Q&amp;A with Kiip Co-Founder Amadeus Demarzi

San Francisco has become the ground floor in a rise of social media projects, inventions, startups, applications architecture and more. Yet even among the cadre of social media app-heads running around there, a few outshine the rest. Amadeus Demarzi co-founder of Kiip, eightbit.me and FollowStyle has become one of those names to stand out within the masses.

Demarzi has a fluid resume including work with Chipotle, Chevron, Google Ventures, and most recently the creation of Kiip – the new wave in mobile advertisement applications. Yesterday he took some time to talk a bit about how he got into the “game,” some of the projects he’s currently involved in and few side projects that are still flying under the radar.

Tell us a little about your professional background.

I would say I am just really driven to build and create things. For me it's always about creating amazing user experiences using technology. If I haven't delighted the client/user, then I've failed. I feel very lucky to work on such a variety of projects like Kiip and EightBit, which allow me to express different creative mindsets.

I went to college for 3D animation, switched halfway through to film, dropped out in '07 to work in web, and had been doing freelance web design throughout college.

The first company I worked for was Eurekster, a social search company that essentially took results from Yahoo via an API, and allowed people to vote on them. I was there for about a year.

After Eurekster I went to work for a design agency called Sequence. There I got the unique opportunity to architect the Chipotle iPhone app – the first application that allowed users to order and pay for food on their iPhone. I also got to work on various other projects for companies like Chevron, Sonos, Google Ventures, Zinio, etc.

During my final year at Sequence, I started working on various side projects with a friend of mine, Courtney Guertin who was an engineer at Digg. Together we built an iPhone app (Skeemo) and a couple small fun sites like answer.to. Eventually we decided to leave our current companies and work on a fashion site together – FollowStyle. We iterated very quickly and had something up and running within a few months, but unfortunately we found it was a very difficult industry to gain any traction in due to our lack of connections.

Around this time, another friend of ours from Digg, Brian Wong a young 19 year old who worked in Business Development [at Digg] managed to raise around 300k for an idea: rewarding game players with real items for accomplishing things in [the] games. Courtney and I dug the idea, and Brian was in need of a couple cofounders that could fill his technical void to build the product, so we joined full time, Courtney as Co-Founder and CTO, and myself as Co-Founder and Director of Design.

Around this time, Addison Kowalski, an ex designer at Digg, had been getting some Internet props for designing these little 8bit avatars for people's twitter profiles. Soon the demand for them got pretty high, and so Courtney, Addison and myself decided to remedy that by making a web based avatar creation tool.

Over the next 5-7 months, Courtney, Brian and myself hustled on Kiip full time. In the moments we could find to spare on nights and weekends, we squeezed in EightBit. We successfully opened up EightBit to the public around SXSW, but also added a bunch more functionality in the way of an iPhone web app and a mini social game based on Foursquare. It still amazes me how often I see people using the avatars on Twitter and various other services.

A couple weeks later, we had an amazing launch for Kiip, which overall went out very well in the press. We have been absolutely inundated by great brands and game developers reaching out to us and wanting to use our service/platform. We just recently got our own office for Kiip, and have expanded the team up to eight, from the original three. We can even be considered bi-coastal since our VP of sales is out in New York.

Tell us about Eightbit.me. Where did the idea come from? What are your plans for it? What makes it so different? What have been some trials, triumphs, etc?

Originally birthed as an avatar creator, it has since evolved into a foursquare based social game. We ultimately would like to make it a very deep social game, that utilizes many other social platforms to create a sort of Internet avatar, which represents you, online. The ideas, concepts and designs have grown very organically over the last 6-8 months. Every project presents a unique set of difficulties. This can range from exploiting limits of a particular technology platform you are on, to solving user experience barriers.

With EightBit, the major challenge was getting a low powered device (iPhone) to create a native like experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. When building an 'app' for an iPhone, you have 2 basic choices. You can build a native application, which uses iOS libraries and Objective-C to build an application. These technologies take full advantage of the iPhone's hardware, allowing you to create very rich visual or data experiences that perform smoothly and efficiently because of this more direct interaction with the iPhone's hardware. On the flip side, the only REAL way to distribute these applications is through the Apple App Store, which means you have to abide by certain rules, and your release cycle is often controlled more by Apple.

Another way to build an application is using web-based technologies in the iPhone's Safari browser. Most people may not know this, but Apple has created far and away the best mobile browser currently available, and they have gone even further to provide excellent APIs allowing for some level of hardware acceleration. The major downside of building a web app is the dependency on a network connection is hard to avoid, the lower computing power of Javascript, because it's such a high level language, with so many browser/operating system layers below it. This means that your code has to be VERY efficient, and sometimes entire processes have to be re-thought in order to accomplish a smooth useable experience.

Kiip - that is a big release for you - what are you thoughts about it, and what do you think sets it apart from others like it?

Kiip is built on an advertising model of cost per engagement, or CPE. We are the vary first rewards platform that allows brands to highly target, much like the world of banner ads, using rewards instead of banner impressions. We also feel that the game experience is not very conducive to banner ads, since they require visual real estate, which on mobile devices is rather low to begin with. Our platform is about targeting users/player/customers when they are excited and happy, by providing a non-intrusive opt-in reward.

We have already had our initial public launch, announcing what we are doing, since we've been in stealth mode for the last 7 months or so. Soon we will be announcing which games we are going to be integrated with, so people can begin actually winning rewards for playing.

Some interesting obstacles with Kiip was around the fact that we are productizing the concept of a reward. Technically we have designed the first ever reward unit, a standard unit that can be used to reward a user for an interaction they had with an application. This is a far more complex usability problem than banner ads. Here at Kiip, we hold user experience in the highest regard, and have been doing everything possible to make the reward collection and redemption process as frictionless as possible.

We took a bit of a cue from Apple, by creating our reward units using html/css/javascript, giving us tremendous control over the design, without requiring game developers to update their Kiip SDK libraries.

Let us in on your thoughts on social media's usefulness, cool factor, possibilities, etc.

Hmm, I have mixed feelings about social media. I feel that it's mostly misunderstood by the general public. Every couple years in the web world we get new buzz words like web 2.0, Ajax, html5, etc., that mostly miss the point and don't really do any justice to what they are describing. At the same time, these buzz words also allow these concepts to become more mainstream, which ultimately helps our tech/web industries.

Overall though, it's hard to make any money in social media. Most of the time, money is not made off the product itself, but rather, by throwing advertisements into it since everyone ultimately accepts these platforms as being free. Ultimately this only works if there is a certain huge mass of users; otherwise it's not sustainable.

It's hard to really say what the future will bring, especially with the market being REALLY frothy right now. The big 'hit' things right now seem to be social tools that utilize the capabilities of mobile devices; always on and connected, location based, short message, photos, video, etc.

I think the far more interesting thing to watch though, is this transition away from 'personal computers' over to mobile phones and tablets. Think about it, kids that are born today, will be growing up in the world of touch based interfaces, always connected, cloud based, and no mice and keyboards. This, I believe represents a HUGE significant change in the world of computing, and personally I am really excited that it's my playground.