New version released

Yesterday we already upgraded our server with a new algorithm for running the recommender system, and today we are happy to release a new version of the app to the market. The most prominent feature is the screen with the recommendations. We listened to your feedback – many many thanks for that – and today we are happy to release to most demanded feature: appazaar now provides its recommendations within the app. So, if you don’t like it, you don’t need to use the widget anymore.

Please keep going on giving us feedback! We really like to meet your requirements for a perfect app recommender. For the next release, we are planning to re-design the UI and provide some smaller features to round up the recommender system.

You can use this QR-tag to download the new version of appazaar.

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Heavy use of appazaar

Wow, amazing! We currently have to cope with a big rush of new users. Some blogs mentioned appazaar and a lot of people twittered about it. We did not expect that great interest into appazaar — really cool! We are really impressed what effect viral marketing can have. However, this caused a lot of traffic and a big load on our server. We fixed small issues to get the service running again. Currently we are working on improving our server’s performance.

Thank you also for all the great feedback that you sent us by mail! We really want to keep up with all of your feature requests. Some of them will already be available in the next release. For instance we are working on the integration of everything into full app instead of forcing you to use the large widget. We are also thinking about providing different form factors for the widget. What do you think?

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Android needs a genius?! Here comes appazaar

The Android Platform is growing fast. Not only more and more devices are equipped with the most innovative operating system, also the number of applications available in the Android market is rapidly increasing. Thus, it becomes a problem for users to keep track with the huge amount of apps and to find cool new and useful apps on the market. Apple has build its great recommender system Genius into the App Store to solve this issue and support the users. However, such a feature is currently missing for the Android platform. This is where appazaar kicks in!

appazaar is a recommender system for Android apps. It learns which applications are interesting for a user and recommends applications according the user’s personal taste. Therefore it tracks the application usage and compares it to other peoples interests in applications. Thereby appazaar is able to give personalized recommendations of apps.

Furthermore, appazaar is not only tailored to the user’s app taste, it is also location-aware. Android users are mobile people and often change their location. With their location they also change their activity, for instance from working at the office to chilling at the beach. appazaar uses that to optimize its recommendations! Surely you agree that you require apps for productivity at work and games and music apps for relaxing at the beach. 0:1 for Android and appazaar! Apple’s Genius fails in making this small but important distinction.

The more people are using appazaar and the more appazaar knows about their application usage, the better the recommendations will be. appazaar is currently in the fledgling stages but growing fast. So give it a try and use it for a while.

appazaar is available on the Android market and can be used without any registration or login right away. Just get it and receive personalized and location-aware recommendations for all those cool apps out there!

appazaar is a project of the Software Engineering Lab at Münster University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The research group is working on location- and context-aware mobile systems.

The Design Space of appazaar

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

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

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!

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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Happy new year & new appazaar version soon

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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