Today, Geewa is pleased to announce we have successfully ported our casual gaming platform onto Facebook.

 

Built using our tried and tested multiplayer technology, the Geewa platform allows Facebook users to enjoy Geewa’s original games as well as more than 5,300 single player games, many of them handpicked. All are searchable in real-time. From a user perspective, we are bringing to Facebook all the benefits of a fully integrated set of features like our Avatar editor, Avatar virtual items, hall of fame, weekly leagues, our virtual currency (G-Points) and our Pro Player subscription model. Users can search for the most played games, the best rated games or discover newly added games (we add on average one new game per day!). The availability of our Live Games platform on Facebook also means you need install only one app for access to all our games. Once a user has the Live Games app installed, they can search and discover all the available games and challenge their Facebook friends to a real-time synchronous match in the popular Pool live! or Word Soccer live! or many others.

Since our platform is connected to our central database of players, Facebook users will be able to compete against players from outside of Facebook. At peak, more than 20,000 people are currently connected to the platform which has been in production for one year at some of our existing partners’ websites.

Play full screen! One of the drawbacks of the Facebook page format is that it is not possible to play a game in full screen mode. Live Games makes this possible thanks to the integration of Facebook Connect to our platform. In one click, players can now easily move back and forth between the Facebook environment and our website to enjoy their favorite games in full screen splendour without losing their Facebook identity and network of friends.

Going forward we intend to optimize our technology for Facebook’s Newsfeed and fully open the platform’s API to allow other casual game developers to benefit from our virtual currency, multiplayer engine and the various underlying set of features the platform hosts.

At Geewa, we believe that the future of casual gaming will be characterized by social gaming companies luring users away from social networks into the open-web where they will have a greater granularity of control over the user's experience and the underlying technology. The recent launch of farmville.com is a testimony to this vision. To achieve this, companies will need to start investing in platforms into which their games can be slotted in order to benefit from cross-platform features. Such platforms also reduce the time-to-market necessary to launch new games since some functionnalities will already be available at the paltform level.

You can experience Geewa’s Live Games platform here: http://apps.facebook.com/live-games/

There are time in the life of a company when you have to sit down, listen and react to unexpected events. It could be the shortage of cash, a partner canceling a long-term contract, an employee leaving, an unexpected order from the sales team or you could be experimenting tremendous growth on one of your distribution channel.

This last case is exactly what we have been noticing for the past months with our multiplayer games on Facebook. Last week, Geewa's Pool Live! game overtook Pool Practice, a singleplayer pool game, and as a result Geewa's Pool Live! is now the most played Pool game on Facebook. From the day we launched it and seeded it to our own friends, the number of players has not stopped growing. In combination with our other Live! games, Facebook has simply become in less than 6 months our 2nd biggest distribution channel.

 

We already knew that launching our multiplayer games on Facebook would help us reach a new audience but we did not expect such a fast growth (even though secretly hoping for it). For this reason, we have decided to react and put more focus on Social Networks. Our game are already available on Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle and we are currently finalizing our Open-Social implementation. Expect a lot of news from us in the coming months including the release of a new version of 8-Balls Pool. Our players have given us a lot of feedback on how to make Pool Live! even better and we are taking the best ideas and including them into the next version of the product.

See you at the Pool table ;-)

Note: The blog post is sponsored by Geewa's shameless self promotion department (aka: me).

I was going through our Google Analytics data this morning and thought readers of this blog might be interested in a couple of information I found on user loyalty and recency. At Geewa, we like to say that our users love our games and come back often to play whenever they want to have a break from their boss or their demanding husband and kids.

Looking at the last 30 days, we can see below that Geewa's large selection of games (you can play more than 5,500 in total) means that the majority of our visitors come back more than 200 times per month. That's more than 7 times per day.

 

 

 

For us, this is a very important piece of information because like any other online business, we have to make sure we minimize our bounce rate. For our existing partners as well as our future one, it means that by having the Geewa games on their site, they have a new way to make sure their visitors come back to their site.

Another way to look at the same phenomenon is the visitors recency or when was the last time a visitor came to play a game. Not surprisingly, 76.66% of our users come back within 24h.

 

 

 

I don't have this kind of data for other categories of sites (read: I'm too lazy to research) but I guess there are other online services which can be as addictive (any Facebook addict wants to comment here?). These result are great because somehow it tells me that even if it is mandatory we keep on looking after our existing audience, if we focus on bringing new users the majority of them will stick and come back. Often!

Another piece of data which complements this is that the average time of game play on our platform is more than 90 minutes per visit. I remember talking to a VC a few weeks ago and he was telling me "you know Cedric, I saw your stats about the average play time and I doubted it but then I went to the site and ended up playing for more than one hour".

So if you are having problem with user retention, stickiness or user loyalty maybe it is time to investigate launching a casual gaming section (preferably with Geewa of course!).

There are two ways to create slides for a presentation: the bad way and the good way.

Let's start with the bad way. You fire up Powerpoint. The bullet-points template is looking at you and you start organising your ideas by title. Under each title, you write down a sentence prefixed by a bullet point. The result? A limited set of slides with a bullet points fiesta on each of them. This is a guaranteed success for the boredom of your audience. Don't forget, you get double-point if you read each bullet-point!

Then there's the good way. Leave Powerpoint away and open up any word processor. From now, focus on the story you want to tell. Write down every single sentence as you intend to present it. In other words, you are no longer a bullet-point warrior but a script writer. Make sure the story you are writing is smooth. Focus on the transition. Pay attention to the verbs you are using and try to stay away from "have", "do" but replace them with engaging action verb. Spend as much time as you can on the script. Once you are done, ask other people to read it and criticize it. Were they bored after the 3rd sentence or did they feel engaged by the script and wanted to read it until the end? Once you think your script is ready start highlightning the most important words or verbs. Each of them will correspond to a slide. make sure each key point of your script has an highlighted word or verb.

Once you're done with the selection, you are now ready to move to Powerpoint. Your first point of call is to dimiss that bullet-point template and replace it with a blank template. Then start to cut and paste each of your word/verb onto a slide. One slide per word/verb. Yes you will end up with a lot of slides! Do not worry about this. What matters is the story you are going to tell, not the number of slides. Now that you have your raw slides, it's time to have fun with them! Replace each word/verb by an illustration. There are 1,000's of royalty-free pictures available online. Spend time looking for the best illustration, bring wittiness to your audience.

Once each slide contains an image or illustration you are ready for the next stage which consist of 3 important steps: rehearse, rehearse and rehearse! Know your script perfectly and make sure your timing for the "next slide" button is smooth and in sync with the highlighted word/verb you are telling.

 If you follow the above guidelines, you will ensure that your audience will be listening to YOU instead of listening to you REPEATING what they just read behind you and if your script was well written and the illustrations well chosen they might even be entertained and think you are a great presenter. But most importantly they will focus on you and what you have to tell. That's the key.

Good luck with these slides then.

I am delighted to report that Geewa launched premium subscriptions today in partnership with Seznam.cz, the largest online community in the Czech Republic. The service is available on hry.cz (if you do not speak Czech fluently, 'hry' means games).

Premium members have access to special features, such as exclusive access to new multiplayer games from Geewa, giving them VIP status within the hry.cz community. For some time now our users have told us that they would be happy to pay a small fee to remove the adverts before games so, as of today, premium members can enjoy a full ad-free experience.

As part of this launch, we are also releasing the first version of our animated avatars. Premium members will have access to exclusive items for their avatars to make them stand out from the crowd. In the near future, items will be purchasable using "G-Points", Geewa's own virtual currency, which can be accumulated via various actions on hry.cz.

In order to celebrate the launch of this new version of  Geewa's Social Gaming Community Platform, we have given away 10,000 free premium accounts to our most passionate players.

Congratulation to the whole team for this major release and expect more exciting news very soon.

Geewa is a multi shape company. Depending on how you look at it, you can perceived Geewa in 4 different ways.

1. Geewa is all about games
On geewa.com you can play more than 5,500 games but the focus of the company is on developing multiplayer games. Besides the “usual suspects”, i.e. TicTacToe or Pool, Geewa is proposing several original games. As it happens, we have found that our original multiplayer games  (head-to-head or “synchronous”) games where both players are online at the same time, are the most popular with our members. They can chat live while they play, there is more adrenalin in the game if you know that there is a live opponent on the other end of the line at the very moment. This is for example different from most of the games on social networks which have until recently offered mostly asynchronous multiplayer experience. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know we launched 3 of our synchronous games on Facebook 2 weeks ago.

2. Geewa's multiplayer server technology
Geewa is also developing a multiplayer server. All our games run on it and we are currently opening it up to outside developers via our multiplayer server API so that they can port their games to it. Our multiplayer server has been operational since 2005 and it is thus proven and tested. And we of course keep upgrading it. The simplest way of making a singleplayer game into a multiplayer one is by letting users challenge one another to beat their score. This makes a singleplayer games into a multiplayer one very quickly. A good example is our own Multiplayer Solitaire. A simple casual game that everyone has played in the past which is suddenly made much more fun by adding the spice of competing against other players. When we launched it we found that the players of this game played on average 14 matches of it per day.

3. Geewa's community platform
Sitting on top of our multiplayer server and around our games, Geewa is also running its own community platform. Now in its 3.0 version, the Geewa platform incorporates user profiles, private (in-game) chat, public chat (incl. chat rooms), competitions (leagues), high-scores, halls of fame etc. While we ourselves operate it around casual games, the platform can be used to present other types of content as well – MMO games, videos, photos etc. Geewa.com is just a game instance of the platform

4. Geewa's multi channel availability
Last but not least, we believe in the multi-channel approach to casual gaming. Many of our games are already available on mobile phones and we have demonstrated in the past our ability to run matches between mobile phones and InteractiveTV. The same games, the same gaming community, just different access channel.

Of course, all this would be technologically nice and cuddly if there was not a business model associated with each of these 4 strategies. From in-game advertising to technology licensing to bespoke game development and micro-payments, Geewa is a multi revenue sources company, which during these uncertain days, is certainly a major strength. Casual gaming is in our DNA and we've been obsessively investing in making gaming more fun, more social, more accessible, more interactive leading to Geewa as it is today: a one-stop shop for everything in social casual gaming whether you are a player or a developer.

Talk to anybody in the free casual gaming industry and they will tell you they have not felt the crisis yet nor do they expect their advertising revenue to decrease this year. In the case of Geewa, this has proven to be true as our first quarter revenue is the highest the company has ever experienced in its 4 years of existence. In fact, since January, our advertising revenue have doubled every month.

This is the result of a combination of multiple success factors. Firstly, it is true that casual gaming during recession times are attracting more people. The games are free and a fun way to spend time. In the case of Geewa, our original games are multiplayer so the experience is even more rewarding since you have to beat a human opponent. Secondly our advertising format (Pre-roll and Post-roll) have been performing outstandingly well and as a result we are starting to see clients who have advertised with us in the past coming back with a larger budget. In fact we have just signed 2 sponsoring deals for a duration of one year. Thirdly our effort to promote the success of our site is slowly spreading and we are getting new clients on a regular basis. They usually start with a simple test campaign and always come back for more. It's a bit like chocolate fondant. You only go for a little piece "because it's so rich" and you end up eating the whole cake. I guess we are the chocolate fondant of the Czech online advertising market :-)

Can this growth continue? Possibly but it is important to remain vigilant. So far we have only monetized our traffic in the Czech Republic while we are building our audience in other territories so we have a lot of room for expansion. Expect a few announcements on this in the very near future.

Every empire rises and falls. It started in 1995 when Geocities demonstrated people wanted a piece of the Internet in order to publish things online. Then came Friendster an easier publishing tool in a more controlled environment we now know as a social graph. MySpace took over in 2004 and demonstrated that people love the freedom of customizing their online environment while maintaining a certain facet of their online identity. Facebook then took over and educated people about privacy and confirmed the human beings' appeal for social apps and games.

Each time the de facto leader was perceived as invincible and nobody could imagine a new service would take over. I remember a VC telling me in 2006 they would not invest in a social network because "MySpace has won". Shortsighted vision indeed. Over and over it has been proven wrong and with Facebook alienating its core users once again with a UI change, it is time to ask the question: Who will be the next Facebook?

Learning from all of the above mentioned services, I believe the next Facebook should have the following elements in its DNA (in no particular orders):

1 - Let the user maintain 1 to n facets of her online identity
2 - Easy sharing/publishing of any type of content
3 - Allowing the highest level of access granularity on data
4 - Give a sense of ownership by allowing deep customization of the user's home
5 - Built-in micro-payment transactions to allow the user to grow its online home space
6 - Nurture the community with social apps with an emphasis on multiplayer games
7 - Give a feeling of proximity to public figures
8 - Bridge the gap between online and offline gathering making online an extension of the offline experience
9 - Easy import/export of the user's data into and out of the service
10 - Leverage geographic and real-time data to replicate human interactions
11 - Multi-protocol instant messenger with offline support
12 - Ubiquitous read/write access via any connected device
13 - No advertising (monetization is done by micro-payments) around the user's data
14 - Community newsfeed with connectors for external services
15 - Vanity URLs
16 - No limitations on the size of files to share within the user's disk allocation quota
17 - People search
18 - Peer-to-peer file sharing for efficient sharing of larger files
19 - Mixed client and server architecture: local data/functionnalities with online back-up
20 - Extensible platform in the form of add-ons/extensions
21- Autonomous profile widget for republishing on other properties

I'll stop here. Each of these items could be the basis for a full blog post and there is more to the eyes than that. Of course, some of  these entries are hiding a world of engineering complexity but if someone wants to defeat Facebook, they have to focus on what the users want and not want is hard to implement.

Yes there will be another Facebook. Users are fickle and they want to be in control of their own online home. The day a company manages to crack the technical challenges and lays out in simple terms the value added of its service compared to today's leader, users will migrate, starting with the teenagers who are the ficklest of the ficklest and are prepared to invest a lot of time in customizing what their perceived as their own.

The question is what will be the initial feature(s) or value proposition that make(s) people switch. It will have to be very powerful and noticeable. Meanwhile Facebook will keep on innovating, raising the bar for anybody wanting to take a piece of their audience.

Jussi Laakkonen did a live mindmap while at the Gamesbeat conference during the VC panel. I never thought of mindmaps as a way to record live conversations. It's a great trick - and an interesting conversation.

Inside Social Games meanwhile is reporting on the  Mobile Social Games discussion from the GDC conference. The iPhone is the new PSP and features like push and in-app purchase from OS3.0 is going to make it even more attractive.

Finally, Mike Arrington is telling Facebook not to listen to its users and has good arguments for that (in the case of Facebook). 

Sorry for the title of this post, but if you were hoping I would share with you my family secrets on how to seduce women, you'll be disappointed. It won't come from me! But since I now have your attention, I thought I could share with you some data about our click-thru-rates (Aka CTRs).

When I joined Geewa 2 months ago, I was baffled by the click-thru rates the company was experimenting on pre-roll ads. The sales team kept on telling me, on average, our CTR was 5% so I wanted to see it myself to believe it. Yesterday, our Key Account Manager sent me the result of a recent test campaign we ran for an advertiser who needed to be convinced that a casual gaming site was a good property for his brand. Here's a screen capture of the Excel spreadsheet.

The average CTR is 7.19% Of course the test was successful and we are now waiting for the client to order a much larger campaign. This is not unusual I'm being told by my colleagues. Obviously pre-roll ads means the audience is captive. We run the ad while the game is loading so the user has nothing else to do than looking at it and potentially click on it.

So who is clicking? The demography of Geewa indicates the majority of our players are female over the age of 30.

There's a preconceived idea that casual gamers are kids but in fact, it's the women who are the bulk of the audience. Talk to any casual gaming company and they will confirm that. If you're a brand willing to target women, I would strongly encourage you to add a casual gaming site in your mix (preferably ours!). On Geewa, our players spend an average of 90 minutes game-play per day and enjoy 9 games per day. They tend to come back every day or every other day for their daily dose.

All this put together gives us a remarkable environment for advertisers. A sticky site, a passionate (mainly) female audience who is not afraid to click on ads and an engaging content. This to me is a great success story for the company and for its clients. IN fact, over the past 3 months, we have booked more campaigns than we've ever had in the past because previous clients are now coming back for more. We have just introduced post-roll format as well and we're now eager to see how well they will perform. My gut feeling is that it won't be as effective, but what do I know, last time I clicked on an ad it was in 1997.