What’s a Smartphone without Apps?

October 5th, 2012 | Posted by Quixey in App Trends | Culture | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

To be blunt, it’s just a brick.

As smartphones become more a necessity and less a luxury in our day-to-day lives, it’s important to take a step back and consider how we got there. Is it the simplicity of navigating the world thanks to Google Maps? Is it the convenience of having email right at our fingertips? Is it the ease with which we can communicate with family and friends through calling, texting, and various social networks?

The answer is, has been, and will always be, apps. Even the most basic of functions on your smartphone—phone, messaging, calendar—are apps, though you might not think of them that way. We at Quixey like to define apps broadly—as simple tools that add functionality to a platform.

With that definition in mind, consider the way you call people on a smartphone. The call feature appears as an icon on every home screen, but you don’t think twice about its similarity to other apps because it’s the most fundamental aspect of your phone. However, just because you have a default calling app, doesn’t mean that it’s the only, or even the best one available.

So what you think of as the “phone” in your smartphone isn’t glued to your home screen. You can download a number of calling apps, like Viper, to replace it. Similarly, you can select from a number of alternative messaging apps, like biteSMS, to swap for your default texting app. What your device offers is a clean slate for you to customize. It’s up to you to pick apps that maximize functionality.

The different apps you download, from games to organization tools, in some sense serve the same purpose—they’re add-ons that breathe life into your smartphone.  So taking a good hard look at the way your apps are arranged is valuable—which ones do you let just sit there, because they came with the phone? How can you swap out certain apps to make your phone better? The app ecosystem has exploded over the past few years following the success of Apple’s App Store (which hit 25 billion downloads earlier in 2012), proving that there won’t be a shortage of unique apps to choose from anytime soon.

In some ways, a home screen is the ultimate form of expression. When you use a device all day, every day, you project everything about yourself onto its interface. Some smartphones are littered with games and gimmick apps. Some have all apps neatly organized into folders. Everyone’s home screen is unique, and that’s because we all value certain apps differently depending on the way we access them on a daily basis.

A smartphone without apps isn’t a smartphone at all. Take away the nearly-limitless potential of added functionality on each of our iOS, Android, or Windows devices, and we might as well be carrying around dusty old rotary phones. That’s why we at Quixey care so much about enabling the user to find apps that do exactly what they want. If they’re the key to transforming your smartphone from a brick into an invaluable do-it-all device, then we want to make sure you can do just that with as little effort as possible. So take a good look at your smartphone’s home screen and imagine how it would look if it was just blank.

We know, we cringed too.

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A Delayed Homecoming: How a College Grad Landed Back into the Heart of Silicon Valley

August 1st, 2012 | Posted by Quixey in Culture | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

This post was written by Alex Popp, Business Development, at Quixey. He recently graduated from Harvard University, where he was a four-year varsity athlete on the water polo team. In college he worked at the Massachusetts State House and interned for different tech start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. You can find him at monsieurpopp.wordpress.com and follow him at @monsieurpopp on Twitter.

Four years ago I left California to go to college on the East Coast. For the first eighteen years of my life, Menlo Park was my playground–one that seemed ever so boring. When I finally graduated, I was excited to pack my bags to attend school on the other side of the country. I wanted to do something new, experience the East Coast, and brave the cold. Trading in my flip-flops for snow boots, turning in my Ray Bans for a beanie, I was moving straight ahead, not thinking of looking back.

Funny how the moment I began my new life on the East Coast, I started looking back more frequently than not.

Silicon Valley is an incredible place, and leaving it only put that more in perspective. Throughout my undergrad years, I would chuckle under my breath as my peers gushed about this hub of innovation and talent, this epicenter of technology and entrepreneurship, where people dared to find optimism at every turn. I realized that if you live outside of the Valley, you mostly hear of the Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles of Palo Alto and Mountain View. But, you don’t always hear about the smaller start-ups, bootstrapped by two or three founders hunkered down in the attic of their mother’s home, living off hot pockets and Mountain Dew.

In Silicon Valley these stories are the stuff of lore; failure is a badge that every successful CEO or VC proudly emblazons on their credentials. It is that attitude that was put more so in perspective some three thousand miles away. I missed that defiance, this willingness to stop at nothing, the intellectual creativity of the Valley. The more time I spent away, the more I realized how much I missed it and had taken it for granted. After my freshman year, I decided to come back to California to soak up some much needed sunlight and to see if I could forge a connection to the start-up world. At the end of every summer after that, I kept telling myself I had to come back.

So I did for the next three years, working for a couple of established Fortune 500 companies’ corporate strategy groups, helping start-ups launch by getting involved in their product management and business development efforts. I remembered why Silicon Valley has no equivalent in the world (sorry NYC tech scene). The intellectual creativity was pragmatic in the Valley. You had to solve problems that were neither academic nor black and white. I realized that while strategizing was rewarding, it more often than not resulted in recommendations rather than results; after a while someone had to have the guts to take the reins and directly involve themselves in pushing the needle forward. That was the biggest lesson I learned in my time reconnecting to the Valley: you have to get down in the trenches if you actually want to build something.

I know I was very lucky to find a start-up that was doing exactly that, and wanted to take a chance on me in helping them pursue their vision of the world. When Quixey approached me in March, I was desperate to add value, but I didn’t know where I would fit in best. Through my interviews with the BD team, conversations with our Director of BD Jake Orrin, CEO Tomer Kagan, and Chief Strategy Officer David Hytha, I realized that Quixey–in the corniest of terms–was trying to build a product that would make people’s lives easier. I’ve always wanted to build something of value, and to distribute a product in the hands of many. Quixey was taking a chance on me and allowing me to do exactly that.

Quixey is very product oriented; we’re building a functional and platform-agnostic search engine that allows people to find apps by searching for what they need at the moment without knowing the name or description of an app. In a world where there are millions upon millions of apps, Quixey aggregates and organizes unstructured and structured data, analyzes all that information through a complex array of advanced machine-learning algorithms, and then services result queries based on the relative weights placed on the collected data. Search, by nature, is technologically fascinating, but Quixey takes it an extra step by tweaking it to fit the more specific case of app search.

I guess I am glad that for the last four years I kept glancing over my shoulder from time to time. Had I not done so, I probably would not have ended up at Quixey. Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” I won’t go as far as to say that I’m doing exactly what he suggests, but I am humbled to take part in a company that is attempting to help mold the future. I am thankful for this one chance, because my decision to join the Quixey team makes me confident that the future is only going to get that much better.

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No Such Thing As A Monday

July 6th, 2012 | Posted by Quixey in Culture - (0 Comments)

This post was written by Jason Prosnitz, Director of Strategic Initiatives. He wrote an impromptu piece on why he loves working at Quixey and we decided to share it here.

I love my job.

Can you say that too? Most people in the working world feel a constant pressure to get their work done faster. Whether it is due to sales quotas, bugs in the code, customer service complaints, or a different issue, there is always pressure top down (from management) to get more done by the end of the each day, week, month, or quarter.

Quixey is different.  There is a very different type of pressure for us to succeed and it is not imposed from the top down; it comes from within.  We are already moving fast; the challenges that we face every day are so interesting, engaging and fun that there is no need to apply pressure from above.  From the minute I roll out of bed in the morning, I am so amped up and excited about what the day is to bring, I just GO. I completely forget about the expectations of others because my own usually surpass them.  Make no mistake, I’m not a unique Quixier in this way, which is another great reason to love working at Quixey: the people. At Quixey, we’re all excited about what we are doing. I get to collaborate with the smartest people that I know, and to solve the most interesting challenges that I’ve ever come across – what other motivation is necessary?

Another aspect that I love about Quixey is our vision for the future. Nowadays, people agree that with the number of apps out there and the rate at which that number is increasing, finding the right one presents a serious problem. Not that long ago, we had to work harder to explain the need for app search. There were only a few platforms, and people seemed satisfied with the results they were getting by using categories and top-ten lists. Quixey has always known that the app ecosystem was growing too quickly for categories, top-ten lists and directories to last, and it’s rewarding to see users jump on board with our vision. It’s a great feeling to know that we are helping to shape the app ecosystem of the future and that Quixey enables us to have such a significant impact.

Most people in the working world dread Mondays – the restart button of a miserable workweek. At Quixey, Mondays don’t exist – every day is as fun and as exciting as the last.  Every day is a Friday.

 

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January Quixey Challenge Recap

January 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Quixey in Culture | Quixey News | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

Thank you to everyone who made last week’s Quixey Challenge the most epic challenge yet, and a special congratulations to all the winners!

For those of you who don’t know, the Quixey Challenge is an opportunity for top engineers to fix a bug in 1 minute and win $100. We run the QC once a month. This month, 396 of the best engineers in the world (many from CMU, MIT, Palantir, Dropbox and other engineering powerhouses) took the challenge and 101 people won.

Here are a few key stats from Thursday’s Challenge:

  • Over 10,000 people came to quixeychallenge.com on challenge day, with an average visit time of over 6 minutes
  • Approximately 25% of people who took the challenge won
  • QC was on the front page of Hacker News for 10 hours
  • Every 4 seconds, someone took a practice challenge
  • Over 50% of wins happened in the last 2 hours of the challenge
  • The fastest winning time was 7 seconds
  • The average winner took a total of 15 minutes to qualify for the challenge, enter the queue and solve the challenge

Compared to our last challenge in December, we did a few things differently:

  • We made it harder to qualify. Instead of requiring contestants to solve one practice challenge in under a minute, we required them to solve three practices in any amount of time. We think the new requirement set the bar higher for contestants.
  • We offered a $50 bonus to anyone who referred a winner. Out of the 101 winners, 55 were referred. Surprise, surprise - smart people know smart people.
  • We had four operators. Last time we only had two operators, and the queue became an unwieldy 2-hour wait. This time, we doubled the number of operators and cut our peak wait time to 15 minutes. The average wait time was only 2 minutes. The result: 396 engineers took the January Challenge, compared to 197 in the December Challenge.

Our improvements worked – the January Challenge was our most successful one yet. Thanks to everyone who played and referred their friends!

We’ll keep representing the Quixey team’s passion for algorithms by running another challenge next month. Make sure to check Quixey Challenge later this week when we start the countdown to the February Challenge!

Making the Smartphone Jump

December 9th, 2011 | Posted by Quixey in Culture | Favorite Apps - (0 Comments)

This post was written by Dan Smolkin, Quixey’s Community Manager.

Back in junior high school, I got my first phone: a Kyocera brick phone with a frosted, translucent grey case. By today’s standards, there was nothing special about it. But it was all I could ever have imagined needing. Heck, we had a nights & weekends family plan!

When I had that phone, the concept of checking my email on the fly didn’t even occur to me. My school had just given us webmail accounts with 10 megabytes of storage. That was back in the day when you could just check your inbox once a day.

For the next decade, I had nothing more sophisticated than a phone that made calls and had a built-in calculator. With a prudent set of parents knowing that nice things don’t stay intact long in the hands of a teenage boy, I was stuck with phones from the free section of the store.

Finally, the day came when my contract expired. It was finally time to follow in my friends’ footsteps and make the the smartphone jump.

Going from a phone that just makes calls to a phone that has an app for everything was a culture shock that delighted me with each new app I downloaded. Like the Star Trek communicator, I could simply pull out my phone and everything I needed was at my fingertips.

When I’ve been out with friends, I’ve not only been able to see what movies are playing with the Movies by Flixster app, but also catch the trailers – a great way to avoid watching a dud.

When I forgot my new dentist’s building number, I was able to check my synced Google Calendar easily.

I can keep the newspapers I enjoy reading right in my pocket with the NYTimes and WaPo apps.

And when I’m out running errands, I can seamlessly pay for my coffee with Starbucks’ app and know exactly how much money is on my card.

Best of all, I’m able to take my favorite web app, Pandora, with me to the gym. I can take ownership of my workout music, instead of having to watch Fox News presidential debates on the gym TV.

If you haven’t made the smartphone jump yet, you should. Smartphones make life better.

There is an app for that. But really, an app that can divide by zero?

April 28th, 2011 | Posted by Quixey in Culture - (0 Comments)
The other day in the office we were demoing Quixey when a friend asked, “If Quixey is so cool, can it find a calculator that can divide by zero?” Of course we all laughed, because as much as we believe in Quixey, we don’t expect it to do the impossible. But just for fun we Quixied, “calculator that can divide by zero.” Sure enough, Quixey found a calculator that claims to divide by zero.

Obviously this calculator does not actually divide by zero, but instead of saying “error” when you try, it gives you a joke message. For example, “you divided by zero and a Canadian dwarf cut off both legs due to the mis-reading of a tiramisu recipe.”

So back to our friend’s original question: “If Quixey is so cool, can it find a calculator that can divide by zero?” Yes, Quixey is that cool.

Ultimately this story only goes to prove one thing- if you want an app for something try searching Quixey. We highly doubted that someone had made a calculator that could divide by zero, but we tried searching for it and we found it. So as we like to say, anytime you think-“there must be an app for that,” we challenge you to Quixey it.

We are constantly surprised by how many great apps exist, and with Quixey, they’re all just one search away.