How many times can you use the walk-through-your-house technique without reducing the strength of the associations ? I can see how useful it would be to use it once - milk on your front doorstep, steaks attacking you in the foyer, it makes sense, but what about the next time you want to remember something? Perhaps, the next time I want to remember a sequence of numbers starting with zero and I will have Ozzy Ozborne on my front door step. After that maybe I want to remember something else and I might have something random on my front doorstep like a mental image of Jack Bauer with a gun .. After a few goes at doing this how will I remember what is supposed to go on my front doorstep at all ?? Does anyone have experience of this ?
Beautiful design, lovely idea, I will be downloading this tonight. Do you have any plans for localizing it to other languages ? ( I think it would be a successful app in Japan )
I would love to stop supporting ie6 but I develop for customers in China and on the last count from our logs over 60% accessed the service with ie6. ( which, surprisingly, is about double of what is shown on your link )
I am not convinced that kids will nag their parents enough to make them pay to upgrade - I suspect most parents will just be happy to let their kid play with the free version.
Regarding "nag their parents" -- be careful, be very careful, you are treading on sore thumbs here. If my preschooler starts nagging me about IAP prompted by whatever ad mechanism that is in the game, the app gets promptly deleted and it gets 1 star rating and a review with a warning to other parents.
As I said in another comment, while I do not like to say "no" to my kid, I really hate him being used as a pressure point for milking parents for IAP money. If your app is respectful towards the parents, I will gladly pay you and probably more than you think.
I doubt that you're a parent. No fault of yours. But here is what happens. Your kid will play the free version and then she will master the free part. You'll see that she enjoys it and you won't hesitate paying for the paid version or the in-app purchase upgrades.
She went through the free version in a zippy and kept playing it over and over again. I took her iPad, disable Restriction and bought the paid version.
We worry about this as well, actually. In fact it's been interesting to get the comments pushing back on IAP, because our concern to date has been that we gave away too much content for free. What's interesting about that Flurry article I linked to is that it's a fraction of the market that's driving the majority of the IAP revenue...so even if most parents don't go for the in-app purchase option, the ones that do should (we hope!) help us keep our lights on.
Have you considered going straight for the paid option
( ie. no free content ) and seeing how much demand you have? I think the app looks a lot better than most of the stuff already out there, and the price point would reassure parents that they are getting a high-quality product for their kids.
We've tried a premium-only approach with previous apps and we've gotten feedback that our users like the option to try before they buy - which is what led us to IAP.
Also, when we've tried a premium-only approach our apps have been made available for jailbroken devices within a couple of weeks, with little chance to directly monetize these pirated free copies of our apps. See, for example: http://theikidsblog.com/blog/2010/11/30/arr-there-be-pirates...
This time around our approach was to build a premium product, price it accordingly and let people try it out via the free version. It's hard to know what the best way to handle it is - but that's definitely part of the fun of the wild west of mobile apps these days..and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, the freemium model seems to have a lot of traction..
Just now, looking around the office here in Tokyo - most of the engineers here sit at their screens day in day out from 9.30am through to past 10pm. Most of them don't exercise more than walking to the elevator and maybe standing on the train for the half hour daily commute. They are all, with a couple of exceptions, "skinny" by western standards. Why are these sedentary office workers not gaining the pounds? It's got to be the diet.
yes there is that too.. but I would like to add some anecdotal evidence.. I am not Asian and while living here I've gradually adopted the same diet ( and adapted to the portion sizes ) and it has done me wonders.
The computer room is an interesting idea but I am not sure I want my kid running around in it at the same time as I am trying to use it. For that reason there will always be a home on my coffee table for the iPad ( or what ever tablet takes over the number 1 spot in the next few years )
I am still working on the back-end to the system but in the meantime I really want to get some feedback from you guys. I have been building the system in my spare time and have now got to the point where I need some extra motivation to see it through to completion. Honest comments appreciated!
The automated video interview idea is really cool. This would have been useful to us earlier this year when we were filtering through many candidates for a junior role, where you don't necessarily want to disqualify people with a lack of experience, but want to get a good feel for their personality and their ability to talk about what they're interested in.
I think the biggest comment I'd have with your project is that the name of the product doesn't communicate to me what it does nor does it hint at the video idea -- I had to dig in and find it myself.
