Cinemagr.am - Montreal (no remote, relocation possible)
Android Lead Dev.
We're looking for a talented developer to create the Android version of our app. This involve a lot of challenging and interesting problems: real-time filters, camera-shake reduction, video processing and all of that should work on devices with limited memory. Email me directly for more info: marc@cinemagr.am
Good job, I love this. I find that FastCells are less useful these days as iphone 3G are less common. I prefer to design my complex cells in interface builder for ease of maintenance. But it's just personal taste. Otherwise, everything in there should be very useful for almost any app. I suggest you add support for external services, like Facebook for instance (which a lot of projects use).
BTW, I love DictionaryHelper, it definitely saves you a lot of headaches if you work with a JSON api!
What matters most is distribution and solving a problem that customers have. It can be an advantage in a crowded segment to have an extremely well polished app for differentiation purposes. But without distribution any app is going to die.
In your case, your app seems to be distributing mainly because you have a customer base from previous apps, which boosts your inherent distribution (pools are created by groups of friends which will talk about your app) and your search results in the app store. Also, from what I can see you are the only one that supports both Yahoo and ESPN, which is pretty cool :)
I released an app recently. First, a quick prototype with a stock UI, then a "beautiful", custom UI. Changes in downloads = 0. Still, I'm not saying it does not matter, because it clearly can, but it's very hard to pull it off. In your case, we can't really tell, unless you released a version with stock UI? Hard to prove that your UI affected sales without a test.
I wonder if awareness + the experience that we had just 10 years ago is going to limit the size of this bubble. 10 years is a very short time it's the same sector.
I know for one thing, I had my lesson 10 years ago, my dad had his lessons investing in Nortel Networks and most of my friends learned a lot about bubbles in 2000. The pain of losing that much money is still there.
There are always people that haven't lost enough in the previous bubbles and the allure of getting a huge return in only 1 or 2 years is greater than life. I'm sure a lot of people recognize that evaluations are already inflated, but feel confident that they'll get out before the bubble explodes.
They interviewed an economist who ran a simple experiment: he created a market for the students in his class with a VERY predictable security (it paid a pre-established dividend N times, and then stopped.) And yet speculative bubbles invariably formed and crashed.
It feels like it's similar to the "guess a number between 0 and 100 that's 2/3 of the average person's guess" game. In the real world, you don't win by doing the most rational thing; you win by succesfully modeling the other players.
We've had this debate about "catchup mechanisms" or negative feedback loops with my boardgames friends countless times. I personally tend to prefer games with a minimal amount of luck rather than a strong negative feedback loop. I dislike settlers of catan as much as as dislike monopoly. As long as luck is under control, I have no problem losing -- because I can understand where I made my mistakes and be better next time :)
In Settlers the catch-up mechanism is meant to be provided by the other players stopping trade with the leader. In the two-player version this is somewhat explicit (there's a trading cost to be winning)
Agreed. Also, what is the actual iPhone app? Where was the ad(s) placed? Different kinds of apps will have different ctr. And ad placement is also very important.
Without context we can't validate your claims and hope to reproduce them. Thanks.
The 0.1% CTR apps relate to mobile games where there is little interaction with the ad is 'Word Seek Social Lite' The 4.5% CTR app relates to generalized RSS readers similar to FMyLife (ex: Softbaum's FMyLife for which we have a rev sharing agreement).
Hope this helps, of course since these are highly profitable, I can't share too much details.
From my experience, users love updates -- of course as long as you're adding meaningful features. We try to update our app every two weeks and and we get a significant increase in traffic each time (i.e. more share on twitter/fb, blog posts by fans, etc). Our customers love the fact that we listen to them and move quickly with features.
TechCrunch is not worse or better than any other news source. They want to get traffic and to achieve that they cover what is interesting to their readers, namely innovation and successful startups. It's good for them to cover the most promising stories, preferably before competitors, to increase readership. TechCrunch and co are not corrupted, but their inboxes are overwhelmed with interesting stories. To sort through that they have only a few options:
1) They know you because you had success in the past
2) You were referred by someone they trust
3) Your story is compelling (with a bonus if you give them some kind of exclusivity)
The thing is, once you have achieved 1) and 2) you can consistently get covered much more easily. And it would appear that you get preferential treatment while in fact you built that reputation over time (often with a lot of hard work).
I think that readers want to be exposed to innovation more. For example, here's new startup, they come up with a new way to buy your next air ticket, etc. Or here's one way to sync your contacts between iPhone. I think readers would prefer that kind of news, it has primarily been the reason why we go online in the first place. Other than email and play game, is to learn and to research.
I can understand people tends to associate past success = future success (more often) and prefer to work with someone they trust. I guess can't do much that about that, other than building more awesome products and connecting with more people.
From what I understand, he is using the 'statuses/filter' call of the stream api, filtering with users that have installed his app. This allows him to get the tweets of all his users in a single connection to twitter. 'statuses/filter' and 'statuses/sample' are the only two methods provided to all accounts and they are very limited. I mean, 100K users is a big number for sure, but not a surprising number given it's a twitter app on facebook. We are far from the firehose level!
As a work around, he might be able to go back to the REST api, use statuses/friends_timeline, and stay within the 300 per hour/per user limit.
Android Lead Dev.
We're looking for a talented developer to create the Android version of our app. This involve a lot of challenging and interesting problems: real-time filters, camera-shake reduction, video processing and all of that should work on devices with limited memory. Email me directly for more info: marc@cinemagr.am
Also, we have serious traction!