Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Fiksu: Get paid apps by trying free ones

By Rodney H. Brown

Boston startup Fiksu Inc. has launched a new way to get paid mobile applications for free after downloading some free trial apps.

The new service, called FreeMyApps, launched today, according to a release from Fiksu. The apps are iOS-based apps only, so only available for use on an iPhone, iPad or iPod with wi-fi. The goal is to help app developers gain more users while still deriving a form of revenue from the download of the app, the company said. The structure is that users download free apps from FreeMyApps and get credits for each one downloaded, which can then be applied to downloading a paid app.

Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu, said in the release that FreeMyApps would allow developers of paid applications to avoid the free or freemium distribution model to grow their user base.

In July, Fiksu – which started life as Fluent Mobile – launched a pair of indexes that it hopes will both show mobile app marketers the kind of benchmarks they need to be paying attention to and possibly draw in customers to Fiksu’s mobile app marketing technology.

Venture-backed Fiksu most recently raised $5.5 million from new investors in December of 2010, led by Charles River Ventures. That brought the total funds raised to at least $7 million for the company, that CEO Adler said had approximately 50 employees in July.