This is a new marketing video for our MobileNoter product. It’s incredible what you can do even with a small budget these days. Anyway, here you go:
Just released a YouTube video we are proud of
May 27, 2010
1 Comment | 
Marketing, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: MobileNoter, YouTube | 
Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
iTunes to use your Facebook connections
April 9, 2010Only a few days ago I discussed the idea of companies using people’s social graph for mass-scale marketing, and here comes the news: Apple is going to do just that in iTunes. This is huge. It will add more power to Facebook in their quest to become the world largest ad platform.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Marketing, Social networks | Tagged: facebook, iTunes | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
What are the best days for AppStore sales?
April 7, 2010It is probably not news for anyone who’s been in the AppStore business long enough… My friends, who develop iPhone games say that Saturday is a huge spike in downloads. Sunday is good too. If your app gets into the “new apps” list on Saturday, it’s likely to make some buck, even if it is going to be buried in the 500th spot in the “top downloaded apps” list eventually. MobileNoter is Business/Productivity software. Weekends and holidays are not good for us. Wednesday is one of the best days for sales for Business and Productivity. Luckily, our business model does not rely on bored people who would download and try anything for a few minutes of entertainment. Even though it’s not in any of the Top 10 list, people do find, download and buy our app.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Marketing | Tagged: apps, iPad, iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
How can companies use my social graph?
April 5, 2010It’s interesting to see when the brick-and-mortar companies will start actively use people’s social connections. There are so many examples how it can be done.
1. Many mobile network carriers have plans with one or more “favorite numbers”. When I make a call to one of these numbers, the call is cheaper or entirely free for me. Why not offer me to make all my Facebook connections “favorite numbers”? Make them cheap to call if they are with other carrier and free to call if they are on the same carrier. It’s an incentive for all of us to stick with one carrier.
2. When I buy a vacations tour, why not offer me a discount if I make all of my connections know what agency I used for that? And if anyone from my connections buys at the same agency later, offer more discount or some bonus points? Same goes for anything, like when one buys movie tickets, insurance, or clothes.
The key here is to create incentives for people to promote products and services to their social graph. The reward should be paid for actions (my friend also bought certain something), not for clicks and views. When companies start doing that, they won’t need any other advertisement. Facebook will be the major ad platform of the future, not Google.
1 Comment | Marketing, Social networks | Tagged: facebook, Google | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Selling to the programmers
February 23, 2010While reviewing ad inventory on the StackOverflow, it occurred to me that it’s not easy to sell things to the programmers. If the visitors of your site are programmers, what ads are going to be most effective and perform better than the others? Currently, the only non-job ads on the StackOverflow are promoting SDKs, components, development and related tools, training courses. This is basically all you can try to sell to the programmers. From the top of my head I typed www.programmers.com into the browser and got a site with just the same sorts of ads.
Now, one would think that it’s not easy to sell these things to the programmers for a variety of reasons:
- There are many open-sourced and free alternatives.
- High piracy rate. Programmers (in general, but not all of them) love to find and download things they need without paying.
- A lot of programming is outsourced these days, meaning there are many programmers from India, China, Russia and other countries, whose buying power is reduced. In other words, there are a lot of customers who won’t spend an extra dollar unless absolutely needed.
- Build or Buy thinking, meaning that every time a programmer evaluates someone else’s software, he thinks “I can build it myself and it will be better”.
For me personally, these reasons are scary enough to keep away from programmers market as far as possible. I know there are people who built successful companies selling stuff to developers, like a code review tool or bug tracking system. Well, these people are very smart and lucky. I’ve seen dozens of companies that tried to sell components and crashed into the ground.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: ads, programmers, StackOverflow | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
We got “iPhone” into Google ad copy, but nobody cares
February 8, 2010OK, we finally got our ad copy approved by Google and it has word “iPhone” in it. We didn’t do anything fancy, just were persistent and Google caved in. The thing is however that we are getting miserable CTR on those ads. It doesn’t look that Google is good to advertise iPhone apps on it.
Now we are trying Microsoft adCenter. The CTR in Search will probably be low as well. The idea is to get somewhere on a Microsoft page with “OneNote” on it. This should be a relevant page for OneNote client for iPhone, ain’t it?
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone, MobileNoter | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Google don’t let advertise iPhone apps
February 4, 2010We tried advertising our app on AdWords and were immediately set back by Google. Turned out, they don’t let some trademarked terms to be used in the ad copy. Namely, we can’t use word “iPhone”. They neither allow “i Phone” or “i-Phones”, but you would expect this from Google.
This is obviously wrong, because it’s legal to use a trademarked term to describe product compatibility. And the sole purpose of using the word is to say that our app is designed for iPhone, nothing else.
Funny enough, we can use “Onenote” no problem, even though it’s a trademarked term too. So, Apple nowadays is really the Microsoft of 90s, the enemy of openness, competitiveness, trying to preserve the monopoly by any mean.
1 Comment | Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
The iPad vs a Rock
January 31, 2010
1 Comment | Marketing | Tagged: iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Why iPad is an Epic Fail
January 30, 2010I was really looking forward to getting the future Apple tablet. Then at some point I thought: “it will be a cool device, but it will cost about $1000 just like everything from Apple, and it will probably arrive to the market somewhere late 2010″. So I chickened and bought a nice new netbook Compaq Mini 311c.
Turned out, I was all wrong: the iPad will arrive soon, it’s seemingly not overpriced, and it’s totally not cool. Let’s start by comparing iPad to Mini 311c and then see if the tablet is good for anything at all. I won’t compare GHz’s and GB’s. They are in the same price category, similar size, the tablet is slightly smaller and lighter. Let’s get down to consumer characteristics:
| Mini 311c | iPad | |
|---|---|---|
| Battery life | 6 hours | 10 hours |
| Camera | front webcam | none |
| Web surfing | any browser, plugins, Flash | basic Safari, no Flash |
| Apps | anything goes | AppStore only |
| Gaming | real 3D games like COD6 run | very basic |
| Video | 720p screen, 1080p HDMI | standard |
| USB | 3 ports | needs adapter |
So, I can use the Mini for web browsing, video chats, HD video, gaming. I can use iPad for lame web browsing, and for …. AppStore browsing. iPad is not a normal computer, is not a multimedia device, not a gaming device, not an eBook reader. To further add to the offence, it’s locked into the AppStore.
Obviously, Apple is up to something. They can’t just deliver a device, which is not good for anything at all. What they are trying to do is to invent a new product category. Something like “a household tablet to read e-magazines and for occasional web-surfing”. The fact that the category name is so long is a bad sign. It means they will have to educate consumers about how their iPad is nice and useful.
But it won’t help, because their product is very ordinary. With iPhone, it tooks others 2-3 years to deliver similarly cool devices. With iPad, it will be eaten alive by the competition this year.
2 Comments | Marketing | Tagged: Apple, iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
The best study of AppStore marketing to the date is here
January 27, 2010I can’t believe someone published a brilliant study of AppStore marketing. Some nice key points:
- Price reduction by 2 times resulted in 3 times more units sold.
- Free ad supported version of an app can easily bring more revenue than the premium paid version.
- Good free version of an app is a must, especially if the premium version is expensive.
- Web advertising for AppStore is utterly useless.
- Cross-application advertising for AppStore is almost useless.
- AppStore Ranking algorithm revealed!
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Marketing | Tagged: AppStore, market | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
