gwallet fueling Virtual Currency

Today is a great day for gWallet – we’ve announced our Brand Advisory Board! Members come with years of experience working with brands and they will provide gWallet with a fresh perspective on what advertisers are looking for. Members include:

• Marc Ruxin, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer at Universal McCann, who leads media innovation across all emerging digital technology and traditional media companies for UM’s global client base.
• Eric Bader, Chief Strategy Officer at Initiative, a new media and marketing leader with deep experience in strategy, brand marketing and business-building solutions for Fortune 500 companies.
• Joe Hyrkin, who formerly held senior management positions at Yahoo! and Gaia Interactive, and who is now an Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures.
• Doug Chavez, Director, Digital Marketing at Del Monte Foods, who brings over 15 years of traditional and digital media experience having worked with brands such as McDonald’s, Kodak, Yahoo!, and Visa to strengthen their market presence and positioning.

We’ve already begun bringing leading brands into the social gaming space, and we’re hoping to leverage the expertise of our advisory board to continue to make this happen!

Today, we announced the “gWallet Challenge” giving new qualified publishers a chance to try out the gWallet platform risk-free.

We’re pretty confident over here at gWallet. In fact, we’re so confident that publishers will increase their revenue using the gWallet platform that we’re offering a cash guarantee.  If the desired results are not achieved within 30 days, gWallet will pay the publisher $20,000 cash. That’s right, $20,000 dollars!!

Qualifying premium publishers can sign up starting today for the month-long challenge. They will put their existing solution head-to-head against the gWallet platform for 30 days, and if they don’t see a growth in revenue, we’re paying up. Integration takes only about two hours of development time, and then the challenge will begin!

For more information, check out our official release or email: partner@gwallet.com.

We thought we’d take a second to update you on some awesome growth metrics we’ve been seeing over here at gWallet.

Earlier this year, you may remember that we launched a unique new way to earn virtual currency…watching video clips.  Since we made this new type of offer available, consumers have watched more than 1.7 million minutes of video ads from leading online social games, social networks and applications using the gWallet platform.

Not to brag, but 1.7 million minutes ain’t too shabby. In fact, that’s about 1,180 days—or a little over 3 years of viewing time. We even had an advertiser return to run a second campaign with us, with a budget of over $100,000!

Both the brands and our publishing partners are thrilled with the results they are seeing. Our publishers have told us that as user impressions are skyrocketing, monetization opportunities have increased 4 to 5 times. These are the kind of numbers we like to see!

If you don’t believe us, see what some of our friends had to say:

• Will Harbin, CEO of CasualCollective: “The video offers from gWallet have brought a new level of engagement to our site — our users love earning coins by simply watching cutting-edge video ads and movie trailers.”
• A gamer on Foopets.com [1]: “I think that [watching videos] is a great and easy way to earn FDs (FooDollars), and I’m running pretty low on them myself…I think it was very kind of FooPets to give such an easy privilege to earn FDs.”

We’ll we’re done patting ourselves on the back for now. Stay tuned for more… In the meantime, keep watching those videos and earning that virtual currency!

Have you ever wanted to own an island? How about a space station or a virtual mystery egg? These days, you can—thanks to virtual currency in MMOGs and social games online. We’ve compiled a short list of some of the most interesting (and expensive!) items purchased with virtual goods.

Crystal Palace Space Station
The World Record for “Most Expensive Virtual Object” was broken earlier this year and is currently held at $330,000 USD by Erik Novak who purchased the Crystal Palace Space Station in a public auction. The auction was held by First Planet Company, developer and publisher of the MMORPG, Planet Calypso. He broke the standing World Record by over 300%.

Club NEVERDIE Resort and Treasure Island
Previous World Records have included a virtual space resort, sold for $100,000 USD in 2005, and Treasure Island on the planet Calypso that sold for $26,500 USD in 2004—both a part of the Entropia Universe. The space resort turned out to be a successful investment reportedly bringing in over $50,000 USD in mining/hunting rights alone in its first five months—and that’s not including the additional real-money revenue brought in by the virtual nightclub and property sales on the resort!

Atrox Queen Egg
This virtual egg was sold for $69,696 USD. Interestingly, it was purchased by the same player who purchased Treasure Island, David “Deathifier” Storey, from Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs—who purchased the space resort.

These increasingly popular virtual worlds are now creating new entrepreneurial opportunities for creative, business-minded players.

So tell us, what would YOU buy using virtual currency?

Here at gWallet we try to keep our finger on the pulse of the virtual currency/social gaming space. From a business perspective, it is important for us to be aware of the current trends in the industry, but there is also another reason we like to read up on the space …the stories are hilarious!

Social gaming has a reputation for being addictive and we see this daily when reading up on the industry (disclaimer—even gWallet has our share of social gaming addicts. It’s hard to take a walk through the office without seeing Mafia Wars or Farmville…). Like any other addiction, social gaming has its extremes, and they are interesting/surprising/disturbing to say the least. For the last few months, we’ve been flagging some of our favorite stories, and we wanted to share our favorites with the world.

So without further ado, here are our favorite social gaming stories of the last couple of months:

• Giving the Farm a little too much attention – Dimitar Kerin is like millions of other Farmville players who may occasionally pay a little too much attention to their farms…with one big difference. Dimitar worked on the Plovdic City Council in Bulgaria and was playing doing council meetings. It was determined that Dimitar spent too much playing and he was voted off the council. His defense—he was not the only councilman playing – Read more

• “I’m selling the car and buying an island” – Virtual goods are growing more extravagant by the day, and few purchases demonstrate this better than the man who spent $26,500 for an island in a virtual world. When asked to explain his purchase, the buyer said “I thought it would be cool to own an island” – Read more

• No gaming after midnight – In South Korea, three of the most popular online games were directed to block people under the age of 18 from playing between midnight and 8am. The real highlight of the article though—the most successful professional StarCraft player of all time is a celebrity in the country, with a girlfriend who is a popular actress. They have been labeled as “the South Korean equivalent of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore” — Read more

• In need of a farm keeper or marriage counselor – In yet another case of farm inspired craziness, a Chinese couple who had been together 4 years decided to suddenly break up. The reason—the pregnant woman in the relationship overslept and did not attend to her boyfriends farm, subsequently leading to his crops getting stolen – Read more

• Love at first click – This story falls more into the category of general gaming rather than social gaming, but is too good to pass up. In Japan, there is a new dating game called Love Plus, where interested men can interact with virtual girlfriends. Showing that even virtual relationships require work, the “girlfriends” require that the men say “I love you” aloud into a microphone 100 times, and sometimes require the men to kiss the computer screen. – Read more

Yep, it is a crazy world out there.

If anyone has their own amusing social gaming stories that they don’t mind sharing, feel free to send them our way at info@gwallet.com. We’d love to do a follow up post with your own stories.

This is your chance to join the hottest social media startup. Five Applicants will be selected for a summer paid internship that can lead to full-time employment as part of gWallet’s Summer Internship Program.

Interns will be playing roles in Sales, Business Development and Operations. We are looking for smart, creative, and ambitious individuals who can keep pace at the startup life.

If your interested in joining, email internship@gwallet.com and include an updated resume as well as a one-pager explaining why you should be selected.

We expect a large response so this is limited to U.S. applicants only.

Look forward in working with you.

gWallet Team

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Company blog, although in our defense, to say we’ve been busy would be a little bit of an understatement.  In the past month, we came out with gLTV, a measurement tool that can find the consumers that engage the most with social media offers, and a few weeks ago, we came out with the first ever branded video engagements, which have already become a big hit with some major brands.

Enough with old news though—today we want to let you know about our latest effort to leave a mark on the social gaming space, gWallet Ventures. gWallet Ventures is an early-stage fund that we created to invest in various social gaming companies. We like to think that by doing this, we are actually investing in the social gaming ecosystem, and are simply doing our part to ensure that quality games continue coming to market.

We are currently looking for companies to invest in (our criteria is fairly simple—if you have fun games, we’re probably interested), and we’re excited to choose our first portfolio company. We plan on playing an active role with all of the companies we invest in, and we’ll do our part to make sure the best games out there are brought to the masses.

If you are interested in learning more (or if you own a social gaming company and would like to inquire about funding), check out http://www.gwallet.com/ventures/. We’d love to hear from you, and we look forward to seeing some new games.

Gurbaksh Chahal
Founder, Chairman & CEO
gWallet, Inc.