The word Google has become synonymous with online search as it refers to the world’s best search engine, and it has developed a platform for huge free web-based applications that now we use every day to perform tasks, or simply for entertainment. The company now is a multinational corporation with a huge budget and a pre-determined strategy to grow bigger. But how does Google does it?
Google does it simply with its interest in providing what everyone needs and the way they want it to be. Unlike the other corporates that sells good or sometimes excellent products for a high price, Google’s answer to this is simply, a high quality “product as a service” and the best part it’s for free. However, the company also does sell online advertisement spaces. The ads are served also in their propriety services like Gmail and Docs etc.
Presenting an operating system for the small gadgets and making it free is a wise way to approach the market, and to get the approval of the experts the company made it based on Linux, the developers’ favorite. The project was first at the hands of a small company, but Google acquired it and financed the project so it can become a reality in order to expand in the telecommunication industry. The smart thing was including all of its services alongside new ones into the software, this making it getting closer to its users and getting the feedback with not much of an effort.
Google has developed some of its key services out from university labs. At first they would be tested for a long time internally, and then when it’s near perfection it’s released to the world like Gmail. The service was in beta phase for five years before it became stable. It’s is a pressure-free developing style, a style that divers it from others. While other companies have deadlines and a releasing schedule, Google doesn’t, simply because there is no one to report to. Its external contracts are different; Google doesn’t create a product for another corporate. Having so will enforce the company to work in a narrow area and with predetermined way. On the contrary it simply creates and presents the product for the other companies to work with.
Its employees are encouraged to work on project that interests them directly. This corporate culture cannot be simply copied. If it was, we would see someone doing it. It’s also what divers it from other companies and it’s what defines it now. Making the workspace fun and interesting is to maintain the current staff and attract new “brains”, the ones who might have an idea of a project that can turn out to be the next big thing.
Google maintains its services up and running with its dependency on ads; this was at first and might still be at a certain degree. But its market share and its focus on many fields might define the future of the corporate. Sole dependency on ads online is definitely not a good strategy and Google has figured that out already, with its expanding plans to other areas, first, ten years ago when it acquired Blogger the famous blogging platform. After that YouTube, with its 4 Billion videos streamed daily, alongside it’s cloud music service that has shown great threat to competitors with its simplicity. And lately it’s 12.5 Billion bid on Motorola Mobility.
It’s clear that Google continues to grow with its unique way of managing its business. It’s is what will define the corporate future, alongside our lifestyle that has been influenced and still does. We used to read printed books; we now read them on small devices to save the huge space the books occupy. There are many examples of how Google has enhanced the way we perform our tasks and activities and made them easy for us, and this is the reason why Google is so succeful.
Unagi said:
Unlike the other corporates that sells good or sometimes excellent products for a high price, Google’s answer to this is simply, a high quality “product as a service” and the best part it’s for free.
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NOTHING is free. I am as guilty as most of the people for taking their 'free' candy, but it will someday bite us on the ass.
Not sure when, but it will happen. And it won't be pretty!
And believe me they are not doing it to be good corporate citizens.
Making money online is easy
Unagi said:
The word Google has become synonymous with online search as it refers to the world’s best search engine, and it has developed a platform for huge free web-based applications that now we use every day to perform tasks, or simply for entertainment. The company now is a multinational corporation with a huge budget and a pre-determined strategy to grow bigger. But how does Google does it?
Google does it simply with its interest in providing what everyone needs and the way they want it to be. Unlike the other corporates that sells good or sometimes excellent products for a high price, Google’s answer to this is simply, a high quality “product as a service” and the best part it’s for free. However, the company also does sell online advertisement spaces. The ads are served also in their propriety services like Gmail and Docs etc.
Presenting an operating system for the small gadgets and making it free is a wise way to approach the market, and to get the approval of the experts the company made it based on Linux, the developers’ favorite. The project was first at the hands of a small company, but Google acquired it and financed the project so it can become a reality in order to expand in the telecommunication industry. The smart thing was including all of its services alongside new ones into the software, this making it getting closer to its users and getting the feedback with not much of an effort.
Google has developed some of its key services out from university labs. At first they would be tested for a long time internally, and then when it’s near perfection it’s released to the world like Gmail. The service was in beta phase for five years before it became stable. It’s is a pressure-free developing style, a style that divers it from others. While other companies have deadlines and a releasing schedule, Google doesn’t, simply because there is no one to report to. Its external contracts are different; Google doesn’t create a product for another corporate. Having so will enforce the company to work in a narrow area and with predetermined way. On the contrary it simply creates and presents the product for the other companies to work with.
Its employees are encouraged to work on project that interests them directly. This corporate culture cannot be simply copied. If it was, we would see someone doing it. It’s also what divers it from other companies and it’s what defines it now. Making the workspace fun and interesting is to maintain the current staff and attract new “brains”, the ones who might have an idea of a project that can turn out to be the next big thing.
Google maintains its services up and running with its dependency on ads; this was at first and might still be at a certain degree. But its market share and its focus on many fields might define the future of the corporate. Sole dependency on ads online is definitely not a good strategy and Google has figured that out already, with its expanding plans to other areas, first, ten years ago when it acquired Blogger the famous blogging platform. After that YouTube, with its 4 Billion videos streamed daily, alongside it’s cloud music service that has shown great threat to competitors with its simplicity. And lately it’s 12.5 Billion bid on Motorola Mobility.
It’s clear that Google continues to grow with its unique way of managing its business. It’s is what will define the corporate future, alongside our lifestyle that has been influenced and still does. We used to read printed books; we now read them on small devices to save the huge space the books occupy. There are many examples of how Google has enhanced the way we perform our tasks and activities and made them easy for us, and this is the reason why Google is so succeful.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is very easy to make money online, go to moolamails . info and Members can earn extra money online by visiting our sponsors websites. After you visit our sponsors link for the designated time, your account will be credited. Members can also earn 25 cents per signup for joining our advertisers programs. You can cashout your earnings at $2 witch will never increase. Along with the pay per click ads, members can also earn by opting into our paid emails list. If you choose, you may have paid emails sent to your email address on file. In our members traffic exchange we offer random 1 cent bonuses. The most important way to earn here is by telling the world about us with your custom Moola Mails referral links and banners. Earn 10% of your direct referrals earnings as a free member or up to 35% with a premium membership. No limits on direct referrals. Take advange of our paid to promote feature, we give you 5 cents for every 1000 times your show the world your custom Moola Mails referral link. Send people to your Moola Mails referral link and watch your ptp earnings and your referral tree grow. Join and start making extra money online with our easy to use custom interface today.
ravisinghal20 said:
It is very easy to make money online, go to moolamails . info and Members can earn extra money online by visiting our sponsors websites. After you visit our sponsors link for the designated time, your account will be credited. Members can also earn 25 cents per signup for joining our advertisers programs. You can cashout your earnings at $2 witch will never increase. Along with the pay per click ads, members can also earn by opting into our paid emails list. If you choose, you may have paid emails sent to your email address on file. In our members traffic exchange we offer random 1 cent bonuses. The most important way to earn here is by telling the world about us with your custom Moola Mails referral links and banners. Earn 10% of your direct referrals earnings as a free member or up to 35% with a premium membership. No limits on direct referrals. Take advange of our paid to promote feature, we give you 5 cents for every 1000 times your show the world your custom Moola Mails referral link. Send people to your Moola Mails referral link and watch your ptp earnings and your referral tree grow. Join and start making extra money online with our easy to use custom interface today.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It will cost me more than 25 cents in electricity just deleting all of the spam generated from signing up to worthless sites. And 5 cents for showing a referral 1000 times? Lol. I think bums on skid row wouldn't waste their time on that!
BTW, Nice segue into a plug for your site.
Related
Google sure doesn't seem to be sticking true to their own philosiphy. It says we can hold them to it. The way they are treating this device launch goes back on their own statements.
As seen here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/company/philosophy/
Ten things we know to be true
We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
Fast is better than slow.
We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.
Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.
You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
There’s always more information out there.
Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.
The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.
You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
Great just isn’t good enough.
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.
What exactly are they "going back on"?
"The way they are treating this device launch"
What? They took preorders and said 3-4 weeks. That timeframe still isn't up, and they are currently sending out stock to brick and mortar retailers so they can have a unified launch. What exactly is the problem?
*philosophy
Trollololol
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium
Really?! For a TABLET?! It's not that serious.
Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2
Damn dude. Get a grip.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2
jamerican413 said:
Really?! For a TABLET?! It's not that serious.
Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2
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It is serious. It's life or death :laugh:
Seriously though, I was just trolling to stir the masses. Take this sh*t with a grain of salt.
Idiots. It will be shipped mid July. Quit crying. They are planning to do (and will likely achieve) EXACTLY what they said.
You could get yourself an iPad...
timmytim said:
It is serious. It's life or death :laugh:
Seriously though, I was just trolling to stir the masses. Take this sh*t with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...
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You have to much time on your hands
Sent from my HTC Sensation 4G using xda premium
P1 Wookie said:
Trollololol
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Trollololol Guy
chROMed said:
You could get yourself an iPad...
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Click to collapse
I would never own that peice of over priced trash but thanks for the advice :good:
Got to get in before the ban hammer.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2
Below is the text of a brief email interview conducted with Cezary Pietrzak, Director of Marketing at Appboy, for an article about app analytics that will be published soon to the XDA Portal. If you have any experiences with specific analytics providers, post them in this forum.
What are the most valuable pieces of data that come out of your product? Why? Give examples of how I might get actionable data, make a change, and improve results.
Appboy’s entire philosophy is making data actionable and giving developer tools to drive user engagement within the app. We’re very much against collecting data for data’s sake which is quite common among mobile analytics tools which bombard you long reports and meaningless percent changes. To change this mentality, we start by collecting data on an individual user level rather than on aggregate, because that allows for more flexibility and customization when running marketing campaigns. We then offer a robust customer segmentation product that lets you create dynamic groups of app users across any attribute or in-app behavior. Lastly, we provide a complete suite of messaging tools, a customer support product and HootSuite social integration to influence specific segments and behaviors.
For example, app developers can use an in-app message to drive feature discovery, help customers get through onboarding, and notify them about bugs/issues in the app - something that has helped our clients minimize negative app store reviews. They can also use push notifications to bring lapsed users back into their app and drive regular engagement through timely updates. Many developers forget about the importance of customer support in a competitive app ecosystem, so we provide them with a simple feedback tool to deal with customer issues in a timely manner. And our HootSuite integration lets developers identify their app users on Twitter while enhancing existing profiles with in-app behavior data, which gives them more firepower to drive loyalty and virality.
Appboy’s big-picture goal is to help app developers increase ROI and drive lifetime value of customers, so we’ll continue building features that support this vision and help them turn their app into a sustainable business.
What most differentiates you from your competitors (features, pricing, etc)?
Appboy’s biggest point of difference is our holistic approach to customer engagement. We bring together the most effective app marketing tools on one dashboard, including messaging (push notifications, in-app messages, email), customer support, social and cross-promotion. No company can claim the breadth of our offering nor the benefits that their deep integration brings. For developers, this means managing only one SDK (vs. 4-5) and one standardized customer data set for all of their app engagement needs. Appboy also stands out through its performance-based pricing that is tied to MAUs rather than data points, which aligns our incentives with those of the app developer.
Explain your range of pricing and, if you have a low tier or free option, what features are only available to premium users?
We have a free version of Appboy (complete with all features) available to any app with <10K monthly active users. For those with a larger audience, pricing starts at $199/month and scales accordingly. The reason we use monthly active users for pricing is to properly align incentives, as Appboy only makes money if the app is successful. Most of our competitors charge by data points or API calls, which creates negative incentives to use their tool and collect the proper data. We also have an enterprise product with custom pricing depending on client needs.
Are there any technical aspects of implementation that would be helpful to explain?
On Android, the Appboy client will ship in two parts: 1) an internal jar library exposing the Appboy events and analytics API, and 2) an open source Android library project implementing the Appboy UI and user interactions on top of the API. The open source library will be available as a public repo on Github and licensed with the Apache 2.0 license. With this setup, developers will be able to fully customize the UI/UX of Appboy within their application, while easily keeping up with upgrades and enhancements.
What advice would you give to help make new independent app developers more successful?
Start thinking about user engagement before you launch your app. Once you go live, you only have a small time window to reconnect with the app users you lost before they’re gone forever (on average, apps lose 76% of their user after 3 months). Ask yourself: What is the ideal user flow in your app? Which parts of your apps cause the most friction and drop-off? How can you encourage people to use your app on a regular basis, and how can you incentivize them to come back once they’ve left? What tools will you use to facilitate and automate this task? Because they focus on the long-term, these questions will help you craft a better product and a better user experience from the start.
It’s also important to understand your goals for the app. While some apps may want drive in-app purchases, others are more concerned with time spent in-app and stills others focus on general exposure and branding. These goals often overlap. For example, many app developers are now discovering that monetization is most likely to happen after a customer is happy with the app experience and has spent considerable time engaging with the product.
If you’re interested in learning more about our approach to engagement, here’s a visual presentation we put together on Slideshare that explains it in depth: bit.ly/mobileappengagement.
Related to the above, in your mind what makes an app successful? Why do some "great" apps not get noticed?
Building a great product is table stakes, but it’s only a start. Here some of the important characteristics we’ve noticed among the most successful apps:
Community. Great apps build a community of people who evangelize the app to their friends and across social networks, which drives their growth at essentially no cost. The challenge of community-building is that it requires work, both on the product side - building hooks to make social sharing easy, as well as on the marketing side - systematizing your outreach to customers and encouraging them to promote you. Most app developers don’t invest their time in the latter because they think it takes too long. What they fail to recognize is that the process can be automated across customer segments without losing the personal touch. For example, the smartest apps ask only their most active users to rate them or share them with friends, because they expect a much higher response rate among this group.
Content. Great apps serve great content and make sure it’s always fresh. Most content is served on the product side through the app’s core function (eg latest weather, breaking news, social status updates), but a lot it can be conveyed through various form of messaging. For example, using push notifications or in-app messages to serve micro-content (rather than plain alerts) can drive engagement significantly. Email is also very effective - we’ve seen apps use it to provide their customers with personal stats and weekly summaries of app usage. Giving people something to talk about on social media is also effective, and can be used to bring users back into app experience. When creating content for your customers, think about the story you’re telling and the progression of information, and don’t be afraid to repurpose what you already have.
Context. Great apps have a knack for connecting with people in the times, places and situations where they can provide the most value. They don’t try to be top of mind all the time, because that’s not sustainable. One of the big problems we’ve seen in the last few months is app developers abusing push notifications and spamming their users which generic, one-size-fits messages. This only leads to frustration and encourages people to shut you out. The best apps use location data, behavioral triggers, historical usage patterns and other data to create a very relevant, contextual and personalized experience. For example, Fab alerts you about new sales, Foursquare tells when your friends are nearby and Circa sends notifications about stories you follow.
An “great” app often doesn’t get noticed because it assumes that a great product experience is enough to succeed. That’s simply not true. First, the structural challenge of the ecosystem are much higher than on the web - apps need to get discovered, apps take time to download and apps are easily lost on phone screens. Second, building relationships with people takes time and effort, and apps are no different. If you’re unwilling to invest your time engaging your customers, then you’re inviting your audience to go to a competitor who better at managing relationships.
Thanks for sharing!
Below is the text of a brief email interview conducted with Christian Poppelreiter, Account Specialist at Flurry, for an article about app analytics that will be published soon to the XDA Portal. If you have any experiences with specific analytics providers, post them in this forum.
What are the most valuable pieces of data that come out of your product? Why? Give examples of how I might get actionable data, make a change, and improve results.
Flurry Analytics reports a variety of metrics related to app usage, user engagement and audiences. In addition to standard metrics, like how many sessions are taking place or how many unique users appear during a specific period of time, we also report metrics that indicate how "sticky" an app is, or how likely the prospects for longer term success. For example, Flurry Analytics has sections which report on session duration, session frequency and overall rate of retention as an application ages. Beyond this, developers can customize how they collect data through events tracking, which can be used to examine user behavior particular to that app, such as when someone likes a status, shares an article, beats a level or makes a purchase. Once events are set up, developers can also segment out sections of their audience either according to behavior (i.e. purchasers) or according to more traditional audience metrics like age, gender or location.
There are also features in Analytics which can help a developer formulate a monetization strategy. The typical length of a session can tell you how many ads might be appropriate to place in an ad supported app. Developers can track how long users typically spend within different sections of the app, can detect when users are most engaged and also see conversion rates from tracked event to tracked event using the Funnels tool.
What most differentiates you from your competitors (features, pricing, etc)?
We are the leader among mobile app analytics providers for a number of reasons. First, as I mentioned before, Flurry Analytics is highly customizable and is designed to work on a variety of types of apps on a variety of platforms. Of course we support iOS and Android, but also Blackberry, Windows Mobile and HTML5 / Mobile Web apps. All of the features mentioned in my response to your previous question are available for each platform.
What's more, because we are the leader and we have the largest sample of data with close to 1 billion unique mobile devices and over 300,000 apps worldwide, we offer features that other Analytics providers cannot, like benchmarking the performance of apps versus other apps in a given category. We can also show what users among a developer's audience belong to behavioral segments called personas, based on their longer term app usage (i.e. what apps they have on their device that also use Flurry. Benchmarking and segmentation by persona would be what I would describe as "features from scale".
There has also been a concerted effort to consolidate the range of services we offer to developers within a single SDK, so anyone that is using Flurry Analytics can create ad spaces to code into their app and monetize using Flurry AppSpot, or launch a promotional user acquisition campaign with Flurry AppCircle, all powered by the data we've collected from Flurry Analytics.
Finally, Flurry Analytics is a free product, which has no doubt contributed to our leadship position in the market. Analytics is also used by a range of customers, from your solo indie developer on up to some of the biggest media and consumer products companies in the world. Many other Analytics providers charge for their products, and very often there is a component of paid consultancy as well. Our platform is designed to be primarily self service, which we've found is very often preferable to smaller scale enterprise.
Explain your range of pricing and, if you have a low tier or free option, what features are only available to premium users?
Once again, Flurry Analytics is free to use, and there are no premium features - all features are included as standard in the only version of Flurry Analytics which exists. When our customers decide to promote their apps on our network they can pay for display ads or videos, or if they decide to monetize their apps using Flurry, there is a revenue share model. If you're interested to learn more about promotion or monetization, let me know, happy to explain more.
Are there any technical aspects of implementation that would be helpful to explain?
Anecdotally, most developers love the ease of use of Flurry and say that integration typically takes less than 30 minutes to do. Technical details related to integration and making use of the advance features of Flurry Analytics can be found in our support portal:
http://support.flurry.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
What advice would you give to help make new independent app developers more successful?
I would say focus on your customer experience and design the app the way that you would want to use it if you were the customer. Many developers start with a great idea, but compromise the user experience with something that is either poorly organized, with limited functionality or something that is overrun with advertising. People download apps because they want to perform some kind of task, whether that task is sending a message, reading an article or playing a game. They don't want to feel disrupted, nor do they want to feel like they're being given a hard sell, and I think a lot of developers need to tread carefully on the fine line between what engages the user and what earns them money.
A while back I did a survey of how many of the top non-gaming apps were being monetized and I noticed that in most instances, advertising was non-intrusive, and in many instances, advertising was not included, because the developers just wanted to retain the users. That said, the baseline expectation of your typical app user is that each app has some minimal functionality and that a good experience can be reached in a reasonable period of time, and that once the user has returned and gets an idea of what the app does, they'll be more likely to tolerate ads, pay for premium services or premium functionality. You could think of using an app like the experience of going into a store. You don't have to buy something to think well of the store and keep them in mind for a future purchase. Once someone goes into the store, or in this case, downloads an app, developers have the opportunity to market to that user indefinitely.
Related to the above, in your mind what makes an app successful? Why do some "great" apps not get noticed?
Great apps get noticed for a variety of reasons - their value is clear, they give something valuable away, their brand is recognizable, they're offering something unique. That the app is thoughtfully organized, is bug free and has basic functionality included is implied. Unfortunately there is no objective formula for success, however there are objective quality metrics, such as the engagement metrics reported in Flurry Analytics and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Each app offers something different, so in each case, these KPIs will also be different.
"Great" apps don't get noticed because discovery is a huge problem in the AppStore, which is how we've been able to build up the user acquisition side of our business. This will not last forever as discovery improves, but I would also argue that if an app is truly remarkable, then the word will spread, and if the word does not spread, there are any number of reasons (app quality, functionality, presentation, pricing) why success isn't immediate. Flurry can help to constantly improve apps until the experience aligns with the expectations of users.
Really good article, Thanks a lot
Interesting. Thanks!
I know a lot of people are upset about the fact that the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 doesn't have a SD card slot and this right here is exactly why I have a 2TB backup drive in my house and it's also the reason I tell people not to use any type of online cloud storage..
Microsoft sues US over secret demands for customer data
Apr 14, 2016 07:29 PM
By BRANDON BAILEY
AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Microsoft sued the U.S. government for demanding access to user emails or online files in secret, saying a provision of a 1986 law that authorities use for such undisclosed searches is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit is the latest clash over privacy rights in the digital age. Law enforcement officials want freedom to view a treasure trove of information - including emails, photos and financial records - that customers are storing on electronic gadgets and in so-called "cloud" computing centers.
Microsoft says the U.S. Justice Department is abusing the decades-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows authorities to obtain court orders requiring it to turn over customer files stored on its servers, while in some cases prohibiting the company from notifying the customer. Microsoft says those "non-disclosure" orders violate its constitutional right to free speech, as well as its customers' protection against unreasonable searches.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the government is reviewing the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Seattle federal court.
One former federal official was critical of Microsoft's position, saying it could lead to warning "child molesters, domestic abusers, violent criminals and terrorists that they're being investigated."
The non-disclosure orders must be granted by a judge who has concluded that "notifying these individuals will have an adverse result, which could include messing up an investigation or even endangering the life or safety of individuals," said Daniel "D.J." Rosenthal, a former National Security Council and Justice Department attorney.
But Microsoft argues the law sets a vague standard for granting secrecy around digital searches. Authorities are required to disclose most search warrants for information stored in filing cabinets, safes or other physical locations, the company noted in its court filing.
"At the end of the day, when you are being investigated by the government, you should know about the investigation so you can prepare a defense," said Mark Jaycox of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.
Microsoft said government demands under the ECPA law are increasing in number for a variety of investigations, including white-collar cases.
"We appreciate that there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed," Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith said in a statement. "But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine."
The Redmond, Washington-based company says authorities used the law to demand customer information more than 5,600 times in the last 18 months. In nearly half those cases, a court ordered the company to keep the demand secret.
Although some orders expired after a period of time, Microsoft said the gag orders were indefinite in about 1,750 cases, "meaning that Microsoft could forever be barred from telling the affected customer about the government's intrusion."
As more people store data online, Microsoft argued in its lawsuit that the government is exploiting that trend "as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations."
In an interview, Smith said the company decided to sue the Justice Department after a case where authorities threatened to hold Microsoft in contempt when it sought to contest a particular secrecy order.
"That caused us to step back and take a look at what was going on more broadly," he said. "We were very disconcerted when we added up the large number of secrecy orders we've been receiving."
While the lawsuit specifically challenges ECPA's secrecy provision, Congress has been debating a number of reforms in response to criticism that it's outdated in various ways.
The House Judiciary Committee this week approved a bill to amend the law so authorities would need a warrant to see email and other digital files that have been stored online for more than 180 days. Currently the law allows access with a subpoena, which can be obtained more easily by satisfying a weaker legal standard.
But a recent amendment to the bill would still allow non-disclosure orders lasting up to six months, which could potentially be extended. Microsoft's Smith said he's not optimistic that Congress will pass any reforms this year.
Microsoft rival Apple has been waging a high-profile legal battle over the FBI's attempt to compel that company's help in obtaining data stored on iPhones.
"It's part of the same trend," said Alex Abdo, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. He said tech companies "have gotten the message loud and clear from the American public, that privacy matters."
The source link to this is here.
http://m.wtvm.com/wtvm/db/376055/content/8llRzBFa
is a good point - but you should also never use a VPN hosted by any of the "five eyes" countries, or all of the "fourteen eyes" either, also you wouldn't run a Samsung account, use Google services such a Gmail, Facebook, or any other myriad of (especially) US based privacy invasive "free" services online.
Privacy is very important. But people forget that their free Gmail account does come at a cost, so does Facebook (loathe that platform).
You cannot just stop using a cloud based storage service (personally I use Tresorit - end to end encryption and a zero knowledge service) and we all use Android devices here (MM privacy settings are a step in the right direction, but also reading and learning about what you can do to make sure your phone isn't the information leak Google would prefer it to be is a wise thing to do)
Change your email to something offering zero knowledge and end to end encryption such as Protonmail or Tutanota. Create a "throwaway" email and account for Google Play and their services. Always use the Google Play gift cards rather than a credit card for purchases.
Don't use Google Maps period. Use Open Street Maps instead.
Use DuckDuckGo as your search engine, never Google.
Find out what a warrant canary is and check them for all the services you use regularly!
Use a firewall on your device. Use Tor on your device. Don't ever use Chrome, use Firefox and make sure you adjust the privacy settings hidden inside it.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider and do if you value your privacy, not just cloud storage.
All of this is easily searchable on the internet so it pays to read.
To paraphrase Glen Greenwald, many people will say they have nothing to hide, well if that is the case send me your login details to your email accounts and online social media accounts. No one has ever taken up that offer......
geekygrl said:
is a good point - but you should also never use a VPN hosted by any of the "five eyes" countries, or all of the "fourteen eyes" either, also you wouldn't run a Samsung account, use Google services such a Gmail, Facebook, or any other myriad of (especially) US based privacy invasive "free" services online.
Privacy is very important. But people forget that their free Gmail account does come at a cost, so does Facebook (loathe that platform).
You cannot just stop using a cloud based storage service (personally I use Tresorit - end to end encryption and a zero knowledge service) and we all use Android devices here (MM privacy settings are a step in the right direction, but also reading and learning about what you can do to make sure your phone isn't the information leak Google would prefer it to be is a wise thing to do)
Change your email to something offering zero knowledge and end to end encryption such as Protonmail or Tutanota. Create a "throwaway" email and account for Google Play and their services. Always use the Google Play gift cards rather than a credit card for purchases.
Don't use Google Maps period. Use Open Street Maps instead.
Use DuckDuckGo as your search engine, never Google.
Find out what a warrant canary is and check them for all the services you use regularly!
Use a firewall on your device. Use Tor on your device. Don't ever use Chrome, use Firefox and make sure you adjust the privacy settings hidden inside it.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider and do if you value your privacy, not just cloud storage.
All of this is easily searchable on the internet so it pays to read.
To paraphrase Glen Greenwald, many people will say they have nothing to hide, well if that is the case send me your login details to your email accounts and online social media accounts. No one has ever taken up that offer......
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Most of those thing's I don't use and the rare times that I do use them I have account names that mean nothing and have no important information in them. Any important emails that I get are sent to my own personal encrypted mail server and I don't bother with VPN connections because Tor Browser is good enough for me. This is also the reason I don't use Microsoft Windows at all and use Linux instead because when something gets installed on my system it's because I did it but with Microsoft Windows it's to easy to get viruses and whatnot and I've yet to ever have that happen to my nix. I also loathe Facebook and I rarely ever get on there because it seems like people detail their entire day every day from the time they wake up until they go to bed and that's a treasure trove to anyone who is looking for information on you! But let's face it though, there really is no way to 100% truly secure your information online because if someone is determined and smart enough they'll get what they want but we don't have to make it easy for them to get it!!
Same here - but I am always surprised at the other people out there that complain about privacy but never do anything about it, or don't know anything about how to fix it...
Unfortunately I am locked into Windows 10 as I have a SP4.....until the touchscreen and the pen works with Linux it is pointless to move OS's - I do have it locked down and no longer sending any telemetry as much as humanly possible!
I spend a lot of time being mobile so setting up my own email servers or use something like OwnCloud (isn't there a vulnerability with that at the moment?) to sync my phone isn't practical as it would require more than a SP4!
Agree that if they really want to know what you are up to they will, but why make it easy eh?!
geekygrl said:
is a good point - but you should also never use a VPN hosted by any of the "five eyes" countries, or all of the "fourteen eyes" either... <snip> Protonmail or Tutanota
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, basically, I agree with what you said, and I've looked at both those providers. Protonmail is based in Switzerland, and Tutanota in Germany. Um... given the Snowden revelations (and other things) can we actually depend on any German company? Is Switzerland even secure anymore?
Maybe I'm being silly, ignorant, or whatever about this. Got any thoughts on this?
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