…only it isn’t a spinoff….and it isn’t ours.

We’ve been working with Jammbox for some time now on one of their hit titles Discovr. It’s been in the press a bit recently and rightly so, it’s awesome! Now, I’m not sure what’s happened in the past few days but the press articles have been getting increasingly strange in relation to our involvement. Like this one I was just sent from one of our partners. There are multiple inaccuracies in this story but the one that concerns us is that Filter Squad isn’t a spin off and isn’t ours. Jammbox has just changed their name to Filter Squad.

It’s just one example of many articles published in the past few days with pretty major inaccuracies and I was pretty embarrassed to find out about our new spin off in this way (Again, Filter Squad isn’t a Bonobo spin off. Sorry for the confusion Bonobo employees, friends and partners), but I find myself imagining how this experience translates to bigger news stories like say the Groupon IPO. What is the best way to deal with inaccuracies in the press? Do you brush it off with a witty blog post like Groupon – you said it commenter 1 – “so full of win”. Or do you keep it real and go on an all out offensive like Charlie Sheen – probably more win than the average person can take.

Coding’s my thing so I just opened textmate and wrote a Discovr like embeddable graph control to express my frustrations. Try it out. You should be able to click on the nodes of the graph up top. My apologies in advance if it doesn’t work in your browser but it was just something I hacked together quickly with graphviz, node.js and some hints gleaned from canviz.

What’s your thing? Is there a company or individual you think handled some negative or misleading press particular well? I’d love to keep updating this post regularly with PR success stories as a kind of PR cheat sheet we can refer back to when we blow it up like Charlie Sheen. #fastball

PS. We might be quietly thrilled that our involvement with Jammbox is exciting enough to write about!

You may of recently read about our nice trademark infringement letter from Apple over the Unretina name.

As fun as it sounds to take on Apple, we don’t have the time or will power to do it for a free app. So the a has become an er, welcome Unretiner:

We also added our most requested feature, now you can drag images straight onto the dock icon.

Update from the Mac App Store, or grab it here.

Rok on.

Our app called Unretina, which is a simple free tool to downscale retina @2x images to work on older devices, has been ticking away nicely on the Mac App Store since day 1. On Sunday we got this nice email from Apple:

It has come to our attention that your app, Unretina, is currently using Retina in the app name in a manner that is not consistent with Apple’s trademark guidelines, as required by the App Store Review Guidelines :

Please make the necessary changes to your application’s title by end of day Monday, April 4th , 2011, or we will need to remove your application from sale.

Surely you can’t trademark ‘Retina’? But sure enough they did:
RETINA – Trademark by APPLE INC. CUPERTINO, CA – Serial Number: 85056810

Interesting enough though, it’s only for hand held games:
Electronic hand-held game units other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; hand-held electronic games and apparatus other than those adapted for use with television receiver only

I have an issue with this for a number of reasons:
1. Our app has nothing to do with mobile game units.
2. It’s an app to help develop apps exclusively for Apple’s mobile OS.
3. It’s totally free, we don’t profit from it at all.
4. Why is it only an issue now, 6 weeks later?

It’s another reminder that if you play in Apple’s home ground you have to play by whatever rules they feel fit.

For now we are going to stand our ground and argue our point, but in the end Apple can just pull the app from the store, so we obey their decision and change the name, or just pull it from the store.

Edit:
Looks like Apple have another trademark that is a bit broader.

So looks like we need to change the name, any suggestions?

With the iTunes App Store fast approaching 10 billion downloads, some really interesting research has been done by Horace Dediu.

By his predictions Apps will have overtaken songs downloaded by March. When you start to consider that the App Store has existed for less than half the time iTunes has been selling music, that is a staggering figure.

Even more staggering is the rate at which it is growing, to quote Horace:

“The amazing story of this chart is not that apps are running at above 30 million download per day, but that the figure is growing. Growth like this is hard to get one’s mind around. Not only are downloads increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing.”

“The number of apps downloaded for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch is running at more than 60..”

It should be noted that many of these apps are free, but a very large percentage aren’t. Looking closely, you’ll also notice that among the top grossing apps 1/3 of them are free (yes, you read that correctly).

Can’t play guitar or sing very well? You aren’t the only one, but you can still be bigger than The Beetles.

We love being part of new things, especially Apple related. When the Mac App Store was announced we wanted in, but being iOS developers we didn’t have a lot of MacOSX experience. However, we did have a few little in house utilities kicking around. So we grabbed one, polished it up and submitted it, Apple approved it with one day to spare and there we were:

See it in the AppStore.

Unretina is a handy utility to resize images for iOS developers, not a massive audience, but a good target audience for initial adopters of the Mac App Store.

So how did it do? Not too bad at all, it was featured at the top of developer utilities:

And with over 80 tweets (generally positive), 14 store reviews (again generally positive), a stack of rankings average 4 stars we were blown away.

We were expecting maybe 100 download on the first day, hopefully 1k or so would find a use for it over time….

Wow. And given it was only open for a few hours in countries like Australia, we expect there should be some good numbers tomorrow as well.

The Mac App Store is an amazing user experience, no installers, great utilities, easy purchases and seamless updates. Imagine what it will be like in 12 months time.

EDIT: Here are the stats for day 2