Skip to main content

My Dream App is, well, Dreamy

Take a walk over to My Dream App. Right Now!

I think of it as American Idol meets the Shareware market.

So, here's the business model.

If you have a great idea for the Mac OS X platform, but no way to build it or hire a team to build it, you can submit your idea to My Dream App right now. This thing was announced all of 2 days ago and they've received 1572 ideas submitted so far. Incredible. You have until September 1, 2006, to submit your ideas, so get on with it!

At that time, the My Dream App team will pick 24 ideas from the list - what they think are the best (and implementable) ideas of the bunch. The top 24 picks will be announced between September 4 and September 15.

Starting September 16, the elimination rounds begin. From September 16 through October 23, the voting is turned over to the user community (registered on the web site). Five, count 'em, 5 eliminations rounds later, the top 3 winners are selected (all by popular vote).

The top 24 picks all win a prize. The first 6 eliminated get an iPod Shuffle. That's hardly a prize. The 3 winners get a MacBook Pro laptop and 15% of the NET profits from the sales of the shareware product that is subsequently built and brought to market.

What I like about it:

  • Great idea that is getting lots of traction

  • The Forum discussions about many of the submitted ideas are FASCINATING; truly a demonstration of the openness of Web 2.0 users. The ideas are already being refined, compared, discussed, and improved.

  • If the concept is proven to be solid, it can be easily extended to other platforms (Windows, Symbian, PalmOS, Linux, Solaris, SaaS).

  • Could imagine building this into a marketplace for programmers and ideas. Just because you are a great coder does not mean that you know the killer idea (and vice versa). You would think that O'Reilly would be all over this.

  • The ideas themselves are not big enough to support a VC-funded business. That's expected, as the target is the Shareware market. However, the My Dream App concept, with some tweaks I discussed above for scalability, could build a nice-sized business and, what I like, is that it could build applications that change the world.


What I don't like about it:

  • The My Dream App guys exclusively own your idea if it is selected. I understand why they did this - they are running a business, and this term makes the legal issues very clear and concise. However, I think it is a bit onerous and they should have stated it as "you own your idea and have given us an exclusive license to bring it to market as a shareware solution for the Apple Macintosh".

  • You get 15% of NET profit, but nobody has defined the accounting that goes into calculating the profit (i.e., what are reasonable and usual expenses, who pays for the developer, etc).

  • They only have to pay you for the Apple Macintosh version. The implication is that if they take your submitted idea (which you gave them, remember) to another platform, like Windows, they would owe you nothing.

  • I personally feel that 5 rounds of elimination are too many rounds. I would do: 24 to 12, 12 to 6, 6 to 3. Resulting in 3 rounds of elimination.


I intend to watch this closely (and, hopefully, will be picked to judge as I'm a big Mac user and fan). I wish these guys all the success in the world. Fun stuff!

Anyway, this has had some great blog coverage. TechCrunch, Paul Stamatiou, O'Reilly Mac Devcenter Blog, binarytales, MacUser.com, Pomcast.com, Manual Web Crawler, anshuljain, FixYourThinking, Mac1

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Coleman Joins 3tera Advisory Board

I think this move surprised a number of people, since Bill recently wrapped up Cassatt Corproation, getting the technology and people  acquired by Computer Associates . However, I was not surprised at all. The announcement, via  3tera Welcomes Bill Coleman : You may or may not have seen the recent press realease.  Bill Coleman, IT/Silicon Valley luminary, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems, has joined 3Tera’s Advisory Board. Yes, this alone is a great testimonial to what we have accomplished in our field.  Getting dignitaries such as Bill does not come easy.  But here’s the best part - this has a lot more than just marquee value and I doubt that Bill would have joined us if that was the case.  Bill, especially since his most recent stint as Founder and CEO of Cassatt Systems, is an extremely knowledgeable visionary in the area of utility and Cloud Computing; and, data center automation. So, Bill will be extremely valuable, reviewing and tweaking both our business plans and techno
Post a Comment
Read more

Kernel-based Virtual Machine hits Linux

Many congratulations to my good friend Moshe Bar and his team over at (stealth-mode startup) Qumranet . Techworld reports that the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project has been accepted into the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel distribution. KVM is an Open Source kernel driver that basically allows a Linux kernel to host virtual machines, as plain old Linux processes, that can run Linux or Windows (or other x86-based operating systems). It runs only on hardware that support Intel's VT instruction set (which is fine) and will soon support the AMD-V instruction set as well. This is cool for a number of reasons. It's Open Source, released under the GPL. It basically turns the Linux that we all know and love into a "hypervisor". Linux-as-hypervisor makes sense because Linux already knows how to manage devices, memory, processes, multi-cores, etc. VMware ESX is, essentially, a "hypervisor" - a small kernel, built on Linux as it turns out, that
2 comments
Read more

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites . It's all Ruby on Rails code, and it's being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include: elfURL ~ URL Shortner FeedVault ~ OPML file storage FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email QwikPing ~ Ping Server SocialMail ~ RSS via email Very cool. I just love the Open Source community . I have actually been writing some code of late, and it's great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I'm going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however. And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan. Tags: Open Source , GPL , Ruby On Rails , Big In Japan , Brian Berliner , brianberliner
Post a Comment
Read more