Archive for March 5th, 2010

Financing: appbackr

Here’s an intriguing option for financing your app development — appbackr, “The New Way To Finance Your Apps”:

  1. appbackr helps connect developers with big ideas and small pockets with wholesale funders.
  2. appbackr users can pre-purchase apps they want to see developed at a wholesale price.
  3. With cashflow from appbackr investors, app developers can focus on what they do best.
  4. Sell your app at retail prices, and purchasers make the profit on each unit they own.

That does sound intriguing, doesn’t it? There’s some more detail in Mobile Orchard’s post about them:

The wholesale buyers are arranged in a queue. The first wholesale buyer’s units are covered by the first sales in the App Store. The latter ones are fulfilled in order.

The developer gives the full amount of the sales covered by the wholesale units to the wholesale purchasers. After the units in wholesale queue are completely sold out the relationship with the wholesale buyers ends and the app developer gets the full amount of all future sales.

appbackr also offers wholesale purchases for finished apps. Here the scenario is that you’ve finished an app — it’s in the store — and you want a block of cash up-front. You sell wholesale priced apps to a buyer who then earns back the full amount as they sell in the store.

Wholesale buyers make $0.20/unit for concept stage apps or $0.12/unit.

Certainly a novel way to structure your venture capital efforts, yes. If anybody’s intrigued enough to check it out further, please share your experiences!

Continue Reading →
2

XML Parsing

If you’ve got any XML-parsing tasks on deck, here is a most exhaustively thorough comparison of your options:

How To Chose The Best XML Parser for Your iPhone Project

We hadn’t even heard of all of these, actually. So far we’ve only needed to parse data feeds in our iPhone projects, so we’ve just used the SDK’s NSXMLParser for trivial jobs, and for heavy lifting the TBXML parser we mentioned here, which does indeed seem to come out well in this comparison too; but if we ever run into a situation where editability is required, from a quick read through here looks like GDataXML is a solid frontrunner for that. But options are always nice!

UPDATE:

RaptureXML is a new attempt at making usage easy!

Continue Reading →
0