Google Play Store offers more control over in-game purchases

Google updates its Play Store so parents and others can require that a password be entered every time someone wants to buy virtual goods while in a mobile game or other app.

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Overstock’s Bitcoin Purchases Account For Less Than 1% Of Revenue, But It’s Growing

Since Overstock.com started to accept Bitcoin as a purchase currency, the company has received a good press for its efforts to support the nascent cryptocurrency. Working with Coinbase to process Bitcoin, Overstock.com announced that it crossed the million-dollar sale mark in the currency earlier this month.

A report out this morning better details how Overstock.com is faring with Bitcoin now that the novelty of its acceptance of the digital payment method has cooled. After the day one sales number, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, Bitcoin has settled in the “$20k to $30k” range, and is “gradually increasing from there.”

Let’s use the $30,000 sum, given that the company is seeing a ramp in the numbers, and if we are going to predict revenue we might as well give ourselves some room to wiggle. Let’s find out if Bitcoin is moving the needle for the company.

For calendar 2013, Overstock.com had revenue of $1.304 billion. Given that the company’s revenue is quite seasonal, we don’t want to use a fourth-quarter number to compare current Bitcoin sales run rates. So let’s take the quarterly average for the company as a starting point. That gives us a 90-day figure of $326 million, or $3.6 million per day.

$30,000 next to $3.6 million is a very small drop in the bucket. In fact, it works out to 0.83 percent. After the Sturm und Drang of the Bitcoin integration, the dollar amount is somewhat minor.

Now, its early days for both Bitcoin itself and even Overstock.com’s integration thereof, so don’t take the above as indicative of failure. More that the network for Bitcoin purchases remains modest, despite Bitcoin itself having a very high market cap.

I’ve been looking at Bitcoin volume for some time. Food for thought: Total Bitcoin in circulation is worth $7.9 billion. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin had volume of only $18.5 million. That’s about 0.23 percent daily turnover. Picking a random stock, say, Groupon, we see that its volume as a percentage of its similar market cap is 3.7 percent daily. That’s about 16 times as much as Bitcoin sees. I think this is the impact of having around half of all Bitcoin owned by fewer than 1,000 people.

That wealth concentration means that the number of people who have enough Bitcoin to purchase items at Overstock.com is smaller than you might expect. That said, the larger Bitcoin network — so far as I can tell — is growing daily. So, expect to see Overstock.com move six figures a day in Bitcoin sales by the holiday season.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER MARCEL GRIEDER UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED) 

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Report: Less than one percent of mobile gamers responsible for half of all in-app purchases

With the runaway success of Candy Crush Saga, it's perfectly natural to wonder just how many people are dropping coin in freemium mobile games. One firm's answer, however, might surprise you. A very small number -- 0.15 percent, to be exact -- of total mobile payers contribute half of monthly in-game revenue, according to in-app marketing company Swrve. The outfit also says that over 60 percent of the money made within the first two weeks of a player's life is made on the first day. Meaning, if most people install a game and don't make any purchases almost immediately, they likely won't at all. The report comes from a limited sample, but designers hoping to build the next fragile confection-like phenomenon are probably studying it for secrets right now. We've embedded the provided infographic after the break should you want a peek at a whole lot of graphs for yourself.

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Rdio Shuts Down Video-Streaming Site Vdio, Offers Amazon Credits As Reimbursement For Purchases

It’s only been six months since Rdio launched its video-streaming platform Vdio to the world, but it appears that the company has already decided to give up on that experiment. In an email sent to customers today, the streaming media startup announced that it has decided to discontinue the service.

While Vdio was only just introduced over the summer, it followed nearly two years of speculation that Rdio would compete against Netflix and Amazon with a streaming video product. When it finally launched, Vdio was less of a Netflix clone, and more of a competitor to traditional on-demand video rental services like iTunes or Google Play.

The shutdown of the service follows a layoff that affected 35 people at the company. At the time, Rdio didn’t comment on how the layoff would affect the video service.

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