Build applications for a potential of 1 billion users!

Posted by on Jan 13, 2009 in AIR | 13 comments

From Wikipedia:

As of June 2008, the number of personal computers in use worldwide hit one billion, while another billion is expected to be reached by 2014. Mature markets like the United States, Western Europe and Japan accounted for 58 percent of the worldwide installed PCs. The emerging markets were expected to double their installed PCs by 2013 and to take 70 percent of the second billion PCs.

As I’m sure you know, PCs are everywhere these days and the market is still growing rapidly. I’m also sure you know that Adobe AIR can run on most of these as well (provided they run Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and SP3, Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows 2000 SP4, Windows 2003 Server, Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher or Linux). That means that, building an application that runs on Adobe AIR has a potential user base of 1 billion users that is growing rapidly every quarter!

“That’s cool, Serge. But how do I make money from building AIR apps? Where’s the AIR app store like Apple’s app store for the iPhone?”
I think Apple has done a tremendous job at making buying and installing applications completely foolproof. But the real question is: “Do you really need an app store for AIR applications?”. There are lots of ways to monetize your application. And there are already lots of good examples of people making money with AIR applications.

For example: EarthBrowser, Agile Agenda, Broadchoice, Tanager Audioworks and Balsamiq all sell licenses per user. No developer programs to sign up to and no middle man (with the exception of the payment provider). Easy to set up and you have total control.

Selling software licenses is just one way of monetizing your AIR application. Robert Christensen, one of the AIR product managers, did a session on this topic at MAX in Milan. If you want more information on how to monetize your application, I would suggest you check out Rob’s blog post on this. Rob has a few real world cases that will definitely inspire you. You really don’t need an app store and thus you don’t have to wait to make money with your work!

Now the only things left to do, is start building your AIR applications, make money with them and send me a percentage of what you make with them ;-).

BBC launches AIR-based news ticker

Posted by on Jul 2, 2008 in AIR, News | Comments Off

I know… I know… A desktop ticker is not really a new idea and the BBC has had one for quite some time but most of the desktop news tickers out there are Windows-based.

The BBC’s John O’Donovan explains:

Firstly, they only work on Windows and are built out of a variety of proprietary tools. We’d like these to work cross-platform but we need to build them differently to do so. They are also difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. We considered a few approaches, but decided to grow our new widget out of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR. This is firstly because these tools met our requirements to work cross-platform and deliver the desktop experience we wanted, and also because they linked up with in-house skills in the team which manages them, making them simpler to manage.

Today, the BBC launched their first AIR-based desktop ticker that keeps you up to date on the latest news and sports news. You can completely customize which types of news articles you are interested in and it also caches the latest news so you can still catch up on today’s news when you’re offline. You can have it running as a small application or minimize it as a ticker.

I’d love to see some video in there as well but hey… it’s still an early beta and I’m sure video is on their radar. Being a beta application, I have to point out that there are still some bugs in the application but that’s exactly what public betas are for, so you can give feedback…

More info and download on the BBC Internet Blog.
Via PaidContent.co.uk

Weekly Roundup: May 4th – May 10th

Posted by on May 10, 2008 in Roundup, Weekly blend | Comments Off

As last week, this is just a collection of blog posts and sites that caught my attention this week.

  • Send your name to the moon: NASA is sending an unmanned mission to the moon and you can be part of it… well… Your name can be part of it but that’s still cool [link]
  • Spam 30 years old: The first spam message was sent on Arpanet on May 3rd, 1978 [link]
  • Giant solar powered LED screen in Bejing [link]
  • A celebration of Pixel Art: Smashing Magazine has a great collection of Pixel Art which includes the AIR launch poster by Eboy [link]
  • MXNA is back [link]
  • Hydra is now Pixel Bender [link]
  • Interactive demos of ILOG Elixir charting components for Flex: If you’re looking for sophisticated data visualization for Flex, don’t look any further [link]
  • FedEx Desktop released: Now you can follow your FedEx shipments with an AIR app [link]
  • Living in The Netherlands? Take the bus to Multi-Mania. The Dutch Adobe UserGroup is organizing a bustrip to Multi-Mania. [link]
  • The User Interface Resource Center: The User Interface Resource Center (UIRC) provides free articles and White Papers written by industry leaders about user interface design and rich Internet applications (RIAs) [link]