Real-Time Analytics Startup ‘Mention’ Crowned GMIC Beijing Seed Stage Winner

Beijing-based real-time behavioral analytics startup Mention charmed the judges and audience with its startup pitch at the ongoing GMIC Beijing event yesterday. This afternoon, Mention was crowned as the winner of GMIC’s Early Stage G-Startup Competition. Mention’s flagship product, Traintracks, is a real-time behavioral analytics tool made by game designers for game designers. Nils Pihl Bohlin, co-founder and behavioral engineer at Mention, took to the stage and demoed the current version of the product. It serves to empower game designers, giving them useful and powerful insights on user behavioral patterns.

How Traintracks came about

The team at Mention has been working on the marriage between behavioral psychology, game theory, and memetics to create a better predictive model of human behavior. It eventually led to dealing with many game developers, which the team thought was the perfect sweet spot to study human behavior. However, as the team started to delve deeper, it realized that the potential of big data analytics has not been fully uncovered by many game developers today. In fact, according to Nils, there is no such thing as data-driven design today, as many game designers have not been empowered to use the current tools that exist in the market right now. Nils (pictured right) highlights three issues with analytics:

1. People are unaware of the right questions that are deeper and more meaningful, which is vital to lead them to the right answers.
2. Most companies are tracking what is relatively easier to track, since it is difficult to interrogate the data. The result focuses on vanity metrics, but often does not give you deeper insights about player behavior.
3. Analytics can get very costly. It might need several departments to come together to answer a question, and a single question might take hours or days to answer.

With this approach, Nils and his team has developed Traintracks, which aims to solve the pain points that game developers face. It also boasts being an award-winning product to take on the game analytics market. Nils adds:

Traintracks has a state-of-the-art backend built on brand new technology that is up to 100 times faster than our most advanced competitors. The game analytics industry is growing into a multi-billion dollar market, and we’re entering that market with a product that is 100 times faster than the competition.

Founders’ backgrounds and upcoming plans

Mention is founded by Jeff Hsu, Nils Pihl Bohlin, and Ryan Braley, with strong backgrounds in computer science, electrical engineering, and game design. It was by circumstance that the team happened to come to Beijing. However, due to the system’s complex backend, Nils explained to us that the team will be moving its core operations to the United States for talent acquisition. It is also looking to raise an initial seed round of $1 million, mainly for talent acquisitions in the next twelve months.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running yesterday and today (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.