Jawaker is a special application that demands a special ad server. We had decided long ago that we would not serve our ads in the traditional online fashion, but would serve them using what we call "Cost per Hand", or CPH for short. The idea is that every CPH credit displays an ad (which consists of branding the back of all the cards on the table, branding the table cloth and a small text ad on the right on the page with a target link) to the player for an entire round (or "hand") of play.

We have been working long and hard to customize our our ad server so that potential advertisers can log into their designated accounts and create their own targeted campaigns on Jawaker. The Jawaker Campaigner does just that. Advertisers create a campaign and choose to target their ads based on: Country, Gender, Age and Time of Day.

Advertisers state the maximum number of hands to serve per day, write their ad text and target URL (in both Arabic and English) and upload their ad images. Jawaker will then approve the campaign and start serving the ads. The advertiser can freeze or delete the campaign whenever they want and can add as many campaigns as they like. Jawaker automatically deducts credits from the advertiser's total CPH credits as soon as an ad is served on a hand to the target audience. The advertiser will also be able to see statistics on their campaign such as how many impressions were served, how many clicks their ad got and their average implied click-through rate.

We plan to keep improving the Jawaker Campaigner based on client feedback. Currently, advertisers need to contact Jawaker in order to get an account and purchase credits, but we plan to role out an automatic sign-up system and online purchasing of credits in the near future.

Baloot Is Launched!

We are (very!) proud to announce the launch of Baloot as the newest game on Jawaker! Baloot is a popular Saudi Arabian card game and is the first of many games that the Jawaker team did not know how to play beforehand. The challenge in building Baloot started from gathering and understanding the rules all the way to implementing one of the most complex card games on the site.

Launching Baloot is a proud moment for us because it is an important step in realizing our vision of becoming a truly international website with card games that fit all local flavors. Enjoy the game!

Jawaker Trix And Trix Complex Advertising Campaign

Jawaker Italian Mafia - Play Trix, Trix Complex, Tarneeb, Baloot With Friends For Free Online by jawaker

Jawaker launches the first of many smart commercials to promote the site with relevant story lines about the game of Trix and Trix Complex. Enjoy.

Jawaker Community

Since our launch, we have noticed that we have created a thriving community of card game lovers. Our users have started making friends with people on the site and have requested the ability to see the games that their "favorite" users are playing in so that they can join them. We have launched a feature that does just that!

Users can now click on the star next to each player during a game to mark them as a favorite. They will be able to see a yellow star next to that user in the future and they will also be able to see (and filter) games with their favorite players from the main games page.

Unfortunately, some people also abuse the site and we have been receiving some complaints about certain players. Therefore, we also introduced the concept of "flagging" whereby a user can mark the 'X' next to each player and submit a complaint about that player to Jawaker for review. Users will also be able to see a red 'X' next to that user in the future as well as be able to see (and filter out) games with these "bad apples" from the main games page.

Faster Jawaker

In our efforts to ensure that you have a great time playing your favorite card game on Jawaker, we have been tinkering with how Jawaker works and we ended up with a major system redesign.

During peak hours some of our users complained about slow game play. Since we believe that performance problems should be solved with smart system architecture rather than by throwing more hardware at the problem, we undertook the big job of redesigning our system.

Jawaker now runs as a collection of cooperating services, each with a specific task. This has given us great flexibility in addressing particular problems on their own without affecting the system in general. Furthermore, this loose coupling of systems allowed us to write different components in different programming languages - using the right tool for the right job. So, for example, our web tier is still running on Ruby using the awesome Merb web framework, whereas the new in-game client/server communication bridge is written in Python.

The changes we made seem to have solved all the issues we were having. The new system has been in production for almost two weeks and we haven't received any slowness complaints since.

In the end we ended up with a system that can handle more players, while at the same time providing a smooth and seamless game play. We hope you like the new and improved Jawaker and continue to enjoy playing on Jawaker!