The first star speakers of Sociality Rocks! 2012 - Moscow
 | Aaron Huang Head of Product Marketing - Kontagent From his position inside one of the biggest ‘Big Data’ startups in social games, Aaron is in a unique position to talk about the prevailing trends in social and mobile gaming. Aaron has a background in all aspects of online marketing, including SEM, SEO, Display, and Facebook Ads among others, and has been responsible for starting and growing multi-million dollar verticals from ideation to success with small teams. He blogs about product and best practices on Kontagent’s blog, and is excited about the transformative influence games will have on commerce and social interaction in the future. Aaron is currently playing Backyard Monsters and Uberstrike on Facebook. Speech: Data-Driven Design. You’ve got the data, so, now what? Short description: Now that you have the data, what's the plan? Using customer data to understand and optimize your social or mobile game can produce huge returns. But, there are also dangers of relying too heavily on data without the proper level of controls, data science and overall process. Fortunately, there are now tools, technology and talent available in the market that are enabling forces for studios who want to be more data-driven. This session will analyze what it takes to become a data-driven organization, and look at some lessons learned from our experience working with some of the top grossing social and mobile game studios. |
 | Edgars Strods Head of gaming department - Odnoklassniki.ru Edgars Strods: head of gaming departent of Odnoklassniki.ru, participated in the development of platforms, system of moderation and rules of games . Together with API team of API for the year has created the most successful platform for developers. Speech: Social games market in Russia Short description: Strange as it may sound, social games market's just a couple years ald, and growth rates are still very impressive. Let's consider the development of the market in numbers, its perspectives and future. |
 | Nikita Sherman CEO - Drimmi September, 2009 founded Drimmi - the company, developing multiplatform gaming applications. December, 2009, in the first round of funding the company received investments from European venture fund Mangrove (Skype, KupiVIP). 2008-2009 - President of Odnoklassniki social network 2007-2008 - President of Mamba 2005-2007 - IT-Territory, Business development director |
 | Yaroslav Sergeev Managing director - Mamba Yaroslav Sergeev - Managing director of "Mamba" - the largest in the CIS dating system. Ideologist and leader of "Mamba" platform for games and applications. Over the shoulders of all the steps of a successful technician: php-developer, architect, team leader, IT-director and finally director of the company. The experience gained allows full consideration to any issues of Internet business: building and managing teams, project work, risk management, search for optimal monetization and much more. Speech: Features of dating-platform for games and applications. Short description: Yaroslav is going to tell about the development of Mamba platform - a highly technological solution for integration of games and applications into a biggest Russian dating service with a daily traffic 2.5 mln people -what is the difference between dating and social networks, -which mechanics are more demanded at Mamba and why -advantages of the platform, its viral channels, users' and developers' support, unique solutions for revenue sharing -analysis of successful application cases with a daily return from 7 thousand dollar/per day |
 | Yaroslav Gorodetsky CEO, CDNVideo The introduction of new telecommunications products and services Speech: Accelerate download games from the developer / publisher / distributor sites. Short description: The report is supposed to talk about speeding up the game download sites with developers and publishers, reducing the load on game servers through services CDN (Content Delivery Network). Comparison of the effectiveness of various methods of solving these problems. |
 | Bogdan Kuznetsov Co-founder, Crazy Panda In 2010, together with Oleg Pronin started a company Crazy Panda. For today more than 2 million people per day play Panda games in CIS Released games: World Poker Club, Zaporozhye, Wonder City. |
 | Alisa Chumachenko CEO and Founder - Game Insight Alisa was VP of Marketing and Advertising in the largest East European holding game company Astrum Online Entertainment since 2007 year. AOE is a recognized market leader, which runs tens of browser-based and client MMOG and casual games. It was merged with Mail Ru Group in 2009. In 2009 she left AOE and founded Game Insight, a company with prime focus on social gaming development which later evolved into mobile gaming. Newly established company invested in multiple small gaming startups helping them bring high quality content to the global market. In 2011 Game Insight became one of the leading developers on multiple mobile platforms and is on its way to expand the reach even further. First hidden object game on Facebook; #1 Top Grossing game on Android Market for over 26 weeks; first freemium hidden object game on iOS and #1 Top Free Game in Korea – are just several success stories for the company, which built its strategy on such values as high quality content only, free games for everyone and best expertise in development. Game Insight audience reached 50 million users in 2011 and grows fast every month. Speech: What does it take to get to the TOP Short description: Alisa promises to share details and numbers for a two-year success story of Game Insight. What does it take to achieve this success in U.S. market in money, resources, time and strength. What are the difficulties encountered on the path that were not so terrible and how not to be afraid of themselves. |
 | Andrew Tertitsky Founder - Social Quantum Andrew Tertitsky came into the industry of online entertainment 2 years ago and during this short period created a company that took the leading position among the developers of social applications. To date, Social Quantum has seven studios in the CIS and Eastern Europe. Andrew graduated from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute (State University), Department of Physics and Power Engineering Problems. |
 | Eros Resmini SVP Marketing and Developer Relations, Europe - OpenFeint | GREE International Speech: Why Social Mobile Games Need a Platform Now More than Ever Short description: Many mobile social games are freemium but lack strong social effects. Only with the help of SNS platforms do mobile social games truly become social and achieve cost-effective acquisition, retention, and monetization rates. |
 | Alex Ruzhentsev Founder - 101XP Alex Ruzhentsev has worked in the interactive industry since 2003. As SVP Business Development at Noviy Disk, one of the leading PC and videogame distributors in Russia, Alex was instrumental in company's growth in market share from around 10% to over 25% from 2003 to 2008, spearheading rapid expansion into PC and videogames distribution and publishing. Alex built and managed relationships with a large number of partners resulting in a slate of over 500 products, including Call of Duty, F.E.A.R., Guild Wars, Hitman, Nancy Drew, Resident Evil, The Witcher, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer. Recently Alex co-founded 101XP Inc., a social gaming developer, operator and publisher based in Moscow, Russia with focus on bringing the best international social games to local platforms in Russia and Eastern Europe. |
 | Johannes Kreibohm Founder and CEO - Plinga Johannes is co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based social gaming publisher Plinga. With 30+ social games on more than 20 social networks and social game portals Plinga is one of Europe’s leading social gaming publishers. As CEO, Johannes leads the overall strategic direction of Plinga and oversees partnerships and finance. Before founding Plinga Johannes worked as Investment Manager at Rocket Internet, Europe’s biggest startup accelerator. Johannes holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. |
 | Arthur Shimunov Founder and CEO - Webgames Arthur Shimun - Founder and CEO Webgames, a leading publisher of social and mobile games in Russia \ CIS. Prior to founding Webgames, Arthur founded two successful international business: the world's third banner advertising network working on a model for the result, Webmedia and company Rapporto, which is the largest provider of SMS in Russia \ CIS. |
 | Maxim Shatilov Director of Development - Webgames Maxim Shatilov - Director of Business Development in Webgames, a leading publisher of social and mobile games in Russia\ CIS. Maxim is responsible for maintaining the active growth of the company. Prior to joining Webgames worked at a venture capital fund ABRT, an investment analyst. During operation, the fund found and participate in the closing of the transaction size of $ 5M in the company Oktogo. He graduated from the Faculty of Business Informatics, NIU School of Economics. Max Shatilov - is the development director in Webgames, the leading Russian/CIS social and mobile games editor. He's responsible for active company's growing support. Before coming to Webgames, worked in venture fund ABRT as investment analyst, where realised the $5M deal for Oktogo company. Graduated bisiness-informatic faculty in NIU School of Economics. |
 | Dan Laughlin Executive Director of Business Development - 6waves Lolapps Dan Laughlin is the Executive Director of Business Development at 6waves Lolapps, where he is responsible for setting strategy and growing the company’s global portfolio of developer partnerships. Since joining the 6waves Lolapps team in early 2011, Dan has played a key role in solidifying the company’s position as the largest publisher of independent games on Facebook. Prior to joining the company, Dan worked at Microsoft Game Studios, where he gained a balanced understanding of game development via positions as a Lead Producer and a Senior Business Development Manager. Dan also spent time at Thomson Reuters and MarketOne International. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Speech: Growing Big on Facebook: A Case Study Short description: Facebook's gaming environment has rapidly matured, creating a highly competitive environment with challenging economics. Understanding how to implement a multi-faced marketing strategy that complements ongoing content development is crucial to giving your game the longevity needed to produce a sizable profit. In a case study you don't want to miss, 6waves, the largest independent publisher of social games, will share key insights from one of its most successful titles. |
 | Jan Hulshoff Pol Director of Publisher Relations, Europe, SponsorPay Jan performs the role of Director Publisher Relations Europe. His mission is to build lasting, valuable relations with companies across the world, regardless of platform, in order to help them increase monetization of their users. He also aims to extend SponsorPay’s ad-funded payment model to new verticals. In his previous role as Head of Commercial Development at Softonic.com, Jan was responsible for promoting and selling Softonic B2B products to third parties and to the software industry. Prior to Softonic, Jan worked in the German internet industry gaining significant experience in sales, business development and marketing. Jan has a master degree in business administration from the University of Hamburg (Germany) with a focus in marketing and international management. Speech: Advertising and Offer Based Payments as a Retention and Monetization Tools in Online and Social Games Short description: A game's profitability can be increased significantly by integrating brand advertising and offer-based payments into its environment as these are effective retention and monetization tools, respectively. The integration of branded video advertising is a highly effective retention-boosting tool as it creates an optimal value exchange for the user¬ — supplying them with dynamic, targeted content and virtual currency. These engagement campaigns deliver extremely high completion rates— typically averaging over 90%. Since the experience is literally frictionless – users get rewarded simply for watching and occasionally interacting with ads in an embedded player – they also have far lower abandonment rates. This is a great way to “hook” users by allowing them to demo the game and is far more effective than “seeding.” This tactic increases user’s stickiness on two fronts — it keeps them logged into the game environment longer as they interact with advertising in the natural flow of gameplay and it keeps users logging into the game as they don’t want to “waste” the currency they’ve earned. Offer-based payments are a great way to convert users into direct payment customers because it exposes them to premium content without them having to open their wallets. Once the user has sampled virtual currency and/or items, they become more likely to also invest actual money and a large percentage convert to paying users. To further the effectiveness of offer-based payments users can be rewarded with virtual items for returning to the game through special promotional offers. This is a great way to ensure users are coming back after the initial re-engagement. For instance, if a user logs into a game a certain number of times or at a specific time, they would then be reward with additional currency or a special item. Additionally, these monetization and retention tactics not only are extremely effective with desktop games, but have also seen success on the mobile platform. In the saturated mobile app market, developers have not only been able to retain users, but increase the ARPU of users when user acquisition is at an all-time high. Specific examples of how to use advertising in games as an effective means of monetization and retention will also be presented, including strategies incorporated by publishers such as Digital Chocolate (social games), Bigpoint (online games) and Smeet (virtual world) |
 | Anna Rubey Key account manager of TOoBEeDOo Since August 2011 Anna Rubey is a leading account manager in TOoBEeDOo agency. TOoBEeDOo is playing the role of Gagarin in online social media advertising - the first agency specializing on advertising in social media applications. From February 2009 till August 2011 Anna worked on developing websites for different companies, government departments and private web pages. Speech: Social applications branding - the main advertising product of 2012 Short description: The strategy of the brand promotion in Internet: role of social network services and social applications, what is the application branding and how it leads to the benefits for the brand examples of integrations and branding in social applications, work with different social platforms, future of the social networking tools. |
 | Yuriy Dobronravin CEO & Founder, Logicking Has been developing games since 2001. Participated in the development of two dozen games: from simple casual to shooters of AAA class. Founded Logicking, which has been providing middleware solutions for game developers since 2009. Currently, the major team efforts are aimed to creating of own cross-platform HTML5 technology and gamedev on it. In 2011, 5 HTML5 projects were released. First social HTML5 game Kitty World to be released in spring 2012. Speech: Features of the cross-platform game development on HTML5 Short description: Based on more than a year of experience of HTML5 games development for various platforms I'll try to answer to the following questions: why to make HTML5 games, what you should know and be prepared for before starting to develop on HTML5, what is the fundamental difference between developing for mobile and normal browsers, which party libraries should I use, what will happen to HTML5 games in 2012, what are the main advantages of Logicking HTML5 Game Tech |
 | Alex Fadin Head of social games department - Mail.Ru Participated in development and realization of different internet-projects in various B2B and B2C spheres for such companies as Samsung, LG, BBK, Huyndai, Sony. Worked out special projects together with "Strim" (MTS), Korbina (Beeline), Central telegraph, Eksmo, Unipharm, 3d Rome etc. Before coming to Mail.ru was in the team that created Creara company, company - one of the leader of Russian social games companies. |
 | Alexandr Kirichenko General director - Alliance 5 In the advertising business - since 1993, seo-promotion and internet advertising - since 2001, since August 2010 - application development for Vkontakte, investor and the producer, General director of "the 5th Alliance" - since March 2011. Speech: That's easy: no penny into marketing, User-generated content, 1.8 million DAU and one server. Short description: An analysis of statistics, based on application-specific advertising on the sites belonging to the "5th Alliance". Overview of different schemes of traffic filling of the new applications, how to use viral channels properly, comparison of the statistics of the leading banner-exchange systems, Vkontakte and your own server data. Specific recommendations for applications promotion. |
 | Андрей Попович Lead gamedesigner - Immo Games For 6 years in gamedev his way was from beta-tester to game designer lead. During this time, Andrei has worked in many large companies such as Akella, DAT-Media, Time Zero, GD-Team and he has accumulated extensive experience in commercial game design. Currently Andrei leads several projects of social and browser games in IMMO Games publishing. Speech: Balance in social games for "Dummies" Short description: The report describes the basic principles of balance in social games. In your eyes the system of character development, and also the basics of game economics and monetization will be overviewed. |
 | Irina Gorelova CEO Adsplay Irina Gorelova – CEO Adsplay agency, key partner of Plaruim games. Adsplay deal advertising in social games and has good qualification in these sphere.Irine in marketing since 2006. Created campaigns for larger retailers and recourse companies (Paterson,Gazpromneft). Speech: Advertising in games as a new trend in social media marketing |
 | Vitali Vostrikov General director Digital Chocolate CIS General director of Digital Chocolate CIS and head of the St. Petersburg development studio since August 2011. Prior to that, six years supervised Sandlot Games SPb studio and four years dedicated to work in the field of supercomputers and virtual reality systems, in particular, led the introduction of the first Russian Center of Virtual Reality for analysis and modeling of the physical machine structures in cooperation with the Stuttgart Center of Supercomputing. He graduated from St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Speech: The dangerous life in the universe or how to build our lives in the big city. Short description: Digital Chocolate is working in a wide range of gaming market, and always leaves room for experimentation and search for new directions. Most recently the company released two interesting social projects, having a different approach to energy issues and interact with other users, unlike most of top Facebook games. The purpose of this presentation is to familiarize the participants with the projects, as well as some preliminary results of this experiment. |
 | Sutton Trout VP Business Development - Viximo Sutton has more than 17 years of gaming industry experience, working with businesses ranging from publishers to media companies and services. Prior to joining Viximo, he served as VP of digital content and technology sales at IGN Entertainment, where he ran content acquisition for IGN’s digital distribution channel, Direct2Drive.com and FilePlanet.com. He also oversaw GameSpy Technologies’ sales group, licensing proprietary technology to top game developers and publishers and enabling their games’ online accessibility. Sutton’s long years on the publisher side include positions held at Sega of America, Sony Computer Entertainment, Eidos Interactive and Konami. He worked on the launch of the first PlayStation and helped transition the Tomb Raider video game franchise from the small screen to the silver screen. |
 | Andrei Dementjev Head of Operations - Fortumo Andrei Dementjev serves as head of operations at Fortumo - the world's most open mobile payment platform. He is managing company development and supporting game developers in building an efficient monetization and distribution strategy. Andrei strongly believes that freemium is the most effective method of web and mobile monetization and allows infinitive distribution options. Speech: How app monetization is different from what we have learned from the web? Short description: Many casual and social game developers have moved to mobile, but since the economics of mobile and web are very different not all of these transitions have been successful. While helping companies like Rovio, Digital Chocolate, Badoo and many others find their monetization strategy on mobile, we have distinguished key factors that developers should change in their monetization strategies while moving to mobile. Andrei Demenjev is sharing these key points so you can learn from and avoid the mistakes made by early adopters of the mobile platform. |
 | Ivan Voznyak Senior producer, Nival Graduated from the State University Higher School of Economics, Faculty of Business Informatics.To gaming industry came in 2004, as PR manager for the Novy Disk. For several years he has been organizing competitions on computer games.Since 2009 works at Nival. He started as marketing manager, but quickly turned into producer. Participated in the development of King's Bounty: Legions, and now engaged to handling this game. |
