Industry Interview: Bingo, a growing game David Jané, Bingo Product Manager, Akamon Entertainment

1. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
David Jané, Bingo Product Manager,
Akamon Entertainment
© FC Business Intelligence ® 2012

2. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
INTRODUCTION David was brought on board by Akamon Entertainment’s
Chairman Carlos Blanco, who he had worked with in the early
2000s. As Head of Bingo, he is responsible for business, design
and technical development of all Bingo games, working to
make them the most played on all platforms.
In his role, David makes the most of his extensive experience in
gaming and new technology, which he gained from founding his
own website torneosonline.com, coordinating the Games Area at
Campus Party, the largest technological event in the world, and
co-founding Volcanic Internet, a company specialising in graphic
design and new technology for the Internet.
David feels lucky to work in what he is passionate about and
thrives on working on fun projects with a strong innovative
element and with enthusiastic teams. So far, he’s never had to
send out his curriculum vitae.
He earned a BA in Business Science from the Open University of
Catalonia, and was awarded the 2000 InnoBit prize from IBM, La
Caixa and Terra for best start-up of a website with elmenuonline.
com.
As well as playing Texas Hold’em on mundijuegos.com in his
free time – ‘the perfect mix of strategy, mind-reading and luck’,
David likes heading for the countryside, to get away from it
all with family and friends at his house in the small village of
Riudaura in Catalonia, Spain.
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013
Conference & Exhibition
London, May 1-2
New platforms, new players:
Attract, retain and monetize a
new generation of bingo player
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo

3. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
Tell us about what Akamon is doing in the bingo space, and how
things have been progressing.
David Jané: We developed our first bingo game four years
ago. It was the eighteenth game the company introduced.
Before that, we concentrated on traditional card and board
games. Revenue exploded, and we found that interactive bingo
gameplay was really engaging for our users. Last year, we ported
our bingo game to a more modern technology, like Flash,
and we added several social features, like collectable items
and experience levels. And we saw the number of daily active
users grow, until bingo became our top game, both in terms of
revenue and activity. And so, in 2013, we are developing a range
of bingo products.
As Akamon is focused on Latin America and Southern Europe,
we are trying to bring bingo experiences that are familiar with
our markets. So, for example, we are releasing tombola, which is
a variant of bingo played in Italy. It has many common elements
to 90-ball bingo, but with multiple prizes, and chips instead of
balls. We’re going to launch three other bingo clones this year.
We’ve realised that bingo monetises really well, and keeps people
engaged on our platform, and provides a fun time.
We used to have a subscription, but now we monetise using
virtual currency. Our users didn’t like the pay-wall, so we
removed it. Now we provide our users with a range of different
card prices, and they can turn on the auto-daub settings.
They can play up to 24 cards each game, which really boosts
monetisation.
It is a freemium model. When users join, they get a few hundred
chips, which they can use to start buying cards, and play for a
while for free. Then, once they run out, they have to buy virtual
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013 currency. We also have a daily bonus, so that every day, when
Conference & Exhibition users come to the platform, they get a pack of currency, which
London, May 1-2 gives them more free time.
Right now, we are generating 70 euro cents per daily active user,
New platforms, new players: which is pretty high compared to our other games. We have
Attract, retain and monetize a about 30,000 daily active users across our portal, and Facebook.
new generation of bingo player And, at the end of March, we’ll have our mobile version, too,
available on iPad and iPhone. About 60 percent of our users are
from Spain, and then about 20 percent are from Brazil, followed
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo by France, Argentina, and Venezuela.

4. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
The average time on the site is about 1.5 hours a day, which
is pretty high. Strangely, the shorter we make the games,
the more the players stay with us. Of course, we also have a
reward system, where the more they play, the more gems they
get. They can then redeem those to get extra bingo cards. For
us, it’s a matter of balancing the length of the game and the
rewards.
How important do you see social being for
bingo? What are the main considerations
to think about when building a social bingo
product?
David Jané: We ran some surveys with
offline bingo players to try to understand
what drives them to go to a bingo hall. One
thing they mentioned is that they like a
comfortable place, that they can go to with
their friends, and they can meet nice people.
So, we try to bring this to our online game.
You can rate the players in the room. If they are rude in the
chat, for instance, you can give them negative points. We also
have monitors who kick out people with bad reputations. We
try to keep the place tidy and clean, because we think this
helps in providing a better social experience where people
enjoy meeting one another.
Our typical bingo customer is female between 25-35 – it’s
often women with children. In fact, you can see between 4pm
and 5pm that the users on the site decrease for a while, when
women go to school to collect their kids.
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013
Conference & Exhibition
London, May 1-2
New platforms, new players:
Attract, retain and monetize a
new generation of bingo player
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo

5. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
You’re launching your mobile product in March.
What were the major considerations and
challenges in creating and marketing it?
David Jané: What we want with the mobile
product is for people to engage with the game
regardless of the screen they use. That was
a technical challenge: how can we bring the
mobile players on to the same platform as the
browser players? But we solved that issue.
Mobile players will play in the same rooms as
the browser players. When the first mobile
players get the app this month, they will already find thousands
of players already playing.
We had to adapt the user interface for the mobile. For example,
we had to change the input features from a keyboard and mouse
to a finger environment. Then, we had to choose which social
elements to keep. We kept chat for our iPad version, but not in
the iPhone version. However, you can still see all the players in
the room whichever version you play.
One of the main reasons we wanted to develop the mobile
product is that we know that people often play online while
doing something else. When people play board or card games,
they have to give their main focus to that. With bingo, it’s
different. Giving people something where they can play while
watching TV, or at the bus stop, is really valuable.
For us, it’s about providing the best second activity possible to
our players. That’s one reason we added an automatic purchase
feature. So, players can select how many games they want to
play, and they don’t have to take care of cards after each game.
It’s automatic. They can just glance at the screen occasionally to
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013 see if their friends have joined, or if they’ve won.
Conference & Exhibition
London, May 1-2
New platforms, new players:
Attract, retain and monetize a
new generation of bingo player
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo

6. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
What elements of Akamon’s operations and
product do you think make it stand out, and
how will you try to build on your recent
success?
David Jané: We are focused on 90-ball bingo,
which is the game traditionally played in Spain.
Probably later this year, we will have 75-ball
game as well, with some extra features that our
competitors don’t have at the moment.
We promote the game mostly through the
Akamon platform, which has more than 40
games on it. We have Brazilian games, Spanish
games, French games that we can use to cross-sell our social
casino products. Once we have people on the platform, we can
bring to them to bingo, roulette, or slots. We find that people
come on and play about three games per session, on average.
Cross-selling is cheaper than other forms of user-acquisition,
and it’s also easier. Because of regulation, it’s very difficult to
market a bingo product in a market like Spain.
Akamon serves Southern Europe, but also increasingly in Latin
American markets. How do you see bingo developing in these
countries?
David Jané: What we’ve realised in the past month is that players
in countries like Brazil need to be educated with this type of
bingo. But we are seeing a great increase in traffic and active
users. In fact, we now have more Facebook users in Brazil than
in Spain – which is a good achievement, considering we started
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013 here, and that Spain is usually the biggest market for many
Conference & Exhibition our games. The issue with Brazil is monetisation: the payment
London, May 1-2 method, and how to move the money back to Spain. But with
Facebook credits, it’s easier for everyone.
New platforms, new players: We have different clones for each of the markets we are in, like
Attract, retain and monetize a the one we have for Italy. But, at the same time, we think that
new generation of bingo player players enjoy discovering games from other cultures. We see
that with our card games, for instance. Catering to different
countries is not a big problem if you have good translation and
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo local support.

7. Industry Interview:
Bingo, a growing game
How will bingo products develop over the next
2-3 years, and what will really differentiate the
next generation of bingo products?
David Jané: There are several issues for us.
One is side-games. We know that bingo players
love side-games. So, we know we need provide
amusing side-games like slots or quizzes, if we
want to keep building our monetisation and
engagement.
The second issue is how we treat people using
their real identities. On Facebook, players
usually have their real names and real friends, and that means
they don’t tend to share content, or spend as much, as on the
portal. So, we need to look closely at that. It’s important for us to
understand what ID we are going to provide.
8th Annual Online Bingo Summit
8th Online Bingo Summit 2013
David Jane will be presenting on mobile and social bingo at the 8th annual Online Bingo Summit
Conference & Exhibition
in London on May 1-2, 2013.
London, May 1-2
He will be joined by over 20+ other expert speakers and 100+ attendees from all the leading
bingo operators including senior representatives from Facebook, Paddy Power, 888, Tombola,
New platforms,Chandler, Google, Endemol, FreemantleMedia, BGO Entertainment and many more.
Coral, Victor new players:
Attract, retain and monetize a
new generation of bingo and opportunities to reserve places at this landmark event are available on:
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www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo
www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo
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