Anyone remember the late 90’s hype over dotcom names? Everyone was clawing their neighbors and friends to stake their claim on some dotcom property like they were ’49ers in a gold rush prospector’s fever dream. Back then it wasn’t unusual to sit down for a haircut and have the barber pitch you on his new dotcom hair-related venture that was an absolute lock to make him and his investors GDP-of-Mexico kind of money. Does that irrational exuberance ring a bell? If you didn’t get to experience that fun in the 90’s don’t worry, you can see the mini-sequel being played out in the iPhone App Store right now.
Here are the things I’ve read in the last two days that have hearkened me back to a crazier time when sock puppets pitched pet food.
- Casinos are on alert that iPhones are being used to count cards. That in its self is unsurprising, money and technology are happy roommates in the criminal youth hostel that is Vegas. The hype portion of the story is that because its being done on the shiny iPhone with an app available over the app store it is now news.
- iFart and ‘Pull my Finger’, two highbrow apps that were clearly made instead of that business productivity suite the creators ‘totally planned on’, have landed in a civil court case over trademark infringement. This story hit CNN.
- A nine year old kid in Singapore just released his first iPhone app, which was a huge hit to the tune of 4,000 downloads. That was even before the free press got a hold of the story. Now expect to see Apple pushing Objective C as a supplement to Oregon Trail in our public school computer classes (not that the Apple 2e’s many schools have could even run xCode)
- Average Joe makes $600 grand a month on the iPhone application he made in his spare time. Not that there is anything average about Ethan Nicholas, the Sun software developer who wrote and aptly marketed his iShoot game and got a whole bunch of lucky when it took off big. No, the ‘Average Joe’ part is what everyone reading the short news blurb will hear in their head, as in ‘if he can do it so can I’, thereby fueling the next big surge of iPhone Programming for Dummies books.
All this hype is fun to watch but there are a couple things that I suspect will come if this bubble is anything like the 90’s. First I envision corporate boards around the world calling up their marketing department asking to get their logo branded on an iPhone app that does ‘something hip and cool’, never mind that its a paper company in Nova Scotia who’s clients still use rotary dial phones. Then there will be the requests by friends and family to help them with their vanity app consisting entirely of coverflow pictures of their cat (free to download, $35 bucks for the upgrade). Finally, like the 90’s, it will all end when the one billionth iPhone app is released and the only company to actually still make money is the in the business of indexing all the apps and selling ads next to the results.
Google and Microsoft announced similar app stores for their mobile operating systems, coming soon. The real question everyone is asking themselves is will important applications like iFart be cross-platform supported. One can only hope.
Photo attributed to Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake
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