Dirty Aura

This is a must-see. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen talks about services and making business in internet.

Among other juicy bits the interview includes stories about testing ideas and concepts via Google Ads and early days of Twitter investments. Did you know that Twitter founder Evan Williams returned money invested in his company Odeo back to investors and said that it’s not going to work, but that they have another idea?

Business Business, internet, video

I’m giving a talk in MobileDevCamp Helsinki on this Saturday (Feb 23th 2009). MobileDevCamp is an event for people interested in innovating and developing on mobile phones. It is held at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, right in the city center of Helsinki.

There’s at least three good reasons to attend in addition to the fact that event is free of charge.

First, Google’s Android Team just sent an Android Dev Phone 1 as a grand prize for the afternoon Hackathon event. Dev Phone 1 is a fully functional SIM unlocked phone running Android operation system. You can read more about the device from the Android web site. I’ll be in a jury who will give a prize to the best application presented at MobileDevCamp Hackathon.

Second, the day starts with a bunch of interesting talks. I’ll give my Platform = Stage – How to choose a mobile development platform? talk that I gave at Slush event in November. It’s a non-technical talk that tries to get you thinking about mobile platforms from the different points of view than just sold units of phones or technical possibilities of a specific platform. I’ll discuss about distribution models on different platforms and other facts that are crucial for your application’s success. I’ve updated the talk with a couple of new insights.

Other talks cover different platforms in more detail. I’m especially waiting a talk by Niklas Wahrman who have developed Asterope game for both Android and iPhone platforms.

Finally, there’s a BarCamp event after the longer talks. You can freely give a short presentation or a hands-on hacking session. I expect BarCamp to be both fun and useful.

I’m planning to give a short technical presentation targeted for novice and intermediated iPhone programmers. Talk is called “Leaks and Zombies” and it’s about memory management in iPhone programming. You might think that that’s the most boring topic ever, but anything that involves zombies can’t be boring! It should be useful too, it seems that even experienced programmers have trouble of getting iPhone’s memory management right if their background is in garbage collected languages. And if you don’t know why zombies are involved, you should come to listen.

Sign up to MobileDevCamp here.

Mobile Android, events, Helsinki, iPhone, MobileDevCamp

Selling iPhone apps is becoming a new business fad that people make fun of. It’s adopting a role of clown that an ad based model of free web services has held for a while.

However truth is that App Store is nothing short of success. In January Apple announced that there had been 500 million downloads from App Store. Let’s put this into perspective. There are about 17 million sold iPhones. Apple lumps iPod Touch sales together with other iPod sales, but estimates are that iPod Touch sales total 25 million, which means that there are about 40 million sold iPhone OS devices. Thus on average there are over 12 installed apps per device. That’s an astonishing number. On average on every iPhone and iPod Touch 12 applications have been installed just in 6 months.

How many installed applications a PC has on average?
I haven’t done my homework, but my guess is something between 0 and 1. Your guess?

How many sold games there are per a game console?
My guess: 5. Answer: about 6 over a 2 year period.

Heck, how many bookmarks is saved to browser’s bookmarks on average?
My guess: something between 5 and 50. Heavy users with thousands of bookmarks are likely to skew this a bit in a way that no heavy user of mobile applications can skew App Store stats.

Compared to these, 12 installed applications is a very vivid proof of a working ecosystem. Granted, most of the installed applications are free, but the number proves that App Store has connected application publishers and users like nothing before. And this on a mobile device. Just a year ago, a person who had installed a mobile application was either a geek or  16-year-old gamer with too much time on his hands.

The most successful mobile application store before App Store is probably GetJar.com, that has about 370 million free downloads since 2004. Other successful stores have hit about 100 million downloads each over several years. With a success of App Store, mobile applications market is quickly catching mobile advertising as a business model.

Nokia is rumoured to launch it’s own application store at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Currently Nokia has a crappy Download! service on S60 phones and N-Gage market on selected models. If Nokia would unify these and duplicate ease of use of App Store for both publishers and users, it has a huge potential. Nokia sold over 100 million devices last quarter. Think if every new S40 and S60 model would have an application store baked in.

N-Gage Market has a silly restriction that games sold through it should be developed in native C++. On N-Gage Industry Insider a potential game developer is proudly challenged: “Think you’ve got what it takes?”. Pardon me, but who the fuck cares in which programming language a game or an application is developed if it’s fun or useful? Nokia has gone to great lengths to support several development environments on both S40 and S60 platforms: Java ME, Flash Lite, browser technologies with Web Runtime and S60 native C++ development. It should leverage this work. Think how many publishers and users Nokia could connect with a well-made appliation store that allows all these technologies to be used.

Mobile ads, AppStore, Business, iPhone, Mobile, Nokia