Limelight Builds Showcase Sites For Your Apps, Now Serving Japan

Limelight is a clever service that recently came to our attention, which aims to help app developers put together a simple, beautiful site to market their application. You can check out the video below to see exactly how it works, pulling text and screenshots from your app page on iTunes and repackaging it in a slick app showcase.

Limelight just announced today that it would be making its service available in Japanese, so developers who need a hand marketing their app to the rest of the world can make use of it. Limelight developer Andrew Culver said in a blog post that almost 10 percent of their sign-ups were from Asia-based developers, with non-English apps.

We asked Andrew about the breakdown of that ten percent, and he tells us that many sign-ups are for Chinese apps. Nevertheless, Limelight is looking to serve Japan because it’s a slightly better fit:

This is a country and a language we’re familiar with. I have a number of Japanese apps on my iPhone and iPad. I’ve met developers in Japan. We love Japan.

But is it really needed?

I initially had some doubts about the service though. I mean, site-building services are usually aimed at individuals who are less tech-savvy, right? And if you’re able to build an application, chances are you can probably build a website pretty easily too. But Andrew explains that out of the 600 new apps that come out every day, most of them still have pretty bad websites. And even those sites probably took a while to build.

He points out that Limelight, in contrast, saves developers time and should increase sales:

Whether it’s pulling all their app images from the App Store, creating Photoshop-esque product shots on the fly, automatically encoding their video to be compatible with both HTML5 and Flash, or integrating with SMS gateways to provide ‘send-to-your-phone’ functionality. You can create an entire site on Limelight in less time than it takes to do any one of those things.