern War, Jamil said his team spent several sleepless nights working through fragmentation issues with older iPod touch devices.

People problems caused by the bubble. Daniel said it’s difficult to hire good talent at a reasonable price due to unrealistic expectations versus the value and impact an employee brings to an organization. From my perspective, the trouble with talent acquisition largely stems from so many venture-funded mobile app companies. I’m reminded of the dot-com bubble, and how that impacted the early growth of my company. Daniel believes that a lot of dumb money is pouring into inexperienced startups with thoroughly unprofitable app concepts. Jamil disagrees, however, that we’re in a bubble. He believes investments are generally rational given how big the mobile app space will be. From a hiring perspective, Jamil said the problem is not just hiring developers. The greatest issue, he said, is hiring top-notch artists.

Randomness of smartphone store policies. Daniel expressed frustration over the randomness of smartphone store operators’ policies including their procedures and enforcement thereof. For example, Daniel cited the recent approval by Apple of Big Fish’s use of subscription billing in a game, which was only days later rejected. Also, Apple forbade the use of incentivized app downloads in April 2011, even though our company’s research shows that users who receive incentives can be highly engaged.

More intelligent ways to drive user acquisition are needed. While pleased they can generally target by country, Jamil would like to see mobile ad networks support demographic targeting.

Got a rant or anti-rant of your own? Please share in the comments.

Rob Weber, Senior Vice President of Mobile Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

How important is system uptime to your customers? At W3i, we feel that it is of upmost importance that our systems are always up and running. This was one of the driving factors for our data center move back in March of 2010 (see related blog post here).
The move to the new data center was a much needed refresh to help strengthen our systems. Let’s be realistic, can anyone ever be up 100% of the time? We all strive for that, but system failure and human error will find a way to bring you down.

What if Bob made a change to an application that he didn’t realize would have an adverse effect on another system that Jane maintains? Or if Bill added a new feature to his application, but wasn’t aware of the system resources required to support the new feature? The new feature add resulted with everything slowing down due to CPU overload.

In the fast paced MVP to full blown product business we are in, issues like this come up all the time. How can one keep track of all these ties to identify when issues come up?

That’s easy, documentation right? Let’s be real though, who reads documentation? We should also remember that documentation is only as good as the contents freshness and relevance. Truth is no matter how much documentation, how many procedures are in place or how much testing goes into something; Murphy’s Law will always show its ugly head every now and again. So how do we make sure that everything is working and functioning as it should and there are no issues with your sites or systems?

That’s where system monitoring comes in. There are a plethora of different monitoring solutions available on the market today and each has their unique capabilities and offerings. Is there one holistic solution out that will fill all your needs? The answer is, probably not. You’ll likely have to piece together your monitor solution with several tools. Once you start to get all your systems covered you’ll begin to fill in the black holes of the unknown with visibility into the function resources that make up your infrastructure.

We at W3i utilize multiple monitoring solutions to try and grasp every aspect of every system and or application. We monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization with Solarwinds Orion NPM while leveraging Solarwinds’ other modules such as Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to monitor services, exe’s and perfmon data and Netflow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) to monitor the bits that are traveling our network. To watch website availability we use a solution from ExclamationSOFT called WebWatchBot that hits our web properties and makes sure specified search terms are present along with a status code we are expecting users to get. We also use WhatsUpGold from IPSwitch to monitor our external availability. Then there are other applications specific monitoring solutions such as Quest Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL and some customer made monitoring utilizing Microsoft PowerShell and the list goes on and on.

From our experience there isn’t a holist solution, but by using many different solutions you should get the full coverage needed to monitor and maintain all aspects of your infrastructure. The goal in any alerting/monitoring solution should be to help keep you informed about potential issues proactively before they become problems. There is nothing worse than getting notified of issues from others outside of the group whom take pride in maintaining the systems. Leave a comment if you found a great solution for system monitoring.

Brad Gocken, Manager of Information Technology, W3i.  Brad has more than 11 years of working experience in IT related fields. He is from Minnesota and loves learning about new technologies. He also enjoys brewing and drinking craft beer.

W3i had a rockin’ year in 2011–doubling sales.  You could say…W3i’s on Fire!  Thanks to all our partners, employees and the tech community in the Twin Cities, San Francisco and St. Cloud.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

Team W3i

Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 30, 2011–W3i® (www.W3i.com), a leader in monetization and user acquisition services for mobile apps, announced today the launch of the $10 Million AppX Game Developer Marketing Fund.  The goal of the marketing fund is to accelerate user growth for up-and- coming mobile social game developers by aiding in their user acquisition financing.

W3i's AppX - Resources to Accelerate Game Profitability

iOS™ and Android™ game developers’ goal is to drive user acquisition of mobile games accelerating the growth of active users.

This fund reinforces W3i’s commitment to iOS and Android game developers to help them compete with AAA competitors thus accelerating their path to profitability.

W3i is known for its extensive experience in partnering with mobile and desktop app developers to grow their app  businesses.  All developers who qualify for the AppX Game Developer Marketing Fund receive adept production support, actionable insight to optimize their game business and profitable user acquisition with funding to speed up growth.  The AppX suite of services is provided without charge and with no, long-term revenue share.
Using AppX does not require the developer to give up their IP rights allowing them to focus on actual game design and development.

“W3i has proven to be a valued partner in marketing our game, My Pet Zombie. Not only did we quickly become  profitable with our app, W3i helped increase the lifetime value of our users by three times. We would highly recommend using W3i to market your mobile game,” comments Brian Robbins, Founder of Riptide Games.

“We continue to develop tools that add value for mobile game developer partners,” said Andy Johnson, CEO. “Our road map continues to focus on improving monetization and user acquisition tools to optimize ROI using a decade of experience doing the same for our desktop app partners.  The rollout continues with AppX.”  For more information contact W3i AppX.

About W3i: W3i is a leader in monetization and user acquisition services for mobile and desktop apps.  Utilize an experienced team of app-savvy marketers with deep technical know-how and many years of industry experience to grow your app business. We are ready to collaborate with app developers to execute programs that quickly deliver revenue and quality users. To learn more, visit www.W3i.com with offices in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Sartell, MN. 

Press Contact:

Deborah Manthei

Director of Marketing Communications

320-257-7571 (office)

deborah.manthei@W3i.com

The names of companies and products mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Everyone agrees that apps are great marketing tools for engaging consumers. Now the debate is whether to develop native or web apps. Which is better? Well, it depends.

What Are Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps?

Native apps are apps that are explicitly developed and stored on a device. Native apps require installation.

Web apps are written entirely with web technologies and the code is executed by the browser; installation is optional.

Hybrid apps are native apps with embedded HTML. They have most of the benefits of native apps. The web portions can be packed with the app or downloaded from the web.

Factor 1: How Will the Consumer Use the App?

If the app uses features of the device (microphone, speaker, camera, vibration, GPS, etc.), a native app is more appropriate. If the app relies on the Internet for content (i.e., a catalog of products), a web app is more appropriate. This chart demonstrates applications by Internet task – shopping and search apps being heavy browser users are more likely to be web apps while connecting and navigating apps use features of the device and are more likely to be native apps.

Factor 2: How Fast and How User Friendly Do You Want the App?

Since a native app is explicitly downloaded and stored on the device, generally the user experience is better. The user interface can be cleaner without multiple frames. As Matt Legend Gemmell said when speaking about native apps in his article “Apps vs the Web,” “…humans are designed to focus the majority of our attention on a single task at a time. Interfaces which permit and even encourage this separation of concerns reduce our stress level, and facilitate concentration.” Native apps tend to have better graphics and a smooth user experience due to the interface with the device.

Factor 3: How Will the App Be Distributed?

Native apps can be distributed for free through app stores using their payment system. However, a negative is the loss of control through the approval process, monetization, and promotion of the app. Web apps generally have less visibility and are usually marketed using search engines or on branded websites directly to the consumer.

Factor 4: What Do You Want to Spend?

Native apps are more expensive to develop, as they need to be developed for each specific operating system – iOS, Android (multiple devices), Windows, etc. Many web apps can be developed by in-house developers using existing skills. Therefore, native apps can also take longer to develop. Maintaining apps on multiple operating systems is also expensive and time consuming.

Of course, you can always use the hybrid model, which can combine the best of both worlds. Hybrid applications are increasingly rising in popularity as operating systems become more fragmented.

Usage, user experience, control, distribution, and cost all come into play when developing an app; and then there is how to design the app itself so that it is engaging and retains the user to defray distribution costs.

To learn more, watch this great presentation entitled “HTML5, Hybrid or Native Mobile App Development Webinar.”

Rob Weber, Senior Vice President of Mobile Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

November 23, 2011 Sartell, MN – W3i, a local Internet marketer, teamed up with CentraCare in their Caring for Generations Campaign to expand advanced health care in Central Minnesota for families, friends and neighbors and generations to come.

W3i is proud to be a member of the St. Cloud community and as a team, wanted to give back to this esteemed cause.  During the month of October employees held several fund-raising events including a bake sale, raffles, and Bingo raising $7,500, of which $5,000 of that amount was doubled by W3i and then matched by Marco.

W3i is having a tremendous year, and our team wanted to give back by supporting the efforts of Centracare in providing outstanding health care to central Minnesota.  The management team and I are proud of our employees for their generosity in supporting this important campaign.” comments Andy Johnson, CEO of W3i.