World Football Calendar is the perfect companion for soccer fans everywhere. It provides you a calendar of all the matches (customized to your location), instant access to the latest game news, detailed information on the participating countries and a vuvuzela! We interviewed the MagicSolver team, check out what they had to say…
The Stats:
Downloads: Over 1.5 million downloads in 1 month. World Football Calendar 2010 was #1 in 35 different App Store across the world.
Monthly Unique Users: Over 1.5 million unique users. Over 500,000 unique users enjoy World Football Calendar per day.
1) What inspired you to build the app?
MagicSolver is a truly international team based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. We are English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Brazilian! The World Cup is the most global sport event on earth, and it represents what we are as a team. Also, the World Cup was coming up and we hadn’t yet seen a really great way to track all the results and news surrounding it! There were a couple small apps acting as glorified RSS readers, but nothing with both a clear presentation and a lot of useful data. In World Football Calendar, we wanted to combine these two aspects to give people everything they needed to know about the World Cup and add our own twist – a daily surprise within the app. This daily surprise is a way for our users to discover other cool apps each day, and a way for us to help other iPhone developers to promote their apps and increase their downloads.
2) Why does the ad revenue model make sense for you?
Our main goal was really to make this app useful for as large a user-base as possible, so that meant we had to go for a freemium model. We have a paid version of the app with no advertising, but the vast majority of people are using the free version (and enjoying it too, judging by some of the feedback we’ve had!).
3) Why did you choose Mobclix?
We are working with various advertisers, but Mobclix has stood out in their constant development and the massive personal support they give to developers. They’re great at suggesting currently running campaigns too.
4) What tips do you have for other developers?
We believe the key to a successful iPhone application is in presentation – design and organization of your content. There are lots of World Cup RSS readers or results feeds, but few with nice graphics to back them up and a clear way to get to the data you want. Also, it’s important that any advertising looks like it belongs in that part of the application, rather than just dropped in the middle of the screen as an afterthought. Localization is an important factor too, and our app is available in five different languages to be closer to our users. Finally, user testing is absolutely critical. We received so much great feedback just by asking everyone around us.
Click here for more information about World Football Calendar 2010, and here for more about MagicSolver.
