Costs Involved With IPhone Application Development

Image via CrunchBase

Given the current boom and income potential of iPhone application development, it's not surprising that so many people have ideas for iPhone apps. And many more people have the ideas than know how to actually turn those ideas into completed Apps for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It's much like the way most people have a great idea for a story or a novel that they just know everyone would want to read-if only they could write.

People are becoming iPhone developers who have other programming experience, and even no real experience at all. iPhone application development classes are cropping up and having to turn people away because they fill quickly, and have three times as many people wanting to take the class as the room can handle. People recognize that right now iPhone application development is simply the thing to be into.

But despite the iPhone developers who have created a nifty little app and become financially independent practically overnight, creating a great app isn't necessarily easy to do. It's not the inability to program that many people have to overcome, but also the costs involved. With iPhone application development the cost can be restrictive.

If you can write applications for the iPhone or you learn how to do it, most of the cost of development is taken care of. That's not to say it won't cost anything, because your biggest cost is time, but the biggest expense is typically hiring someone to do the programming for you. Though some people have seen that iPhone development is a hot ticket have decided to pay people to do everything from design to development to testing, most can't afford to do so. In these cases, iPhone application development can easily cost $5,000, $20,000 or more depending on the type of App. For example, games can run more on the high side to produce with 3D graphics and the like.

Entrepreneurs with money to invest in a new project are the ones who can shell out that kind of money on an application that may not even take off. After all, there are over 25,000 applications in the App Store right now-the only place developers can sell iPhone apps-and most of them aren't going to make their developers rich. Many barely sell at all. So the tales of the folks who have hit it big virtually overnight aren't the common ones.

Yet, it can happen. And even if your iPhone app doesn't become the next "it" thing, it could still sell steadily and make you a considerable amount of money over time. Remember though, even after the expense of the actual programming, it might be necessary to pay people to help them test the app. And then once Apple approves it and starts selling it, Apple takes 30% of the top, so slow sales can be very disappointing.

The cost of hiring a developer can vary widely. Because of the high demand, many are contracted out between $100 and $150 an hour. Others might be able to look at your idea and guess about how many hours it will take, and contract for a flat fee. An application that takes a full week to complete could easily cost $4,000 to $5,000. You can see why the idea of learning iPhone application development yourself has obvious appeal.

About the Author
Jordan Ianelli has been an iPhone App Developer ever since Apple announced the release of the SDK in 2008. After working for 2 iPhone Development Companies, he decided to go on his own and form a company with 2 other iPhone Developers.

Internet traffic superpowers

An Arbor Network study found half the Internet traffic runs through 150 content delivery networks. Two years ago, 10,000 companies accounted for half the traffic, but now there are barely 100 companies that matter on the Web

By: john e dunn

Something extraordinary is happening to the Internet. According to one of the largest analyses of traffic yet undertaken, what the world calls ' the Internet' is rapidly turning into an entity that exists inside and between a tiny number of hosting superpowers.

According to Arbor Networks, which gathered the data for its 2009 Atlas Observatory Report, the implications of this will be profound.

Most people will guess that Google is one of the new Internet superpowers - it accounts for six percent of all Internet traffic of every type - but how many ordinary Internet users have heard of other traffic notables such as Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds or Gravity?

And how many would have heard of a company called Carpathia Hosting? Its MegaUpload, MeaErotik, MegaClick and MegaVideo services have turned it into a company that now accounts for one percent of all Internet traffic, says Arbor, and this will doubtless grow.

The important takeaway is that few of these companies had even been heard of two years ago, and very few of them are big telcos.

To put all this into perspective, in 2007 Arbor found that the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic was accounted for by 30,000 entities, with fifty percent of traffic accounted for by around 10,000 companies.

Only two years later that same fifty percent now runs through only 150 top 'content delivery networks' (CDNs), an astonishing consolidation made more remarkable by the fact that Internet traffic has grown significantly during that time.

"Up to 2007, The Internet meant connecting to lots of servers and data centres around the world," notes Arbor's chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. Now there are barely 100 companies that matter.

Traffic patterns tend to be hidden, mainly because the companies losing out - the traditional telcos and ISPs - don't exactly have an interest in advertising their waning status. The reason for their decline in importance is that Internet traffic is being driven by huge providers with access to content such as video.

"For 150 years, they [British Telecom and other telcos] have had the same business model. Now everyone is trying to get away from being a dumb pipe."

Arbor's Atlas Internet Observatory report crunched traffic from 100 of the Internet's largest entities, accounting for 12 Terabytes of peak throughput, equivalent to about a quarter of the Internet's total at any one moment, said Labovitz.

The importance of this is not simply that a small number of companies will account for a lot of traffic, but that these companies are increasingly what the Internet actually is.

The Internet up to around 2007 was dominated by a hierarchy of companies, co-operating with one another to allow traffic to be passed from one to the other, regardless of size. The new Internet superpowers, in stark contrast, bypass a lot of this and use direct connections from one to the other. If a company is not part of this new core, it could find itself increasingly passed to the 'long tail', a polite way of saying they will be shoved to the fringe.

Video, including video that runs over web/http, now accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic, and is one reason all these direct connections between large data centres are now necessary. IPv6 traffic remains tiny at only 0.03 percent of traffic, but is showing sudden and possibly rapid growth in recent months thanks to deployments by named hosters.

Interestingly, P2P is in rapid decline, falling from around three percent of all traffic in 2007 to only half a percent now. Again, downloaders appear to prefer direct connectivity for downloads, mostly through port 80 and the web.

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Orange, T-Mobile merge to create UK's largest carrier

Orange and T-Mobile are to merge their British operations to create the UK's largest mobile carrier, their parent companies said on Tuesday.

The as-yet-unnamed joint venture will have a combined customer base of about 28.4 million people, or 37 percent of the market, with the deal expected to complete in November. Orange chief executive Tom Alexander will be chief executive of the new company, with T-Mobile UK chief executive Richard Moat as chief operating officer.

The companies said the merger will cost between £400m and £600m. It is expected to deliver savings of around half-a-billion pounds per year by 2014, by removing duplicate base stations and retail outlets, as well as other efficiencies in operational staff and customer support.

Timotheus Höttges, chief financial officer of T-Mobile UK's parent company Deutsche Telekom, said in a statement: "We will become [the] market leader — our customers will benefit in many ways, for example from the best mobile broadband offer in Britain.

"In the second-biggest market in Europe, which is undoubtedly one of the toughest and most competitive, we are giving T-Mobile UK a clear and strong future."

The deal will include T-Mobile UK's 50 percent holding in its 3G network joint venture with Hutchison. It is not known how or if the deal will affect the status of Virgin Mobile, which runs on T-Mobile's network.

Deutsche Telekom lost €600m (£525m) in the first half of 2009, down from €1.3bn profit in the same period last year, with its T-Mobile UK division writing off €1.8bn and losing 100,000 customers. The period saw gains in the German company's other European mobile operations.

Orange said its UK first half sales were down 2.6 percent from last year, at €2.54bn.

The deal will need shareholder approval from both companies and will also have to be cleared by British and European regulators. The UK mobile telecommunications market is widely regarded as highly competitive, and no regulatory problems are anticipated.

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E-Waste and Telecom Recycling

Are you looking to learn more about electronic waste commonly referred to as “e-waste”? Are you looking to meet directly with buyers and sellers of electronic waste, scrap, and surplus electronics? Do you want to meet to network with and listen to leading experts from the electronic waste management industry, Government policy makers and environmental organizations? Do you want to have a positive impact on the compounding electronic waste issue? Do you want to be a part of the billion-dollar electronic waste industry?

The International Electronics Recycling Conference & Expo will be held California on October 1st & 2nd, 2009. The event venue is the world-class Sheraton Gateway hotel, which is only two blocks from the Los Angeles International airport (LAX). Complimentary transportation will be provided to the hotel and conference.

Event organizers have left no stones unturned in ensuring that this is the premier networking event for the electronics industry including electronic waste and recycling. Attendees will have access to a trade show, featuring the latest and most innovative products and services from leading electronics recycling and electronics waste management companies such as Waste Management, IT Renew, Recellular, Electronics Recyclers International, Sims recycling and several others.

Over 1,000 key decision makers, business owners and executives from the electronics waste and recycling industry and other industries are expected to attend.

When computers, cellular phones and other electronics become defective, obsolete or simply reach their end of life (EOL), they have to be recycled in an environmentally friendly manner. Electronic waste contains toxic materials such as lead and mercury, which can pollute the environment and water supply if mishandled and not properly recycled. Several states including New York, California and Washington have electronic waste laws that require manufacturers and resellers of electronics to take responsibility in the proper disposal of end-of-life and unwanted electronics. There are also federal mandates and laws in development to handle this important electronic waste issue.

The Seattle Washington based Basel Action Network, and other environmental watchdog groups have recently published several reports on the effects of electronic waste from the United States and Europe in countries like China, Ghana, Nigeria, India and Pakistan. These countries usually have less stringent environmental laws or lack any facilities to handle the electronic waste and toxic trash they receive in a bid to bridge the digital gap. It is estimated that out of 500 containers bringing in computers and other IT assets, less than 5% are working. The non-working parts and inventory get smelted for copper and other metals in an uncontrolled environment, thus leaking into the water supply, air and soil. This gross pollution has to be reversed as it affects all of us explains Professor Roland Geyer of University of California, Santa Barbara’s Donald Bren school of environmental sciences. Something has to be done with the compounding amoung of electronic waste.

The International Electronics Recycling Conference & Expo (IERCE) will bring together over 30 leading speakers in the field of electronics waste management, marketing, compliance and certification, transportation & logistics and academia, who will discuss topics such as responsible recycling practices, how to generate more business and review current electronic waste laws and developments.

This event aims to be an ideal networking and learning platform for the electronics waste and recycling industry explains Liz Corpus, who is the Director of Business development at IERCE. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on environmental responsibility and compliance. Most electronic manufacturers, resellers and distributors are looking for ways to be more ”green” and are also seeking more information on the financial and moral rewards associated with recycling and proper electronic waste disposal.

The waste industry is a $52 billion dollar industry and electronic waste from computers, cellular phones, IT equipment and other forms of electronic waste are the fastest growing waste stream in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. There are more than 130 million pounds of electronic waste consisting of computers and networking parts recycled everyday in the US alone and over half a billion used and retired cellular phones collect dust in drawers, closets and storage units all across the country.

There are three common forms of recycling- reuse, repair & refurbishing. In essence, most companies on TelecomFinders are indeed electronics recyclers and should learn more about the benefits of this fast developing and important aspect of the electronics waste and recycling industry.

John Shegerian, CEO & founder of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI) based in Fresno, California states that “electronics recycling is not the trash business, we are in the cash business”. “Green is good”, states Shegerian whose privately held company earned over $32 million net income in 2007.

Topics to be discussed at the 2-day event include innovative collection strategies, marketing techniques and the need for more stringent compliance standards within the electronics waste and recycling industry. Sharmaine Robinson, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at IT Renew, a Newark California electronic assets recycling and remarketing firm states that, “there is a significant advantage to been an ISO 9001& ISO 14001 certified company, we are able to reduce costs and maintain a zero-waste policy”.

The conference also includes discussions on how to recover precious metals during the electronic waste disposal proccess such as gold, platinum, palladium and copper from end of life electronics and earn revenue from items that once ended up in the dumpster. Luis Perez with Calico Electronics was delighted to learn that his company was receiving a check for $15,000 by simply shipping old inventory to a reputable electronic waste refinery. I’m looking forward to meeting more players in this industry and looking for ways to generate more electronic waste and scrap for resale. This event seems like the perfect platform to do that states Perez.

Special events include a Golf Tournament in Malibu on September 30th, a Grand Tour of Los Angeles and an Awards Ceremony with live entertainment honoring and recognizing industry leaders and groups that are at the frontline on the war against electronic waste. On September 30th the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) will present pre-conference workshops on topics of electronic waste and recycling

For those who want to attend this electronics waste and recycling conference, you can register online at www.electronicsrecyclingexpo.com . Members of TelecomFinders who register before September 10th will receive an additional 10% off published registration fees, 10% off exhibit booth rates & a special pricing on hotel lodging.

Remember, “GREEN IS GOOD”. See you in Los Angeles at the International Electronics Recycling Conference & Expo.

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How to Build a Teamwork Culture

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Fostering teamwork is creating a work culture that values collaboration. In a teamwork environment, people understand and believe that thinking, planning, decisions and actions are better when done cooperatively. People recognize, and even assimilate, the belief that “none of us is as good as all of us.” (High Five)5

It’s hard to find work places that exemplify teamwork. In America, our institutions such as schools, our family structures, and our pastimes emphasize winning, being the best, and coming out on top. Workers are rarely raised in environments that emphasize true teamwork and collaboration.

Organizations are working on valuing diverse people, ideas, backgrounds, and experiences. We have miles to go before valuing teams and teamwork will be the norm.
You can, however, create a teamwork culture by doing just a few things right. Admittedly, they’re the hard things, but with commitment and appreciation for the value, you can create an overall sense of teamwork in your organization.

Create a Culture of Teamwork

To make teamwork happen, these powerful actions must occur.

• Executive leaders communicate the clear expectation that teamwork and collaboration are expected. No one completely owns a work area or process all by himself. People who own work processes and positions are open and receptive to ideas and input from others on the team.
• Executives model teamwork in their interaction with each other and the rest of the organization. They maintain teamwork even when things are going wrong and the temptation is to slip back into former team unfriendly behavior.
• The organization members talk about and identify the value of a teamwork culture. If values are formally written and shared, teamwork is one of the key five or six.
• Teamwork is rewarded and recognized. The lone ranger, even if she is an excellent producer, is valued less than the person who achieves results with others in teamwork. Compensation, bonuses, and rewards depend on collaborative practices as much as individual contribution and achievement.
• Important stories and folklore that people discuss within the company emphasize teamwork. (Remember the year the capsule team reduced scrap by 20 percent?) People who “do well” and are promoted within the company are team players.
• The performance management system6 places emphasis and value on teamwork. Often 360 degree feedback7 is integrated within the system.

Tips for Team Building

Do you immediately picture your group off at a resort playing games or hanging from ropes when you think of team building? Traditionally, many organizations approached team building this way. Then, they wondered why that wonderful sense of teamwork, experienced at the retreat or seminar, failed to impact long term beliefs and actions back at work.

I’m not averse to retreats, planning sessions, seminars and team building activities – in fact I lead them - but they have to be part of a larger teamwork effort8. You will not build teamwork by “retreating” as a group for a couple of days each year. Think of team building as something you do every single day.

• Form teams to solve real work issues and to improve real work processes. Provide training in systematic methods so the team expends its energy on the project, not on figuring out how to work together as a team to approach it.
• Hold department meetings to review projects and progress, to obtain broad input, and to coordinate shared work processes. If team members are not getting along, examine the work processes they mutually own. The problem is not usually the personalities of the team members. It’s the fact that the team members often haven’t agreed on how they will deliver a product or a service or the steps required to get something done.
• Build fun and shared occasions into the organization’s agenda. Hold pot luck lunches; take the team to a sporting event. Sponsor dinners at a local restaurant. Go hiking or to an amusement park. Hold a monthly company meeting. Sponsor sports teams and encourage cheering team fans.
• Use ice breakers and teamwork exercises at meetings. I worked with an organization that held a weekly staff meeting. Participants took turns bringing a “fun” ice breaker to the meeting. These activities were limited to ten minutes, but they helped participants laugh together and get to know each other – a small investment in a big time sense of team.
• Celebrate team successes publicly. Buy everyone the same t-shirt or hat. Put team member names in a drawing for company merchandise and gift certificates. You are limited in teamwork only by your imagination.

Take care of the hard issues above and do the types of teamwork activities listed here. You’ll be amazed at the progress you will make in creating a teamwork culture, a culture that enables individuals to contribute more than they ever thought possible - together.

Boxee

Boxee + Online Video + Social Networking: Boxee is quickly becoming my software application of choice for watching television content. It aggregates online video services and social network for content filtering and recommendations.

Boxee media center software is being developed by a startup company. Boxee supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through its Python plugin system, Boxee includes incorporated addon features such as Apple movie trailer support and subtitle downloading, as well as online internet content channels and services, like BBC iPlayer, Jamendo, Joost, Last.fm, NPR, SHOUTcast internet audio plugins, ABC, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV Music (music videos), MySpaceTV, Netflix, Revision3, YouTube, Warner Bros Television Network^[15] internet video plugins, and Flickr and PicasaWeb picture viewing plugins. All are available as media sources available alongside your local library. Some of these are specialized connections to services (e.g., YouTube), while the rest are a preselected list of Podcast channels for streaming using generic RSS web feeds (e.g., BBC News).

Boxee had supported NBC Universal's Hulu quite early on, but in February 2009, was asked by Hulu to remove the service at the request of Hulu's content partners.^[16] Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulu's RSS feeds,^[17] but Hulu once again blocked access.^[18][19] Boxee recently introduced a new architecture based on the XUL framework. Because Boxee will now use Firefox's core architecture, Hulu will see Boxee as "any other Mozilla browser so Hulu doesn't block the app."^[20] Hulu's latest attempt to thwart Boxee involves HTML encryption.^[21]

Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p. Boxee is able to use Nvidia's VDPAU on Ubuntu Linux installations to accelerate HD content with the help of a system's GPU.^[22] However, Boxee does not currently support other hardware video decoding, so the entire load of the video decoding process is handled by the system's CPU which means that users need, by today's standards, a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with a modern video codec like H.264.

Boxee source code is based on the XBMC Media Center project's code, and the Boxee developers contribute source code back upstream to the XBMC project.^[23][24] Boxee open source parts is distributed under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by Boxee licensed under the LGPL), however Boxee's social networking layer library, libboxee, is closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee's online back-end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase.^[25]

Boxee also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there are also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. Through Boxee's Python plugin system it is also possible for end-users to add unofficial third-party plugins to enable Torrent downloads from sites such as thepiratebay.org.

Features

Social Networking Layers

The social networking component of Boxee is its major differentiator from other media center software, in several ways, as follows.

Boxee requires registered user accounts, which form a social network of fellow Boxee users. Users can follow the activity of other Boxee users who were added as friends, and can publicly rate and recommend content. Users can also control what media appear in the activity feed in order to maintain privacy. If a user recommends something that is freely available from an internet content service then Boxee will let others users stream it directly. If a user recommends something that is not freely available then Boxee will try to show metadata, and trailers if it is a movie.

Boxee can export a user's media activity feed to other social networking services such as FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr. The list of supported sites is small, and this feature is one-way, (it is not yet possible to monitor Twitter feeds from within Boxee), but this type of third-party integration is different from the way content sources as treated. Through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr it is then possible for a user to choose to post the Boxee activity feed to social networking sites such as Facebook, (currently through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr apps for Facebook). The user's friends' Boxee activity feeds are displayed on the user's home screen, as is the user's own recent activity. Internet content is accessed through a sub-menu of each of the video, audio, and photo menu items, such as Video -> "My videos" and Video -> "Internet videos."

Audio/Video playback and handling

Boxee can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the system's DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), or eventually UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) shares (not available in v0.9.14^[26]). Boxee is designed to take advantage of the system's network port if a broadband Internet connection is available, using the IMDb to obtain meta data information, thumbnails, and reviews on movies, TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via FreeDB) for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Boxee can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Boxee can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.