Magyarország

I spent the week-end in Budapest, to kick off our coverage of that city for our web site and for upcoming Budapest iPhone and iPad apps from Nelso.

We expect to formally launch Nelso.hu on April 1, 2010 (although the site is already live for beta testing now). The iPhone and iPad apps should also launch around that time.

How many App Store downloads are required to rank in the Top 20 in the Czech Republic?

We had exactly 155 downloads of the Nelso Prague iPhone app in the Czech Republic¹ yesterday (January 7, 2010), which earned us the #15 spot for free apps. This put us ahead of Google Earth, Facebook, and Skype.

The previous day (January 6, 2010) we had 125 downloads in CZ, which got us the #25 position. Based on this info, I'd guess that the total number of downloads from the App Store in the Czech Republic yesterday was fewer than 10,000.

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¹ That is, we are counting here only downloads from users in the Czech Republic, and not including downloads from any of the other App Stores.

Nelso iPhone app for Copenhagen now available

Our iPhone app for Copenhagen was approved very quickly (36 hours) and is now available in the App Store.

The app is free and about half the size of the Prague app (there are fewer photos in this app, but that will be corrected soon). Download it and send us feedback at iphone@nelso.com or leave a comment below.

Nelso Prague iPhone app hits #16 in Italy

The Nelso Praga (Italian version) iPhone app started climbing the charts in Italy leading up to Christmas, and on New Year's Day it had hit #16 in the Travel category.

This has far exceeded our expectations. It's well known that a lot of Italians come to Prague for New Year's Eve, but because our app is specific just to the city of Prague (unlike, say, a translation app or currency convertor that might be downloaded by travelers going to any city), we were hoping only to rank in the Top 100 for travel apps, not to break the Top 20 and appear on the first page of the Travel section. Having the only free app in Italian for the search term "Praga" doesn't hurt, of course, but it's still (to us) a surprising result.

Needless to say, this has encouraged us to continue improving the Prague app, and to release similar apps for other cities. We'll be submitting an app for Copenhagen this week, and apps for other European cities later in January.