Checkout Touch Carrom 1.1.2. The best version yet featuring the new faster controller.
Other changes include:
- Improved board visual
- New font across all screens
- New instructions video
Download at: http://itunes.apple.com/app/touchcarrom/id337993724?mt=8
Please provide your feedback in the App Store or comments below.
Isn’t the new game screen gorgeous?
Touch Carrom gets its own home page at http://touchcarrom.com. Please let us know what do you think at http://www.zentity.com/contact.html.
We at ZENTITY thank all Touch Carrom players and fans for their continued support! There is a lot more to come.
Gizmodo broke the story on the Nexus One (NO – the Google Phone) pricing earlier yesterday. There is nothing innovative about the price it’s fairly standard way in which the mobile phones are priced: locked version which is subsidized by the carrier and unlocked full priced version. There had been a couple of earlier posts about the features and the form factor. All in all, NO is shaping up to be a competitive device and will further the cause of Android phones. It would be interesting to see how it all pans out with so many device manufacturers, carriers and now Google getting into the game so directly. There is also an indirect VoIP story in the NO launch somewhere and carriers will be sensitive to that. In a lot of ways, iPhone is actually a better play for carriers then anything Google can ever offer because the Google business model is so directly dependent on cheap bandwidth, ads and control over content discovery and delivery.
So what do I think about Google NO? It’s no iPhone killer. It will further cement Android’s position as a distant #2 in the smartphone category and become a second platform of choice for App Developers.
Oh and everyone at ZENTITY wishes you a very happy and prosperous year 2010.
Checkout a new review of Touch Carrom on http://www.amitbhawani.com.
Inbound marketing by Halligan and Shah is as practical as you can get about SEO and Social Media without actually describing the installation of blogging software, HTML code and HTTP server configuration files. The book starts by explaining what is inbound marketing and how it is different from outbound marketing (the current interruption based advertising model). Inbound marketing is all about driving leads towards your business, when they are seeking information or reading on a topic relevant to your business. The authors then build a case for why inbound marketing is important in today’s world and why it’s much more effective than outbound marketing.
The book is divided among four sections:
The structure is quite logical having first explained you the basic concepts, it then moves on to increasing your reach within Google and Social Media, converting prospects into customers and eventually measure how well your inbound marketing efforts are doing.
The interesting thing about the book is that most of the advice is common sense and probably not new to anyone who has been following last 6-7 years of Web 2.0 and Social Networking boom (yes, I used the dreaded word). After convincing you, that inbound marketing is the most effective lead generation tool you have online, the authors then explain how to use modern social networking sites and Google to get found and build a following. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon – it’s all covered. There is some practical advice on SEO, but this is not an SEO primer. The book contains basic and most important (and legit) SEO advice and doesn’t go overboard in telling you tricks to exploit current bugs and loopholes in search engine algorithms. The whole promise is to build long term assets which would keep on giving after you have long stopped attending to them (however, if you want to keep maintaining and growing your leads quantity/quality you are never really done with SEO and content creation).
The last few chapters contain good pointers on how to effectively measure everything you do online from lead quantity/quality to internal staff efficiency. This is good enough for a start, but I believe every company would like to build their own matrices and measures. As Jack Welch said in his famous “Straight from the Gut“ book: what you measure is what you get.
I try to keep up to date on online trends and read most new books on the subject. Some of my recent good reads include The Long Tail, Everything is Miscellenous, Groundswell and Free along with whatever Gladwell and Godin write 
. This is a different sort of book and a comparison is not Apples to Apples, but this book stands tall even in such distinguished company. And that’s saying something about the first book by the authors.
Having said all that, there is one caveat, the era of outbound marketing is not over yet. You have to explore both inbound and outbound marketing approaches to make sure you attract the right segment for your product/services. The authors say this much even in the book that outbound marketing can be useful especially in the beginning when you are just starting to build your inbound assets.
Grab it at http://bit.ly/inboundbook, it will enrich you in every sense of the word.
In under two days Touch Carrom has added 99 fans as of now.
Announcing a new promo code give away: every 100th facebook fan will get a free promo code for the game. The codes are currently valid for the US store only.
Click here to become a fan!
The new version in the App Store rocks!
Well, this is no way to make a product announcement But I have to say that the version in the App Store for last 20 days sucked! There were some annoying bugs which we found in extended testing. Apple has finally approved our latest upgrade.
We have fixed those issues and then some. I can finally say we are closer to our vision of what a Carrom game should look and play like on the iPhone/iPod Touch or any touch control device for that matter.
There is still a lot to come very soon, but for now we are proud to announce this latest upgrade and hope you enjoy every moment spent with Touch Carrom.
Having said all of the above, we know there a long way to go before we perfect this game. Please help us improve by reviewing the game in the App Store and sending us your feedback (we love criticism)..
Here is a sneak peek of the latest version:
A lot going on around the CrunchPad story. Michael today announced that the lawsuits are now imminent. I also remember reading somewhere a conspiracy theory that this whole thing might just be a promotion gimmick and the involved parties will miraculously come to an agreement and do a join launch. Whatever the case, there are some lessons which startups can draw from this story:
Here is a bonus lesson , and not just for startups, most people are not inherently good or bad. It’s mostly a matter of their motivations and circumstances. Which goes back to lesson two above, in a common venture there should be no deal unless all parties have their goals aligned.
There is a lot of noise about AppRejections.com. I think it’s generally a good idea. Mostly it’s being used to highlight how ridiculous are some of the rejections, but I think there is an opportunity to use the site to learn what not to do to get rejected.
App Store is still a relatively new entity, and we are still learning the rules of the game. AppRejections.com can play an important role here.
We have just launched our first iPhone game (touchCarrom) and one thing I learned while doing research on the app store was that the reviews are not worldwide. Which is OK from a reviewers perspective, but as a developer you want to know what people have been saying about your application worldwide. One way to do it is to go to each country store and look for your app. This, however, is not very practical as you can imagine. A Google search on the subject resulted in an interesting application which I found to be really useful. The application is aptly called “AppReviewsFinder” and you can grab it at: http://code.google.com/p/appreviewsfinder/.
The application is not a native mac app, but a Java application. Which means you will have to run it in your terminal command line as following:
java -jar AppReviewsFinder_1_0.jar
You can then add the application for which you want the reviews. Here is a quick screenshot:
