We are proud to announce that we have gone live with our self-service platform für appvertisers. It allows developers to directly book into our system, allocate budgets and view reportings on marketing success.

Over the past few months, during the closed beta phase, we’ve gradually given a three-digit number of app developers access to the self-service area. This enabled us to test this feature extensively and incorporate changes in response to user feedback. We’re delighted that we’re now in a position to launch such a strong product offering ‘appvertisers’ centralized access to our network

Please check it out!

In German:

apprupt startet Self-Service Plattform für Appvertiser

Wir sind stolz zu vermelden, dass wir kürzlich mit der apprupt Self-Service Plattform live gegangen sind. Nun können sich Entwickler direkt in unser System einbuchen, Budget aufladen und Kampagnen zuordnen sowie Reportings einsehen.

Wir haben in den letzten Monaten während der Closed Beta schrittweise eine dreistellige Zahl an App Entwicklern in den Self-Service Bereich gelassen und diesen somit ausgiebig testen sowie eine Menge Feedback verarbeiten können. Wir freuen uns nun sehr, mit einem starken Produkt an den Start zu gehen und „Appvertisern“ somit einen zentralen Zugang zu unserem Netzwerk zu bieten.

Wir freuen uns auf Feedback!

We were invited by Mobile Monday Austria to hold one of three Keynotes for the event, which was this time was all about App Marketing. We had a lot of fun and gained some good insights on the Austrian developer/mobile scene. We’ve embedded the presentation below, check it out!

Great news today, we just received official notice that we are among 50 finalists (out of 250) that have been nominated for the Mobile Premier Awards on the 15th of February. Each nominee was chosen by a MobileMonday chapter, in our case it was Hamburg. German-speaking readers, read this.

Out of the remaining 50, 20 will be chosen to present at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A jury will decide on the finalists by the end of January. The jury is going to mainly use our profile on dotopen.com – so please check it out and let us know how we could improve it. We are adding a slide deck soon.

Let’s hope we’re among the last 20!

Ortwin Gentz, seller of the app Where To? (the company’s name is FutureTap) today released some interesting numbers on his app business and its development since he purchased the app from tap tap tap about a year ago – his blog post was even picked up by Techcrunch.

Gentz bought the app for $70k and has so far made about $325k in gross sales, which leaves him with about $227k in sales after the Apple cut. Another interesting fact is that new versions and being featured by Apple actually seem to have caused a rather constant stream of sales, thus not the typical „few-weeks hit“.

In our opinion, the most interesting fact is that, just like we mentioned very early on in one of our blogposts, Gentz does not see that buying reach to increase app downloads is paying off for apps. Regarding any performance marketing, the calculation is very simple: pay less than you earn. But with regard to app revenues, click prices and available marketing inventory, so far, this only seems to work for very few apps.

So what bottom line do the FutureTap numbers leave us with? We think that on a general note regarding apps there are two things that need to change or that have to further develop in the future:

• Developers need more and better ways (channels) to market their app(s)

• Developers need more and different ways of monetizing existing users and traffic so that they can spend more on customer acquisition and sustain a profitable business

 
We see apprupt as a real alternative for developers to gain additional downloads without the usual marketing risk and without overpaying for customer acquisition – and we will keep improving and constantly work on the above named points.

If you look at our website today you will notice some changes. We are excited to announce the “apprupt Performance Network”, which is an affiliate networks for mobile apps. We are launching this first beta version of the platform, but have been working on the Performance Network for the entire year of 2009.

We wanted to launch the platform before Christmas, but will add a lot more functionality in January. We call this our “unofficial launch”, as not all functionalities are available as of yet– so far you are able to sign up, download and integrate our download tracking library as well as integrate your app into our partner network. Functionalities like adding funds and getting download reports will be available in January.

What is the apprupt Performance Network?

As already mentioned, the Performance Network is basically an affiliate network for mobile apps – as of now we are offering distribution for iPhone apps, but will be adding other platforms in the future.

The Performance Network consists of wide-reaching partner sites (mobile websites as well as apps) that distribute the applications via an “App Store”, which is integrated within the partners existing site. The user sees a pre-selection of relevant apps and app reviews that link to the detail page of the app in the Apple App Store where the app can then be downloaded as usual.

You can find more information on the partner network here. We are proud to say that it consists of some of the most wide-reaching German mobile websites and we plan on extending the network to other countries in 2010.

We call it an “affiliate network” because we distribute apps on a performance basis, meaning developers may integrate their app into the apprupt partner network on a pay per download basis.

Developers pay 0,35 € per brokered download or 30% of the net revenues, depending on which is higher. We think this is a very fair price and there is no risk attached to it, as developers will know up-front how much they pay for one download. 

Developers should read this section to get more information or register directly.

Why Do We Think The Performance Network Is Useful?

As also mentioned on this blog before, we think the main problem for developers (and their apps) as well as users regarding a centralized App Store is that they are unable to find each other. If an app is not in the Top 25 or Top 50 of a certain category it basically disappears in the App Store and most probably won’t be discovered by those users that might have downloaded and liked it. Additionally, there are no adequate means for developers to do marketing for their apps.

Besides trying to get some press coverage or the product spreading itself virally, what are the options? There are not many, and those that exist (buying reach/clicks) do not work for the bulk of developers out there, which means they overpay for customer acquisition. We want to change that.

We want to help users find great apps and developers to get to their target group and increase downloads. We also want to give publishers a chance to monetize existing traffic with content that is relevant to their users – and we think we are on the right track with what we have launched today.

We will not be blogging during the Christmas days, but will be back before New Years Eve with some updates. Until then, please take a look at our website, give us your thoughts and feedback in the comments or contact us directly.

And of course, developers as well as publishers: become part of our network!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and great holidays!

We just came across the latest Distimo report, which they produced in collaboration with Skyhook Wireless. The report focuses on location based apps. We have been talking about location before on this blog and the report seems to verify a lot of the assumptions we made. These are some key findings:

• The largest proportion of paid location based applications (57%) can be found on the Apple App Store – Blackberry is at 49% and Anroid at 21%. More than 50% is quite a large percentage considering the amount of apps on the App Store.
• Prices for Maps & Navigation remain stable, despite the launch of Google Maps Navigation, which is free.
• The average price of location based applications on the Apple App Store is $7.34 – it’s at $14.37 on BlackBerry App World.
• The most location based apps are published in the Navigation & Travel category, News & Weather as well as Social. What is interesting is that regarding the Social, Lifestyle and Utilities & Tools category, the most location based app are published on Android (relative to the overall number of apps in that category).

 
Have a look at the report – it is not extensive, but well worth a look. You can download it here.

Seems like Christmas is the time for app developers to step up their PR efforts. This is great, as we find out a lot about how 2009 went for them and what their outlook on 2010 is. Today we read about Shazam and Tapulous, two of the most successful mobile product companies.

Tapulous broke the news that their revenues per month are reaching 1 million US dollars and that they are already profitable. This is an example of a very successful app company, which claims that they (we) are only at the beginning of making money mobile. They see a huge wave of mobile commerce coming and they want to profit from it just like Zynga or Playfish did online. So far the company is earning money through advertising and selling music through its apps. Once users in general become more accustomed to buying virtual goods with their mobile phones, 600 million plays of Tapulous-songs up to today already seem like a great basis for future revenues. Quote Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous: “It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?’”

The second example, Shazam, tells the world that it’s aiming for 100 million users in 2010. It is astounding and impressive to see the user growth the nine year old company has seen since the launch of the Apple App Store. Since then the company has nearly doubled its user base to 50 million, adding 500,000 uses a day as of lately. Moreover, the so far free service seems to have worked out a well working monetization strategy: freemium. They did not give out sales numbers, but as far as the premium app’s (Shazam Encore) ranking on the App Store goes, it seems to be working.

It is great to see more and more examples of app developers that develop an individual strategy for making money with a consistently growing user base while providing value. We are hoping to see a lot more of this in 2010.

The year is going by quickly and still a lot of things are happening these days – especially regarding wrap-ups on 2009 and look-outs for 2010. This is what we found important during the last week:

• AdMob released its metrics report for November, which helps getting some insights on 2009 and thus make assumptions for 2010.

• Morgan Stanley released their  “Mobile Internet Report“ – it is an extensive paper, we recommend for everyone who has not read it yet to take the holidays as a chance to at least skim through it. Must read for mobile professionals.

• RedLaser lets us know more about their sales data – interesting for any iPhone developer without a marketing budget

• Android Market now offers 20,000+ apps – does it?

• THE Google Phone is coming – good start into 2010 for Android.

• EVERY online website and every brand will have an (iPhone) app. Latest addition: the wine.com iPhone app

 
Have a great weekend!

Techcrunch has an interesting article up on their site today. The article is about iPhone app company Occipital (this is their Twitter-feed) and their app RedLaser. They claim there will be much more to come from them, but the case of RedLaser is already quite interesting in itself. Regarding numbers, up to now the app has been downloaded more than 750.000 times, bringing in more than a million US-dollars in revenues for them.

Much more interesting though is the way they got there: no marketing spend. Because the product was in the App Store since may 2009, but only started working well with an update in September, the app did not receive a lot of blog reviews or PR either.  The founders themselves conclude that the app spread almost exclusively by word-of-mouth, which appears reasonable.

We wanted to share this case with you, as we think this is a rare case of a product simply spreading itself virally – because it is a product that just works and provides utility. But why is this not the case for every app out there that works and provides utility?

In our opinion, the answer is simple: uniqueness. The mentioned Techcrunch article also refers to the early days of the App Store and how things have changed since then. Nowadays, a lot of the apps in the top 25 have a marketing budget, many of them even are brands. So to get attention and compete with other apps, everyone needs a marketing budget. We think that for RedLaser this would not be any different, if they offered an app that was slightly better or slightly different from two to ten other apps. But they really have something unique. The product is great and there were not many other that went into the RedLaser direction when they first came out. Also, from a user perspective regarding a bar code scanning app, there probably isn’t a large grey zone between working and not working. It either works in most of the cases or it doesn’t – so uniqueness is strongly related to “success-of-reading-the-barcode-rate”. In the end, the next four or five apps that offer a related utility, will most probably need marketing to get attention (as of now, a few more apps have been added to the App Store that offer barcode search).

So, congrats to RedLaser and their achievement, we hope to see a lot more coming from them. As a bottom line, stories like the one of RedLaser are not likely to be copied by looking at what they did to promote the app, but rather by looking at the app itself and its positioning among other apps.

We just got back from this year’s LeWeb. We were hoping to meet a lot of “app-people” there, which kind of was not the case regarding actual app developers. However, we met a lot of mobile- and tech-savvy people there and the networking was great. This is our short 8-point recap:

1. We did not get to actually sit through and listen to a lot of the speeches and presentations. There was a lot going on in the hallways. Although on many of the presentations almost every seat was taken, it never felt like the bulk of the conference participants went to see it
2. Maybe the mistake is on our side here, but despite the an app contest and some app related presentations we did not see that many app developers come to the event. Maybe the pricing wasn’t right for them?
3. Almost every person important to the internet-industry seemed to have been there. Especially the amount of “influencers” from the Silicon Valley attending LeWeb was, in our opinion, impressive.
4. As a direct result of three, networking was great. Since we are about to launch a completely new product (this is a hidden announcement), it was great to show it to mobile savvy people and bloggers. The feedback we got was generally very positive.
5. It’s all about mobile. “Mobile” was THE most used tech-word at the conference (okay, maybe a little exaggerated). Of course, a main driver of this was and is the iPhone, so a lot of the discussions off and on stage did make (at least) a reference to mobile apps.
6. With regard to five, we had a lot of discussions on how mobile and the internet connect conceptually and thus overlap. This topic deservers its own post, but the question is an important one: what is so unique about mobile, that it calls for its very own competence and or products? Put simple: how difficult is it for already existing online sites to move into the mobile space? Qype is a good example of going mobile with an existing online service and content.
7. 2010 will be the year of Android phones. Whether it will be the year of Android apps remains to be seen.
8. We had the chance for a quick chat with Erik Lammerding, who is with Apple and responsible for developer relations, as many of you might know. We have discussed the topic of Apple mistreating developers quite few times on this blog, so just on a general note: every employee of Apple we have met so far was very very pro-developer, pro app-diversity and very open for discussion and regarding Apple in general.
 
We tried to make this a Top-10 list, but these eight points basically sum the event up from our point of view. As a bottom line, the event was very well organized, overall impressive and fun, the food was okay and the location was great, so we hope to meet all of you there next year!

PS: For additionaly reviews of LeWeb from other perspectives, have a look here, here and here.