“It’s not about ‘gamifying’. It’s about driving revenue, saving costs, making people more efficient.” – Bob Marsh, CEO, LevelEleven Gamification is officially part of the set of marketing tools that every business should use to develop its marketing strategy. It is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game application to make them more fun and engaging. I’m sure that if you use even only social networks you know what I’m talking about. I spend so much time on internet and in the past months I found that many more brands are embracing a gamification strategy to engage their users and promote their products. The modality depends a lot on the brand, the platform chosen to gamify and type of gamification.  We can actually divide gamification into two big families: The first one is more visual and is closer to a real game, with levels, scores and social competition. It usually implies the development of a dedicated app or website and a higher investment.  We have an example of this with Nike  and the Nike+  app that they created. In 2011 they registered a 40% increase of subscribers of the app Nike+; this contributed to increase the business revenues of the running sector by 30%.

This year's f8 conference was all about helping developers build, grow and monetize their apps. Facebook's main objective is to become a stable mobile platform for developers to build on top of.   I took the time to watch the keynote . It's a 1 hour video. If you have the time, go ahead, it's worth watching it. If you don't, I'll give here the main points covered.

"Downloads only enable an app to succeed, they do not indicate actual success," says Brant DeBow , EVP of technology at BiTE Interactive .  As with every emerging phenomenon, the first studies are more simplistic, perhaps for a lack of data. At the beginning of the App trend, the studies made to understand and predict the user’s behaviour were essentially focused on the number of downloads. According to DeBow there’s much more to the success of the app than that.  With breakneck speed growth of the app industry, the available data increased and the studies of the metrics became more accurate. A few months ago we talked about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on the “How to do the web analysis of my mobile app?” article.   Today the challenge is to relate some of these Indicators with app engagement. So I want to explore some of the metrics that I think are important for you to consider, to make your beautiful app interesting and engaging. Although there are other metrics I could mention, I prefer talking about the ones that are that are mainly used on all kinds of apps. So let’s start!

The penetration of smartphones and number of apps in the market is growing more and more and at an equal pace the number of people who want to develop and build apps by themselves runs up.  The process of developing an App seems very complicated to most, for this reason I asked some questions to two members of our iOS developers team, Mathieu Fancello and Alex Manzella . The purpose of my interview was to find out the basic skills required to enter into the iOS development world, and then to share this knowledge with you.  

A few days ago, I was talking with Jerome and Arianna about the frequently asked questions we receive from our users, and about the subjects we should handle on this blog to answer these questions. We've realized that you now have quite a bit of experience with our service and you have created apps for wide range of contents. So instead of talking about the technical aspects of the creation of an app, about which you surely already know tons, I decided talk about how to organize your contents in order to deliver the best possible user experience. In this article, I'll give you some insight on what is the best way to plan and design your app. The first and most important thing you should know is who your readers are, so you can find the best way to arrange and structure your app.

Everyday, I'm in contact with people who have a WordPress site and want to turn it into a mobile app. It's not surprising since more than 19% of the web runs on WordPress   During the conversation, we always end up speaking about the best way to make this transformation, so I thought about sharing this with you in this blog post.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about it you'll do things differently " Warren Buffett

The past was dominated by voice. Now we have moved into another decade, where digital services take the lion share of industry revenues.   The mobile analyst Chetan Sharma  had predicted that voice data would leave space to mobile data, the new big revenue source.  Only during the past year, mobile data service revenues grew by 20% reaching $24.8 billion, and it has become the primary growth driver for US mobile industry.

Recently, I fell upon a very interesting article written on Flurry's blog  about the decay of apps. Every app has a lifetime cycle where it reaches the top, and then monthly active users (MAU) start diminishing. Flurry focused on what happens after the peak ... and did you know what they discovered? News apps are decaying slower than other types of apps! Sounds good for you GoodBarbers, right?

That was one of the great features that came with GoodBarber Salvador back in September. Every GoodBarber account has a great web app associated, in addition to the native app for iPhone and the native app for Android.   Your natives apps are distributed in the App Store and in Google Play. But what about the web app?    By default, your web app is located on http://<appname>.goodbarber.com/m/. But you can (you should?) change this URL and choose your own.   For instance, you can decide to link your web app to http://m.yourdomain.com That will be far more convenient for your users to access your html5 web app, right ?   That's what we're going to do together in this post.

Today I’m going to explain you how to create a Flurry account, to have more analytics data of your app.   First of all go to www.flurry.com  and sing up, entering all the information required and accepting the terms and the conditions.

If you read carefully tuesday's update, you saw that we enabled Disqus comments on GoodBarber. Many of you had requested this feature, so we set aside our developments on GoodBarber 3 for a few hours, in order to bring this feature to GoodBarber 2. It's now ready to be used. Let me explain how to turn on Disqus comments into your app.

Big news today. Since yesterday's update, revision #1900, 2 new templates have landed in your back office. They are called Minimal color & Minimal photo. They have been designed for the article section and the video section.  It raises to 8 the number of templates you can choose to display a list of articles (or videos). But Minimals are a brand new kind of templates. As suggested by their name, they are sleek and simple. Let me show you how beautiful they are. With minimal photo and minimal color, no doubt you are going to create a stunning article or video section. 

The technologies are far from opposing. Rather, they complement each other and will continue to recombine in the near future.

Today, we're going to have a look to some deep features that you can use to customize your app a lot more! It can be a little technical to manage, but that's worth it. You may have noticed a section of the backoffice called Settings API. Trust me, that's where the best features are hidden ;)

In the era of the Web 2.0, the real life overlapped the virtual one, making crucial for any business, the study of the habits of their users while they are surfing on the web.   Thanks to web analysis became possible not only to analyze your target customers, the access, the traffic, etc ... but there are also offered the tools to optimize your investments on the web advertising, to improve conversion rates and the results of your business.

We have already talked about it in the past, now we will resume what has been said and delve further into the subject. As you all know, an app can help you to increase your customer base and your traffic. But before this can be possible is important that your new app is presented to the world! You must to expect a normal period of transition in which you will try to redirect the users of your mobile website to your app. At this point, it is usual to undertake marketing strategies to promote the app and make it known to the world.

We have discussed many times the "benefits" that the creation of an app can bring to your brand, not only as a commercial brand, but also as a blog, a VIP, a radio, a club, etc.   Nowadays, native apps provide a better user experience and improve the way content is made available. The experience that a mobile application offers to users is much more rewarding than the one offered by a mobile web app.

Trees decorated to the nines, sparkling lights, smell of hot chocolate down the streets and soft white snow that covers everything. Christmas is coming! Every city, with all the christmas decorations, is so much beautiful in this period. And what about your app? Is it maybe less important? Does not deserve to be decorated? Your users will appreciate that you want to support the Christmas mood! :D Here some advice to design your app for this period of festivity!

Your GoodBarber app embeds social sharing features that will help your users to spread the word about your content. It means that almost everywhere in the app, your readers have access to a "share" button that will lead them the sharing screen.   You've probably already added such features to your website: you can easily understand that the more the process will be easy for your users to share your posts or videos, the more they'll share it :)   Since the GoodBarber 2.5 Salvador release, we've also integrated Facebook likes into the apps. It means that once your reader is logged in your app with his Facebook account, he'll just have to click on the "heart" button to like the post he's reading. It's not exactly the same action than a real Facebook share: a share will create a new post in the user's timeline, and a like will just appear in the Facebook ticker feed.   To be honnest, as a Facebook user, I prefer most of the times to just "like" a blog post than to actually "share" it to my friends: the two actions are totally different and apply in different situations.   GoodBarber also allows you to ask your users to login using Facebook or Twitter to post a comment, to bookmark a content, or to submit a picture/video/text from a Submit section. You should enable this feature if you don't want the comments on your website to be anonymous.

Since we launched GoodBarber, our goal has always been to offer applications with the best user experience. Beyond the interest that they can present for the final users, our approach — which is mainly shared by the industry — is to estimate the user experience of an application by the design and the fluidity (speed) of the interface. Our second goal is to give our users the maximum flexibility in the management of their application with the diversity of the settings, and by modifying it easily. It's the reason why we created a system of remote control for the applications updates. As fast as possible, this tool helps you updating all the base installed (design for example) on your app without an other submission to the stores. The combination of these various constraints created a complex equation to be solved. Because the largest the flexibility of the settings is, the most complicated it is to keep the speed and  fluidity of the interface. And conversely, the more we look for speed, the less settings we can propose. We dedicate a big part of our work to keep on improving GoodBarber and make it the sharpest DIY software to create beautiful app (especially through the GoodBarber 2.5 Salvador update). In parallel our team works on the optimisation of the application after every release. 

When you are considering how to make an app for iPhone, Android, or any other platform, you must add a killer splash screen if you want to ensure a good launch experience for your users. After all, the splash screen is the first image that is seen when your app is opened. So, let's review some tips that will help make your app a success, shall we?

In your GoodBarber backend, you can find several types of usage statistics for your app. In this post, we are going to review the traffic statistics (that you can find in the Audience > Statistics > Traffic menu). These stats will help you to measure the numbers of your app's readers, and their loyalty. Here are some definitions, and some ways to analyze them. Keep in mind that you can consult your stats specifically for iOS or Android, or for both platforms. You can also choose the time range to analyze.

The new version of the My GoodBarber app is available on the stores since last week. We designed it to be your best companion, all along your app lifetime.   You'll discover some useful features to manage your app on a daily basis.