by ·Comments Off on Evernote gets Eye-Fi connectivity

Evernote gets Eye-Fi connectivity. Shoot a picture with a digital camera, and it’ll automatically upload the pictures to Evernote, where it’ll recognize text in the picture and make it searchable. Can’t tell from the video if they have geo-tagging it as well, but this is definitely a nice addition to EverNote.

by ·Comments Off on New GE CFL Bulb

This new CFL bulb will be rolling out into stores on Dec 28, 2008. Looks like a regular bulb, but with CFL guts.

by ·Comments Off on A Good iPhone Idea – but with problems

Seth Godin posts about an iPhone idea to create an app to transmit traffic information between users. This is exactly like Dash Express, which is a GPS that does all this for you.

Unfortunately for Dash, they are killing their GPS devices. Does that mean it was a bad idea? Not at all. It’s a GREAT idea.

Now, would this make a great iPhone app? Probably, but the problem with it is that if you’re giving routing information, you need to know where you’re going in the first place? Why not let the iPhone’s built-in map do it? Well, that’s against the iPhone rules.

Someone’s going to figure out how to do this properly, either through an agreement with Apple, after Apple loosens the rules up, or through a Dash-like device that does this in a way the company can keep going. (Maybe Garmin will buy Dash out?)

by ·Comments Off on Pricing iPhone Apps

Over on Safe From the Losing Fight, Andy Finnell posted about the wrong way to price iPhone apps, and I have to say that I agree.

If you look at the pricing for other phone apps on other mobile platforms, prices are much higher, enabling developers to at least stand a fighting chance to make a living. In particular, the apps on mobile phones usually are $4.95 or higher. On the Palm, a reasonably good Sodoku game runs around $9.99 or even higher. The same apps on the iPhone are either free or $0.99. How in the heck can a developer make a living doing that?

The real killer of pricing at $0.99 (or even $4.95) is that the support you can provide at that price is virtually nothing. Really the only thing you can do is write a web page with an FAQ. Answering that support e-mail actually costs you money if it ends up just being a “user error”, rather than a real bug.

Now, don’t get me wrong… You need to make sure your apps are as bug free as possible and getting reports from users is important, but at $0.99 answering questions for confused users that don’t understand how to use your application can kill a product, because you can spend all your time doing support, and not developing know apps.

Apple (and Sega) set expectations for what applications should be priced by making Monkey Ball $9.99. On any other mobile platform, a game like that would run between $19.99 and $24.99. I think developers are in the mindset, “Well, this thing isn’t as good as Monkey Ball….I have to price it lower”. But a year from now, how many of those people are still going to be around?