Our awesomeness meter skyrocketed this week when we came across the cool designs from Vaja Cases. Vaja are high-end craftsmen of leather cases for phones, laptops, cameras, PDAs.  As iphone addicts (i-addicts?), we reckon entrants to the competition on Swagpak.com might find a funky protective case for their precious iphone to be very useful indeed.  The ivolution Grip is made from full grain cowhide from the top 10 percent of Argentina’s leather and is constructed one at a time by Vaja’s highly skilled craftsmen.

We’re excited because not only can we choose the colour from 32 schemes, we can personalise it with text or a graphic – we were thinking of putting our avatars on it!

We reckon Steve Jobs would be a fan of Vaja Cases.  We are.  And you can be too.  Checkout the competition at Swagpak.com.

Some of the data didn’t surprise us.  For example, 82% of the respondents replied that ‘bootstrapping’ was their source of funding and nearly 85% said that the founders consisted of 1 to 2 people.

What we found very interesting though was the average marketing costs to acquire an active user:  48% of respondents said zero.  Really?!   Another 24% said that they spent between $0 and $1.  Can this be right?  Nearly three-quarters of the respondents spent virtually nothing on acquiring an active user.  Has the holy grail of business been uncovered – a way to acquire customers for next to nothing?

Maybe.  Maybe the current approach of sending in an app for review to get a good write up and then hoping it goes viral is a great way of promoting the app and building a successful app development business.  But with over 92,000 apps according to www.apptism.com (we know it is not quite the official number) in the App Store and growing, how do developers find new ways of rising above the cacophony of apps screaming for attention?  After all, if the current 92,000 apps were sent into the 10 most popular review sites who then reviewed 50 apps per week, that process would still take around 3 ½ years to complete.

Fundamentally, we believe that the recent article by tuaw (http://www.tuaw.com/2009/10/07/why-the-app-store-is-working-just-right/) has got it right.  Developers need to be businesses: come up with an original idea or dramatically improve an existing idea, invest time and effort in marketing it, and repeat.

In your marketing toolkit, you can:  build a microsite for your game, add a YouTube video, do some SEO, almost certainly don’t do any PPC campaigns, and maybe consider creating a competition based upon achievements within your app and offering some original prizes to drive sales.  How do you do that?  Watch this space ……

Every time you finish a game, you are presented with this score review screen:

There’s no real explanation or encouragement to do it, but one of the four options is to submit your score either to Twitter or Facebook. Clicking on submit score, Facebook, presents the increasingly familiar Facebook Connect log-in (we reviewed Connect’s marketing usefulness a few weeks back here):

Entering your Facebook credentials submits your score to your Facebook news stream. Kind of cool in itself, although this is becoming more popular, with Xbox Live soon to start doing the same thing natively from your Xbox. What’s even cooler though, is how the game itself markets itself to all your friends who see your achievement….

The ‘Get Doodle Jump for iPhone or iPod Touch’ AND the ‘Beat that!’ next to the score itself is a direct jump to the game itself within iTunes, whether you click on it on your Mac/PC, or from the iPhone/iPod touch Facebook app itself. If you’re friends are even slightly competitive, they’ll click on ‘Beat that!’ and 99c of disposable income later, they’ll be playing Doodle Jump.

Doodle Jump also has a fairly well maintained Facebook page, with over 4,000 fans. Importantly, they’ve allowed fans to submit their own content, maintaining the cool, community feel of the game, and advocating even more sharing and new stream updates for friends to see, and click through from.

Marks out of ten for game marketing innovation: we’d say…8.5! Well done Doodle Jump….and if you’re publishing you’re own game or developing it right now, Beat that!

Image courtesy of Engadget

But what about marketing? How does an iPhone a game….a SINGLE game…get found in a haystack of 21,178? (That’s probably already over 22,000 since starting this post ). Most iPhone game developers we walk to, say the answer is Twitter. Or Facebook. Or both. Or sometimes, there just isn’t an answer. Why? Becuase game developers care about games, and about the creation and enjoyment of them.

So, whilst we’re working on a a platform to help promote games that are deep in the haystack, it appears that Apple are listening to some feedback…Even though it wasn’t announced at the media event yesterday, they quietly added a new ‘Top Grossing’ section to the new iTunes 9. Why does this help? For one, it raises the gamers perception of what it means to be a top 10 ‘grosser’. When anyone looks at that list now, we KNOW that gamers are voting with their wallets. The TOUGHEST accolade by far! Well done Gameloft

Interested? We think you should be…here’s why:

1. We hope (and pray!) that SwagPak.com will grow to become the only community on the web where gamers pre-register for competitions and win some Swag!
2. We’re going to work hard to try and attract gamers, both hardcore and casual, to SwagPak.com regularly to browse the latest promotions, as well as receive updates directly into their Facebook accounts, Twitter and e-mail
3. YOUR game could be either one of the ‘hero’ promotions advertised across SwagPak.com, or be ‘listed’ and gain from the marketing driven by the LiveSocial team throughout the rest of the year.

Do I qualify for the Alpha? You need to be at least one of the following:

1. A games Publisher with current in-market games, or running launches in Q4 of 2009. Your games will generally be cross-platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC, PSP, Wii, etc. and may or may not include mobile (iPhone) versions and/or social versions
2. A games developer, marketing your own games. These may be XBLA, social games, web mini games etc In particular, right now, we love iPhone developers

You need to be able to commit to the following (all easy!):

1. Choose a game to promote!
2. Think up some swag. (Watch out for a new post here soon on ‘Swag: The low-down’) – OR: If you haven’t got any, we may just put our own hands in our pockets, and make you some Of course, promo codes, or access to some DLCs are cool too, and sometimes even more sought after than a t-shirt or lanyard.

What will the LiveSocial team do?

1. We will build and launch SwagPak.com in early November, which will contain a…
2. List all the Alpha games and promotions
3. Allow gamers to register and enter your promotions
4. Promote not only SwagPak.com but also your specific game and promotion through our own marketing efforts
5. Manage each competition from end-to-end (promote, invite, close, award winner, publicise etc)

“Enough already, I’m interested!”

Cool: We’ve put together a really simple application form, just to give us a feel for you and your games…please apply here

You spent the GDP of a small country on developing a game, shouldn’t that mean you don’t need to promote it? Or have you just run out of patience, and cash? Or perhaps you’re developing games for next to nothing now? So are you going to feel uncomfortable spending ‘marketing’ dollars? Or perhaps you’ll splash out on lots of celebrities endorsing your product on global TV spots?

Enough questions already! What do you want me to do? (Sorry, another question)…

Click here to take part in our LinkedIn poll about game launch marketing spend. Thanks!

This month’s Wired magazine cover says it all. We believe in the power of competition too. It’s quite frankly, what SwagPak is all about.

We’re heads down focused on building the Alpha release of Swagpak.com, so we haven’t got too much time to tell you about it right now. Plus, we want to build up some suspense, of course… And to help do that, we’ve put a countdown timer on our home page, and a whopping great big, fat, logo and countdown on SwagPak.com itself.

A small hint: We’re also heads down working with our favourite (and big!) games publishers, as well as some amazing (and small!) indie developers to agree on their first SwagPak promos.

Worked out what it’ll do yet? Feel free to contact us (we’ll welcome the interruption) if you just can’t wait….