This inaugural episode of the Mobile Orchard Podcast features an interview with Rubyist-turned-iPhone mogul and iWik creator, Hampton Catlin. iWik, now renamed iPedia, is a 99-cent Wikipedia companion / browser. It has sold over 50,000 copies at $1 a pop, appeared in Time Magazine, and has been a “featured app” in the App Store. As of early October, it was continuing to sell at about 1,000 copies per day.
In 30 minutes, Hampton talks to Mobile Orchard’s Dan Grigsby about:
- creating the first version of the app in just three days
- trademark issues and the name change
- marketing in the App Store
- Apple taking more than a month to approve the latest version
- competing against a free application
- his upcoming dictionary application Dictionaire.
May we also use this opportunity to say.. please subscribe to the Mobile Orchard podcast! You can do this with the following feed URL: http://podcast.mobileorchard.com/feed/podcast/ or click here to subscribe in iTunes.
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Hezi 10.25.08 at 5:55 am
Hello,
I dont get something, why do such apps as a wikipedia reader needed for mobiles?
can’t the user just navigate using a browser to wikipedia’s site? and if so why not work on developing better equiped browsers?
thanks,
Hezi
Pete Forde 10.28.08 at 5:34 pm
@Hezi: It’s a reasonable question. The reality is that Wikipedia looks like crap on Mobile Safari. It’d be great if a better equipped browser (or perhaps a better designed site) could be made, but in the meantime, people want to use Wikipedia on their iPhones, today.
I would also say try it, because the usability of Hampton’s application compared to navigating to the Wikipedia site is really quite dramatic, for a buck.
Finally, it’s packaged up nicely as a single purpose app. Having a Wikipedia icon works for me.