The Raspberry Pi Foundation, in conjunction with indie content portal IndieCity, and technology service provider Alcatel-Lucent, is proud to announce the launch of the official Raspberry Pi Store.
The new Pi Store features include: A one-stop shop for all users to share their Pi content.
The Store is now part of the Raspbian operating system and is also available from the Raspbian repository.
Consumers will find free and paid titles available at launch, ranging from games and apps to tutorials and other development tools.
Creators can sell their games/apps and tools using IndieCity’s secure payments system.
Creators of free content can benefit from a ‘tip jar’ system, allowing people to reward creators on a voluntary basis.
IndieCity provides the bespoke distribution platform and a recommendation engine to make content easily discoverable.
The content delivery platform provided by Velocix (a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent) will ensure that uploading and downloading of Pi content will be smooth, fast and reliable.
Unique ‘Upload’ area allows every user to upload and share their creations.
Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi Foundation is enthusiastic about the potential of the new store: ‘With the Raspberry Pi finally having a dedicated software store, it’s going to bring together the already-thriving Pi community in a way that’s simply not been possible before. By combining the expertise of our partners IndieCity and Velocix, we’ll be able to provide all Pi users easy access to a wide variety of content and we’re hugely grateful to both organisations for helping us to make this possible.’
He continued: ‘Our driving aim has always been to use Raspberry Pi to encourage and introduce a generation of children to programming and creative computer science. By now enabling Raspberry Pi users of all ages to gain critical and commercial success from their work through the new Pi Store we also believe it will be a powerful incentive for others to get involved and further spread the word.’
Chris Swan, Head of IndieCity, commented: ‘At IndieCity we’ve long been huge fans of the Raspberry Pi, and are therefore delighted to be working with the Foundation to provide the store for them. By combining the Pi and its educational goals with a store that is open to all types of content I cannot wait to see how it will be shaped by the community.’
Paul Larbey, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Video division, is also enthusiastic about the collaboration: "Raspberry Pi is a great initiative and the launch of the official Pi Store is great way to showcase innovation. I learnt to program on a BBC Micro and it’s great to see a new platform that will stimulate the next generation of computer scientists. As a company that is a global leader in communication technology, we recognise the importance of maintaining and developing the computer science talent pool and look forward to seeing the first wave of students inspired by Raspberry Pi."
The official Pi Store is now part of the latest release of Raspbian, which can be downloaded by Raspberry Pi users from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.
The Store can also be accessed through any non-Pi browser at: http://store.raspberrypi.com