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Posts Tagged ‘premium’

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LG announces availability of the X300, their fancy ultrathin laptop

For the past four months, Amsterdam-based eBuddy has turned a profit, CEO Jan-Joost Rueb tells me, by offering advertising-supported services for free in combination with sales of a premium iPhone application.

The company, backed by $11.5 million in venture capital from Lowland Capital Partners and Prime Technology Ventures, markets a Web-based social network and instant messaging aggregator that enables people to sign in to their service once and stay connected to people through various platforms in one single interface where all of them are centralized.

It also offers a number of ways for people to use the service on their mobile phones, through a mobile web service, a Java-based messenger client and applications for iPhone and Android.

(Keep reading if you want to try their premium iPhone app for free, by the way)

Rueb informs me that the J2ME client in particular has seen phenomenal success, recently surpassing 50 million downloads. The free app is currently the most downloaded program as registered on GetJar, a one-stop shop for mobile applications, with more than 36.7 million installations (up from 10 million in March 2009).

Its iPhone applications (a free one and a premium one that goes for $4.99) are also quite popular: in total, the apps have been downloaded 3 million times since their debut in the App Store. The free version was released in July 2009, the paid app late November 2009.

eBuddy expected between 4% and 8% of its free app users to convert to the paid application, and says it is indeed currently hovering around a 6% conversion rate. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that its revenue from the premium app is thus about $900k, or $600k if you take into account Apple’s 30% cut. Conceivably, adding the revenue from ads on its free app, eBuddy is raking in around $1 million from its iPhone applications alone.

If you’re keen on giving the premium app a whirl for yourself: the first 1,000 users who purchase eBuddy Pro from the U.S. App Store and follow the instructions on this promotion page will receive an iTunes gift card worth $5, i.e. the price of the app.

In total, eBuddy has attracted about 100 million unique users, of which about a quarter uses the service at least once every month. These are heavy users: on average, 14 billion messages get sent via eBuddy per month. And don’t think all of them are using their cellphones: eBuddy’s Web application has seen 50% growth year over year, says Rueb.

Still, its strategy of having a feature-limited, ad-supported app in Apple’s App Store alongside a paid premium one with more bells and whistles, has resulted in close to 50% of the company’s revenues now coming from its slew of mobile products. Advertising accounts for about 60% of that income, and 40% comes from app sales today.

Rueb declined to share revenue numbers in greater detail, but said that the company has now been profitable on a net income basis for the past four months and is cash-flow positive, which means its mobile monetization strategy is clearly working out well for them.

A bit of good news for BlackBerry users, finally: eBuddy expects to (finally) ship a custom client for the platform in the next couple of months.

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Hope you already bought the Windows 7 Family Pack . Well, if you were planning to; you could be the type of person who still writes “M$” without a hint of irony. Anyhow, the Family Pack is now sold out

Original post: 
Windows 7 Family Pack all but sold out

ViewSonic dove headfirst into the ultraportable notebook game yesterday, with the announcement of the “ViewBook” line of 12-, 13-, and 14-inch low voltage machines. The 13.3-inch ViewBook 130 (pictured above) looks to compete directly with Acer’s 3810-model Timeline offerings, while the 12-inch ViewBook 120 (video below) bears a striking physical resemblance to the Lenovo S12 series. The ViewBook line was announced in Taiwan but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we would eventually see these machines in the U.S., since ViewSonic products are already represented reasonably well here.

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ViewSonic announces 12-, 13.3-, and 14-inch ‘ViewBook’ ultraportables

Watch.

Continued here: 
This is what a PS3 smashing into a Sony Bravia TV at 50 MPH looks like

So we know that Best Buy is going to be the only place you can score the Nokia Booklet in the US. Cool, but it seems that the 3G netbook might be sold its full retail of $600 instead of being subsidized by a carrier, which kind of kills any appeal it might have

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Nokia Booklet to sell for $600 at Best Buy? Say it ain’t so.

TwitterCounter, a fairly basic but popular service that gives users insights on how well they’re doing on Twitter with regards to numbers of followers and tweets, is flicking the revenue switch to ‘ON’.

A decent amount of Twitter users regularly visit the TwitterCounter website to get statistics based on their account name – Compete pegs the number of monthly uniques at approx. 650,000 – and the team behind the service believes companies and organizations could well be willing to pay them a monthly fee for a premium service with more features and more detailed stats.

In what the company dubbed the Premium Dashboard, paying customers are able to compare and track multiple accounts and obtain stats from over a year’s time rather than the maximum of 3 months non-paying visitors get to see. In addition, TwitterCounter ‘pro’ users gain the ability to export statistics in CSV format and enjoy their graphs in a larger format.

Patrick De Laive from TwitterCounter tells us support for multiple account tracking and comparisons was an oft-requested feature and that the team, which is also behind a ‘MyBlogLog for Twitter’ service called TwitterRemote and events like The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, is happy to finally be able to offer it. Not that the self-funded startup wasn’t already trying to monetize the web service: they also offer a way for users to gain more followers by ‘featuring’ them at a per-view rate (e.g. 100,000 views for $289).

Pricing for the Premium Dashboard is based on the number of users you would like to track, starting at $25 per month for 5 users and up to $198 per month for 100 users. Call me crazy, but while pricing may sound steep I can actually see why companies – and particularly their PR and marketing departments – would be willing to cough that up for this type of service.

Let Twitter work out how and if it will make money on their own in the meantime.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out I used to write for The Next Web blog)

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Predictify, a prediction market that launched back in 2007, is closing its doors. The service allowed users to vote on potential outcomes for current news stories (it likened itself to a “fantasy sports for everything else”). Users could have their accuracy measured across multiple polls, both on the site’s central hub and on partner sites, and the most clairvoyant of them were featured on the Predictify leaderboard.

Last year, the site seemed like it was starting to pick up steam: by summer 2008, it had forged partnerships with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and it subsequently got CBS News as well. News sites liked Predictify because it could potentially increase reader engagement. Along with its media partnerships, Predictify also offered “Premium Questions”, which allowed businesses and market researchers to pose questions to the Predictify user base for a fee. The most accurate users would receive a portion of the money generated by the Premium Questions, and marketers were entitled to all of the resulting data (including demographics).

The site has posted the following:

Due to the tough economic climate, we are planning to cease operations and shut down the company in the near future. As such, we are no longer approving or scoring questions and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have an account balance of $20 or more, please visit your account page and enter your withdrawal information by 11:59pm on August 31, 2009 to receive payment.

We sincerely enjoyed building and operating Predictify, and we’re glad that you could be a part of it.

The Predictify Team

Predictify has been added to the Deadpool.

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If you’ve got an iPhone, there’s a good chance you’ve got Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge installed - the game is ranked as the iPhone’s most popular game of all time. Tonight the latest update to the game lands, adding a handful of new features including themes, “battles”, and a new song import feature. The features are part of the latest update of Tap Tap Revenge 2, which you can download for free here (if you already have the app you can just update it).

One of the most notable additions to the game is the introduction of themes. While the premium versions of TTR have featured a variety of color palettes and effects, the main version of the game has maintained the same color scheme for every song. Now Tapulous will be able to embed new themes with each new song that is downloaded, and songs that are imported from the premium games will retain their themes as well. This may not sound like a big deal, but as anyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band can attest to, variation in the game’s appearance can really add to its replay value.

The other major addition to the game is the ability to import songs purchased through the premium editions of Tap Tap Revenge. Since late last year, Tapulous has been regularly releasing premium custom editions of TTR with music licensed from major artists, including Coldplay, NIN, and most recently, Dave Matthews Band. Before now if you wanted to play these songs, you’d have to boot into each game. Now Tapulous’s server can detect which songs your device should have access to, and will allow you to download them for play through the main application.

Tapulous is clearly looking to channel its popularity into a single application rather than have it scattered across multiple premium apps, and these new features are the latest steps in that direction. TTR is quickly gaining steam with major artists - last week it featured the hit single “Gives You Hell” by the All American Rejects as a free song, which was downloaded over 500,000 times. And once the iPhone 3.0 software update is released this summer, users will be able to buy premium songs directly through the flagship TTR app instead of having to download them as their own applications. Labels are taking notice, and they’re sure to become even more interested when they can sell their songs on an integrated TTR music store.

But Tapulous is going to face one major obstacle along the way: microtransactions are only going to be supported for paid applications on the App Store, and the flagship TTR games have always been free. Which means Tapulous will have to find a way to convince its millions of users to cough up 99 cents for TTR3.

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MoFuse, a service that will take your website and instantly create a mobile version of it, is launching a premium version of its mobile website development service for the enterprise space. MoFuse’s existing platform, which spares websites the development costs of formatting the site by hand, creates customized iPhone versions of sites in addition to the standard versions for basic mobile browsers. MoFuse is offering TechCrunch readers 50% off any premium plan for Website owners who use the promotional code “TechCrunch” when signing up before May 1.

MoFuse Premium for Business is a completely separate platform from the site’s original service, which will remain intact and will be known as MoFuse for Blogs. The premium service creates higher quality mobile sites for businesses with more features, including the ability to nest topics in the site with drag and drop technology, search functionality, Google Maps integration, color customization, a local weather app, and more. The pricing for the premium site development starts with the “Basic” plan, which is $39 per month with a 50,000 page view limit for one site; “Small Business,” which is $89 per month, creates 3 sites with a limit of 125,000 page views per site; and “Ultimate,” which is $199 per month, creates up to 10 sites with a limit of 1 million page views per site.

Founded in 2007, MoFuse has become popular with publishers—the service has helped nearly 25,000 organizations create mobile websites. Several of our colleague publications in tech news use MoFuse for their mobile sites including GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb. In addition to converting a web site for mobile consumption, Mofuse also allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites via revenue shares with Google AdSense and AdMob. Jag.ag also provides a simple service to help less tech-savvy consumers create their own mobile presence in a few minutes but doesn’t offer some of the same premium features yet. Zinadoo and Wirenode also provide similar services.

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