I read a blog post by Andrew Wicklander about the reason why a $41 Million investment in Color was a bad idea. In his post Andrew says:

“But I think there’s something much more ominous than a poor version 1.0 and being made fun of that their investors should be worried about. And that is that the founding team, regardless of their previous successes (which are large), are showing a general lack of creativity and a misunderstanding of the marketplace in which we currently live.

This is evident most clearly in the fact that they paid $350,000 for the domain name color.com and another $150,000 for the domain name colour.com. That’s right, half a million dollars for two domain names.

The problem with this isn’t necessarily the cost of the domains, but the fact that they even think domain names matter anymore. I was talking with a friend and he made a great point that if someone was selling diapers, and it was 1997, and they bought diapers.com it might actually make sense.

I do find the cost of the domains ridiculous, and I also disagree with Andrew that domain names do not matter anymore. While it might not have the same impact as in 1997, choosing a company name (and an accompanying domain name) can have a surprising effect.”

In 2010 I founded a new company that built a platform aimed at mobile app developers and publishers. 

We spent a lot of time on the technical details, developer and user experience. The platform connects your app to all major social networks and enables sharing of content for your users to their friends. The platform also offers comprehensive real-time Social Analytics for the app developer/publisher allowing them to improve the user experience. We built native frameworks for both iOS and Android allowing developers to integrate the service literally in five minutes.

While building the technology we didn’t spent (nearly enough) time on a name for the company. At some point we decided we understood the basics concept and reached a point where the question of a name for the company/service needed to be answered.  We did the usual brainstorming, mind mapping, finding inspiration elsewhere, but couldn’t get to a name we felt comfortable with.

One day I decided we should just pick something. Not having a name was blocking our release schedule (we needed a web site!). We already knew we would do iOS development (Android was on our radar too), so a lot of associations we made were somehow related to Apple.

We ended up combining  a color with an apple, pink and Elstar (the Elstar is a famous Dutch apple). 

The star was interesting as it would fit perfectly in certain aspects of our service and made a good icon. It sounded ok, although we did worry if English speaking customers would know how to spell it  (PinkelStar, PinkleStar?). We grabbed the domain and had ourselves a name. 

In the fall of 2010 we had our first public appearance. We got featured on VentureBeat, drew more attention to our site and got other sites to publish about our new service. We  landed a $500K funding round and were building on the service. We got developers to test the service and provide us valuable feedback. The first apps were finding their way into the different marketplaces with PinkelStar integrated.

And then it all happened. After a TechCrunch post someone made an smart remark about our company name. Were we aware that ‘pinkeln’ actually means ‘to pee’ in German, and that we effectively managed to call our company ‘Peeing star’? WTF?

Our company is based in Amsterdam, Germany is our neighboring country. But none of us realized what PinkelStar translated to in German. We were hoping that developers would pick up on the benefits of our service. Instead that one comment lead to an entire new discussion.

The comment got picked up by ‘a few’ German Twitter users, and a ‘peeing’ storm was born. Hundreds of retweets appeared and traffic to our main website surged to a level twenty times higher than usual. 

Within hours it seemed everyone in Germany knew that we were the new peeing stars of Europe.


It was one of those moments where you wish you could hide on a deserted island with no one to bother you. It is said that all publicity is good publicity, but this is not what we intended nor wanted when we combined a color and a fruit to pick a company name.

The name got us a lot of unexpected attention. Did it hurt us in the end? I don’t think so. We did have a few very awkward investor meetings afterwards. And for obvious reasons that traffic spike didn’t lead to new signups. I am still awaiting the first German app to integrate our service :-)

We have decided to change the name. In the end we felt it is important enough to choose a name that makes us, our users, and our customers happy.

What will our new name be then? Glad you ask. This is yet another story to be told but for now it suffices to mention that we are about to launch a new consumer app that, we believe, will change the way you can discover great mobile apps. 

We have put more effort into finding a good name for the consumer service and ended up with Zwapp. The consumer app and the developer’s platform all fit into one unifying company strategy, so I felt it was important to align the service names. PinkelStar will therefore be renamed to Zwapp Connect.

Color may have spent too much on 2 domain names, but making a mistake like ours as a startup is costly too. Not just in terms of money (which should be spent wisely), but also in terms of design and development costs. Rebranding your service can be a costly exercise.

We will launch the new website shortly, and with that public launch the service will come out of Beta. Until that time you can sign up for the service here.

prorattafactor asked: As a developer using your tool, can we inject additional content into the Facebook status update that has an image and link to the iPhone app?

Hi, yes this is possible.

You can set custom images and custom content URLS for every share in your app. As a developer you have full control over the share process and the UI. 

If you have more questions please fee free to visit our support forum at support.pinkelstar.com

We thought it would be time to update a video that explain how to set up the PinkelStar social sharing and analytics service for your mobile apps. As you know the service offers instant sharing capabilities to major social networks (currently Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Buzz, and e-mail. More to come).  It also provides developers a real-time social analytics dashboard that helps them understand more about their app, the different mobile platforms, social networks and the users that use their service.

This video shows that integration of PinkelStar in iOS (iPhone and iPad) takes less than 2 minutes and a few lines of code. The service is fully customizable and comes with a lot of flexibility for the developer.  The UI is open source so that you can adapt it to your needs.

Please ensure you always read the documentation in our Github repositories to ensure that you have the latest instructions on how to integrate PinkelStar into your app.

As always, if you have questions or feedback you can comment here or visit us at our support forum.

Join the PinkelStar Beta program today at www.pinkelstar.com.

Happy coding!

We’ve just released a new version of PinkelStar. On the server side we’ve added new social analytics. On the client side we implemented e-mail sharing for iOS (Android update coming soon) and we also have a new iPad only UI.

In your social analytics dashboard you will find a new overview for the content URLs that your app users are sharing and their friends are clicking on. The overview will provide you with more detailed information about the most popular URLs and the nr of page views those URLs are getting.

We’ve made our back-end environment  more efficient and decreased the loading time of the social analytics page for your convenience. We will continue adding more analytics shortly.

On the client side we have updated our iOS UI code base. PinkelStar now offers e-mail sharing next to social network sharing. As a developer you can add content URLs, images, data and text for the user so that sharing via e-mail becomes super easy.

If you are interested in a different UI specifically designed for iPad only then check out this new video that we’ve created.

It shows our new iPad only UI and our new social analytics dashboard. Integrating the iPad interface takes less than 2 minutes and only a few lines of code. You can get the code for the new iPad UI here. Make sure you check out the iPad only branch.

You can find all code for iOS and Android in our GitHub repository.

As always, we hope you will like our new release, and if you have questions or feedback visit our support forum or mail us.

Happy coding!

We’ve been working on a new home page design for PinkelStar. Our previous design was thought up very early in the process of building our company and service. Over time our notion of what the service would become has changed a little.

We started out with the idea of making in-app sharing easier for developers. During our beta period we had lots of developers testing the service and providing us feedback. From the feedback  we learned 2 things. 

1. Although sharing to social networks and e-mail was already possible in mobile apps, developers liked the ability to have one solution that works on both Android and iOS. During the beta test we added e-mail sharing and LinkedIn to the existing sharing capabilities, and these appear in the UI on the fly. The developer doesn’t have to spend any time on that. Time saved that a developer can spend on app features instead.

2. The biggest value for developers turns out to be the social analytics that PinkelStar provides. Understanding how your users are taking your app and its content to their friends on the web provides valuable information. Social analytics help you improve your app and retain users.

We felt now was the time to reflect those lessons in a new home page design.  As you can see the new design is cleaner and more to the point. It has a focus on Social Analytics and it describes the added value of PinkelStar for mobile app developers and app users in 3 simple steps: share, discover and measure. 

Here is the old design for comparison.

We are happy with or new design and will slowly integrate it into all aspects of our service. We hope it will convince new developers to give the service a try too. 

Let us know what you think! 

After our participation at Appnation in San Francisco we’ve been busy implementing lots of improvements to the PinkelStar service. We have just updated both our server and client code.

We have improved your Social Analytics dashboard. The design is cleaner, making the graphs easier to read. We are constantly adding new analytics. An example is the new Click-Through graph that shows you the nr of people that have interacted with share messages by clicking on the accompanying links (see the sample graph).

We have also added a few device types that we track for you so that you can now see what type of mobile platform is used, including Android, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. 

Here is an sample of a much improved graph, overall usage versus the nr of unique devices.

We hope that you will enjoy the analytics update. We will be adding more graphs and stats to your social analytics dashboard in the near future.

On the iOS front we have upgraded both the server framework and the iOS UI code. The new UI uses a UINavigationController to control the flow of the interface. The navigation bar is now normal sized, and we have removed the separate settings icon and now use the pink icon on the right side of the navigation bar to open the Settings panel (see below).

The new interface is available for iPhone, iPhone 4 retina display and iPad. As always, the code is open-source so that you can adapt the UI to your own design if needed.

We will be adding more social networks to the service shortly, starting with Google Buzz and Orkut. Once they are ready, your interface will automatically include them so that your users can share with their friends in those social networks as well.

We’ve also fixed several bugs and improved the overall stability of the code. We urge you to upgrade both the Server Framework and the UI code in your project so that your users can benefit from a better service. 

The PinkelStar framework can be found here, and the UI source code can be found here.

As always, if you have questions or feedback please visit our support center, or send us an e-mail.

Happy coding!

We’ve just uploaded a new version of our PinkelStar iOS Server Framework and UI. The major change for this version is that we have implemented the PSPinkelStarServer class using the Singleton pattern. Our Android library already used that pattern, so we need to catch up on the iOS side ;-)

As a result of this, initializing the service will be faster and loading of the main UI can be delayed until the user is actually asking for it.

You need to change the way you integrate the PinkelStar service into your iOS app slightly. When your app launches add the following code snippet to your applicationDidFinishLaunching method

psServerSharedInstance = [PSPinkelStarServer sharedInstance];

As a result of this you can delay creating a PSMainViewController instance until the moment that the user has actually provided a share request (by pressing a PSShareButton).

Take a look at the demo app in our Github repository to see how this can be used. You can get the PinkelStar framework without demo here. Make sure to follow the instructions in the README.mdown to check out the correct branch.

As always, if you have any feedback send us an e-mail, or visit our support center.

Happy coding!

It has been a busy month at PinkelStar headquarters. Summer is over, and we’ve been hacking into our service, modifying and improving it based upon the feedback we have received from our Beta testers.

We went to the Appnation conference in San Francisco to show the service and gained a lot of new Beta testers and excellent feedback during the demo sessions.

Its a good time now to explain where we are with the service and what we are working on.

What does PinkelStar currently offer?

PinkelStar enables mobile app developers to integrate content sharing native in their mobile app to social networks. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you think, I can do this already.

That isn’t all. When users start sharing, you will obtain Social Analytics that will help you understand how (the content of) your app is shared across the web. We think this is a valuable asset in building better apps and creating social distribution channels for them.

We have open sourced the UI code for both Android and iOS. It works out of the box, but you can also customize the entire UI to match your own app design.

We currently support Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and thanks to our network connector architecture, adding new social networks will be relatively simple. You don’t have to do anything for it. The PinkelStar UI will detect them as soon as we enable them.

What will PinkelStar offer shortly?

We have tons of improvements and new features in mind.

Social Networks

We will add Orkut support, and after that we’ll add a few more networks, depending on your feedback. Tell us what you need, and we’ll get it for you.

Social Analytics

We are now designing and implementing big changes to our analytics environment. We have tons of cool ideas and they will start appearing in the releases coming up in the next couple of weeks. We will add demographics, location-based stats and stats regarding the use of your app. We’ve demoed heat maps in SF and developers loved them (we won’t disclose yet what you can do with them, but it will be very cool)!

We will need some time to implement all of this, but watch your Analytics dashboard change over time. It will be worth it!

iOS / Android libraries

The libraries are open source and as a result of that we are receiving feedback on possible improvements. We’ve just updated the iOS framework and iOS demo repositories on GitHub making sure the integration process remains super simple.

We plan to add tagging to the UI and Server API so that you can track where and what content is being shared from within your app.

We will be implementing the PinkelStar server Framework using a Singleton pattern shortly, providing you with more flexibility to integrate it into your app.

You can reach our PinkelStar Github repository here.

Get the code now and integrate it. it should take less than five minutes.

Examples

If you want to see PinkelStar integration live in action, then take a look at a couple of live apps here. These apps are live available in the Android / iTunes app store right now.

The PinkelStar service is free. Join our Beta program today at www.pinkelstar.com. As always, if you have questions, send us a mail or visit our support center.

Day by day, we are signing up more developers to our Beta program. Here are some great examples of mobile apps that have recently embraced PinkelStar as a means to allow users to share content and obtain social analytics.

StuBru on Android

Studio Brussels is a well-known Belgian Radio channel which has recently launched a great Android app providing its users with direct access to Studio Brussels’ website content (including streaming audio). StuBru has integrated PinkelStar into its Android app so that users can share StudioBrussels’ website content with their friends.

In every screen StuBru has added sharing capabilities so that users can tell their friends about new music, videos and news items.

JAAP.NL on iOS

If you are looking for real estate in the Netherlands then the JAAP.NL  iPhone app is for you. Jaap lets you search for potential homes and lets you share your favorites with your friends.

Jaap.nl and StuBru are perfect examples of two mobile apps that are using PinkelStar to its fullest potential. Not only is sharing now easier to integrate into your applications, but as a developer, you can now see how your app is being shared across the web. 

As always, if you have any questions or feedback mail us, or visit our support center.

We’ve been undercover for 2 weeks working on a huge release for PinkelStar and are happy that we’ve deployed successfully yesterday. What’s new?

We have now added full iOS support to our Framework. As of now you can integrate PinkelStar into your iOS app and it will automatically use an optimized UI for the iPhone, iPhone 4 Retina display or iPad. We received a lot of requests for iPad and Retina support and now its all yours.

The new iPhone4 and iPad UI additions look great but if you want to use your own app design then we are happy to announce that we’ve also released the UI source code. You can pick up the source code from Github and integrate your app design if you want to! 

We’ve added LinkedIn support so that your app users can now effortlessly share content and your app via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. No need for you to do anything, your app will detect and add LinkedIn on the fly. The real exciting part for us was that with our new Network Connector architecture it took Josh only 4 hours to implement LinkedIn sharing! We can now use this architecture to add more social networks for your users to choose from.

We’ve further tweaked the design and functionality of your Developer’s dashboard and your statistics page.

What’s up next? Well, we’re gonna get ourselves a strong coffee and start the next release cycle. In then next 2 weeks you will see some really big improvements in your stats environment. We want to give you more useful stats and better design.

As always, if you have feedback drop us a line at support@pinkelstar.com or visit our developers forum.

The PinkelStar team