Intel Offering Developer Incentives For AppUp Store [Intel Takes Our Advice, Hopes To Boost Developer Involvement in AppUp Store]

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Intel’s AppUp store was released to public beta in late January, and its goal is provide small apps to netbooks running the Intel Atom series of processors. We found back then that the app store was severely lacking in a selection, but Intel is trying to boost the number of apps on the store by some offering some bite-sized incentives.

In my hands-on “review” of the AppUp Store beta back in January, I wrote:

After using it for 10-15 minutes, nothing terribly exciting stands out. The apps range in price from $10 to $2 (not including the ton of free apps). There isn’t much of a selection compared to the mobile platforms, and what selection there is, is pretty weak.

Intel apparently agrees, as they’ve announced the “Million Dollar Development Fund” which is apart of the “Intel Atom Developer Program”, with the intent of luring developers to the AppUp store. Intel is offering three different incentive programs for prospective Atom developers.

The ‘Fast Track’ program will award the top 250 AppUp applications $500. I’m presuming that this list is being sorted by most downloads. Considering the low number of total AppUp apps (when I used it, at least), this actually shouldn’t be a hard incentive to reach for enterprising app developers, and I’d imagine that anybody with a moderately good app could get in this top 250. While they’re giving it out 250 times, $500 seems like peanuts, specially if compared to some reports of people making $13,000 a month from iPhone apps.

The next incentive is the ‘Dollars for Downloads’ where Intel will match dollar for dollar the revenue of the apps sold on the AppUp store. The app has to be $2 or less (free apps included) and Intel will match revenues up to $5,000 for free apps or $25,000 for paid ones. This will go on for four months. Again, the dollar amounts are small potatoes for what we hear about the iPhone apps, but they could be nice rewards for new upstart developers.

The final incentive in the “Million Dollar Development Fund” is the “Intel Atom Developer Challenge”, where there will be multiple categories, with Intel looking for “innovative development”. The prizes for the challenge will be various netbooks.

Despite the meager state of the AppUp store when I reviewed it, it seems that Intel seems committed to trying to nurture the young app store into something more developed like the Android Market and iTunes App Store. Now, weather or not there is a market for applications on Windows-based netbooks is another question entirely…