YouVersion

Many of you have been enjoying the New Living Translation as an offline version of the Bible on your phone. As we mentioned in January, the offline download has been available for a limited time, and that time is almost up!

If you haven’t already downloaded the NLT to your iPhone or iPod Touch as an offline Bible version, you’ll have until April 5 to do so. (Read the original post for instructions on how to download an offline Bible version.)

We appreciate the generosity of Tyndale House Publishers in allowing us to make the NLT available offline for this time period and we look forward to future partnerships with the Foundation to continue to make the Bible readily accessible for people all over the world.

The YouVersion team has been working hard on some great things that will be announced soon. In the mean time, we wanted to continue rolling out little goodies for you to enjoy and the YouVersion WordPress Plugin is one of them. We’re awaiting approval in the WordPress Plugin Directory, but until then you can download the plugin directly here.

Our newest WP plugin is simple and echoes the core function of the first YouVersion plugin. With the new plugin you’ll be able to quickly and easily link to Bible verses from your WordPress blog posts or pages using a simple tag structure. Here’s a quick example:

What you type in the WordPress text editor: “The Bible says in [youversion]Acts 1:8[/youversion] that we will be His witnesses.”

What your website visitors see on the published post/page: “The Bible says in Acts 1:8 that we will be His witnesses.”

The new plugin also gives you the ability to set a default Bible version that you’d like to link to as well as the ability to link to spans of verses within the same chapter, like Acts 1:8-11.

We hope you enjoy the new YouVersion WordPress plugin and we can’t wait to tell you all about all the amazing things we’ve been working on for the past few weeks.

Over the next four weeks we’ll be giving away a few highly coveted YouVersion T-shirts, a bunch of nifty YouVersion stickers, and the big grand prize…an Unlocked (YouVersion.com engraved) Nexus One phone! Since YouVersion puts the Bible on every web enabled smartphone in the world, we decided to give away the latest mobile gadget available. That makes sense, right? Well, we also have a killer Android Bible App that runs perfectly and looks beautiful on the Nexus One!

We know you want to put your name in the hat to win a Nexus One phone, so here are the details for the giveaway:

• – We’ll do four weekly drawings leading up to the Nexus One giveaway. At each drawing we’ll give away a free YouVersion T-shirt and a handful of YouVersion stickers. (Drawing dates: February 24, March 3, March 10, March 17)
• – The final drawing for the Nexus One will take place on March 17 and will coincide with the end of the South by Southwest conference (SXSW), where YouVersion will be a topic of discussion among thousands of web and software developers and designers from around the world.
• – Go to http://youversion.com/nexusone to sign up for the giveaway. Make sure to follow the directions!

What are you waiting for? Go for it!

We are continually blown away by the growth of YouVersion and want to thank you for the huge part you’ve played. Sharing Scripture, your reading plans, and YouVersion Live events on Twitter and Facebook or by email has caused God’s Word to spread faster than it ever has before…virally. Keep it up!

We wanted to take a moment and celebrate passing a big milestone: 4 million YouVersion mobile app users on the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Java, and Palm. Here is what the growth curve looked like over the past 6 months:

It’s exciting to see so many people engaging with Scripture on their mobile devices, as well as the growing momentum of YouVersion mobile apps. Each month, 500,000-600,000 new users install the YouVersion Bible app on their phone or mobile device. Here is a look at our top 3 mobile platforms over the past 6 months:

Top 5 iPhone Devices:

1. 1. iPhone 3G
2. 2. iPod Touch
3. 3. iPhone 3GS
4. 4. iPhone Edge
5. 5. iPod Touch (first generation)

-We also see some iPad users have YouVersion installed!

Top 5 Blackberry Devices:

1. 1. 8300/ Curve
2. 2. 8330m/ Curve
3. 3. 8900/Curve
4. 4. 9000/Bold
5. 5. 9630/Tour

Top 5 Android Devices:Top 5 Android Devices:

1. 1. T-Mobile G1
2. 2. Motorola Droid
3. 3. T-Mobile MyTouch
4. 4. HTC Hero
5. 5. HTC Eris

We’re passionate about mobile because it’s proven incredibly effective in allowing millions of people around the world to access Scripture. As you may remember, just over a month ago we celebrated that YouVersion users had spent over one billion minutes reading the Bible on their mobile devices and we expect to hit 2 billion very soon.

Because we’re so excited about hitting this milestone we’re going to follow it up with a little celebration. So take a moment to subscribe in the sidebar follow us on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook and stay in the loop!