AppHero lands $1.8M in seed funding for app discovery

Your Facebook data can now be used to bring the best app recommendations right to you

AppHero announced Thursday that it has secured just under $1.8 million in seed financing to create a social recommendation platform for mobile apps. OMERS Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and ENIAC Ventures along with a number of top angels and seed funds have invested about $1.3 million, with an additional $500,000 forthcoming from other sources.

We all have had that moment where we wanted to find a perfect app for a given problem (whether it was a great to-do checklist, a navigation aid, or a financial planning app) and were met with endless search results organized by popularity rather than your needs. It looks like more companies are understanding this frustration and want to find better ways to discover apps that work for you -- especially since the number of apps available for the iPhone and iPad has more than doubled over the last year.

Earlier this year, Apple acquired Chomp, an app search and discovery business and just a few weeks ago, Quixey raised a $20 million Series B round to help people better discover and explore apps across their phone operation platform.

Currently AppHero plans to build this app recommendation platform by analyzing their historical activity and their social data -- including a friending functionality that helps pull data from friends and the apps that they like.

AppHero founder Jordan Satok is also the creator of popular website App of the Day and has chosen to leverage Facebook data from likes, pages, profile data, comments interests and more to help bring users apps that cater to their needs.

"Consumers have been paralyzed by the sheer volume of apps, and often miss out on the ones that are truly best for them," said Satok, in a statement. "We have focused on building an innovative recommendation platform with a simple user experience to match users with apps they will love. This new funding allows us to continue growing our team to make our social recommendation platform more intelligent and expand to other verticals."

Currently a team of five, AppHero will use the new seed funding to hire machine learning experts to help grow the team.

The Toronto, Canada company's app is currently available free on the App Store.

Changes in app discovery and dowloads

Earlier this week I learned about a mobile app user acquistion platform: Fiksu. 

Fiksu announced on Tuesday that it raised $10 million in a Series B round of funding and has plans to use the funds to expand to meet the surge in global customer demand and wants to increase its footprint in both Europe and Asia-Pacific. 

Fiksu for Mobile Apps is focused on lowering the cost of getting new users on both iOS and Android so that companies are better able to grow their services. As it stands, apps have a really tough time adopting the first wave of users if they don't already have a loyal user base in other areas of its business -- but once an app gains adoption momentum, the increase is exponential. 

Fiksu helps improve the cost per user investment through a Web-based portal where users can get paid apps for free if they try out apps from others, thus increasing the number of apps downloaded across the board and letting more people experience possible apps that can improve their lives.

Fiksu's mobile media optimization platform also has extended lately to include other significant channels, including real-time bidding exchanges, traditional mobile ad networks, the mobile Web, social networks, video, email and SMS. Architected for predictability and scalability, Fiksu's real-time bidding algorithms and optimization engine deliver the industry's highest performing and largest reach campaigns.

Fiksu's algorithms run billions of advertising permutations based on the three groupings above to identify the best advertising decisions based on historical performance, the client's budget and volume goals, and the client's monetization strategy. Fiksu then optimizes campaigns in real time to deliver economic efficiencies, maximum download volume and loyal, long-term users. 

Fiksu currently records more than 1 billion user acquisition app events per day -- this could include launches, registrations and in-app purchases, as well as real time bidding requests.  

Thus far Fiksu has raised $17.8 million in venture funding and has instigated 30 billion actions in mobile apps each month.  

With more than 100 employees currently, Fiksu has plans to double its staff this year as it expands its service globally.

App controversy 

With millions of apps out there, all developers are clamoring to get into the top 10, 25 or even 50 apps within their category so that people can easily search, learn about and then download their product, but getting that high up is a huge challenge with a lot of mystery and controversy all bundled together. 

While many people want (and even assume) that apps move organically to the top of an App Store list, there are a lot of techie ways to get your app high up without real resonance with a fan-base. From automated bots and hiring people to download to incentivizing people to download something they may not want to get something else for free, apps are gaining mobility in a variety of ways -- and not everyone is happy about it.

Just this February, Apple cracked down on a number of dubious marketing firms that use software bots and swarms of human users to download apps in order to push the titles to high-profile positioning. 

Now, in any particular month, Apple removed 5,000 apps for a variety of inappropriate tactics used in the downloading process. 

Apple even put out a statement in February about how it feels when apps are pushed up the ladder without the organic motion: “Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

Fiksu is in a different but not completely opposite field of incentivizing the download of, otherwise, unknown apps and people are split on whether these tactics lead to genuine use and discovery or are just another inorganic propulsion that create new top charts' make-ups.