Jonah Grant

Your surfing through the App Store and come across an awesome app, and then you see the price tag, $.99.  What do you think? Way too expensive? Should it be free? or are you willing to pay the price for a great piece of software?

This is the biggest problem in the App Store.  People these days are so used to seeing a cool app and then downloading it for free and then they get used to it, not paying developer for their work.  They don’t understand that these cool little things take time and money to make, yet they still don’t pay for these utterly cool products that people devote time and money to.

Just look at appulous, “The solution to a flawed App Store.” I personally know people who will find a cool app that will cost $.99.  Only $.99 and the first thing they do after they see it on the App Store is they open appulous and pirate it for free.  Not a good ‘solution’ if you ask me.  One of my applications, Pong - iPhone Edition, had over 18,000 free downloads on appulous within a few weeks of it launching on the App Store back in May.  Now let me remind you that it is one dollar.  Really? You don’t have the money to spend one dollar on a game? Wait, how much is your iPhone or iPod touch? $200? $300? $400? If you can afford such an expensive device, something is seriously wrong if you cannot get the money to pay less than a dollar for an app and you feel that you need to get it for free, which is illegal and you can be fined up to $100,000 per piece of software.

While I could go on forever talking about different situations where pricing has had an impact on the application, but I’d like to focus on one.

Ramp Champ.  An excellent skee-ball game on the iPhone and iPod touch.  It costs $2.99 and ships with four ramps and for $.99 you can purchase two more ramps in a ramp pack (currently four ramp packs exist) Have you ever heard of a skee-ball game on the App Store? How about the number one app on the App Store right now? Skee-Ball by Freeverse. Yes, it is the same basic concept, but Ramp Champ takes it much further (I mean it) with tickets, prizes, stunning graphics and its an overall amazing game.  Yet, it has not even pierced the top 25 apps while Freeverse’s Skee-Ball has been at #1 for almost a week because Skee-Ball is $.99 while Ramp Champ is $2.99.

That really says something about the App Store.  Starting today and for the weekend, I am bumping the price of my applications up to $10.  I hope that others will join me in the cult against the free/$.99 App Store to prove that software is worth more than it is priced as on the App Store.  If you are going to make your application $10 for the weekend, be sure to link to http://cld.ly/92ccl in your app description.

Apps that are included are listed below

- ICanHasCheezburger by MC Development

- iDjembe by MC Development

- Pong - iPhone Edition by Jonah Grant

- Hot Links by Jonah Grant

- Boom by [creative]

Please email me to get your app listed here if you raised the price of it.

matthewrex:

I’ve been a fan of ngmoco since I played their first game for the iPhone. Great innovators, great polish, good stuff. You’re always guaranteed something well designed and thought out. ngmoco has also always charged a decent premium price for their games. I bought Rolando 2 for $10 and Star Defense for $6. I had no problem paying these prices in an AppStore full of $0.99 games because ngmoco’s polish was through the roof, and with the recent Plus+ integration, I was totally drinking the ngmoco koolaid.

Now though, I fear we’ve lost these talented devs to something called greed. Not intent with charging for games traditionally, they’ve opted to release games for free and require you to pay-to-play. Now I’m no stranger to this formula, I’ve played MMOs and the like, but I wasn’t quite expecting it to be so dramatically greedy that it severely effected my willingness to play.

Read More

Dick Costolo is the founder of Feedburner which was acquired by Google in 2007. He is currently the COO of Twitter. He has also performed in Chicago’s Annoyance Theater and various improv shows and festivals. (via CrunchBase)

Jonah:  What was so promising about Twitter back in 2007 that made you join 6 others and invest $5 million in it?

Dick: When I first saw Twitter back in 2007 I was like many other people: I didn’t get it, I didn’t really understand it and what it was but when more people started using it and my friends got on I realized how many people were using it.  I remember specifically one time I tweeted that I landed in New York and someone in San Francisco said,  “Hey I’m in New York for the week, lets go out to dinner.”  This is something that would never happen on any other social networking platform.

Jonah:  How does Twitter generate revenue to keep on running?

Dick: So I think the short answer is there are many, many ways that Twitter can make money.  Paid accounts for businesses, analytics, special profile pages, advertising opportunities with millions of people following them, everything.

Read More

Here I was, sitting here with my jailbroken iPhone, about to click “Restore,” when a tweet comes up in my timeline from hacker extraordinaire, Steven Troughton-Smith talking about his new Exposé like springboard hack.  The idea came from an Exposé concept for the iPhone from earlier this week.  Let me say that again, came from a CONCEPT.  Steven got started on it, and within two hours had a stable version of Exposé running on his iPhone.

Read More