Indexes | Fiksu Benchmarking app store competitiveness & the cost of mobile app marketing Fiksu Indexes for February 2014: Cost per App Launch Index: February 2014 The Cost per App Launch Index tracks the cost of each repeat app launch over time, which focuses on engagement and life-time value of mobile users. Cost per Install (CPI) Index: February 2014 The Cost per Install (CPI) Index measures the cost per app install directly attributed to advertising. App Store Competitive Index: February 2014 The App Store Competitive Index tracks the aggregate volume of downloads per day achieved by the top 200 ranked free iPhone apps in the U.S. Cost per Loyal User Index: February 2014 The Cost per Loyal User Index measures the cost of acquiring a loyal user for brands who proactively market their apps. Fiksu's Analysis: February 2014 Another reason for this February’s steady hold was an increase in the use of incentivized traffic – such as Fiksu’s FreeMyApps (FMA) – up by about 15 percent.
How I built 7books in under 4 weeks | 7books blog Update: This post is slightly out of date now since V2 of 7books is now live. See the "making of" post for V2 here: Let me tell you a story. It's a story of my very first coding project, called 7books. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Why I built 7books I've had plenty of ideas in my time. I quickly scribbled in my moleskine this diagram: As you can see, originally I was planning on calling the site 10books and I was planning on using some Ajax magic. Still, as I sat on the train thinking through the idea I started to become very attached to it. It's based on one of my passions (I love books a lot)I didn't think it would be too difficult to buildIf I wanted to use the service then it was a sure bet others would too Underneath my diagram I jotted down what I thought the three main USPs would be: Now, given it's still early days I've not yet got all 3 of these USPs nailed but that's the vision. Me, 4 weeks ago Four weeks ago I couldn't code. Phew.
Lean/Kanban - Crisp AB Kanban is a lean approach to agile software development. Actually, Kanban means many things. Literally, Kanban is a Japanese word that means “visual card”. Does Kanban matter to me? Do any of these sound familiar? “We’ve done Scrum for a long time now and our process improvement has levelled off. If so, read on. How does Kanban work? There are many flavors, but the core of Kanban means: Visualize the workflowSplit the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall.Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow.Limit WIP (work in progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state.Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes called “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible. This is a direct implementation of a lean pull scheduling system. Here’s a more complex one (see Kanban kick-start example for a closer look & description) Yes. Marketing
How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web A purple rooster sculpture made from recycled grape Fanta bottle labels. Clocks designed to hang in corners. Bauhaus posters from the 1920s. Hand-painted vintage typewriters. These are some of the carefully curated objects for sale on Fab.com, the fast-growing flash-deal site for designer goods. Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. Fab vs. Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally. The Samwers’ base of operations is a startup accelerator in Berlin called Rocket Internet. Groupon (GRPN) got cloned by the Samwers two years ago, and the results were expensive for the daily-deal site. The Samwers are revered for putting Berlin’s startup scene on the map and despised for sticking Germany with a reputation as the copycat capital of Europe. EBay’s business model appealed to them from the start.
Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-growing Agile toolkit Agile development is a value system — not a process. The Agile Manifesto is a short, 4 lines, set of phrases that indicate what’s important to those practicing Agile development. These statements are the “mom and apple pie” statements for agilists. There’s no specific processes specified — however over the last several years common practice has emerged. (For more on agile value system and culture, read Agile is Culture, Not Process.) Common Agile Practice takes the best from the buffet Specific processes call themselves “Agile” when they believe the value system that motivated their creation is aligned with an Agile value system. It’s common to take a Certified Scrum Master course where originally you’d learn the ins and outs of Scrum’s Scrum Master role, but today you’ll learn the basics of Scrum, all its roles and process flow, and a lot of additional practices that weren’t in the original process described by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. Shrinking stories makes Agile development easier
How to make Angry Birds – part 1 Hello and welcome back to my blog! This time I’m going to try something new. There are many tutorials for various techniques and tricks on the web, but what you don’t often see is one that takes you through the development of a game, step by step from start to finish. This is what I’m going to attempt here. I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with the basics of game development and I’m going to concentrate on the art and programming. Angry Birds So, the game I’m going to be making is to be based on the extremely popular Angry Birds by Rovio, a AAA title which cost some $140k USD to make. Angry Birds Obviously, since its just me making this I will have to take a few short-cuts and will be concentrating on the core part of the game. Cloning Before I start I should mention that I do not condone the cloning of games in any way; what I’m doing in these tutorials is purely for educational purposes and I have no plans to release the game at the end of this. Analysis Graphics Code Camera Physics
Introducing rollout: Condionally roll out features with redis | James on Software Aug 01, 2010 When we work on new features, we like to push them to production regularly. We've found that long-lived branches tend to introduce more defects than short-lived ones. And as useful as staging can be, it's hard to beat seeing and tweaking new features on the real, production site and infrastructure. When we're ready to alpha the feature, we'll roll it out to staff. If we do find a problem, we need to be able to disable the feature in real-time. We do all of this using a tool we put together called rollout. How it works gem install rollout I like to assign an instance of Rollout to a global variable. $redis = Redis.new$rollout = Rollout.new($redis) I can check whether a user has access to a feature like this: $rollout.active? Let's say I want to roll out a chat feature. if $rollout.active? The simplest way to start rolling out our chat feature is by giving access to a single user: $rollout.activate_user(:chat, User.find_by_nickname("jamesgolick")) $rollout.active? Performance issue?
How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen Do you have an idea for a website, online business, or application, but need a programmer to turn that idea into reality? Many of my friends have been in the same position, so here's my best advice, below. But first, a quick request: If you are a programmer, please leave a reply below with YOUR best advice. Feel free to include your URL and email for anyone to contact you. I know my advice is not complete, (and you may totally disagree!) 1. First read my short “Version Infinity” article. Dream the big dream of everything your site/service/company might be some day, and write it all down. But then think of the bare minimum that would make you happy, and people would find useful. Call this Version 1.0. A programmer is much more likely to say, “I can do that!” Your goal here is just to get Version 1.0 built. 2. Again, remember: only describe Version 1.0. Leave off all details that the programmer doesn't need to know. Be succinct. Include people in a story, using the terms you use. 3. 4. 5. 6.