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Weekend of February 25th, 2011 – Hour 2

HOUR 2:

Tech News & Commentary

John in St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands listening on 970 AM WSTX asked: “Where can someone who has an idea for an Application, but not the technical experience as far as how to write the program, get assistance with doing that?”

If you want to write the app yourself you’re gonna have to learn about Object Oriented Programming, some knowledge of logic and math would make that a lot simpler. You can find information regarding the specifics of the language you’re gonna have to learn on the platform’s developer’s website and there are many books and programming courses that can help you get started. Or … just contact our App Developer, Horacio on our staff!

If the “assistance” you need is finding someone to do it for you there are a few things you should consider: first and foremost, what are your expectations? almost every app on the several app stores makes little to no money. Most people believe if they put an app on a store they will instantly become millionaires, the truth is Angry Birds is very much the exception, not the rule.

As an example of this, there was a man in London that wanted an app that showed Michael Jackson moonwalking back and forth on an iPhone’s screen, he was convinced that he would make, at least, hundreds of thousands from the app… not shockingly when he had it made he made $0, no one was willing to pay 99¢ to watch Michael Jackson moonwalk, that’s what YouTube is for. For free.

That brings up another point to consider, if you want to make money from something that’s gonna cost almost nothing you have to sell a lot of it, if you’re going to make something that only appeals to a small niche, be ready to make it good enough to be able to charge a lot for it.

Another point is, can it be made? not everything can be made into a mobile app, platforms have limits and app stores have sets of strict rules on what can be published (especially, but not only, Apple).

The last really important point is, are you willing to pay to have it made? Apps are not cheap to make, they take a lot of hours of work.

Developers will usually not be open to hearing about ideas if that’s all you bring to the table. If you bring contacts, infrastructure or anything else of value then you might make it worth the gamble, but an idea alone and a 50/50 split on potential income is usually not, people work for money.

If you still want to pursue the app you can probably skip big publishers, they’re usually not open to hearing ideas for legal reasons (if they already had the idea under development, they hear it from you, turn you down because they’re already doing it, and publish it they open themselves up to lawsuits from you saying they stole your great idea), that leaves you with smaller developers.

We’d like to hear your idea, send us an email and we’ll see if we can help you.

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.

“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline

Joshua in Nashville, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 called and asked: “I’m an older gentleman on a limited budget. My grandson wants an iPod touch or something to get apps on. Just wanted to know the best kind and maybe the cheapest. He’s 10 years old.”

Unfortunately you won’t find a lot of alternatives to the iPod Touch if what he’s interested in is apps.

There are plenty of devices that run third party apps from online stores, but almost all of them are phones, there have been attempts at Android based MP3 players to rival the iPod Touch, but so far not much is available.

Samsung announced the “YP-MB2” at CES. It’s basically an Android phone without the phone but, unlike other Android-based players, with the Android Market.

Unfortunately, there’s no release date and the best guess we’ve been able to find points at it being released sometime around september, but that’s based solely on the fact that Apple’s big annual event is in september.

Other than that, the Archos 32 at $140 is definitely cheaper than the iPod Touch, but the apps you can get on it are limited to an Archos store that doesn’t have the same variety Apple and Android users enjoy.

The problem seems to be that while Apple has moved from “music players” to “multimedia players” to something that is far more about games and applications than any media, the rest of the manufacturers seem to still be stuck on “multimedia players”, at least for the moment…

The cheapest iPod Touch on the market right now is the 8GB version, it sells for $229 and besides the App Store and the usual music and video features, it comes HD video recording capabilities and a front facing camera for video conferencing, for an extra $70 you can buy a version that looks the same but has four time the storage capacity, for an extra $170 you get the top of the line model with a 64GB capacity, 8 times the storage of the base model.

Since money is a concern we’d say that, if you end up getting an iPod Touch, a ten year old would probably be more than happy using the cheapest, though still not cheap, 8GB version.

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.

Guests in this hour:

• Ed Smith, Director of Product Management – Qualcomm’s Skifta

Skifta is a free media shifting service that turns your smartphone into a global remote.

Erik Zamkoff, Founder & CEO – MiMedia

MiMedia is a cloud-based personal media platform that allows users to back-up, access and share their digital lives, at anytime and from anywhere.

“Into Tomorrow” Product Spotlight with Rob Almanza: “Tablet Update ”

At CES we saw the introduction of many new tablets like the Motorola Xoom and others … and at Mobile World Congress we actually played with many of them. Our Mobile Correspondent Rob Almanza joins us next with some of our favorite tablets…

Rick in Raleigh, North Carolina listening on WPTF 680 AM asked: “Cable Modem speed and the actual throughput you get. A lot of the speed tests are confusing. I want to be sure I’m getting what I pay for through my cable service. I’m wondering what the best speed test is and how to interpret the results.”

We think the best measure of whether you’re actually getting enough speed or not is whether your connection is so slow it irritates you or not…

However, it does make sense to check your speed sometimes, for example, some people may be paying for 20Mbit/s while living in an area with old copper wires that won’t let them achieve speeds of say over 2Mbit/s. In situations like that testing your connection can help you realize you’re paying too much for speeds you won’t ever be able to get, so you might as well pay less and get the same quality of service.

If you want a simple speed test that will help you compare your connection against others you can go to: testmy.net they have a “smart test” that will continue running tests until it considers it’s gotten reliable enough results to share (in reality that means that it will run tests until a test has taken more than 7 seconds to complete), then it will show you a graph comparing your real speed to the average real speeds for cable, dsl, satellite, dial up and the average speed for users on your network.

You should also run a test on speedtest.net, because they’ll pick a server that is close to you to improve the accuracy of the test and, while they won’t show you a graph comparing your connection to average DSL, cable, satellite and dial up, they will compare your speed with the speeds other people get on your ISP’s network.

If you have several computers or devices that use the internet in general, make sure they’re not using the connection while you’re testing, since that will result in the test showing slower speeds than you are actually getting (the speedtest only really tests your computer’s connection speed, not your home network’s speed, so if the rest of your network is using up your speed allowance then the test will show a false slower result).

Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.

This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners

Improv Electronics: Several Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablets in a variety of colors and accessories including sleeves with stylus holders & magnet kits.

Intuit: TurboTax Deluxe Online – Several Pre-Paid Codes

Screen Guard: Foam Cleaning Spray with microfiber cleaning cloth to clean all of your electronic devices

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Written by Chris Graveline

Chris has covered consumer technology for over 20 years. He is the host of This Week in Tech History as well as a regular co-host on "Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline" and our Technical Director.

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