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Adways’ Party Track begins integration with 5Rocks to create one-stop mobile analytics solution

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Back in January we reported that Tokyo-based digital advertising network and game publisher Adways has invested in and partnered with Korean growth hacking startup 5Rocks. At the time we mentioned that Adways planned to integrate 5Rocks segment-specific user behavior analytics into its own app tracking tool Party Track, in an effort to make it a one-stop analytics solution for marketing attribution and insights into in-app user behavior. According to a brief announcement today, that integration has now finally begun. Adways CEO Haruhisa Okamura made a brief statement: Adways is always seeking the way to support our clients to maximize the profit by using our service – last year we released Party Track and realized the need to focus on not only ad-analysis but more detailed analysis on user basis. I believe this business tie-up with 5Rocks will help app developers to solve more issues.

Party Track

Back in January we reported that Tokyo-based digital advertising network and game publisher Adways has invested in and partnered with Korean growth hacking startup 5Rocks. At the time we mentioned that Adways planned to integrate 5Rocks segment-specific user behavior analytics into its own app tracking tool Party Track, in an effort to make it a one-stop analytics solution for marketing attribution and insights into in-app user behavior.

According to a brief announcement today, that integration has now finally begun. Adways CEO Haruhisa Okamura made a brief statement:

Adways is always seeking the way to support our clients to maximize the profit by using our service – last year we released Party Track and realized the need to focus on not only ad-analysis but more detailed analysis on user basis. I believe this business tie-up with 5Rocks will help app developers to solve more issues.

Korean growth hacking tool 5Rocks comes out of beta, planning global expansion

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See the original version of this article, written in Japanese We have mentioned 5Rocks, a Korean-based growth hacking tool for mobile apps many times before. In August of 2013, the startup raised $2.3 million from Japanese venture capital Global Brain, and it expanded the business to Japan [1]. The product has been adopted by many game developers such as Gumi, Pokelabo, MyNet, Mutations Studio, KLab and NewsTech. The beta version has been operating for more than a half year now, but recently on April 2nd, the official version of 5Rocks was finally released, and is available in five languages, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English, and Russian. The pricing for the Japanese market was announced as well. There is a charge of one yen (about $0.01) is charged for each monthly active user for an app. If you have less than 10,000 MAU, then it’s free. The maximum fee would be 300,000 yen ($3000), for any app that has more than 30,000 MAU. 5Rocks offers a SDK as well, which game developers can implement into their app to acquire and analyze users activity data. In this new official version, 5Rocks added some new features based on the feedback from their beta phase,…

5rocks_featuedimage

See the original version of this article, written in Japanese

We have mentioned 5Rocks, a Korean-based growth hacking tool for mobile apps many times before. In August of 2013, the startup raised $2.3 million from Japanese venture capital Global Brain, and it expanded the business to Japan [1]. The product has been adopted by many game developers such as Gumi, Pokelabo, MyNet, Mutations Studio, KLab and NewsTech. The beta version has been operating for more than a half year now, but recently on April 2nd, the official version of 5Rocks was finally released, and is available in five languages, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English, and Russian.

The pricing for the Japanese market was announced as well. There is a charge of one yen (about $0.01) is charged for each monthly active user for an app. If you have less than 10,000 MAU, then it’s free. The maximum fee would be 300,000 yen ($3000), for any app that has more than 30,000 MAU.

5Rocks offers a SDK as well, which game developers can implement into their app to acquire and analyze users activity data. In this new official version, 5Rocks added some new features based on the feedback from their beta phase, including the ability to chart correlation of user activity (who log-in regularly) and sales.

5rocks-userstat
The chart indicates the variation of users, according to frequency of gameplay

5rocks-salesstat
A chart showing sales

The chart showing the number of the users playing a game in real time was particularly interesting (see below). I hear that some game developers even project this chart on a big screen in their office just to help motivate employees.

5rocks-useraccess-realtimestat

A growth hacking tool needs more than just data acquisition and the analysis. It needs to let game developers take action based on results. For that purpose, 5Rocks provide two added features: promotion and push-notification. Both functions target specific clusters of users based on certain attributes and lets game developers to send messages to those users’ smartphones by uploading images or text to 5Rocks’ dashboard. These features are adopted in the SDK, so members in charge of marketing can proceed with promotions or A/B tests without requiring support from engineers.

5rocks-campaign1
Promotion page: Select user attributes on the left. The image on the right is the ad for the promotion.

5rocks-campaign2
The promotion displayed in the app

According to Japan country manager, Yasuo Sato, 5Rocks has been adopted by about 80 game developers in Korea and Japan and about 200 apps. The company plans to expand to elsewhere in Asia, with the goal of being used by 3000 apps by the end of this year.

The competition in this field is quite fierce, with Kaizen’s planBCD just announcing that it has raised $5 million, and will expand to the US. There’s also Singapore-based Unicon which operates Fello, and CyberAgent subsidiary Sirok which operates Growth Push, Growth Replay, and Growth Point.


  1. The startup began as an online reservation application, but has since evolved to different business. ↩

Japan’s Adways partners with Korean growth hacking startup 5Rocks

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year. Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain. It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business. Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients. Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

partytrack

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year.

Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain.

It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business.

Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients.

Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

Japanese VC invests $2.3M in Korean growth hacking startup

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5Rocks is a Korean startup focused on providing business intelligence (BI) tools for mobile gaming developers. The startup announced today that it has raised 2.55 billion Korean won (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese venture capital Global Brain. For the latter, this represents its first investment in a Korean startup. Tokyo-based Global Brain has formed joint investment funds with established businesses such as Japanese telco KDDI and internet portal Nifty. The firm boasts a strong portfolio of notable Japanese tech startups including Nanapi, Monoco, Rarejob, and Origami. 5Rocks was launched back in September of 2010 and raised 2 billion won ($1.8 million) from Seoul-based Stone Bridge Capital. The startup was previously known as Ablar Company, providing a mobile-based restaurant finder and booking services for Korean consumers. Back in June, the company rebranded itself as 5Rocks and started developing the mobile BI tools, capitalizing on its previous experience in the mobile app business. The company launched a closed beta version of its BI tools back in late June. A month after launch the tools were adopted by many local game developers including Sunday Toz, Link Tomorrow, Gamevil, Load Complete, Rocket Oz, and Momo. In terms of differentiation from similar tools like Micro…

Global Brain and 5Rocks
From the right: Nobutake Suzuki (Global Brain), Yasuhiko Yurimoto (Global Brain CEO), Changsu Lee (5Rocks CEO), Jeong Seok Roh (5Rocks CSO).

5Rocks is a Korean startup focused on providing business intelligence (BI) tools for mobile gaming developers. The startup announced today that it has raised 2.55 billion Korean won (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese venture capital Global Brain.

For the latter, this represents its first investment in a Korean startup. Tokyo-based Global Brain has formed joint investment funds with established businesses such as Japanese telco KDDI and internet portal Nifty. The firm boasts a strong portfolio of notable Japanese tech startups including Nanapi, Monoco, Rarejob, and Origami.

5Rocks was launched back in September of 2010 and raised 2 billion won ($1.8 million) from Seoul-based Stone Bridge Capital. The startup was previously known as Ablar Company, providing a mobile-based restaurant finder and booking services for Korean consumers. Back in June, the company rebranded itself as 5Rocks and started developing the mobile BI tools, capitalizing on its previous experience in the mobile app business.

The company launched a closed beta version of its BI tools back in late June. A month after launch the tools were adopted by many local game developers including Sunday Toz, Link Tomorrow, Gamevil, Load Complete, Rocket Oz, and Momo. In terms of differentiation from similar tools like Micro Strategy and Yellowfin, 5Rocks’ solutions are more niche-focused, and dedicated to improving user retention in mobile gaming apps.

The startup revealed that it will start soon providing a closed beta version to five Japanese game developers: Pokelabo, MyNet, Mutations Studio, KLab and NewsTech. Following its entry into the Japanese market, they are planning business expansion to Mainland China.

Here in Japan, we have seen several startups competing in this space, including planBCD, Growth Push, and Fello. With 5Rocks now also in the arena, these startups will be forced to be deliver even better features moving forward.

(Thanks to beSUCCESS for pointing out this one, and for image above)

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