Soonr is in the Top 10 in Apple Store!

The Apple application store is a wonderous thing. I remember the “old days” when you have to hire a marketing firm or do a lot of analysis to understand how your product was being received. Companies were created that charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to measure the effectiveness of an offering or a marketing campaign. The folks at Apple have solved a lot of very hard problems with the application store.

When initially introduced some complained that the 30% fee that Apple was charging was a bit much. Clearly these folks didn’t understand what it takes to create:

• A seamless marketplace
• Easy installation experience on a handset
• Commerce engine
• Alleviate credit responsibilities
• Creation of a website to sell an application

What Apple has done is truly remarkable. Oh yeah, and our application is free. So we pay Apple 30% of $0.00.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for free. I love the internet and I love the Apple application store.

Thanks to all the users supporting us by trying out Soonr! Let’s see how far we can move up the scale!

We watched as companies like Twitter got millions of users (6 million reported recently), with an unclear business model. We had established quite a large base of users as well but were also wondering how we would make our cloud computing technology into a business with revenues! We made a decision in 2007 that the next year was going to be all about launching our technology alongside partners in the telecommunications and the services arena.

We spent the next year polishing our processes to make sure we could create a complete branded service inside of a month. I’m not talking about a few icons, but a completely localized web service fully integrated into a customer’s infrastructure and connected to their billing and quality of service monitoring systems. If you’ve ever done this, you know it’s not an easy task! Entire industries make their living off of connecting disparate systems. These systems integrators normally charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to make these systems work. At Soonr, we decided that we’d make this daunting task not only possible, but repeatable for a fraction of the cost.

So here we are at the end of 2008. Being a white label service, you don’t really tout your own brand. You just support other brands and take a slice of the revenue that is generated. We quietly launched half a dozen services spanning the globe from Asia to America. In the mix are two telecommunications companies (with a third on its way), three SaSS providers, a handset software OEM, and a network hardware manufacturer.

Soonr Wins Red Herring 100

Oh, and along the way we were recognized by a few industry publications as well. Including the Red Herring 100 hottest companies and the Venture Beat’s Top 30 Mobile Startup company of 2008. So there were folks who noticed.

Now we are closing in on the beginning of 2009. MacWorld and GSMA occur at the very beginning of the year and there’s always big new developments to discover from companies all over the world. We’ll be at these events and we’ll begin to speak up again. Albeit, softly.