Posts Tagged ‘Nokia’

Win Wolverine with a Nokia Ovi App!

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Posted 31 Jul 2010 — by Dale
Category Events, Mobile

Not that long ago I posted some info about the Ovi App Wizard that Nokia had launched to help mobilise web content into Ovi Store compatible applications. One of the apps that I created with the wizard was for a site called Toy Tragic, and the Calling All Innovators competition has made the app one of the Top 10 finalists. Thanks Nokia!

To celebrate this achievement and to help with driving further usage of the app, Toy Tragic is running a competition for the month of August. Download the FREE Toy Tragic app before August 31st, and you’ll go into the draw to win an exclusive Wolverine Mighty Mugg! Offer is open to anyone who downloads the app, leaves a comment on the Ovi Store, and emails Toy Tragic with their details, so what are you waiting for! Full details here on Toy Tragic.

Winner is announced September 1st, 2010.

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Nokia App Wizard open for business

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Posted 07 May 2010 — by Dale
Category Development, Mobile

The Ovi App Wizard has been moved out of private beta and is now open for general use (although still in “beta”). App Wizard is an online service that ties directly into the Nokia Ovi Store, and allows users to create a Java and WRT application for navigating through an RSS or Atom feed from a website. The changes that have happened through the private beta is that now at the end of the app creation process, you can now publish directly to Ovi Store, and in a very short period of time it’ll be moved through QA and into the store (assuming you already have signed up as a publisher for Ovi).

Watch for some demos coming from Forum Nokia shortly, but if you’re new to Ovi Store, I’d suggest giving this a try. It’s not really designed for “developers” to use, but rather publishers of online content who don’t have access to programmers, or who are looking for a quick and low cost entry point to Ovi.

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Followup on Free Apps in Ovi Store

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Posted 03 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Business, Mobile

Last month I wrote about a change I had made to one my old games in Ovi Store, Palleggio, and going from a paid to a free download. The results in downloads were pretty dramatic, and now at the end of the month here’s the numbers:

  • March 2009 – Feb 2010: 63 paid downloads (@€1 EUR)
  • 1st half March 2010: 3302 free downloads
  • Total March 2010 (one day not shown in chart): 9462 free downloads

As I had seen earlier with free downloads, the tyop 5 countries had changed, and Italy remained out there on top, and the non-touchscreen devices were clear leaders (even though there was a touchscreen version available).

In looking at those downloads, I also then started experiementing with including some AdMob advertising into some free apps I created using the Ovi App Wizard. I created free apps that turned the RSS feed from some of my websites into Nokia WRT widgets and also Java apps so that basically all devices supported by Ovi Store were covered. The apps covered OviFlash.com, ToyTragic.com and this blog, DaleRankine.com, and in the last 2 weeks of March, the app for OviFlash.com had 7324 downloads and started earning about AU$3 a day from AdMob advertising. Guess I’ll have the deposit for that Maserati sooner than expected ;)

Overall, interesting stories have come out of this for me with Ovi Store. One is that without marketing these apps at all, or having them highly visible in the Ovi Store clients (web or mobile), you can still achieve some reasonable downloads. Add into that an ad-funded model, and depending ont he app you might make a tidy little sum of cash over a reasonable period of time (and by reasonable I mean you might be able to pay for the beer and pizza you used to bribe your developers to do the coding!). Real money will still only flow from paid apps that are heavily promoted and visible, or that generate significant word-of-mouth marketing.

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My first Ovi App Wizard product in the Ovi Store

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Posted 17 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Development, Mobile

In my last post I mentioned I was working with a new tool being trialed by Nokia called the Ovi App Wizard. It’s essentially an online wizard for converting an RSS feed into an application ready for publishing on the Ovi Store, similar to the “hello world” RSS widget app that you can create using the WRT extension for Dreamweaver and other IDE’s.

The Ovi App Wizard takes an RSS feed, some customised images and icons that you create, some skinning options, and produces a Java and WRT application. Simply take those files, plus the icons and screenshots that it also produces for you, and assuming you’re already setup as a publisher for the Ovi Store, login and upload your application files. The documentation that comes with the produced application files suggests that you can even just check all the supported devices as “Fully Tested” – which I did and the first of the apps I uploaded has just passed successfully through Ovi QA in a very quick time frame (certainly compared to when I first uploaded content to Ovi).

The first of the apps I uploaded was one for the OviFlash.com website, which showcases and links to Flash content within the Ovi Store. The WRT widget has passed through QA first and is now live on the store. The Java version is still in testing but I’m expecting this to also pass through without any problem. I also have an app awaiting approval that is for one of my other hobby sites called ToyTragic.com so I’ll let you know when those are online as well.

One suggestion I’ve had for the Ovi guys is to incorporate their Asset Generator tool into the App Wizard, so when you complete the wizard, you not only get the application files and screenshots, but also customised advertising banners ready to use. Just a thought …

Anyway, I’m interested to see how this goes. I’ve set my apps as free (cause I have a fundamental problem with people charging for an RSS feed), but you have the option during the App Wizard process of including your AdMob publisher ID and including mobile ads, which I have done in these first apps.

There are of course similar concepts to this already around the web, and in looking at the main one that I know of, I actually have a sneaky suspicion that there might be some re-skinning of services going on with the Ovi App Wizard, akin to Forum Nokia’s now defunct online SWF packager service (see if you can find out who might be powering the App Wizard – I’ll give you a clue … look for similar demo graphics!). Ovi App Wizard will certainly contribute to the number of apps Nokia can say are in the Ovi Store. Let’s see what the consumer response is from this kind of content being delivered.

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My experiment with free vs. paid on Nokia Ovi Store

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Posted 15 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Business, Mobile

I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!

So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …

From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.

Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?

And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well :)

I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!

Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.

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