Last week hundreds of people within the gaming industry descended on San Jose for Engage! Expo, a two-day event focused on increasing user and consumer engagement within gaming communities. The event pulled together many of the leaders in the gaming space with viewpoints from many angles - social gaming, mobile gaming, MMO’s, Virtual Worlds, and traditional household brand names as well.

Super Rewards had a team at the event and was able to provide valuable information about the growth within the virtual currency space, the benefits of this kind of solution, and how an organization can create an ongoing revenue stream. Offers-based systems and virtual currency platforms were one of the hot topics of the event as panel members on both days were asked over and over: “How can I make money with my game or application?” This just goes to show that virtual currencies are one of the biggest ways a gaming company can create a significant revenue stream for their properties while maintaining the quality of their brand.

We saw many familiar faces at the event and got to speak with many new publishers as well about the capabilities of our platform. Those discussions spilled over into the official after-party sponsored by Super Rewards at the Loft Bar and Bistro a few blocks from the San Jose Convention Center on the first night of the event. All those in attendance had a great time mingling with the SR team and engaging in discussions with current customers and prospects about the effectiveness of our monetization platform.

Join the Super Rewards team next at the New York Games Conference happening this week (http://www.nygamesconference.com) and again at the Virtual Goods Summit at the end of October in San Francisco! (http://www.vgsummit.com)

Super Rewards Publisher Sales team

Mingling at Loft Bistro

More Mingling at Loft Bistro

SuperRewards continues to maintain the leadership position in helping iPhone developers monetize their apps through virtual currency.  Julie Craft, Super Rewards Vice President, presented the Super Rewards SDK and mobile monetization solutions last week to approximately 300 iPhone app developers at the standing room only iPhone Meet-up in Palo Alto.   

Julie Craft presenting at iPhone meet-up

Super Rewards powers many existing iPhone apps and was the first company to monetize virtual currency on mobile platforms, social network applications, virtual worlds, and Twitter.  You can check out the Super Rewards’ offerwall on iPhone apps such as  Loot Wars and Epic Pet Wars and many more.  We encourage all application developers to check out just how easy it is to implement the Super Rewards iPhone SDK by signing up today at www.srpoints.com.

Chris Abad, CEO of Irata Labs, accompanied Julie to the event and gave an outstanding demo of his Super Rewards integration on his overnight-sensation and the very first Twitter game, Spymaster http://playspymaster.com which recently launched on the iPhone as well.  What started as a fun and unique exploration of Twitter’s application platform for Chris and his team, has since taken over Twitter and become an addiction for thousands of passionate users. Chris and his team are the first company to successfully implement a true cross-platform persistent play user experience spanning the web, twitter and now mobile. 

Chris Abad presenting at iPhone meet-up

Spymaster, First Twitter Game, Deploys Virtual Currency
Monetization Platform Across Mobile and Online Social Networks

Super Rewards, an Adknowledge company and the leader in monetizing virtual currency for online games and social networks, today announced it has created the industry’s most integrated, multi-platform gaming experience via an exclusive partnership with Spymaster to power its virtual currency across Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone. Irata Labs, the creators of Spymaster, have designed a groundbreaking gaming platform enabling “persistent play” across online and mobile social networks. As the first to deliver multi-platform, virtual currency monetization solutions across these networks, Super Rewards was the logical partner of choice for Spymaster. Super Rewards’ highly targeted, reliable monetization solutions, coupled with Spymaster’s “persistent play” platform, form a winning combination that delivers a superior user experience and high earnings per user for publishers.

“Reliably monetizing games, while preserving the best possible user experience, is a big challenge for the gaming industry,” said Chris Abad, CEO of Irata Labs. “But the Super Rewards monetization platform has allowed us to do precisely that and by partnering with Super Rewards we are delighted to receive persistent pay for persistent play.”

Super Rewards was the first company to partner with game developers to help evolve Twitter from its existing use as a micro-blogging tool into a profitable, social gaming channel. Spymaster is the first social game that allows users to transport their social graph while maintaining their online character identities to experience persistent play across multiple social networks. For example, gamers who log in to Spymaster through Facebook to run their virtual spy rings can swiftly interact and play real-time with their friends who are logged in through Twitter, be it via a Web browser or the iPhone.

“Each day consumers are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual currency by participating in advertising offers powered by our Super Rewards platform,” said Scott Lynn, CEO of Adknowledge. “Given the explosion of smartphone sales and the recent research that show thirty percent of gamers total play time is happening on mobile phones, it makes perfect sense for us to extend this proven platform to Spymaster’s new iPhone app.”

The Super Rewards platform provides tremendous value for publishers, advertisers, and consumers alike. It provides game and social application publishers with a sustainable revenue stream. The platform empowers advertisers with a more effective, less intrusive, and more appropriate way to engage social gamers than traditional CPM ads or one-time sales. The platform enables gamers to interact and choose the offers they are interested in, and then they are rewarded for their actions with in-game points, virtual goods or virtual dollars that measurably enhances their overall game experience.

About Super Rewards
Super Rewards is a leading provider of monetization solutions for online games and social networks. The Super Rewards turnkey solutions deliver highly-targeted advertising offers to millions of global Web site and social network users. The platform seeks to maximize revenues for developers while increasing engagement for users of any Web site, game, or application through additional points, credits, tokens, coins or chips, etc. Super Rewards has offices in Burlingame, Vancouver, and New York.

About Adknowledge
Adknowledge is a performance-based advertising network that utilizes powerful predictive technology to connect advertisers with consumers across multiple channels, including email, Web content, domain, and social networks. The Adknowledge email advertising platform is used by hundreds of email service providers and affiliate marketers to monetize over 1,200 ad categories. The Adknowledge social advertising platform is used by thousands of publishers and developers to monetize their user base. Over 50,000 advertisers use the Adknowledge ad network to promote their offers. Headquartered in Kansas City, Adknowledge has domestic offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Florida, and international offices in the United Kingdom and Australia. For more information, visit www.adknowledge.com.

About Irata Labs
Funded by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and other angel investors, Irata Labs is a small group of talented software developers currently working on a mobile, location-aware platform for social gaming. Products to-date include the wildly popular social game, Spymaster, and iList, a powerful search and recommendation engine for the Twitter marketplace. CEO Chris Abad will be speaking at the Twitter Conference on Tuesday, September 22nd in Los Angeles: http://parnassusgroup.com/twitterconference/speakers/. For more information on Spymaster and Irata Labs, visit http://www.iratalabs.com/

Super Rewards will be at Engage! Expo on Sept. 23-24 at the San Jose Convention Center. This event features over 125 speakers, attracting them from social networking platforms and apps; virtual goods-related companies; major brand advertisers; and venture capital firms. Super Rewards is a sponsor of the conference, and we’ll be exhibiting at our booth (#61) and providing giveaways and a grand prize drawing. Stop by to pick up your invitation to our hosted party, the Super Rewards Developer and Publisher Mixer. This is an invitation-only event filled with fun, complimentary cocktails, free food, and a great time of networking. Here are the details:

Venue: Loft Bar and Bistro (loftbarandbistro.com), just 4 blocks from the San Jose Convention Center.
Date: September 23rd.
Time: 6:30 p.m. - 9 p.m.

On the second day of the conference, our President Adam Caplan will be speaking about “Monetization of Social Games and Applications: What Works and What Doesn’t.” Adam will be on a panel discussion scheduled for Thursday at 4 p.m. in room 3B. In this session, you’ll hear from virtual currency experts speaking about new and innovative payment methods, and you’ll learn where payment platforms excel and where they come up short. It’s a session you won’t want to miss.

Remember to stop by the booth (#61) for your admission ticket to our Super Rewards Mixer and to enter our prize giveaway!

Super Rewards attended the Facebook Developer’s Garage in Cambridge, MA this past weekend. The theme was internationalization, and the topics primarily focused on the implications and challenges of Facebook’s expansion into all corners of the world. Presentations and discussion covered how various regions are either accepting or struggling with accepting Facebook’s online presence into daily lives.

Jessica Lee from InsideFacebook.com stated that some countries see Facebook as a boon, while other areas (primarily Eastern Asia) are dealing with issues like censorship, privacy controls, and the role that social networks play in the relationship between citizens and governments. The U.S. user base is clearly more comfortable in generating and sharing content, using the site as a communications tool, and interacting with other users in various popular social games.

Tim O’Neil from Super Rewards spoke about how the Super Rewards monetization platform is powering a majority of the top monetizing games and applications on Facebook, and how the platform reaches far and wide across the world to provide payment options and incentivized offers to monetize almost every user through virtual currency. Tim pointed out the current difference in region-specific behavior: most users in the U.S. opt to complete offers to obtain more currency, whereas users outside of the U.S. are more likely to utilize direct payment options. He noted that the U.S. market is starting to see a shift and the idea of paying directly for virtual items in social games is becoming more popular.

Tim O’Neil speaking at Sept 12th Facebook Garage in Cambridge, MA.

It’s boots and hats time. Super Rewards will be in Austin, TX starting on Sept 15^th for the 2009 Game Developers Conference (gdcaustin.com), a four-day event focused on connected and online games, including virtual worlds, casual games, MMOs, and social networking game play. Super Rewards is a sponsor and we’ll have a booth (number 207) at the conference. Come by to meet the team, grab our give-aways, and enter in a drawing for a prize. Be sure to stop by and enter to win! Hope to see you there.

Tom Koltai, an influential technology blogger, wrote a great article this week on the success of Facebook apps, the recent increase in interactive online game play and his theories on why this may be occurring…he attributes the integration of Super Rewards into these games as one of the main reasons why user engagement is on the rise! ….read on…….  

Non-traditional media interactive game playing has recently increased from 44.25 hours per month to 68.82 hours per month and from 12% of the population to 19% of the online population.

Are the games being used more because they are getting easier to access because of their presence on Facebook – as opposed to being located in a Shopping centre with a big sign saying “Computer Games Here”.

Are the alternative payment methods for commercialization leading to wider adoption and higher profits for the game makers ?

I would put it to you dear reader that all of these factors have a contributing influence in the uptake, the continuing use of and the absolute virulent propagation that we are witnessing.

Just as Microsoft copied the functionality of WordStar by inventing a better Word Processor with substantially increased throughput capabilities, The Facebook developers appear to be copying the best ideas from each other, with the clear benefit being:

Increased productivity.
More competition.
More users leading to more subscribers – both direct and indirect.

Another one of the answers lies in companies like Super Rewards (Adknowledge) who are thinking outside the square to allow companies like Zynga to offer alternatives to users desiring to maximize their playing experience.

Game developers’ success coupled with Super Rewards integrated monetization model is proof that Benjamin Franklin was right: 

Tell me and I will forget.
Show me and I might remember.
Involve me and I will understand. (and play even longer!) 

Read the full article here:  http://www.perceptric.com/blog