Category Archives: NAX

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TouchMountain finds peaks with augmented reality

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What does it take to develop a compelling, innovative app for Nokia Lumia smartphones? For the developers of the TouchMountain app, it helps to be attracted to the Windows Phone UI. ‘It was fascinating to find out how much you can do with a smartphone,’ says André Meyer, a student and TouchMountain’s main developer, ‘and to learn how much potential we can find in this young platform.’

TouchMountain is a mobile tourist guide to finding mountain peaks. The app, which started as a 12-week university project, has been published by MIT-Innovation AG, a technology development company in Wollerau, Switzerland.

The TouchMountain app combines and integrates several mobile technologies to let Nokia Windows Phone users find and learn about nearby mountain peaks. TouchMountain uses the phone’s camera and Augmented Reality to let users discover local mountains. The app then uses data from the phone’s GPS sensor, accelerometer or gyro-sensor, digital compass, plus the Internet connection, to visualize recognized peaks on the phone’s display. Users can also find peaks on a map or text list. To learn more about any peak, users tap a mountain peak on the screen; TouchMountain then offers information on more than 750,000 peaks worldwide, including elevation, distance from the user, live webcams, Wikipedia articles on the surroundings, and local weather. TouchMountain also features a compass, navigation, sharing, and pictures of the landscape that include images of annotated mountains.

You can meet André and see the app in action in this TouchMountain video.

To develop the TouchMountain client, Meyer and his colleagues used a variety of programming languages, third-party libraries, and developer tools, including the Telerik RadControls, a suite of UI controls for creating engaging and interactive UIs for Windows Phone apps. (Access to the Telerik suite is among the benefits of the Nokia Premium Developer Program, of which MIT Innovation AG is a member.) Meyer describes the RadControls as ‘simply stunning’ and adds that the experience was so good, his team also bought a license for Windows 8 and WPF applications. Along the way, valuable help was provided by both Nokia and Microsoft. ‘Nokia and its employees do an amazing job with their developer platform’, Meyer says, ‘helping developers with questions, test devices, and other support.’

Next, Meyer and his colleagues are going to concentrate on promoting their application. They plan to use the geotargeted Promotions feature of Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to promote TouchMountain in other apps to users in countries where such an application is relevant. NAX is an easy-to-use, cross-platform ad exchange that links developers with more than 120 ad networks worldwide and enables payments in more than 200 countries.

Early feedback from TouchMountain users has been overwhelmingly positive, Meyer says, adding, ‘We get absolutely incredible feedback from our users everywhere around the world.’ Some users have even offered to add new features to the app, including translations into additional languages and new peaks for the database. Perhaps that’s not surprising; TouchMountain’s developers were also its first users. ‘As avid outdoor athletes,’ Meyer says, ‘we always wanted to know the name of the wonderful mountains we found.’ Now they, and other mountain fans worldwide, can.

Touch Mountain screenshot

Check out the TouchMountain app on Windows Phone Store.

Follow TouchMountain on Twitter and Facebook.

 

Learn more about developing apps for Windows Phone and the Nokia Lumia smartphones.

 

Asha Premium Developer Program introduced

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Asha Premium Developer Program bannerWe’ve been having a lot of fun lately—we launched the Nokia Premium Developer Program for Lumia back in October, and it proved to be our most successful developer program ever. Our rewards program, DVLUP, has also proven extremely popular with developers, and we recently expanded it to include developers in the UK.

So we decided it was time to bring some “Premium goodness” to Asha development. Today we are excited to introduce the Nokia Premium Developer Program for Asha.

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Health Pack Games: ‘NAX is our go-to tool’

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Health Pack Games, a publisher of mobile games, has been using Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to cross-promote its apps, and monitor its global downloads and in-app advertising results, and they like what they see. The game publisher has seen higher click-through rates, higher conversion rates, and substantial revenue improvements.

Canada-based Health Pack Games offers mobile games, including Monster Stack 2 and Chicken Story 2. Both games run on multiple platforms, including Windows Phone 7-based Nokia Lumia smartphones.

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New Asha developer competition: you could win big!

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Do you develop apps and content for Nokia Asha Series 40 phones? Interested in winning cash prizes and Nokia promotions? Then the Nokia Asha Developer Competition is for you.

For apps submitted to Nokia Store between now and June 30th, 2013, we’re giving awards for the best apps in four Asha categories: music and entertainment; games; utilities and productivity; and news and information. For each of these categories, we’ll be awarding three cash prizes: 25,000 euros for first place, 15,000 euros for second place, and 10,000 euros for third place. In addition, we have three special prizes of 10,000 euros each for the best user experience, best web app, and best new idea.

To top it all off, we’ll promote winning apps in Nokia channel campaigns and present them in targeted communications to other developers to give the winners even more exposure.

To qualify, your app must be designed to run on Nokia Asha Touch phones, and will ideally use at least one of Nokia’s monetisation methods: in-app purchasing or the Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX). The competition is open to developers from around the world—just make sure you publish in Nokia Store by June 30th, 2013.

Ready to accept the challenge? Then get your app ready and enter the Nokia Asha Developer Competition!

Air Soccer Fever shoots and scores with NAX

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Air soccer fever screenshotFor Dangling Concepts, the US-based developer of Air Soccer Fever, using Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to increase the mobile game’s discoverability is a winning move. This past December and January, when Air Soccer Fever was featured in a NAX ad campaign, daily downloads of the game to Windows Phone devices more than doubled, from 1,500 a day to 3,200.

Air Soccer Fever is a casual swipe soccer game available for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, and Windows 8 tablets. Available in both free and $0.99 (USD) Pro versions, the game can be played by either one or two persons in the same room or by multiple online and Wi-Fi players in real time.

NAX is a private mobile advertising exchange offered by Nokia that offers app developers and publishers access to more than 120 ad agencies and networks worldwide. NAX also lets publishers incorporate in-app advertising and gives them a dashboard to track their apps’ performance. NAX can be used for both free house campaigns aimed at cross-promoting apps and paid campaigns in which developers bid for ad space on the apps of others.

‘Integrating NAX ads was very straightforward’, says Imran Shafiq, president of Dangling Concepts. ‘We had no issues or bugs, so we spent no time in troubleshooting.’

Because Air Soccer Fever is truly a global game – it lets players choose teams from 100 nations around the world—Shafiq uses the NAX dashboard to target specific countries based on their ad prices. ‘The NAX dashboard is one of the best we have seen’, he says. ‘The UI is clean, and it has great features.’

One feature Shafiq finds especially useful within the analytics dashboard is ‘Performance by Country’ option. This shows a breakdown of ads served by country, along with their comparative costs (expressed as cost per thousand, or CPM). ‘That way’, Shafiq explains, ‘we can fine-tune our ad targeting’. The result: In last 2 months, NAX provided 40% of total ad traffic and revenue for Dangling Concepts. This month Shafiq and his team have redirected more traffic to NAX due to great eCPMs as compared to other ad networks. According to Shafiq, NAX will provide 70% of the overall ad revenue moving forward.

Although Air Soccer Fever has not yet been promoted with either paid ad campaigns or house ads, Dangling Concepts plans to try both soon. For example, when the developer releases his next new game, the game will display house ads for Air Soccer Fever to cross-promote and drive downloads. These cross-promotional opportunities could be impressive: every day, an average of 15,000 unique users play Air Soccer Fever, according to Flurry Analytics figures cited by Shafiq.

Dangling Concepts also finds that when it comes to in-app ads, a little restraint can be beneficial. The free version of Air Soccer Fever shows ads only when the game is paused, never during game action. Similarly, the game’s menu pages only show ads at the bottom of the page, so the ads do not cover or overlap the menu UI. This restrained approach seems to work: Shafiq reports ‘great’ click-through rates on Air Soccer Fever ads, in some regions reaching as high as 15 per cent.

Check out Air Soccer Fever on the Windows Phone Marketplace

Watch a video of Air Soccer Fever in action