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Posts Tagged ‘immad-akhund’

Last June, Heyzap, the Y Combinator-funded startup that builds products around Flash gaming, launched a new micro-transaction platform for Flash that looked to offer developers a way to monetize their highly viral but difficult-to-monetize games. The platform is off to an encouraging start, and today Heyzap is taking it one step further with a new payout system that offers publishers a chance to take 15% of the proceeds. As a special promotion, the site will offer 20% of in-game proceeds to the first 1,000 publishers to sign up for the program through this link.

Heyzap’s gaming widget allows publishers to embed thousands of games in one fell swoop, and is already being used by over 35,000 publishers (you can see an example game that integrates payments below). Up until now these publishers have used Heyzap’s games to increase engagement, but haven’t been able to directly monetize the embeds. Now they’ll have an even greater incentive to use Heyzap: they’ll be able to increase user engagement while generating revenue any time a user makes an in-game purchase.

Co-founder Immad Akhund says that so far, around 15 developers have integrated Heyzap payments into their games. He expects that number to increase quickly, as many developers are currently working on games that are being built with microtransactions in mind from the start (most of the games currently using the platform integrated it after initial release).

Participating publishers will receive a 15% cut that will be taken from the proceeds first, and the remaining revenue is split with 70% going to the developer and 30% going to Heyzap (note that this has changed in the developer’s favor since the platform initially launched with a 50/50 split). Publishers will be able to monitor the money generated by games embedded on their site though a dashboard on Heyzap’s homepage.

Other players in this space include Mochi Media, which has also launched a payment platform for Flash games.

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Heyzap, the Y Combinator startup that’s looking to become a “YouTube For Flash Games“, has closed a seed funding round led by Union Square Ventures, with independent investors Naval Ravikant (Hitforge) and Joshua Schachter (delicious) also participating. The exact size of the round was not disclosed, but it was “above $500k and less than $1 million”.

Rather than focus on building a portal, Heyzap offers a widget that includes a catalog of 12,000 games that site owners can quickly integrate into their sites. A major part of the company’s strategy lies in partnering with major online publishers to embed the widget, and it sounds like they’re seeing some success - Current features it in the site’s gaming section, and Cooliris is a partner as well. Heyzap generates revenue through advertising embedded in the widgets (most of which is served by Mochi Media).

At this point the company is operating with a very small team, with founders Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund remaining the sole employees. Akhund says that Heyzap plans to use the funding to expand.

For a taste of the kind of games HeyZap offers, check out the widget below.

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Users beware - if you try out a brand new service in private beta, don’t get too upset when everything goes wrong.

On Monday we wrote about iMindi, a new startup that first showed its stuff at TechCrunch50 in 2008. In the post on Monday we gave out 1,000 private beta invites, which were apparently snatched up quickly.

Then, disaster. The email iMindi sent out, which contains the dreaded phrase “we accidentally deleted all the user accounts” sort of says it all. Brave souls can start all over again here. I know there are at least a few of you out there that are quite willing to forgive and forget.

Here’s the email. Credit to iMindi CEO Adam Lindemann for standing up and taking a beating.

Dear Friends of Imindi,

Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.

We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.

We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.

Below is the new invitation URL:

http://imindi.com/invitations/03711dda503b02868903efbed6649d59046952d9

Thank you again,

Adam Lindemann

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After 473 days of beta testing and many, many preliminary releases, the rich multimedia mobile browser Skyfire has just hit version 1.0. Though Skyfire’s biggest features (namely, its ability to handle formats like Flash and Silverlight) have been in since its early days, there’s enough polish and primp in this release to justify branding it with a whole number.

In an effort to continue fostering the Android development community, Google has announced the second round of its Android Developer Challenge - a competition that rewards some of the platform’s best applications with large cash grants.

Google will begin accepting submissions from developers in August. In an interesting twist, Google is going to let anyone with an Android handset participate in the process, allowing them to vote using a special application available on the Android Marketplace. The voting application will randomly download applications from the pool of competitors, and users will be asked to rate them. These votes will determine the top 20 apps in 10 different categories (for a total of 200 apps), which will then move on to the next round. Users will be able to vote in the second round as well, but votes from Google judges will make up 55% of the final score.

So what are the developers competing for? Here’s how Google is breaking down the awards this time around:

Prizes will be distributed as follows; all prizes are in USD:
For each of the 10 categories:
1st prize: $100,000
2nd prize: $50,000
3rd prize: $25,000
Overall (across all categories)
1st prize: $150,000 (meaning the overall winner will receive $250,000)
2nd prize: $50,000 (meaning the 2nd prize winner will receive up to $150,000)
3rd prize: $25,000 (meaning the 3rd prize winner will receive up to $125,000)
In addition, attendees of selected developer events will be provided with devices intended for use in developing submissions for ADC 2.

All together, it sounds like Google is setting aside around $2 million for the winners. For more details, check out the official guidelines here.

Google’s last challenge kicked off in November 2007, with the final winners announced the following August.

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz reiterated today that Yahoo is still talking with Microsoft “a little bit” about a possible search deal, but said that it would require a “boatload of money” along with the right data-sharing arrangement (because the search data is key to Yahoo revenues, ad relevance, and user experience). Pressed onstage at the AllThingsD conference whether she would reconsider selling the entire company to Microsoft, she replied: ” Oh, they’d have to have big boatloads of money.” While she still seems resistant to the idea,the fact that she would now consider it at the right price is a softening of her public stance. This doesn’t mean an outright sale is back on the table (that original $45 billion boatload of money left port a long time ago), but at least she is open to the possibility.

A search deal with Microsoft remains a more likely transaction. She explained: “There are two parties in all of this. The other party has all the money, we have the data.” Both are valuable.

More immediate deals might come from Yahoo doing some acquiring itslef. “We are very interested in social, and in video technology,” said Bartz. She was particularly bullish on Web video: “This is just the beginning. The whole video area is so exciting. Video advertising growing four times by 2011.”

In terms of what she needs to do to get Yahoo back on track, her main focus remains streamlining management and decision-making at the company. Bartz related the following story of Jerry Yang inviting her over to his house when he was trying to recruit her for the CEO job, which she didn’t want initially:

Jerry said, ‘At least come to my house and talk to me.’ I said, ‘I will come talk, but I am not taking the job.’ He pulls a flip chart out of the closet. We all have a flip chart at home, right?

I said, ‘Show me who on this board would make the big search decision. He started drawing the arrows. It was like a cartoon. I said, ‘Oh my God. You need management here.’ I couldn’t figure out who was in charge. He didn’t explain that part very well.

So what does she think needs to do fix Yahoo? She didn’t get into specifics, but acknowledged that Yahoo needs to be updated and do a better job of what it already does well:

Yahoo drives more traffic to more sites on the Internet than anything else. What is it about us? People trust us. We just have to do an even better job. We have to make it simple. On the other hand, it has to be more customizable. It just has to be a more modern UI and more modern approach, and that is what we are going to do.

Bartz distanced her strategy from chasing any particular hot trend, whether it is search or social networking. “Everybody doesn’t just go to Facebook,” she noted. “People visit 85 sites a month, but spend most of their time on one or two. They can start on Facebook, but it doesn’t give them their news, their stock quotes, it doesn’t give them a of of things.” Them’s fightin’ words.

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