Thanks K and Sydney!

It was going to be a start of a great week at Hubbl Mission Control, but our loving Appstronaut Kelly just made it AWESOME!

Thanks K and Sydney!

        

Kelly, One of our favorite Appstronauts has  showed us some love through these Awesome pics of our Teen Appstronaut Sydney sporting authentic purple Hubbl tees.

       

Kelly says - “I love discovering apps on Hubbl!”

So thanks Kelly and Sydney for your super support and love for the purple telescope!

Small Step for an App, Giant leap for the App Kind

We started Hubbl with a goal, to help you discover amazing apps with ease, and today we are taking our first step! Hubbl 0.5 has arrived and is now available for download in the App Store and the Android Play Store.

It has been an amazing journey assembling the smart telescope over the past two months, and we are pretty sure it’s gonna help you discover apps that you’d never be able to find otherwise. Below are some of the key features in this version

“Skyview”

A perfect analogy of what our telescope can do for you. Discover not just the brightest, but the newest, the most promising and also the hidden gems via the SkyView. It’s an all new way to browse through apps.

“Smart Suggestions”

Share your opinions about apps with #hashtags and Hubbl smartly curates them to help you discover other relevant apps. Tag along all your favorite apps, discover apps your friends and the community suggest.

“Explore”

Search for relevant apps based on features you need like, PhotoFilters, StreamingMusic or MobilePayments. If you don’t find a tag yet, feel free to create and apps apps to it. (we also have some cool rewards when you suggest a tag/app for the first time or the most number of times)

“Apps in the news”

Discover apps that are discussed in real time in popular blogs and news channels. Want to know what apps are being discussed in TechCrunch, Mashable and many other popular channels? you can quickly filter the apps based on channels and stay up to date with the latest apps.

Discover with friends

Connect with your friends or make new friends and find Apps they suggest, download, use and mark as favorites.  You can quickly build your profile with the apps you own and favorite and your friends will be able to discover your apps without having to ask you a word. We will notify you every time someone downloads an app from your suggestions or from the apps you own/favorite.

Go ahead, get your own smart telescope for iPhone or Android.

Raison d’être

How did you come across the last App that you downloaded on your smart phone?
Very likely, it will confirm to one of the following
1. You read about in the media
2. A friend or colleague recommended you
3. It was part of a conversation or a chatter
4. You were looking for a specific utility and searched for it.

 If I were asked to define Hubbl without going into any technical details or telescope analogies, I’d say its a word-of-mouth platform for Apps. We wanted to create an environment that would promotes casual and candid chatter around apps. A platform where users would be able to drop their opinions in bite sizes (read: #tags). Where the opinions are interpreted and genuinely add value - and not get lost in the sea of reviews. If you published a review for an app on the App Store, you’d know exactly what I’m blathering about. 

So Hubbl discovers apps from conversations, media and friends - on one single platform. Users can #tag apps or conversely assign apps to #tags. Checkout www.hubblapp.com where we have simulated that feature to give you a flavour of what is in under the tarps. 

Hubbl rewards users for expressing their opinions succicintly. Eventually, tagging activity builds a deep network of daisy chained #tags that makes browsing for apps really fun and refreshing. Say, I tag Evernote as #ProductivityTool and you tag it for #NoteTakingRedifined and someone else tags it as #LifeLoggingMadeEasy. When you are looking for apps, you can tap around on a given #tag and review all the apps with that #tag or feature. So when you stumble upon Evernote, you will see all the relevant tags next to it and when you click on the feature(#tag) you are interested in, you get to see all the apps in that category. Rinse and Repeat. 

Hubbl’s Android avatar is also coming along nicely. The team is working crazy hours to assemble it. Cant wait!

Hubble telescope has shown scientists galaxies in all stages of evolution, including toddler galaxies that were around when the universe was still young, helping them understand how galaxies form. Very soon, our Hubbl will throw light on nascent and undiscovered Apps in equally revealing fashion.

Epiphany at Hubbl Labs

As we promised, here we have some live updates from the Telescope Assembly Line for you! We managed to iron out the last kink yesterday. We always wanted to make App Discovery a very intuitive and enjoyable experience and finally had our eureka moment! We’re happy to report that post this breakthrough, you now will be able to gaze through Hubbl lens and enjoy a panoramic ‘Sky View’. You will be able to caliberate your purple telescope and point it in your own chosen direction to spot the best apps according to your friends, media experts, passionate bloggers or the curators at Apple. We are very excited about this. It makes those serendipitous app discoveries oh so natural. 

We at Hubbl truly believe that there is a lot more than a sophisticated ‘search algorithm’ to app discovery. No matter how evolved, a piece of software can not replace human touch and that is where Hubbl steps in. We put you in charge and let Hubbl translate your thoughts and opinions to app attributes. This eventually morphs into a refreshing app browsing and discovery experience.

Oh, by the way, did you know that image clarity from Hubble telescope helped challenge basic theories of dark matter? It sent astronomers back to the drawing boards on their theories about galaxy formations and the invisible substance that was considered to glue massive clusters and galaxies together. Oh well, our purple Hubbl may not give you such ground breaking cosmic insights into the universe but we are confident that it will help your next favorite app come find you. Stay tuned!

In case if you have not signed up for our prelaunch updates and early beta access, there is still time. Just do it here.

You can also follow the journey of the purple telescope on Twitter and Facebook.

Birth of the Smart Telescope

Mobile App discovery in it’s current state is very inefficient. As both users and developers of this incredible ecosystem we feel so much of work is yet to be done. Users end up looking at the same subset of top apps everywhere, while there are so many amazing apps waiting to be discovered. Moreover, developers find it difficult to take their incredible apps to the hands of the user. And a bridge had to be built to connect these islands. Mobile App discovery was something that had long bothered us, and finally we decided to do something about it.

The spark came when one of us was walking around Manhattan (Varick and West Broadway to be exact) trying hard to look for sign of a star in the night sky, and the idea dawned upon us. The app universe is just like the star filled sky in the night and there are as many apps today as there are stars in the sky. The sky was once mysterious and baffling until the humans invented the first Telescope. From there we went on to discover so many new surprises, we made sense of new stars, discovered galaxies and constellations, we leaped beyond the obvious and the universe became more accessible to us. The Telescope changed everything. That is exactly what we wanted to build. A smart telescope to spot apps, which will make us discover new surprises, accurately spot apps based on interests and needs, and finally make the app universe more accessible to all of us. 

The name Hubbl is our tribute to the Hubble Space Telscope and Edwin Hubble the father of modern cosmology.

How exactly are we going to do it?

Hubbl is a novel App discovery model that lets you curate, find and share apps in a very simple and social way. 

We at Hubbl think that present algorithm driven app discovery approach is borderline orthodox and deficient. And with thousands of new apps added everyday, the existing solutions are also not very scalable Hubbl solves this problem by introducing first of its kind community driven interest based curation platform. As we are assembling your purple telescope in our labs we are also trying to make it incredibly smart, so it’s less effort from your end and more about the joy of discovering great apps.

You can sign-up for pre launch updates and get early beta access here.

You can also follow the journey of the purple telescope on Twitter and Facebook.