Google announced that the new Google Analytics (currently in beta and only rolled out to selected accounts) supports event goals.

So, if you have been using GA to track events within your Flash game, Social Network app or anything else, you can now interpret them directly as goals and don’t need to fake Pageview-calls of “virtual” (non-existing) pages in a hidden div or iframe (which is what I have been using before).

Interestingly, no mentioning of event funnels so far – which is strange, since funnels can be defined for “normal” goals anyway.

My background is twofold – I started out as a software developer for Alcatel, but switched into some project management, development lead, CTO and managing director positions, both inside and outside of the games industry (namely Rockstar Games, VeriSign, and a small german startup called plazz entertainment).

From my perspective, BI or data mining (if you can call it that) in the “traditional” retail-oriented games industry (think Rockstar shipping Manhunt 2 or Grand Theft Auto) back in 2005 has been pretty basic, and mainly focused on usability and play testing, like generating 2D heat maps for level architectures from people playtesting the game – with that, the game designers and level designers could determine which were the most and least frequently visited areas in a level, and be use that information to change the level structure and/or level elements accordingly to guide the player better.

Of course, Microsoft/Bungie (Halo) has been very active in that field, doing much more than that, and also talking about their approach and findings quite openly at conferences.

Things changed for me when I became CTO of a german startup, doing their own “Club Penguin” clone in Germany called “Atlantis“. Initially, we had a freemium (free basic access with premium subscription as option) business model. this was changed to the now typical microtransactions for virtual item sales.

Since we were building the complete platform from scratch, we had a lot of different areas to tackle, so BI was mainly seen as a “hobby” of mine, rather than the strategic necessity for commercial success I thought it is or should be.
Basically, we did aggregated log events from the database (a MySQL single read/write master, multiple read-only slaves setup) per time slot – like number of chat messages per day, time spent online per character per day. We did this using an open source tool called ART.

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On the website, Google Analytics (and Piwik) provided the standard metrics like Visits, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate. I thought about using Ajax-calls into Google Analytics to track ingame events, but decided against it, not to mix web traffic stats and ingame events (that need to be stored in the database, anyway).

My employment there ended before I had time to research and implement something more elaborate and detailed. I’d be very interested to talk about what others did, what tools or methods you use, and so on.

EasyRec enables you to include item recommendations based on the behaviour of your website users.

From their website:

User Actions are sent to the easyrec using the REST API. Possible actions are viewing, buying or rating an item.

These user actions are stored in the database of the Recommendation Engine.

The provided Analyzers periodically analyze all recorded data for identifying patterns to generate recommendations.

These Recommendations can be accessed through calls to the easyrec webservice API and presented to a user.

I left VeriSign in 2008, so it will be quite interesting for me to see how it evolved.

Founded in 2009, and they won the “Best Startup” prize at last year’s Game Developer Conference, but even now they still appear to be in stealth phase.

Interestingly, I have been thinking about data mining since I was working on Atlantis at plazz entertainment. Having talked with a lot of developers and publishers, it seems that most of them rely on basic data aggregations and averages as a basis for their decisions to optimize, while obviously it would be very rewarding to segment your customers into groups and and target them more specifically, predicting revenue curves and lifetime value, presenting them items to purchase that other, “similar” users have bought, etc.

If you are game developer (or publisher) using data mining techniques, or are interested in this topic, please contact me via Xing or LinkedIn.

If you have not already done so, please have a quick look at the slides:

Or you can watch a webcast of a live talk by Eric on the same subject, “How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step”:

Earlier this year, a Google Group was started.

I try to force myself to use Things on a daily basis. I had put the library files on a local server, but with “Back To My Mac” enabled, I had troubles accessing it over the net sometimes.

When I read about Dropbox, I reminded myself that I’m spending quite some money every year on Apple’s .mac (now Mobile Me) service, but 99% of the time I am just using the email part of it.

So, I wanted to see if I could put the Things library on the iDisk, despite the fact that their FAQ says it’s not possible.

It is possible.

1. Quit Things.
2. Enable “iDisk Sync” in the Mobile Me preferences pane.
3. Move your Things library (if you have not changed anything, it sits in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code) to your iDisk.
4. Create a symlink from ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code to /Volumes/iDisk/Documents/Cultured Code.
5. Launch Things – if a request comes up, browse to ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things and select it

Voila. Life can be easy sometimes.

Atlassian has a new promotion for the upcoming release of Jira 4:

If you send in a screenshot of your current issue tracker, you can either choose a free 10 user license (complete with 12 months support and upgrades, renewable for $10/year), or a 20% discount on your order.

Cool, huh? As a very satisfied Atlassian customer, I highly recommend to check it out!

I’m quite happy with Google Analytics so far, but the fact that you don’t own the data coming from your users on your website (along with some remarks from our lawyer about exporting usage data into the US being not the preferred solution, especially in Germany) was enough to start looking around for other solutions.

Piwik is an downloadable web analytics PHP/MySQL application, that aims to be an open source alternative for Google Analytics. The feature set already is impressive, and can be extended through plugins.

A JavaScript tracking code snippet must be included on all relevant web pages, to enable tracking.

Speaking of plugins – there does not seem to be a whole lot of community provided plugins yet, and the list of available plugins is a bit cumbersome to browse and search (partly because its served by trac).

There is no out-of-the-box support for goals, but you get some extra reports like “Visits by local user time” that have no equivalent in Google Analytics (as far as I know – I’m no GA geek).

The GUI is informative and pretty to look at – but I guess the big thing is the API. You can access the data – your data – in JSON, XML, PHP or CSV format.

As I have no plans for the API so far, I’m most interested in comparing the numbers I get from GA with the ones from Piwik. I will report my findings here soon.

In the meantime, here are some slides giving some more detailed info about Piwik’s structure and features:

That’s right, a free license, no strings attached – for all 3 Jira editions.

I have not looked at the fine print, but it seems you only get official Atlassian support (which is excellent, btw) for the starter license.

Still, the personal license should be enough to get you hooked…

And, related to my previous post, here is a demo explaining how to setup BlazeDS and Flex in IntelliJ IDEA, including debugging both the client and the server side – nice!