Game g = new Game();

I stumbled across this interesting Greystripe study, focusing on the “iPhone moms” in the US as a new demographic made up of female iPhone users with children.

“Children and family focused iPhone applications are gaining in popularity and have become big business” said Jason Petralia, CEO of People Operating Technology, a New York-based iPhone application publisher. “We’re happy that Greystripe is pioneering research into this market.”

Highlights include:

• Over 59% of iPhone moms let their children use their iPhone with 41% downloading entertainment applications 20% downloading educational apps specifically for their kids.
• 89.25% use their phone for entertainment, whether this is listening to music, browsing the Internet or using various entertainment apps.
• 96% are involved in their household purchasing decisions, with 40% being the sole decision maker.

The complete report is available as PDF.

As a more positive and proactive followup on my previous post about the Top 10 of retail mentality, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the “Lean Startup” philosophy and concepts, started by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

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.

startups.yeebase.com features my interview on their landing page today.

Tomorrow Wednesday Aug 5th at 19:30 CEST, we will organize a big stress test to challenge our AT.LANT.IS server infrastructure.

During the test, all items in the shops will be available for only 1 ORI, to encourage lots of item purchases and new avatar renderings at a short timespan.

So, if you always wanted to check out how that golden shark helmet fits you, register now and login tomorrow evening!

(As a side note, all beta users will receive 3 months premium membership for free !)

Andrew Chen’s blog is always a very clever, interesting read.

In one of his latests posts he cites a discussion with Matt Humphrey of Bumba Labs, reminding that seemingly small differences in retention rates have a big impact, actually:

Having month-to-month user retention of 92%, 96%, and 97.3% will get you on average 1, 2, and 3 user-years respectively per user that ever signs up on the site.

Okay, in English? If each month you lose 8% of your existing users (92% retention) from the previous month, the average use will stay for 12 months. If you can hold just 4% more of your users (96% retention), then they will stick around for 2 years. If you can hold only 1.3% more than that (97.3% retention), they will be in for 3 years.

The multiplicative effects are just enormous over time. And, 90%+ seems a rather unrealistically high number.

Retention-focused features are very powerful
The point of all of the above is that retention-focused features are very powerful because they let you create dramatic improvements in all the important metrics, across the board – be it pageviews, total time usage, revenue, etc.

In real life, it seems to me that this mindset to focus on features that increase user retention is difficult to grasp for people coming from a retail history. They tend to follow a “big bang” mentality in terms of feature scope for launch, marketing, launch dates, etc., rather than

[...] put a tremendous amount of time into a whole host of retention-driven features like:

• A great product and value proposition
• Targeted notifications
• Fresh news and content on every return
• Desktop app-integration (which has a much lower rate of uninstall)
• The number of friends on the site (the more that are there, the more notifications can be generated)

All of the above contribute meaningfully to this user retention number.