Mobile + Social: Show us the Money / Slides

On 24/06/2010, in Uncategorized, by Volker

Here are the slides to my talk delivered yesterday at the Virtual Goods Forum in London. Enjoy!

Conference: Virtual Goods Forum, London

On 22/06/2010, in Uncategorized, by Volker

Tomorrow, I will be heading to London to attend and speak at the Virtual Goods Forum. I will be delivering a completely shiny new and all around better iteration of my “Mobile + Social: Show Us the Money” talk.

The conference is organised by the same fine folks who have made the Mobile Games Forum such a stalwart of industry networking, and I am looking forward to learning more from what looks like an excellent speaker line-up. Here’s some of their speakers:

  • Mark Curtis, CEO Flirtomatic (and great presenter!)
  • Ray Anderson, CEO Bango
  • Phil Guest, EVP Ad Sales Sulake (the Habbo guys)
  • Benjamin Joffe, CEO +8*
  • Alex Krug, CEO Softgames
  • Alex Brutin, VP Biz Dev Offerpal
  • and many more…

If you are getting the appetite, Osney Media did give me a promotional code, which gives you a 50% discount. It is C0015SPK. I hope to see you there!

And if you cannot make it, you can at least follow the thing on Twitter: @virtualgoodsuk.

The Economics of Apps / Slides

On 19/06/2010, in 1, by Volker

Last week, I had the great pleasure to attend Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. I thought it might be interesting to share the slides of my talk on the “Economics of Apps” there. So here you go…

The Economics of Apps

For those of you who prefer it, I have also published it to Scribd here.

Virtual Goods Boom in 2010!

On 09/06/2010, in 1, by Volker

I stumbled across an interesting piece of intelligence today, which looked at the development of virtual goods in the market place. According to this, median spend on virtual goods by users in North America has climbed a whopping 67% year-on-year to $50 p.a.

Equally interestingly, males are the largest spenders and, broken down by ethnics, Asians (26%) lead Hispanics (20%) by some margin over whites (11%).

So far (sic!), most virtual goods (how many? I don’t know) are purchased from stand-alone web-based games (World of Warcraft anyone?) but 31% had bought items in social networks (that would be the Zyngas and Playfishs of this world) with 29% in “network-based games” (what are they, I wonder). Facebook credits were used by 16% of buyers. Mobile? No word. It’s coming though: do bear in mind that there are 3x more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users! And, yes, that’s true…