tiny hearts

InstaMatch Is An Insta-Hit!

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:48:00 -0400

We released our latest app InstaMatch - The Instagram Game a month ago and man has it been an amazing experience! It’s safe to say that our first game has become somewhat of an insta-hit with the press, Apple and our customers from all over the world.

The making of InstaMatch started off as a partnership between two fans of instagram: Jeremy (@samuraicode) and I (@robjama). Our goal was to add some more fun to the Instagram experience by turning it into a beautiful game. We spent many long days and nights polishing and crafting InstaMatch to a point where we were proud enough to share it with the world…so it’s really humbling to see all of the great reviews and feedback so far. Here’s the launch recap:

The Reviews

InstaMatch received some amazing coverage at launch from Techcrunch, Revision 3 (video review at 1:43), Swissmiss, Coolhunting, Kotaku and TUAW who called InstaMatch “a gotta-buy app for gamers lovers any age.”

Apple Features

One of the major benefits of getting good press is that it puts you on Apple’s radar increasing your chances of getting a coveted iTunes App Store feature. Thankfully, the folks at Apple thought highly enough of InstaMatch to feature it as a New & Noteworthy, Staff Favorite and What’s Hot app in a bunch of countries!

Updates

This is only the beginning for InstaMatch! We’ve already updated the graphics for the new iPad’s retina display and are working on adding new themes & features along with a free version of the game. Follow us on twitter @tinyheartsyou to get latest updates!

Our latest app, InstaMatch – The Instagram Game is now available...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:36:00 -0500

Our latest app, InstaMatch – The Instagram Game is now available on the App Store! Download it here.

What Happens When You Make Your Paid App Free?

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:21:00 -0400

We were feeling very generous over at the tiny hearts studio and decided to make Pocket Zoo HD free for one day as apart of the Moms With Apps weekly #AppFriday promo. Moms With Apps is an awesome developer group we’re apart of that’s made up of family-friendly developers making and promoting quality apps for kids and families.

What Happens When You Make Your Paid App Free

So what happens when you take an app that’s $2.99 on the iPad App Store and make it free for a day. This…

Promoting Your Free Promo

Pocket Zoo HD quickly climbed to the top of the free Education category all over the world and slowly started appearing in top overall free charts as well. It’s no surprise that people love free on the App Store but even a free promotion needs promotion.

We got the word out via the weekly App Friday post over at the MWA blog. App Friday is a weekly sale promotion that highlights apps from 3 or 4 developers and encourages the community to share the deals through Twitter and Facebook. The post Pocket Zoo HD was featured in was shared close to a 1000 times and that’s not counting all the #AppFriday mentions on twitter that were linking to Facebook or directly to iTunes. MWA is not only a great community for kid-friendly developers but it’s also a great avenue to promote relevant apps.

We also reached out to the guys over at AppAdvice.com, one of the larger app review sites. They have a regular series called iOS Apps Gone Free which we’ve appeared in previously for our iPhone version. Pocket Zoo HD received a mention on the Apps Gone Free post helping to boost us up the charts.

Gizmodo also features App Deals of the Day as apart of their daily Dealzmodo guide. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get a mention on the Giz. But that didn’t hinder our chart mojo.

Don’t forget to update your app description - you want to call out the fact that your app is free at the top of the description while mentioning the original price.

Before we knew it we blew past the Twitter app on the top free chart and made it to the Top 50 overall…briefly inching past Evernote and Flipboard.

What Kind of Numbers Do You Need To Make the Top Free Charts

At the end of the day, Pocket Zoo HD was the #1 Free Education app in the US and had reached the Top 50 overall with a total of 4,000 US downloads. The grand total for the day, including the rest of the world was 6,000 units. These numbers are for the iPad - I’m pretty sure the iPhone charts require hundreds of thousands of downloads before you start ranking near the top.

Why Even Make Your App Free

Free is a great way to acquire new users. We participated in an #AppFriday promo last year with iPhone version of Pocket Zoo and saw 13,000 downloads in one day (ironically it was on Friday September the 13th).Needless to say, we saw a large lift in sales after the free promotion. That was our main goal with the free Pocket Zoo HD promo…to get new people using our app with the hope that the increase in engagement and visibility in the charts would lead to word of mouth which is one of the most effective ways to promote an app. There are risks involved with going from the paid to free and back to paid. Jumping from one chart to the other means that you need to start from scratch in terms of the rankings & downloads as the numbers from one chart don’t carry over to the other. This is why your free promotion needs a lot of promotion…and when your app goes back to paid you need to promote it even more but hopefully by then you’ll have a few thousand people helping you spread the word.

Pocket Zoo HD is featured on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog),...

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:57:15 -0400

Pocket Zoo HD is featured on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), one of our favorite Apple blogs, as the Daily iPad app! Thanks to Steven Sande for the great review.

Pocket Zoo for iPad on the App store and All over the Web!

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:12:00 -0400

Time really does fly when you’re having fun! It’s already been a month since Pocket Zoo HD debuted on the iPad App Store. In many ways Pocket Zoo is more suited for the iPad form factor - whether it’s exploring the virtual zoo, viewing photos, videos or the live streams. This is why we decided to revisit the Pocket Zoo UI and completely rebuild it with a custom interface for the iPad.

In terms of content, Pocket Zoo HD is jam-packed with even more animals, more cams and videos. Plus, a brand new feature that allows you to donate to your favorite zoos by adopting animals.

Here’s a rundown of the features:

35+ live animal cams (now with a new grid view that let’s you view 9 cams at a glance)
200+ amazing wildlife videos
HD virtual zoo with 50+ original animal illustrations
Real animal sounds, teacher-approved fun facts and animal details
Adopt an animal from your favorite zoo
Free illustrated wallpapers featuring the Pingwin (@happybird) and the rest of the Pocket Zoo crew

We’re blown away by the great press and reviews we’ve seen so far:

As always…thanks for your continued support!

We’re thrilled to bring our award-winning and #1 Education...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:01:25 -0400

We’re thrilled to bring our award-winning and #1 Education app Pocket Zoo to the iPad in HD with more animals, more cams, and more videos. After a few months of hard work, Pocket Zoo HD for iPad has been submitted and is now waiting for review. The iPad App Store is about to get a little wilder!

That’s Pocket Zoo at the #2 spot on the Education category...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:04:00 -0400

That’s Pocket Zoo at the #2 spot on the Education category after going free for Earth Day! Thanks to all of you Pocket Zoo’goers who made this happen. The free promotion was for only one day but in our world everyday is Earth Day! We can all participate every single day by choosing healthier and more sustainable alternatives while also thinking about our impact on the world.

Earthday.org

Thanks A Billion!

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:09:12 -0500

Over 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store…that’s a mindbogling number!!

We’re honoured that Pocket Zoo™ was able to get a fraction of those and are even more excited by the fact that we are able to put smiles on the faces of animal lovers, young and old. Our app has been able to bring families a little closer together and connect us all with the beautiful creatures we share our world with. We’re committed to doing our part to encourage and promote conservation efforts through our partnership with 1% For The Planet.

Thanks to all of our happy fans for the rave reviews on the App Store - currently 4.5 stars. We absolutely love reading the reviews and the emails you send us. Thanks again for letting us share our passion with you and for choosing Pocket Zoo!

What’s next? The wildest app on the App Store is going to be coming to an iPad near you.

Happy Birds by Pingwin: Top Five Anger Management Tips for Angry Birds

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:37:51 -0500

Happy Birds by Pingwin: Top Five Anger Management Tips for Angry Birds:

Meet Pingwin the new star of Pocket Zoo!

ahappybird:

Hi-ho, my fine un-feathered friends.

Your plucky pal Pingwin is back from his bid to bring peace to the land of the egg-layers. I finally got to the soft downy underbelly of the Angry Bird issue threatening to tarnish the image of featheries everywhere.

After some intense…

Pocket Zoo 2.0

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:07:42 -0500

Pocket Zoo 2.0 is now available and it’s better than ever. Pocket Zoogers are loving the new update. It’s currently sitting at a 4.5 star rating. Here’s what’s new:

Our brand new Video feature - over 150 amazingly captivating wildlife videos
New Live Cams - cheetah, elephant, manatee, leafy sea dragon, seal cams and more
Complete retina display support and new hi-res animal photos for iPhone 4 (previous update)

Here’s a great Top 10 list of some of the best animal videos online from Wired Magazine. You can find a lot of these great videos and more in PZ 2.0. Enjoy!

To our delight and surprise Pocket Zoo made it into the New York...

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

To our delight and surprise Pocket Zoo made it into the New York Times this past weekend. Crazy! Not only was our zooperb app mentioned in the article, it made the headline. You can read the article online here: Toddler’s Favorite Toy: The iPhone

Today is October the 4th and that can only mean one...

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:03:20 -0400

Today is October the 4th and that can only mean one thing…it’s World Animal Day! To celebrate we’ve teamed up with one of our favorite blogs - none other than The Animal Blog to run a contest & “un-sale” for charity. We’ve doubled the price of Pocket Zoo and are donating all proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund!

theanimalblog:

CHARITY AND CONTEST FOR WORLD ANIMAL DAY

Pocket Zoo is running a little competition on World Animal Day for the readers of our blog. Pocket Zoo is an app created by Tiny Hearts.

What can you win? Zuny Animal bookends and Pocket Zoo iPhone cases

What you need to do? Reblog this post which will be worth 1 entry OR purchase Pocket Zoo ($3.99) and leave a review of the app on the iTunes appstore and then email your review name to Love@tinyhearts.com which will be worth 2 entries.

All the proceeds will be donated to the World Wildlife Fund.

Two winners will be randomly selected by Pocket Zoo at the end of the week.

About Pocket Zoo: Pocket Zoo with LIVE Animal Cams is a wonderfully wild portable zoo for animal lovers. Find out what it’s like to have your very own zoo at your finger tips with brilliant animal photos, real sounds, fun facts and LIVE Animal Cams. Pocket Zoo (demo video) was a #1 Education app and a Top 50 overall paid app recently and was featured in the September issue of Wired Magazine as a Must-Have app.

Featured by Apple as a What’s Hot app and finalist in the 2010 Appstar awards in the Entertainment & Fun category. Press mentions include: The Huffington Post, Macworld, TechCrunch, Real Simple Magazine.

About World Animal Day: World Animal Day was started in 1931 at a convention of ecologists in Florence as a way of highlighting the plight of endangered species. Since then it has grown to encompass all kinds of animal life and is widely celebrated in countries throughout the world.

App Marketing Rule #1: Get Featured By Apple

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:59:00 -0400

Here’s a post we wrote for the Family friendly developer group blog MomswithApps. Enjoy!

When my wife and I set out to create a fun and educational live zoo app for animal lovers we naturally felt excited, a little nervous, and wondered like everyone else “how in the world are we going to shine amongst the hundreds of thousands of apps?” Our goal was simple: make an awesome app that we’re proud of and get featured by Apple on the front page of iTunes! We knew this was going to be quite a process, but just how adventurous was about to set in. It all came down to one thing for us as we created the app we dreamed of: paying attention to every last detail.

We were fortunate enough to receive a global New & Noteworthy feature in June, less than a month after we launched Pocket Zoo with Live Animal Cams. The feature helped propel us into the Top 50 overall paid apps list and the #1 Education spot in the US. Our zooperb app has continued to be featured since then and is now a What’s Hot app in 14 European App Stores (and a Staff Favorite in the UK). Here are 5 things we did to help ensure our app got noticed by the ever elusive iTunes editorial team.

Build An All-star team

We knew it would take a very talented and creative team to bring our vision of a virtual zoo to life. We put together a nimble group of friends and talented creatives to compliment our skills. The team included my artist wife, two illustrators, a motion graphics and UI designer, a programmer, and myself as the quarterback and creative director. I had worked with most of our team on previous projects which helped speed things along. We learned that amazing things can happen when you combine a talented group of people and extremely tight deadlines. The App Star Awards were two weeks away, which meant we had less than two weeks to make a prototype complete with the UI, illustrations, sample content and demo.

TIP: Team work makes the dream work as they say, and embrace constraints.

Design A Must-Have App

It all started with a unique idea of combining a virtual zoo with live animal cams. We asked ourselves “Is there an app for that?”. The answer was no, so we set out to create one that lived up to our high expectations. We designed our app to have all the components of a truly playful zoo experience. For the animal content, we included only the most brilliant animal photos we could find along with animal sounds and fun facts to bring them to life. We combined our animal illustrations and content with live zoo cams to pull it all together – kind of like having a zoo in the palm of your hand!

TIP: Design for delight, design for differentiation. It’s much easier to get noticed when you make something that doesn’t exist. We highly recommend this talk by John Geleynse Director of Technology Evangelism at Apple titled The Ingredients of a Great iPhone App.

A Name That Says It All

The name, Pocket Zoo, was relatively easy to come up with. It was the first thing that popped into our heads. It’s very descriptive and illustrates our value proposition extremely well. The only problem was that there were already two other apps with that name. Plan B was to call the app Zoowee; more abstract but fun sounding.

Descriptive names are much more effective, especially in a hyper-competitive environment like the App Store. We looked at the two other Pocket Zoo apps and noticed that they were very limited in their features and scope. We went with our gut and stuck with the name that we thought suited our baby best. We added additional copy to the name to give the user a better idea of what made our app unique and ended up going with Pocket Zoo™ with Live Animal Cams.

TIP: Descriptive > Abstract names

An Icon That Pops!

We placed a great deal of emphasis on the icon and demo video. The icon is the face of our app, small as it is, it’s key to getting the attention of our primary audience (and the iTunes editorial team). We thought only the most popular animal should be the star of our icon, and based on the highly successful online panda cam, the choice for a panda was easy. To highlight the main feature of our app, the live animal cams, we gave the background of our delightful panda a Live video-recording theme that was consistent with the UI of our app. When it was featured on the front page of the iTunes App store and we saw our panda smiling at us, we knew we had made a good choice.

Our 45-second video featured all three components of our animal content: photos, sounds and facts, and our favorite panda cam where you can see the star of the show live! Our video demo resulted in a runner up spot in the App Star Awards. This attention to detail paid off with mentions on TUAW, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb; and perhaps this is what got us noticed by Apple.

TIP: Stand out from the crowd with an icon that stands out! Remember, you will be judged by your icon.

Send Steve Jobs An Email

When all else fails send Steve Jobs an email. No, I’m kidding, that’s not what we did. But we did want to do something “different” and nice at the same time. So we sent Steve a gift via iTunes. That gift was Pocket Zoo with Live Animal Cams. We can’t tell if he redeemed our app for sure…but we’d like to think he accepted the gift, it’s the least we could do.

TIP: Think different

Thank You for making us #1!

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:01:00 -0400

We’ve been featured by Apple in ‘New & Noteworthy’ and it feels especially great since it happend on the same day as the iPhone 4 launch! Talk about perfect timing. Thanks to the good folks at Apple for taking notice. The increased visibility has been amazing…Pocket Zoo with Live Animal Cams is now the #1 Education app in the US & Canada!!

Here’s a behind the scenes look at the making of the...

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 13:49:00 -0400

Here’s a behind the scenes look at the making of the Pocket Zoo logo designed by Fawad M, who combined typographic treatment and bright colours to give us our visually memorable look.

The first phase of the Pocket Zoo identity was to sketch individual letters. It was important to make the letters appear fun and edgy. Experimentation included playing with weight and angles. The next and final phase was to digitize select letters. During this phase, colour and composition were key while maintaining legibility. The finished identity caters to a young audience through its vibrant colours, fluffy shapes and overall fun appeal. @FawadM

Pocket Zoo™ with Live Animal Cams promo video.

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:00:00 -0400

Pocket Zoo™ with Live Animal Cams promo video.

CNN posted this video right about the same time as our launch...

Sun, 30 May 2010 18:56:06 -0400

CNN posted this video right about the same time as our launch showing how people just love animal web cams. What perfect timing…and with Pocket Zoo™ you’ll be able to watch and experience a wonderful zoo that you can take with you where ever you go.

Pocket Zoo™ is out in the Wild!

Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Our zooperb app is now on the App Store! Pocket Zoo™ was officially born on May 29th, 2010, only a couple of weeks after the birth of our lovely daughter. It’s been a crazy journey these past few months and to reach this milestone is super thrilling.

We’re doing a soft launch since it’s Memorial day long weekend in the U.S. Plus the weather is so nice out that we decided to just relax, celebrate and spend the weekend enjoying the outdoors with family, which we hope you are doing as well. Expect to be hearing a lot about Pocket Zoo™ in the next little while as we put on our marketing hats and start spreading the word.

The guys who built the Here, File File app said it best. Even if we don’t get sell a single copy we’d consider this a success because we’re so happy with how it turned out! And from the early feedback we’re getting and the organic growth we’re seeing in the rankings it looks like we’re making a lot of you happy as well :)

Sweet Submission and Free Pocket Zoo™ Wallpapers

Tue, 25 May 2010 18:23:00 -0400

We’ve submitted Pocket Zoo™ after what was an exciting and humbling few months of development! It was definitely no walk in the park - developing, assembling and working with a team of super talented creatives and your spouse, juggling a day job, expecting your first child and now parenthood. It’s safe to say submission day was super sweet!

We’re now just sitting back and patiently waiting for the approval process to take it’s course. It kind of feels like waiting for a baby all over again…you know it’s going to come, you just don’t know when. [It pays to be patient - our application just changed state to “in review” while writing this post]

Here are some free wallpapers for you to download starring the wild crew from Pocket Zoo™, while we wait for the app to be available in the App Store. Visit the Goodies page here to download the wallpapers (they will also be available in-app). These whimsical animal illustrations as well as the art we used on our splash screen, promo video and website were done by the talented, Adam Record.

Our world got so much brighter this week as our baby girl...

Thu, 13 May 2010 13:32:00 -0400

Our world got so much brighter this week as our baby girl stepped into our lives weighing in at 8lbs 3oz. Our daughter was born on Monday May 10th at 8:50 am. Both Mrs. Tiny Hearts and baby are doing great.

We chose the name Tiny Hearts after hearing her comforting (tiny) heartbeats at our regular midwife visits…We’re so happy and grateful to have her in our lives. World meet our inspiration, meet our little bundle of joy!