Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

This is great. Thanks to ProcessAway, you can now process credit cards with your iPhone or iTouch.

Their site says:

ProcessAway is your complete mobile processing solution for accepting credit card payments both in and out of the office. Swap meets, street fairs, antique shows, mobile detailing, on-site consultants, taxi cab drivers, tour guides.. the list is endless on who could benefit by offering the convenience of accepting credit cards on the spot and the peace of mind getting immediate authorization for the charges.

EA Sports is coming out with a Tiger Woods iPhone application. There isn’t much information on it as of now, but we did find this screenshot.

This is pretty neat.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyS8lOBBk8I&hl=en&fs=1]

You can get it here, but you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone.

Fortune has a great article out today discussing the life span of iPhone applications. If you’re a developer, or are just interested in the App Store phenomenon, you know that there are two types of money-making apps: ones people pay for and ones that are free but have advertising in them. So, which is the way to go?

Philip Elmer-DeWitt breaks it down:

In a slide show packed with hard-won insights, Jesse Rohland and Greg Yardley of Pinch Media offer the results of a statistical analysis of 30 million App Store downloads. Among their findings:

* Users tire of applications pretty quickly; fewer than 20% ever come back to run a free app the day after download.
* Time spent on any app declines by almost 1/3 in the first month, stabilizing at just under five minutes.
* Paid applications see slightly more use than free apps and are used for slightly longer periods.
* The biggest usage differentiator is category — games are used for longer periods than any other type of application.

Behind these general observations are some very useful stats:

* Appearing on the top 100 list increases daily new users 2.3 times.
* The average price cut increases demand by 130%
* The average price increase drops demand by 25%

Bottom line: only a few of the stickiest applications — less than 5% — are suitable for advertising at the current ad rates, and a developer won’t know if he or she has got one until after launch.

The Oregon Trail will soon be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch! Is anyone else as excited as me?! Um, anyone? OK, probably not.

When I was in school, we had to pass a mandatory typing class. It was extremely boring but if you powered through Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing fast enough you could play The Oregon Trail for the rest of class. I now credit that game with my ability to type quickly, something I spend too much of my day doing now as an adult. But for those of you who don’t remember The Oregon Trail, let’s let Macworld remind you:

The game takes players across the famed Oregon Trail — one of the few practical ways that early American settlers in covered wagons had to travel to the northwestern United States. The trail was notorious for taking a heavy toll on settlers, who succumbed to illness, starvation and occasional attacks from bandits and others on the way.

The iPhone version takes you from Independence, Mo. to Willamette Valley, Ore., making decisions and solving problems on the way. You’ll have to ford raging rivers, survive bear attacks and avoid sickness and starvation, plus you play eight skill-based mini-games using the accelerometer, such as hunting, fishing, wagon repairing, river crossing, rafting, telegraphing, gold panning and berry picking.

The old school version didn’t have a bunch of mini games. Actually, the only ones I remember were hunting and deciding whether of not to pay a guide to help you across the river. I just hope the new app still allows you to personalize the tombstone messages!

The Oregon Trail Classic

The Oregon Trail App

Yahoo!, a company that insists on keeping that annoying exclamation point at the end of its name, will be releasing Yahoo Mobile shortly, the company announced on Tuesday.
From Electronista:

The app will also let users access their e-mail and social network accounts, as well as instant messaging programs. The interface will also bring together access to websites, sport scores, news, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, horoscopes and other information.

In other words, it will let you do a bunch of crap you can already do on the iPhone. But this time, it will say Yahoo! on it. Wow, news and sports scores? Are there any apps currently out there that will give me this information? There can’t be!

The economy is in the crapper. Layoffs are causing the unemployment rate to skyrocket. And Ethan Nicholas just quit his job as an engineer with Sun Microsystems. You’re probably thinking, why would someone with a steady paycheck up and quit? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he just raked in $600,000 in one month from one iPhone app.

According to Wired.com, Ethan’s artillery game iShoot rose to the top spot in the App Store which earned him a whopping $37,000 in one day.

Wired points out:

Until recently, there has been no realistic way for individual programmers to make serious money on their own. Most of the software market is dominated by big companies, and the traditional distribution method for independent developers — shareware — isn’t conducive to striking it rich. By contrast, Apple’s iTunes App Store provides a platform for marketing, selling and distributing software; all a developer needs to provide is a good idea and some working code.

Nicholas’ success story proves that there’s still plenty of potential to strike it rich in Apple’s seven-month-old App Store. In September, iPhone developer Steve Demeter said he made $250,000 in just two months with his puzzle game Trism. But as the App Store expanded rapidly, many developers thought the store would get too crowded with apps and business would inevitably slow down.

What makes Ethan’s story even more interesting to me if the fact that he wasn’t a programmer by trade. Since he didn’t have enough money to buy the coding books he needed, he scoured the Internet to teach himself the skills he needed to build the app. That was of course after he put in a full day of work, and helped take care of his 1-year-old son.

iShoot sells for $3 although there is a Lite version you can download for free. It was actually the Lite version, created after the full-version was completed, that drew enough attention to the game to make it a booming success.

iShoot made independent developer Ethan Nicholas a measly $600,000 in one month

The GSMA Mobile World Congress is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain, and while Apple is noticeably absent, the company’s name is not. CNET reports:

The iPhone and Apple’s successful App Store got more than a passing mention on Tuesday during a panel moderated by The Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg.

The panel which included three of the most powerful CEOs in the mobile industry–Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, the second largest mobile operator in the U.S.; Olli-Pekka Kallasvu, CEO of Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker, and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, the worldwide software leader–centered on the need for more openness to spur successful innovation in the mobile market.

The overall panel discussion centered around the need for simplicity and openness. “The iPhone is a great success, but it would be even better if the applications were interoperable,” said Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility.

While that may be true, several mobile companies at the conference have recently launched phones aimed at directly competing with the iPhone. CNET also reports that “Microsoft and Nokia clearly think that Apple is on to something with its App Store, since each company announced its own version of an application marketplace here this week.”

The iPhone wanna-be Toshiba TG01 features a 104mm (4.1-inch) 800x480-pixel face touchscreen. (Photo credit: Crave UK)

BoingBoing.net says that the South Park guys have long since completed an iPhone app, but it was rejected by Apple for being potentially offensive.

The website posted a quote from a South Park source on the matter:

“We first announced our iPhone App back in October, after we submitted the Application to Apple for approval. After a couple of attempts to get the application approved, we are sad to say that our app has been rejected. According to Apple, the content was “potentially offensive.” But Apple did admit that the standards would evolve, citing that when iTunes first launched it didn’t sell any music with explicit lyrics. At this point, we are sad to say, the app is dead in the water. Sorry, South Park fans.”

According to Admob, the iPhone and iTouch are #1 and #2 respectively when it comes to internet traffic. Of all mobile devices, the iPhone has an 11% share of all web usage and iTouch has 7.4%.

The next closest is Motorola’s RAZR V3 at 3%.

The iPhone continues to dominate.