On December 3rd, Appsfire organized  the third Appstories event, where successful app developers can present their experience. Thanks to Ouriel Ohayon and the Appsfire team for this great event! Here are my notes of some of the presentations.

Edouard Andrieu, Le Monde

Le Monde is one of the major daily news paper in France. They have a successful web site and mobile applications.

• Mobile page views are now as high as web page views. 54% comes from iOS devices, but Android is growing fast.
• Mobile ads bring 15% of the revenues of digital ads (so much lower than web ads relative to page views…)
• People want to scan news fast, but are ready to spend time reading when they find something they are interested in.

Jeff Clavier, SoftTech and Jean-David Chamboredon, ISAI

Major VCs in France.

• In e-commerce, transactions are more numerous and at a higher value on iPad than iPhone.
• Companies like Instagram are difficult to launch in Europe as the exit is to be acquired and there is no big enough players here.
• Gaming is a difficult domain as it is hit driven, so they are not likely to invest.

Jean-Marie Hullot, Fotopedia

• China is the biggest audience (22%), Japan in second (14%). US is behind (as people have little holidays and don’t travel much!).
• They do cross promotion between their own apps with good success.
• It is difficult to acquire users but even more so to retain them (25-30% lost after one day). They are moving from travel guide to travel magazine with fresh content to give more reason to use the app often. They also use push notification more more engagement. They optimized the notifications to make them as effective as possible by monitoring usage (what is the best time in the day, etc.).

Laurent Gatignol, iPhon.fr

Well known french blog for iPhone and iPad news.

How to attract attention from blogs and get reviews:

• This is not typical PR so do not use typical PR forms (company profiles, etc…). Be careful if you hire PR firms, check that they know the specificities of this domain!
• All contacts by email. All messages are read though not necessarily answered.
• Tips for the contact email:
• Keep it short!
• 1 line introduction stating if it is a new app or an update. New apps are much more likely to be reviewed.
• 3 lines for the ‘what’
• 3 lines for the ‘why’
• A link to the app store page if the app is released. Better than a link to your own web site, as the bloggers are used to the app store page format and can get the needed information quickly.
• Including pictures is useful.
• It’s good to have a video. Preferably hosted on YouTube, as it will appear embedded in the email for gmail users, so it can be watched immediately.
• Including promo codes in the 1st email is a waste.
• Avoid sending the email close to Apple keynotes as there is no space for app reviews at that time.
• More emails are received at the end of the week, so better send at the beginning.
• Avoid embargoes.
• A press kit (as a zip file containing photos and such) can be useful but only if all the needed information is in the body of the email. Actually the iTunes store page is basically all the press kit that is needed.
• A review may not create a huge spike in download, but news users are really engaged as they know what they download (that was a common theme of many of the presenters: engaged users are more important than raw number of downloads).

As many others, when I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 6 I noticed that the points of interest in the new map application were all over the place. I initially thought that they were just at random locations, but actually it’s not (always) the case. I realized that many are located as if the streets were much wider than they really are, to the point they sometime overlap with the next parallel street. So the points of interest are pushed away from the streets into the buildings, and sometimes they are closer to the next street – which is very confusing.

Not clear? Here is an example. This is in Paris, but I have seen the same thing in many places (though it certainly does not explain all the problems!) In the figure, the businesses on ‘Rue d’Enghien’ are located as if the street was extended to the pink lines and those on ‘Rue de l’Echiquier’ as if that second street was extended to the orange lines. The businesses on the map are moved as shown by the arrows, and thus the places on those two streets are mixed up.

It’s crazy that such a blatant error made it to the released product, but it should be quite easy to solve – maybe just tweaking a parameter in the geocoding algorithm and those locations will be back to the right place!

Now I wonder if there is such a pattern that explains why so many businesses are in the wrong category