Heads up, mobile marketers. Our new flexible in-app messaging tools have unlocked a world of possibilities for you and your team.

We’re thrilled to not only announce a dramatic upgrade to our overall marketing flexibility, but also the release of multiple new turnkey solutions that marketers can leverage in their live service, engagement, and monetization efforts. Combined, these changes represent the latest in our long-term commitment to providing mobile marketing professionals with the most effective tools for building personal, profitable relationships with their customers.

We’ve made some powerful improvements to the way push messages are managed and measured in Upsight. Instead of being scheduled and reported as discrete entities, push messages are now organized into campaigns, making it easier to analyze the aggregated performance of multiple messages that share a common goal. We’ve also released a variety of new tools and metrics that empower marketers to build, deploy, and measure more sophisticated push strategies across their portfolio. We’re confident these upgrades will make it even easier to optimize push performance and garner better overall results from all push-related marketing projects. 

We’ve made it even easier to quickly surface valuable insights using one of our platform’s most powerful ad hoc data exploration tools: Metric Explorer. Our latest update adds new controls that empower users to quickly reach data-driven conclusions and conduct intuitive comparitive analyses. These upgrades represent the latest in our ongoing mission to provide enterprise marketers and analysts with the tools they need to go from insight to action in a single, comprehensive platform.

Lifetime value, which was formerly a discrete line item in all Upsight service agreements, can now be requested as part of our standard analytics offering. Existing customers interested in taking advantage of this new feature can contact their dedicated CSM to have it added to their dashboards. This exciting change is the result of some hard work from our dedicated team of data scientists and engineers, who have been able to dramatically streamline the LTV calculation process. Furthermore, thanks to Upsight’s flexible metric handling and data visualization capabilities, marketers can measure LTV across any standard dimension including country of origin or attribution source. The result is a graceful, lightweight BI solution that we’re thrilled to be offering to any new or current analytics customers.

The world’s best marketers understand the importance of cohesive brand engagements in their web and mobile products. The ability to unify every aspect of a product under a single, consistent aesthetic is what sets the most memorable brands apart from their competition. Things get challenging, however, when marketers need to tailor delivery of their native web and mobile engagements according to customer behavior.

Modern enterprises deal with more data than ever before. Beyond simply aggregating, visualizing and analyzing your data, the conversations about it are crucial to gaining understanding and deriving insights. At Upsight, helping you understand your data so you can optimize your marketing and monetization efforts is central to what we do, so we're always looking for ways to make you and your team's life easier. Today, conversations about data are taking place in email, IM, intranets and elsewhere. A common problem with all these conversations is that your discussion winds up on a static snapshot of your data, unable to be explored, not being updated in future days and living in a separate system that doesn't allow you to easily view other metrics.

Veteran mobile publishers know internal cross promotion can be an effective way of driving installs and engagement across their portfolios at little to no cost.  For anyone less familiar, internal cross promotions are essentially in-house ad campaigns designed to drive traffic from one first-party digital product to another. Thanks to their unimpeachable ROI ratio, they’ve remained one of the most highly-utilized digital marketing tools in the industry.

This week, we’re excited to announce updates across nearly all of our standard dashboard visualization types. These updates focus on increased interactivity, allowing more exploratory analysis and improved readability. They also lay the groundwork for future improvements.

The Mobile Games Forum events have been a mainstay of the industry for years, and we couldn’t be happier to be sponsoring this year’s London event. We're most excited for the fantastic panels and presentations the organizers have assembled this year. We've scoured the agenda and picked out the 4 presentations you can't afford to sleep through.

Welcome to 2017! A new year means a new event circuit, and the good folks at Pocket Gamer are getting things started right. On January 16th and 17th, the mobile publishing and development industries will converge on London for an all-star gathering that unites the best and brightest of mobile's indepedendent and enterprise worlds. While we're proud to be sponsors of Pocket Gamer Connects London once again (shoot us an email to schedule a meeting!) we're most looking forward to the fantastic sessions and discussions scheduled for this year. Here's our shortlist of what is absolutely not to be missed:

Few things let digital publishers address their users more effectively than a well-made video. Whether it’s to promote a new app or address a community, videos pack lots of information into digestible, user-friendly chunks that get noticed. Though they can be more expensive than static ads to produce, video campaigns can be among the highest ROI projects any team undertakes, made more so by the possibilities available to modern digital marketing teams. With the recent release of Upsight’s video campaign tools, we thought we’d share a few creative ways for publishers to use in-app video to engage their users.

We’re welcoming another enterprise tech professional to our team of dedicated customer success managers. David Vaghari joins us from a diverse technical background spanning software, hardware, and everything in between. We sat down with David to learn more about his time in the US military and what he’s looking forward to most about his work at Upsight.

This week we're shipping two new improvements to our marketing tools that improve efficiency for digital marketers and streamline the milestone management process.

We’re always looking for ways to help our partners get more done in a day. To that effect, we’re rolling out three new time-saving features for anyone using Upsight to track their analytics, deliver push notifications, or manage their app settings.

The digital world runs on video. Modern users expect premium communications wherever possible and they won’t waste time or attention on anything less. That’s why we’re proud to announce that Upsight customers can now leverage videos in their in-app marketing.

(Game of Thrones season 6 spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.)

After joining Upsight in late September, Nir Amram quietly became one of the most interesting people in the office. A trained physicist, his career history includes everything from military cryptography to experiments with the world’s largest particle accelerator. As the newest member of our customer success team, Nir analyzes quantitative data to identify trends in user behaviour for our enterprise partners. We sat down to talk about why, after nearly 15 years in experimental physics, he decided to study people instead.

With the end of summer in sight, we're rolling out a few helpful product updates that will make it even easier to parse your data and customize visualizations to suit your team's needs. Here's what we've been up to.

Mobile user acquisition is more competitive than ever.

Join the Upsight team at Casual Connect in San Francisco, July 18-20.

We’re proud to announce a new way for Upsight partners to reach their user base using Android push notifications. In addition to a few behind-the-scenes optimizations that will make these tools faster and more reliable, these upgrades will help our partners foster greater engagement across their user base. We’ve also made a few usability improvements to make scheduling and editing your notifications even easier.

Our product team has been hard at work developing a number of incremental workflow improvements across the Upsight platform. This month we’re releasing improvements to DataMine, custom dashboards, and advanced metric settings that will empower everyone on your team to gain the insights they need to positively impact your portfolio’s KPIs. Here’s what we’re shipping this month:

The Upsight team will be out in full force this July!

We’ve built Upsight to handle the challenges of sophisticated digital enterprises.

For first time publishers, deciding what to charge for your IAPs is often an intuitive decision rather than a rational one. Should the cheapest IAP in your app cost $1.99 or $4.99? Will the drop in conversions ultimately matter against the increase in revenue? Does a higher price necessarily have to result in fewer conversions? Without data, any answers to these questions are strictly hypothetical.

Upsight’s User Experience Management tools let our clients adjust in-app variables directly from the Upsight dashboard. As of our most recent update, these changes can now be tested before rolling them out to your entire user base, thanks to our new user experience A/B testing feature.

It’s no secret: we’re passionate about data visualization. It’s been in our DNA from the very start, and it’s that passion that has motivated us to build the dynamic tools our partners use to succeed. It’s also why we're thrilled to announce a new feature that’s going to make our dashboards more flexible than ever before.

We want to empower our partners to design visually intuitive dashboards tailored for their business, and we know that there are some outstanding visualization libraries out there. That’s why, as of our most recent update, you’re free to create custom chart types that sit alongside your current Upsight charts.

You can access this feature through a new administrative interface where you’re free to create and edit custom chart types, name your creations, add your own icons, code the javascript, and link to external charting libraries. You can even create metadata objects to capture things like color, label names, or integers used as parameters for your code.

For as long as there have been mobile ads, designers and product managers have been critical of their effect on user experience. Chief among their concerns has been a negative impact on retention in the case of interstitials and cannibalization of IAP revenue in the case of rewarded video. There’s been no shortage of arguments both for and against ad-based monetization, with networks themselves investing significant resources into dispelling the myth of a negative correlation between ad impressions and LTV. Recent research has in-fact suggested that ads are how users prefer to pay for their experience.

Life at Upsight is anything but boring. We live by the motto; “work hard play hard”. You will often see us in back-to-back meetings and rallying together to meet a deadline, but we’re also pros at enjoying a sunny patio day with a few drinks, or learning about speciality coffee or craft beer in the office kitchen.

App publishing veterans have learned that a low conversion rate is the first sign your freemium app is in trouble. It’s one of the most telling KPIs available and should be a top priority for anyone tasked with boosting performance across a digital portfolio.

Did you play with Lego as a kid? I did. I built intricate cities with buildings and skyscrapers, roads and bridges, cars and trucks, restaurants and businesses, and of course, Lego people. I also built intricate suburbs so my Lego people had housing and lifestyle diversity. What I didn’t realize at the age of eight was that I had unknowingly created cohorts for my Lego people and treated them dynamically based on criteria like geography, jobs, and behavior.

Be prepared to be more productive with the following enhancements to your custom dashboard visualizations.

In today’s competitive mobile game economy, you need to ensure that each player has the best game experience possible. How can you possibly achieve this? Simple – apply player-centric design across your entire monetization strategy and leverage the power of a player-centric platform.

Is your analytics provider delivering on their promise? If you really want to maximize success, review the list of top three features to look for in an analytics provider to see if your solution checks all the boxes.

Publishers can affect drastic change in revenue by taking an active role in the virtual marketing that goes on in their apps. The most resourceful publishers have been able to win over their competitors by applying real-world marketing strategies like sales funnels and promotions in their virtual spaces.

A common thread with push notifications is that there’s a fine line between a helpful reminder and an annoyance. Your app’s push notifications have the potential to register as either. In our experience, many notifications fall short with poor implementation, poorly targeted push campaigns, and the tendency to spam users with irrelevant content. The result, a jaded audience that won’t hesitate to switch you off as soon as you get on their nerves.

That said, there are plenty of users who look forward to hearing from their favorite apps because their publishers have taken the time to learn what their users want and when they want it. We’ve put together a few tips to help make sure your users look forward to hearing from you. 

Going, going, gone! There’s nothing more appealing to your users than the opportunity to get a must-have item for a great deal. Promoting offers as a ‘one-time only’ deal allows you to price them attractively and give that extra push to persuade a purchase. However, it’s important to remember that these offers tend to lose their charm and become annoying if they repeatedly pop-up for your users, whether they’ve bought them or not. 

As the free-to-play space has become increasingly sophisticated, players’ expectations have evolved as a result. In order to succeed in the new game economy, you need to have the right tools and the right strategic playbook tailored specifically for your game. You have to deliver the right offer, to the right player, at the right time in order to maximize revenue.

Upsight is sharing this knowledge with our free Monetization Playbook for Mobile Games. The playbook explains monetization strategies at four crucial game stages and how to take action by leveraging the right tools in order to drive revenue. With 25 pages of tips, best practices, and sample plays, the playbook will help you drive measurable results in no time! 

Push notifications have allowed mobile games to foster new levels of engagement with players by staying in touch even when they’re not playing. Their ability to encourage (or even demand) scheduled gameplay helps develop strong relationships between players and their favorite mobile games that few PC or console titles have been able to replicate. We’ve put together a few points to get you more familiar with push notifications and how they help make mobile games unique.

One of this year’s big mobile buzzwords is “Mobile Marketing Automation” or MMA for short (not to be confused with the punching and kicking version). Think of MMA as marketing at the user level, powered by analytics, delivered in real-time, and of course, automated. It’s all about getting the right offer, to the right user, at the right time. Upsight has been active in this space for several years now, and our product has evolved into a powerful platform that delivers on the promise of MMA.

Whether your game is in pre-production, or live, it’s never too late to think about monetization. With a sophisticated user lifecycle management platform like Upsight, you can monetize your app at every stage of the development process. With Upsight, you have full visibility over your users, and numerous ways to take action on them. Here are four ways to leverage Upsight’s platform and increase monetization in your app.

Most publishers have accepted ads as part of their monetization strategy for their apps. In addition, they’ve come to realize that no single ad network is sufficient to fill all their ad requests, in every country, and deliver the highest value. With that realization, a publisher must decide how best to integrate multiple ad networks into their apps. The choices are somewhat limited. Either a publisher has to integrate ad networks separately and build logic to control which ad network gets called and when, or they use a third-party mediation platform.

When it comes to rewarded video offers, it’s easy to see the benefits. It’s truly a win-win scenario; revenue for you and rewards for your users to enjoy. However, many apps don’t have rewarded offers integrated strategically and miss the full potential of its benefits. Often, reward offer buttons idly sit in shop menus waiting for users to notice them, well not any more!

We are pleased to announce Upsight has been named to AppIndex’s list of ‘Top Mobile Ad Mediation Platforms’ and MobyAffiliates list of ‘Top Mobile Ad Servers’ along side industry heavyweights MoPub and AdMob.

Challenge

A year after its release, Hutch was looking for ways of improving overall revenue in MMX Racing while offloading ad monetization to free up internal resources for game development. They were managing rewarded and non-rewarded ad placements with a variety of ad networks, adjusting their waterfalls based on daily performance, and keeping up with multiple SDK update cycles. When it came time to implement a strict blacklist, Hutch had to manage individual blacklists with every network and confirm they were all being adhered to. As time and resource costs increased, they pursued a new solution.

The countdown to GDC is underway, are you ready? Pack your converse and zip-up hoodie, be prepared for no sleep, and severe liver damage.

There’s a lot of choice when it comes to ad mediation platforms to help mobile apps monetize their users through advertising. Of course, the reason and main motivator to use a mediation platform is that it allows app developers to utilize many different ad networks so they can get optimal performance and fill rate, or “yield” from their ad placements. In most cases, a single ad network simply doesn’t have enough ad demand to fill all requests from an app with global traffic.

Let’s set the scene - the Mobile Growth Summit took place last week in San Francisco and our very own VP Mediation Platform, Darren Keyes, joined the experts on the Ad Mediation Hot Seat to talk about what else, ad mediation. Here are the six hot topics discussed:

Upsight’s Ad Mediation Platform (formerly AdRally, by Fuse Powered) tops AppIndex’s list of ‘Top Mobile Ad Mediation Platforms in 2016’. Upsight sits alongside prestigious platforms like MoPub and AdMob, as one of the industry’s best mobile ad mediation platforms.

Challenge

Every publisher we speak with wants to know how we drive such high ad performance with our optimization layer. Although we’ve always been completely candid with our publishers in our meetings, we’ve never revealed our trade secrets around our performance in a documented form – until now.

The expression, “location, location, location”, is usually referenced in real estate, but is just as important when talking about ad placement in mobile apps and games. Ad placement is a key factor in the ad experience. Strategically placed ads can invite users to engage, giving them an optimal gaming experience.

We’ve all heard the rumour – rewarded video cannibalizes IAP revenue.

When it comes to integrating rewarded video ads, many mobile publishers are hesitant for fear of cannibalizing IAP revenue. Despite the fact that top publishers like Supercell have included rewarded video ads as part of their overall monetization strategy, many publishers still fear their players will grind out premium currency through video views – currency that would have otherwise been purchased as an IAP.

Casual Connect San Francisco has passed again and it was an excellent event – as always. Spread across three days, it remains one of the essential dates in the calendar for anyone who wants to learn the major trends in the mobile gaming industry and beyond.

COMPANY OVERVIEW:

• Founded in March 2006, OLX is owned by global media and digital company Naspers.

Mobile advertising is a key part of the app economy.  A report from Business Insider claims that mobile ad spend in the US could reach $42B in 2018, with marketers shifting away from desktop to appeal to the new mobile reality.

Growth hacking. It’s an unusual term and one that can have an elusive definition, but in the world of mobile, a good growth hacker can be the difference between success or failure.

WMS Improves Campaign Open Rates by 10x - Directly Increasing User Engagement with Upsight DataMine

As a marketer, you know that designing a marketing campaign takes careful planning and small changes in your campaign can result in big changes to your conversion rates. However, it can be difficult to know if those changes are impacting your results, good or bad. This is where AB testing becomes invaluable to your mobile marketing strategy.

WWDC, Apple’s flagship software conference, is well underway and the company has delivered its high profile keynote.

But what were the major announcements at the show? And what in particular will affect mobile marketers across the world? Here are our top five takeaways.

WWDC, Apple’s annual conference, will be kicking off next week in the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco.

Traditionally the big curtain raiser is Apple’s plans for a major developement to come in the following year.

A good push notification strategy has been an essential element of mobile marketing for a number of years now. The importance of providing timely and useful notifications to users on their tablets or smartphones has, in some cases, driven app launches up 278%: a key step towards improving retention and monetization.

So, you’ve decided to take the guessing out of your mobile marketing strategy by running some AB tests, but aren’t sure where to begin? We’ve got you covered. Here are a few AB tests you can start running right now in your app that could result in higher click through and conversion rates, with relatively little effort on your part.

App store marketing has just gotten turbo charged. The news that Apple Analytics and Google Play A/B testing are on the way means that you will finally be able to see how effective your app store marketing assets are at pushing downloads for your app.

Mobile has forever changed the way we do business. The customer experience is no longer fostered only with face-to-face communication, e-mails or even with an engaging website. Mobile, and specifically mobile apps, are now at the forefront of customer engagement. Considering consumers check their phones an average of 150 times a day (and for some of us many more) this presents an opportunity to engage with consumers anytime, anywhere and in any context.

In this week's mobile industry news roundup, discover how big brands are incorporating mobile into their marketing strategies, find out the easiest way to stay up-to-date on the NFL Draft, learn the 5 biggest push notification pitfalls and more.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) held their Smart Mobile Cross Marketing Effectiveness (SMoX) Roadshow this week in San Francisco to present their new study that's been two years in the making with major brands like MasterCard, The Coca-Cola Company and Walmart. The goal of the study: to assess the value of mobile in the overall marketing mix and to help marketers use mobile more effectively to drive their business goals.

The theory of “effective frequency” became a standard practice in the mad men era when measuring the effectiveness of TV media buys.

A picture says a thousand words...which is why we’re excited to announce that Upsight Push now supports emojis. Mobile marketers can communicate with their users through personalized and eye catching push notifications.

Many factors come in to play when a user decides whether to opt-in to receive an app’s push notifications. In every case there is one constant: app users want your push notifications to confer some sort of benefit. Whether that benefit is timely access to information, alerts about deals or offers, or updates on social activity in your app, users give your permission because they trust that you will follow through on this implicit promise.

In this week’s industry news roundup, dig deeper into what’s driving app revenue, find out where many Americans get their internet from, and discover how mobile is playing a big role in the NCAA Basketball tournament. Also, we had an April surprise: push notifications for REM sleep!

Did you know that mobile visits account for one-third of the traffic on top eCommerce sites and the current mobile commerce market size is estimated at $40 billion? If your business isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing out on a piece of that pie and losing potential customers to other companies that are mobile-ready.

Now that we’ve explored what in-app messages are and shared some tips to getting starting, we want to dig a little deeper into your mobile marketing strategy. Let’s discuss tactics to help you generate revenue through your in-app messages.

In this week’s industry news roundup, discover data’s role in March Madness tournament predictions, learn the new approval process for publishing android apps to Google Play and find out how big brands are improving marketing ROI by reallocating spend to mobile.

As a mobile marketer, we’re sure you are always looking for new ways to create fresh campaigns to increase your user base and ultimately drive more revenue. A/B testing is a great way to take small risks with your marketing campaigns, learn what resonates with your users and produces the highest conversion rates.

In this week’s mobile industry news roundup, read the latest updates about net neutrality, find out where to watch next Apple event and discover this years projected spike in mobile gaming revenues.

Today, we're excited to roll out the entirely new Upsight Marketing platform. Redesigned from the ground up, the new Upsight Marketing was built to handle the complexity of mobile data and the sophistication of modern mobile marketing strategies. What resulted was a radical simplification of traditional mobile marketing workflows - built to make running data-driven marketing campaigns easier than ever.

In this week’s mobile industry news roundup, read why mobile was all the buzz during the Super Bowl, how come some companies saw their search rankings lower and what’s behind mobile data traffic growth.

People clearly love mobile apps. According to Nielsen, Americans age 18 and up spend over 43 hours per month in the apps on their phones, with the the vast majority of time spent in fewer than 10 apps. So, as a mobile marketer, what are some tactics that you can employ to keep customers using your app?

In this week’s industry news roundup, discover why you may want to rethink your freemium strategy, what mobile entertainment and the U.S. Box Office have in common, and more.

When was the last time you went to a website on your phone and it was so difficult to see or loaded so slowly that you became impatient and left? It happens all of the time and you don’t want to be the business left behind by your mobile-focused customers.

After toasts and new year’s resolutions were made, the mobile industry hit the ground running this week ready to kick-off 2015. In this week’s industry roundup, read exciting predictions for the year, discover new ways for your brand to reach your mobile customer, and check-out the surprising focus at CES.

We want to wish our partners, friends and family a very happy holidays and send a huge thank you for your continued support this year.

In the world of mobile applications, the ability to predict a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) is akin to finding the Holy Grail of mobile analytics. Imagine if you knew how much your customers were going to spend in your app over their entire lifetime. It’d be an incredible business advantage, one with uses beyond just being able to accurately forecast your revenue for investors.

In this week’s mobile industry news roundup, check out how Cyber Monday trends dominated mobile this week, discover a fresh approach to digital advertising and figure out what to get your sister for Christmas.

Today we're excited to roll out the next generation of Upsight DataMine. Not only is our new mobile business intelligence platform 2x faster, but we added a number of new capabilities to help data analysts and marketers better connect their data across multiple channels - including mobile, online and real-world. 

At a basic level, cohort analysis is a type of segmentation. The difference is that it’s based on a common characteristic or experience shared by a group of customers within a defined period of time.

“Tis the season of holiday cheer, sharing time with loved ones, and let’s not forget - getting your app into gear for the holiday surge.

It’s only been a few days since Thanksgiving, and we’re already seeing mobile play a significant role in the customer experience this holiday season.

Since we know you are busy preparing to eat lots of turkey and seeking out the best shopping deals, we’ve compiled some of the top stories floating around the mobile industry this week. Discover trends in holiday shopping on mobile phones, take a peek at how attached consumers are to their devices, get 5 tips on how to leverage big data in your app, and more.

Staying ahead of today’s savvy mobile users and keeping them engaged in your app is a top challenge for mobile marketers and developers. Not only is it getting more expensive to acquire users, it’s getting difficult to keep their attention when they have so many alternative options.

In today’s mobile and tech-savvy world, the term “Big Data” has become all the buzz. This mass collection of data allows us to pull information about users from multiple sources, including web, social, and mobile platforms.

As we head into 2015, we are starting to look back and reflect on 2014 and beginning to look forward to the next year. From purchasing your eggnog lattes or mobile games to cheering on your favorite NBA team, the importance of creating an engaging and loyal customer experience on mobile continues to be a huge focus.

Smartphones continue to change the game. Observing consumers to determine their behaviors and habits will show who they are, what makes them tick, and why they buy what they buy.

We may have blocked this out of our minds, but it’s funny to think that just a few years ago most business leaders were skeptical about the future of social as a customer engagement outlet.

Smartphones are quickly taking center stage in your customers’ lives, generating mountains of data ripe for marketing analysis. Mobile data is a “customer data gold mine” and marketers should leverage this data to create contextual mobile moments that engage your customers, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

Holiday campaigns are in full swing this week and creating a strong mobile strategy is a common focus among many of the top retailers. From helping you locate an item in a store to paying for your bill at a restaurant to writing a letter to Santa, this holiday season is all about mobile.

Over the past month, Apple Pay has put the spotlight on mobile payments. This new form of “express pay” is shaking up the industry, but it’s certainly not the first nor will it be the last technology that encourages brands and customers to change the way they interact.

These days everyone is using some type of smartphone to make their lives more convenient. So much so, that it's no longer a rare occasion when your grandmother whips out her new iPhone 6 to request an Uber on a Saturday evening. Needless to say, we've come a long way since flip phones...we've even come a long way since mobile-optimized websites.

Happy Halloween! From brands embarking on mobile to ApplePay and iOS 8 adoption rates, check out what's going on in the mobile industry this week.

What is it about mobile games that make them so hard to put down sometimes? Online Psychology Degrees put together an infographic outlining what makes our favorite games so loveable.

Data is the foundation of good marketing. A recently released Econsultancy report, tells us that 92% of digital marketers know that analytics drive actionable recommendations that make an impact.

The Upsight team is headed down to LA for GDC Next and the App Developers Conference next week (November 3-4). We are excited to participate as a sponsor at the show as well as partner again with local meet-up group, MoDev LA, for a mixer. If you’re in the area, we’d love to see you.

Build or buy? For many, the decision to go in-house or to an outside data analytics provider boils down to simple economics: is it cheaper to build from scratch or buy a platform? A lot of companies opt for the former. After all, any respectable mobile developer already has a team of engineers. Grabbing a few to create a data analytics solution shouldn’t be that hard, right?

Throughout the year, we’ve been keeping an eye on the most effective and creative ways to keep users engaged. We compiled five tips companies can user to better leverage the power of mobile to drive engagement and create a better app experience.

We wanted to share the news that Upsight has sold the Playhaven Ad Network to Science Inc.

iOS 8 launched on Wednesday and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launched on Friday, and we’ve been monitoring our network to track adoption rates for Apple’s latest sensations.

Last week, we noticed early on that adoption of iOS 8 was tracking much slower than the adoption of iOS 7 the previous year. Perhaps the attention and excitement around the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus halted the typical early adopters from downloading the new software on what will soon be an old phone. Nonetheless, after 5 days we’re seeing iOS 8 slowing gaining momentum with 24% adoption rates across Apple devices, but this is still significantly lower than iOS 7 adoption from last year that was at 64.5% adoption at day 5.

At Casual Connect USA taking place in our hometown once again this year, Upsight’s CEO Andy Yang talked about consolidation in the mobile games industry – why this is happening, what actions are being taken, and what this means for the future of the games industry.

GDC Europe (August 11-13) and Gamescom (August 13-17) are just around the corner, and we’re excited to partner with PocketGamer this year to host some great events in Cologne, Germany. If you are in the area, we’d love to see you.

Today, we’re excited to launch Upsight Geo – a new solution to help mobile marketers discover where their users are in the real world and engage them with relevant marketing campaigns.

Upsight owns and operates PlayHaven, a non-incentivized mobile ad network. Thousands of mobile app developers publish PlayHaven Ads in their apps – generating revenue for publishers and high quality app installs for advertisers.

PlayHaven released a new algorithm that resulted in a material, sustained improvement to performance. Global iOS eCPMs are up 92% since February. This has been a broad-based, non-bid related change as the impression to conversion rate has improved 31% as well. Overall, we’re now significantly better at presenting users with advertisements that they find valuable.

We had the pleasure of speaking at Casual Connect Asia in Singapore a few weeks ago – sharing our opinions and insights on how consolidation is impacting the mobile games industry. Shawn Bonham, who leads operations and strategy for APAC out of our Japan office, shed light on recent consolidation trends in the mobile games industry (even our own merger!), and what developers can expect in the next 3-5 years.

When we announced the newly combined Upsight platform at GDC, we released a new, native SDK for our iOS and Android developers. Two months later, our SDK has been integrated into thousands of apps worldwide – helping developers like you harness the power of our integrated analytics and marketing platform.

When Upsight launched back at GDC, we were excited to unveil our analytics and marketing platform to the mobile developer community. In 3 short months, the Kontagent and PlayHaven teams came together, formed one company, and launched a brand new platform combining both of our products. And we’ve had a great run since the launch – adding thousands of apps since launch. Handling over 500B events per month,

Upsight Data Mine is an industry-leading mobile analytics data mining platform. Built on top of Hadoop with a HiveQL interface, Data Mine allows you to query your entire catalog of raw data and get deeper metrics beyond what’s possible in standard mobile analytics dashboards. Available to Upsight Enterprise customers, Data Mine offers some powerful features:

I love peanut butter. I love chocolate. The only thing I love more than either is the two as a combination. Today, the artist formerly known as Kontagent+PlayHaven, is launching an equally delicious combination for app developers.

Candy Crush Saga has taken Facebook and mobile by storm, earning a permanent spot on smartphones, tablets and desktops around the world. But what really has the industry in a tizzy is that the game has only been out for about five months.