Courtesy of Flickr's kenjonbro

To our loyal Ayogo blog readers, thanks for all your recent comments and re-tweets. It’s good to know what you’ve been up to — we really appreciate it! In terms of what we’ve been up to, we’re getting ready for a huge summer.

To start, Pet Pupz, a community-based virtual pet  app (originally a Facebook game launched on Facebook awhile back) is now available in the Apple AppStore – and therefore your smartphone and the iPad! You can download it here.

As for coming attractions…

We have an exciting announcement to share with you on June 14th and then one more later on in the month. The first announcement involves a topic on serious games and health, and coincidentally, it was also the topic of a panel Michael was recently a part of. Terry Lavender from the Vancouver Observer covered the panel at last week’s Vancouver Digital Week. I also attended the event and I was excited to see the enthusiasm for “serious games.”

On the panel, Michael spoke about game design for casual social games, and in particular about game design in games that aren’t just played for fun, but also may encourage and incentivize certain “serious” behaviours. Here is an excerpt from Terry Lavender’s post,

Why do kids willingly do chores in FarmVille (a Facebook-based game) and World of Warcraft, but not in real life, asked Michael Fergusson, CEO of local casual game company Ayogo. The answer, he said, is the appeal of competition and challenge. Ayogo is working with a large health research institute to see whether a health-based videogame can actually motivate people to develop a healthy lifestyle. But in order to work, the game has to be fun first, with the health benefits strictly secondary, according to Fergusson.

As for some cool statistics that I picked up from the conference, did you know that….

* 1 billion people see a Google page every day
* 55% of people online are women
* Social media users are more positive about brands than non-users
* There are 5 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion personal computers and 1.1 billion televisions
* 75% of Canadians have mobile phones
* Canadians send 100 million text messages every day

Oh, catch us at Launch Party 9 on June 17th in Vancouver. Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is just one of the celebrity judges at the event. In the meantime, please show us some love and VOTE for our video!

Ayogo’s been selected to participate at Launch Party 9 and we’re excited. Come out to the Roundhouse Community Centre on June 17th to witness us take home (hopefully) the trophy for best start-up.

What will you see at Launch Party 9, you ask? We’ve chosen two games to showcase to you AND to some of the world-class judges in attendance. (Some of the judges include Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, Debbie Landa, Katherine Barr and Jason Bailey, to name a few.) First up is Pet Pupz, an iPhone game that allows you to nurture, adopt and train a virtual puppy. (Cute, right?) Next, is a more serious, but still totally awesome health-based game that can actually motivate people to develop a healthier lifestyle. (No way, you say?) We know that you’re as excited as we are, so why not come and check us out at the event. In the meantime, you can show us some digital love by voting for our video. Thanks!

Courtesy of Flickr's C-Ali

I attended the Inside Social Apps Conference a few weeks ago. You can see the notes from each of the presentations to get a better feel for what went down. For me, I thought it was a good conference to get insight into the future of social apps and to meet some amazing people. The panel on monetizing games really struck me. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing that I couldn’t find in the notes, so I thought I would tell you about it.

The main idea is that right now monetization through “offers” is through a complete separate “offerwall.”  An offerwall, like Superewards and OfferPal, is a separate page in the app that shows offers. The user decides which offer to complete and then eventually they will be awarded the offer currency.

This is very convenient and easy to integrate, which is why it was adopted so widely, so quickly. The problem with the offerwall? It lacks context. It’s a daunting wall of random offers, many of which are not interesting and the user has seen before. A simple solution is to use context-awareness improve both the usability and overall effectiveness of the offerwall:

• Amount of offer currency: For example, if I have 4 favor points and I need 16 to get the 20 point platinum hunting rifle, I should be presented with offers in the 10-20 range, not a wall of offers from 1 to 200 pts.
• Timing of the offers: If the game popped up an offer for just the right amount, right at the moment when the user desire for the item is most acute.
• Look and feel: The offerwalls use the offer providers chrome (or “look and feel”). So game designers don’t have a way of  customizing the look and feel of the offers presented. As a result, we quarantine the offerwall off in a corner of our application, so we don’t break the overall aesthetic feel of our games.

To do these things, the offer providers need to give us an API into their offer system. Then we can decide which offers to present to a user at which times. If we can have an offer presented in our apps look and feel, that is timely and relevant to the user, we’ll look for opportunities to show the offers more often, and our players will get offers they’re more likely to accept. Seems like a win for everybody.

Courtesy of Flickr's kohtzy

One of senior team members, VP of Engineering, Dave Orchard flew down to San Francisco last week to check out two conferences, f8 and Inside Social Apps. He has written a detailed blog post about the take away messages from f8, including some really cool technological announcements that were revealed. For a more detailed read, you can read his blog post on our tech blog.  I’ve cross-posted a sneak peek of the post below…

I think the biggest announcement is a combination of announcements, so let’s start with the top-down view. What Facebook can now do is be the gatekeeper for all aspects of personal information. If you like a movie, song, restaurant, article, person…whatever…on a 3rd party site like imdb.com or yelp.com, that site will notify Facebook. Then Facebook will update your profile in real-time! That itself is simply amazing, that the profile you statically filled out on sign-up and never revisited is now real-time with you. But wait, there’s more. Applications that you have added can subscribe to your profile and changes, and will be notified, typically in less than a minute. In fact, they will try up to 5 times and keep the callback for up to 24 hours.