Mobile user acquisition is still a hard slog. Listen to what the experts say about it.

User acquisition is a sexy topic. I know because I moderated a panel discussion on the topic at the Casual Connect conference last week in San Francisco. We had a standing room-only crowd listening to the experts that we rounded up to talk about the problem of acquiring mobile users for apps and games among a million competing choices in the app stores.

Competition is getting so fierce that in many cases, the cost of acquiring a user is exceeding the value you can get from that player. Smart companies are hiring user-acquisition experts to help design better strategies. Our panel included a few of these: James Peng, who handles user acquisition and monetization at mobile game developer Storm8; Andrew Birnbryer, the director of business development for North America at mobile marketing platform AppLift; and Matt Bruch, sales manager at sweepstakes company Liquid Wireless. In this session, I got the conversation rolling and then handed it over to the audience take over with the questions. The result was a useful conversation that went deep into the problems and solutions.