Chomp

This Week in Apps

Each Friday, Team Chomp kicks off the day with some bagels and candid conversation around the week's happenings, both company and industry-wide. 

As you might imagine, on the heels of an eventful week like this one, several hot topics surfaced.  Everything from WWDC take aways and their impact on industry and developers to the upcoming iPhone in space and beyond were easy candidates for discussion. 

Here are some highlights, thoughts and reactions to "this week in apps":

The week kicked off in high gear with Apple's coveted WWDC.  The enduring line of anxious attendees (including our own, Rob Wills!) started forming at the tender hour of 6am in anticipation of the main event, Steve Jobs' keynote, which began at 9am on Tuesday and lasted roughly two hours.

Jobs unveiled some fascinating stats, including numbers that validate the continued adoption rate of apps (yippee!), even beyond the download of music in iTunes.  Here are some of our favorites:

• There are now over 425,000 active apps in the App Store, 90,000 of which are iPad apps
• 25 million iPads have been sold in 14 months
• 14 billions apps have been downloaded in less than 3 years (even more interesting when compared this to the next point)
• 15 billion songs have been sold in iTunes
• Apple has paid out $2.5 billion to app developers, which is up $1.5 billion from a year ago

For more on WWDC, we recommend this article by Tech Crunch

App milestones:

Congrats to Evernote, the wildly popular note-taking service, for reaching the 10 million user mark in just under three years.  Evernote has its product available on all major platforms including iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and HP WebOS with plans for Windows Phone 7. 

iPhones (and apps!) in space:

Odyssey Space Research has created an experimental app, SpaceLab for iOS which will run on 2 iPhone 4s as part of the final shuttle mission later this year.  The app will contain step-by-step instructions on experiments conducted by astronauts.  This replaces the conventional use of paper print outs traditionally used. 

The takeaway:

This is another great example of how apps are being integrated across a wide variety of industries for a multitude of purposes. 

For more on this, check out the VentureBeat article.

Do you have other interesting news bits to share around apps or the tech industry?  Leave a comment and we'll highlight on our Twitter and Facebook pages. 

Have a great weekend and happy app searching!

Big Thanks for Celebrating

With a great SXSW event in the books, we want to extend a sincere thanks to everyone who supported and attended The Search Party in Austin, TX on Sunday. 

The event was a massive success, bringing in over 200 VIPs plus more than 1,500 attendees over the course of the evening and some fun post event press.  Some notable guests included, Chomp advisor, Ashton Kutcher along with Demi Moore and hoards of Tech celebs like Kevin Rose, MG Siegler, Dennis Crowley and others. 

Austin based photographer, Annie Ray captured the silly side of the event which we've deemed 'fun with photos'.  Check out some members of Team Chomp:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you participated in our VIP pass giveaway with Popchips, thanks very much.  We had an overwhelming number of responses.  If you didn't receive a VIP pass but played along, send an email to robin@chomp.com and we'll send you a token of thanks for participating. 

Thanks again for the great times and awesome memories.  More photos from the event will be posted shortly.  Cheers!

Chomp is "Calling on the Search" - A SXSW Party You Won't Want to Miss!

Everyone knows that the real reason to go to South by Southwest is for the great Austin food (Tex Mex or Barbeque, anyone?) and to get stupid at the best parties this side of the 3GSM Mobile World Congress.

Chomp is quickly becoming famous: first for providing an amazing app-search experience, but perhaps secondly for holding amazing parties.  This year we're teaming up with new web search sensation  Blekko and Hipmunk  the "hippest" way to find the best flights, to "Call on the Search" at SXSW with the "Search Party".

Held on Sunday March 13,  the doors open for VIP-only access from 8PM and to everybody else starting at 9PM.  If you're lucky enough to have a pass just follow the searchlights to the Hanger Lounge at 318 Colorado St in Austin.

If you’d like to chill with the who’s who of the Internet, rub elbows with Hollywood A-listers or get down to beats spun by legendary SF-based DJ, Kidhack, but haven’t scored your own ticket you can still get lucky.  Just follow @Chomp on twitter.  During the days leading up to the party members of Team Chomp will be tweeting out times and places where you have a chance to get hooked up with your very own VIP lanyard. But pay attention and be snappy - every one’s looking for a way to get in on the action and tickets are limited.

For more information or to register, visit the official event site here.  The Search Party is held in association with SV Angel and @aplusk.

Chomp Culture: Notable News wk of Feb 7, 2011

One of the regular meetings we have over at Chomp is our Friday morning bagels and coffee. Sometime mid-morning the team congregates in the kitchen and between bites of bagel and sips of espresso everyone has the chance to talk about what went on during the week.

As part of our ritual we usually talk about what we did, how the week was, compliment the good work someone may have done, ask others on the team any questions we might have and finally, and most fun, we talk about what industry (or even non-industry news caught our eye).  

Starting with this post we’ll be sharing some of the news we found interesting, important or funny enough to share with the team (and now with you).

The thing everyone was talking about this week was the Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy presentation.  We already mentioned it in a post the other day, but if you missed it you should really check it out.

Another piece of news that the team spied was Pocketgear changing their name to Appia and developing a platform for white label app stores.  As you might expect, the team thinks this kind of news is great - the more app stores there are, the more people need a great search engine for apps.

In a move that many analysts are saying is far from brilliant, Nokia has apparently decided to drop their own Symbian platform (at least for smartphones) and adopt some version of Windows 7 instead.  While this news wasn’t a complete surprise to people in the industry, the roughly $8.5 billion penalty Nokia’s shares have taken as a result of the news was pretty unexpected.  Is this the rebirth of two great companies in the mobile space or the end of Nokia as we know it?  Only time will tell.

In still more industry news the combination of tablet computers and handsets have outstripped PC sales for the first time.  This is very promising news for developers focused on apps and of course for Chomp since we make it possible to find the apps you need. ;-)

On the fun, funny or quirky side, the Chomp team liked this TED video about putting legs on mobile devices, we discovered some bad-ass stencil kits, an alarm clock that proves the maxim “when you snooze, you lose”, and finally we learned that the Vatican is not going to let you confess your sins with your iPhone.

Oh -- before we wrap up this first peek into Chomp culture, the team wanted to remind everyone that just got (or is going to get) a Verizon iPhone, that in order to “Rule the Air” you first need to get some bad-ass apps and nothing can help you do that like Chomp - the app search engine that lets you find the apps that do what you need.  Download Chomp first and finding everything else is easy.