Apple needs to put more resources into their iPhone app program. We have all heard how slow it is to get apps approved or for simple updates to be pushed through. We experienced this first hand working on iHoops where some simple updates took close to two weeks to get approved.

Now some apps are being rejected due to third party content that the developer has no control of. Apple pulled these apps claiming it violates their policy of no adult or hate related content. It is impossible to police everything on the internet and the fact that some user could sabotage an app which costs thousands of dollars and weeks or months to develop seems unfair. As long as the app adheres to Apples policy I don’t think third party content brought into the app should be made to follow the same guidelines as long as their is proper warning that the content is being delivered from the internet not the app itself. What is the difference of launching Safari and going to an adult website on the phone. There is none.Yet Apple has allowed controversial apps to be approved in the past. I want to know who dropped the ball on the Baby Shaking app which Apple initially approved and then later removed.

Searching for apps also presents problems. Apple needs to incorporate some type of better search algorithm. It seems as if old school black hat seo tricks of the web work on the app store, such as keyword stuffing, and unrelated content about other apps. I recently searched for an art type of application and though the top results were related to my search after the first couple of apps they started to become totally unrelated. I clicked on the apps to see why and found out that in the description text listed hundreds of other popular apps at the bottom. To me this seems so out dated. If I am searching for “Graffiti” why would “Coed Spring Break” come up ahead of iGraffiti. Just because they have the name in their description? Come on, take a page from Google and learn how to filter results better and not let simple tricks such as unrelated keyword stuffing determine the results. If it takes so long to get apps approved why not take a few minutes and have the person approving the app actually read the description to make sure it is in line with what the app claims to do and not allow unrelated content.

I am one of the biggest Apple supporters out there and love pretty much anything they do. But I feel they need to invest more time and money into their app store to streamline the process, deal with third party content in a better way, and improve their own search capability. There are just too many inconsistencies with the app store and apps in general.

Today when checking my CNN News Widget on my Mac I saw – Hunch’ Web site will make decisions for you -. It seemed interesting enough and figured it was some type of personalized search engine. It seems to be a combination of a search engine mixed with Pandora where it “learns” what you like over time. Personalized search is not new as many companies are working on it. But with this interface it has more of a social media site feel then a traditional search engine.

The site just launched on Monday and was created by one of the co-founders of Flickr. I can see design elements from Flickr here, very clean, lots of negative space, 2.0 style looking javascript etc. The site is very user friendly and follows the trend of less is more and user generated content being the focus.

I think this will be a good place to do some initial research for products or decisions weighing on your mind. Or simply a fun place to surf around if you are bored. From a marketing perspective companies can use this form of crowd sourcing as the ultimate market research to zero in on exactly what their customer base is looking for. It will be interesting to see how this site / company progress in the future and who buys them out.

So go read the CNN Article and then head over to Hunch to check it out.

Apple is closing in on another historic milestone, 1 billion app downloads. That is mind boggling considering the iPhone is less than two years old and the actual apps themselves have been around for less than one year. You can almost imagine Steve Jobs ala Dr. Evil holding his pinky finger up to his face saying to Blackberry we have 1 BILLION DOWNLOADS!

I remember July of 2004 when the iTunes store was closing in on 100 million song downloads and thought that was very impressive, especially how only a few short years earlier downloading music online was the wild west. Fast forward nearly 5 years and we are again looking at something remarkable from Apple.

Just as the iPod pretty much crushed the competition for other MP3 players the iPhone is already on it’s way to do the same in the smart phone market. The only thing holding it back is it being limited to AT&T, once it is available on the other carriers game over for everyone else.

The slogan you hear in the iPhone commercials is dead on “An app for pretty much anything.” You can seriously find an app for anything you can think of and if you can’t just wait a few months and chances are you will find what you are looking for. One can only think of the type of apps that will be coming out later this year with the 3.0 OS Software due out later with the push technology and other exciting features.

I’m so excited our app is finally up! I’ve been working extremely hard on this project the last few months over at my other company AgencyWeb. This was a fun project as I got to be the project manager on it. This was the largest project I have been in charge on and really enjoyed it. I worked closely with Luke from Group Zero on a daily basis which was great. I made sure the app and back end of the website was easy to use and navigate while still maintaining nice aesthetics. I designed the front end of www.ihoopmadness.com and skinned the blog at www.ihoopmadness.com/blog.

We have had the app complete and ready to go for a week or so but have been in talks with BURGER KING® about sponsorship of iMadness 09. Thanks to them we are able to offer the first 100,00 downloads for free! So go download the best NCAA Basketball Bracket app for the iPhone for free while you can. Make sure you tell your friends so you can make leagues and fill out a bracket for the 2009 college basketball tournament. If your friends don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch they can still play along with you. Simply register for free at our site.

Also give our post a Digg to help get things started!

iMadness 09 is Available on the iPhone App Store

We have been working very hard at AgencyWeb over the last 5 months on an exciting project. We have developed iMadness 09, a college bracket app for the iPhone. Now when you do your office pool for the NCAA Basketball tournament you won’t have to fill out sheets of paper and try to keep track of everyones picks and scoring. iMadness will track the performance of your bracket, has the option for custom scoring with upsets, and can email a PDF file of your bracket for those who wish to print it out. The cool thing is you can create leagues with your friends who have iPhones and even those who don’t. The site will also link the leagues together for iPhone users so you can be in the same league as your friends across the country.

The app is due out very shortly along with the back-end of the web site. So check back here for updates or visit www.ihoopmadness.com and www.ihoopmadness.com/blog.