I feel a lot of the reaction here will be, man if only I could come up with something like that! The reality is, though, they probably spent a lot of time on this project, and when you divide the $100k up between the people who worked on it and the number of hours they worked, it does not come out to a ton of money. Also the $100k in a month seems unlikely to be repeated - a bunch of people downloaded it for the "coolness" factor, but it will fade and drop off, as happens with so many apps that are basically tech demos rather than truly useful and productive apps. To summarize, this is likely not a good business model.
However, that's not to say the project wasn't worth it for the people who worked on it - just a caution that while the headline is catchy, the upside for these guys is probably the resume / VC pitch bullet rather than the money.
Indeed. In fact, we had almost exactly the same idea when brainstorming about cool iPhone apps with a couple of people, but thought it was too lame and that we couldn't pull it off in a high-quality way ;) Ideas don't matter, people (with their skills, enthusiasm, etc) do :)
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why it took iSteam barely a week ... to briefly become #1 entertainment application in the App Store."
I'm not so sure it's so obvious. Why is playing with steam so popular? I downloaded it and liked it, but I still don't know what was so compelling about it.
Any pointers as to why suddenly there has been such an improvement in water simulation effects? Is it just that computers have become faster, or have some nifty algorithm ideas emerged in recent times? Even the iBeer stuff impressed me.
Really?!? You're questioning why Apple iPhone users would want to purchase an app solely because it's shiny "eye candy"? Sorry, that joke just writes itself.
Think about what else in the world costs $.99 -- can't even get a 20oz soda for that anymore -- and then think about what cool software -- like games -- normally cost.
This is a cool little piece of technology for less than the cost of a soda. That's a) something you can't really get anywhere else and b) possibly the beginning of the micropayment revolution for things other than music that we've been waiting on for awhile now (unfortunately self contained to the iphone for now, but I'm sure coming to the rest of the product line soon)
Because of the difference between deploying infrastructure vs. maintaining infrastructure already deployed.
Companies seem to be willing to deploy infrastructure to collect e.g. 1 dollar payments, but not 10 cent payments.
I'm guessing that they'll be willing to maintain that infrastructure even as the value of the payment decreases due to inflation, since the per transaction costs are low and likely to get lower, and there's little risk in maintaining existing infrastructure.
However, that's not to say the project wasn't worth it for the people who worked on it - just a caution that while the headline is catchy, the upside for these guys is probably the resume / VC pitch bullet rather than the money.