Director of Engineering with Augmented Reality, Gaming and SW+HW industry experience. Technical lead in scaling and growth of several high profile products in MySpace, Guild Wars 2, Kingdoms of Camelot, MSN.
I have a technical background from the advertising industry and in monetization on mobile.
There are several monetization loops that can be employed on iOS. If you already have the tracking app implemented on other platforms or is cross-platform compatible, you can achieve similarly successful yields from Android with a different set of best practices.
If you point me to your app, I am happy to review it and have detailed follow-up discussions over clarity.fm.
I was in a similar place when I was first exposed to the advertising industries. One of the most effective ways I found in familiarizing myself with AdTech was by teaching it. So I ended up handling all of the onboarding of new product managers, engineers and designers in our company.
The lumascape is meant to scare folks not familiar with the industry away. At the basic core of advertising, it is simply about connecting advertisers with their target audience through content sites and various mediums. Everything else in between are middlemen with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Some of these players make a business out of optimizing an advertiser's campaign on metrics that matter to them (eCPM, CTR, CPE, etc). Others move the needle further by removing the human aspect (i.e. sales, campaign managers, etc) by connecting advertisers with publishers programmatically.
I am happy to go over this crowded and somewhat confusing advertising ecosystem if you have specific follow-up questions.
I dealt with similar challenges for mobile and web games that I have managed.
It really depends on where you are in the game lifecycle and the outsource team in question. If your game is in a well-understood genre and similar to popular hits or card/casino games, then the likelihood of an outsource team having enough background context to answer questions is much higher.
Even if your game is in a unique genre or has its own spin, you can mitigate the risk with outsourcing your Q&A by starting off small. For example, perhaps you outsource only Tier 1 level support to begin with or non-paying users only vs. whales (high paying customers). Based on the initial sample size of answers, you can assess the quality of your outsource team without compromising your game community.
If you would like to discuss this in further detail or review specific outsource Q&A teams, I am happy to discuss via Clarity.fm.
I have encountered similar challenges when both hiring for a company on a tight budget as well as when implementing my own product ideas. There are a few paths you can take here depending on what you are trying to create.
For well-known domains with tight specs, you can go with fairly inexpensive contractors offering their services via elance.com or odesk.com.
If you have a high level vision of your mobile app but still need to identify product market fit, you have a couple options: 1. Build it yourself even if you don't have a technical background. The barrier for entry on mobile prototyping has been lowered thanks to WYSIWYG editors such as Appery.io which will work across Android, iOS and Windows Phone platforms. 2. Participate in a Hackathon. Folks at most of these events are young, friendly and looking to network. So if you have a compelling idea and can offer value towards the project (i.e. design, art, etc), you will find many like-minded folks who are willing to pair up with you. If you are not located in a tech centric city, you can always join virtual hackathon events via Hacker League https://www.hackerleague.org/.
If you have additional questions, ping me via clarity and I am happy to discuss further.
Yow-Hann has been the lynchpin for the search team since the beginning. Time after time he stepped up to the plate, whether it was as minor as a text change or as big as putting prototypes together from single-line emails. He maintained his composure during stressful release cycles, kept communication flowing at all times, worked tirelessly for a better product and contributed significantly to good morale on the team. I hope one day down the road I’ll get to work with Yow-Hann again…it’s been a pleasure.
Yow-hann is an extremely talented developer who has a wealth of technical knowledge. His attention to detail is excellent, his ability to identify and fix issues is uncanny and his passion for coding is contagious. Most importantly, he is willing to work with others to find the best solution for a given problem.
Yow-Hann prevailed in coming, abruptly, into our team and manage all sorts of tasks. From inspiring the team to handling technical coding problems, he was awesome at everything that he touched. Any person should be glad to work with Yow-Hann.
It's been a great pleasure working with Yow-Hann at Kabam’s flagship game, Kingdoms of Camelot. We have a nice time before Yow-Hann moving to help out one of company's next generation projects. Yow-Hann led the team thru couple important evolutions of the game, includes the new type game play/battling system - Dark Forests, data center migration and more.
Yow-Hann also shows great skill in management. We had a very smooth transition when he become the director of the team. He respects team members and helps them to build and execute their career plan.
Yow-Hann is one of the finest development directors I've had the opportunity to work under. It's a testament to his ability that the development director role was thrust upon him, and further testament that he managed to bring together the disparate elements in a large team, working on an older code-base laden with legacy issues, and plot a course, both technically, and in terms of process, that made us nimble, efficient, and capable of tackling more ambitious tasks with greater confidence.
Technically, Yow-Hann is unquestionably strong-certainly one of the strongest I've ever worked with. As a manager, Yow-Hann excels at remaining aware of all of the members of even a large team, and ensuring that they have what they need in order to progress effectively. This includes career management, critical oversight, and facilitating useful collaboration across functional groups. He truly cares. That might be why he's willing to work the almost absurd hours he maintains. That's also why I would work with Yow-Hann again in a second, given the chance.
It has been awesome working with Yow-Hann at both MySpace and ArenaNet. While I was an SDET on Yow-Hann's team at MySpace, he would always tackle issues that I (and others) brought up quickly, and I could see that others would do the same based on his example. He took time to help me grow my skills, and I'm much better off having had the opportunity to work with him. I was happy to get to work with him again at ArenaNet. He's a passionate and skilled dev that any company would be lucky to have.
I had the pleasure of working with Yow-Hann at Vision Critical in the software engineering team. Yow-Hann is a lifelong learner and constantly keeps his knowledge up to date with the latest advancements in the software world. I recall working alongside Yow-Hann on very fast paced, time pressured projects which demanded quick learning abilities, high motivation and constant collaboration and team interaction and Yow-Hann delivered on these without fail. I highly recommend his work to anyone who demands a hard working, dedicated and highly entrepreneurial team member.
Yow-Hann joined myspace seattle office when it just started here. Yow-Hann is very passionate about technology, good at architecting and designing web solutions independently. He built the Lucene search index system ground up and worked on the full stack for community product offering and Search solutions. Yow-hann lead the technical team which multi-tasked several product needs and delivered the solutions in tight schedules. I personally enjoyed working with him and recommend him as a reliable technical leader.
Yow-Hann is that rare type of developers that listen to what Operation has to say and actually try to implement ops' suggestion to make our live easier. He is very knowledgable and very easy to work with. Great guy!
Yow-Hann is a strong and detail-oriented developer who was friendly and fun on top of it all. His youthful exuberance when tackling challenges really was an inspiration and encouraged others (including myself) to be proactive in their approaches to solving problems.
It's a shame he decided to leave, but I'm glad to have worked with him and hope to again in the future.
