This past Wednesday, our client Offerpal Media hosted a Facebook Developer Garage at Mezzanine in downtown San Francisco. The event, themed “Turning Virtual Currency into Real Revenue,” drew more than 250 application developers and others involved in the social networking games industry and a small army of Facebook employees. Offerpal is the leader in “managed offer platforms” for social networking applications–acting as a bridge between advertisers and developers to bring real dollars and cents through the use of embedded surveys and offers, leveraging virtual currency in social networking applications.
Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick (who is hard at work on a book about Facebook) was one of the attendees, as was Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith, who posted the live Ustream.tv feed of the event on his site. We shot some video of participants discussing their latest Facebook apps. Stay tuned for the actual footage.
There was also an impressive lineup of speakers, including Anu Shukla, CEO of Offerpal Media, who shared secrets to monetizing social networking applications using virtual currency, and John Hwang, Director of Products at RockYou – developers of SpeedRacer, one of the most installed apps on Facebook.
A panel of top apps developers spoke at the event, including:
- Siqi Chen of Serious Business (developers of Friends For Sale!),
- Nicholas Talarico of Sibblingz (developers of Make a Baby), and
- Markus Weichselbaum of TheBroth (developers of PuzzleBee, KickMania! and What’s Your Stripper Name?).
This lively panel included some surprising stories and insights about what makes for an addictive Facebook application. For example, Chen, who developed his application “Friends For Sale” so that he’d be able to “help people get laid in the real world,” soon had such a popular game on his hands that people were clamoring for the virtual currency needed in order to play it. It became so raucous that at one point, he received a death threat from a game player who demanded hundreds of thousands in virtual currency. Panelist Nick Talarico joked that it was a sign that you’ve got one successful application on your hands!
No doubt Offerpal Media will continue to prosper. We’re thrilled to be working with a company that is empowering innovation and success on social networks.