Appbackr and Branded Research iOS App Pitch Night

Our bud­dies at Brand­ed Research host­ed an iOS App Pitch Night at their offices in San­ta Mon­i­ca, in coop­er­a­tion with Palo Alto based, App­backr.  The evening was filled with a lot of enthu­si­as­tic mobile app devel­op­ers, a dozen box­es of piz­za, and beer on tap.

Appbackr’s big pitch that night — a chal­lenge to the devel­op­ers in the room to come up with an app that was unique and inter­est­ing enough to receive up to $25,000 in funding. 

Aspir­ing entre­pre­neurs and devel­op­ers alike pre­sent­ed inter­est­ing ideas, shared insights into their expe­ri­ence work­ing in the mobile app devel­op­ment world, and pre­sent­ed ana­lyt­ics on sales trends.  One idea pre­sent­ed – an app that would alert you to take a pic­ture of what­ev­er it is you’re doing at exact­ly 5:59PM each day, every day.  Oth­er con­cepts involved being able to use your mobile phone to scan a room and with use of Blue­tooth, “pick up” anoth­er user of the same app and get pro­file infor­ma­tion such as inter­ests, rela­tion­ship sta­tus, and what­ev­er it is that they want­ed to share.  The ideas were great, but the con­cepts were still in their infan­cy stages with no work­ing demos or screenshots.

The high­light of the evening’s event were pre­sen­ta­tions by select­ed speak­ers includ­ing Eddie Marks co-founder of Ined­i­ble Soft­ware Inc., a devel­op­ment house that is known for their Shot­gun and Shot­gun Duel apps, which when com­bined with all of their apps have gen­er­at­ed a stag­ger­ing 11 mil­lion down­loads.   Also present was Amy Li, a free­lance cre­ative direc­tor and design­er helped pro­duce a num­ber of pop­u­lar apps for AT&T Interactive.

Eddie dis­cussed the real world dif­fi­cul­ty of mak­ing mon­ey in the app store, demon­strat­ing that a dis­pro­por­tion­al­ly small num­ber of devel­op­ers are respon­si­ble for the high­est vol­ume of down­loads and rev­enue.  Eddie also point­ed out that hav­ing a high quan­ti­ty of rat­ings gen­er­al­ly cor­re­lates to a stronger trend in down­load vol­ume, espe­cial­ly if the rat­ings are skewed towards the high­er side. 

Amy pre­sent­ed var­i­ous con­cepts in the pos­si­ble future of mobile design and also shared a col­lec­tion of apps from the Have2 line­up includ­ing Have2Drink, Have2Eat, Have2Snack, and Have2P – the lat­ter gar­ner­ing atten­tion from Giz­mo­do and The New York Times.

So far we have not heard back yet from App­backr, but we think the $25,000 pot still remains, so we rec­om­mend you hit up App­backr with your ideas and get crackin’!