Published: Sunday, April 25, 2010
It can pay to be first with iPad apps
BALTIMORE — While Apple is enjoying the early success of its iPad, the tech giant has once again captured the imagination of those looking to make a buck from its latest gadget.
Among them are the creative workers at Fastspot, an interactive design firm that built a new digital game for the device months before they even had it in hand. When the iPad went on sale this month, their Jumbalaya word game was one of the first applications available in Apple’s iPad App Store.
While the game costs $2.99 and only about 150 have been sold, Fastspot didn’t want to miss the chance to be on iPad’s ground floor for apps. For every hot, successful program in Apple’s marketplace for mobile applications, there are scores that hardly make any money.
“We, like many people, were thinking this was going to be a gold rush opportunity,” said Zach Waugh, a Fastspot developer who helped build the game.
Software developers are looking to the iPad as a new revenue generator for them. iPhone apps now number more than 185,000, but apps for the iPad, which has a larger screen, only number around 4,000. With a less-crowded field in the iPad App Store, developers are racing to build apps that would have less competition.
Expectations are so high that a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, doubled their funding for promising iPhone and iPad developers to $200 million last month.
The Apple gadgets may be generating the most buzz among consumers and software developers, but they are not alone. Google’s Android mobile software system has thousands of apps. And BlackBerry users also have many apps on offer.
So far, the iPad has surpassed Apple’s sales expectations. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said last week that more than 450,000 had been sold since the April 3 launch. Demand for the portable tablet computer has been so high that Apple recently announced it had to push back its international launch for the device by a month, to late May.
Millions of iPads are expected to be in consumers’ hands by the end of the year, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are planning their own forays into tablet computers. Such devices and the popularity of applications on cell phones have led many businesses to consider building their own mobile apps as extensions of websites they’ve made for desktop computers.
Among them are the creative workers at Fastspot, an interactive design firm that built a new digital game for the device months before they even had it in hand. When the iPad went on sale this month, their Jumbalaya word game was one of the first applications available in Apple’s iPad App Store.
While the game costs $2.99 and only about 150 have been sold, Fastspot didn’t want to miss the chance to be on iPad’s ground floor for apps. For every hot, successful program in Apple’s marketplace for mobile applications, there are scores that hardly make any money.
“We, like many people, were thinking this was going to be a gold rush opportunity,” said Zach Waugh, a Fastspot developer who helped build the game.
Software developers are looking to the iPad as a new revenue generator for them. iPhone apps now number more than 185,000, but apps for the iPad, which has a larger screen, only number around 4,000. With a less-crowded field in the iPad App Store, developers are racing to build apps that would have less competition.
Expectations are so high that a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, doubled their funding for promising iPhone and iPad developers to $200 million last month.
The Apple gadgets may be generating the most buzz among consumers and software developers, but they are not alone. Google’s Android mobile software system has thousands of apps. And BlackBerry users also have many apps on offer.
So far, the iPad has surpassed Apple’s sales expectations. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said last week that more than 450,000 had been sold since the April 3 launch. Demand for the portable tablet computer has been so high that Apple recently announced it had to push back its international launch for the device by a month, to late May.
Millions of iPads are expected to be in consumers’ hands by the end of the year, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are planning their own forays into tablet computers. Such devices and the popularity of applications on cell phones have led many businesses to consider building their own mobile apps as extensions of websites they’ve made for desktop computers.
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