RIM launched the BlackBerry Application store last night (midnight). The bloggers picked up on it and over the last 8 hours, there's been some strong traffic. Actually pretty high/solid traffic for something that won't really get talked about until today. Om Malik has a review with the bottom line being "good enough." Like any good geek, I was on this puppy seconds after it went live and I'm pretty happy with it as well.
An interesting (and, for me expected) observation was the top 25 list and what is on it.
The Bloomberg App is number one as of 8a, followed by Viigo. You'll see the Yellow Pages Business Finder, WorldMate, Google Quick Search, among others in the top 25. A 3 buck fart app ranks high than Google Talk, gee there's a shock. It will be fascinating to watch the top downloads from Apple's Store, RIM and Microsoft continue to evolve as everybody goes after various market segments. There will be lots of demographic and customer information being squeezed out of these lists.
In any event, the folks in Waterloo deserve a hearty well done for saying when it would be released, delivering on that promise, and producing a very respectable V1.0 product.
(3 bucks for a fart app?)
Go Viigo! Great to see a cutting-edge Canadian service ranking so high!
Posted by: Greg Nisbet | April 01, 2009 at 09:11
Rick, you might be interested in some stats calibrating the importance of App Store visibility to software companies in the BlackBerry ecosystem.
By 9:00am we had surpassed our average daily download volume for Viigo on BlackBerry ... by 2:00pm we had surpassed our best day ever across all platforms (and we've had some excellent days) ... and by 8:30pm we had reached 1/4 of the MONTHLY downloads we were getting on the platform only 4 months ago.
Now, to put this into perspective, Viigo's download run-rate was ALREADY one of the best on the BlackBerry platform.
Interesting stuff ... to say the least.
Mark Ruddock
CEO
Viigo
http://www.viigo.com
http://www.twitter.com/ruddockmh
Posted by: RuddockMH | April 01, 2009 at 20:40