Mochi Media continues to quietly build out monetization and reporting tools for Flash game developers. In May we reported on the big growth in their ad network – over 100 million people a month now play games that include their ads. You can find their games on big sites like Hi5, RockYou and Meebo. We’ve heard that games that include Mochi Media stats or advertising products are played over 1.5 billion times a month.
These games are embedded on publisher sites and are very often “borrowed” by other sites who just lift the Flash files. So it’s important that the game files generate revenue directly. Ads served by the publisher around the game aren’t reliable. Mochi Media puts the ads directly into the games, so even if they are ripped off, the ads still show and create revenue.
The problem is these ads don’t make a whole lot of money – the industry average is around $0.50 per 1,000 game plays.
To fuel revenue growth to developers (and therefore Mochi Media), the company has launched a payments platform called MochiCoins with a handful of game developers. MochiCoins lets developers charge for game upgrades – users can pay for coins via credit card, PayPal or SuperRewards, and the coins that then be used to purchase upgrades in games.
The early results, we’ve heard from someone close to a game developer on the platform, are stunning. → Read More
A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good. Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new facts obviate old ones and alliances switch to account for new alignments. In Twitter’s case, the early instability and the high stakes involved made for a great deal of passion and attendant posturing. We all took it personally (well, I did) when Twitter removed key features that favored serendipity and discovery. Until then, we felt the new space Twitter opened up was like the Old West, expanding outward without sense of limit or control. It wasn’t that Track was the most useful part of the service. It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries. Taking it away hardened the service into its fundamental structure, the familiar limits of space and time, the tenuous constructs of “friend” and “follow” rather than the surprise of the unfamiliar appearing suddenly with fresh ideas and humor. Before Track went away, we never knew what would happen next; afterward, we knew enough to not anticipate. In a similar way, 140 characters felt less like a limitation and more like an invitation to be surprised at how much you could squeeze into the frame. Like perspective in a painting, or echo in a recording, the creative use of limitations helped us overcome gravity and imagine more than we could “see.” Supporting the limits became a creative validation of the surprise that Twitter has always been. How many events and ideas must we share before we get over that surprise, that once again Twitter has exceeded expectations? 140 characters brought us url shorteners, the key to this new self-compressing and auto-expanding universe. Our software is now compensating for the microURL opacity, unpacking these links and harvesting the metadata they carry to aid indexing of the gestures they contain. Once again, the apparent limitations of the shorteners (gas station on every corner, lurking potential runaway code, mom and pop businesses closing down and orphaning links) are creating investment opportunities and entrepreneurial enclaves. It’s a little like the present wrapped in a series of enclosed boxes, where the → Read More
Gateway’s got a new line of student-friendly notebooks in the NV Series. There’ll be a myriad of configurations available starting at $499, most or all of which will feature a 15.6-inch LCD with 1366×768 resolution, 4GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, six-cell battery, DVD burner, integrated webcam, HDMI, and Vista Home Premium. → Read More
In the online reservation space, you probably know about OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service’s IPO in a time of drought for IPOs, made big headlines. Now imagine OpenTable for just about everything besides restaurants. That’s BookFresh.
Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area.
He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says. → Read More
Google has just debuted the latest entry to its fleet of Labs products, introducing the search giant to the travel space. Dubbed City Tours, the new site can build itineraries for brief trips to locations around the globe in a matter of seconds. At this point details on the new product are fairly sparse — it looks like Google hasn’t written its customary blog post yet, but given how basic the product is it’s pretty easy to figure out how it works.
Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location. → Read More
Some of you may be growing tired of hearing about companies described as the ‘Kayak of _____’ but if the analogy fits, we might as well abuse it to nausea. So without further ado, I give you DoNanza, the Kayak of online freelance project search. With 70,000 projects on offer, there’s high chance there’s something for you as well so you should consider giving it a whirl if you’re looking to make some extra money on the side in these tough times.
The one thing you have to keep in mind about DoNanza is that it keeps clear of offline gigs, so if you’re looking to for a babysitting job, DoNanza is not for you. It does however have 70K available projects on offer right now, with 30K new projects added each week, or about 4K a day. There are 12 main categories with more than 400 sub-categories. The most active in terms of user-interest are (in the following order): Writing, Web Development, Graphic Design, Virtual Admin. Support, Translation, Marketing, SEO, and Programming. → Read More
Normally I’d be more up in arms about something like this — as far as I’m concerned, once I purchase a device I should be able to do whatever I want with it — but this is really more of a virtual recall than hardware DRM. It seems that Panasonic, worried that third-party batteries might prove troublesome in their cameras (wouldn’t be the first time), has created a battery authentication process to make sure your power source is approved. Nice of you to do so, Panasonic, but don’t you think a warning dialog would have accomplished the same thing? → Read More
Just as we were speculating a couple nights ago, Apple has apparently decided that with the new parental controls now built into the iPhone 3.0 SDK, nudity is now okay in iPhone apps. The first such app, Hottest Girls, has actually been around for a little while. But an update today “upgraded” the pictures from girls in bikinis and lingerie, to topless and completely naked girls.
“We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity,” Hottest Girls’ developer Allen Leung tells Macenstein. Quite an accomplishment.
While some will undoubtedly see this as a bad thing, I think this is actually a good thing. First of all, allowing mature content like this should free up the App Store screeners to be able to focused on finding apps that are actually malicious or out of line, rather than being prude-police. → Read More
Before you get excited, I should probably state for the record that the headline is totally fake. There’s no way to tell whether Jesus actually recommends this robot &mdash he’s just holding it. He might not like it at all. But if that’s the case, I would have to respectfully disagree with him there, because this little robot looks like a lot of fun. It’s a pretty simple little guy, as robots go: all it does is follow any line you put it on, at a speed of up to 3ft/s. That’s pretty fast for a robot the size of a CD. → Read More
Another day, another weird Twitter story. Tonight the news broke that NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal was being traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Huge news, but what’s humorous is that apparently Shaq found out he was traded on Twitter.
Look at Shaq’s last few tweets. Several minutes ago he tweeted out “I didn’t hear dat yet” in response to this tweet, “is it true u a CLEVELAND CAVALIER.” A few minutes later someone sent Shaq the following tweet, “U CLEVELAND BOUND…shaq found out he was traded thru twitter! lmao….hahahaaaaaa” Shaq’s response? “I kno right.” → Read More
Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in.
Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears. → Read More
I believe a new form of subliminal message has been discovered. Actually, it’s no so much subliminal as just constantly right there, but using the icons on your dock to spell stuff out is pretty slick. Or nerdy. I can’t decide. If only there were a word that combined those two things… other than my own name.
And… yes, I believe I’ve figured out a way this can benefit prime-time television as well! → Read More
If you’ve got an area you’d like to fill with shelving, this looks like a great solution — if you don’t mind the industrial look. And the brilliant part is that it takes almost no craftsmanship skill to make — just measure, decide on shelf sizes, then take a trip to the local hardware store.
Useful if your books are heavy or you’ve taken to collecting really big rocks. → Read More
The Redfly (or REDFLY if you like their all-caps nomenclature) is a great, well-made device… which only supports the ugly grand-daddy of mobile OSes, Windows Mobile. Sure, it’s easy to underestimate the venerable OS, but there’s a reason everyone’s excited about everything other than WinMo. With BlackBerry growing in popularity, it could be an excellent partner for Celio, whose market is being eaten up by netbooks and such.
Imagine a Redfly working with a BlackBerry Storm 2 — less crappy soft keyboard, more screen space, and no cumbersome extra interfaces. → Read More
You might not think that we here at TechCrunch have a lot in common with the band Blink 182. But actually, we do. We both now have our own branded TweetDeck applications. You can find ours here.
TechCrunch TweetDeck users will get all the features of the normal version of TweetDeck (Twitter, Facebook, 12seconds, etc, integration), with the added bonus of the TechCrunch Column, as an option. This column features tweets from TechCrunch’s writing staff. It’s seriously riveting stuff. Why just last night, our own Robin Wauters tweeted out, “Cleaning up disks, creating backups etc. Necessary evil.” → Read More
With ad pricing from ad networks changing constantly, publishers not only have to keep a pulse on revenue from impressions, but also on which ad network is delivering the best value. In fact, publishers can benefit greatly from diversification in this dynamic environment. PubMatic, an online ad optimization service and TechCrunch 40 company, is launching a new product, Ad Price Prediction, that matches the optimal ad network with every ad impression with real-time functionality.
Ad Price Prediction’s algorithm has been developed using data collected by PubMatic’s ad optimization service over the past three years. The company processes more than 100,000 data transactions per second through ads served for 6,000 publishing customers, and has applied this data to its technology to enable real-time processing. → Read More
Western Digital announced today that they are releasing an updated version of the extremely popular My Book World Edition, increasing the maximum capacity to 4TB, and adding a built-in RAID system for additional data security.
It’s interesting to see Western Digital blurring the line between external drives and NAS devices. I’ve had a couple of the My Book products, and found them to be reliable, but I moved away from them after setting a NAS up on my home network. However, when you consider the fact that the new My Book has Gigabit ethernet in addition to the standard USB 2.0, there’s almost no reason to buy a NAS instead of this drive. → Read More
When Facebook’s Vanity URL landrush kicked off nearly two weeks ago, over 500,000 people registered their new names in a matter of 15 minutes. Over the following weekend, nearly 6 million users staked their claims. The most desirable names, like ‘Jason’ or ‘Mike’, were snapped up in a matter of seconds (if they weren’t already registered by a Facebook employee before the landrush even began). Needless to say, a lot of people were left in the dust, forced to settle for something other than the vanity URL they’d been dreaming of for weeks.
Well, if you’re a member of the unlucky masses, here’s your chance to get the name you’ve always wanted. Sort of.
Developer Alex Gonzalez of Branch Interactive has put together an application that will allow you to to generate a Facebook application in your name, giving you the URL apps.facebook.com/NAME. So instead of Facebook.com/jasonkincaid, I would be apps.Facebook.com/jasonkincaid. Sure, it has the four extra letters designating it as a Facebook application, but it’s hardly an eyesore. → Read More
