The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘market’

It’s not a huge deal – $7 off – but if you’re in the market for a new DS, maybe to rock some Pokemon (now with Pokewalkers! ™ ) eCost has a rectified DS Lite (not the DSi) for $88. Obviously this thing is refurbished so don’t expect it to have that new Mario smell – an admixture of garlic and patchoulli, judging by Mario’s dreams in Super Mario World 2 – but it’s black and it’s fun for the whole family

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CrunchDeals: $88 Nintendo DS Lite

Amazon is selling Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85, today only.

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CrunchDeals: Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85

3D TVs are coming whether we want them to or not. TV makers and content providers aren’t testing the water - they’re jumping head-first and pulling consumers in, too. But like high definition a few years back, early adapters will be forced to pay a high premium and suffer through a format war of sort before it really catches on.

Take a look at Sony’s just-announced 3D lineup: The company announced eight 3D BRAVIA TVs for the Japanese market along with a set of necessary 3D accessories, which will compete against Panasonic and Samsung sets when they all eventually hit the market in the coming months. Nevermind that the US models might be slightly different. Let’s talk about the multiple steps needed to watch 3D content on your brand new 3D TV.

In the months following the iPhone App Store’s launch in July 2008, it became clear that the platform was turning into a gold rush.  Success stories of one-man companies earning $250,000 in a few months became common. And even though the odds of striking it rich were clearly much lower than the media portrayed, a huge surge of developers started building iPhone applications. Android Market, where meager sales have been the norm, was left in the dust.

Now Android Market is getting its own glimmers of hope. Edward Kim, who built the application “Car Locator” around five months ago, has just announced that he’s pulling in $13,000 a month from the application, which “started as a little side-project while [he] was vacationing with [his] family”.

Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much).

So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success.  Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature.

Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.”

Here are some of Kim’s other observations:

• The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day. Too bad I didn’t have a Valentines date this year — we would’ve gone somewhere real special!
• There appears to be clear peaks on the weekends and during holidays. This was always my hunch, but I think I can finally say this with certainty since the signal-to-noise ratio is much better now.
• Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands. But the Android market appears to rotate applications in and out of the featured apps list in some psedo-random fashion. Every time I open the Marketplace app, the featured list is different and most of the time, I don’t even see my app on there.
• The price of the application was increased from $1.99 to $3.99. I ran a few price experiments and was surprised to see that though I doubled the price of the app, the number of purchases decreased by much less than half. Android users appear to have a willingness to pay more than a couple dollars for apps.
• Piracy appears to be an increasing problem. A quick search for Car Locator on Twitter reveals links where people can download the .apk file without paying. I tend to have the same attitude on piracy as Balsamiq, so I’m not too worried about it, but I would love to hear some typical statistics on Android piracy.

InFocus is under new management and ready to thrive again. The company is now more lean and ready to strike at the flat screen market. But not with a home AV flat screen or even a dedicated signage panel, but rather with a boardroom flat screen set that blends the low price of a consumer-grade TV with many of the features found in a commercial model

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InFocus aims new Thin Display Series flat screens at boardrooms, schools

A WebOS port of the popular GB/CGA emulator is pretty rocking’, even though it only runs at 90% speed on a good day. The hackers who figured all this out will get it back up to speed shortly but don’t expect to download this at the Apps Market or whatever Palm is calling it

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Mario Kart (and more) for your Palm Pre

If you just so happen to be in the market for a second hand space craft, NASA has a deal for you, pal. The Space Shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour are  currently for sale with a price tag of $28.2 m each. Just think, you could park one of these bad boys in your trailer park and relieve its glory days

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CrunchDeals: A slightly-used NASA Space Shuttle

For some odd reason Slashgear has been using the term smartbook in their posts, a portmanteau that is, arguably, about as descriptive as “sandwichbacon” or “cleverob/gyn” in that it conflates two terms in with the suggestion that other members of its own classification are not equally sandwich-oriented, clever, or smart. While we will forgive them this slip, they just got a fax from the law firm in Germany tasked with protecting this term in the market. Seriously, Smartbook AG: nobody gives two piffles about the smartbook name.

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Smartbook trademark owners not as specifically intelligent as their product

Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones.

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Review: Nexus One

And now D-Link is in the home security business. The company, of whose router I bought several months ago and fight to use on a daily basis (seriously, the Internet just cuts out at times… what are you gonna do?), has just announced a series of home monitoring devices, including the Home Monitoring Starter Kit ($149).

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D-Link now has thingamajigs that will remotely monitor your house for security breaches. Amazing.