Kiip, a company that allows app developers to embed both real-world and virtual rewards and achievements within their own app has announced version 2 of its API this evening, and it sets the company up to step outside of its gaming genre.
Basically, the company is surfacing a new system that records achievements within apps, which it calls “Moments.” Up until recently, Kiip was known for giving you say, a Starbucks gift card, for reaching a certain level in a game. That opened up doors to new types of advertising opportunities for its partners, and Brian Wong, Kiip’s CEO, tells me that it’s time to go to the next level.
It’s not about mobile-only moving forward, as I broke earlier this year. HTML5 support is indeed on the way, which will open up all types of opportunities for all involved: Kiip, developers and brands.
Here’s what Wong told me tonight:
This helps position Kiip much more diversified beyond the “game achievement” and into our internal initiative “Kiip everywhere”. This enables our concept of “spot-rewarding” – instant gratification rewards – to be so much more ubiquitous. A powerful API is the core to our product growth next year.
The company shared the details with developers on its blog as well:
Goodbye Achievements and Leaderboards
Kiip is introducing a completely new system for recording the moments of achievemnt in your application. Simply, “Moments”.
For existing applications, all existing achievements and leaderboards have been migrated to Moments. This should not effect your application in any way.
You’ll notice if you log-in to app.kiip.me that there is a tab named “Moments”. This shows you what moments have been sent to your application.
Creating New Moments
No more adding achievements and leaderboards manually – just simple save a moment and we’ll automatically show it to you on the dashboard.
Using our new SDK’s, it’s as simple as:
[[Kiip sharedInstance] saveMoment:@”Hello World” withCompletionHandler:nil];
You can download the SDK and follow a guide over at docs.kiip.me, our new documentation center.
What all of this means is that some things will change for developers over time, as far as how they integrate Kiip within their app. The language and framework changes are new opportunities to recognize moments that can generate more revenue for the small and large teams that use Kiip’s SDK.
Kiip has published a glossary that will help developers as the company deprecates some of its older functionality. The company has raised over $15M to date and is changing the way that brands and developers connect to provide rewards and opportunities for users.
Also, Kiip hired this guy. Remember him?