Foursquare has already done the hard work of finding matching restaurants, so the trickiest part of building this MVP is finding a way to generate structured data from natural language. The great thing about tools like wit, LUIS, and api.ai is that they make this part so easy that you can build an MVP like the above in an afternoon. In our experience, 3rd party tools are an excellent way to build quick prototypes. You could just as quickly build a bot to find videos with the YouTube API, or products from Product Hunt.

Ragot said new dev teams can even just focus on one metric: “If there is one KPI, according to my experience, that tells you everything, it is “Retention at Day X”. D1 retention is how many people come back to your app in the same day after they install it. I am always looking at D1, D3, D7, D14 and D30. If you put all of your effort into measuring this, you have good analytics that is a mix of retention and acquisition.”

So after you’ve built an app, the first task is to position it so that your potential users start downloading it. User acquisition is all about getting app downloads. After downloads start climbing — even a slow increase is okay as long as it is steady — then it is important to start focusing on retention: getting users to start integrating your app into their habits so they reach for your app regularly.

Increasing user acquisition for your app starts with app store optimization. 30% of downloads occur after someone has searched by keywords in Google Play. So getting noticed within the app marketplace can already drive up user downloads before looking at any other type of promotion.

The booming IT industry attracts more and more people by offering tremendous job opportunities and compensation well above the average level – according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2015 the median annual salary in IT was twice higher than the national rate.

Oculus previews a new untethered headset, Cyanogen shifts business strategy to a modular OS program and online furniture store Wayfair releases its first API.

Google announces new hardware and “Actions on Google” platform, Apple and Deloitte team-up for enterprise solutions and HTC’s Viveport VR app store goes live globally.

In this article I aim to help with the above challenge by means of a slightly unconventional approach: In my research I tried to quantify the merits of the most popular libraries, given a series of “developer-friendly” metrics.

Sounds weird and subjective? It is. Read on.

In this edition Google is reportedly planning hybrid devices that run both Android and Chrome, game developers boycott Oculus due to its founder’s support for Donald Trump and Google takes its Daydream SDK out of beta.

In this edition, Angular team announces the release of Android Studio 2.2, Oracle confirms rumours of a Java EE 8 delay and Microsoft has been crowned the new king when it comes to open source contributors.