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Dogster Inc. Company Blog

Dogster retains bite post downturn as revenue rolls inYesterday

“Dogster retains bite post downturn as revenue rolls in”

That’s a headline I could read all day.

Big thanks to Camille Ricketts and Venture Beat for doing their own research and writing an article about the Dogster, Inc. that get’s it right.

Wishing You A Happy Howlidays & A Purrfect New YearDecember 23 2008

From Dogster …

… and Catster!

Nice Stats! Pages Per Visit: 144, Average Visit Time: 32 MinutesDecember 18 2008

Our new dog breed photo game and cat breed photo game are huge hits. In the last week they’ve averages 144 pages per visits with session lengths averaging 32 minutes for a total of 1,250,000 pages leading to a bounce rate 6.34%!

An important less is that for years we knew such a game would be popular, but whenever we spec’ed it out it would always get bogged down in trying to include advanced game mechanics which required complicated data storing mechanisms. Simply put we didn’t want to make a game unless it was the coolest we could imagine, yet we never had the resources. We ended up backing into this one thanks to an internal challenge of what’s the simplest game we could make that would still be fun to play. Simplicity is also rife with failure as there is a very fine line between something having just enough to make it work, and not enough and it sucks. A very fine line indeed.

Here’s a screen shot of the game:

(I told you it was a simple game ;)

Here’s our first entry about the games

Doom & Gloom is For the Other GuysDecember 17 2008

Some years the holiday’s feel like an onslaught of forced consumerism and advanced marketing thumb screws.

Other years it’s a simple reminder of great it is to be alive and doing what you love. We think it’s a great time to be alive and doing what you love and First Round Capital does to.

Watch their holiday video if you haven’t seen already. Three Cheers for First Round.

Fun & Games TimeDecember 12 2008

We’re making an iPhone game that will challenge players to correctly guess the breed of the dog photo they are shown. There will be all kinds of silly animations, sound effects, leaderboard stats, etc. One big hurdle we had though was that though we have millions of photos of purebred dogs, a percentage of them are actually photos of the owners, photo of their other pets, places they visited, etc. People can tag photos, but we still have hundreds of thousands of photos that aren’t good photos of the dog itself.

So we’ turned a problem into a huge fun experience for our website members. We made a simple web version of the game anyone can play, and if your are challenged with a photo that is blurry, shows a cat, shows a dogpile of dogs, you can click it as inappropriate. We store how many bad flags a photo gets, as well as how many times a photo is correctly guessed so we can learn the best and worst photos.

The best part is it’s been a ton of fun. Yesterday our average page-serves-per-visit increased 40% because the game is such a hit. We’ve been getting tons of great feedback which we hope will help make our the game we sell in the iPhone store a hit. We’re not pl