Most of the apps I see are pretty uninspired. This looks interesting, novel, and useful. I keep hearing how tough the app store is, but if you actually "make something people want" is that really true?
$1 million after being top 5 app for 3 months? Urrgh. There's either 2 or 4 (two founders + two employees?) so $250k in revenue for a year's work isn't exactly huge. It's a big win I'm sure for Occipital--a million dollars is a million dollars--but if that's the pay off for a home run the iPhone is not a market I want to play in.
This is very inspirational. We work with the Occipital guys on FoodScanner, and it is cool to see a product rise to the top just by virtue of being kick-ass.
I might be wrong on this but I will say it anyway.<p>The original idea for this came out of the Google App contest for Android. This was the idea that won the competition. So the idea was available for anyone to execute after that.<p>The red laser team might have come up with the idea independently or just learned about it from the Google Android contest. I am not sure if the contest or the app came out first. Someone here might know.
Theory: As the internet becomes a more developed medium of communication, word of mouth will approach being the only way of marketing a product. Quality will be the only way to deserve word of mouth.
This one is bittersweet, as we had the idea, the staff, and the time and money to implement it, but chose not to, because we substantially underestimated the size of the market.<p>Where by 'we' I mean 'I'. It's completely my fault that RedLaser was allowed to win this market. I killed the project.<p>It's nice to see that we were at least somewhat correct on the general goodness of the concept, though.<p>Congrats, and nice work, guys.
Good for them! A great app, at the right time, on the ideal platform - exactly the kind of thing that should be a raging success. And now this awesome developer's got a whole bunch of money, who knows what great things he's got the resources to do ..
iphone users are so gullible - when you are all said and done with paying for your iphone and your service contract and your 'redlaser' app, you're over 2k in the hole, and for what? a 'mobile cuecat'?
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat</a>