April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is coming up one week from today. We had to turn off registration over the weekend because we’re at capacity, but tomorrow at 11am US PT we’ll be making a small number of additional tickets available, so we encourage you to register then to reserve your spot.

On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

At Inside Social Apps 2010, executives and experts from leading social game and app developers, payment services, advertising providers, and investors will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective. The event will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map). The full agenda for the day is available here.

The full list of speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010 is below:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Partners
  
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
  
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

We encourage you to register tomorrow at 11 am US PT.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

Space is almost sold out, so we encourage you to register tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11am US PT.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

We at Inside Network have been committed to understanding Facebook’s growth from its earliest days because of its extraordinary growth and potential to change the way we socialize and interact online. To further this understanding of the Facebook ecosystem, today we are proud to announce a new report on tracking Facebook’s financial growth and corporate strategy, the Facebook Quarterly Business Review, Q1 2010 Edition.

The Facebook Quarterly Business Review examines every major business change and development affecting Facebook from Q4 2009 through Q1 2010, and is only available through Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service specifically dedicated to tracking Facebook’s business and growth around the world.

Facebook is becoming one of the great Internet companies of our time. Whereas many companies have tried to emulate Facebook’s success, or challenge it in one geography or another, Facebook has proven that the core asset on which all of its services are built – the social graph – is much more defensible and powerful than many others once anticipated.

In 2004, Facebook started as a simple place to build your online identity and communicate with friends. In 2007, it started sharing Facebook identity and connections with application developers with the launch of the Facebook Platform. It opened those up further to the rest of the Internet – and any connected device – with the launch of Facebook Connect in 2008. In 2009, the company saw unprecedented growth – from 150 million users in January to 350 million users in December – largely driven by its mobile and international initiatives.

Where will Facebook go next?

As we enter the second quarter of 2010, Facebook stands in a unique position at the intersection of online identity and content distribution. Social media is living up to the hype by driving more traffic than search to many publishers, and developers of new virtual goods businesses are finding social platforms the best place to connect with hundreds of millions of direct-paying customers. At the same time, Facebook’s own in-house advertising platform – powered by the deep, generic identity that Facebook has built and protected for so long – is beginning to come into its own.

The purpose of the Facebook Quarterly Business Review is to bring readers up to speed on every aspect of Facebook’s business through the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010.

The Facebook Quarterly Business Review is available as a part of your membership to Inside Facebook Gold. To join Inside Facebook Gold, and download the Facebook Quarterly Business Review, click here.

The full table of contents is below:

Facebook launched a new Safety Center today as part of the company’s effort to create a more comfortable social environment, and also in response to concerns from parents, educators and law enforcement, according to its press release and a blog.

The Safety Center offers tips, answers frequently asked questions, offers advice and other general information divided into main topics: General Safety, Safety for Educators, Safety for Law Enforcers, Safety for Parents, Safety for Teens.

Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan writes in a blog post that safety is Facebook’s “top priority,” and that the Safety Center was created in conjunction with the company’s Safety Advisory Board, created at the end of 2009, to present information in a way that’s easy to navigate.

The Safety Center provides content from Facebook as well as other organizations that focus on online safety, such as: Childnet International in the United Kingdom, non-profit Common Sense Media, Connect Safely, The Family Online Safety Institute and WiredSafely.

It includes content like “Addressing Personal Safety” and “Responding to Objectionable Content,” as well as information on cyberbullying, how to report pedophiles, information for parents like “How do I teach my teen to use the Internet wisely?” and “Can I ‘friend’ my teen on Facebook?”

Facebook seems to be moving to address problems that have been popping up related to safety issues on the social network. Most recently, after the death of a young girl at the hands of a man she met on Facebook, there was an outcry in the UK for the so-called “panic button” to alert authorities to potential pedophiles on the site. Facebook declined to do that, but this effort is another move intended to allay the inevitable safety concerns that arise from running a large social network.

Each week we usually point to the growth of Facebook’s two major smartphone apps to show the platform’s mobile growth: Facebook for iPhone has about 32 million monthly active users, while Facebook for BlackBerry has 16 million. But what about all the other phones out there? GetJar, an independent app distributor that’s partnered with Facebook, says its own app has been downloaded 50 million times in just six months.

The news is useful for helping gauge Facebook’s success on a mobile platform, because the app itself is not much more than a bookmark — although its users may not know that. When mobile users visit m.facebook.com, they’re offered an app download link that depends on their device.

Facebook then directs the non-smartphone users over to GetJar, where they download what is essentially a Facebook icon carrying a direct link to the mobile version of the site, which may be optimized for the device. Users who aren’t tech-savvy may think the app does something special, but its real benefit is to declare an intention, and create an ever-present reminder, to regularly visit Facebook on a phone.

This simple app isn’t just more downloaded than the smartphone versions, it has also grown at a faster pace. GetJar’s chief marketing officer, Patrick Mork, says the app spiked up to 1.5 million downloads in its first week. The download volume slowed only slightly after that initial rush, with over a million downloads coming in each week over the past half-year. “The app is enormously popular in Southeast Asia,” Mork told us. “And it’s also popular in the United States for Samsung, LG and other high-end feature devices.”

Although GetJar isn’t sharing any more specific stats, we can guess at how many of GetJar’s downloaders continue to use the Facebook app on a daily basis by looking at Facebook’s own stats for its mobile site, which show that almost eight million people visit on a daily basis. That’s fewer than the smartphone apps, but still a quite respectable number considering that many of the devices being used aren’t as slick and addictive as an iPhone or BlackBerry.

And GetJar’s 50 million downloads do offer more outside evidence to corroborate Facebook’s announcement that 100 million people, about a fourth of its users, are visiting through mobile devices. By partnering with GetJar, which has long expertise in delivering apps to networks across the world, Facebook gets to skip distribution hassle and focus on making a full-featured site for mobile users and other products.

Of course, the app and mobile site as they are today are just part of a broader strategy for Facebook, which we wrote about on Friday. That includes a new “Zero” text-only version of the site that carriers can give to users for free, and a long-term focus on content beyond just social networking.

Guinness recently launched a new Facebook fan page to promote its US division, appropriately named Guinness US, and it’s now promoting the page with a campaign called the Emerging Artists Series. The new promotion is part of the overall Fortune Favors The Bold campaign, which the brand has been pushing through social media and TV spots since late last year.

The Page is following a couple trends among brands using Pages. One is that it has decided to target US users separately from its other efforts on Facebook. Other brands, notably rival brewer Budweiser, have made the same decision. The other trend is that it is trying to tie itself to up-and-coming musicians, as Levi’s, Odwalla and Microsoft have recently been doing.

The Emerging Artists Series is currently focusing on a variety of musicians from the Washington, D.C. area and is being backed by both Guinness and Marc Ecko’s Complex magazine and website. The artists range from soul singers to DJs — each artist receives a feature bio, and an events calendar highlights the upcoming appearances for the artists.

Guinness recently launched the new Facebook page dedicated to its US brand, and the Emerging Artists Series promotion is immediately visible on a The Bold Life tab that’s now its landing page. The fan page is a bit of a break from the original Guinness brand page, with more of a focus on traditionally American demographics.

While the promotion is readily visible on the complex.com site, there’s no mention of the campaign on the Guinness site. There was a post a couple of weeks ago on the original Guinness fan page alerting fans to the new US page, but there’s currently no mention of the promotion anywhere on the international Guinness page, which currently has about 77,800 fans from around the world.

Guinness’s original fan page is well-populated with videos and photos, and the administrators post regularly and respond to posts by fans. The new US page seems to be run in a similar fashion, with ongoing, engaging contests that highlight fans, and a few photos and videos from both Guinness and its fans. The Guinness US page currently has more than 3,300 fans.

The new campaign is being promoted through banner ads, such as the one on dimemag.com, an online basketball and urban lifestyle magazine,and it appears that Guinness is attempting to establish a completely unique identity for its states-side endeavors. By using this specific music series the brand seems to be targeting a more urban market for a their product, which is already wildly popular with the pub crowd.

Zynga’s back on top again this week on our weekly list of the top 20 Facebook Pages with the most new fans, as measured by Inside Facebook’s PageData tool. FC Barcelona’s recent win over Arsenal also added a few soccer/football-related Pages to the mix, in addition to regulars Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, Facebook was also on the list, as was Starbucks and other food-related Pages.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	16,431,797	+600,778	+3.79
2.	Mafia Wars	11,565,127	+362,550	+3.24
3.	Kitkat	764,544	+299,128	+64.27
4.	FaceMoods	1,748,448	+261,613	+17.60
5.	The Last Song	470,419	+181,388	+62.76
6.	Justin Bieber	2,663,130	+157,075	+6.27
7.	The Artifice	3,485,945	+108,092	+3.20
8.	Facebook	8,073,855	+104,706	+1.31
9.	Lionel Messi	1,608,345	+102,382	+6.80
10.	Lady Gaga	6,076,521	+94,070	+1.57
11.	Facebook Site Governance	1,341,187	+93,872	+7.53
12.	Mozilla Firefox	1,249,700	+88,841	+7.65
13.	Ricky Martin	278,608	+80,905	+40.92
14.	American Eagle Outfitters	994,185	+79,972	+8.75
15.	YouTube	4,705,035	+74,741	+1.61
16.	Starbucks	6,529,952	+68,281	+1.06
17.	Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts	1,322,815	+58,763	+4.65
18.	FC Barcelona	1,600,524	+54,477	+3.52
19.	Skittles	4,192,264	+54,101	+1.31
20.	iTunes	3,399,779	+52,381	+1.56

Last week Kit Kat split up Zynga’s top games, Texas Hold’em Poker (first) and Mafia Wars (second), but this week the candy’s Page was pushed down to third. Poker added almost 601,000 fans last week and is now inching towards 17 million fans and Mafia Wars added 362,550 fans with more than 11.5 million.

Trying to figure out why these Pages are so popular inevitably leads to the conclusion that the games themseles are just really popular. However, their Pages are chock full of updates, such as a recent $25 million contest on Poker and Mafia Wars status updates urging fans to invite bookmark the Page and sign up for SMS notifications. This is likely making the Pages even more popular.

As previously mentioned, Kit Kat candy bars was in third place this week, but there were no recent posts on the Page that added 299,000 fans to its base of 765,000. Maybe the Page is still getting attention because of a recent snafu with Greenpeace?

Other food-related Pages on the list this week included Starbucks at number 16, adding 68,200 fans to grow to more than 6.5 million, followed by Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts breakfast pastries which has a Page that offers free virtual stuff and is promoting pastry-themed music on the Page and Skittles at number 19, which doesn’t seem to have done anything other than grow by 28,300 on April 8, perhaps because of a Page consolidation effort.

The emoticon app FaceMoods’ Page was fourth, adding 261,600 fans to total 1.7 million, but the Page has been working hard to get there, asking fans several times in status updates (in all caps, no less) to “invite your friends to join our Page. Plus, the app recently added Twilight-themed emoticons.

Teeny bopper chick flick “The Last Song,” showed strong growth over the weekend to take fifth place, adding 181,400 fans, but growth fell flat during the week. Another teeny bopper, singer Justin Bieber, took sixth place, adding 157,000 fans to his 2.6 million fanbase, probably because he’s currently promoting his new album in magazines and on television, most notably as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

That which shall not be defined, “The Artifice,” was seventh this week, adding 108,000 fans to almost 3.5 million followers, amazing given that there’s still no information available about what exactly this Page is about. Its original launch date was moved to April, and then moved again to May so we’re still waiting to find out. Facebook’s Page was number 8 on the list, adding 104,700 fans to its 8 million-plus following with a jump of 62,800 on April 8, probably a Page consolidation.

Perhaps the most interesting additions to the list this week were soccer/football star Lionel Messi’s addition to ninth place and his team FC Barcelona’s spot at number 18. Tuesday Messi’s team, FC Barcelona, beat the English football club Arsenal in an impressive display of athletic prowess where he scored four goals that had commentators the world over singing his praises. Consequently, Messi seems to have added 102,400 or so fans to his Page and FC Barcelona added 54,500 or so; both have about 1.6 million fans.

Random Pages made up the rest of the list, this includes Lady Gaga adding 94,000 fans to her 6 million-plus fans (she’s currently on tour and is headlining the Lollapalooza music festival) and eleventh place’s Facebook Site Governance Page which added about 94,000 to its 1.3 million fan count (probably because of user feedback regarding new new terms of service changes). Twelfth place was occupied by Mozilla Firefox for unknown reasons; the Page added almost 89,000 fans to its 1.2 million base this week.

We saw Ricky Martin on the list again this week; the Puerto Rican singer revealed that he was gay last week, prompting a huge surge in his fan numbers. This week he added about 81,000 fans to his 278,600 but there doesn’t appear to be much activity otherwise. Following Martin was the American Eagle Outfitters Page at number 14, which added about 80,000 fans to its 994,000 base and the iTunes Page rounded out the list, adding about 52,400 fans to 3.4 million.