AppMix: Most popular free apps of 2009 according to @lifehacker
Don't worry we won't publish all the good lists made out there. but this one by LifeHacker seemed like a must
AppsFire.com ★ blog ★
discover and share apps on ★ fire ★
Filed underfree
The value of a free app: $1m in Sales from the Pizza Hut iPhone app
iPhone applications capture consumers’ imagination in a way that WAP sites simply can’t do, so the decision to expand to the iPhone was as good one for us. [ Bernard Acoca, senior director of digital marketing at Pizza Hut]
Nice! in just 3 months. Now imagine what it would be if Pizza hut was making good pizzas!
Anyway, if you want to try it getAp.ps/fx [only in the US app store]
Short thought: Are free apps really free?
What a stupid question. no? Well maybe not. If you got an app for free from the App Store, you probably noticed that many of them serve advertising. Like in the example below
Now if you are running your app on a data network (which is not wifi), those ads are served dynamically via the internet, meaning live.
This simply means that by running a free app, you are using your data package. Many times this does not really matter because the app requires you to connect to the web in order to be used (for example Last.fm), so the incremental usage of that free app is not really critical.
But if you thought your app would run locally and that could use for free, you're wrong. A free app with advertising will use your data package.
Wait! if you have an unlimited data package, then of course you're safe and you probably won't mind. But if not: mind your bills
The only problem, which is more general today, is that there is no way to know what apps are consuming in terms of data. That would be a tremendous information
For which either Apple, or Mobile operators will have to open their data a little more.
What they should do is either allow developers to have access to that information (splitting generated by the app and usage generated from the ad serving) or give general access directly to the user. Making money from advertising is a great thing, but consumers should know what it cost them.
For now mobile ad formats are rather simple and static, but the day those formats will become richer (like on the computer) the data required to serve them will become bigger.
The same way we know from our operators which phone number generated minutes of call (and therefore part of our bill), we should get the same from apps.
Agree?
