Flurry, YouWeb, GetJar and more (via postie)
We’re excited to make some new announcements about the speakers and content at DiscoveryBeat, our event on Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. The event is all about how to get apps noticed in an age of noise. We’ve got a maximum capacity of 200 and we expect the event will be sold out. We’ve rounded up some new speakers for DiscoveryBeat, including speakers who will give presentations on specific topics on app discovery, analytics, and monetization. The presenters are:
Simon Khalaf, president and chief executive officer of Flurry, will give a presentation entitled, “Should Driving App Discovery Require Hemorrhaging Money?” In Apple’s AppStore, on 100 apps are listed in Top 50 and Featured categories at any given time. With over 118,000 available apps, this means that less than one tenth of one percent can be found easily by consumers. The other 99.9% are at a disadvantage to attract downloads. Considering discovery options, the story gets worse. The main alternative, in-app advertising, delivers negative ROI. That’s because the cost-per-acquisition of advertising often exceeds what developers make per application download. Developers have a choice: spend at a loss or choose not to spend. Flurry will present about its latest platform, AppCircle: a better, ROI-positive way to solve App Store discovery.
Chris Dury, vice president of product at GetJar, will talk about “Super-sizing the app economy” by extending it beyond the iPhone. Giant app businesses grew on the Facebook platform but so far the iPhone hasn’t produced a single Zynga-like success. So what is needed to super-size the mobile app economy? Dury will talk about the key ingredients of successful platforms in the app economy: scale, discovery, and payments. GetJar operates the world’s largest independent mobile app store.
Peter Relan, founder and chairman of incubator YouWeb, will talk about “Social Gaming:Â The Evolving Technology Platform & Monetization.” He will focus on discovery in the social gaming space, including current and future trends, monetization, business models and technology platform evolution. His talk will be interspersed with examples and real life stories from the successful growth of his companies in the social gaming space including CrowdStar, Aurora Feint/OpenFeint and Sibblingz. Open Feint has become one of the most popular platforms for developers to socialize their iPhone games with features such as leaderboards, challenges and cross-promotion.
Vijay Chattha, chief talker of AppLaunch PR and VSC Consulting, will talk about using publicity and social media to drive user discovery of apps. VSC has won 30 PR awards since its launch in 2002 and it has represented every kind of social media and mobile company, including Fortune 100 firms. Chattha can talk about the landscape of apps and reveal his techniques for getting apps noticed, from his “sniff test” to his list of do’s and don’ts on working with the media that covers apps.
Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, will also appear on the DiscoveryBeat 1.0 panel on how to get started from scratch in getting your apps noticed. That panel will also include Jeff Smith, chief executive of iPhone music app maker Smule, and Julian Farrior, chief executive of iPhone app developer Backflip Studios.
To enter the DiscoveryBeat Apps Contest, click on this link.
To buy tickets to DiscoveryBeat, click here.
