Crowdfunding is now cool thanks to Tim Schaffer's Kickstarter success, but personally I'm more interested in appbackr's wholesale approach.

Certainly it's better in terms of mobile games and apps, and if a release is a success, as backer you don't get a copy of the game you funded.

You get 27 or 54 percent return on your original investment.

And as discussed when we interviewed CEO Trevor Cornwell, the company has a much wider view on the industry too; something that's highlighted by its new initiative.

What's my number?

Called the Appbackr StoreScore, it's a 'general marketability metric', which is based on customer reviews, sales and other factors for each apps on an individual Android-based app store.

Apparently, the company has rated every Android app released - something it's labelled an Appbackr Score - in the process building up its machine learning-based score algorithm in terms of the success of releases.

Now, it thinks this is well honed enough to also provide predictions of what new releases will be successful, hence it's opening up the Appbackr StoreScore to all companies who are running Android stores.

Using the StoreScore, they can create their own custom channels of apps that should appeal to users, with each app's StoreScore being dependent on local variations for each different store, whether this is be geographical, user or business model based.

Retailing nous

"This is a major breakthrough for developers because Appbackr Score allows discoverability based on quality not just quantity sold," said Cornwell.

"Appbackr StoreScore gives stores a chance to leverage their unique understanding of their customers and deliver consistently high quality apps, often not available in other Android stores."