I love using widgets. I probably have too many of them on my phone’s home screen. News apps, weather apps, stocks, stats. I love being able to glance through them without opening the corresponding apps. This led me to realize though that I have seen very few widgets for mobile games. As I started working…
Author: James O'Claire
Stay up to date with the latest tech new with Hacker News Widget & App
Hacker News is one of my go to sites to read the best takes on the latest tech news. Probably the reason I keep going back to it is the honest discussions and supportive community. But you probably already know this, since Hacker News is one of the most popular tech news sources out there….
I built my own very simple strategy game
It certainly isn’t anything amazing, but it was something that I really wanted to do for myself. After recently stepping away from my position at Bubbleye and taking a month or two to enjoy some camping, family time and generally enjoying life I finally got back to Taipei and realized I had a unique opportunity…
How to see traffic from your Android Device
GREEN: background processes for emulator and mitmproxy. RED: Running game (portrait but on side) with a pink banner ad at bottom. YELLOW: mitmproxy captured traffic with another example banner ad.
Is Someone Else Using Your Game’s Monetization IDs?
Looking around app-ads.txt files one of the first things I was excited to check was whether DIRECT publisher IDs show up on other unrelated apps. To do this I ignored any apps that shared the same developer contact URL or Developer IDs. This doesn’t catch 100% of the legitimate publishers I checked, as the examples…
What A Mobile Ad Monopoly Looks Like
Google’s market share in in-app advertising is unmistakably dominant. The data above was scraped from 100k+ Google Play Store & Apple App Store apps (with a slight emphasis on games) who use advertising for monetization. This public data is made possible by adoption of IAB’s app-ads.txt standard which allows buyers and sellers to cross verify…
Can You Use AI to Generate Marketing Creatives?
Disclaimer: All images and ads in this post are for spec commercial examples only. The originator of thecommercial is not affiliated with, connected to, nor sponsored or endorsedby Clash of Clans (or Starbucks). TLDR: Fully formed art, but difficult to control details AI Text to image models have seen explosive growth the past year matched…
The Future of VR: Open Frontier or Walled Gardens
There is a growing discrepancy between the vision and reality of VR. For decades, science fiction and technology visionaries foresaw a future where consumers were able to freely traverse virtual reality like surfing the web. Virtual reality was seen as an open platform where millions of people could share, consume and explore content. Instead of…
To Love & Hate in the World of Advertising
“I hate ads, who likes to see ads?” Recently my mother came to visit me in Taipei. On the drive from the airport we talked about my startup, Bubbleye, and how we predict a user’s interests in mobile ads. Her response: “I hate ads, who wants to see ads?” She’s right, no one wants to see…
Why I started up away from home, and you should too
Growing up in the North Bay I was always aware of the Silicon Valley tech scene. Yet I was more interested in experiencing the world away from home so I traveled to Africa, went to college in LA and for my career I went to Asia. After working for Elex Tech & Cheetah Mobile, I started at my…