Join us on Monday August 10, 2015 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco for a full day of learning and activities. Our Developer Evangelists will share tips and best practices on how to build, optimize and monetize your apps and games. The developer day is complimentary and doesn't require Casual Connect event badge access.

Starting off the day, we’ll give you an overview of the Amazon developer ecosystem including how to immerse your players into experiences that move beyond the glass touchscreen - to the living room with Amazon Fire TV and beyond with spoken language skills with Alexa. AWS will join us to explain how to build games that scale with the AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android. Then we’ll share how to cultivate and engage power users maximizing their revenue potential. A light breakfast and lunch will be provided along with the opportunity to win some awesome prizes!

Register here for this exciting event! Or to learn more about Casual Connect visit their event page here. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

Check In and Light Breakfast

9:30am - 10am

An Overview of the Amazon Devices and Services for Mobile Developers – David Isbitski

10am - 10:30am

We will start the day off with an overview of Amazon's current developer ecosystem. Learn how you can take advantage of Amazon’s Mobile App SDK, Amazon's Appstore and the new line of consumer Fire devices like Alexa, Echo, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick and Fire tablets, as well as monetization services such as in-app purchasing.

An Introduction to Using Amazon Web Services and the Alexa Skills Kit to Build Voice Driven Experiences – David Isbitski

10:30am – 11:15am

Come learn first hand how to build for Amazon Echo and Amazon Voice Service enabled devices using the Alexa Skills Kit and Amazon Web Services. This session will walk through using Amazon Echo and how to build your first Alexa Skill using both AWS Lambda and AWS Beanstalk. We’ll also take a look at how to monitor your new Alexa Skill using AWS CloudWatch and how to submit it for certification so its available to customers later this year.

How We Made a Game No Fun  - Mike Hines

11:15am – 12pm

There are lots of suggestions about how to make a game fun.  Best practices are everywhere, but you can't just follow them blindly.  To create a fun game, you have to figure out how best practices integrate into your specific game.  Come see what we did wrong, and what we learned along the way.  

Lunch 

12:00pm – 12:30pm

How to Evolve Players into Fans  - Paul Cutsinger

12:30pm – 1:15pm

 We’ve analyzed the top mobile games to see what best practices make them stand out from the crowd. Several trends emerging now will amplify those best practices, and games will have more opportunity than ever to excel. In the future, the top games will have fully realized fan bases that will drive their user acquisition and engagement engines. That fan base will include players but also content creators, advocates and potential new customers — this will open up a wider range of monetization options. Come see how top mobile games drive more engagement and revenue and learn how to you can do this with your own game. 

Build & Deploy Your Mobile Game with AWS - Dhruv Thukral

1:15pm – 2pm

Developing a successful mobile game today is about more than just the game:  Users expect backend services like user authentication, downloadable content, and social features. Using our AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android, it’s easier than ever to build a game with these services.  This session will provide a step-by-step approach to add features to your game such as user identity management, dynamic content updates, cross-platform data sync, and more. We’ll demonstrate how to use the AWS Mobile SDK to securely interact with services such as Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Amazon EC2. Finally, we’ll provide a few common architecture patterns and scalability tips for AWS game backends.

Break 

2pm - 2:15pm

Understanding Your Power-Users (and Fostering More) - Peter Heinrich

2:15pm – 3pm

A relatively small group—tiny, really—of dedicated customers often generates an unexpectedly large percentage of total revenue for a mobile app or game. Who are the members of this group, and how can you better engage them? More importantly, how do you encourage others to join the ranks of these "power-users”? As an app publisher, Amazon has a unique perspective on power-users in aggregate. Here we offer tips and best practices for cultivating new and existing power-users, keeping them engaged, and maximizing their revenue potential.

Bringing Your Game to the Living Room - Jesse Freeman

3pm - 3:45pm

In this session, we cover what's needed to bring your Android app or game to Fire TV. We walk you through controller support for a game scenario (buttons and analog sticks), controller support for UI (selection, moving between menu items, invoking the keyboard), and how to account for the form factor (overscan, landscape, device and controller detection). By the end of this session, you’ll be able to understand what you need to do if you want to build or modify your own app to work on a TV.

Raffle and Wrap-up – Paul Cutsinger

3:45pm – 4pm

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