October 2011

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DOT Placards celebrates 10,000 downloads

October 22, 2011 in Android development, microISV startup by ag | 3 comments

Transportation Placards

Version 1.0 of our DOT Placards product was released on 3 September, 2010. Today I checked in Android Developers Console and saw it has crossed the 10,000 download threshold. Huzzah!

The Android Marketplace doesn’t publish exact download numbers for consumers to see. Rather, it reports downloads as being within ranges such as < 10, 50-100, 1,000-5,000 and so on. But the bands get bigger as the counts go up. It gets to be a bigger and bigger deal to cross each threshold.

We’ve been in 5,000-10,000 band for a long time and, for a time, were stalling out a bit on attracting new users. Then we removed the ads feature. Showing ads had never done anything for revenue, had probably annoyed some users, and required extra permissions at app install time. Taking them out was a great decision.

Many thanks to Mark, whose brainchild the product was, and to Hokan, who built it.

Brad Pitt as a Quantum Leader

October 4, 2011 in Books, microISV startup by kkeown | No comments

MoneyBall_p
I experienced a tidy patch of synchronicity last week.
First, I worked my way through the Crisis Management chapter in the Quantum Leadership book I’m reading.  Second, I dragged my husband to the theater to see Moneyball, the new Brad Pitt movie about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s baseball team.  Then, in quick succession, I had the opportunity to see a preview of Windows 8 on a slate computer and  Amazon announced its new Kindle line-up, including the Fire, a heavily customized Android tablet.


Quantum’s take on crisis management is, essentially, “Get used to it.  Get better at it.  Stop thinking of it as something you only do from time to time.” Read the rest of this entry »