A small and very new startup out of New York called Pinch Media is building tools for iPhone and iPod touch developers.
The first of these tools is an analytics offering called Pinch Analytics, released just today for free, that will track an application’s number of unique visitors and active users, as well as how much time those users spend on the app and where they are located geographically. Fred Wilson is calling it the “FeedBurner for iPhone apps”.
Pinch Media is debuting with some formidable backing. Both First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures have provided an undisclosed amount of seed money in conjunction with several angels. Chris Fralic, a partner at First Round, says the firm is a big believer in “the power of the iPhone platform and how it’s driving usage beyond its market share and functionality beyond the desktop.”
Expect Pinch Media to roll out additional tools for promoting and monetizing apps built on the iPhone SDK. The startup’s already signing up advertisers for its platform.
Founders include Jesse Rohland and Greg Yardley, who left Yahoo in March.
Pretty, but if you’re going to market yourself as a company developing tools for promoting and monetizing apps built for the iPhone, why not debut a tool which promotes or monetizes, instead of a Google Analytics clone?
Pretty simple Randy. You acquire the inventory to monetize by providing value added services to all the folk who use your analytics app for tracking. This is the initial customer acquisition piece.
They’ll likely be competing against Apple if there’s any money here or it’s a must have feature.
Apple owns the OS. Apple will win.
Apple just rips off start ups, they seldom buy them.
This sounds pretty cool. As an iPhone developer, I would be happy to have some help with monetization, even though going through a third party like this will probably cost a decent bit of revenue. Of course, everyone should aspire to get enough users to build their own ad network down the road.
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“the power of the iPhone platform and how it’s driving usage beyond its market share and functionality beyond the desktop.”
Driving usage beyond its market share is meaningless to a startup based on this platform. Silly people with too much money.
The information on their site is very thin. It doesn’t seem to add a lot of useful stats that would convince developers to let them to leech off their apps.
Fred Wilson is a well connected man… maybe too connected to write an objective blog.
Are there any other companies like this?