NativeX Blog

AdNatively: a half day conversation about the new frontier of ‘native advertising’

Posted by & filed under Business, Mobile.

As eMarketer recently stated: “Social networks, news sites, digital content aggregators, and streaming media services are rife with ads that are integrated into the content experience. … Whatever the unknowns surrounding native advertising, there seems to be no question that its role in the digital advertising ecosystem will only get bigger.”

The 2013 AdNatively Conference explores the rise of native and mobile advertising and tries to help explain why now and why tomorrow, from leaders in advertising, brands, publishers and technology.

AdNatively Conference, a conference about native advertising

AdNatively 2013 will take place on May 23, from 1-6 PM EDT at the Associated Press building in New York City. Tickets are still available for purchase on the AdNatively Eventbrite page

Those heading out to NYC for AdNatively, will get to participate in a conversation about the new frontier of native advertising, with speakers including Fred Wilson, Owen Thomas, and NativeX’s VP of Marketing, Diana LaGattuta. After launching five mobile advertising businesses, including Enpocket, Sprint, Nokia, NAVTEQ, and NativeX, Diana has earned a reputation as an international marketing leader and pioneer in new media. In 2012, she was named one of Mobile Marketer’s “Mobile Women to Watch,” she is a regular speaker at industry events, and a contributor to marketing publications including iMedia, ClickZ, and New Media Age.

If you can’t make it to the conference, follow the action on Twitter with the handles @nativeX and @adnatively. If you have questions for Diana or are interested in learning more about native advertising in mobile games, drop us a note.

The Perils and Triumphs of using Cassandra at a .NET/Microsoft Shop

Posted by & filed under Mobile, Science.

We recently transitioned a large portion of our backend infrastructure from Microsoft SQL Server to Apache Cassandra. Today, this Cassandra cluster backs our mobile advertising network, supporting over 10 million daily active users that produce over 10,000 transactions per second, with an average database request latency of under 2 milliseconds! The journey to get there is one of struggle and perseverance, where everyone lives happily ever after.

Cassandra Summit

If you plan on attending Cassandra Summit 2013, you’ll get to hear the story firsthand. NativeX Infrastructure Architects Derek Bromenshenkel and Jeff Smoley will be there discussing their experience of successfully connecting our .NET web apps to Cassandra. They’ll also offer insight into what went well and more importantly, what surprises you can expect when it’s time for your business to make the transition.

Cassandra Summit runs from June 11-12, in San Francisco. Registration is still open so click here for details.

For those who can’t make it to the conference, we are going to post the slides on Slideshare shortly after the conference. We’ll also cover the action live on Twitter so follow @nativeX and use the hashtag #cassandra13.

If you have any questions for Derek and Jeff or if you would like to meet up at Cassandra Summit, drop us a note.

Sell emotion, not content: Free-to-play Design Rule 13 [GAMESbrief]

Posted by & filed under Art, Business, Mobile.

Originally posted by Nicholas Lovell on GAMESbrief - Selling content is what content creators do, right? Not any more. Now that digital distribution has made it incredibly cheap to share content on the web, consumers are increasingly refusing to pay for it. (Recent research suggests, for example, that 49% of people think it appropriate to download music for free and 40% can’t remember when they last bought a CD).

This means that a developer making a game has to change the way they view their business. Instead of spending $2 million building a virtual world and charging people for access to it, they have to spend $2 million building a virtual world, give it away to build an audience, and find other things to sell in it.

Those things are unlikely to be expensive to make. They are most likely to be an entry in a database or a few days of art/programmer time. They might be selling:

  • -Self expression (costumes, avatars, animations)
  • -Progress (trading time for money, instant gratification)
  • -Power (better weapons, better equipment)
  • -Status (the ability to show off to others, whether aesthetically or within game mechanics)
  • -Relationships (gifts, co-operative benefits)
  • -And much more

These aren’t mutually exclusive elements. The point is that no gamer thinks about how much something cost to build when considering whether to buy it or how much to pay. They are considering how much it is worth to them. Whether they will enjoy it. How it will make them feel.

In the world of free-to-play, you are competing with tens of thousands of games that are totally free to play. In that world, you aren’t charging for content; you are charging for emotion.