I am a quantitative marketing and mobile user acquisition specialist. My specific interests include analytics, user acquisition, freemium economics, and programmatic statistical methods for prediction. ufert.se is where I discuss issues facing the freemium mobile industry as well as general trends in data science and analytics. Feel free to email me using the contact form on the About page.
Tokyo-based mobile game developer GungHo Entertainment has dominated mobile gaming press lately with its enormous and ever-increasing revenue announcements: in late March, Japanese gaming analyst Dr. Serkan Toto reported that GungHo’s largest title, Puzzle & Dragons, had generated between $62 – 86mm in February alone. In April, the company’s market cap surged to $9 billion [...]
The performance of Zynga’s stock in the almost two years since its IPO has chilled public markets ambitions for gaming companies. But two Western gaming developers, both of which have capably navigated a transition from Facebook (and other web-based platforms) to mobile, currently contend for the distinction of most likely to undertake the first post-Zynga [...]
Apple’s Q1 2013 results were undisputably poor; its net profit fell by 18%, representing the first time in more than a decade the company has posted a quarterly earnings decline. Samsung, meanwhile, grew its shipments by 56% year-over-year, to 69.4 million. Apple’s shipments grew by a mere 7%, to 37.4 million, which is its slowest [...]
One of the more difficult adjustments to make when transitioning from academia to industry is the change in vernacular required in communicating the machinations of models. In academia, the formatting and notations used generally indicate concepts that are taken for granted by the author and sometimes included only because, at a theoretical level, not including [...]
(The model referenced throughout this post can be downloaded here) Supercell’s recent $100mm secondary financing round raises some interesting questions about how mobile game developers capitalize on a hit game. A title in the Top 10 grossing chart for the US can, as evidenced by a number of recent high-profile examples, generate upwards of $500,000 [...]
I’ve stated a number of times that, within the context of the freemium model, retention is the most important metric a product manager must track; in the Minimum Viable Metrics methodology, retention is the top-most of the top-line metrics. Retention is not only a proxy measurement for customer delight, but it’s also the input for [...]
The last country covered in the three-part overview of mobile gaming in Asia is Japan, which is fitting given the recent buzz around GungHo Entertainment, the Tokyo-based developer behind Puzzle & Dragons: last week it was reported that Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank purchased a 58.5% stake in GungHo for $265 million. GungHo’s nearly half a [...]
Last month, Flurry Analytics projected a larger total smartphone and tablet install base in China than in the US (246 million versus 230 million). This usurpation of the top position is significant because 150 million of those nearly 250 million devices – or 60% – were added in 2012. China’s breathtaking pace of mobile device acquisition [...]
Until mid-2011, mobile gaming in South Korea was a niche activity, despite the country’s reputation as a gaming powerhouse. The reason was regulation: the South Korean government insisted on reviewing all games made available in localized app stores, meaning gamers interested in recent titles were forced to register foreign app store accounts. But since this [...]
When I left undergrad, I experimented in a few finance positions for a year before joining a technology start-up in 2007. The technology ecosystem at that time looked very different from its current incarnation: clear skillset delineations separated the functional groups within a company. Engineers coded. Business analysts played with spreadsheets. Marketers sent out emails [...]
