UPDATE: FreeAppADay CEO Joe Bayen has issued a statement to TNW to clarify its position on its relationship with Socialcam:

Socialcam used their own marketing channels to promote their app on the app store up until April 29th. At which point FreeAppADay gave them additional exposure.

During our initial conversation, which included verifications of his previous statement, Bayen had stated that without FreeAppADay, Socialcam wouldn’t have cracked the top 25. I’m told that the original statement had more to do with the overall hard work and legitimacy of its platform, and not its relationship with Socialcam specifically.
——

Last week I covered some of the tactics being used by social video sharing app Socialcam to climb the charts and engage its users with YouTube videos. In response to the YouTube issue, Socialcam moved quickly to clean up its act.

One side-story of the Socialcam saga is the fact that the company was also using a marketing service called FreeAppADay. Here’s the gist from my original post:

When we reported that Socialcam had hit the #1 free app position on Apple’s app store, I followed up quickly with the fact that the company was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay to drive itself up the charts. Whilst FreeAppADay is normally only used by paid apps going free for a day (SocialCam is free), this type of non-organic growth isn’t “illegal”, and Apple doesn’t seem to mind. Once you get into the top five on the charts, you start experiencing organic growth due to the curiosity of those watching the charts for new apps to download.

I pointed out then that the service wasn’t breaking any rules, it was just a curious part of the entire “Socialcam rise to glory” story. I was told by a source that Socialcam didn’t approach FreeAppADay to use its service, and after speaking to its CEO today, Joe Bayen, I was able to confirm that was indeed the case:

We always strive to showcase to our end-users the very best app in the app store and in this specific case SocialCam met all our criteria to be featured on FreeAppADay. Our junior sales representative did not grasp yet the various plans that we are offering to our developer partners and proceeded to offer our rev-share model to SocialCam which made absolutely no sense since the app was already free.

Bayen told me that after the gaffe the company had started the process of charging Socialcam, but then decided not to. The company makes it clear that “freebies” aren’t the norm for it, so it looks like Socialcam made out pretty good on the deal. Bayen went on a bit further to share how well the campaign went, which started at the end of April or early May:

If it was not for our efforts I can guarantee you that SocialCam would not have been able to crack the top 25.

Just win

Now that we can put all of these specifics to rest, the question “if you could potentially sell your company for a billion dollars. What lengths would you go to find success?” still stands.

In Socialcam’s case, it looks like it got very lucky in that it used a service that advertises itself as being able to help developers find their way up the App Store charts by promoting it to its users through its website, other apps, and more. Again, Apple doesn’t seem to mind, so at the end of the day it’s a job well done by FreeAppADay.

Now that we’re hopefully over the “Instagram for video” debate, I’m interested to see which players come up big with features and value for its users. Because that is how you win.

UPDATE 2: According to a source, along with actual app data, Socialcam reached the #2 spot on the app store on approximately April 24th, which would contest the FreeAppADay CEO’s claim that “If it was not for our efforts I can guarantee you that SocialCam would not have been able to crack the top 25.”:

I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s iTunes or its iOS and Mac App Store. The design always feels really boring to me and doesn’t go out of its way to draw me in to make a purchase. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that application developers can do to stand out on the App Store either, unless their creation is blessed by the Apple Gods who promote the lucky few.

A new service created by Apple app developers freshcode called Bodega livens things up a bit when you need a new piece of software for your Mac.

The service describes itself in this way:

Welcome to Bodega, the world’s most innovative way to discover and obtain the hottest and latest applications for your Mac. Bodega is like a storefront right on your Mac’s desktop, one that’s chock-full of software apps from Mac developers around the world.

Much like the Apple’s own store, you can look for apps by searching, browsing through categories, or checking out what’s featured. However, forget about boring app pages, because Bodega provides a more interactive experience that lets you read press reviews about certain pieces of software, as well as file your own reviews.

Prettier than the App Store

Right off the bat, you can tell that quite a bit of thought went into building Bodega. You’ll find little things like swinging signs and smooth response in the app, which means that the team is pretty well versed on user experience.

Here’s a look at the Bodega “storefront”:

As you drill further into the store looking for apps, you’ll notice that the company has done a really amazing job at making the applications “pop” off of your screen. Strangely, Bodega’s category pages look way better than Apple’s.

Apple’s App Store:

Bodega:

It feels like you can literally grab a piece of software off of the “shelf”. Once you click on an application, you’re able to download it or purchase it right away, with 93% of the proceeds going directly back to the developers:

Not only do developers get a better deal by selling through Bodega, the service also provides assistance with marketing as well as deeper analytics than other services offer.

I would highly suggest giving Bodega a look, as I’m already finding it as a sexier alternative to Apple’s own Mac App Store. The service even tracks all of your currently downloaded applications, letting you know when it’s time to update.

➤ Bodega for Mac

The Next Web got an exclusive first look at the latest report from app store analytics company Distimo, which zooms in on the App Store for iPad, roughly two years after Apple’s first ‘magical’ tablet computer hit the market.

The report is largely based on United States-only data about the App Store for iPad as measured throughout February 2012. According to the latest public figures, Apple has sold over 55 million iPads to date, and very much counting.

Update: Distimo’s graphs are now up on Pinterest.

Two years post-iPad launch, there are now over 180,000 applications available in the App Store for iPad in the US, which means that it is growing at roughly the same pace as the App Store for iPhone and Google Play (formerly Android Market), which offered 200,000 and 175,000 applications after two years in business, respectively.

The graph below displays the road to reaching 180,000 iPad-fit applications, and remarkably, the growth is nearly linear.

Distimo points out that there was evidently an initial boost from iPhone applications that were ported to the iPad, but the graph also shows the proportion of ‘universal’ applications. Such applications, which are fit for both iPhone and iPad, have seen an increase to over 61 percent in February 2012.

Either way, the App Store for iPad remains the largest mobile application store available in the United States by a mile, as the graph below shows. Only a small proportion of applications available in Google Play are optimized for tablets.

Among the other major findings researched by Distimo analyst Gert Jan Spriensma is the fact that iPad users appear to be quite willing to pay for premium content offered by newspaper and magazine publishers in the Newsstand category.

Already, Distimo asserts, the top 100 grossing Newsstand applications – including The Daily, NYTimes for iPad and The New Yorker Magazine – are generating more than $70,000 in revenue per day in the United States.

Interestingly, China appears to have overtaken the United States when it comes to downloading free iPad apps. For the first time in the history of the App Store for iPad, the number of daily downloads in the top 300 most popular free applications exceeded 1.1 million in China, while the daily download volume in the United States clocked just below 1 million.

It remains to be seen if this will continue to be the case; Distimo believes app download volumes in the United States will pick up again in the coming months, particularly with the new iPad hitting the market in recent times.

Be that as it may, the United States still wears the crown when it comes to paid apps, remaining the highest grossing country alongside other English-speaking nations like the UK, Australia and Canada.

China by the way, is not even among the top five most-grossing countries.

Meanwhile, apps that come with the ability for user to effectuate in-app purchases make up a larger percentage on the App Store for iPad than application marketplaces for smartphones. According to Distimo, roughly 10 percent of all applications in the App Store for iPad currently feature in-app purchases, compared to 6 percent in the App Store for iPhone and 2 percent in Google Play.

And finally, zooming in on the 200 highest-grossing applications currently available in the App Store for iPad, 74 percent of applications come with the ability to make in-app purchases.

On to the next Distimo report, and the next few years.

In less than 5 days, Angry Birds Space has done some amazing things when it comes to moving units. Earlier, we reported that the much anticipated game had been downloaded over 10M times in its first 3 days alone.

Along with that milestone, the app has also climbed the charts to become the #1 grossing app on Apple’s App Store. That title was previously held by OMGPOP’s “Draw Something“, which was the major catalyst behind Zynga purchasing the company last week.

Draw Something held the top spot for quite some time, and actually has both its paid and free titles listed as top grossing since it makes a bulk of its money from in-app sales.

Rovio has made itself an absolute money-making machine with the Angry Birds series, and there’s no signs of slowing down. Not only are their games highly addictive, but when it comes to marketing, the company is second to none.

It was reported in November of last year that Zynga had attempted to purchase Rovio for $2.25B, and now we can clearly see why. While Rovio made quite a few games before Angry Birds but hasn’t since. Once it does it will be a clear competitor and threat to Zynga’s social gaming kingdom.

I bet that OMGPOP was glad that Angry Birds Space launched after its sale went through, as the top grossing spot might have become a bargaining chip to bring down its price.

We all know it’s hard to find great iOS apps beyond your usual suspects as the App Store grows and grows and grows. It’s a problem many startups are trying to solve, and Apple has acknowledged the issue as well, in a big way, by acquiring Chomp precisely to make it easier for people to search for and discover good iOS apps.

Aside from Chomp, there’s a whole plethora of services that aim to enable better mobile application store search and discovery (AppsFire, Discovr, Chorus, AppShopper etc.) and also numerous apps and sites that highlight discounted or temporarily free applications that might be worth installing (Monster Free Apps, FreeAppAlert, iOS Junky, Free App A Day, and so on).

Iddiction, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Slovenian entrepreneur and former Outfit7 CEO Andrej Nabergoj, is taking a slightly different approach.

The company is today debuting an app called App-o-Day (iTunes link), which it bills as the “Groupon for Apps”. I’m not a fan of that description, but let’s take a look.

Basically, Iddiction teams with app developers and publishers who agree to make their usually paid apps free of charge for a limited time and to promote them on the App-o-Day app, social media outlets and website.

The goal is to present users with a carefully vetted list of deals for premium iOS apps that were created by developers or publishers specifically for App-o-Day. In other words, the app doesn’t merely aggregate apps that went from paid to free, but instead features curated, exclusive deals.

Essentially, users would visit App-o-Day to save cash on daily app deals, while developers would use it for promotion and to get some traction.

I asked Nabergoj if he has plans to expand to other platforms such as Android and Windows Phone in the future, but he’s disinterested in that. He says he wants to focus on where he wants to take App-o-Day, and that means choosing a single platform. He does intend, however, to launch App-o-Day for iPad later this year.

Iddiction is backed by Playdom founder Rick Thompson, other angel investors and a slew of investment firms, including Comcast Ventures, IDG Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Felicis Ventures.

➤ App-o-Day (website)

According to a report by TechCrunch, a company behind an app called Evi has woken up the sleeping giant that is Apple. The app is extremely similar to Apple’s Siri product, complete with artificial intelligence and lady-like voice.

The company behind the iOS app is natural language search engine True Knowledge, and TechCrunch reports that Apple at one point told the company that it would remove it from the app store due to the fact that its UI was strikingly similar to that of Siri.

The app has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently costs $.99, so the company is definitely profiting from the story of its potential removal. One problem though, the app isn’t working.

When asking “Evi” a question, such as “Where is the closest CVS”, she responds with, well nothing:

What you get in return is the equivalent of a 404 error on the web. Apparently all of this attention has brought the app to its knees which makes Apple’s Siri product look even more impressive. We speak way faster than we type, so try to imagine the number of queries that Siri sees every minute and then think about how amazing it is that it can still be fast with an answer. Evi didn’t think about that.

The reviews in the app store are stating similar issues and Evi is getting a slew of one star reviews. Apple might not have to remove Evi after all, since the app just might remove itself due to poor performance. Here’s an example of the reviews coming in for Evi:

Definitely not an alternative to Siri. The app doesn’t work, even simple requests generate a “I’m having trouble getting a response from my servers, you might want to try again in a minute”. Saw this on 9to5mac and thought it would be legitimate, but it’s a ripoff. Seriously, how difficult is it to find a sandwich shop near me!!!!

Unfortunately, I can’t get my $.99 back, but I can honestly say that in this battle Evi got her ass kicked by Siri.

You might remember that some time ago Apple launched its first attempt at a social network with “Ping“. When it launched, many thought this would be a perfect spot for Apple and Facebook to partner by sharing and selling music on Facebook’s platform.

That turned out to not be the case, and many stories surfaced about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see eye to eye with then Apple CEO Steve Jobs. No deal was done, no partnership between the two were made. That fact however, hasn’t stopped Apple from utilizing Facebook for marketing purposes, just as other companies do on the platform.

The folks on the marketing team for Apple’s App Store and iTunes have found its Facebook pages as a great way to promote new apps and music available, and interact with people who are doing the buying.

Its Facebook page has 4,087,987 Likes and currently has 99,795 talking about it in status updates and comments on the social network. Its iTunes page is doing even better with 19,391,307 Likes and has 460,070 talking about it.

What’s more interesting than the numbers is what Apple is doing on its pages. For example, on the App Store page, the company is playing word games with fans by scrambling up the name of an app and letting people guess which app it is:

The iTunes page is currently taking advantage of Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance by promoting her new album:

While Apple’s Ping product has proved to be a serious loser in its attempt to becoming a huge music-focused social network, it looks like Apple hasn’t taken the lack of partnership with Facebook personally at all. So while no deal could be made between the two companies, Apple wasn’t willing to run away from the social network, because without Facebook, Apple would have nowhere else to turn to socially pimp its wares. Facebook knows that, and ended up getting Apple to use them just like everyone else.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a company called TagMyDoc that found a pretty useful purpose for QR codes. I was hard pressed to find other actual useful purposes for QR codes, since they’ve become a bit of a marketing fail.

One company disagreed and sent me its QR code pitch, and it’s pretty darn good.

App2Card helps you build simple business cards to promote your app specifically, with a QR code on the back that brings people directly to your download link upon scanning it. The impressive part of the site is that the card itself is unique, in that it takes your app’s icon and makes it the entire front of the card.

If you’re a developer, it’s the perfect handout to get people to check out your app later, especially if you have a great icon.

Find your app, create cards quickly

The site requires no design work from you at all. Simply perform a search for your app if it’s on Apple’s app store, or create a custom card if it’s on another platform.

Creating cards for iOS apps is super simple, as the site grabs your icon and URL automatically. You’re shown the preview of your card, and can purchase them for a pretty good price, considering that they’re a cool custom size.

When you’re at a tech party or in a meeting trying to impress VC’s, dropping a few of these off is way more impressive than giving them your old boring card. After all, it’s your app that’s important, not you. They’ll stand out too.

So perhaps I was wrong, QR codes can be quite interesting when the idea presenting them is unique and executed well.

➤ App2Card

Google+, which just updated its Android app, has released an update for its iOS version today.

Interestingly enough, Google refers to its chat feature as “Messenger”, which is the same name Facebook has given to its messaging product.

The Google+ mobile team says this about the new release:

What’s new:
- Support for Google Apps users
- Messenger now lets you know if someone’s online, and if they’re currently typing.
- Lots of bug fixes including some of the crash issues you’ve been reporting!

We hope you enjoy the improvements. As always, please keep the feedback coming!

You’ll also be able to +1 photos with the new version.

It’s nice to see Google staying consistent with its app designs, and the iOS version led the Android one as far as its recent iteration. Keeping apps on multiple platforms consistent is difficult, since separate teams are working on them.

The focus on its messenger product, a hybrid of Gchat, shows that Google isn’t ready to give away messaging to Facebook just yet. Recently, we reported that Beluga had been shut down and Facebook Messenger sits atop the free apps on the Apple app store.

It’s intriguing to see the iOS version of Google+ getting features first, as the submission process on its own store would most certainly be a simpler one than that of Apple’s app store.

We’re starting to find out what you can do with pictures other than host and share them online. Apps like Apple’s Card app and Photogram have sparked interest in making real-world physical goods at a price for your friends offline.

Today, Calendagram hit the Apple app store, letting you connect to your Instagram account, select 12 photos, and have a physical calendar sent to you or a loved one.

It’s a brilliant idea that creates a layer on top of the photo filtering and sharing phenomenon, Instagram. By far, this is the best Instagram API usage I’ve seen. The app is free, and it costs $24.99 to make a Calendagram. It’s a little pricey, but for the customization opportunities, this could be a perfect gift for the upcoming Holidays.

Creating a Calendagram

Once you connect Calendagram with your Instagram account you’re shown all of your photos. Unfortunately, you can only choose from your photos. It makes perfect sense, because those photos are yours to do with whatever you like, after all. It would still be nice to be able to tap into photos from friends. Perhaps the company can build a permissions based system for that usage.

Once you have your photos pulled into Calendagram, you can start selecting photos in the order, from January to December, that you’d like them to display in.

Previewing and buying your calendar

Once you’ve selected your photos, you can pick between three colors, white, black, and brown. You can flip through your calendar, and if you’re ready to purchase, it will cost $24.99 plus shipping. If you’re purchasing for a group, the cost gets less as you order more. If you purchase ten or more calendars, the price is $19.99.

More than likely, the lion share of the cost comes with the printing process. Again, with the customization options and simplicity of creating a calendar with Calendagram, it might be well worth the cost.

Will Instagram start paying attention to others and build its own services for its platform ala Apple and Twitter? It might be a smart bet if something like Calendagram takes off.