Few developers go into details about what marketing has worked for them and what does not. Tav Shande, developer of the Vanity and CrunchTime apps, explain what marketing worked for making his Vanity app very popular and the professional marketing people whose work did not help the CrunchTime app. Great info and many tanks to Tav Shande!
Mobile is hot, and Swype is the latest company to succeed. For those of you how have not used it, Swype has a specially designed keyboard for mobile devices that allows the user to enter text by simply sliding their finger from key to key to spell a word. It includes the functionality to learn new words and make guesses about what the user has entered. Some people love the Swype keyboard, and it is installed across 50 million Android devices.
It has just been purchased by Nuance for $102.5 million. Not bad since the Swype keyboard is free and has no room for ads. Swype also raised a total of $14 million in funding. The deal had links to both companies’ past. Swype was created by Cliff Kushler, who also pioneered the T9 text input method at Tegis Communications. Tegis Communications was purchased by Nuance in 2007 from AOL for $265 million.
It will be interesting to see how Nuance leverages the Swype technology in the future. It will also be interesting to see what startup Cliff Kushler works on next.
252 developers filled in a survey about what their apps were making on the iTunes App Store. You can read all of the details, but bascially, few apps are making most of the money.
Only 25 percent of developers have earned more than $30,000 lifetime total revenue selling iOS games and another 25 percent of developers have hauled in less than $200. Four percent of survey respondents have earned more than $1 million in the App Store.
It has been a force that the telcos have been fighting since the Internet became such a success. The age of the dumb pipe for telcos is coming, even if the governement has to force it down their throats.
The UK governement has release a tender for a new mobile payment system to integrate the payment systems of the three largest UK banks. It is based on the traditional Internet model when the telcos would just deliver the data over their network but would not be part of the financial transactions. I am sure that the telcos will not take this quietly.
Found two great pieces of info today. The first statistic explains part of the problem that Android developers are having monetizing their apps compared to their iOS compatriots. According to Fierce Mobile Content, which is quoting a research report from Allot Communications,
The question is will Google’s slow but steady way match Apple’s huge head start in mobile?
