Alan Miller: Part 1

It's a good objective; I think it's a good target to reach for. But if you look at the online games industry, it's primarily composed of subscription models and virtual goods-based models, and those are already huge businesses.

This year we estimate the virtual goods business - so that's not even subscription business like World of Warcraft or Runscape - as over $10 billion this year. And it's consistently growing - it was $5.5 billion in 2009, $7.5 billion last year. It's the way that the industry is going - and over the next four years that amount of revenue generated by the segments we address is going to be $50-80 billion.

So when we say we want to add $1 billion to that over the next four years, that's 1-2 per cent of the total revenue for that part of the business.

Well we provide two different models. One is commission on revenues generated, and in that case we have to reserve a control group outside of our services to accurately measure the income generated by our services. That's pretty common, and that's where we're going to generate a lot of revenue.

But we also provide a model that's a more traditional consultant service, where we'll talk to companies about how they can set up their games to provide the data that's useful, and other kinds of fundamental analytics consultancy.

What thrills me is that it's novel. It's the first application that I'm aware of that uses analytics at this kind of level in the games industry. It shows tremendous promise for improving revenue, but also customer satisfaction - and that's the second part. It serves both players and publishers. I'd be much less interested if I thought we were only doing this to extract more money from publishers...

Well, you generate profits to stay in business, but our approach identifies successful pathways that players have taken through a game. We can also identify pathways that are leading to frustration - and we want minimise that frustration while maximising satisfaction.

In the next few months we're going to establish offices in the San Francisco Bay area, and I'll be hiring a small team here - the North American office will be sales and marketing activities. All the analytics will be performed in the UK, in the Edinburgh area.