My new mobile venture

http://www.pinkelstar.com

[disclosure: this post is about my new mobile venture, so it may be a bit subjective here and there 😉 ]

Its been really quiet over here lately. Entirely my fault, I have been extremely busy starting up a new venture. I had almost forgotten what it is like to start something new. It starts with a vague idea which quickly, driven by enthusiasm and energy turns into something you lose sleep over.

The past few months I went through that exciting process again. Building a great team, getting people to listen to your thoughts and providing useful feedback. Coming up with a solution, throwing it away again, coming up with something new. The cycle repeats itself until you reach a point in which you feel that the problem is understood and the solution is a good first shot in the right direction. Getting the team, friends, peers, investors excited about it and just taking the first step of a new adventure.

So what is this new venture about? It’s born out of a bit of frustration that current mobile app stores do not seem to help me find great mobile apps. I’ve noticed that  many of my friends (and myself) often find ourselves asking each other if they have any new great apps for their mobile. And it occurred to us that finding great apps isn’t a simple task anymore with app stores that contain hundreds of thousands of apps.

Enter PinkelStar. PinkelStar is a new service that is aimed at mobile application developers (iPhone and Android). It offers developers the ability to integrate social networks like Facebook and Twitter natively into their app. It lets app users take their favorite apps into their social networks and tell their friends about it.

An experienced developer might say, “why would I need that? I can do that myself?”. Sure you can. It isn’t super complicated (although not everyone will find OAuth a simple protocol). We still think that there are many reasons why you might want give PinkelStar a try.

1. It’s fast. And I mean really fast. Can you integrate Facebook and Twitter in less than 5 minutes? With PinkelStar you need less than 2. Check out this video if you don’t believe me.

2. We take care of the boring stuff, that gives you the time to focus on features for your app. We’ll keep everything updated and working with the latest Social Networking API’s, so no need for you to watch out for changes.

3. PinkelStar gives you (real-time !) stats. Think Google Analytics for apps.  In your developers dashboard you can see what people say about your app, how many shares have been made, how many people have viewed/interacted, how many new downloads these shares have created, etc.etc. You can intersect this data with the different supported social networks and mobile platforms.

4. PinkelStar comes with an open API that can be used to extend your app. We’ll be adding more networks, more platforms and a fully customizable UI that works out of the box.

5. PinkelStar will help you understand what your users think about your app. It will help you improve the user experience further and drive distribution and brand recognition.

Integration of social networks is just the start of this adventure. There is much, much more to come, but we’ll get to that in due time.

If interested I suggest you just give it a spin. It’s literally a few minutes of work and then you can see for yourself what this can do for your apps. PinkelStar has been in private beta for a little while now, and we are now slowly opening up the service to more developers. let me know what you think of it, and if you want access to our Beta, either register at http://www.pinkelstar.com, or drop me a line.

Advertisement