Students earn extra cash with ads on Windows Phone 7 apps

Challenge

College students attracted to the Windows Phone 7 clean-slate and easy to use platform aim to connect with users and earn cash by integrating ads into their mobile apps.

Solution

College seniors Jake Poznanski and Sam Kaufmann are computer science majors and first time mobile app developers. After a bad experience developing for the PC Android toolkit, they turned their attention to the Windows Phone 7 platform because it was a clean slate for development. Their goal was to infuse all the nuances of a paid app in the form of an ad-supported app.

Results

Poznanski and Kauffman saw their revenue grow tremendously since the launch of the marketplace, earning $12,666 in gross revenue since November 2010. Focusing on popular and staple apps like cards games, they created an intuitive user interface that was optimized for use on Windows Phone hardware. “Developing for the Windows Phone platform is so easy and the ad control library provided by Microsoft pubCenter is unrivaled in simplicity and quality,” the team said.