At TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, the Hubbl team was showing off Hmmm, which was a kind of social networking search app. Since then they’ve changed course and have been busy with a mobile app discovery and distribution platform that provides an alternative to the usual marketplaces. And now they’ve just beta launched Spacebar, which is their new venue for app discovery: app ads that are related to web content you’re currently reading.
I’ve written previously about Hubbl’s use of crowdsourced hash tagging to categorize apps and ultimately provide a search engine into the back aisles of iTunes and the Android marketplace. Based on the Hubbl community’s tags, you can either search on your own or else follow, in social media fashion, a friend’s app lists.
The big problem they’ve been trying to solve, of course, is overcoming the complacency of the heavy-tail, where 1% of apps soak up 99.9% of the attention and revenue, thereby starving the rest of the app eco system–i.e., the top 5 lists, the most popular, trending. Some would say there’s a herd effect going on as we blindly click on what’s hot.
In any case, Hubbl lets you explore beyond your immediate surroundings into Deep App Space–hence the astronomy metaphors you’ll find in their marketing. But I think it fits. They currently have over a million and a half apps shared on their platform spread out over 8000 different tags–all of which been selected by the Hubbl crowd. More on that later.
With Spacebar, they’ve made it even easier and more convenient to discover apps, by insuring that only relevant app icons appear on a web page or, say, blog post. There’s a revenue sharing model underpinning the economics. So a blogger, for example, who writes about various topics on startups in the NYC area can position related apps next to the copy, and then split revenue with developers when a purchase is made.
I had a chance to chat with the Hubbl team last week. They emphasized their motivation was to fix the “broken” app distribution mechanisms. No arguments from me. Spacebar relies on the underlying Hubbl platform with its giant supply of classified app. After performing a bit of language processing on surrounding content, Spacebar dips into the Hubb library to pull out apps that best match.
They walked me through the Spacebar ad widget generator, which let me produce the widget you see above with just a few clicks. You’re given several options. You can let Hubbl work with the current web page or else supply it with an explicit URL for its NLP-based suggestions. Or if you have specific app in mind, you can explicitly choose your favorite one–from either IOS or Android–after searching through Hubbl’ app library. That’s what I chose for the sample on this page. There’s also option to display multiple apps corresponding to a specific hashtag.
I am impressed. And when I have some time, I will add Spacebar widgets to this blog. This is excellent work, and I have my fingers crossed that these guys will really disrupt the way we discover mobile apps.
One last point, the revenue sharing part of Spacebar has not yet been implemented. However they do currently provide a dashboard to keep you on informed on click-throughs and other app search stats.
Image credit: Wikimedia