Posts tagged STORE
App Store Optimization
Feb 16th
The arena of app stores is much like the way organic search results used to be. Knowledge on app store optimization can still provide a big advantage over your competitors and it can be a lucrative way to exploit your old fashioned SEO skills.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
IM3.co.uk Join Digital Media Store in SEO Partnership – PR Web (press release)
Feb 8th
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IM3.co.uk Join Digital Media Store in SEO Partnership
PR Web (press release) IM3, a leading SEO agency for SME's in the UK is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Digital Media Store. Responsible for all online organic search promotion, IM3 are adding to a successful portfolio of over 80 SEO clients. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Apple to Developers: Don’t Mess With Our App Store Rankings
Feb 7th
Apple really does not like it when you mess with its finely tuned systems. Especially when it is the company’s cash cow iOS platform. In a short statement yesterday, Apple warned developers to not game the rankings system in its App Store, threatening the loss of Apple Developer Program membership to developers that are found using services intended to artificially raise the profiles of their apps in Apple’s store.
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Full statement from Apple’s developer page:
“Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.“
“Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.“
This is not the first time that Apple has reacted to entities trying to game the App Store rankings. Mobile marketing company Tapjoy was famously kicked off the iOS platform last year after providing users incentives for downloads through virtual currency. This latest threat comes as some developers may be turning to third-party services overseas where users are paid to download apps in order to have them rise in the rankings.
The practice of paying users to download apps or flood the Web with posts has been called “water armies” because of their willingness to inundate the Internet with content or downloads for the right price. It is a way to game various ranking systems by playing off what algorithms are looking for. There are different tactics for water armies, such as link and content farming or posting to social media channels. Google has battled water armies in its SEO rankings for some time with its Panda program.
The same concept applies with the Apple App Store rankings. Users getting paid to download apps so as to rise in the rankings became enough of a problem that Apple felt the need to speak out on the subject. As Apple is usually tight-lipped about its metrics and methods, the announcement is a bit of a wonder in itself.
Apple paid $700 million to developers last quarter with the top performing apps likely taking up the bulk of that revenue. Hence, it is very important for publishers to get their apps in the top rankings as it is the difference between making hundreds of dollars on an app or thousands.
There are a variety of third-party marketing services that developers can use to avoid the ire of Apple. Options include analytics firms like Flurry, Localytics, Apsalar, PlayHaven (among others) to more traditional marketing outlets like public relations firms or mobile marketing studios like SapientNitro or AKQA.
In any business, marketing is not easy. There is really no easy fix. Attempts to game the system are likely to be punished or be scorned by the larger community. Apple has put its foot down on this issue several times. Tapjoy found out the hard way and has been spending a good portion of the last year finding ways around the App Store (through its own application marketplace and HTML5 initiatives).
The best advice to get into the top of the rankings of the Apple App Store is to have an app worthy of the attention. Releasing a mediocre app and gaming the system will only work for so long as users find it subpar and start flooding the reviews sections with calls for the developers head on a pike.
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The 4-Terabyte Data Object Store: CAStor’s Latest Volley Against RAID
Jan 24th
Last month, we introduced you to a cloud-based backup system called CTERA – a practical demonstration of the flexibility of the underlying object storage platform. That platform, called CAStor, is essentially a mapping system for files stored over a widely distributed pool of clusters in the cloud. CAStor takes care of where things are located in the cloud; applications like CTERA map those locations using systems that make sense to humans.
Today, the company behind CAStor – Austin, Texas-based Caringo Inc. – altered the definition of “things” in that context, with the introduction to its customers of CAStor version 5.5. With the help of a little process learned from Web mechanics called chunked encoding, data centers will become able to store widely distributed chunks of files up to 4 TB in total length. It’s part of Caringo’s latest effort to squash RAID using the cloud as its weapon.
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The idea of chunked encoding is for a system to begin storing an object as it streams in, rather than have it wait in a cache while its final size is ascertained. For a system that can accept a 4 TB single file, that’s a lot of cache; and if the same system is to be used for objects that may also be infinitesimally small, a huge cache could actually work against you. So chunked encoding enables clusters to be provisioned while huge files are being uploaded. CAStor sorts it out once it receives the “zero byte” signaling everything’s done.
Caringo’s other upgrades for CAStor version 5.5 include a zero-provisioning system in the new Cluster Services Node (above) for setting up additional nodes in networks. Rather than manually install the CAStor software on every node in the network, the new system enables nodes added to the network to access and install the software for themselves.
These latest upgrades represent the latest effort by Caringo to reintroduce its customers to the notion of replication as a viable method for protecting data. Replication is a service that CAStor does perform, but which its end users never have to be concerned with. A July 2011 Caringo white paper on the subject (PDF available here) made the point that enterprises that came to depend on RAID1 architecture for redundant disk arrays started moving away from replication as costly and inefficient, perhaps believing that redundancy and replication together were… well, redundant.
The graph from that white paper demonstrates that CAStor can implement optimized per-object replication, as well as other resilience measures such as performance reserve (holding open a small amount of space for periodic defragmentation) and reserve storage pool space for “hot spares” when a RAID5/RAID6 rebuild becomes necessary (the right column, above), while consuming no more storage space than raw replication alone would have required under RAID1 (the left column).
“if you are using RAID 5 or 6 as a data resilience method it is only a matter of time before you experience data loss (if you haven’t already),” the white paper concluded. “Replication will ensure the resilience and recoverability of your data for the full life cycle of your applications. The CAStor storage architecture delivers the value of replication without compromising capacity when compared to RAID alternatives. CAStor customer environments reap the benefits of future proofing of their storage investment spanning the entire life of the system for a superior TCO experience.”
Caringo did concede at that time that RAID5/RAID6 configurations could be more efficient than CAStore with file systems where file size tended to be larger; the advantage swung back to CAStor’s favor where file sizes were smaller. But that was before the implementation of chunked encoding for version 5.5, which could conceivably have swung the pendulum back in Caringo’s direction.
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TechData Opens An App Store for VARs
Jan 23rd
Giant distributor TechData announced today the opening of its StreamOne Solutions Store. Think of it as an app store for VARs. No, your local VAR isn’t going to start selling iPad apps, but the “bigger apps” for their clients to download cloud services or download commercial applications software products and their licenses. It is a great idea.
“The Tech Data StreamOne platform is unlike anything currently offered within the channel,” says Gertrud Pillay, Vice President, Category Marketing and Licensing Operations at PCMall, a leading computer retailer. “With its intuitive interface, we’re able to quickly and easily bring greater value and efficiency to our customers by identifying which software solutions and cloud services will help our customers reach their goals.”
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The StreamOne Solutions Store will also be made available as a rebranded white-labeled offering later this year, enabling VARs to establish a customized solutions store on their own website. The store has wizards to step VARs through the setup process to customize options for particular end-user clients, as you can see below.
StreamOne is the second phase of Tech Data’s online software storefronts: the first was the Software Licensor Selector that helped guide resellers through a few easy steps to ensure that the right product and SKU were picked.
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Appstores.com: The Platform That Wants To Run Your Niche App Store
Jan 19th
App discoverability is one of the biggest problems facing mobile publishers these days. That is especially true for HTML5 developers publishing apps to the mobile Web. A San Francisco-based startup wants to help. Appstores.com today is announcing mobile app distribution network to help developers make their apps more discoverable and profitable.
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Publishers will now be given the ability to have their own niche app stores that can be curated with up to a million apps across iOS, Android and HTML5. Publishers will also have the capability of advertising their apps in the network with HTML5 mobile ads. The big idea here is the notion of the network. Publishers can band together to showcase their apps across categories and app repositories, increasing visibility across the platform.
The notion of Appstores.com is intriguing not for what it is, but what it could become. By giving developers and publishers a platform to curate their own app stores, Appstores.com has the potential to create several high profile app repositories that cloud transcend the platform itself. For instance, a gaming studio could create its own app store to sell its Android, iOS and HTML5 apps and make partnership deals with other publishers to include their games as well.
The idea is intriguing. The key phrase for the platform will be “powered by Appstores.com.” The startup itself does not need to be another third-party app store like Getjar or the Amazon Android Appstore but positions itself to be a platform, giving the power to the developer the create the network. Appstores.com will supply HTML5 ads of apps that can cross individual apps stores as well as a dashboard for developers to claim their apps and submit them to individual stores. The dashboard also has basic analytics for views, clicks and installs from across the network. Appstores.com has already logged almost every iOS and Android app into its library which means that developers can just sign up and claim their app.
The initial rollout partners are distinctly of the niche variety. The first five to launch are HelloBrit.com, CreativeDigitalMusic.com FabFitFun.com, OutDoorzy.com and iPhoneGames.com.
In terms of the HTML5 ad network, initial partners are 9GAG, TheNextWeb, WPtouch and local news aggregator Topix.
Developers: Can you see yourself claiming your app on Appstores.com? Or are you going to host your own app repository? What benefits can you see with the Appstores.com’s model? Detriments? Let us know in the comments.
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Amazon Launches iPad Kindle Store to Dodge Apple’s Restrictions
Jan 11th
Amazon has launched a more touch-friendly, Web-based iPad Kindle Store. A tablet-optimized Kindle store was available through the HTML5 Kindle Cloud Reader Amazon launched last August, but the new iPad Kindle Store is a standalone Web app. Upon visiting amazon.com/iPadKindleStore from Safari, a pop-up prompts the user to add it to the home screen. This is the most seamless way for Kindle users to buy books on the iPad.
Apple’s in-app purchasing rules prevent e-book sellers from offering stores in their native apps (without giving Apple a 30% cut). The route around that was to include a link to the Web store inside the native reader app. Last July, Apple forced Amazon and other e-reader apps to remove this link, so users of e-book platforms other than Apple’s iBooks must buy their books in the browser, in a separate place from where they read.
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Amazon’s first strike against this rule was to launch the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader, so that users could read and buy books from the browser on any device, not just the iPad. It’s a nice experience, but the native Kindle app’s performs better and is more useful offline, even though it doesn’t offer direct access to the bookstore.
In December, Amazon brought the Kindle Fire Newsstand to the iOS app, so iPad users could receive subscription publications from Amazon in the Kindle app, in competition with Apple’s own Newsstand. After beefing up the Kindle app, the new standalone Kindle Store Web app better serves Kindle users who want to use the native reader instead of the browser-based one.
Apple and Amazon come at each other head-on in this market. Their approaches are basically opposite. Apple wants controls over the media available on its devices, because content is an inclusive service it provides to make its profitable devices more attractive. Apple breaks even on content, but it wants to lock users into its devices with the convenience of that service.
Amazon’s business is selling content on razor-thin margins. Its Kindle devices are the service, while the content is the product. That’s why Amazon offers so much support for iOS devices, even though it just launched its own Kindle Fire tablet. Amazon loses $2.70 on each Kindle Fire, but it’s sure to make up the loss in media purchases. Sales to iOS users are pure profit for Amazon. The new iPad Kindle Store is its best possible solution for its customers allowed on Apple’s devices.
Do you read e-books? What’s your set-up?
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Amazon Announces “Best Of” Digital Store to Highlight Content Offerings
Dec 22nd
Amazon is making a move to highlight its wealth of music, books, TV shows, movies, apps and games today with the release of a new “best of” digital store. Got a shiny new Kindle Fire for Christmas? Amazon wants you to download, download, download to your heart’s content.
For Amazon, this is an “of course they would” moment. The company loses money on the hardware for the Kindle Fire and basically breaks even on other Kindle products. Amazon then must push consumers to its digital products. What better way to do so then by highlighting some of its best paid apps and expensive books?
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Christmas is the largest day for digital sales on Amazon.com, followed by Dec. 26, according to the company. This makes perfect sense a popular gift for the oh-so-hard-to-shop-for person in your life tends to be an Amazon gift card. This year there is far more to highlight for Amazon as it has been busy making content partnerships with the major TV and movie studios, record labels and top app makers. In terms of content, this was the year that Amazon exploded and diverged away from its traditional book offerings.
The top recommended Kindle book is “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, the official biography of Apple’s founder. “The Social Network,” about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, is the top movie.
What really of interest to us are the apps. ESPN Score Center is the top recommended Android app, followed by LinkedIn, QuickOffice Pro, The Weather Channel, EasyTether, Exchange by Touchdown, Pandora, Urbanspoon, MapQuest and Zillow Real Estate. Those seem like some strange choices for a best of list. LinkedIn’s Android app has been thoroughly lambasted by the tech media while MapQuest is distinctly NOT Google Maps.
The regular suspects dominate the list for Android games. Angry Birds takes the top spot, Words With Friends second and Bejeweled 2 in third.
Software has two Office products in the top listings, with Microsoft Office: Home & Student 2010 the top and Office Mac Home & Student 2011 second.
Of course, Amazon is touting its own apps as well with Kindle for (pick your platform), Amazon Mobile, MP3, Price Check, Deals and Windowshop all on the list.
What is your “best of” for 2011? Did Amazon’s editors get it right? Let us know in the comments.
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How HP Has an App Store Inside Your Printer
Dec 21st
The notion of app stores is expanding into the world of printers and HP has made some important strides in the past year after it announced its ePrint line of printers. The apps, combined with an Internet-accessible printer, are both actually pretty neat and I will show you what is involved in getting it all to work.
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Internet printing isn’t a new concept. The first efforts were with my colleagues Marshall Rose and Carl Malamud who set up an experiment in the early 1990s that was found at tpc.int. The idea was to set up a bunch of Internet-connected fax machines around the world, and connect them to the service so that only local phone calls would be needed to send documents to them. This was back when we cared about local and long distance phone bills. The HP ePrint service builds on these early experiments.
When you buy one of the HP printers at the above link, it doesn’t look very different than the typical multi-function or laser device you can get otherwise. The key is in its firmware, and associated Internet connectivity that are inside the box. Once you set up the printer via a USB cable, you can attach it to your wireless network. With a few more clicks on its LCD color touch control screen, your printer has its own email address, such as rww@hpeprint.com.
This is the cool part. Now any text that you email in the body of your message gets printed out within a few minutes to the printer. It is almost like magic. Attachments other than Office documents and anything in the email subject line are ignored. So you can attach a Word or Powerpoint file to your messages and the printer will print them out. I didn’t experiment with lots of different file types but for the basics it seems to work just fine and with a resolution and color density that is acceptable. HP cautions that for best results you might want to print them directly from your computer, but on the few comparison prints that I did they looked identical. Every ePrint job gets an email notification when it is sent, too. There is no notification when any print job has been completed. You can also limit the senders by email address, so that only you and a few colleagues can send documents to your printer.
The printer that I tested was an Envy 110 that retails for around $250 and can be had for much less at the traditional retailers. You can monitor what is going on with your printer on its own Web page, naturally: the screen shot below shows you what is typical. Note that the status icon says it wasn’t connected, which was incorrect.
So let’s move on to the actual apps that you can load on your printer. You can use eFax to send faxes, print photos from your Facebook account, print out your Delta and Alaska airline boarding passes, read transcripts of 60 Minutes TV shows, get portions of the USAToday newspaper delivered to your printer, print out crossword and Sudoku puzzles, and print out Bing maps. Some of the apps didn’t quite work without some extra fussing around. You enter any required information (such as starting and ending points for your map, or your Delta account info) on the printer’s touch screen, which you quickly find is not quite the joy of an iPad or typical smartphone touch screen. (It is a bit too squishy for my taste.)
I had problems with the eFax app: Faxes that I sent to an existing eFax account didn’t print, and those sent to a new account only printed the cover page and not the actual faxed contents.
All apps have to be first added from the printer’s control panel, and then depending on what else you need will require some action with a Web-connected PC nearby to finish the setup process. It is not as easy as adding an app to your smartphone, say. I would have preferred to add them from the Web printer portal page and type everything in from my computer’s keyboard.
The multi-function Envy that I tried out also can copy and scan documents a page at a time. There are provisions for grouping multiple pages into a single fax, for example. Scans can be sent to a USB-connected computer or a flash drive that you insert directly into the printer.
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So who should and shouldn’t buy an HP ePrinter? If you are a small office or a home-based business and are looking for a new printer and want your remote people to directly send you documents, then this is a very useful thing. But they probably are already doing that via email: the ePrint feature just saves a few extra steps. If you have a lot of tablet or smartphone users that are frustrated at not being able to print things, then ePrint is a good thing and can enable them to print their docs. If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of eFax and want to be able to both send and receive faxes without tying up a landline, then this feature is also useful.
The printer apps are mostly gee-gaws and not really truly useful yet, although developers might be energized to do more in this area. Still, it is an interesting use of how small pieces of software can expand your functionality, even of something as mundane as a printer.
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What’s in Store for SUSE in 2012
Dec 12th
It’s been a long, strange trip for SUSE. What started in 1992 as a small German company (SUSE was an acronym derived from “Software und System Entwicklung,” or “software and systems development”) with a derivative of Slackware Linux became a mighty Linux distribution in its own right. Money problems led to a sale to Novell in 2003, which had its own share of troubles.
Finally Novell was sold to Attachmate in a deal that closed in April of this year. Attachmate then decided to spin SUSE off into its own business, and tapped Nils Brauckmann as president and general manager of the unit.
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To get a sense what SUSE is in for in 2012, I talked to Brauckmann this morning. Brauckmann’s involvement with SUSE started with Attachmate’s purchase, so the first time we spoke was earlier this year just after he took over the role. This time I found him much readier to discuss details of the SUSE strategy, if not every minor product detail.
Cloud Focus
The big focus for SUSE in 2012 will be the enterprise server market, naturally. According to the platform lifecycle that SUSE provided today, expect to see SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 service pack 2 (SP2) sometime in the first quarter, and SP3 late in 2012 or later. SUSE Linux Enterprise 12? We won’t be seeing a major refresh until 2013.
SUSE announced its commitment to OpenStack in October, along with a development preview available via SUSE Studio. This includes the three major components in the Diablo release (Nova, Glance, and Keystone). Brauckmann wasn’t sure about specific contributions that SUSE would be making to OpenStack, but did say that the company plans to follow up with a second technology preview in Q2 of 2012. (The “Essex” release of OpenStack will come out in late Q1 if it sticks to schedule.)
When’s a SUSE-based OpenStack offering going to be production ready? Probably no sooner than Q4 of 2012, after the Essex+1 release of OpenStack. I asked Brauckmann if this was trailing the market a bit, considering that VMware, Eucalyptus and Amazon Web Services (among others) are already being widely used. Brauckmann says that they’re in conversations with SUSE customers and that they seem to be in sync with actual enterprise deployment plans for private clouds.
Though a minor update, SP2 should bring some important features to SLES. For example, in addition to the usual driver updates and such, Brauckmann says that SUSE will be rolling out btrfs support for copy on write (COW), checksumming and filesystem snapshots. They’ll also be providing support for Linux Containers (LXC) and YaST and Zypper (SUSE management and software management tools, respectively) will have features to manage system snapshots and rollbacks.
Though SUSE isn’t quite ready yet to host private clouds, the company is well under way with its plans to be a good guest in the clouds. Brauckmann mentioned the SUSE Studio 1.2 release earlier this year, and the ability to build custom versions of SUSE and openSUSE and deploy them directly to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from SUSE Studio. Assuming that companies want to deploy an OS with the application (instead of just deploying an application on a PaaS provider), SUSE is in a pretty good position here.
Another area that SUSE is in a good position, but you don’t hear much about, is embedded in storage devices and other appliances. For example, Brauckmann mentioned one major customer – GE Healthcare – that is using SUSE Linux for some of its medical devices. However, SUSE is essentially an invisible part of the system and doesn’t get a lot of notice for its role there.
Desktop
One of the lingering questions over SUSE right now is the fate of its desktop offering, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). If you comb carefully through Novell and SUSE announcements from the last two years, you’ll find little if any mention of the plans for SLED. This morning, Brauckmann noted that when they were planning for products to focus on and products to discontinue, SLED fell… someplace in the middle.
Brauckmann says that the three focus areas for SUSE are “enterprise computing, cloud and cloud infrastructure, and integrated systems.” But when the question about what to stop doing, SLED didn’t make that list either. So SUSE will continue to “invest in the desktop,” but the lack of attention effectively ensures that SLED isn’t going to be a growth area for the company in 2012, and certainly not a focus area.
I also asked about SUSE’s commitment to LibreOffice, and Brauckmann hedged a bit about talking numbers. Since SUSE is no longer attached to a public company, they’re not obligated to provide any sales figures, Brauckmann noted. The company policy, he says, is not to provide numbers. However, when I pressed about LibreOffice’s general prospects he indicated that when averaged out it was a “slightly growing” portion of the SUSE business.
Brauckmann also specifically called out SUSE’s relationship with the openSUSE community, and noted that the company had been keeping its promises to support and work with the openSUSE community. Indeed, the openSUSE community does seem to be thriving these days. The 12.1 release, aside from the silly version bump (from 11.3 to 12.1 with no intermediate 12.0) is one of the best openSUSE releases in some time.
Going into 2012
Going into 2012, SUSE looks like it’s in a solid position. I don’t see any indication that SUSE is poised to try to take the crown from Red Hat, or make any risky moves at all. But it does seem like it’s in good shape to keep its share of the enterprise market and maybe start carving out a position as the preferred private IaaS on top of OpenStack. Since Red Hat isn’t one of the many joining the OpenStack chorus, it’s between SUSE and Canonical to carve out that market – if it appears. Given that SUSE has a long history with enterprise customers, they’ll have a good shot at a lot of that business.
It hasn’t been easy being green for many years, but it looks like 2012 is going to be a bit easier than the last few for SUSE.
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