We just launched a totally new Golden Monkeys mobile app, and it’s available now on the iPhone app store and the Android Market. Our Mobile Lab, API and UX teams collaborated heavily on this iteration, so it’s got some major improvements over the previous version (namely, really powerful search and deep integration into “MailChimp Proper”).

For those of you who don’t know, Golden Monkeys is a simple little app for stat freaks that sends real time push alerts whenever VIPs (we call them “golden monkeys” here at MailChimp) open and click your emails (you can read the original blog post about it here).

Here’s a breakdown of what’s new…

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I’m excited to share that Golden Monkeys is now available on the App Store.

Golden Monkeys helps you keep up with your VIPs. You select the folks you want to keep up with, then sit back and let Golden Monkeys alert you (in near real time)  whenever they open or click recent campaigns.

Golden Monkeys for Android isn’t quite ready but it will be available soon. Just a heads-up: it’ll require Android 2.2 (for push support).

Let’s say you have a subscriber list of tens of thousands of customers. Chances are, you’ve got a handful of “VIP” customers on that list that you want to follow very closely (big spenders, thought leaders, long term friends, members of the press, etc).

At MailChimp, we have a name for those people: Golden Monkeys.

Sometimes we’ll send them email newsletters with links and inside jokes, specifically to see if a certain customer clicks something (we recently sent an email with a link to this, to gauge their geeky-ness). Anyway, constantly logging in to our campaign stats and hitting “refresh” over and over again to see who clicked what is a chore. We started to think up ways to make that easier, then we thought “heck, this is probably something our customers would love, too.”

So the guys in our new Mobile Lab (more on that later) have built an iPhone app that will send push notifications whenever a Golden Monkey opens or clicks anything in one of your MailChimp campaigns. If it sounds interesting, maybe you can help us beta test it.

Here’s how it basically works…

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As of today, MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector (powered by Return Path) has added support for four new mobile environments; iPhone, Windows Mobile 6.5, Nokia/Symbian and Blackberry Curve. Inbox Inspector makes it one-click easy for you to generate screenshots showing how your email will render in the major desktop, web-based and mobile email apps.

See how your campaign will look on Nokia's N96 Series phone and more.

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You know that iPhone commercial, where they ask “what’s for lunch?” and then they shake the phone and a random restaurant shows up? MobileCrunch has got a fascinating interview with Urban Spoon co-founder Ethan Lowry, and how that commercial sent them up over 2 million downloads. Pretty inspiring entrepreneurial story. While reading I came across AdMob (the way Urban Spoon makes money) and thought some of our readers might be interested in trying it for their local advertising. Seems to work something like Google Adwords, where you prepay (a minimum of $50).