Michael Yuan

We had a very good Mobile Monday meeting tonight at Motive! The topic is rich applications and app stores. I did a presentation on the iPhone App Store. Due to popular demand, the presentation is here!

In the meanwhile, the Pinch Media presentation I was talking about is here: (I just find it remarkable that PinchMedia concluded that the majority of apps would not be supported by Ads — coming from a company that sells ads to make money!)

http://www.pinchmedia.com/appstore-secrets/

Additional resources on app store marketing:

* Ringtone apps and Financial Realities of the App Store

* Raising prices and Dropping prices

* But all those “ringtone app” complaints ignore the long tail in the app store

And finally, here are some stories from people who “made it” — it is actually not all that uncommon to strike it rich in the app store.

* iPhone game saves a family’s home

* $30,000 per day for iFart

* Austin-based small shop Pangea produced two iPhone games that have generated more than $1 million apiece

As iPhone developers, we all heard of success stories of people selling 10,000+ copies of their apps per day in the app store, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in mere weeks. I always wondered what it is like to have a truly popular application in the app store. Well, now I know.

Just a week after we released Hook Mobile’s Multimedia Messaging app, it’s download number has skyrocketed to 12,000+ / day, and it is still accelerating! At this rate, we will have one million users in a quarter. Those are not your average “web users” — they are people who downloaded the application to their phone, and confirmed their phone numbers with us!

Okay, the Multimedia Messaging app is free and we are not exactly making a load of money yet. And, as the reviews indicate, there are a fair amount of problems (partly because we never anticipated this amount of traffic to hit our servers and support staff in such short time!) But to me, this is an eye opener on what a successful iPhone application can do. A lot of lessons learned that can hopefully help us market other for-pay applications.

Onward!

I just received a hard copy of my book “Seam Framework” from my publisher today. That means you should be able to get it from Amazon and Barnes and Noble very soon.

The book is the “second edition” of the original JBoss Seam book I wrote back in 2006, which was a JavaOne and Amazon best seller. But, it is much more than a “sequel” of the original book, my co-author Jacob Orshalick has made many major contributions to the book to address the latest and greatest features in Seam and WebBeans. Check it out!

The picture shows both the original “JBoss Seam” book and the “Seam Framework” book side by side — the photo on the cover of the original book was taken by Ju during our trip to the Death Valley in 2005.

In a related story, my friend Norman Richards (also a core developer on the Seam team) spotted the Chinese translation of the original Seam book while he was in vacation in China last month. Now, anyone in China wants to buy one and send to me?