Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 1)

Tapjoy is a mobile platform that helps monetize freemium apps. This discussion is an excellent overview of the dynamics of app monetization in the mobile world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some context. Tell us who you are. Give us a bit of background and introduce us to Tapjoy.

Steve Wadsworth: I’m the President and CEO of Tapjoy. We are a leading provider of lifetime value optimization solutions for mobile app publishers. What that means is that we provide a software platform to allow mobile app publishers to maximize the value of user’s engagement in their app.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: But if you look at the reports, there are also reports, for example, that people have already got the apps that they want to use on a regular basis on their phone and that they’re not downloading a lot of new apps. The number of new apps that are getting downloaded is going down.

Samar Singla: No, it’s not. If you look at Cohort data, their per user usage is going up, and per user app downloads are going up. The total number of apps is obviously going up because the number of smart phones is increasing. Even if you look at Cohort data, it’s actually increasing. There’s no doubt about it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this kind of work is happening on mobile apps versus on a regular web application?

Samar Singla: A lot of our work is server side. I would say almost all of these are mobile first. When they get traction, they typically start something on the web. Essentially, it is more than 80% mobile first.

Sramana Mitra: What is your general feeling about this mobile first strategy on this scale? The mobile platforms are getting very crowded with apps. Everybody wants to have an app on the mobile, but it’s not a very good user interface. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you are producing these kinds of applications also for large companies. Is the McDonald’s example a real example?

Samar Singla: McDonald’s is not a real example. We have done something for Coca-Cola. We have done two marketplaces for them. I cannot disclose the projects. They are, very soon, going to be in public domain. You might have heard of this Coca-Cola entrepreneur program. They just started doing press releases about it. Before that, nobody knew about that. We are one of their suppliers. We do most of their technology for that program. A lot of those products are actually marketplaces.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 2)

Samar Singla: How do we build up marketplace components? It could be peer-to-peer marketplace. In that case, there are some more steps to the marketplace. Finally, there’s the user side mobile application. Then there will be a billing component. If you look at these, there are probably about 10 such modules, which we have developed in a very generalized sense. Once we have those, it is very easy for us to build them together. We do the plumbing. Every module in this works a little differently. Dispatching solution works differently for a plumber on demand than for a taxi on demand. That’s the way we bring this to life. These are not really API-based stacks but this is module-based.

Sramana Mitra: Even though it’s an API-based interaction, it is a module that kicks in gear in some of these applications. You treat that as another module that you bring in to the application.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 1)

Samar Singla has built an interesting Outsourced Product Development company by latching onto the trend of developing mobile marketplaces a la Uber for large and small customers. This interview is an exploration of the mobile marketplace trend based on his experience catering to a variety of customers.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Click-Labs. What do you do? How do you do what you do, and how do you differentiate from your competitors?

Samar Singla: We work with bigger companies between Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 for their innovation department on new products that they want to launch. We also work with entrepreneurs and help bring their ideas to market. We differentiate ourselves by focusing on some key areas and by trying to create IP in those areas that have delivered hardware with smaller time to market. For example, we focus a lot on sharing products such as Uber. We try to focus on niches and by that focus, we have quite a bit of IP.

Sramana Mitra: You have developed IP in certain types of niches and applications. You are able to re-use that IP and get your customer to a fast time to market turnaround time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company or did you take the proceeds from the SmarTeam acquisition and build this organically?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: When it started, I was funding this company myself. We have raised $90 million today from VCs. The last round was $35 million that was announced two weeks ago. We got $35 million from Goldman Sachs to continue scaling our business.

Sramana Mitra: Who are the other VCs in the business?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 5)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Many people have tried to fix this issue of how to drive collaboration that matters. As you were saying, technology has changed a lot. The real impact of cloud on companies is that it makes companies real time. If I go right now to Salesforce and I look at the report, I will understand now what the status is for this specific second. This was not there before. Of course, there was CRM system. >>>