With the acquisition of an iPod Touch, I and many others have found the new convenience of being able to think things through while away from a desk. One of the issues I have is that I do not have an app dedicated to a subject that I specifically care about. In particular, an RSS feed from this blog is easily drowned in the multiple feeds I get from my MobileRSS app. So whenever I want to go back to a paper featured on Nuit Blanche or to a conversation I had with one of you or I want to recall a specific line of thought, articulated here, it takes a while to make that recall efficiently. I just stumbled on a way to make an app that could be made available through the iTunes app store and I am now wondering how much I should charge for it. As I stated before for the newsletter (I am still contemplating how to go about it), all the information that will be available on this app will really be an RSS feed of this blog and attendant pages (big picture, job, hardware, videos,...). So with all this in mind, how much would you be willing to pay for a Nuit Blanche iPhone/iPod Touch app ? Please come to the site and answer the poll below. Each of the numbers have been carefully thought of, even the most extreme ones. Thanks!
3 comments:
I think the app should be free, after all sites like the NYT and other major newspapers and magazines have their apps for free, offering also information and videos. After all the site can be easily accessed from the browser of the iphone. Maybe you could develop an app that feeds on other scientific blogs but more like researcher oriented rather than public oriented, then you have a product that is not easy to find for free in the app store.
Leon,
I wholeheartly agree with you that "After all the site can be easily accessed from the browser of the iphone." but this is not the reason such an app would exist. It would exist because of:
- the convenience of having an app dedicated to NB and attendant pages
- it would be a way of finding a way to sustain economically the blog (it takes time and effort to put it together). The blog is a strain on my ability to do my own research.
As I have also said, I don't mind putting out two near identical apps: one for free and the other for $1000 if I have a few customers who would pay for that effort. There might be slight differences between the two apps but in effect much of the information would be the same.
With regards to focusing on others blogs, I think this is a just a question of time that somebody does that I am thinking about it and thinking of a way to provide some money back to the original bloggers (even though it is not their intention to make a buck out of it initially).
Igor.
Igor,
A good question and the fact that I agree that it should be free should not in anyway discourage you nor mislead you into thinking that such an app would not have potentially great value.
However, there must be a low barrier for information sharing in order to begin to build useful connections and the value of your site is nowhere near what it might be in the future. For example, look at the RCP site. At first they were begging for money just for their development time. Now my guess is that the founders of the site are both rich men.
Compressive sensing fits into a larger framework of system identification for a particular problem set (those problem that have a natural measurement basis of sufficiently high dimensionality so that the representation basis carries the measurement of a phenomena from a sparse to a nonsparse vector set which can be sampled by a maxentropy method and then projected back into a much smaller subspace of the natural space with much of the information still intact--at least that is how I see the value of CS). CS has value, but it also has great limitations. It does have the potential to go the way of fuzzy logic or neural networks if the limitations of the technique are not packaged along with its utility. Thus, in my opinion, a purely CS site will soon lose its glitz as the field of endeavor matures and CS is incorporated as one of a set of techniques.
The point is that I think you need a greater critical mass before you can be a commercial success and that the value you deliver at a monetary price is something that should be dependent but separable from the value of the information that you deliver at no charge (but effectively for about the cost of the effort that a subscriber pays in accessing the information). The form of access is not so significant--but it can expand your clientele. Many others face a similar predicament. So, if you are interested in this line of thought we can go off-line and discuss in detail what I'd suggest.
Post a Comment