CKA Takes Chicago By Storm

Well, there wasn't any actual rain, sleet, snow, or any other storm requirement that took place yesterday, but we did head out to Chicago for an interview at Chicago Public Radio affiliate 89.5FM Vocalo.org. If you didn't get to listen live, you can find an archive here. We don't come in till about 2 and a half hours in, so fast forward a bit haha.

It was a pretty amazing day, which really made me just sit back and reflect on how unbelievable to CollegeKidApp.com experience has been for us all summer long. Really, my entire work day consisted of driving to Chicago with some friends, walking around the city, taking an hour or so to get interviewed by a Chicago radio station, and then grabbing some pizza near Millenium Park (which ended up being free! more on that later). It was a pretty amazing afternoon and one that will really be a highlight of my summer.

The day started off with a quick stop at Wendy's. Our friends Aviral and Jason headed out to Chicago with us, which made the day a lot more fun. It was just kinda nuts to think that a work day could consist of essentially hanging out with friends on a mini roadtrip.

After the 45 minute drive or so to downtown Chicago, we arrived and parked at Navy Pier. If you've never been there, it's pretty much a big mall with rides and tours. It was an amazing day outside, which made the whole "walking around with huge groups of people everywhere" thing a bit better. Once we arrived, we had about 2 hours till our interview, so we decided to head down toward Michigan Avenue.

We would have been horrible Apple developers if we didn't make a quick bit stop at the downtown Chicago Apple Store. We fiddling around with the new 13' Macbook Pros, listened to sweet tunes on some iPods, and really wondered why Battery Go! isn't a demo app on every iPhone in the store (it really should be!). The huge Apple nerd in me finds this to pretty much be the greatest store in the world, so time spent here was a definite treat.
After hitting up Michigan Avenue, Mike and I made our way back to Navy Pier to hit up Chicago Public Radio's office for our interview. As you can see above, we really can't ever get Mike off an iPhone, even when he's taking a day away from programming. The interview went on at about 3:30pm and we had a great time meeting with the people at the station. If you didn't hear interview live, definitely consider listening to the podcast here (about 2 and a half hours in). Here's a picture of Mike in the studio.
We left Navy Pier and heading to Millenium Park to check out the big metal Bean there. While we were walking around, I saw one of those sweet 3D chalkings! It's the first time I've ever seen one in person.
After seeing the Bean and stuff, we went back downtown for some dinner at a local pizza place called Pizano's for some deep dish Chicago style pizza. It was pretty good and got even more amazing after we found out it would be free. We got a large cheese pizza and finished all but two pieces, so our server asked if we wanted it boxed up to take home. We were fine with that, since we're college students and definitely could turn that into another meal. Anyways, apparently somebody dropped our leftover two slices in the boxing process, so the restaurant decided to give us the entire pizza for free. It was unbelievable and absolutely amazing.

So to recap; we went to Chicago, saw the Apple Store, got interviewed, ate free pizza, and had a lot of fun. I love CollegeKidApp.com.

Chicago Public Radio 89.5FM Vocalo.org Interview

Leaving for Chicago in a little bit for an interview that Mike and I have with 89.5FM, Vocalo.org.

We'll be on from 3-4PM CST talking about Battery Go! and CollegeKidApp.com. Apparently they want us for a whole hour, which just boggles my mind. I guess they don't know that I become extremely uninteresting after approximately 13 minutes. Oh Chicago, please don't hate my total lack of wit come 3:20PM or so.

If you're interested in tuning into the interview, feel free to tune your radio into 89.5FM at 3PM CST in the Chicagoland or Northwest Indiana regions. They also make use of this interesting new feature called, webstreaming, which I've been told can cure disease AND transmit radio signials at the same time. It sounds pretty amazing and you can find a link here.

I also plan on "live tweeting" the entire escapade, mostly becasue I'll be hanging out with Michael Phelps for an extended length of time and Twitter is the only thing I can do to keep myself from jumping off a bridge. If you're interested in following, check me out at @CameronBanga.

Battery Go! Sales Data - Three Weeks Later...

We've been kinda holding back on showing off some of this data, but now that we've got a couple solid weeks of output, we'd figure it would make more sense to show off what we've learned when it comes to sales of Battery Go!. We had a lot of internal debate with this chart, but figure that one of our primary goals in this blog was to inform other potential iPhone developers of what it's like to put a product out for the platform, so it only made sense to give out this stuff and not hold it to ourselves.

As a quick note, we're not going to be giving away any figures right now. We're sorry if that totally ruins this for you, but we're just not comfortable giving away exact numbers. We may release our sales numbers in the future, but if you're looking for an exact tally here then you may just want to look somewhere else. Know that we've done alright and it's helped pay for our summers like a regular job would have, but we're definitely not making it rain Pacman Jones style. Whether you're a developer, blogger, iPhone user, or just interested in our development experience, we hope you find this sale data useful. If you do find it to be useful, consider giving Battery Go! a purchase in the App Store. As super indie developers (also known as college kids using the summer to try out app making), each purchase is huge for us and we'd really appreciate the love. Here's the graph, for a higher-res version, click on the picture.
As you can see from the data we've collected with Battery Go!, the honeymoon is over fairly quickly when it comes to sales in the App Store. We've read reports about sale baselines, but didn't figure it would come as quick as it did, especially since we hit the top 100 paid apps for a considerable period of time. Right now, we're at about a sale flat point and we're real curious as to where we'll see spikes or valleys in the future.

To help explain the data, we attribute our first big spike to PCMag's review of Battery Go! and it's placement on Google News. We were also still considered a new app then, with placement on the first page of paid utilities, which we feel also contributed to our success. After that jump, we were pushed into the top 100 paid applications in the US and saw high sales until we dropped out of the top 100 on July 10th or so. The second peak you see in the US comes from the 14th when we were in the Chicago Sun-Times, a couple radio shows, and AppSlappy all on the same day. The small purple peak in Italia was from a review posted on iPhoneItalia, which saw us jump to the 33rd or so ranked app in Italy. A couple reviews in the Netherlands pushed us up to the number one spot in the entire country, which corresponds with our best sales day there. Finally, the blue line represents total sales worldwide which pretty much follows the US peaks and valleys, as the US store has accounted for about 60% of our sales.

It's important to note that we've seen fairly good sales and are probably an outlier when it comes to iPhone app sales as a whole, as we've reached the top 100 if only for a couple days. This is our only paid app release, so we'd be interested in seeing similar charts for less/more successful applications, but we don't have that data ourselves.

Hope you find this useful, if you have any questions, feel free to e-mail them to me at Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. If you get a chance, definitely consider buying Battery Go! in the iTunes App Store. It will help give us a bunch of support and you'll have an amazing battery utility as well.

Wild CKA Shirt Appeared....

Just got this amazing picture from one of our Twitter contest winners who has been sporting his new and super rad CollegeKidApp t-shirt. I cropped this photo to focus on Aaron, but what you don't see are the flocks of attractive women who are gathered around to check him out now that he is wearing this shirt. I would have included them but the original picture had a 112923x9392393 resolution because there were just so many women up in his grill (hahahahaha what a funny joke, because he's grilling!!!! Hahahahaha).

Congrats on your t-shirt win Aaron, hope you enjoy it. If you need any help getting rid of all your new found female fans, let us know and we'll be sure to send over Phelps to scare them away with his face.

What Do I Do As a Job?

People always ask me, "Cameron, what do you really do at CKA? Do you every actually work? Please explain your job to me? Don't Mike and Jeff do everything that matters?"

Well to those of you who've ever wondered what I do here at CKA, I present to you this video. Its pretty much what I've been working on since May and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. It isn't 100% finished, so please keep that in mind. However, it is about 8 weeks of work and pretty much the greatest thing I'm taking away from the CKA experience this summer. Enjoy and send me an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com with what you think.

So We Were Playing Around on Alltop...

One of the most important parts of our day is searching the entire internet for ourselves pretty much all the time. It's sounds self centered (and to be honest, pretty much is) but if you start at tech company, you need to know what people are saying about you around the net just about 24/7 so that you can respond to any statement pretty much instantaneously.

So after getting posted on Alltop, we decided to do some searching for ourselves there to see what we could find. The results were...interesting.
Apparently I'm an Australian Twitterati? I can tie back blogging, citizen journalism, and India (yes India) to stuff that could possibly be tied to me, but the rest are kinda interesting and I'm not sure how I got tied to them.
Australian Twitterati must be the hip new thing to be, as Jeff also gets a nod in the category. Tech makes sense, but when did he become an influential part of the U.S. House of Representatives. As expected, Mike pulled the most hits, which I would contribute primarily to sharing a name with a prominent swimmer. Funny to see Australian Twitterati pop up again. What's with that? Anyone have any idea as to why we'd all see such a strong connection to the Aussies?

We Got Posted on Alltop. Nice.

If you've never checked out Alltop, you should definite make your way over there for a few minutes, mostly because the greatest group of college iPhone developers in Valparaiso, IN just had their blog posted in the iPhone section.

Alltop is pretty picky as to who enters their ranks, especially for popular sections like the iPhone. Some of the other blogs in the category are MacRumors, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, AppleInsider, TUAW, AppVee, 148Apps, and more, so we're fairly excited to be posted there as well.

Even if you don't check out the iPhone section, check out the rest of Alltop. It's an amazing RSS aggregator and definitely the place to be when you want to find out what's important.

Sup Valpo?

Just logged on to the Valparaiso University website to look up my class schedule for next fall and found this. Feel free to judge us. We just don't hope we ever scare anyone away from visiting VU.

Battery Go! Satisfaction Survey So Far...

Right after we launched Battery Go!, we put out this little survey to gain a bit of insight on what people thought of the application. We really wanted to get some opinions which we could use to help develop future updates to the app.

We never really publicized the survey, so we've only seen 56 responses so far. However, there has been a lot of useful information from what we've had which we will definitely use in the future. While it isn't a huge sample size, it definitely gives us enough feedback to see value in the responses as a whole.

We've decided to publish some of our findings, mostly to show you guys what we take out of a survey so that you can hopefully use this information to create your own survey when you create an iPhone app or create a product in general. It's kinda amazing as to how much you can take out of a quick survey of only a couple questions.

The first question we asked was an obvious one, as we wanted to know what percentage of our respondents actually have bought Battery Go!. As you can see, we had a fair amount of people answer the survey who don't own the application, which is great. Some would look at this as a negative, but we like having this mix so that we can get opinions on the app from people who aren't huge iPhone users and have a different opinion on what makes a good app.

Next, we wanted to just judge peoples' overall feelings on the app. Here we wanted to know in general, all things considered, if the app was worthwhile. Obviously we know these numbers are fairly skewed, as people visiting our site and taking the survey are probably proponents of the application in the first place, which is why they're checking us out. Still, very good data none the less.

The next (and maybe most important) question of our survey had to do with Battery Go!'s accuracy. In developing a battery app, accuracy is huge and we wanted to know what people thing of our current marks. This question played most into our current development of our update, as we now know that most people find the app accurate enough, so we don't need to focus on that component as much. Obviously, we'll continue to work on our accuracy, but this next update will focus most on design and new features thanks to the results of this question.

Finally, we wanted to know if people would share Battery Go! with their friends or family. Viral advertising is, in our opinion, the best kind of advertising for an app like ours, so we want to make sure that we have an app that people are willing to share. So hopefully you can see the value in the responses we've received and can take this back to your own projects in the future. We've learned that short surveys are the best, as people are more willing to answer completely and honestly. It's amazing though that a couple quick questions can provide us so much data which will direct our entire project into the future. If you develop an iPhone app or any other software project, definitely consider putting together something similar. It's easy to get jaded in your work, since you'll never thing it's bad because you're the one who made it. It's tough to read honest opinions from others, but it definitely helps in developing a better product.

New Twitter Game: Trending Tuesdays

With the addition of the new "Trending Topics" column on the right side of the twitter.com homepage, I decided to start a new twitter game. I'm calling it Trending Tuesdays. The object of the game is to make a totally new list of trending topics. There can be no new topics from Monday. I think it will help new topics come into discussion and force the millions of twitter users to talk about new things. (It may also destroy the integrity of the Trending Topics column, but oh well.)

If you think this is a cool idea, tweet this:

RT @jeff_vu #TrendingTuesdays is a new game where we change the entire trending topics column. Help us out! http://tinyurl.com/nzw2xe

Thanks!

Consultation Videos Available Now!

CollegeKidApp's first production, Facebook For Parents, is now available for $5 to the general public. Facebook For Parents is a consultation video teaching parents (and all those interested) how to use the social media service as well as how to make sure their children are protected while using the service. Here is a much better description of the educational video:

"Facebook For Parents is a 20 minute inside look on what a parent should expect when their child sets up a Facebook account. Learn about security features, talking to your child about Facebook, monitoring their use of the service, and much more."

Not only will you have the opportunity to learn in-depth features of Facebook, but you will also get the chance to feast your eyes on the ever so luscious Cameron Banga, co-founder of CollegeKidApp. If that isn't enough to entice you, every customer will be the proud new owner of some of the best customer service available to mankind. Any questions, comments, or concerns you have about the video or Facebook can be directed to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com, who will answer them to the best of his abilities in a very timely manner.

So click this link and get your download on! This video is a great deal with tons of information delivered in an active and user-friendly environment.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the video, your favorite foods, or diabetes, feel free to send me an email at JGreco@CollegeKidApp.com. I'll be sure to answer your emails as best I can. Have a good day!

Malcolm Gladwell Timeout

Making Phelps take a time out from working right now to watch Malcolm Gladwell's TED video on spaghetti sauce. If you know me personally, you probably are tired of hearing me talk about Gladwell's work. Phelps had never heard my big spiel on Gladwell, so I'm making him listen to this video.

If you've never checked out this video, I definitely suggest that you check it out. It's unbelievably interesting and definitely worth the fifteen minutes.

Michael Phelps is Removed from Facebook

Last night I received an e-mail warning from the Facebook team stating that I was misusing features and that the continuation of this could result in my account being disabled. The e-mail went on to point me to the terms of agreements for Facebook. An hour or so later in my attempt to log into Facebook I had found that my account had indeed been disabled. After reading over the short list of Facebook no-no’s I have concluded that my account was disabled for being named Michael Phelps. Over the past couple days, I have added an enormous amount of friends in attempt to broaden my networking capabilities, which isn’t mentioned in their term’s of agreement. I have e-mailed the Facebook team to try and get my account out of limbo and find out why exactly it was disabled in the first place. Here I faced a problem as my login e-mail address was my old Purdue e-mail address, one in which I no longer have access to. Because of this I received a response back saying I had to email them from my login email account. I have sent another email and am still waiting response. I am asked often if sharing the name with a famous Olympic swimmer affects me and my general answer is no….. However I do face the seldom message on Facebook of random people telling me I am their hero, and an occasional pot joke here or there, once from a professor: awkward. These small effects can be overlooked but now I have had my Facebook account disabled and it has effected me. Just because I am not as famous does not give me any less right to my birth name. Sorry about the rant, this has little to do with CollegeKidApp, iPhone application development, or Battery Go!, however I thought that I many fans out there would want to know the dillio and a little peak into a day as a Michael Phelps.

The Anatomy of a T-Shirt Giveaway

So if you didn't check it out, we ran a giveaway over the last week or so where we're shipping out two of our new sweet t-shirts. If you haven't seen the final design, here's our very own Michael Phelps with his sexy model pose.

I've never really done a giveaway before, so I wanted to ensure that like Fox News, I was fair and balanced. I definitely don't want to be that corrupt t-shirt giveawayer guy. There are many other titles I would rather have such as super awesome bro, cool haircut man, funny joke teller dude, or that one guy with the stench of hotness. Yeah, those are much better titles than corrupt t-shirt giveawayer guy.

So here's a little guide to how I put together our giveaway for those who are interested or may need to throw together their own giveaway in the future.

The first thing I did was compile a Google spreadsheet of each user who entered the contest. I'm on Twitter a bunch during the day anyways, so I made a saved search term for the entry and just kept tabs of every time it was mentioned. All-in-all, we had 36 tweets for the contest. Not too shabby of a number at all. We were pretty pleased with the response and are thinking about doing a similar contest for any other t-shirts we produce (thinking about a Battery Go! shirt in the future). Hats go off to MacCheetah, who definitely had the most tweets entered into the contest.

So after putting together this list, I figured it would be easiest to find a Random number generator and then produce two numbers, which will correspond to those little numbers to the left of everyone's Twitter user names. For this part of the process, I've decided to go with Random.org. There, I can set some perimeters and make it an easy two second choosing process. I'll output two numbers at first and then if by chance the same person wins with both numbers, I'll select another random number until I get a different person.

So after random number generation, I'm given a nice little output page that looks like this.
Then I move on over to the spreadsheet, check out the names in those slots and get the following names as winners in the contest.
So there we go, congrats to @MacCheetah and @JoshMajestik for your wins in the first CKA t-shirt giveaway contest! We'll be in contact here soon and I'll be sure to get your shirts to you guys. You'll soon be drowning in a sea of admirers upon wearing these super sexy threads, so take five minutes to go buy a life-jacket.

First Palm Pre App

I have made my first Palm Pre app! It tallies how many times you have clicked on a button! Palm store here we come! (Totally kidding, for the record.)

Shirts Have Arrived!

Our first ever run of t-shirts (and what start up would be complete without t-shirts) has finally arrived and we're super pumped about them. CustomInk.com did an amazing job and we're definitely pleased with the quality of these new threads.

If you're interested in owning one of these rare pieces of American history (only 12 were made), remember that there are still a couple hours left in our t-shirt Twitter contest. Check out here for the rules and get your tweet in!

Some NWI Times Lovin'

Saw this as Mike and I walked to Jimmy Johns for lunch. We're almost as important as the Sears Tower (and twice as sexy). Nice. If you haven't had a chance to read the article, here is a link to the story on the Times website.

Designing an iPhone App Icon: The Full Process

In this article, I'll walk you through the entire process I went through in order to design, create, and publish an iPhone icon. I have included pictures for each step since this is a visual process, however this is not for novices. I don't explain everything, but the entire process as a whole.

1. Think. It's important to understand what you're making. Think about what would convey your app's function. For Battery Go! the main color would be green, since that conveys battery life, and a battery icon, like the one found on the iPhone itself.
2. Sketch. I always sketch ideas out since that helps me think. I drew out an idea I had for Battery Go! even though it looked crappy at first.
3. Scan. I scan artwork I draw onto my computer because I suck at drawing. I am much better with a mouse than a pencil. Make sure that you scan any artwork in color and at 600 DPI to preserve any small details that you sketched in step 2.
4. Edit. This may seem silly and can be skipped, but it's helpful for me to edit the scanned image to be only what I need. For me that meant cropping the image so that I would only worry about my sketch and not the entire page.
5. Vector-ize. For logos, it's important to create a vector version early on so that you can scale your icon as big or small as you need it. The smallest icon that an iPhone will need is a 20 x 20 pixel version for Spotlight Search, and the largest is 512 x 512 pixel version for the iTunes store. You'll also need a 57 x 57 pixel version for the iPhone icon itself, but I'll cover all of that later on in this post. I hand-drew the "Go!" part of the image, but the rest is either a font (Accidental Presidency) or just lines/curves.
   
   
   
6. Export. Now that you have a nice vector logo, you'll need to get it into Photoshop to make the magic happen. In Adobe Illustrator, go to File -> Export -> PNG. That will create a .PNG image that you can open in Photoshop. There's other ways, but this is my way.
7. Photoshop. I took the png file of my logo and opened it in Photoshop. I then went and made a green background with a grungy texture. I then added visually appealing elements like paint splatters, wings, shine, and other patterns that would subtly complicate the image. Below is an animate .GIF that shows the building process.
8. Export (again). Now that you have your image, you'll have to export at least 2 versions of this logo. One at 512 x 512 pixels as a flattened, high quality .JPG and at 57 x 57 pixels as a flattened .PNG. Since this is kinda crazy to do each time you make an icon, I made a photoshop action that exports these images for you. It's available for download now.

That's it! Now you just have to use the images in your iPhone app. If you have any questions about this process, feel free to email me at Jeff@CollegeKidApp.com

In Response to Questions About Battery Go! Accuracy

I've been getting a lot of e-mails about how accurate Battery Go! really is, so I figured I would put together a video and show you for yourselves. This video is also somewhat a response to some reviews on iTunes which we have received that I'm fairly certain are posted by fake accounts used just to slander our app.

Anyways, let me know what you think and please leave a comment on the video. Definitely would love to hear your opinions.

A Short Summary of a Crazy Day

One of our main goals of this blog is to kinda keep a running diary for ourselves of this whole crazy experience that is making an iPhone application. We kinda had a hunch that this would be one of the most eventful summers of our lives (turns out we were right by beyond anything we could have ever imagined), so we wanted to keep a way to look back and reflect upon everything that happened along the way.

Because of this, I'm going to admit that the following blog post is going to be a bit more self centered than most posts you'll find on CKA. However it's been a fairly eventful day and something that I'd definitely like to document for myself. I'm not going to lie, this is probably a story (and maybe even a blog post) that I'll pull out 40 years from now to tell the grandkids. I hope you find a bit of interest in it yourself as well.
So I knew that the Chicago Sun-Times article was coming this morning, as I'd had a couple conversations with the writer yesterday. He was a great guy and took a lot of interest in the story, so I really couldn't wait to see how it panned out on paper. I'll be completely honest though, I figured it would be a small little write up somewhere way in the back of the paper. I had no idea we would be on one of the feature pages right below a huge article on Barack Obama and his love of the White Sox. Throughout this entire app experience, it's been beyond words to see ourselves in the same company with articles, people, or applications that we'd never dreamed that we would see ourselves compared to. I honestly don't see all the hoopla, but if someone thinks that we're news enough to be up on the same page with Barack Obama, I'm not going to complain.

Thanks to the Sun-Times article, I got woken up at about 6:45 by a producer at 97.9 The Loop, which is a rock radio station out of Chicago.
The producer wanted me to be on the Johnny B Morning Show to talk about our app, which was definitely a fun experience. I'd heard of his show before, but didn't have a clue that he insanely popular until my friend Bud called to tell me that his dad had heard me on the radio and my dad also kinda got super excited over hearing me on the show. I've got a link to the podcast here, so take a listen about five minutes in to hear me talk about Battery Go!. Hopefully I don't sound too tired, because I got out of bed literally 2 minutes before I went on air and went back to sleep immediately after. Honestly, I don't even really remember much about giving the interview, besides wondering what time it was.
After waking up an hour or so after going back to bed, I headed on over to the Christopher Center and finally got up to date on what exactly was going on with our team. First thing I did was check out the Sun-Times website to see where were at there, and was super surprised to see that we were one of their featured stories of the day. Seriously though, it was another huge wow moment to see us as a featured story along with Sonia Sotomayor's Senate hearing. We're not even in the same league, so it was kinda mindblowing. I'm hoping that whoever made the decision to feature us like that got fired, because we're definitely not that important (just joking, I would seriously give that guy a raise).
From there, we were on the run around campus for a photo shoot. I'm not sure when exactly, but Valparaiso University is going to feature us on their homepage as one of their rotating "featured VU persons" pictures. This kinda blows my mind too, since other people in that gallery have written books, work for Disney, or given awards by USA Today for academic excellence.

I felt kinda bad because I held up the entire shoot and everyone had to wait for me. I didn't mean to cause a delay, but I was on the phone with NBC5 Chicago. They ended up running a great story on their website about our iPhone experience.
This was an extremely nuts article because when you check out their list of "most viewed" stories today, we're right behind the two escaped murderers currently on the run in Michigan and above stories on Jennifer Aniston, the Blackhawks GM firing, Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson's breakup, the new Harry Potter movie, Barack Obama's White Sox love, and the marriage of Hugh Hefner's ex-girlfriend. Yeah, I had to re-read that list a couple of times too. What's wrong with people and why are they reading about us?
After finishing up the photo shoot, Mike and I spent about an hour and a half on what we're planning as a big Battery Go! update (seriously, purchase the thing now because we think you're really going to like what we have in store if we can figure it out). After looking at some stuff he had mocked up (again, can't wait to show you), I booked it over to Lakeshore Public Radio's studio in Merrillville for another radio interview. I got a chance to sit down with Len Clark's afternoon show to talk all about Battery Go! and the last two months of our lives. It was a real great interview and I had an unbelievable time talking about our project. Not going to lie, I still chuckle a little bit inside when people give me a "really, you guys made this with no experience after two months??" response when I tell them our story. I don't laugh inside because I think they're asking a stupid question, it's just that I can't totally comprehend the idea myself either.

It would be a great day if that's where it stopped, but I headed home to find Battery Go! reviewed on the popular podcast AppSlappy. Scott Johnson was really high on the app and you can hear his review at about the 38 minute mark of episode seven.

The rest of the night included a quick nap, a Facebook invite from a reality TV star who has an iPhone app idea, and the answering of countess e-mails while watching the MLB All-Star game (not going to lie, I was pulling for the NL and am kinda disappointed).

Needless to say, it was an amazing day and I can't wait for tomorrow. I kinda got a big boost of energy after that 20 minute nap and am ready to pull an all nighter working, but I think it may be best to go get some sleep and hit the ground running early.

If you've gotten to this part in the post, thanks for checking out my story and I hope you've enjoyed this little personal narrative. A super big shout out thank you to everyone who has sent me a text message, phone call, Facebook message/wallpost, tweet, or anything over the last day or so. I've been flooded with them, so I apologize if I didn't get back to you personally. However, I do want to let you know that I've read all of your messages and your support means the world to me. Seriously, I think I speak for the whole CKA team when I say that we never would have made it close to this point without the support that you have all given us since day one.

Thanks for checking this post out, if you have a question, comment, app idea, or want to send me a love letter, shoot me an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com.

Apparently NBC 5 Chicago Likes Us Too

If you haven't seen it, NBC5 Chicago's website has a great article about Battery Go!. Definitely an amazing thing to see your picture on the website of the news channel you grow up watching all of the time. Still beyond belief, to be entirely honest with you.

Again, here's the link if you haven't checked it out.

How Would You Like to See Cameron Everyday?

That's right, you can see Cameron Banga, co-founder of CollegeKidApp and just general good looking kid, everyday from the comfort of your couch while learning how to more efficiently and effectively use social networking tools to your advantage. How, you ask? Well it's rather simple.


But before I tell you about how you can achieve viewing bliss, I will introduce myself. My name is Jeff Greco and I am the newest member to CollegeKidApp. I am the Director of Media, with my specific focus being consultation videos (more to come later in this post). You can check out my profile by clicking on the Meet the Team link on the left. But back to the goods!

As of now, I am currently in the process of editing videos of Cameron teaching the ins and outs of Twitter, Facebook, and Blogging, as well as how to reach the people and potential clientele you want to via these powerhouses of social networkng. A couple of weeks ago, I met with Cameron, Jeff, and Mike in Valpo to start production on these videos. After 9 hours of shooting (and several mistakes -- blooper reel coming soon!), I had enough footage to get started on post-production, aka editing the video. One of the videos is finished, and waiting to be placed on the website so that you can purchase it for direct download from the web. The other videos are still in post-production, but nearing an end.

Anyway, you can hang out with Cameron everyday just by purchasing these educational and insightful videos. Once you download them, you can view them as many times as needed until you have a firm grasp on the topic, or until you have had your fill of the good looking wonderboy we so affectionately call Cameroon. I am very proud of the work I have put in on these videos and rather pleased with the outcome. However, I am always a fan of feedback. So if you have anything at all to say to me regarding the videos, my favorites foods, or pretty much anything else, send an email to jgreco@collegekidapp.com. I will do my best to answer any questions as soon as possible. Plus, I always love to hear praises of my hard work.

Podcast from Jonathon Brandmeier Show Available

So if you've been keeping up with my tweets (which you really should, I'm @CameronBanga), you'd know that I was woken up to be on The Loop 97.9FM's Johnny B show this morning.

Obviously, you can wake me up every morning if you want to put me on air, mostly because I love the sound of my own voice. It was pretty amazing to be on the show to talk about Battery Go!, and is definitely a great experience I'll remember about this summer.

If you weren't up and listening to 97.9FM early this morning, or if you don't live in the Chicago-land area, you may have missed out on the interview. Luckily for you, I've got a link right here. I'm the first segment after the news break, so about 2-3 minutes or so in.

Hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think by sending an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com.

Photo Shoot!

Mike, Jeff, and I got carted around campus today in a fun photo shoot. We've seen some of the possible final shots, but I'm not going to ruin the surprise. Keep an eye out on the Valparaiso University homepage though, we may get a sweet scrolling picture included into a gallery there sometime.

Battery Go! in the Chicago Sun-Times!

If you're new to the site, you probably found us through the article I'm going to talk about. This morning, we were featured in an article by the Chicago Sun-Times about Battery Go! and our experiences so far this summer. Right now, we're featured as one of the top stories on the Chicago Sun-Times website up a story about Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. That's just nuts and we can't believe the support.

If you're visiting the site for the first time and found us on the Sun-Times, definitely look around and see what we have to offer. We've put together a fairly extensive library of articles on what it's like to be an iPhone developer. You can also click here to purchase Battery Go! for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Give Us a Call!

So, I got hooked up with a sweet Google Voice invite today. I was pretty pumped to receive the e-mail, since I've been super excited for the service ever since it was announced.

Naturally, the first thing I did was mesh my work life and my personal life together to an even further degree by setting up a CollegeKidApp contact button. As if I couldn't get away from the site already, I've now given you yet another way to contact us. We're not actually sure as to if anyone will use it, but we figured we would give you the option anyways. I've embedded a copy below, but you can also find it on the menu frame to your left.

If you have a question about an app, our consultation services, what we're going to eat for dinner, or pretty much anything at all, don't hesitate to connect through this widget and talk to us. Seriously, don't hesitate and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Story Behind CollegeKidApp.com

I've received a lot of questions and e-mails about the story behind CollegeKidApp.com over the last couple of days, so I figured I would put together a post detailing who we are and what we've done. If you're new to the site or haven't checked our story out before, you'll probably find it to be a little different than you would expect from a typical iPhone developer. If you're a Digg user, click here to Digg this story.

We're all students at Valparaiso University and began the project in May, deciding that it would be a great way to spend our last summer before we graduated doing something that we really enjoyed. It was our one last hurrah of sorts. I know that personally, I didn't want to spend my entire summer doing real work. Mike had just lost an internship due to the recession and Jeff was working in Valpo at the IT desk, so it worked well that we were all within a few miles of each other for the entire summer.

We began on May 13th, the first day after finals, for our first day of work. We were pretty much the most inexperienced group you could find, but we still had hope for the project. Jeff would do art/design, I would handle the business/marketing, and Mike would do all of the programming even though he pretty much had no experience and had only taken one basic intro to C++ course three years ago. I think the lack of programming and general business skills were our biggest hurdle in this whole event. I mean really, Mike hadn't had a programming class, let alone anything C related, in three years. I would compare it to translating an advanced Spanish novel after you haven't had 1st Spanish in over three years. It was a daunting task to say the least. We began by also creating this blog to document our story. If you've never been to the site before, check out our archive for posts on a huge variety of development topics.

So anyways, we plugged along and worked pretty good weekends for the next month in a half. Mike would spend about 60 hours a week learning how to code, I would promote us to anyone who would listen, and Jeff would help mock and create art for graphical interfaces. We would work long hours, sleep on couches, eat PB&J or off dollar menus, and do pretty much whatever it took to develop an app at pretty much no cost because frankly, we didn't have any money to spend since we didn't have real jobs. After toying around with a few app ideas, I had the idea for Battery Go! one night before I fell asleep, calling Jeff and Mike at 2am to tell them. They figured I was drunk, but it turned out to be a pretty good call.

We spent the next couple weeks learning code and eventually developing Battery Go!, which we submitted to the App Store. Finally, we found out on Sunday that we were released, which was pretty much the most proud moments of our lives. We really didn't care if we sold two copies, it was just amazing for us to see what we made develop into a product, especially when we had no experience before we kicked off the project.
We would have been happy had the story ended there, but then Monday came and we were lucky enough to have a review of our app published on PCMag.com. The story gained a spot on Google News and our sales promoted us right to the fringe of the top 100 paid applications in the iTunes App Store, a goal that seemed impossibly beyond reach when we started, and well beyond our wildest dreams.

Tuesday morning, we found out that we cracked the top 100, seeing ourselves in the #99 spot at about 9am. Needless to say, we were pretty excited, and from there we've climbed to up #73 in the US sales charts. We're were #35 in Italy, #75 in Brazil, and are currently #1 in the Netherlands. It's just been an unbelievable experience all around.
We've seen some downs over the last couple days as well. Last night, we found out that software pirates had cracked our software and are distributing it illegally. As of right now, we've lost over $10000 in sales, which is kinda unsettling and has caused us to rethink our marketing strategy a bit. We've also gotten to see how we stack up compared to some of our favorite apps, which has been kinda neat. Yesterday, we passed apps called Koi Pond and Tweetie which were our role model apps during development and programs we wanted to model ourselves after. We don't think we're as good as those apps by a long shot, but when you pass up an app like Koi Pond which has supposedly made about a million dollars in sales over the last year, it's definitely a bit to comprehend as guys who have only been in the business for two months and the App Store for about three days. We've also used Google translation to create a computer translated Dutch version of our site, to help cater to our huge success in the Netherlands. The international success has been amazing in general, as we've seen sales in about 25 countries or so going into today.

Sorry it took so long, but that was pretty much the shortest way I could find to abbreviate our story. If you'd like a little better write up, this story does the trick. In these recent economic troubles, it's been pretty cool to buck the trend and see success through hard work and dedication while learning a bunch of great business principles which will last with us for a lifetime. We didn't really even expect to have an app see the light of day by the end of summer, let alone one with as much success as Battery Go!, so this whole experience will definitely be something I keep with me for the rest of my life.

If you haven't gotten a chance to check out Battery Go!, definitely give it a download by clicking here. It's an amazing app and something we're really proud of regardless as to where it ends up over the next couple of months. If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to send me an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com.

If you're a Digg user, click here to Digg this story.

Battery Go! T-Shirt Giveaway

So, we finally got around to ordering some hellasweet t-shirts to commemorate the launch of CollegeKidApp.com and our first months on the project. I've written up a post on them before, but if you've never checked them out, here is the mega hot design.

This is our first of hopefully many t-shirt runs, so to celebrate it the occasion, we're going super limited with only 12 of these babies produced ever. After we take away shirts for team members, family, etc, we pretty much are squeezing and withholding from a couple people who really want one just to have two extra shirts.

Because we love you guys and the mad support you've reigned down on our team and Battery Go!, we're going to give these two extra away via a contest on Twitter. It's super simple and you don't even have to purchase anything to enter, you just need to tweet. If you're interested here is how you enter the contest.

1. Get on your Twitter.com account.
2. Tweet the following "I love Battery Go! and CollegeKidApp, I want a t-shirt! http://tinyurl.com/luaber Check out Battery Go! at http://tinyurl.com/batterygo"
3. You can also enter the contest as many times as you want by just clicking here
   

   

4. Do this before July 17th, 2009 at 5pm.
5. You can do this as many times as you want, no limit on numbers of entries.
6. Shortly after July 17th, we'll do a random drawing off of entries found by searching the above tweet on search.twitter.com. If you're one of two selected winners, we'll send you out a free t-shirt as seen above. You don't even have to pay shipping and handling.

So that's about it, we hope you go wild and give a tweet or two in chance of winning one of those sexy CKA t-shirts. Again, this is first run and super limited, so you have a chance at one of twelve t-shirts which will ever be made for what is eventually going to be a Fortune 500 company and one of the most powerful operations in the world.

As a short couple of notes, you can enter as many times as you want but if we suspect you're using a bot or some kind of cheating device, we do hold the right to disqualify you. Shirts have a value of about $20, are blue, and will make you a magnet of hot women (or men if you're a girl). Purchasing Battery Go! won't help you're chances of winning, you only need to tweet. We'll do our best to accomidate your size needs, but given we're only having twelve made, sizes choice is extremely limited. Contest is void where prohibited and while eligible to anyone worldwide, with CollegeKidApp.com promising to do it's best job possible with regards to shipping the item. However, CollegeKidApp.com can't be held responsible if it happens to be illegal to ship t-shirts to wherever you live. Winners will be posted on Twitter around July 17th on @CameronBanga and @BatteryGo. Winners must contact and provide shipping address to CollegeKidApp.com after winning. Must be 13 or older with parental approval to enter. Any other questions, e-mail Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com.

Once again, hope you enter and good luck at winning!

Number 1 in the Netherlands!

Kinda cool moment earlier today when we became the highest selling paid application in the Netherlands. You may shrug it off as a smaller country in Europe, but this moment will always have a special place in my heart as I'm the first in my dad's side of the family to be born in America, with my grandparents migrating from the Netherlands. Pretty neat to be considered the best paid app in a place your relatives lived for hundreds of years.

With our huge spike in sales across the pond, we've also seen huge web traffic from the Netherlands as well. To help with this, we've used a Google Translate link to include a Dutch translation for CollegeKidApp in the menu bar to the left. We know it's not perfect, but hopefully our foreign readers find it useful if they've checked out our app.

Here's to hoping that this isn't our first and only #1 spot around the world. Thanks to all those who have helped make Battery Go! such a success and we can't wait to see where we're at tomorrow, next week, and next year!