If you want to know how much things have changed in the app world in less than two years, consider this: When Apple’s App Store launched in mid-2008, it had a paltry 500 apps—and not one from a major entertainment company. Fast forward to the iPad, which now has more than 2,000 applications, including content from nearly every major media property, like ABC (NYSE: DIS), CBS (NYSE: CBS), MTV, and the NBA.
The dearth of bigger media players during the iPhone launch created some rare opportunities for no-name app makers. Take magician and gag artist Steve Sheraton, who created the iBeer, which simulated pouring and drinking a beer using the phone’s accelerometer. It quickly became the 10th-most-popular paid application. When Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) published a list of the hottest apps five months after the store’s launch, also high on the list were apps like Koi Pond (which lets you watch fish swim around; it hit No. 1 on the list), LightSaber Unleashed (of Star Wars fame), Flashlight (which lit your way), myLighter (which displayed a flame) and A Level (which allowed you to make sure a line was straight). And some of the start-ups behind these playful productions went on to become much bigger companies. Urbanspoon, for one, was bought by IAC (NSDQ: IACI), and Tapulous, the creator of Tap Revenge, and Shazam are now well-funded by venture money.
Some bigger media companies are the first to admit that with the iPhone, the train left the station and they failed to get on it. Cameron Clayton, the VP of Mobile at The Weather Channel, said they were six months late with their app. In many ways, he says, the Weather Channel is just now starting to get into the groove with its mobile-app development efforts. The Weather Channel iPhone application has gone through eight or nine versions. “We learned a lot and are still learning a lot about how people interact with the content and what kind of content do they want to consume from us,” he says.
The Weather Channel’s iPad application aims to accommodate the two ways most consumers interact with The Weather Channel today: on their phones or PCs, or via TV. The application, which is free and sponsored by Toyota, melds video from the TV channel with lots of data that you’d find online. “I hope we pulled it off, but just like with the iPhone this is 1.0, and then we’ll have 1.1, and then 2.0.”
When the App Store first launched in July 2008, there were 554 applications, and of those, only 20 were music- or video-related, with the most prominent ones coming from Pandora and AOL (NYSE: AOL). Not a single application came from a TV network, movie studio or music label. It took another two months before that happened, and first out of the gate was CBS’s citizen-journalism application, which allowed people to upload photos about events they were witnessing in real-time.
With dozens of big-time media companies participating on the iPad launch, do the odds shrink dramatically for people like Sheraton? This time around, he’s developed the iBeer Keg app, which is another visual gag that lets you pour beer from the iPad into your iBeer application on the iPhone. He’s confident that the iPad still will offer plenty of room for little developers to thrive. “Certainly because you and I still love to laugh…there’s room for both,” says Sheraton, who has been developing applications since Palm’s early days.
