Marketing

We've developed a unified four-layer model for app promotion and added our recommendations.

Before we wrote this article we had our apps downloaded over two million times, ran about 50 large promotional campaigns, and made it onto the App Store top-lists in over 24 countries to finally combine all of it into a single workflow.

You won’t find almost any obvious stuff about keywords, nice-looking icons, screenshots, or ad campaigns in this article. We’ve tried to develop a unified model for a product-focused company based on our experience by answering the questions “What? When? Why?” and even “And what then?”

If you’re developing your own app, want to start developing one, or just have a friend who’s a developer or marketing professional at a product-focused company, you’ll find lots of useful information in this article.

“Instead of using technology to automate processes, think about using technology to enhance human interaction.” ~ Tony Zambito, Lead authority in Buyer Personas.

Do you know ~ according to research, 93% of customers make purchase decisions based on visual appearance. Visual elements of your brand are the key deciding factors for a majority of potential customers.

Your logo, website colors, chatbot texts, etc all have an impact on the psychology of people who come across them. Some colors or features attract them and some make them leave your website instantly.

In this era, interactive features with the help of technologies like Artificial intelligence are enhancing such effects. AI has the power to add interactive elements to your presentation. This creates a connection between your company and its customers.

Hi! Though the 2019 conference season is not over yet, we'd like to talk about the bug-finding challenges we offered to visitors at our booth during the past conferences. Starting with the fall of 2019, we've been bringing a new set of challenges, so we can now reveal the solutions to the previous tasks of 2018 and the first half of 2019 – after all, many of them came from previously posted articles, and we had a link or QR code with information about the respective articles printed on our challenge leaflets.

With the Asian market rapidly growing, almost every ambitious IT product sooner or later faces the challenge of localization for this region. And without knowing all its facets any localization project is rather doomed to fail. That’s why we at Alconost have decided to translate and share with you the article on localizing games for Asia by Plarium, a global game developer with solid experience in game localization. We found here some useful approaches that are also valid for our localization projects and hope that you’ll like the reading, too.

For Western developers, entering the Asian market is like entering outer space, only 30 megabytes heavier. Localizing games into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean requires a Herculean effort. You need to account for certain technical requirements and scrupulously research the market and the target audience’s mindset. But if this is your dream, keep reading — our experience should stand you in good stead.

Setting up the content localization and, thus, configuring the interface language of the product in such a way that the right language is rendered to the right user is extremely important for each digital platform. That’s why we have decided to translate and share with you this expert article by Nicolai Goshin from Hellicht Medien.

And we strongly hope that some strategic points would be valuable for your localization projects!

Background and preliminary considerations

Digital projects targeting audiences in different countries or different language areas are doomed to take advantage of localization strategies. So we must answer the following question: which users should be given which content in which languages? The question at the first sight seems simple. But later in this article we will point out why this topic is, in fact, complex. And, of course, we will also address how to deal with this complexity.

Let's assume a scenario in which content (for example, an online magazine) is available in three languages: German, English, and Arabic. The goal is ideally to provide content to each user in their native language. If this is not possible, the content should be provided to the user in the language that they best understand apart from their mother tongue.

About the game Streets of Rogue

In 2017 tinyBuild released Streets of Rogue, a unique visual successor to the hit game Punch Club. Streets of Rogue is remarkable for the variety of its game features and genre elements. The developers combined an intense top-down roguelike, a retro pixel art style, an atmosphere of irrepressible excitement, classic character levelling, and questing. The game revolves around playing through a series of randomly generated cities. This can be accomplished via brute force, stealth, or hacking — it’s up to you!

How and why the game needed to be localized

Streets of Rogue quickly garnered a warm reception from gamers and the press alike, so tinyBuild naturally decided to bring the game to a wider international audience.

Recently we at Alconost were producing several videos for games and, in the process of working with clients, we heard questions again that we had heard before: what should we show, should the video have a voiceover or not, how expensive is it to translate into multiple languages, what source materials do we need, how can we capture video of the screen of a mobile device… To answer these burning questions once and for all, we would like to share with you and give specific examples of how we make videos for games.

We think our experience will be useful both to anyone who is trying to produce video independently and to developers who are outsourcing creation of video for their games.

Written by Alconost

Nowadays, visual communication is crucial. So, companies that do not work on enhancing it, leave opportunities to capture more leads, and grow business. In this post, we will go through some useful tools for content editing and social media storytelling. Let's go!

In the previous article, we discussed the most important languages for app localization. Soon afterward we received several requests to share our perspective on the key languages for game localization. That’s why we came up with this new post.

We’ve analyzed localization languages from the perspective of return on investment.

There are numerous case studies, research projects, and forecasts regarding the most promising countries and languages for game localization. In this article, we’re going to examine the game language issue from the perspective of the most efficient allocation of your localization budget.

What are the highest- and lowest-priority objectives when it comes to game localization?

We suggest raising this question first before selecting localization languages. Why? Because, depending on the type of game you’re localizing, your business objectives, and your audience’s expectations, there are several levels of localization.

You can do the minimum required and stop at the first level, or you can go further with a step-by-step localization and maximize outreach.

The first thing to start with is the localization of keywords and game description for app stores. This alone might work perfectly well if your game has little to no text or voice and its interface design is fully compatible with the standards of the country you are targeting.

Next, if your game contains text-based instructions, you have no choice but to translate them. In addition, other design choices will also need adjustments in terms of colors, numbers, and other local standards.

Finally, voice-over, if present in the game, must be translated as well, or at least subtitled. Or you can fully complete the localization process by rerecording voice-over in your target languages, thereby providing the perfect user experience.

Written by Alconost

According to predictions of the analytical platform App Annie, interest in mobile apps will enjoy stable growth over the next four years. So, if you’re considering bringing your app to new markets, this is the time to do it.

During my two years as the localization manager, I came to understand that localization has its own rules, and knowing them can help you adapt any product for a new market quickly and competently. These principles will be useful for anyone who wants to localize an app but doesn’t know where to start.

1. Evaluate the potential

Start with the most important thing: figuring out which languages you need to localize your app into and determining whether or not localization is justified at all.

Here’s an example from my experience: Israel isn't a high-priority market for Badoo, but the app is localized into modern Hebrew. Moreover, only 6% of Israeli Badoo users actually run the app in Hebrew (as a comparison, 62.5% of Israeli users speak English). In this particular case, localization is justified even with these statistics, but a similar situation could represent a losing proposition for your app. So, study your market.

Attackers and defenders to face off in digital metropolis security challenge featuring real-world critical infrastructure and technologies.



Cybersecurity experts at Positive Technologies and Hack In The Box are inviting red and blue team security specialists to test their skills attacking and defending a full-scale modern city at The Standoff Cyberbattle held during HITB+ CyberWeek. This mock digital metropolis with full IT and OT infrastructure including traffic systems, electrical plants, and transportation networks will feature all the latest technologies used in actual critical infrastructure installations, allowing players to expose security issues and the impact they might have on the real world.

App localization statistics, case studies and analytics

The goal of every app developer, product manager, and marketing manager is to drive their app’s visibility and broaden its coverage. At the same time, this is also a way to approach the ultimate business goal of increasing monthly active users and revenue.

This brings us to the idea of app localization, which allows a product to reach new geographical regions and satisfy specific needs and user expectations. As such, localization must address multiple linguistic, cultural, regional, and religious considerations.

Written by Alconost

A/B test is not enough

There is a common opinion that A/B test is a universal, half-automatic tool that always helps to increase conversion, loyalty and UX. However misinterpretation of results or wrong sampling leads to the loss of loyal audience and decrease of margin. Why? A/B is based on the basic assumption that this sample is homogeneous and representative, scalability of results. In reality, the audience is heterogeneous — recall the “20/80” distribution for income. Heterogeneity means that sensitivity to A/B varies significantly within the sample.

Every manager knows what it is like to solve a problem. This is a daily activity for many people and it usually leads to the best outcomes. If you ignore or admit problems in your business, competitors can quickly pass you and your company will hang behind.

Any action that is aimed to solve a problem should identify this particular problem and its causes. Understanding the causes, you'll be able to set priorities and choose alternatives for the best solution, as well as directly implement this solution. The ability to solve internal and external problems timely and make responsible decisions is what managers should learn from the very start of their career. In this article, we’ll identify powerful problem-solving activities and analyze some effective techniques and exercises for teamwork.

Microgaming is justly considered a founding father of the online gambling industry as it created the world’s first online casino platform back in 1994. And the first mobile casino was launched in 2004, again by Microgaming. Over the years, the brand’s legendary casino products have gained a high-profile reputation.

Backlog prioritization requires simplification and weighting of tasks. Each one belongs to strategy like ads acquisition or CRO. We may consider turnover, operational costs, other metrics as input; profit margin, ROI — as output in case of retail. The perfect goal is to find 20/80 solution and focus resources on a single strategy at a time. Metrics tied to strategies gives the dimension of model. Sometimes unit economy relations are violated because of non-linearity. In practice it means low/insignificant correlation and poor regression. Example: it is impossible to separate acquisition and conversion — the quantity of acquisition affect its quality and vice versa. Decomposition of tasks/strategies assumes linear decomposition of nonlinear system. Besides nonlinear statistical evaluation of strategies is required when CJM can't be tracked or online/offline channels can't be separated.

Let's say, your website offers content, products, or services for people from different regions or countries who speak different languages. Search engines will probably count this as duplicate content, leading to low rankings.

Successful decisions are being achieved by the efforts of individuals. Their collaboration is the key to success. No matter if they have won a basketball champ or released a new software product.

Where does the team path to success begin? In this post, we share ten essential tips on how to improve team meeting discussions and describe five powerful methods that accelerate brainstorming sessions. IT professionals, this will perfectly suit you too.

WordPress SEO plugins will help you automatically add meta tags, load pages faster, correct redirection mistakes, optimize images, etc. Free and premium versions of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO in 2019 are listed down below.

What is redirection?

Redirection is a way of forwarding the user to the URL that is different from the one they initially clicked on. Down below some of the most common types of redirection are listed.