So now that I’m getting in deep with exploring all the avenues to promote our apps, I inevitably created a facebook page for our company.

http://facebook.com/surjesoftware

Facebook lets me have multiple personalities, because you can decide to log in as the company or the human, which is insanely cool. Now I’ll have to see how to build that page into something useful, or it will become just another internet graveyard for content.

I’m hoping that the social aspect of facebook makes the page useful, which is why I’m going to blog about it tonight, and add a link to the site.

While we are working on our next suite of apps, we continually reflect on how our existing crop of apps is doing. While we are getting some consistent downloads, we figure we may get a greater return on investment from them if we advertize a little bit…

So we’re looking into many advertizing platforms and hope to see which one is most effective. So far we’re looking at :

• Facebook
• Google Adwords
• TwtMob
• iAd (Apple ad network)

I hope to come back to this story in a little while to announce my findings on which was most effective. I’m guessing google or iAD will be most effective, but I’m most intrigued by twtmob and facebook, the more social forms of advertizing. TwtMob in particular is intriguing because I’ll get actual twitter users to hawk our products, which I hope will be more effective than ads on the side of a web page which are more obvious and more easily ignored.

Stay tuned…

Here are my picks for the top 20 must have iPad apps. They are all free and some might have optional in app purchases. The games I chose really showcase the coolness of the iPad, great for showing off to your friends! Of course the news, radio and TV apps I chose pertain to Canadians, in particular for Calgary, so you should search for your local stations/papers in the app store.

News & Weather

CBC News
Calgary Herald
WeatherEye HD

National Post, The Globe and Mail and CTV News also have apps. You may also want to check out CNN, BBC News and The Huffington Post.

Radio, TV & Film

CBC Radio
IMDb Movies & TV
NFB Films for iPad

CTV, CBC and Global all have apps to watch local TV.

Games & Fun

Virtuoso Piano Free 3
CryptoQuip Free
Solitaire Classic
Let’s Create! Pottery HD Lite

Hobbies & Interest

Kobo – 1 million Free Books – Read eBooks!
NASA App HD
Google Earth
170,000+ Recipes: BigOven

Social Networking

Skype for iPad
HootSuite for Twitter

Facebook and Twitter have iPad apps. LinkedIn has an iPhone app only. HootSuite accesses all of your accounts.

Utilities

Free Light
Nightstand Central for iPad Free – Alarm Clock with Weather and Photo Wallpapers
Calculator for iPad – Calc Pro HD Free
Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder

In case you have a young toddler who likes to play with your iDevice, check out Bitsy the Spider, the simple toddler app with physics for the rain drops. It’s free  until this Friday, so act now!

In other news, today is the Wikipedia / Craigslist / etc blackout day in protest of legislation being proposed in the US. It’s funny how they speak out in support of the internet when it helps revolutions of Arab states, but want to be able to censor and shut the internet down like China and Iran do. Check out the Wikipedia page on SOPA for more info!

Finally we’ve started exploring advertizing through social media, twitter in particular. We will talk more about that once we find out how effective/ineffective it is.

So now that the App store is back up again after the holiday break, it was decided to retire Santa’s Loot for the year. Santa had a decent 1st year with several thousand downloads. We noticed a small uptick in Santa’s off season game Rafter’s Loot as well, so it was a good 1st effort at a holiday skinned version of one of our games.

Generally it was a higher than normal levels of downloads on our apps, and I imagine it’s across the board. I can just imaging people realxing with their new iPads on the couch, enjoying a well earned game after a busy holiday build up. We had our best ad revenue day yet on Boxing day!

AS for the next year, well we thought, maybe a mayan calendar would be good to count down until the next winter solstice, but there are already a bunch of em. We have some other ideas in the hopper, including environmental apps and medical apps. We’ll see, you never know…

Anyhow enjoy the rest of the year and the new one, 2012, to come.

So with the year end nearly upon us, we are trying to decide what kind of app to develop next. We have a whole bunch of ideas, including some social networking style stuff, but those apps require some heavy lifting on the server side, so we’re undecided if we’re ready and willing to pursue that type of devlopment at the moment.

Some ideas so far are:

• Friend/Tracking app (maybe with busses)
• Artistic app
• Something else…

The next app should not be a game, since it will be used in part to help students learn to develop apps. For those of you unaware, one of our programmers is a Associate Professor at Mount Royal University, teaching the App Development Course: COMP 3504

In the meantime, we’re playing around with social media advertizing, trying to get the word out about Santa’s Loot before Santa retires for the year.

If we don’t post again soon,

Happy Holidays

So our little app development company is doing great going into this 2011 Christmas holiday season, Santa’s Loot and CryptoQuip are doing well, and surprisingly Voodoo Mother In Law is doing better than expected as well.

But there’s a little nuisance I want to share with you, mostly cause it’s funny, but also to make people out there aware of the most annoying form of spam I’ve ever come across as a blog owner: Ugg Boot Spam

For some reason, the people who own Ugg Boot websites have decided to leave us comments almost every day trying to get links to their (counterfiet) ugg boot sites. Now normally, I expect some Viagra, or whatever spam, but what makes this interesting is how they try and convince me to approve their posts through flattery. Here are just a few examples of the kind of coments I’ve been rejecting:

• We wish to thank you all over again to your beautiful ideas you gave Jeremy in planning her post-graduate research and also, above all, designed for providing the whole set of ideas available as one article.
• This page is considered the beginning I’ve noted that is not rubbish. It requires a first-class work ethic that can put out something decent much site, carry on.
• Glance a person’s best with Angry Birds Online Walkthrough Angry Bird Game Online (links removed)
• Which isn’t the one thing I often do! I purchase pleasure from studying a publish that will make folks think. Additionally, i appreciate permitting me to comment!

So in conclusion, spammers are now trying to complement web site owners on how brilliant their posts are to trick them into publishing links (usually to their counterfeit Ugg Boot websites).

Happy Holidays!

So it’s been a little while since I’ve posted, so I’m going to talk about a few things.

Firstly, we’re working on a holiday themed version of Rafter’s Loot. Instead of navigating a river and collecting adventure loot, we’re making a version where you navigate a sled on the ice, collecting presents and other holiday stuff. It will  be free, supported by ads. Look for it later this month!

We also finally raised the price on the full version of Cryptoquip, after breaking the 1000 download mark. Given the price of the puzzle packs, buying the full version gets 150 puzzles and no ads, so it’s still a great value.

Finally, on a more personal note, we finally replaced our blackberry phones with iPhone 4S’s! As app developers we probably should have done it right away, but we had to wait for our contracts to allow a cheap upgrade, and we wanted to wait for the new iPhone.

They are wonderful little machines. I absolutely love Siri. I think this will have a big impact on how we interact with our personal computing devices.

• I asked Siri to set a timer to ensure we made our doctor’s appointment, and it was a paradigm shift from the old way of: entering an app, setting things manually then putting it away. It took 10 seconds to do and it worked perfectly!
• I also enjoy being able to to do searches in Google by talking, it’s leaps and bounds faster than typing, and it’s more natural. You just say ‘Search Google for “blah blah blah’ and she does!
• I was trying to plan my day and asked her about my meetings this week, Boom! up pop all the meetings in my calendar. I can’t wait to try and set a meeting for real. When planning a fake meeting to test her out it worked better than any calendar app ever has for me. It notifies you of conflicts and captures all the info you’d have to type manually. Best personal assistant I’ve ever had (Note: I’ve never had a personal assistant)
• I was getting along so well with her, I asked if she could talk dirty to me… Her response was hilarious… I won’t spoil it for you try it out yourself!

The day we’ve been waiting for is finally here. Our family welcomed it’s newest member, a beautiful baby girl! Mom and baby are fine (and so’s Dad, if any one cares).

What that means for us is a lot less time for new app development, but no matter since you all love the games and apps we’re already created right? Anyhow. Expect a little radio silence for the next little while, but we’ll be back soon (hopefully before year’s end) with something new.

If you haven’t already, help support a teeny tiny software company that supports a teeny tiny family by buying our apps . And if you already have, help spread the word.