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Friday, June 17, 2011

App discovery gets smarter

Mark Bridge writes:

I’ve written previously about the changes happening to mobile application stores. Last week I was talking to Todd Levy about the family-friendly application store he’s planning to launch. He explained how BloomWorlds would be curated to provide trusted reviews that weren’t skewed by the app developers themselves.

Mobile affiliate network OfferMobi has also been bringing attention to the “dirty little secret” of the app charts suffering from developers who manipulate the figures. It says Incentivized Cost Per Install - offering users virtual currency in exchange for installing an app - is temporarily boosting installation figures but resulting in low quality users. As you’d probably expect, it’s a fan of app usage and not merely downloads… and it has a commercial solution.

Howie Schwartz of OfferMobi said “With such a large volume of app developers now attempting to manipulate the charts at once using incentivized CPI, it has become more difficult than ever for a company stay on them long enough to attract actual REAL users. After the Beta launch for iOS earlier this year of the OfferMobi App Discovery Network, we are pleased to bring the platform to Android devices to provide App developers with a cost-effective platform changing the game for App developers who desire non-incentivized installs of their apps to build true lifetime value with their installs.”

But the biggest news comes from Yahoo! Mobile, which has introduced a new mobile application called AppSpot. That’s right - not its own app store but an app-finding app. Apparently it “works like a flashlight in the darkness of more than 425,000-plus apps in the Apple App Store and 200,000 apps in Android Market”. Hyperbole aside, it’s available on iPhone and Android devices - and it’ll do its best to recommend apps based on your preferences.

Is this the future?  As Todd and I discussed last week, this sort of thing is certainly a solution... but the big-name app stores with their overloaded shelves will be with us for quite a while yet.

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Opinion Articles

How long can Apple remain torn between two lovers?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool, loving both of you is breaking all the rules”.

Mary McGregor sang those words in 1976 – and Apple would do well to bear them in mind today. Why?  Well, Rick Astley is to blame for it all.

Oh, alright, Rick’s not personally involved. It’s worm-writer ikee, along with the people who’ve followed him in creating security threats for the Apple iPhone. But why am I invoking the lyrics of Mary McGregor?  It’s because Apple has two loves... and it may be struggling to choose between them.

Author: The Fonecast
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Everyone’s selling Android phones… but who’s selling Android?

Mark Bridge writes:

Samsung. Huawei. Acer. HTC. Motorola. LG. Toshiba. Sony Ericsson. INQ. Dell. They’re all after a slice of the Android cake. (The Android cake is an éclair at the moment. Not particularly good for slicing. But I digress).

And my, what advertisements we’ve seen. Most recently Motorola has been knocking the iPhone while HTC has been playing with marker pens.

But those ad campaigns are mainly about manufacturers and phones. As you’d expect, really. Not about Android.

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1 paisa for 1 second

James Rosewell writes:

One paisa is equivalent to 1/100 of an Indian rupee. In American dollars, a paisa is worth 0.00022 cents. For the British reading this, that’s 0.00013 pence.

Why is this important?

A company in India called MTS have launched a pay as you go SIM card that allows you to make on-network calls for ½ paisa per second...

Author: The Fonecast
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Two mobile operating systems to rule them all

Mark Bridge writes:

Cain and Abel. Price and Andre. Judge Dredd and Rico. History is full of pairings that didn’t work out. Two forces that started off together but ended up trying to destroy each other. And so it could be with mobile phone operating systems.

This week it’s been reported that Nokia will be dropping Symbian from its N-series devices by 2012, favouring Maemo instead.

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Who ya gonna call when the phones go dead?

Mark Bridge writes:

This week there’s a government exercise taking place in London. A number of civil servants and private sector employees are simulating the failure of the UK’s fixed-line telephone network. Called “White Noise”, it imagines a scenario where telephone exchanges are destroyed by a giant subterranean monster that pulls really hard on all those underground cables.

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