AdMob and mobile advertising.

I have been using admob ads for the last half year in our Tasls App for Android, and I have come to several conclusuion.

Too few advertizers.
In the last month or so I have seen at most 10 different ads. 10 is too few for one month. Whenever there is a new ad I see the click rate growing, but after several days its back again. So the result is that people click on the add, but as there are only 10, they get tired of them quickly. I am not blocking or filtering any type of ad and this low number of ad variety is common across all admob users, you can find many blogs discussing it. This leads me to my next point.

Only the middle man wins
When ads are being shown on my page advertisers loose money, and publishers like me don't gain much from this. The only one that really gains is the middle man, AdMob(Google). They say, mobile advertizing is growing. It is true, but only for the middle man.

Is there a solution?
Google should work harder to bring more advertizers. Bring them will be a win-win situation for all the parties involved.

Should I switch from AdMob?
Well, no. Unfortunately, admob is the best there is now. Its biggest competitor, Moblix has several critical problems. I won't discusse them you can find more info in other blogs, I will just mention them: problems with paying out, frequent correction of previous earned amounts.

Well, that is for me now. I just wrote that because I think we should put more presser on Google so that they do better job and bring more advertizers to AdMob.

Marketing and Sir Richard Branson

It's my second post in the marketing series :-)

Richard Branson is inspiring figure for me, and he is one of the best people in marketing in the world, or at least for the last 30 or so years. In his autobiography, there is a chapter where he speaks about starting Virgin Atlantic. At the time his resources were very limited and he knew very little about the air trafic business, just like me, and many other entrepreneurs today. That is why before he started he went to see Sir Freddie Laker, a pionneer in this industry, who unfortunatly lost his business against the bullying tactics of British Airways.

Sir Freddie Laker, gave a lot of advices to Richard Branson, but what I find really a key advice is that he said to Richard Branson to use himself to promote the airline and even to make fool of himself. An advice that I think Richard is using to this day and has used in almost all his ventures (he even dressed as a bride in his business venture "Virgin Brides" :-) ).

This is a fun and really a good advice, which can be used even better in today's blogging world. Me and fellow developers and entrepreneurs can use it to promote themselves and their businesses. That is one of the main reasons of why I am writing in this blog and why I am using twitter. I want to promote my self by sharing with my friends, collegues and the world, and by promoting my self I believe this can help my business and also the people using the software, services and products provided will benefit.

Marketing of mobile apps

Marketing of mobiles apps is not easy and apparently we are not doing it right.

This blog and our recent social initiative is part of correcting this. We believe in that people should have an easy access to great software and they should know about it. That is why our twitter account will be much more active and why we have created a Facebook Page of Terlici Ltd., our company.

What do I mean by all this?

On the Android Market there are a lot of great apps and apps that are not so great. Unfortunately some of those really good apps are not getting enough attention. Moreover, people are using the not so great ones and praising their qualities, which turn out to be only of mediocre quality when compared to the really good apps. I really do believe that our app “Tasks” fits into the category of really good apps with not enough attention.

In this blog I am starting to discuss a solution around this problem. There will be several goals of my posts:

• Find marketing strategies for increasing people knowledge about quality apps.
• Helping to us, and to other developer to realize the full potential of our applications and capabilities.
• And other goals that I do not know about them, yet

Everyone who is interested is welcome to join the conversation on this topic: either trough comments of this and my future posts, or trough our facebook page, or our twitter account:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Terlici/182765421763695

http://twitter.com/terlici

As this will be a modern game, we need character development in the game. One other interesting thing from foursquare is the time patterns.

Hm... a lot of copying ideas until now :) I will combine it with twitter and make it original ;)

Some more ideas.

Geolocation can be fun, but I think it should not be obligatory, but if people use it will bring something more to the game, but if they don't they will also be able to play.

It should be the same with friends/followers. If you follow more people, or more people follow you this will make a better game for you, but again you will be able to play even without any followers or without following any one.

An additional feature of the game can be that even people that do not write tweets specifically for the game, participate, or their tweets participate.

I had an idea about a project :)

A game!

Well not very original.

A twitter game!

Now it's better, but what game?

Well I do not know yet :) but it should include several things: twitter api, social graphs, reward players for playing(for using tweets). I like also foursquare idea. I can use their api, but I will use twitter, just because I am a big fan of Biz Stone, after I saw him at the Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge event, during my Mphil Management year in Judge Business School.

However, foursquare ideas of rewarding badges, ranking, becoming a mayer and stimulating the users to add the data(the places) themselves are really good.

Maybe I will also use some location :) But for this the app should be mobile? or use geolocation capabilities of mobile browser?

hm.. I wanted to be browser based at the beginning... i need a little more time.

More on nodejs

I really want to test nodejs and its full capabilities and moreover the capabilities of javascript as language for full web app, both client and server side. If I use a database I think between three choices: my own javascript db, redis and mongodb. All of those three can yield better technolagy then any other existing in the moment and combined with nodejs, it can be really powerful.

One question arises:

What should I make, what project?

This time I will write about node.js (http://www.nodejs.org) a fascinating new framework for working all sorts of network programs in an event. In addition it is blazingly fast, use V8 from Google, and uses javascript for development. All this combined with its simplicity makes it one of the most powerful technologies around. That is way by looking at it I though about a thing: Can we build some sort of very fast, scalable and robuts database around it? Moreover I would like to be able to use the database in two different manners. Either as a separate process by just invoking node db.js on the shell and then contecting to it in a server manner, or as a module.

In both cases I think it will be best to place the database in the memmory as much as possible and only read and write files rarely. Thus we will be able to speed up. The questions is what do we do with writes to the database? If we cache the writes and do not write them immediately data can be lost due to power outage or memmory corruption. Second good questions is about data performance in terms of memmory when the data grows? Imagine facebook using this database? Should it be optimal in all casess or should it be configurable so that it can adapt to the context, or maybe both by adapting automatically. Performance issues in terms of speed are generaly due to file I/O, thus by minimizing them or doing them in parallel they can be speed up-ed. I will think more about it. It is a funny idea. In addition I will make it open source, my first true open source project.

From my inquiries during the last 3 days at I found out that right now there is no real 3D game engine or even render for Android. There are a few interesting 2D engines, but no 3D. Perhaps there is some proprietary known only to the gurus in this field.

One other thing is that I could not find good OpenGL ES tutorials. There are some, but I find them very limited.

There is only one conclusion: I should make such tutorials and I should create at least rendering engine, better a fully functional game engine for Android.

Problems: First, I am a real beginner concerning 3D programming. Second, I can not draw and I do understand very little of design. Third, I like simple things and I am a big fan of the KISS(keep it simple stupid) principle.

So how will I proceed?

Let's talk about the tutorials. They will be organized in three categories.

• How Things Work


• Optimize


• Beautify

The fist category of tutorials will teach how different aspects of OpenGL ES work and how different tasks can be accomplished. The second one will bring optimizations and how we can make programs faster. The last one will be on how to make our 3D worlds more real, more beautiful and less edgy.

That's for tutorials, now the engine.

The engine will be easy to use and easy to integrate, where ever you need to integrate the whole engine or only some part of it. I will start with the rendering engine, because I feel is the integral part of the game engine and because I need such an engine now.

Rendering Engine. It will be build upon OpenGL ES 2.0 in C. Why 2.0 and C instead of 1.0(or 1.1) and Java. Simple: OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported only devices that run at least Android 2.1 and those are more powerful devices, which I consider much better for real 3D rendering. I will use C instead of Java for two reasons: first it is more portable across platforms, and second the Java OpenGL ES, is just GLES20 class in which you call the same functions as in C, with same names in the same manner and thus I do not see any real advantage in using Java, just some overhead that can slow down the whole 3D experience.

Besides that, I am not sure what a rendering engine should do :-) Let's see what I want mine to support and then we will see what the Internet thinks it should support.

1) Easier to use than OpenGL ES 2.0.

2) Easy to integrate.

3) Simple API.

4) Easy to import 3D models from at least one popular format.

5) East drawing of all 3D models.

6) Easy support of 2D and just as easy for 3D.

Hm, not very specific. It will become more specific with time.

One last thing. There is no schedule on when each of this engine and tutorial things will be done or I will be working. It is just something that is missing at the moment and I believe I should fill the gap.

Let's get to work.

Stefan Fidanov

My main goal is at the end, after I finish this OpenGL stuff, to be able to draw a figure. More precisely a pawn, a static pawn with the size and color I want. It will have only one main color at first, so as to be easier to implement. I am not a designer so it will be difficult to create something more compelling on my own. An idea, at first the pawns should be cubes. Once done, I should make a function that can import models from some popular formats, and find a gallery with this format.

I've been reading recently OpenGL ES Programming Guide from Addison and Wesley, which has almost everything you need to know. At the same time, some simple topics are discussed in too much length or repeated too much, and thus they seem much more complex than they really are. All in all, a very good book.

OpenGL ES, shaders seems to be very, very powerful. The only thing that I am a little bit worried that there are tons and tons of functions and variables. In the same time things are getting more and more clear, the main thing I am not sure now is about the coordinates. What are those coordinates that I give to the vertices array? How are they connected with the screen size?

I have decided. I will read about OpenGL ES and the try to modify a little bit the Qualcomm code. Then a little bit more and I will do this until I end up with a code that can load and draw static 3D models at specific position. Once done I would have the first milestone reached. Wish me luck :-)

(this blogging thing is better then twitter when it comes to expressing your self, twitter is great for news and short sharing)

Restarting my blogging :-) My first post here. I will write in English for wider audience. I will use the blog to express my self and free my thoughts. Hopes it helps me to be more creative.