2 Million RE.minded

2 Million Served

The month of June is drawing to a close which means 2011 is almost half over; where does the time go?

But there's another reason we here at Handelabra are celebrating - some time today, somewhere in the world, RE.minder will fire it's 2 millionth RE.minder of the year!

It may be something simple like a RE.minder to take out the trash or return a phone call. It may be something of great importance, like a RE.minder to take blood pressure medication or pick up your daughter from school. We've heard from people all over the world that they use RE.minder for all of the above and much, much more.

Thanks for making RE.minder a success!

So what's next for RE.minder?

At the beginning of June we released RE.minder 2 and the response has been overwhelming. We've received tons of positive feedback about the new features, new workflow and for the new add-ons. And one thing we added that was probably lost on our english speaking users is that RE.minder is going international!

RE.minder 2 shipped with a German language option and the next update for RE.minder will include even more. Right now, our goal is for RE.minder 2.1 to include Italian, French, Spanish and maybe even Dutch and Hebrew! If you want to help us out, visit http://www.getlocalization.com/reminder/ and start translating.  The more we get, the faster we can add your native language.

Finally, one of the most requested features we've fielded since RE.minder 2 was release is a desire for syncing between multiple devices. We don't have anything concrete to report on that front just yet but I will say this - iCloud is coming!

And remember, RE.minder is a FREE download, so if you're not using it yet, what are you waiting for?

Expo Bingo, the game to play during the Keynote

Some of you Apple fans, you know who you are, will remember the keynote bingo cards of years passed. They would travel around the internet the week before a big reveal and were a fun way to participate in the speculation. Well we were shocked to discover that there was nary a keynote bingo game to be had on the app store! A situation we felt needed to be remedied.And late last week, Expo Bingo was approved. Free for all and universal for all iOS devices, Expo Bingo is a game we whipped up for the community that is just like the keynote bingo cards of yore, only even better.

When you launch Expo Bingo, it will check in and download the latest bingo squares so we can make sure the rumors are as up to date as possible. It also gives you a totally random bingo card so you really are playing against the world. And since apple isn't the only company with big presentations and huge announcements, we'll go ahead and set up a game for just about anything if you just ask. Aside from WWDC tomorrow, we also have games set up for the 3 big E3 presentations from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo this week.

And because a game like this is only fun when you're competing against others, you can share your winning board for all to see via Twitter or email. Go ahead and gloat!

Get it for free right now!

Used games and the phantom "Publisher Buyback

I just finished reading this article about the "secondary games market", aka, Used Games. Well reasoned, it reminded me that I've had something to say about this for a while.

The Phantom Buyback

At PAX East this year, I attended a "Legal Issues in Gaming" panel run mostly by lawyers, several of whom represented big game publishers. At some point in the the panel, they asked for a show of hands "how many of you buy used games?" I raised my hand. Then they asked, "How many of you think the publisher or developer should be getting a cut of that sale?"

My hand went down and I was frankly shocked at how many stayed up.

Now I'll admit, I consider myself (maybe narcissistically) to be more informed than the average bear concerning intellectual property issues. This is a very clear case of first sale. Once you've packaged up and sold something, it's not actually yours anymore. If I choose to sell it to Game Stop for $20, and then they turn around and sell it to someone else for $40, that's the market working the way it's supposed to (but the less said about "the free market" the better).

To every publisher or developer who thinks they should get a cut of that sale, I would ask, how much of that $20 I got from Game Stop came from you exactly? And while we're at it, how many publishers actually run their own buyback programs for used games to compete directly with this model? Why settle for a cut of that resale price when you could have the whole thing?

My guess is because they don't like the entire concept of competing on price and having several used game outlets would open used games up to something most intellectual property never has to worry about - commoditization. Since copyright is essentially IP monopoly, most IP creators have gotten used to the idea of being able to name their price. Competition in the used games market (for both buyers and sellers) adds an element of instability that most would rather not deal with.

Digital Distribution or Digital Extortion?

Another point made by a panelist was that digital distribution would help this problem "self-correct". I agreed, but given the way things have been going, I think we were thinking about it in very different terms.

From my point of view, the "digital distribution" angle is very clearly happening in places like the App Store. We are seeing, in some cases, the exact same game that sells for $50 in a box going for $9.99 (if even that) on the App Store. And this is often times after additional development costs to translate to a touchscreen control system. But it's a lot easier to justify a $10 price tag when you know every sale is final (no resale of digital goods, for now at least) and the volume has the potential of hitting 200 million.

Unfortunately, I fear this is not the digital distribution you're looking for. I think he was referring to the increasing popularity of locking off parts of the game behind a single use code included in the box.

Some of you might remember the dust up when the Downloadable Content for Bioshock 2 was in fact already on the disc. Back then, many felt they were being charged for something they already paid for. The single use code does essentially the same thing. To the point where Game Stop has actually been sued over deceptive practices over the fact that stuff pictured on the box isn't actually included when the game is sold second-hand.

Bravo lawyers, bravo. You turned it around on them.

But the overarching point in my mind is really quite simple. If you don't want people to "wait till they can buy it used", you price it to move. Hell, I've bought every Lego Star Wars game new and I then sold them back but I've almost re-bought several of them over xbox live because, two years later, who can argue with $19.99? If it had been $19.99 to start, maybe I would have just kept it instead of getting $25 back from the $50 I spent. After trade and buying it a second time, I still will have spent less than buying it new and keeping it.

With a value proposition like that, why wouldn't I trade my games and more importantly, why would I care if the developer didn't get a cut of the used sale? Clearly the game is only worth $19.99, right? So why shouldn't I be incensed that I paid $50 in the first place?

Why indeed.

So what happens next (feed the bigger patent troll)?

In doing what I can to try and navigate the waters that have become a bit murkier over the last 72 hours, I've landed upon what I see as the only real workable solution, and you're not gonna like it.

• Lodsys owns a patent (lets forget for a moment the moral implications of that, let's just take it as fact)
• Lodsys wants to license it to indie devs
• An indie dev entering into such and agreement is probably not smart, we'd be paying a 3rd party to license software from a different 3rd party
  • What happens if Apple removes features?
  • What happens if Apple adds features?
  • What happens if Apple changes the system completely?
  • What happens if Lodsys decides to change the terms?
• And on top of that, Indie devs are probably forbidden from entering into such an agreement by the iOS dev agreement.

So what's the workable solution? For Apple to buy Lodsys.

Of course! Apple has tons of cash! In the grand scheme, it'd be like a parking ticket to them and then the iOS ecosystem can move on, unhindered into the world of glorious In App Purchasing. And then Apple can turn around and go after the Android devs for the same license fee.

Oh.

Apple would go from shining knight on a white horse to hated black sheep in the blink of an eye. People have been (rightfully) pointing out that Apple has a pretty extensive patent portfolio themselves and especially given how contentious they've been regarding the App Store trademark, we'd be crazy to assume they would buy up the patent just to sit on it.

So I guess we're back to square one. Which is of course the best solution -

Throw out software patents. Or, at the very least, require a company asserting a patent right to be actively engaged in producing something, ANYTHING, pertaining to the patent they claim.

RE.minder PRO

Earlier this week, I talked about what's new for the RE.minder you download for free from the App Store and some of you may have noticed something about "RE.minder PRO".  'What could that be?' you asked yourself. Read on to find out...First the really good news - if you are one of the incredibly generous people who used RE.minder and decided to send us a couple bucks to turn off the ads, you already have PRO! Your "no ads policy" helped fund the upgrades that are coming so we figured, who better to benefit from them than you! So what exactly is PRO and what does it get you?

PROs are Advanced

Lots of people are finding really great ways to use RE.minder but they are also finding, as great as it is to set repetitions "anywhere from minutes to months" (thanks App Store reviewer Spoat!), it would be a lot more useful with a few added constraints.

Now, in addition to "repeat every" you can also turn days of the week on and off and set an end date, or total number of repetitions.

To put them all through their paces, let's say you have a routine you want to be reminded about every 8 hours, but only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and after 15 repetitions, you want it to stop. With RE.minder PRO, you can set that up super quick. We're expecting this to be a very popular feature.

Another thing PROs tend to like is setting everything they way they want it the first time. With the advanced workflow, you can go directly into advanced edit mode while you are setting your RE.minders and change the title, add notes, change the sound, icon, color, repetitions and everything else right away, without a trip to the RE.minder list first.

You also might have noticed a message that reads "touch + hold to edit" in the screenshot to the right. PROs like to customize and the Quick Pickers can now be rearranged to your heart's content. Just tap and hold and you can drag your favorite icons to the front of the list or even drag unused ones completely off into oblivion (don't worry, you can bring them back from the info tab). For more on this, read about the Add On Packs below.

Add a little color

There are two important changes along the color spectrum in RE.minder 2 and the first one is global color schemes:

Our current favorite is "Threat Level" (third from the left).  There are 9 different color schemes included in RE.minder PRO. If it's popular, we'll see about adding more.

Also on the color front, PROs can now change the icon and icon color of any RE.minder at any time. Choosing automatic will have the icon colors stay within the bounds of the selected color scheme but if you want something to really stick out from the list, this can be really great.

One last thing I insisted on, PROs can set the default sound for new RE.minders to Random (within a given category).  I just like being surprised, what can I say.

And needless to say, PROs aren't bombarded with banner advertising (but you knew that already, right?)

Add On Packs

The story doesn't end there though! Something else we have up our sleeve for RE.minder 2 are Add On Packs for icons and sounds. We've gotten a lot of feedback on how much people like the sounds we 've included (even to the point of people requesting to use them as ring-tones!) so we've bundled up a bunch more for you to add if you like. The add on packs available for RE.minder 2 will be:

• Musical Sound pack - 20 new sounds of the Musical and Simple varieties including rock, blues and electronic
• Fun Sound Pack - 22 new sounds of the Fun and Simple varieties including cartoons, animals and electronics
• Extra Loud Sound Pack - We've taken great care to mix our sounds "properly" so they are in line with expected volume levels. But we've had some requests for louder sounds so this pack contains dynamically compressed and juiced-to-11 versions of 17 sounds from the various packs. We can't add a subwoofer to your phone, but these are as loud as we can make them.
• Fun and Games Icon Pack - Over 20 new icons to use in your Quick Picker bar in the Media, Sports and Games and Transportation categories
• Home and Office Icon Pack - Over 20 new icons in the Food and Drink, Medical, Office and Social categories
• Miscellaneous Icon Pack - Lots of other icons we liked but either couldn't think of a category for or were too quirky to fit elsewhere.

All these packs are available from the new RE.minder Store in the Info Tab along with the RE.minder PRO upgrade.

I've done my best to be comprehensive over these two posts but there's really so much new, I'm sure to have missed something. We're putting the finishing touches on RE.minder 2 as we speak and expect to submit it within a week.  Assuming all goes well, RE.minder 2 will be on your phone before May becomes June.

We hope you like it!

RE.minder 2 Preview

Things may have seemed outwardly quiet for the last month or so, but that merely belies the head-down, push-till-it's-done headspace we've all entered here in the Handelabra-verse. We've taken in tons of really terrific feedback over the 100,000 download history of RE.minder and we did our best to boil it all down into a new an improved RE.minder experience. RE.minder 2 is fast approaching "finished" so I figured now might be a good time to detail some of what you can expect when it drops some time (hopefully) before the end of May.

Free for all

First of all, RE.minder will remain a free download from the app store and there are tons of great additions and enhancements coming, completely for free.

The first thing that will jump out at you is the new action bar that pops up when you tap a RE.minder. Look at all those pretty icons! What does it all mean? From left to right:

Share this RE.minder - With a single tap, you can now bundle up a RE.minder in an email and send it to anyone you like. If they have RE.minder installed, a single tap will set on their iPhone. Send it to a group to set a meeting.

Bug Me - We received a lot (like A LOT) of requests for a snooze function. Unfortunately, there are some very real limitations in Apple's local notification system that simply preclude the ability to add a real snooze functionality. Bug Me is the next best thing. Tapping on the bug will toggle the Bug Me function between "Off", "Every Minute" or "Every hour". Your RE.minder will now continue ringing at the interval you choose until you actively turn it off. This is also completely separate from our repeat settings (more on that later).

Delay - In RE.minder 1, a single tap on a fired RE.minder cleared it and sent it to History. Meaning 4 or more taps to set it again (as well as some hunting to find the right one). No more my friends! Tap the delay button and you'll be presented with a time Quick Picker right there in the action bar. 2 taps and you've reset the RE.minder. It even works on RE.minders that haven't fired yet if you just want to put them off a bit.

Advanced Edit - Even though we've worked to make it faster to reschedule a RE.minder, all the advanced options are still there. Just tap on on the edit button to change the title, add notes (see below), use more detailed scheduling, change the sound, change the Bug Me setting or add repetitions.

Clear/Send to History - And when you're all done with a RE.minder, be it fired or not, just tap here to remove it to your history.

What else is new?

You may have noticed a little color in our screenshots. Don't get your eyes checked, they are not deceiving you! RE.minders are now color coded based on how far out they are:

• Red - Overdue (now with a friendly readout to tell you by how much)
• Blue - Within the next 24 hours
• Green - Within a week
• Yellow - Within a month
• Orange - Longer than a month

This is a great way to get a feel for what your schedule looks like moving forward.

You also might have noticed that I mentioned Notes above. I'm going to go ahead and admit it right now, notes were an afterthought. When we put them in, we honestly didn't know how much people would use them, if at all. Well you've let us know - WE WANT BETTER NOTES!

We've listened and improved both the way you enter notes, and their visibility in the RE.minder list. Go ahead and write as much as you want in there!

There have also been many smaller improvements to the overall RE.minder experience including a smarter Quick Picker system that remembers what you type, a better History that makes reseting RE.minders quicker and easier, sound groupings and a lot of background intelligence that will make setting RE.minders super fast.

If that was the end of the story, we'd consider it a pretty solid update, but we haven't even started talking about the elephant in the room (or the ad at the bottom of the screen). That my friends, is RE.minder PRO but that's a post for another day!

RE.minder hits 100,000 downloads

As of some time yesterday, RE.minder has had 100,000 downloads from the app store. In addition to thanking everyone who's using it and loving it (thanks!), I thought this might be a good time to share some stats, in case anyone is interested. Now keep in mind, we've only been tracking a lot of these since late January, but they should be mostly on target.

• 101,704 - total downloads from the app store (as of this morning)
• 136 - number of days on the store
• 747 - average downloads per day
• 244,949 - total RE.minders set
• 5,000 - average daily users
• 1% - percentage of users who have upgraded in app to the ad-free version (we expect this to grow when you see what's coming in RE.minder 2)
• 74% - percentage of daily users who average between 1 and 3 RE.minders per day
• 40% - average user retention (almost half of the people who try us, keep coming back)
• 958,474 - total sessions since we started tracking, about to crack a million!
• 428,934 - total sessions outside North America (almost half!)

But enough looking back, it's time to look forward because RE.minder 2 is nearing completion and we are so excited to show you what's coming. Keep an eye out for a RE.minder 2 preview, coming later this week. We've gotten tons of great feedback on what you want to see from RE.minder and we think RE.minder 2 is gonna blow most of these numbers out of the water.

Thanks!

Social Media - your life, as performance art

My wife and I had a conversation last night about social media. She was wondering aloud about how the constant performance brought about by Facebook and Twitter might effect a person, specifically, a younger person. I'm sure there are far smarter people who have broached this subject but as soon as she said it, I realized some behaviors I'd only recently picked up, specifically because of Twitter.I recently retweeted something along the lines of: "Twitter makes you love total strangers while Facebook makes you hate people you actually know". It was a funny, pithy observation but it rang true.  To me, Facebook is a community place where I only accept requests from people I've actually audibly spoken to at least once while Twitter is the grand marketplace of ideas where all are welcome.  And I've realized that I much prefer the latter.  The act of discovery with Twitter, finding other like-minded people via retweets and the like, makes it something I check almost constantly while Facebook has become a place I check in with once, maybe twice a week, if I remember.

I also curate more than one twitter account. @mrjhandel is just me while @handelabra is for the company (and @gameminder as well).  And I realized, after my wife mentioned the idea of the "performance" that I've been subconsciously censoring myself recently on Twitter.  Why would I do this?  Several of my recent follows @mrjhandel have seemed to come from @handelabra and I started to worry that some of my left leaning retweets might turn people away from the business and it is exactly this phenomena my wife was referring to.

Is your social media you - presenting yourself to the world as you are or is it *YOU!* - as you want the world to see and experience you?  My initial foray into twitter was the former.  I was just tweeting away, retweeting whatever deemed repeating.  But then, I started to get people following me that seemed to come from the business side and I started to feel like maybe I needed to "play the part" of a more middle of the road, boring business owner.  Something I failed to consider before this conversation was, maybe those people were actually following me. The me who actually had opinions.  And maybe they like Handelabra because there's actually people behind it that have opinions.  Crazy thought, I know.

But what really bakes my noodle now is - now that I'm aware of this, am I really going to go back to being me, or will being me just be a different kind of performance?

Tonight the part of @mrjhandel will be played by...