The Design Space of appazaar

By matthias | Published: 09/08/2010

If you are interested in the mechanisms behind appaazar and our recommender system, we would like to call your attention the 2nd Workshop on Context-aware Recommender Systems that will take place at the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. We will present a paper there about the design space of context-aware recommender systems that suggest mobile applications. If you are interested, please drop us a mail to receive a copy. The abstract is as follows.

Abstract: Current technology development in mobile computing and upcoming application stores enable an easy development and distribution of mobile applications. This leads to an increasing number of available applications and to the user’s problem of content discovery. Recommender systems aim at guiding users to relevant items. Currently, recommender systems for mobile applications neglect that the usage of mobile devices is characterized by perpetual changes of a user’s context. In this paper, we give rise to the context-aware recommendation of mobile applications. We explore the design space of recommender systems for mobile applications and describe the different dimensions and techniques for capturing the users, the items, the contexts and the corresponding relevances. For proof of concept we present the prototype of a recommender system that combines the design options in a hitherto unexplored way.

You will find the approach described in the paper and some other ideas that came up and have been reported to us in the last weeks within the next version of appazaar. It will mainly improve our recommender system and fix some bugs of the Android app.

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New version (finally) available

By matthias | Published: 18/05/2010

Hey there, we got some good news for you ;)

While you’ve been looking for new apps using the lastest version of appazaar, we baked a new version with a lot of improvements and integrated a lot of your feedback as well as our own ideas into it! And now, after a long time of testing, it is finally available in the Market :D

This is what the new mobile app looks like:

This are our changes in detail:

  • “What are you just doing?”: Our recommendations are now tailored to your activity! Just answer the question and tell us something about your current activity to get the right apps.
  • Tags for your activity: So far you had to insert free text to describe your activity. Now you can use tags to describe your current context more quickly. And in addition you can now connect appazaar with Facebook! The tags you insert into the widget are directly posted to your status on Facebook :)
  • Blacklist: An app recommendation appears all the time and you don’t like it? Now you’re able to get rid of it by adding apps to a blacklist which can be edited within the settings.
  • Scrolling: You are now able to scroll through our recommendations from page to page directly within the widget. We think, this is a good tradeoff between widget size and the number of recommendations. What do you think?
  • Battery usage (GPS): Moritz did a really great job to improve the performance and battery usage. Nevertheless, for now we can not completely abandon the use of GPS positioning. Specially in areas with bad wireless/wifi coverage or insufficient accuracy appazaar falls back on gps positioning. There are already some more ideas in the pipeline to reduce this further and we’re confident to be able to minimize the usage of GPS further with the upcoming versions!

So just update appazaar or download it via the Market Store and let us know what you think about it ;)

(If you experience some issues after updating, please try a clean reinstall before submitting a bugreport!)

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Meet the developers @ Pervasive 2010

By matthias | Published: 16/03/2010

Hey guys, we didn’t give news for a while but we’re really busy working these days! Sorry for that but we’re pretty sure you’ll appreciate once we finally shipped the new version ;)

In the meantime we have some great news: We will present appazaar at Pervasive 2010 – The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing. We got our poster “Contextualizing Mobile Applications for Context-aware Recommendation” accepted for presentation and the reviews are very motivating! Here’s a short summary of the papers content:

Abstract: Current recommender systems for mobile applications neglect the very mobility of their users and their perpetually changing contexts. Although applications naturally serve for a special purpose, they cannot be addressed to a particular context of use. Hitherto, context information is not taken into account for the recommendation of mobile applications. In this paper we present work in progress on a platform that gives rise to context-awareness for mobile application recommendation. It records the users’ application usage and relates it to context information that is traced on the users’ devices. Thereby we can determine the context of use of the applications. We describe the conceptual design of a recommender system that exploits this information and suggests only contextual relevant applications to its users. A prototype implementation is presented.

If you are interested in all the techniques and algorithms running behind the software, you can meet us at Pervasive 2010 in Helsinki, Finnland. You’ll also find the paper and the poster on this website after the presentation at the conference. However, if you cannot make it to the conference, please drop us an e-mail for any feedback, question or suggestion.

Oh and by the way, the next release is coming soon, we are just in the phase of stabilizing the new features. And it’ll come with a lot of new features and improvements ;)

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appazaar 0.6b is out in the Market Store!

By Moritz | Published: 18/02/2010

After a lot of work during the last week are proud to release the new version! We worked a lot on the power consumption and performance but we also changed the layout :) Take a look yourself and be prepared for the upcoming 0.7 for which we’re already giving a tiny preview in this release! We hope you like the new version! Please let us know if you have troubles with it or any ideas to improve it!

new widget layout

Changelog:
*new layout
*less battery usage
*less gps usage
*performance tweaks

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appazaar 0.6 in the Market

By Moritz | Published: 07/02/2010

The week since the official release in the Market Store was pretty interesting for us. We got a lot of different feedback and now we’re proud to release another update. As we implemented some major changes we increased the version number to 0.6 and hope that it’ll make appazaar even more useful and less buggy :)

beta 0.6

The changelog is pretty short but I can assure you that it was a lot of work:
* performance issues
* navigating with trackball

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appazaar Beta 2 released to the Market

By Moritz | Published: 27/01/2010

Today is a big day for us as we just released the second beta to the Market Store. So from now on you guys will get every update directly and I guess there’ll be some during the next days ;)

We also would like you to give us detailed feedback if you feel like it. As this is still a beta feedback is important for us to be able to continue developping appazaar with respect to your ideas! So don’t hesitate if something is bothering you or you have an idea on your mind :)

appazaar WidgetContext tag editor

Since the first beta we improved appazaar a lot but the most significant changes for you will be these:

* context tags: You now have the possibility to describe your current situation with a few words like “home, lunch” or “working” to improve the quality of the recommendations.
* less traffic: We reduced the traffic a lot with zipping everything and scaling the icons down. So there is less data to commit!
* recommending: On the server side we’re now using different algorithms that still need to be trained more, but that already should recommend more interesting apps for you.

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Happy new year & new appazaar version soon

By Moritz | Published: 08/01/2010

We hope you all had a good start of 2010 and just want to let you know that we’re not lazy at all! The next and improved version of appazaar will be released soon and by soon we mean before the end of the month ;)
It’ll offer some new features, including so called “context tags” and a better recommendation system on the server side. We also improved the performance and worked on the battery usage. And… well, we’ll let you know about all the details once we finished working and are ready to release ;)

Oh and I shouldn’t forget to mention that we’re also planning on releasing the upcoming version in the Android Market Store as well!

Stay tuned :)

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Screenshots of beta

By matthias | Published: 30/12/2009

If you are curious about how appazaar looks like, check this screenshots of our beta version running on an HTC Magic. The first one shows the appazaar widget containing the recommended apps. If you click on one of them, they either start directly or get installed via the Market Store. I personally like the recommendation of Photoshop and Layar :-)

appazaar widget

appazaar widget

The second screen shows the settings, that you reach from the main menu. They are currently pretty rudimentary as you can just start or stop the service.

start or stop the appazaar service

start or stop the appazaar service

Check our beta version if you want to try appazaar on your mobile. If you have any ideas or feedback please let us know.

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First beta release

By matthias | Published: 22/12/2009

We got it! The first beta release of appazaar is ready for shipping. You can install the app on your Android mobile by simply following these steps:

  1. Open the browser on your phone and point it to http://www.appazaar.net/beta.apk
  2. A short download and installation process will start.
  3. After the installation, you will have a new entry in your menu. The icon brings you to the settings of appazaar, which are currently pretty rudimental as you can just start or stop the service.
  4. Start the appazaar service from these settings. Please be aware, that from this moment we log your application usage and your location. You find more information about that logging in the FAQ-Section of this page. In case you don’t want us to log, you can simply disable the service by stopping it but don’t forget that the base for our recommendation system is the analysis of the data we are logging.
    If you have further questions, please feel free to write a comment or contact us via mail!
  5. For the full experience, please add the appazaar widget to your desktop.

What is appazaar doing?
The short answer: appazaar is the last.fm for mobile apps ;)

Once the appazaar-widget is started it will recommend you apps from the Market Store. If you want to know how we know what to recommend, take a short look at the FAQ and the About appazaar page!

Please be aware, that this is a beta version. However, we really want to integrate your ideas and feedback into our appazaar. Please leave comments here in the blog, join our group on Facebook or send us mails to mail@appazaar.net.

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Become a beta tester

By matthias | Published: 21/12/2009

We are currently wrapping things up to release a first version of appazaar. If you are interested in testing this beta version and you want to be one of the first users, please use this form to register.

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