The Sweepstakes Winners Are…
Thanks to everyone who participated in our iTunes Gift Card Sweepstakes. Lot of folks invited and followed their friends on Apptizr during this promotion. Many of our top users also captured many followers. We also received lots of feedback in our survey. Thanks so much everyone!
Now it's time to announce the winners of our sweepstakes. Drum roll please.... The grand prize winner of $100 in iTunes gift card goes to Ed Armstrong from St. Louis, MO. The winners of the $50 gift cards are:
Congratulations to all of our winners!
New Twitter Search Widget & Auto-Own
We've been working hard as usual, and we have some exciting new features to announce. First, we added Twitter Search Widgets to our app details pages so you can see the latest buzz on the app on Twitter before deciding whether to download the app or not. The widget shows you the search result on the name of app on Twitter, so you can see what everyone is saying.
Another feature we just launched is based on the result of your feedback. Many of you have mentioned that when you click on the "Get It" link to download an app, we should automatically move that app to "Owned" so you don't have to do it manually. We decided to implement this feature even though sometimes you end up not downloading or purchasing the app. In this case (which should not happen too often), you can simply remove the app from your Owned list. As always, please let us know your thoughts on these new features.
Hottest apps this past week & last chance to win $300 iTunes Gift Cards
We started tracking the App Store Top 300 rankings a little over a week ago, so you can see what the Hottest apps are in the App Store in terms of how quickly they are moving up the charts. Now that we have more than a week of data, we thought it would be fun to look at the top moving apps over the last 7 days. You can go to the Apptizr site for the full list of 50 hottest free and and paid apps - you can also change the time period from 1 day vs. 7 day as well as look at these lists by category.
Here are the hottest 5 free and paid apps based on how quickly they moved up the ranks in the last 7 days. A couple of observations: (1) There is actually a decent degree of turn over when you look at the list on a week by week basis (all ten of the apps listed below were not on the top 300 list a week ago); (2) Games is still the dominant category of popular apps. Any other thoughts?
Hottest Free Apps:
Hottest Paid Apps
BTW, today is February 28, which is the last day of our $300 iTunes Gift Card Sweepstakes. Get going today to get in some last minute entries into the Sweepstakes. You can enter by following friends or other Apptizr users, invite your friends, or by filling out our short user survey. We'll be announcing the winners of the Sweepstakes in a week or so on this blog.
Over 5 Million App Recommendations Served & Top Apps from January
Believe it or not, Apptizr has now served over 5 million personalized app recommendations to our users! It's been a fun ride and we really appreciate all of the support and feedback our users have given us. To celebrate this occasion, we thought we would take a moment to look back, and share some data on what we've learned from our users.
Since we know when our users tell us they like an app recommendation, we thought it would be fun to look at the most liked apps from last month. This is the resulting top 10 list for free apps vs. paid apps. Starting with the free apps, I did find the popularity of music apps a bit surprising (2 of top 3). It was also surprising the lack of games among the top 10, although you'll see that they are among the most highly downloaded.
Here's the top 10 list among paid apps which were most liked by Apptizr users in January. A bit more games, but lots of Productivity apps. I guess people are happy to pay for some productivity improvements.
Lastly, we looked at when our users actually clicked on the download button to try to install these apps. Not surprisingly all of these are free apps, with games being a top category.
Please feel free to share these lists with folks who will find them interesting. To make it easier to share, I've posted this as a presentation on Slideshare. As always, thoughts or feedback on the post would be welcome.
Hottest Apps & Top Ranked Apps
Want to know what the hottest apps are in the app store? We've often wondered that ourselves, and decided to build a feature that answers this question. Apple provides the top 300 ranked apps in the iPhone App Store, for free apps and paid apps. We decided to build a feature that tracks which apps are moving the fastest up the ranks. You can see what the hottest apps are now, and you can even filter by category. Since we have this info, we decided to also display the top ranked apps in the app store as well. Hopefully you find this useful. Please let us know what you think!
Some apps you’ll need to plan the perfect Valentine’s Day
So it's almost Valentine's Day, how can your iPhone help? Here are some apps that will be helpful in planning your perfect Valentine's Day.
1. Booking a restaurant reservation - assuming you've got a Valentine already, you may want to take him/her to somewhere nice to celebrate. Use the Yelp app to find the best restaurants that matche your tastes and fit in your budget. Zagats is another classic guide as reference. Once you figure out the restaurant, use OpenTable to book your reservation.
2. Want to cook for your date instead of going out? Use these great apps to find the perfect recipe. Epicurious has an app that'll give you recipes for dinner and dessert. AllRecipes is another popular app to find that perfect recipe. Use the Wine Rating Guide to find the perfect wine for your dinner.
3. For those of you without a date yet, here are some apps that can help. Match.com has an app you can use to find that special someone. You can also use Hot or Not to find your date. OKCupid is another cool free dating service/ app you can use.
Of course, you can use these apps to find and plan your perfect date whether or not it's Valentine's Day. Let us know what you think!
$300 iTunes Gift Card Sweepstakes
To celebrate the launch of the Friends tab, we decided to do a promotion to also thank our users for using Apptizr. We're giving away a total of $300 in iTunes gift cards (five prizes in total - one $100, four $50), so you can buy plenty of cools apps or music for your iPhone / iPod Touch. All you have to do to enter is to follow or invite friends via our Friends tab, or invite friends through our website invite friend flow. Facebook limits the number of people you can invite to 8 per day so you should get started ASAP. You get one entry into the Sweepstakes per person you invite or follow.
You can find out more about the promotion here, including the detailed promotion rules.
Hurry and get started today since the promotion only lasts through the end of the month!
Surpassing 3 Million App Recommendations
We have now served to our users over 3 million app recommendations! It's a milestone we're pretty proud of. Hopefully 10 million apps recommendations served will be just around the corner...
Friends Tab launched – see what apps your friends like or own
This is one of the features many users have requested - Friends tab. You can now link up your Apptizr account with your Facebook account and see what apps your friends like or own! I know I exchange app recommendations with my friends all the time, this makes the process super easy. It's another great way you can use Apptizr to discover great iPhone or iPod Touch apps.
Hello world!
Hi there! After talking about this for a while, we finally got around to publishing the Apptizr blog. This is a forum for us to share announcements around new product features, promotions, as well as pass along thoughts on cool apps we've seen. Hope that you find the blog useful.
Please leave us any feedback/ thoughts in the blog, on our customer support forum, or email us at feedback [at] apptizr [dot] com.