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Big News! New Bible App for Symbian Phones

We’ve been working hard to bring you a new Bible app for the Symbian platform and we’re excited to announce that it’s ready and available for download now in the Opera mobile store and on GetJar.com. Many Americans aren’t familiar with the Symbian mobile platform, so we’ll take a moment to explain why we believe this is a big deal.First, Symbian accounts for about 40% of smartphones in the world. There are hundreds of millions of people carrying a Symbian-powered device in hundreds of countries. Second, because Symbian is so ubiquitous outside the United States, we’re excited to see how God uses this step to reach the world with the Bible, helping millions more engage with Scripture.

Like the first version of our mobile Bible app on other new platforms, the Symbian app is currently a basic Bible reader that accomplishes our foundational purpose of increasing Bible engagement around the world. Future development will bring more features you’ve come to love on other mobile platforms, like Reading Plans, social sharing with Twitter and Facebook, YouVersion Live, and more.

Have fun with the new Symbian app and don’t forget to tell your friends to download the YouVersion Bible app on their phones. It’s the easiest way to give someone a free Bible!

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Free YouVersion Promo Video – Download now!

We love seeing more people engage the Bible through YouVersion, so you can imagine that we’re pretty excited that the YouVersion Bible app is being downloaded to a new mobile device every 4 seconds. But individual downloads aren’t the only thing to celebrate. We’ve been encouraged by how small groups, churches, conferences, and universities are adopting YouVersion Live as part of their events and gatherings and we’ve seen even more groups simply encouraging their people to download the Bible app during their regular meetings.

So, to make it even easier for churches, conferences, musicians, universities, small groups, coffee shops, and others to share the Bible and YouVersion, we’ve made the video above available as a free download on OPEN, LifeChurch.tv’s library of free digital resources for churches and other ministries. (Choose “Week 3 Whispers Promo” in the list near the bottom of the page.) The video can be downloaded in multiple formats and is free for you to use at church, in your small group, or just sharing with a friend.

Have fun and don’t forget to let us know how you plan to use the video to tell people about how they can engage the Bible through YouVersion for free!

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Introducing YouVersion in Norwegian

Today is an important day for YouVersion. It’s the day that YouVersion begins a long-awaited initiative to help people around the world engage the Bible, no matter what language they speak. We’re incredibly excited to tell you that YouVersion.com has been translated into the Norwegian language. It’s the first of many steps that will make it possible for millions of people to read the Bible in their native language and in community with others.

To visit YouVersion in Norwegian, just go to http://no.youversion.com. Or, if you’re already on the site and want to switch to a different language, you can click the button that says “English” in the footer of any page on the YouVersion website to see a list of language options. (Right now it’s English and Norwegian with Spanish coming soon.)

Thanks to the generous folks at Norea Mediamisjon, the entire website has been translated by native Norwegian speakers and not by translation software. Human translation means it should be much more accurate and feel more natural. We’re committed to making further refinements as necessary to make sure the site is fully localized (geek-speak for translating a website) and ready for someone who only speaks Norwegian to enjoy.

We have big plans for YouVersion as it moves into the international community and more people around the world will be able to engage the Bible in their own languages. And, as usual, with big plans come big announcements, so stay tuned for more big news in the coming days and weeks!

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Two Billion

That’s how many minutes you and millions of others in the YouVersion community have spent engaging the Bible on mobile devices! Two BILLION minutes!

Two billion minutes reading the Bible is a huge milestone for the YouVersion community. Since it’s tough to visualize such a huge number, let’s break it down. Two billion minutes equals:

  • 3,800 years (Abraham was alive 3,800 years ago.)
  • 1,388,889 days (You could fly around the world 785,714 times.)
  • 33,000,000 hours (You could fly to the moon 458,333 times.)

While 2 billion minutes is a huge milestone by itself, an even more amazing feat is that you reached 2 billion minutes in a fraction of the time it took you to reach 1 billion minutes. That means Scripture engagement on mobile devices is taking off like a rocket!

More time engaging the Bible— it’s why YouVersion exists, and you continue to break new ground and set new records doing just that. Way to go! Celebrate with us at http://youversion.com/billions or leave a comment below to let us know what you think of people reading the Bible for 2 billion minutes on mobile devices.

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New for iPhone/iPad: Facebook Sharing & Universal App

The latest version of the YouVersion iPhone & iPad app is available now in the iTunes App Store. This update (2.3.1), along with the previous update (2.3), brings several niceties and one big feature update to Apple’s mobile platform. Here’s the breakdown by version.

2.3
With the 2.3 update, we joined our popular iPhone Bible app with our iPad app to create a single application that runs on both devices. This means you’ll only need to stay up-to-date with one app for your favorite Bible application on both iPhone and iPad. We also moved the “sign-in” to the Settings menu to prepare the way for the biggest update coming in 2.3.1.

2.3.1
We went one step further with 2.3.1 and completely changed how the app handles sharing to Twitter, plus we added the ability to share to Facebook. With the new sharing structure, you can share seamlessly to Twitter and Facebook at the same time through YouVersion Connections (which was also added recently to the YouVersion website, as well as the Palm Pre/Pixi and Blackberry apps). Once you’ve connected your YouVersion account, sharing the Bible with your friends on Twitter & Facebook will be easier than ever.

We have big plans for the iPhone & iPad (iOS) platform in the coming months, but we wanted to get these updates out to you as soon as possible. Let us know what you think by rating the app in the App Store and leaving a comment. Don’t forget that issues can be reported on our support site at http://youversion.com/support.

Connect with us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/youversion or Twitter at http://twitter.com/youversion.