A Quick Sitecore Roadmap Looking at the Next Year #sitecoresym

Sitecore's Senior VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia provided an updated Roadmap for Sitecore's stable of product offerings during the Sitecore Symposium 2012 North America in Las Vegas. There's quite a few interesting improvements and additions that will be of interest to both business and technical users.

Here's the highlights of the Roadmap Darren discussed. 

Near Term Additions for Q4 2012

• Version 6.6 of Sitecore CMS will be released
• Good news for Mobile developers as this will include Sitecore's Mobile SDK and a very sophisticated system for simulation of content on many mobile device classes
• Updates to Sitecore's DMS system, adding Engagement Intelligence features that will be of great use to business and marketing users
• A refresh to the Foundry product based on Sitecore CMS v6.6 and an update to their Social Connected tool

First Quarter 2013

• A big, much-anticipated update to Sitecore CMS with the release of Sitecore 7, which includes large scale item storage support
• For business users there's some new and very powerful additions to DMS with the Visual Path Analysis tool which allows marketing folks to dig deeply into how users are reaching (or not) various content
• Email Campaign Manager 2.0 will also be released

Second Quarter 2013

A lot of technical and infrastructure goodies come in Q2 2013, including:

• A refresh to the new SPEAK UI platform
• Updates to DMS to support the CRM Service Layer
• A refresh of the Sitecore Intranet Portal product based on Sitecore CMS v6.6
• Sitecore's DMS will integrate with Sitecore eCommerce, and DMS will become available on Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform
• The Sitecore Adaptive Print Studio will gain ability to interact directly with files produced by Adobe InDesign

Second Half of 2013

• Some significant updates to the core CMS functionality with updates to Sitecore CMS workflow, new features for content reuse, and finally the beginnings of some usability improvements to the administrative interface which will accelerate in the future
• Launch of Big Data for Sitecore's DMS. With all the tracking and analytic requirements of Sitecore's Customer Engagement features, the ability to manage the data requirements of the system has been a concern from Day 1. With this update the DMS system should be able to handle many terabytes of analytic data with the option of storing that data in a variety of locations both locally and in the cloud

… and Beyond

• Significant enhancements to the existing Sitecore Personalization features, including the ability to personalize down to the field level within the CMS

About the Author

Ryan Bennett is a certified Sitecore developer and Principal Solutions Architect at San Francisco-based consulting firm Cylogy, Inc.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Zynga's New Game: A Bet On Real-Money Gambling

As Zynga plans to cut staff and more than a dozen games from its offerings, it's paddling across the pond looking to get lucky with online casino games in the U.K. Can the beleaguered company cash in by letting players cash out?

Zynga's playing a new game, and this time, it's hoping to cash in by letting gamers cash out.

Alongside its third-quarter earnings report yesterday, Zynga announced an interesting but not altogether surprising partnership with bwin.party, one of the largest online real-money gaming operators, to bring users in the U.K. a host of games they will be able to play using (and potentially winning) cold, hard, real cash.

Zynga joins competitors in the space such as Big Fish, which in August announced it would start letting U.K. players cash out on casino games. It's worth nothing that Zynga's old ball and chain, Facebook, also announced in August it would partner with Gamesys, a U.K.-based online gambling operator, to let 18+ players of its Bingo Friendzy app play for cash.

Through the bwin.party partnership, Zynga says its real-money games service across the pond will bring 180 online casino games, including slots, roulette, and blackjack, to the U.K.--where online gambling is legal, unlike in the United States--in the first half of 2013. The company says to also expect a real-money version of Poker, as well as a FarmVille-branded slots game.

"Partnering with an established leader like bwin.party is a strategic and prudent way for us to enter a key RMG market while giving local players the real money games they've been asking us for," Zynga's corporate and business development EVP Barry Cottle said in a statement.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has made it known for awhile that the social games company would eventually move into the real-money space. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported Zynga was investing in lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., and California to bring real-money gambling stateside.

Zynga's signaled interest in the real-money games space makes sense for its bottom line. According to bwin.party, the global online casino market is expected to reach $8 billion by 2015, while a BI Intelligence report pegs the social gaming market at $5 billion in the same period. When you're raking in more revenue per individual user, versus the pennies-on-the-dollar monthly returns from massively popular social games such as Words With Friends, it's helpful not to have to depend on revenue streams such as advertiser spending, which Zynga reported was down 24% in the last quarter. (Though some industry experts say similar deals tend to drive little revenue for the brand--in this case, Zynga--after both the operator and the affiliates through which it distributes the branded games claim their respective shares.)

The tradeoff is that although each real-money game will be more niche focused--and thus reaching a smaller core group of users than a Words With Friends--they will each drive higher average revenue per user.

"We need to do a better job segmenting our audience and bringing more games to them that may be for somewhat narrower parts of the audience, but that achieve higher [average revenue per user]," Pincus said on the post-earnings conference call yesterday.

Although the news of the partnership prompted some, including investors, to throw Zynga a bone for making a significant first step toward better-monetizing its portfolio, the conspicuous lack of details offered up by Zynga execs during the post-earnings call left more to be desired by others.

"The deal, to be blunt, is not at all interesting. It's a traditional, plain-vanilla, run-of-the-mill branding deal with bwin.party," says Chris Griffin, CEO of Betable, whose platform allows developers to bake a real-money component into their games without having to obtain their own appropriate gaming licenses.

Zynga execs repeatedly declined to share more information about the financial breakdown of the deal during yesterday's call, but a bwin.party rep confirmed the Zynga-branded casino games portfolio "will include both slots that we develop in-house as well as those we license from other developers." The FarmVille-branded casino slots, for example, are being created within bwin.party's Games Studio, which runs on a two-week release cycle for new slot games.

Griffin said the deal's provisions involve little more than Zynga slapping a prominent brand such as FarmVille on a generic casino game created, operated, and distributed to an affiliate network by bwin.party. That's a very different concept than Zynga adding real-money support to games it produces in-house, he says, which stifles the company's ability to play to its strengths: creating and marketing compelling games.

"These are not Zynga games," Griffin says. "These are basically bwin.party games wearing Zynga clothing."

Ed note: We have reached out to Zynga and bwin.party for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

ePrize Passbook Integration Helps Marketers Reward Customers On the Go

ePrize, providers of online promotions and contests, has announced its integration into Apple's Passbook app for mobile access to rewards, contest offerings, coupons and loyalty programs.

Passbook, a new Apple iOS 6 feature, helps people corral their airline info, coffee house cards and concert and movie tickets into one place. ePrize is tapping into Passbook to allow its own digital engagement platform to coexist along with customers' other mobile wallet-like items.

Real-Time Rewards

In business for over a decade, ePrize provides a full suite of advertising and promotions to many popular websites. It makes use of a mobile device's geolocation to offer coupons when a person walks by a participating store. In an interview, David Wachs, ePrize's vice president of the mobile division, said that as iPhone 5 users start to take advantage of Passbook, it presents a great opportunity for ePrize.

In January, ePrize bought Cellit, a company more focused on mobile than on standalone sites. The Cellit buy brought Wachs into the fold, and the new Passbook integration is the next step for the combined companies. Companies hire ePrize to design and build contest and promotion websites, and then connect out to the ePrize-hosted site, which looks and feels just like the companion site it is working with. 

ePrize contest in the Passbook app helps incentivize customer behavior.
 

Now that ePrize is focusing more on mobile, Wachs believes that Passbook integration is just the first step. Eventually, he said, other mobile operating systems will have Passbook-type apps that ePrize can work with.

Google's Android OS has the Google Wallet app, but it has more to do with transactions, something Passbook doesn't include. Google Wallet allows people to buy things with their smartphone and near field communication technology, something that, for a variety of reasons, has yet to become very widespread. 

In order to really make use of apps like Wallet, people need to be connected all the time, and stores need to have the technology to allow the NFC feature to work as well. Those are just two of the roadblocks in the way for Wallet. With Passbook, there is less focus on those transactions, and that's where the ePrize instant rewards and coupon reminders come in.

"Apple is doing things without credit cards, which is smart," Wachs remarked.

Apps Over Email

With traditional coupons and rewards, people have to go into their email to redeem them. An ePrize-based coupon can be saved right into Passbook and redeemed from there. Additionally, any loyalty programs used can have the points updated right in the Passbook app.

As for other geolocation features, if someone has an ePrize coupon that is about to expire, Passbook can remind them once they get close to the store's physical location. 

All this activity is tracked and stored by ePrize and analyzed to improve performance, helping digital marketing campaigns be more efficient. EPrize has over 800 customers worldwide, and it provides fully customized promotion and mobile marketing programs of various sizes. ePrize also has integrations with systems like Salesforce and SurveyMonkey. Pricing for ePrize products will depend on what the customers need, so that information is not publicly available.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com