Last November Kostas Eleftheriou, a 25-year-old London-based entrepreneur, was
standing in his bathroom after a shower when the steamed-up mirror caught
his eye. “It was my eureka moment,” he recalled.
Like an increasing number of business-minded young people, Eleftheriou had
been trying to come up with an application - or app - that users would pay
to download to their iPhones. He decided that a mock steam that you can wipe
away on your touchscreen, with an accompanying squeaky noise, was a winner
because “it would only take seven days to make and is so simple my mum would
understand it”. He called it iSteam and it has already netted his company
more than £40,000. Not bad for a week's work.
There was a time, of course, when young people seeking fame and fortune threw
on pinstriped suits and headed off to the City with dreams of earning a
six-figure salary. In the past few months, however, the rules have changed.
The City has taken to firing people en masse and a tantalising new way has
emerged to earn money. All you need is a basic Mac, some decent computer
skills and a killer idea . . . then the recession will look anything but
grim.
Take Steve Hyde, a 29-year-old environmental scientist from London. He has a
respectable day job mopping up pollution, but in his spare time he has been
toiling in his bedroom designing an application that tells you where the
nearest PizzaExpress is.
“I got an iPhone three or four months ago,” he explained, “and started seeing
all this stuff you could download, from games to navigation tools and funny
stuff. I wondered who was producing it all and it seemed it was people like
me in their room upstairs, sticking stuff up for 59p a go and realising they
can make real money.”
Real money could be an understatement. Since Apple launched its iPhone in June
2007, it has been catnip for geeks and stylistas alike. But it was not until
July 2008, when the firm brought out a superfast 3G model that Joe Public
could make cash out of it.
The new version included a feature called App Store, a sort of online market
where people can peddle applications and games that will turn a phone into a
flute, a pinball machine, a spirit level, a croupier’s table, a whoopee
cushion or a multi-lingual translator.
At first the choice was limited and the downloads were few but, a year on, the
number of apps has reached 30,000 and worldwide downloads are poised to
exceed 1 billion.
It is estimated that the App Store does three sales a second and could become
more successful than iTunes, its sister online music store. Users of iPhones
buy twice as many apps - more than 50 each on average - as iPod owners buy
songs. It is being touted as the biggest techie gold rush since the birth
pangs of mass internet use in the mid1990s.
BlackBerry, Google and Nokia are all in various stages of development with
their own versions of App Store, which will make the phenomenon truly
global.
“What’s exciting about the App Store is that it’s so democratic,” said David
Rowan, editor of Wired, the technology magazine. “If you’ve got an idea and
know something about [computer] coding you could have a shot at making large
amounts of money. You can make £200 a week with a moderately successful
application. It’s a good way to top up your income.”
Ethan Nicholas, an America programmer, was struggling to make his mortgage
payments last summer so he devised a game called iShoot. “It became so
successful that at one point he was earning £20,000 a day,” marvelled Rowan.
“He made £500,000 in five months.”
The reason why so many cash-strapped techies are trying the App Store is that
the start-up costs are low and the logistics easy. If you already have a
Mac, all it costs is about £59 for a developer’s licence from Apple. The
price of apps varies from free to more than £30, but most cost 59p - you
keep 36p for every unit Apple sells on your behalf.
The cherry on the cake is that the programs are not complex video games that
require millions of pounds and take years to produce. A simple successful
program can take a competent technophile no time to produce. With
distribution and payments sorted by Apple, it is a tantalising proposition.
“Right now what works on the iPhone are very simple, single-user
applications,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers, a venture capital firm.
Murphy, based in California, manages a $100m fund dedicated to apps for mobile
phones. “Things that are cool, fun and provide instant value, work,” he
said. “Anything more complicated is not ramping as fast as the lightweight
stuff that you download, enjoy, get bored with and move on from.”
So if you are hoping to make a fortune, take heed. Some of the biggest hits so
far include iBeer (which fills your screen up with virtual beer, then burps
when you tip it out), iFart (you can guess) and Koi Pond (fish float around
and you prod them with your finger. It was the store’s most-downloaded
paid-for application last year).
Steve Sheraton, a former magician who created iBeer, advocated the quirky
approach. “It’s up to the product’s creator to make people pick your product
among all the thousands of items on the shelves,” he said. “As one of my
Vaudeville magician teachers preached: ‘Be different or better, but most of
all, you gotta have a gimmick’.”
That said, people have come up with plenty of apps with a more useful bent.
Mainstream websites such as Facebook (the biggest hit with an estimated 5m
downloads) and Google Earth have iPhone apps, but some are even more
inventive. With the Betty Crocker app you can type in the contents of your
fridge and it will give you handy recipe suggestions. Stylish Girl stores
images of your clothes and creates ensembles for you to try, while Nike
Training Club has video demonstrations of exercises you can try at the gym.
Some of the most helpful apps are also the most obvious: extensive weather
forecasts, bus route maps, television guides.
The key is having an original wheeze. “I got the idea for PizzaExpress because
one of the first apps I saw was McFinder,” said Hyde, “which used the GPS
function to find McDonald’s, and I thought there should be something for the
more discerning diner. I’m not into computer programming but it seemed like
something that could be done with a little interest and not much work.”
Hyde’s plan sounds positively Gordian compared with iSteam. “We launched it
for free on December 29 and seven days later we had 1m downloads,” said
Eleftheriou.
Does he wish he had charged money from the start? “No, because the idea was to
establish a big user base and now the total number of paid downloads is
110,000, which is very high.
“For the first time in many years, from when computers and games first started
really, one person is able to develop stuff in their own bedroom for
millions of people.”
Naturally, it is stories such as those of Nicholas and Eleftheriou that are
getting amateur programmers excited. Murphy still believes that anyone can
break through with a shrewd enough idea and a bit of luck.
“Despite having 30,000 applications, unknown companies can launch their app
and if it's good it will find its way up the charts,” he said. “We have a
company called Pinger, which had tried some stuff on SMS [text message
format] with limited success. Six weeks ago they launched iPhone apps called
Textfree and Textfree lite [which allow American users to send free text
messages] which hit No 1 or 2, acquiring over 50,000 users a day with no
promotion or marketing. [It’s] a perfect example of a relatively level
playing field.”
Level but crowded. With the App Store filling up it is getting harder to
guarantee success, as four employees of this newspaper recently discovered.
“As we all had iPhones, four of us decided to have a bet and see who could
dream up an application and get it on the iPhone App Store first,” said
Simon Regan-Edwards, production director of The Sunday Times.
Jamie Ferguson, from our IT department, got there first with an app that
correlates Ordnance Survey maps with the phone’s GPS, which proved a brief
hit with ramblers.
“There was a day or two when Jamie crept above Spore, a game that its
creator EA [a huge gaming firm] had spent millions on,” said Regan-Edwards.
His own app - for looking at the solar system - took ages to build and has
so far netted “enough to buy myself a cup of coffee every day”.
Success seems to depend upon a whimsical stroke of genius or pushing the
technology to the limit. Eleftheriou says his company, GreatApps, has come
up with a piece of technology that makes the iPhone not just feel where you
push the screen, but how hard. “We’re building our next app around that, but
it’s impossible for me to tell you any more,” he said darkly.
“Everyday people can still dream, too,” said Rowan. “It’s nice to know there’s
still an exciting, innovative way to make money these days - and one that
hasn’t been nationalised by Alistair Darling.”
Top downloads
Top 10 free apps (2008)
1 iPint
Drink a virtual pint
2 Facebook
Social networking site
3 Google Earth
Satellite images of planet
4 Lightsaber Unleashed
You are Luke Skywalker
5 Labyrinth Lite Edition
Guide a steel ball game
6 Remote
Turns phone into TV control
7 Tap Tap Revenge
Dance with your fingers
8 Touch Hockey
Arcade game
9 Flashlight
Screen becomes a torch
10 Shazam
Names songs being played
Top 10 paid-for apps (2008)
1 Koi Pond
Makes tropical fish portable
2 Crash Bandicoot
Racing game. Tilt to steer
3 Super Monkey Ball
Primate adventure game
4 Moto Chaser
Two-wheeled racing
5 PocketGuitar
No strings attached
6 Texas Hold’em
Poker game
7 allRadio
Global radio receiver
8 Cro-Mag Rally
Cavemen kart racing
9 iChalky
Dancing stick man
10 Air Hockey
Arcade game
QUIRKY AND USEFUL iPHONE APPS
LOSE IT!
You tap in everything you eat and drink, it tots up your calorific intake,
offsets it against what you burn off and produces a graph to show whether
you’re getting fatter or thinner. Scary stuff
FLIGHT CONTROL
Game that allows you to imagine that you are an air traffic controller given
the job of looking after flights in the Los Angeles area. Incredibly, it has
been the No 1 paid-for iPhone application in the past week
MASSAGER
Does exactly what it says on the tin ... well, kind of. Transforms your phone
into a neck massager by virtue of the vibrate tool, but one that is unlikely
to have much impact on anyone but the most feebly muscled
iBEERTurns your iPhone screen into a full, frothy pint of beer you can
tip up and “drink”, complete with a polite burp sound effect at the end. For
those who don’t like alcoholic drinks, there is iMilk. You can imagine ...
ACE BUDGET LITE
You enter everything you spend into a database that churns out charts and
suggestions for how to spend less. It is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring
an accountant, but no less annoying
ALARM FREE
Emits a piercing alarm should you be attacked at the bus stop. As it requires
you to unlock your phone and open the app first, perhaps it’s not much of
deterrent. Plus they might steal your phone too
iFART
Users pick from an extensive menu of noises, including Burrito Maximo and
Laundry Day, that the iPhone then recreates with searing realism. Scourge of
teachers, librarians and anyone over the age of six
STEP TRAK LITE
A pedometer that tells you exactly how many steps you take during any given
journey. It even tells you whether your activity should be classified as
moderate or vigorous exercise
