While somewhat hidden, we do have a “Feature Request” page that is actively managed and read by members of our team.
Many of the feature requests are curated from your feedback and posted on this list by our head of operations and support rockstar Jimmy Fan (if you’ve ever filed a bug or request, he was the one that was responsible for tracking the right person and/or solution down for you!)
Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, and it is quite likely since it is also rather (unintentionally) hidden right now, we have a customer support forum page which we are always staying on top of as well to get your feedback to improve our products!
San Francisco, California, June 30th, 2010 — San Francisco based social web analytics company Kontagent, has raised over $4 million in additional equity funding in its latest round of funding. The round was led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, co-founder of FlyCast and Adify. This brings the total amount raised by Kontagent to nearly $6 million to date. Anthony Lee from Altos Ventures and Eric Kim from Maverick Capital will be joining the Kontagent board.
The company’s social web analytics platform is the most broadly used platform of its kind, deployed by many of the top social game and app developers on Facebook. The Kontagent platform now tracks over 60 million users monthly across hundreds of Facebook connected games and services.
The new funding partners will be joining existing angels and seed funds announced earlier this year that include: Jameson Hsu, co-founder and CEO of Mochimedia; James Hong, co-founder and CEO of HotOrNot; Benjamin Sun, co-founder and CEO of CommunityConnect; Auren Hoffman, founder and CEO of RapLeaf; Greg Thomson, founder of TallTreeGames and Mike Sego, chief product officer of Gaia Online and also the Facebook Fund, The Hit Forge and Extreme Venture Partners.
The company plans to use this additional capital to extend its technology platform, as well as to build out its sales and marketing capacity. Kontagent is actively hiring and expanding its engineering, sales and marketing teams in both its San Francisco and Toronto offices.
About Kontagent:
Kontagent is the leading viral analytics platform for social network application developers. The Kontagent platform has been built from the ground up to provide deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service.
Kontagent was founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs Jeffrey Tseng (2nd startup, most recently founder of Aevena) and Albert Lai (5th startup, most recently founder of BubbleShare). The company is headquartered in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California with a presence in downtown Toronto, Ontario.
At Kontagent, we’ve been super quiet but laser focused and busy building out the latest iteration of our platform. So after a nearly a year of flying under the radar a bit, we are super excited to announce that we have crossed the 50 Million Monthly Active User tracked mark, along with some new customers and investment partners.
The Kontagent team has multiplied in size and our customer list. We are lucky to have a massive number of fantastic new customers that are working with us, giving us fantastic feedback to improve our service. Considering we have no full time sales or marketing people on the team, it is a real testament to the favor that our customers have done for us in “virally” passing the word around for Kontagent. So thank you for those who have referred us to your fellow Facebook developer friends!
Recently, we’ve also been joined by a number of great strategic financial partners/angels that are lending us a lot of their thought, leadership and resources to improve on the thinking that we’ve put into the product over the past two years.
It is amazing that the founding four-person team that we started with has been together for two years now. Not only have we stuck together but the team has multiplied in size and we have yet to lose a single team member in spite of the crazy, hard work that building this company has demanded from each one of us on the team.
When we first started as started experimenting in the Facebook ecosystem in the first months of the F8 platform, we never thought we would end up having the opportunity in building such a fun and challenging analytics platform company.
I want use this opportunity to thank the Kontagent team and all our customers for supporting us over the past two years. The tremendous response we’ve had over the past 90 days since launching our premium features has been astounding. We are quickly catching up on the backlog of customers and requests that we’ve garnered, and looking forward to working with you all soon.
We feel fortunately to be a part of this excited phase of the building out the “social web” – in the form of games, apps, and the many innovative services that our customers and partners are building.
Thank you again to all those that have worked with us, and those that are just looking at partnering with us now and in the coming months. We are working hard at work building a kick ass development platform to enable you all to keep kicking ass building the new new thing.
Kontagent Facebook Analytics is Setting the Industry Standard with Top Customer Wins and Investors
San Francisco, California (—) April 9th, 2010 — Kontagent a Facebook funded social analytics platform has emerged to establish itself as the industry standard in its category with dozens of top industry customer wins while mostly flying under the radar up until now.
Kontagent has chose to surface with some key metrics about its now growing momentum, and dominant position in the social analytics space. In the past quarter alone, Kontagent has managed to win dozens of casual and social game industry’s top players as customers — collectively tracking over 50 million monthly active users.
With the recent release of Kontagent Social Analytics and Marketing-Automation Suite v1.5 (SAMS), which has been in development for over 2 years, the company has managed to secure many of the largest casual game publishers and venture backed game developers as paying customers in just the past three months alone. These customers include PopCap Games, Real Networks, Gaia Online, TenCent, Paramount, PlayFirst, King.com, ThreeRings, Conduit Labs, MetaPlace and many other leading brands.
Furthermore, the company has announced that it has attracted a new group of veteran social and casual games software pioneers as angel investors, including: Jameson Hsu, co-founder/CEO of Mochimedia (Acquired by Shanda), James Hong, co-founder/CEO of HotOrNot , Benjamin Sun, co-founder/CEO of CommunityConnect, Auren Hoffman, founder/CEO of RapLeaf, Greg Thomson, founder of TallTreeGames and creator of YoVille (Acquired by Zynga), Mike Sego, Chief Product Officer of Gaia and creator of (Fluff)Friends (Acquired by SGN). These investors will be joining Kontagent’s existing seed investors Naval Ravikant from The Hit Forge and Extreme Venture Partners. Kontagent has raised approximately $1 Million dollars in outside financing in addition to $250K from the Facebook Fund, it has been able to generate significant revenues from its annual pre-paid enterprise contracts.
For the first time, Kontagent is also opening up demo account that enables visitors to see the full set of features of its v1.5 platform here [Direct link into Demo Account: http://www.kontagent.com/dashboard/demo/]. This account demonstrates the never before possible power and insights that a analytics platform built from the ground up for the social web and social games can deliver.
As social networks and their 3rd party application ecosystem have grown up and become more competitive, social game and app developers look to Kontagent for its best-in-class social analytics and marketing automation platform. Kontagent is a new class of analytics and marketing automation software with specialized tools that enable its customers to systematically engineer viral growth and gain a deeper understanding of the demographics of their user base. Kontagent, a San Francisco-based startup co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Albert Lai and Jeffery Tseng in 2007, is a venture-financed company that is focused on delivering a “Social Analytics and Marketing Automation Suite” to meet these new analytics needs.
Unlike traditional analytics platforms that have historically focused on providing information relating to page views, time spent on site, search engine ranking – none of which provide an accurate understanding of the demographics of a site’s users, how the users are socially linked, and what social interactions occur among the site’s users – Kontagent’s analyticsplatform has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the demographic information and social interactions present in social networks. This information provides powerful insights and actionable information using an intuitive data visualization interface to improve the ability to target specific demographic groups and accurately measure how effectively that goal is met. Unique to Kontagent is its ability to analyze and map the rich demographic and social network information to display how an application’s users are engaging and propagating the viral spread of the application.
Albert Lai, Kontagent’s co-founder, states that “Kontagent has experienced a massive influx of new customers over the past three months, especially the given the strong response to our v1.5 release of the Kontagent Platform. Our industry leading customers partner with Kontagent because we deliver the industry’s most powerful viral analytics and social marketing automation platform. We deliver the insightful and actionable metrics and tools that is the life blood of our customers and drives the success of their business.” Jeff Tseng, Kontagent’s co-founder, remarks that “this is the beginning of a new era of competition in the Facebook application environment. Now everyone can access to the most powerful analytics tools to generate viral growth.”
About Kontagent:
Kontagent is the leading viral analytics platform for social network application developers. The Kontagent platform has been built from the ground up to provide deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service.
Kontagent was founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs Albert Lai/Co-founder (5th startup, most recently founder of BubbleShare) and Jeffrey Tseng/Co-founder (2nd startup, most recently founder of Aevena). The company is headquartered in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California with a presence in downtown Toronto, Ontario.
Interview Contact:
Albert Lai, Co-founder
Phone: 647-885-1897 or 650-544-1524
Email: albert (at) kontagent (dot) com
Web: http://www.kontagent.com
Kontagent
185 Clara St. #101A
San Francisco, CA, 94107
Yesterday, we launched an update to our website, complete with a lot more product information. We added a section on the features, benefits and also our preliminary pricing all in the products section of the site.
We also have a cool new marketing video, which was produced by the great guys over at Procasts in the UK. If you need a demo video done, you should definitely check them out at Procasts.
Lastly, we launched a new version of the support site as well where you can find tutorials on how to instrument your application, how to use Kontagent and information on any technical questions you may have.
As promised, here are the videos from the Facebook Developer Garage. We hope you’ll find these videos to be a helpful compliment to the slide shows posted eariler (best view with both blog posts opened side by side).
Thanks to everyone who came out last night and to those to watched the stream on ustream. We’d also like to extend our gratitude to all our speakers who did a awesome job with the presentations as well. Lastly, we’d like to thank Facebook and Intel for sponsoring and supporting the event.
We’ll be adding content as we collect it, but to kick things off, here are the presentation slides:
This Facebook Developer Garage, co-hosted by Kontagent Ananlytics, will be the first to event of its type to exclusively cover fbConnect, social games and advanced social app metrics. We will reveal some of the development processes and metrics that are behind top multi-million dollar social games. Our lineup of expert speakers include a number of experts in metrics (Dr. Andreas Weigend/Stanford, Erics Ries/Kleiner Perkins, Justin Smith/InsideFacebook, Jeffery Tseng/Kontagent, Vikas Gupta/Jambool, etc.) and successful game developers sharing their insights on how to utilize metrics to increase growth, engagement and monetization of Facebook applications and social games.
This event is open to all developers (social game developers are encouraged to participate), marketing professional and all Facebook enthusiasts. The presentations will be data driven and very actionable. Every developer should be take away something that can be used to change the way they’re developing applications.
There will also for thousands of dollars in prizes, including a draw for premimum passes to web 2.0 expo, and other exclusive prizes to be announced at the event.
[Note: This is Part 3 of our 4 part series of the Kontagent Social Gaming Workshop Summary, here is: Part 1, Part 2]
As the application space on the Facebook platform has evolved, the typical complexity of apps has increased with ever more applications being built around a virtual currency system. Not only does this lead to interesting and engaging game play, but it also provides another avenue for application developers to monetize what they develop.
One of the break-out sessions at the Kontagent Social Gaming Workshop focused on virtual economies with the goal to determine what metrics should be used to effectively monitor the virtual economies. Measurements and metrics that were discussed include:
Measureaverage net worthto monitorinflation– A primary concern with virtual economies is controlling inflation. Why bother to control it? Well, if inflation is rampant, highly-engaged users who have been saving up for a big purchase will probably not be too happy and may head for the nearest virtual exit if their savings have been rendered worthless by inflation.
The first step to controlling inflation is to monitor it, and the group agreed that measuring average net worth of users over time was a reasonably simple, yet adequate, proxy for measuring inflation. This metric gives the application developer an understanding of what goods the average users could afford to purchase.
Trackingsourcesandsinksin the economy – How do users get their money and how do they spend it? By measuring this, you can understand what parts of your virtual economy are working well and address the parts that are not performing.
For example, is the primary source in your economy the initial seed money you give all users? This is probably not a good sign. It may indicate that users are not finding the game engaging enough to earn additional currency or perhaps it’s too difficult to earn currency in the game.
Tracking individualvirtual good purchases– By tracking all individual purchases, the developer can identify what goods are in high demand and use that information to adjust prices accordingly, create more goods like the ones in demand, and remove unpopular goods. Perhaps the user base of a particular application just does not buy goods in large quantities outside a particular price range.
Dual currencies– Multiple participants pointed to dual currencies as an effective way of monetizing around virtual economies, where one currency (regular) can be earned through game play and the second one (premium) can only be acquired through real-money purchases. Conversions may be allowed from the premium currency to the regular one, but not the reverse. Application developers can then choose to make certain items available only via the premium currency, which encourages users to purchase the premium currency.
What is the right time increment for measurements? – Most metrics for monitoring virtual currencies should be averaged over a certain time period to avoid reacting too quickly to random fluctuations in the metrics. The consensus was that a week was a sufficient time increment for most metrics. Obviously, if you have a major shift in some key metrics, such as the average number of transactions in your economy dropping by 80% over night, it’s probably safe to say that you have an issue and you shouldn’t wait a week to investigate it.
Virtual currencies are currently an integral part of many applications on Facebook and are likely to continue to be so. Having the right metrics to control sources of currency, appropriately price virtual goods, and keep inflation under control will be important to ensure the continued success of an app with a virtual economy.
We appreciate the input from all the participants at the workshop. If I missed something that was discussed please add a comment!
