AppStoreHQ gets another shout-out in The New York Times | Gadgetwise

A few months ago the AppStoreHQ team noticed a spike in visits from The New York Times. We checked our referrer logs and discovered a very flattering description of our iPhone app search offering in this article.

This morning we saw a similar bump and wondered if the same piece had been rediscovered. Instead, we discovered a new (and even more flattering) mention in a Gadgetwise piece on a new app discovery feature from Apple titled "Is That a Recommendation, Or an Ad?" After describing Apple's offering - a collection of recommended apps for different needs - the author (Roy Furchgott) goes on...

"Okay, I’ll grant that it’s really difficult to pick between the many great apps out there (and the many more cruddy ones). But that’s just the point. We need a better system. Take a look at something like AppStore HQ, which lets you sort through apps using multiple criteria, like category price and popularity to narrow your choices to a manageable number. Something like that from Apple would be useful."

AppStoreHQ may be a "new" media company, but when a "traditional" company with the stature of the New York Times singles us out for attention, it still makes us feel like the most feared and respected teacher in school just gave us a gold star. Thanks, Roy - we're honored to be on your radar and working hard to make sure we deliver for your readers.

This is cool: real-time results from Cooler Planet's solar calculator

The clever guys at Cooler Planet keep coming up with new ways to shine a light on the U.S. market for residential and commercial solar panel installations.

Here's their latest: a real-time display (anonymized, of course) of the savings estimates provided to consumers and businesses using their solar system cost estimator. You can see an example in the image above - every few seconds a new result is displayed, showing where the customer is located and how much they could save a month by going solar. Nice work, gang!

Announcing our newest Founders Co-op investment: Nearlyweds!

Today we're proud to announce a new member of the Founders Co-op family: Nearlyweds!

In business since 2007, Nearlyweds! provides personal wedding websites for design-conscious couples. In a market littered with generic free offerings, Nearlyweds! has built a great premium business by focusing on the user experience, partnering with top invitation designers in the industry to offer beautiful design coupled with intuitive and functional social software.

The company's focus on quality has attracted key industry partners as well - in addition to operating their own destination site, Nearlyweds! also powers the wedding website offerings of leading wedding stationery designers Wedding Paper Divas and the world's favorite non-traditional offering the Offbeat Bride, and works closely with a passionate community of supporters in the independent wedding design and wedding blog community.

We first met Nearlyweds! co-founder Porter Bayne in early 2008, but at the time he and co-founder John Scrofano were running the site as a side-project while pursuing other businesses. As we got to know Porter and John better, we learned more about the business and collectively began to see significant untapped potential in the "social wedding software" space, powered in part by:

• Shifting demographics - as young adults raised on social software enter the wedding market, many of them are looking for online wedding tools that enable the kinds of collaborative planning and sharing they're accustomed to.
  
• Fragmented / localized business - wedding vendors are still predominately local, and despite the best efforts of leading online brands like The Knot and Brides.com, the default process for inviting wedding guests and communicating with them in the months leading up to the wedding is still largely managed offline, via a highly fragmented collection of service providers.
• Secret sauce - In thinking about where they'd come from and where the market was headed, John and Porter had some really interesting new ideas about the role Nearlyweds! could play, but they needed a little more firepower than the current business could support.
  

The ink is still drying on this investment, and Porter, John and Chief Architect Eric Malone are now heads-down turning some of those ideas into software and new customer relationships, but you can expect to hear more about what they're up to in the months to come.

If you're (a) planning a wedding; (b) have stories to share about the social software you wish you'd had when you got married, or (c) play a professional role in the wedding business and want to learn more about what Nearlyweds! is up to, please drop me a line and I'll introduce you.

iPhone App Discovery + "Mad Libs" for iPhone App Search

I've always been kind of a word geek. One of my favorite games when I was a kid was "Mad Libs", a notebook of short stories with blank spaces provided for strategically placed nouns, adjectives and verbs. Depending on the words you or your friends chose, the resulting story could be hilarious, obscene, or just plain bizarre.

As many iPhone analysts have pointed out, finding iPhone apps within the iTunes App Store has become nearly impossible. If it doesn't make the "New and Noteworthy" or Top 100 list, an iPhone app quickly gets lost in the huge and rapidly-growing sea of competing applications.

The team at AppStoreHQ was thinking about this problem the other day and came up with a fun idea: what if we created a "Mad Libs" for iPhone Apps? Because everyone's looking for something different, but they all ask the same questions:

• Is it a game or a utility, a travel app or a music app?
• How much does it cost?
• Has it been well-reviewed by other iPhone owners
• Is it new, or has it been around for a while?

Our "App Search Ad Libs" feature (image above) is now live on AppStoreHQ. As you'd expect, the service lets you construct a simple sentence from the four questions above to create your own custom list of iPhone apps. (We also added a keyword field for those who want to narrow their results even further).

So now, if you want to see something like:

• Every free game released in the past 6 months rated 3 stars or better, or
• Every business app on the subject "sales" with at least one user review, or
• Every app in the App Store priced over $50.00

...we've got you covered.

If people like this enough, we'll go ahead and add things like saved searches and RSS feeds, but (true to form) we wanted to get it out there and see what kind of feedback we received before spending more time on it.