Hooters Calendar girls arrive on the iPhone in new $1.99 app |
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I know. I know. Most of you go to Hooters for the chicken wings and onion rings. But for those who enjoy some of the restaurant's other attributes, a new iPhone application might whet your appetite.
Developed by Seattle's Movaya, the $1.99 game allows players to assemble tiles in order to create images of bikini-clad Hooters girls. The game features three levels of difficulty and even uses the iPhone's accelerometer, allowing a game player to shake the phone in order to reshuffle tiles. Hooters also has a Crazy Eights card game in the app store.
Ah, technology.
"The beautiful girls of Hooters Calendar combined with the touch screen capabilities of the iPhone and iPod Touch make this game incredibly fun” said Movaya CEO Phil Yerkes in a statement. He adds in a blog post that they are looking for suggestions to improve the game.
I am sure readers will have a few ideas.
Actually, the Hooters iPhone application hits on a larger trend occurring in mobile software development. A number of large corporations are expanding their brands to the iPhone, hoping to tap the young, mobile users on the device. Seattle area startups are helping them out, with Treemo developing a citizen journalism app for CBS and Zumobi developing a ski report app with REI.
If the iPhone continues to grab market share, look for more corporate brands to follow suit.
UPDATE: I asked Yerkes to share some details about developing the new application as well as Movaya' s future development plans for the iPhone. Here's what he said:
"Working on this project was great. It took us about 6 weeks to build the game and our dev team got ramped up on the development kit quickly. We submitted to Apple on a Monday and we were live in the AppStore sometime Thursday. I have been told that a 3 day turn-around is highly unusual. I guess you can attribute that to either us building a good product or catching them at the right time but I know other apps have taken weeks or even months to go live. I thought the interface for submitting apps was clean and straightforward and their daily download reports are great.
We have 3 other iPhone apps in development right now and are actively bidding on another 10-12 projects. We will also be launching the Hooters game in the Android market soon and we have been working with their tools for a month or so now. The data coming out of the AppStore is just unbelievable. I’m sure you’ve read all the stats but for those of us who have been mucking around in this space over the last 4-5 years it’s phenomenal. Apple really nailed it with the device and the AppStore. While there are lots of apps and there are lots of developers not making much money, there are also quite a few developers making a lot of money right now."
John Cook is co-founder and executive editor of TechFlash. He has been covering the technology beat for nearly a decade, writing about startups, entrepreneurs and venture capital, most recently serving as a reporter/blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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