MobileBeat: AppStoreHQ and Touchnote declared best mobile services
The judges and attendees at our MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco have spoken, and from seven presenters (not to mention the more than 100 startups who applied), they have selected the two best service mobile startups, who receive the MobileBeat Tesla Award: AppStoreHQ , a service that helps you find and learn more about applications in Apple’s App Store, and Touchnote , which wants to help other applications add a feature for printing photos.
The founders of AppStoreHQ (which was the judges’ choice) say that despite everything that Apple has done right with the App Store, it hasn’t actually created a great shopping experience in iTunes, particularly when it comes to finding good apps. (From the developers’ perspective, there’s a common complaint that there’s a precipitous drop-off in popularity and revenue if you’re not at the top of the App Store.) So they looked at other online experiences, particularly Amazon, and put together a site that combines some of the Amazon experience with ideas from news aggregator Techmeme .
AppStoreHQ aggregates and assigns a score to articles about iPhone applications on top tech blogs and on iPhone-focused sites. Then users can navigate that data by either just looking at recent coverage, or by looking at the best-reviewed applications. And it’s not just about the AppStoreHQ site, says co-founder and chief executive Chris DeVore (pictured) — the company is now looking for companies to take its technology and provide App Search capabilities on their own site. AppStoreHQ is also building tools that use this data to help developers build better applications.
The Seattle company just announced a $150,000 seed round from Founders Co-op .
As for the winner chosen by the votes of MobileBeat attendees, Touchnote has already released an application for printing and mailingĀ Facebook photos as a postcard. But chief executive Raam Thakrar (pictured) says that by providing this service to other applications, it can help them develop long-term revenue models. After all, he says, there are around 700 photo-related applications on the iPhone, and they either make money through advertising or through a one-time fee, and neither method seems likely to lead to big bucks.
For users, this means there’s another way you can interact with a photo app and share your activity there. The example Thakrar uses is an app that adds a moustache to photos, which is fun, but even more fun if you can send the photo as a postcard to your friends. Thakrar adds that Touchnote will eventually expand beyond printing photos on postcards and find other ways to integrate physical printing into apps.
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