The latest from TechCrunch
- BarMax, The $1,000 App (That's Actually Worth It), Hits The iPad
- OpenInvo: A Marketplace For Innovation
- What The "Great Delicious Exodus" Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard
| BarMax, The $1,000 App (That's Actually Worth It), Hits The iPad | Top |
| It was just about a year ago that we first wrote about BarMax , an iPhone application meant to help law student pass the Bar exam. But if you’ve heard of the app, it’s more likely because of its price: $999.99. And now you’ll be able to part with the $1,000 at the click of a button for the iPad too. BarMax, which, believe it or not, actually seems to be a good deal at $1,000, has just launched the iPad version into the App Store this evening. Specifically, the California (each state has different Bar exams) version is ready to roll. Last month, we did a preview of the iPad version and noted that the company had racked up over $200,000 in sales from the California and New York versions of their iPhone app. And the iPad version looks to be even more useful as it has been re-built from the ground-up to take advantage of the new form factor and larger screen. Here are the key features of the iPad version from the company: Native iPad app that has been built from scratch to take advantage of the iPad screen size. Larger screen eliminates the need for books that some users still had. Students can buy a new iPad if they don’t have one and the course for just $1,500, which is still more than 50% off from other leading courses. We expect a spike in iPad purchasing among law students. Enhanced outline reader layout with quick page scroller. Ability to highlight text, create notes, and bookmark pages. Redesigned Multiple Choice section with explanations of correct and incorrect answer options. The reason the $1,000 price (the max you can charge in the App Store) is reasonable for this app is because of both the massive amount of data included — just about 1 GB — and because the course that students typically take for Bar exam prep, BarBri, usually costs something like $3,000 to $4,000 for the same type of information prep. More importantly, the app appears to actually work. The data from the last Bar exam results showed students who used BarMax fairing well above the average pass rate. To celebrate the iPad launch, BarMax is also giving away one copy of the $1,000 app to a lucky soon-to-be-lawyer TechCrunch reader. Simply email info@getbarmax.com with “TechCrunch” in the subject and your law school and graduation year in the email by January 5, 2011. They will select a winner at random from those who email. You can find BarMax for iPad here in the App Store . CrunchBase Information BarMax iPad Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| OpenInvo: A Marketplace For Innovation | Top |
| Have a great idea, but don’t have the time or money to actually bring it to market? A new startup called OpenInvo wants to help you turn it into a nice chunk of change by selling it to existing businesses that are looking for an extra dose of innovation. Now, there are other platforms for sharing business ideas — you may be familiar with Kickstarter , which has gotten attention for projects like the iPod Wristwatch . But Kickstarter is for people who want to bring their ideas to fruition and just need funding — OpenInvo is for people who have an idea and are willing to put the time in to flesh it out on paper, but don’t want to have to deal with actually starting a company. For most users, the setup is pretty simple: you log into the site, agree to a fairly lengthy legal document, and then outline your ideas using diagrams and other supplementary material as necessary. Established businesses eager for some outside inspiration can then come along and browse through OpenInvo’s directory of ideas (after paying for access, of course). At this point the tools for browsing this directory are still fairly nascent, but founder Emily Lutzker says that the company plans to build it out once it raises additional capital. So how much can you expect to make should a business decide it likes one of your ideas? This varies a lot — Lutzker says that the service gauges a variety of factors, like the potential market size, how much work you’ve put into fleshing out your idea, and whether or not there’s an existing relevant patent in order to establish a fair price. But she says the range could be anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000. There’s also an option for the idea creator to collect a percentage of revenues generated by the idea, though the purchasing business would obviously have to agree to those terms. There are a lot of IP issues involved here, and Lutzker says that the site has been vetted by lawyers to make sure that things are up to snuff. New idea submitters have to agree to an online contract indicating that they accept OpenInvo’s terms, and companies that wish to browse the ideas have to sign a contract of their own. To help prevent abuse (for example, companies simply taking ideas without paying their creators), OpenInvo tracks each page that a business visits. OpenInvo is still in a very early state. Lutzker says that the service has some large companies who are eager to browse through the site’s directory, but that the service is waiting for the marketplace to fill out with more submissions before it opens the floodgates to these ‘Idea Seekers’. If those submissions don’t come then the service is obviously in trouble, so it’s doing what it can to get the word out. In the future, OpenInvo will also flesh out its collaboration tools, and it will eventually offer real-time brainstorming sessions that businesses can use as online focus tests. There are plenty of other online platforms for sharing ideas, including Kickstarter and Quirky . The latter has its community vote on submitted ideas, and it brings them to market with the original creator getting a cut of the proceeds. There’s also Innocentive , which sets out to solve ‘problems that really matter’. CrunchBase Information OpenInvo Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| What The "Great Delicious Exodus" Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard | Top |
| When word got out two weeks ago that Yahoo is not 100% committed to Delicious, people who still use the bookmarking service started to panic and look for alternatives. One competing bookmarking site that some people turned to is Pinboard , a barebones bookmarking site which looks a lot like Delicious did in its early years: lean, no-frills, and very useful. The company saw an influx of traffic and activity. The chart above shows requests per minute to its servers in the three days following the Delicious news compared to the week before. A couple hour ago, Pinboard Tweeted out a link to the chart: @PinboardIN Pinboard This is what the Great Delicious Exodus looked like to our servers: http://bit.ly/frLwmA (contrasted with normal traffic a week earlier) about 23 hours ago via TweetDeck Retweet Reply The service wasn’t handling a huge number of requests to begin with—a few hundred per minute at peak—but that number increased about tenfold to over 2,500 requests per minute. Pinboard allows you to import your bookmarks out of Delicious. Mike suggested switching from Delicious more than a year ago. But from what I can tell it only has about 9,000 users. You are asked to pay a one-time fee to sign up, which helps to prevent spammers from joining. The current fee is $9.07 and it is based on the number of users. So not a whole lot of Delicious users switched to Pinboard, but it was enough to move the needle for the small bookmarking site. Update : Pinboard says it has closer to 16,000 users. The longer Delicious remains in purgatory , the more users are going to look for alternatives like Pinboard. The site even provides an honest list of pros and cons for those considering the switch. CrunchBase Information Pinboard delicious Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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