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Rhinofly zoekt een enthousiaste Senior User Interface Designer die in staat is om scherpe concepten te vertalen naar slimme interfaces.

Heb je een sterk ontwikkeld gevoel voor User Experience, begrijp je als geen ander het online gedrag van gebruikers en wil je deel uit maken van een enthousiast team van strijders in het online landschap? Dan hebben we de perfecte functie voor jou! Lees meer over: Vacature: Senior User Interface Designer bij Rhinofly.

Netflix is making it even easier for kids to bypass channel surfing and search for their favorite shows and characters, with an updated app for the Xbox 360. The latest version of Netflix’s Xbox 360 app, which went live this morning, brings its increasingly popular ‘Just For Kids’ user interface to the gaming console.

Netflix’s Just For Kids UI debuted nearly a year ago, offering its younger users an easier way to find and watch their favorite shows. Unlike Netflix’s usual user interface, which highlights movie box art and descriptions, Just For Kids is character-centric, so that toddlers can navigate what they want to watch based on which popular characters most appeal to them, whether it be Dora The Explorer or Spongebob Squarepants. Since introducing the UI on the web, Netflix has been busy porting it to other devices, such as the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Apple TV… and now the Xbox.

For the Xbox 360, the updated app is a clear win, as it will mean even more media consumption on the game console. Microsoft seems to be pushing the Xbox more as a media hub than a game console these days, so grabbing the attention of a home’s youngest users is one way to solidify its place in the living room.

That said, the emergence of the interface and increased Netflix viewing from younger viewers might be having an effect on traditional children’s programming channels. Viacom has seen a fall in ratings at its Nickelodeon channels, for instance, which seems to coincide with the broader release of Just For Kids.

Adv - Rhinofly zoekt een enthousiaste Senior User Interface Designer die in staat is om scherpe concepten te vertalen naar slimme interfaces. Heb jij een sterk ontwikkeld gevoel voor User Experience, begrijp je als geen ander het online gedrag van gebruikers en wil je deel uit maken van een enthousiast team van strijders in het online landschap? Dan hebben we de perfecte functie voor jou! Solliciteer nu!

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Rhinofly zoekt een enthousiaste Senior User Interface Designer die in staat is om scherpe concepten te vertalen naar slimme interfaces.

Heb je een sterk ontwikkeld gevoel voor User Experience, begrijp je als geen ander het online gedrag van gebruikers en wil je deel uit maken van een enthousiast team van strijders in het online landschap? Dan hebben we de perfecte functie voor jou! Lees meer over: Vacature: Senior User Interface Designer bij Rhinofly.

PayPal is the granddaddy of the online payments space. It was the remora of eBay until the auction giant bought it in 2002. Last year, PayPal processed $119 billion in transactions and accounted for 38% of eBay’s revenue. In the past year, eBay’s stock (+52%) has well outperformed Google (+11%), Amazon (+16%), Facebook (-45%) and Groupon (-75%) as of Friday’s close. (Disclosure: I have options against Facebook and Groupon. Facebook’s and Groupon’s numbers are based on their respective IPOs.)

We’re now in the midst of a new transformation of the payments space. Giants like Google, PayPal, American Express, Visa, VeriFone and Groupon are fighting for wallet share. (Although Apple hasn’t officially announced anything, it’s only a matter of time.) Dozens of startups such as Square, Gopago, LevelUp, Swipely, and Cardspring are trying to either carve out their niche or get acquired by one of the big guys.

PayPal has been on an acquisition spree. In the past 18 months, it has acquired Where, Fig Card, Zong, and, most recently, Card.io.

PayPal has significant consumer awareness and adoption, with 113 million accounts.

The company has announced big initiatives to bring PayPal payments into the physical world. PayPal is now accepted at big box merchant Home Depot. At the other end of the spectrum, PayPal created an initiative called PayPal Here that competes head on with Square for the small and micro merchants.

PayPal has its challenges. It has a reputation of being difficult for merchants, providing a terrible consumer experience and being an unpleasant place to work.

I sat down with David Marcus, PayPal’s new president, at PayPal’s offices in San Jose to talk about the future of payments and PayPal. Marcus replaced Scott Thompson in March. After our conversation, PayPal PR took me through a tour of the PayPal Shopping Showcase, an impressive laboratory that PayPal uses to sell retailers on its vision of the future of mobile payments and to conduct consumer research.

Marcus wants PayPal to be a brand that consumers interact with every day. That’s a tall order; there are very few brands that do that.

“The beauty of payments is that you pay for stuff everyday,” Marcus said.

I left feeling that PayPal is thinking about the right problems in the right ways.

Some in Silicon Valley look at PayPal’s legacy and its corporate parent and dismiss it. That’s a mistake. If I had to pick a winner today between Google and PayPal, it would be PayPal, hands down. But I’m equally confident that the folks in Cupertino will have something to say about this soon.

PayPal Here

Here is PayPal’s answer to Square. And after months of waiting, it’s finally here. I received my triangular dongle in the mail recently.

Marcus admits that PayPal was late to the party. Until now, PayPal hasn’t marketed Here, because it didn’t want to have a long line of people waiting for dongles before they could get them out. Marcus said that the dongles are now being shipped within a couple of days of a merchant signing up. PayPal plans to use eBay’s large merchant base as a marketing channel to reach small merchants for Here. Although he didn’t have a percentage, Marcus said that a large number of eBay merchants also have physical storefronts.

Although the software isn’t yet as elegant as Square, Here provides merchants a more complete solution than Square when it comes to payments. In addition to accepting credit cards, merchants can deposit checks into their PayPal account. Unlike Square, funds are available to spend immediately through a linked debit card. For merchants who handle both online and offline transactions, Here is a clear winner. It is also marginally less expensive than Square; but merchants who are worried about that tiny difference should be using a regular merchant account.

PayPal at retail

PayPal is making a big push into retail, allowing users to pay with PayPal at Home Depot, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Jos. A Banks. I’ve been highly critical of the experience. Instead of swiping a credit card, consumers can enter their phone number and a PIN to pay.

Although it has value to PayPal and to merchants (in the form of lower transaction costs), I’ve been hard pressed to find a meaningful consumer value proposition today. So was Marcus. He sees the real value of PayPal at retail in the future. (He hinted at features that were in the works but didn’t share any.)

The goal, Marcus said, was to make PayPal another option, not to displace existing payment mechanisms. “We have no ambition to process all the credit card transactions for Home Depot,” Marcus said.

Mobile payments

When it announced its quarterly numbers, eBay also announced that PayPal is expected to process $10 billion in mobile transactions this year. Although it’s always tempting to compare numbers, this number is very different from the $6 billion in transaction volume that Square is expecting for 2012.

The $10 billion comes from eBay users who complete purchases with PayPal on their mobile devices, as well as merchants who use PayPal in their mobile products. (Tablets are included in the $10 billion number.) PayPal Here and PayPal at retail aren’t included in that number, but I doubt they would be meaningful.

Depending on the final tally for this year, I expect that to be between 5% and 8% of PayPal’s total transaction value this year.

I asked Marcus where he thought that mobile payment figure would be in five years. After getting the customary warning from a PayPal PR representative who was sitting with us, advising Marcus not to project numbers, Marcus said that in five years the lines will be so blurred that it wouldn’t matter. If someone researches a transaction online, reserves it, and then pays for it with a mobile phone, is that an online or mobile transaction?

“You won’t be able to tell the difference in that time,” Marcus said. “Everything will be converged.”

Those lines are blurring already. Yesterday, I placed an order using the new eBay Now app on my iPad. A courier picked it up from the Best Buy store in San Francisco and brought it to me. When he arrived, I used PayPal Here on his iPhone to pay. Is that an offline or online transaction? It it mobile or not?

User experience

One of the biggest issues I have with PayPal is that, at every step of the way, the user interface is designed not to accomplish what I want to do, but what PayPal wants me to do. I never, ever want to pay with my checking account. I want to use my credit because of the consumer protection benefits and the Starwood points I get with my American Express. PayPal would rather have me pay with my checking account because it makes more money that way. It’s a sore point every time I pay with PayPal.

“That will change,” Marcus said.

He wants PayPal to be a consumer-centric company at the same time that it serves merchants. He didn’t specify a timeframe, but he said that mobile will help drive that change.

The small screen size forces designers to focus on the user’s most essential tasks. “It’s a forcing function for simplification,” Marcus said. “As a result of that, the Web experience will be a lot simpler.”

User experience also extends far beyond just a Web site or mobile app. It extends to every interaction with the consumer. “Historically, PayPal hasn’t been good at product marketing,” Marcus said. “This is a muscle we’re building.”

For a product like PayPal Here, this includes something as mundane as the packaging that the dongle arrives in. PayPal did a great job. To be fair, the packaging design is a blatant ripoff of Square’s package design. The one improvement I saw in an earlier PayPal Here package prototype — corrugated paper instead of foam — was replaced with plastic in the version being sent to merchants. But both companies ship the dongle complete with an attractive window cling that shows that your business takes credit cards and concise instructions on how to get started.

Data and interchange

Transaction data is going to be a big battleground. That’s one of the motivations for Google’s push into payments. Transaction data is one of the most powerful tools that can be used for offer targeting and personalization. I suggested to Marcus that some retailers may not want want to share line-item transaction information with a company like PayPal. He responded that PayPal already had more data than it uses.

The contention for data will also exist with card networks. Card networks have liked PayPal because many of its transactions have been additive. The eBay buyer who otherwise would have been using a money order means more volume, which translates into more data and more interchange fees for the card networks. But if a PayPal transaction replaces a Visa transaction at Home Depot, that means less data and less interchange.

PayPal Shopping Showcase

Inside its headquarters, PayPal has built a fake mall to showcase the future of payments. There’s a clothing retailer, a fruit stand, hardware store, grocery store and coffee shop. Josh Schoonmaker, the showcase’s manager, showed me around.

PayPal uses it to show retail executives how they can incorporate PayPal into their retail experiences. Schoonmaker showed off a number of concepts:

• A window display with QR codes. A shopper walking by when the store is closed can scan the QR code and order the item for pickup. When the order is placed, the clerk has access to the shopper’s history and can be prepared with upsells to matching items when the customer comes in.
• In the hardware store, we saw a barbecue grill that had been ordered online. It was paid for using the PayPal wallet, which contained a store gift card. An offer was automatically generated for a grill tool set.
• At the grocery store, we paid using a phone number. (This is the experience currently offered at Home Depot.) A receipt arrived by email.
• In the coffee shop, we could order ahead and walk to the front of the line to pick up our prepaid espresso.

Although some of these are just conceptual, they show that PayPal is thinking deeply about the best ways to integrate offline and online shopping experiences.

Just as important, PayPal is thinking about the right way to sell these concepts to merchants. Retailers are not technology visionaries. Having a tangible experience is key to selling them on the future of selling.

Shopping psychology

Shopping is not a perfectly rational activity. (How else can you explain Chia Pet?)

That’s something a lot of startups who are chasing the space fail to understand. A lot of psychology goes into a shopping experience, and just as much needs to go into trying to change it.

Schoonmaker explained that when you offer features like “skipping the line,” which allows users to order and prepay for coffee, there also needs to be corresponding signage. People are uncomfortable just walking to the front of the line and appearing to cut in front of everyone. Like elite lines at airports, there needs to be signs that implicitly give some people permission to cut the line. (And serve as a marketing vehicle to encourage other people to sign up for the service.)

You don’t get that by whiteboarding product features. The best way to get that is by watching consumers in action. (Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” is a good read on the subject.)

PayPal also uses its showcase to introduce consumers to new concepts in payments and get their feedback.

Being part of eBay

Having a large business within a large business is always a challenge.

Of course, eBay was instrumental to PayPal’s early success. eBay users needed a way to pay. Before PayPal, paying online to small merchants was painful. I was an eBay seller back then. After an auction closed, I had to hound the buyer for payment. I provided my street address, the buyer went and purchased a money order, mailed it to me, I had to verify that it looked legitimate, then I shipped out the product. A best case scenario was a three-day turnaround, with many transactions taking a week or more. PayPal cut that time to minutes.

Even today, eBay accounts for about 67% of PayPal’s transaction volume, according to eBay’s quarterly report.

“We are blessed with an unbelievable business,” Marcus said. But the downside is that it provides the ability and incentive to not innovate, he said. It’s easier to just not rock the boat. But, “there is huge upside if we ship the right products.”

Recruiting and culture

eBay and PayPal have long had a reputation as terrible places to work, especially for engineers. As it happened, I was having lunch with a top engineer before my trip to PayPal. When I mentioned that I was headed to interview PayPal’s head, he expressed his disdain for the company’s culture. A friend who is a high-profile recruiter in Silicon Valley promised to smack me if I ever went to work for PayPal.

As with anything in Silicon Valley, being able to compete for top talent is going to be a big determinant of whether PayPal succeeds. I asked Marcus how he would compete with the likes of Square, which is often perceived to be the next hot startup.

Marcus said they’ve shifted from the old model where engineers and product managers sat far apart. Product managers would write 100-page PRDs and ship them over the wall to engineers who would build them without regard to whether the features made sense. A year later, you’d have a product that most likely didn’t meet the needs of a rapidly changing market. Now, they sit together and iterate more frequently.

As we chatted, Max Metral, who is leading up PayPal Here was walking by. He joined PayPal as part of the Fig Card acquisition last year.

“I’ve never had more fun,” Metral said. “And I’m at PayPal.”

PayPal also has more than 100 million people signed up. The payments business involves a lot of drudge work, including partnerships and regulatory regimes. (For example, to do what PayPal does legally, you must be a licensed money transmitter, which is a state-by-state process.) Much of that work has already been done, and you can just focus on building great consumer experiences, Marcus said.

Marcus said he has a lot of top engineers knocking on his door because of the new culture and PayPal’s significant resources.

Such statements are always hard to assess. Every big company claims it is like a startup and wants to empower employees and cut bureaucracy. Very few actually do. But Marcus’ pitch was convincing enough that I’d actually entertain a conversation, whereas a few years ago I’d never return a call from eBay.

[Top image credit: PayPal]

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

With the rise in popularity of visual content, marketers are realizing that Pinterest is a great way to show off their brands’ personalities, engage their social media fans and followers, and even generate some leads along the way. But many marketers — particularly those who represent B2B companies, are still left wondering, what in the heck should I be pinning?

Well let me tell you, fellow marketers: You sure do have some options!

I scoured Pinterest looking for examples of truly engaging pinboards and realized there are quite a few companies out there doing some really creative things with their Pinterest accounts. So if you’re ready to get your feet wet with visual content, here are 28 creative pinboard ideas to power your Pinterest marketing. And what’s even better? Most — if not all — of these pinboard ideas can be transferable to your own Pinterest account, whether you’re company is B2B, B2C, or nonprofit. Time to get pinning!

1) Idea/Inspiration/Example Board

Inspire your fans and followers! Think about your target customers’ interests and hobbies, and create a board to give them examples and ideas to inspire them. For example, Grand Image, a source of fine art for the corporate, hospitality, and healthcare design markets, uses its “Color Inspirations” board to inspire its followers with colorful examples, and Drake University uses its “Study Inspiration” board to motivate its student audience.

 

 

 

 

2) Philanthropy Board

Show off your business’ philanthropic side with a philanthropy board! Pinning images of your employees giving back to the community will show followers that your company cares about the greater good, just as FedEx has done through its “FedEx Community Involvement” board pictured below.

 

 

3) Marketing Campaign Board

Use one of your boards to feature one of your latest marketing campaigns. DoubleTree hotels, for instance, uses one of its own to highlight images depicting its “Little Things Project Tour” campaign, which travels the country to bring the guests of its hotels little things that make a big difference when traveling. DoubleTree also uses its board to link to its Facebook page about the campaign to encourage engagement there, as well.

 

 

4) Video Board

Pinterest isn’t only for pinning pretty images. Users can pin videos, too! So if videos are a part of your marketing mix, create a board just for them as Gemvara and Econsultancy have done below.

 

 

 

 

5) Customer Success Board

Highlight your customers’ successes in one of your boards as Salesforce does in its Customer Success Stories” board, populated mainly by video pins.

 

 

6) Products/Services Board

We don’t recommend you litter your Pinterest presence with product-specific pins, but we think one or two boards dedicated to your products and/or services is just fine. AMD, for example, has a board dedicated to its technology, and we have one at HubSpot, too, featuring a peek at our marketing software.

 

 

 

7) Behind the Scenes Board

What happens behind the scenes that makes your company run like clockwork? Give your Pinterest followers the inside scoop with a board that highlights just what happens behind the scenes at your business. Peapod does this well with its “Where in the world is that Peapod Truck” pinboard, and General Electric makes machinery fascinating in its “From the Factory Floor” board.

 

 

 

 

8) Contest Board

Use your Pinterest presence to hold a contest and motivate your followers to action, like GE does with its “Freshpedition Sweepstakes” board. You can also highlight submissions to past contests, as the manufacturing company does in its “#GEInspiredMe” board.

 

 

 

 

9) Employee Board

Give Pinterest users the opportunity to get to know the awesome people behind your brand. Petplan Pet Insurance does this creatively in its “Meet the Team” board, in which it features most of its team members with a furry friend. Furthermore, Salesforce uses its board to highlight why its employees love working at Salesforce, and Peapod profiles its employees in its “Peapod Pros” board.

 

 

 

 

 

 

10) Mission Board

Give your Pinterest followers a sense of your company’s mission and values, like the U.S. Army does in its “Army Values” board and Heart Shaped World does in its “Supporters & Causes” board.

 

 

 

 

11) User-Generated Board

Because you can allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards on a user by user basis, this opens up a great opportunity to involve fans and customers in your marketing. Let Pinterest users get in on the action with a user-generated pinboard. You can either gather images and compile them into a board yourself, as the Weather Channel has done through its “iWitness Photos” board, or give specific users permission to pin content to your boards themselves, as Drake University and ModCloth have done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

12) Blog Board

Highlight your awesome blog content via a blog board. Just be sure each post you pin has a compelling visual within. Grand Image and HGTV both offer stellar examples of blog boards.

 

 

 

 

13) Content/Resources Board

Piggybacking on the blog board idea, create a board to showcase some other awesome content and resources, whether its content you’ve created or content you’ve aggregated from other sources. Petplan does this well with its “Healthy Reads” board, and HubSpot even has its own “Helpful Marketing Ebooks” board.

 

 

 

 

14) Testimonials Board

Are people saying nice things about you? Share it with Pinterest! Or take a spin on this idea, like the U.S. Army does through its “‘Thank a Soldier’ Notes” board, seen below.

 

 

15) Visual Industry Data/Statistics Board

Does your audience love data? Highlight interesting data and statistics for your industry in a visual way — through charts and graphs! Econsultancy has a cool “Stats and Charts” board, for instance.

 

 

16) Industry Infographics/Diagrams/Flowcharts Board

Similarly, if your audience is crazy for industry-related infographics, diagrams, or flowcharts, create a board just for them, whether you’ve created them yourself or collect them from the web. Mashable has a board just like this, as does Intel!

 

 

 

 

17) Meme Board

Creating memes to help power your social media presence in general (here’s how!)? Feature them on their own board, as we’ve done in HubSpot’s “Meme-tastic Marketing!” board.

 

 

18) Complementary Products Board

Okay, so maybe you have a board for your own products. But you’re super helpful, too … right? Create a board for complementary — not competing — products that your audience would find useful, like AMD does in its “Laptop Bags & Cases” board.

 

 

19) Inspirational Industry Quotes

Motivate your audience with inspirational quotes from industry thought leaders and experts. The Wall Street Journal adopts this idea in its “Quotes” board, for example.

 

 

20) Events/Conferences Board

Feature awesome conferences and events in your industry, or create a board to promote an event you’re hosting yourself, as we’ve done at HubSpot with our “Inbound Conference” board. You coming?

 

 

21) Brand Lifestyle Board

Create boards that appeal to the lifestyle your brand promotes. Chronicle Books does this well with its “Library Love” board, for instance.

 

 

22) Industry Tips Board

Offer some tips! You can either pin original tips you’ve visually optimized, or pin content like tip-focused blog posts you’ve written or aggregated from others. Take a look at how Petplan and CNET do it.

 

 

 

 

23) History Board

Appeal to the history buffs in your audience. Compile a board to highlight your history, whether its the history of your business — like in Intel’s “Our Heritage” board — or the history of your industry, as MarketingProfs features in its “History: Vintage Marketing” board.

 

 

 

 

24) Customer Interest Board

Create boards that play to the interests of your prospects and customers. Jewelry maker Gemvara knows that a lot of its customers come looking for engagement and wedding rings, so its “‘Fit The Dress’ Recipes” board is a great choice. Similarly, HubSpot customer AmeriFirst Mortgage has its “Lavish Landscapes” board for its future and current home-owning clients.

 

 

 

 

25) Industry Cartoons Board

Use a board to feature funny industry cartoons, as MarketingProfs does in its “SnarketingProfs” board. HubSpot has a board like this, too!

 

 

 

 

26) A Day at the Office Board

What’s office life like at your company? Give your followers an idea with a board that features the goings on at your office, like Petplan does in its “Just a Day at the Office…” board.

 

 

27) Newsjacking Boards

That’s right. You can use Pinterest as a platform for newsjacking, too! The U.S. Army does this nicely with its “U.S. Army Olympians” board, where it highlights U.S. army soldiers who have competed or coached in the Olympics — just in time for the 2012 London Olympics! Peapod did this, too, for the Super Bowl, using its “Super Bowl Party” board to feature snack food and recipe ideas for the big game.

 

 

 

 

28) Boards Organized By Location

Is your company a franchise? Maybe you just have multiple office locations around the country — or the world! Create a series of boards focused on each of your locations, as Ronald McDonald House Charities has done with its Pinterest account.

 

 

What other boards are you using to power your Pinterest marketing?

Image Credit: net_efekt

Message/image board forum 4Chan has reached a record 1 billion posts, the site’s official Twitter account stated Friday.

4Chan is often known as the birth place of memes, ridiculous inside jokes that people share on the Internet that most people probably attribute to Reddit these days. The site is credited for creating such historic memes like Rick Rolling and LoLcats. It started as a place for people to share manga and anime in 2003, but slowly evolved into an anything goes forum, with various channels that have their own rules of conduct. User’s posts are mostly anonymous and the various community channels stay pretty active.

So, what was the billionth post? 4Chan said it isn’t sure, but suggested that people use their imagination.

The site is currently pulling in 22 million unique visitors per month, and 620 million monthly page views, according to information 4Chan posted in early July. I think its safe to say that neither meme culture, nor 4Chan is going away anytime soon.

Filed under: offBeat, VentureBeat

Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s platform, where it’s been and where it’s going as a result. Although the company’s stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore — by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month.

Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.

Purdy had earlier made it clear that the company has launched over 7,000 timeline apps, which has grown since 3,000 in March — clearly developers are keen to get it on the social bump, the alley-oop coming from the Social Deathstar. Facebook has become an important channel to drive users to new apps they discover in their news feed. In the past 30 days, for example, Facebook has driven people to the App Store and Google Play nearly 150 million times.

The Head of Facebook Product Management said that Facebook recognizes they can’t build all the social experiments, but they’re “all about extending that virality” to different verticals.” There are many businesses we’re not getting into, and we want third-parties to do that for us.

The difficulty, Purdy said, is in balancing priorities, specifically between developers and users (with some advertisers in there as well), because at the end of the day, if they don’t have either, they don’t have a business.

Founder and CEO of BranchOut, Rick Marini, Airbnb Product Lead Joe Zadeh, and FreshPlanet co-founder (publisher of SongPop) Mathieu Nouzareth also joined in on the conversation, which was especially relevant as each company they represent has seen big benefit from building on the Facebook platform. Airbnb recently announced that 10 million nights have been booked, while Facebook-connected guests in particular make 85 percent more bookings on average.

Songpop, meanwhile, has grown from zero to 12 million-plus monthly active users in the last three months, while 65 percent of its mobile users log in with Facebook, and Facebook users are spending 35 percent more time and money than those who don’t login with Facebook.

Marini himself said that BranchOut made a commitment to analytics in December, using a mixture of Mixpanel and Optimizely to make the experience better, trying to harness some of the power of its 400K-to-12M user growth. User acquisition shot way ahead of retention, and BranchOut has since turned its focus to harnessing that. Facebook, he said, helped give the company access to a new demographic, specifically to international users in Indian and Brazil — reach that they wouldn’t have been able to find otherwise.

In the meantime, Nouzareth said that the Open Graph had been instrumental in helping SongPop grow, with users sharing five or 6 times in a minute, although it was a constant worry campaign over whether or not Facebook’s algorithm would be putting those posts from the app into users’ news feeds.

At that point, Josh (who moderated the panel) coaxed Purdy into saying that, in fact, Facebook was not referring to its algorithm as EdgeRank (although the rest of the industry does), and nodded his head as Nouzareth said that they can’t worry about controlling that, they really have to just focus on making a good game and great user experience.

That’s where Purdy again chimed in to encourage developers to just focus on building a great gaming or app experience, and to use Facebook as the amplification tool to give them that extra boost. Purdy said that the better the apps are that end up in the news feed, and the more relevant the notifications and posts, it helps drive success for Facebook itself, and make their ads far more relevant — good for the bottom line.

“Build an awesome app, plug in Facebook and success will happen,” Purdy quipped.

Josh also asked about Facebook’s Face.com acquisition, and whether we might be able to expect a Facial recognition API anytime soon. “We have no plans for that at present,” Purdy said, although he did hint that if they saw enough interest from developers, it’s something that they would consider.

Updating…