Category: Business

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Business

Dear Steve

Craig Hockenberry: “I’m one of the developers that is affected by the Lodsys patent infringement claim. I’m writing not to beg for your support, but rather to give you a better idea of how this legal action affects the average iOS developer.”

Go read the entire article. Craig gets to the point. Paying this troll won’t break the bank, but it opens the door to others.

Something else to keep in mind. Lodsys reserves the right to increase their licensing fee at any time. So, what if 0.5+% goes up to 5% of your revenue, or 10% of your revenue? That would definitely hurt the ecosystem.

Categories
Business

Dave Winer on the Lodsys Mess

Dave Winer: “The gist: Apple requires developers to use an Apple-provided service in order to sell their apps in the App Store. The developers are getting sued for patent infringement for doing this. Apple itself is exempt from being sued because they did a separate deal with the owners of the patent.”

It’s true developer are required to use In App Purchasing if the want to allow you to add to an existing product. A lot of shops do this to upgrade you from the free ad supported version to the paid version that doesn’t include ads. A lot of games use IAP so you can purchase additional levels inside the game. It’s pretty slick, one tap installation.

What’s not entirely accurate is how Dave presents it. Developers do not have to use In App Purchase. You only have to use it if you choose to upgrade your application the easy, duh, makes perfect sense to me, way.

If I had this feature, I’d pull it. I’d make two versions of my application. Free with minimal features and paid, with everything. The free one would include a statement that said something like this.

“Software patents are broken. So broken, in fact, great features that would make this application better were removed because of Patent Troll, Lodsys.”

It would be something like that anyway.

I’m sure there are a few patent trolls just waiting to see how this plays out. Open floodgates, perform cashectomy, and destroy the app developer echosystem.

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Business

Hashtag Fresno, Open for Business

Fresnobeehive.com: “Co-founders Travis Sheridan and Irma Olguin, Jr. saw that other cities had such spaces, and felt Fresno’s creatives needed their own place: something better than a coffee shop, yet more accessible than an Executive Suite. They envision their space fostering creativity, collaboration and community.”

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s official, Hashtag Fresno is open for business! They even have their new, very stylish, website up. I like the green.

Our roving reporter, Mr. Jerry Fahrni, snapped this picture just yesterday.

Time to get downtown and give it a look.

Categories
Business Development

A Common Mistake

Dave Winer: “Why, as a creative person, did I have to become a corporate executive? That was a mistake. Good software, like anything creative, is made by people who focus on product, not business. Managing a company, raising money, dealing with crises of all kinds, took me away from the thing I do best, and love, which is create.”

This is a common mistake made at a lot of software companies. You take a great software developer and reward him, or her, by making them a manager. Sure there are still problems to solve but one of your best resources will now spend time solving problems not related to technology. They’ll have to deal with people problems and a lot of the time they’re no equipped to do that.

If a techie is completely happy building product, let them build product, if they have a desire to become a manager give them a shot, but don’t be too surprised if they come back at some point and ask to go back to coding. It happens.

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Business

Publicis Lineage

The Publicis Lineage

Yes, I work for a rather large company, again.

Hey, if you want to be acquired by a French company you should hire me. No, seriously, this is the second time I’ve been at a place acquired by a HUGE French company. Smile, life is good!

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Business

@Twitter’s Crap Sandwich

Marco Arment: “Oh, and one more thing: formerly-xAuth apps that need DM access have only 12 days to build this completely new login interface, test it, and release a new version — and, for iOS and Mac App Store apps, get it approved — before their existing apps start being denied access to DMs and probably display confusing and incorrect error messages, since the developers could never have foreseen this condition.”

And the topper to this crap sandwich is Twitter doesn’t have to implement this for their clients, just third parties.

I feel really bad for people, like Iconfactory, that got Lodsys’d and this news, all in the same week.

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Business

A Call to Boycott In App Purchase

Mike Lee: “If you currently have an app on the App Store that uses in-app purchase, you don’t have a choice. While removing in-app purchase from your app may not protect you from lawsuits, leaving it in at this point is tantamount to asking to be sued.”

I couldn’t agree more.

If you’re using In App Purchase you should remove it, at least until this is settled.

Categories
Business

Prophetic

Mike Lee: “You might think that sounds dramatic. A small cut is not going to kill a thriving business, true, but this is the opening salvo to all-out war. The parasites have taken notice of the goldrush, and would like nothing more than the precedent that allows every modern-day mobster with a patent lawyer on retainer to start cracking nuts.”

That post was on May 16. Today, May 18, we get this lovely news. That’s right, it’s a different company going after patent royalties.

From the article: “Jim McGill, chairman of MacroSolve, has said that the patent covers “thousands of existing apps” that collect data and send it to a central server. “

Thousands of apps. Here we go again.

Categories
Business

Publicis Acquisition

PublicisIt’s true, LEVEL was acquired by Rosetta who has now been acquired by Publicis. I joined LEVEL Studios in June 2010, in September 2010 we became a part of Rosetta, and now, in May 2011 we’re a part of Publicis. One location, three different companies, it’s been a crazy year.

The bottom line is we’re still LEVEL. I’ve had some folks ask what changed with the Rosetta acquisition, the answer for me is nothing. Not a single thing changed. We continued to work on the same things, with the same delivery dates, in the manner we’d worked on them prior to the acquisition. The LEVEL culture, which is absolutely fantastic by the way, hasn’t changed. Our leadership, hasn’t changed. Basically it’s the same place I joined in June 2010.

I do want to make one thing clear about the Publicis, I was the first to break the news. I was, you just didn’t pick it up. The audio wasn’t great for our conference call, so most of us had ZERO idea what the actual name of our parent company really was.

What's a puba seat?

And later I continued to let the cat out of the bag with this gem, I’m surprised nobody picked up on it.

NO COMMENT!

Wasn’t that an obvious clue we were acquired? Come on! Oh, and I wasn’t alone in my confusion about our new parent company’s name.

PoodleFish?

Categories
Apple Business Life

Apple Smackdown Coming?

Cult of Mac: “Patent troll Lodsys has been suing iOS indie developers for using Apple’s own in-app purchasing mechanism. Sleazily, the company has claimed that they had no choice but to go after the little guy because Apple refused to cough up an App-Store-wide patent license.”

Apple could step in here and be a real knight in shining armor. They could offer to pay villainous scum Lodsys out of their 30% take from In App Purchase.

We’ll see.