Monthly Archives: November 2011

Trying to get my Android apps live on Kindle Fire

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The Kindle Fire is live and it’s a huge success. Even before launch, it was clear that this would be a hit, an Android tablet device at this price point, coming from Amazon.

I figured this could be a nice extra channel to sell our existing Android apps.
About a month ago, as a test, we created a special build of our CLZ Movies app and submitted it to the Amazon Appstore for review. Approval took 2 weeks, but it got approved in one go. So we quickly prepared builds of our other 4 apps and submitted them too, hoping to get them all live before the launch of the Kindle Fire on November 15. We just missed that deadline, but still, on November 17 we received the OK on the other 4 as well.

After which I proudly announced to my Facebook fans that our Android apps were now available for the new Kindle Fire. Some customers had been asking about apps for Kindle Fire, so I told our support guys that they could tell them the happy news.
In the meantime, we had already sold some copies of CLZ Movies through the Amazon Appstore, so things were looking good. Continue reading →

Adwords tip: check the Geographic report

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I have written about the importance of running your Adwords Geographic reports before, but in the meantime checking your geographic performance has become much easier, so let’s look at this again.

Nowadays, to view your campaign performance (impression, clicks, conversions) by country, you can just go to the Dimensions tab in your Adwords online interface and select GeoGraphic from the View list on the top left. Make sure to select a date range long enough to have substantial data (say the past 3 months). Continue reading →

Fighting the App Store Attitude, or: how to get users to “ask for help” again.

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This week, in my post What happened to “asking for help”?, I wondered about a trend I was seeing regarding the user attitude in case of software problems. A short summary:

10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.

However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution. Continue reading →

Drinks are on me at the ESWC pre-event meeting

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In the weekend of November 19 and 20, the 11th annual European Software Conference (ESWC) will be held at the DoubleTree hotel in London.

My company Collectorz.com will sponsor the pre-event meeting on November 18 in BAR92 at the conference hotel. So if you will be attending the ESWC come say hi and have a couple of drinks on me.

BTW: I will also be speaking on the first conference day, at 1:15 PM. My topic:

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you there!

What happened to “asking for help”?

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In the early days, when a user of my program ran into a problem, he/she just contacted me to ask for help. Resulting in a nice and friendly conversation, where I would ask questions, and the user would provide more detailed information.
Ultimately, in most cases, resulting in a satisfying outcome, either me helping the user use the software, or the user helping me fix a bug. Nice, fruitful, effective …

However, here’s what we’re seeing more and more nowadays, especially for our mobile apps, but it’s becoming more common for our desktop apps too:

A user runs into a problem, and instead of asking for help, immediately jumps to complaining about it in a public place like the App Store, the Android Market, Facebook or Twitter. Just stating the problem… no request for help, no conversation and therefore in most cases: no solution. Continue reading →