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When Ninja Metrics CEO Dmitri Williams started researching game psychology in the 90s, he never anticipated that games would become so… mainstream. But the fact that they are (Candy Crush Saga, anyone?) has now morphed Williams’s academic research into a company with customers like Electronic Arts and investors such as Harvard Business School Angels.
Today, that company, Ninja Metrics, is releasing its core social analytics product to the public. The product, Katana Social Analytics Engine, helps to pinpoint the most socially-influential users of a social game or mobile app by predicting stats such as how much social influence users have, who they influence and how long they will use the game.
Last year, Ninja Metrics was enlisted by Electronic Arts to put this powerful social analytics formula to work on a Star Wars game and, since then, the PhD-heavy team of 16 has been working on the Katana product so that anyone from “a kid in a dorm room to a giant company” can unleash the power of social analytics. As of today, Katana, which was launched in open beta with 12 companies last month, is available for everyone to use.
“Right now, our job is to get this technology into people’s hands and show that it is valuable,” Williams said.
Just how valuable is Katana? Well, it’s based on an algorithm that predicts how people influence each other. Right now, Ninja Metrics is using that algorithm in the gaming realm because, frankly, that’s where the expertise of USC professor Williams and co-founder Jaideep Srivastava, a University of Minnesota professor, lies. (Dig into their 80 research papers for proof!)
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But since the team estimates that about 25 percent of people’s actions are driven by other people, they started to think that their predictive analysis might be of interest to others… like marketers who, say, want consumers to buy their products, for example.
“E-commerce, gambling, healthcare, streaming content and content consumption: there are a lot of places where people impact each other’s behavior,” Williams said. “That’s kind of an understatement, huh?”
Although Ninja Metrics isn’t necessarily planning on rolling out products in all of these industries, Williams said the team will be “thinking broadly” about strategy in many sectors. And Ninja Metrics is inviting the LA tech community (a group that Williams said is “not as confident in itself as it should be”) to join in on this brainstorm sesh.
“There are lots of smart people in LA who will think of uses for our technology that we have not,” Williams said. “Those are the people I want to talk to.”
