A few months ago the AppStoreHQ team noticed a spike in visits from The New York Times. We checked our referrer logs and discovered a very flattering description of our iPhone app search offering in this article. This morning we saw a similar bump and wondered if the same piece had been rediscovered. Instead, we continue…
I’ve always been kind of a word geek. One of my favorite games when I was a kid was “Mad Libs“, a notebook of short stories with blank spaces provided for strategically placed nouns, adjectives and verbs. Depending on the words you or your friends chose, the resulting story could be hilarious, obscene, or just continue…
Back in April I wrote up some parallels I was seeing between the current iPhone app explosion and the first big wave of mass adoption of the Web. One of the patterns I predicted at the time was a building rush of incumbent companies coming into the space: “Brands Rush In. In the late ’90s continue…
One of the most accurate business cliches I know of is this one: “success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Most good entrepreneurs come up with new business ideas constantly, but also know from experience that those ideas have no value if they aren’t backed up with commitment, sustained effort and constant adaptation to market continue…
A few weeks ago VentureBeat emailed to tell me that AppStoreHQ had been selected as one of seven finalists for the Best Services Startup competition at their upcoming MobileBeat show. More than 100 companies had applied for the competition, so I was stoked to get picked but had no real expectation of winning. We just continue…
I love the New York Times – it’s one of the only publications I still read in paper form (every day, no less), so it’s always a good day when one of my projects gets a mention in the Gray Lady. Today was that day for AppStoreHQ. Roy Furchgott gave us a nice shout-out in continue…
Last week Ian reminded me about Joel Spolsky’s famous blog post on “Fire and Motion” – here’s a key excerpt: “When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards continue…
A while back I made a prediction that 2009 would be a breakout year for Google’s Android project. With the mid-year mark approaching and no new devices shipped that bet was looking a little shaky, but today’s announcements from the Google I/O conference put a little more weight behind my bullish view (phew). There’s been continue…
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” – Anonymous We just shipped a major upgrade to our search and browse functions at AppStoreHQ. It sounds crazy to say it, but as far as we can tell we now offer hands-down the most useful iPhone app discovery experience on the Web (not continue…
Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQTwo-thirds of the Urbanspoon team dropped by Founders Co-op for our weekly all-hands lunch this week, fresh on the heels of their acquisition by IAC. They shared the story of their journey from struggling Facebook app developer to iPhone app superstars, including some of the best (and worst) decisions they made continue…