Kleiner funded iPhone games company here.

Story of RunKeeper learnings here.  Premium version ($9.99) sold 5k in two months…changed to ad supported free version that sold 120k in two months…

Update 2/23/09:

Another detailed analysis of iPhone application downloads.  Their analysis is wrong though as there download rate dropped off dramatically even before they charged a fee of $.99.

Average use of free apps lasts about 30 days…

More coverage on TechCrunch.

http://mashable.com/2008/10/14/boss-mashable-challenge-winners/

Thanks to Adam Hirsch, Mashable and the Yahoo BOSS Team.  It was great being part of this contest and I look forward to expanding our use of Yahoo BOSS API’s.

My previous coverage is here.

http://mashable.com/2008/10/11/mahalo-redesign/

I like their new UI.  The Live Blogging idea is very interesting.  They also moved a little closer to our business model with more news aggregation that is more scalable than human edited news.

Many people have been wondering why Microsoft didn’t do this earlier after they inked the advertising deal with Facebook that included an equity stake.  At this point, the search results are no different than what you get outside of Facebook.  I am assuming this is version one and that MSFT and Facebook will track the searching habits of the users over the coming months and eventually begin building in social features to improve the relevance of search results to users based on what their friends are clicking on.  I am not entirely convinced this will dramatically improve search results, but it will be interesting to see someone try.

Another good post on this is here.  According to the math Mark Hendrickson lays out, MSFT needs every user on facebook to make ten searches a month to increase MSFT’s total search queries by 420 million queries or about 42% of the 1 billion queries already being performed on Live Search.  That is a significant figure.  It won’t happen over night, but improved placement will make it easier for people to use and improved search results will make people want to use it.  It is still so easy to go to Google for a search, so MSFT is smart to bring the search tool to the user.

3% of Nings customers actually pay for premium services…

This is a good data point for all start-ups (including mine) that are contemplating the “Freemium” pricing model.  This pricing model is certainly the most popular on the web and allows a company to get a large customer base of free users to monetize with ads along with some subscription revenue from the power users.  I have heard some entrepreneurs state they plan to get 10-20% of their user base to pay for the premium features…but that is probably not going to happen.  Obviously this percentage depends on a lot of factors such as pricing, features, market and others, but I think the 3%  figure that Ning is reporting seems to be the ballpark for the premium component of the Freemium pricing model.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ning_500000_networks.php

500,000 networks is a big number…what is even more impressive is the fact that 65% of them are active.

The field has been narrowed down and Player Search has been selected as one of the top 10 finalists for the Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge!  You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Overview of the contest:

The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer.  How do you win?  Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies. Yahoo! Search BOSS is a completely open API from Yahoo! Search.  It gives developers access to highly scalable Web, news and image search technology without the need to make large infrastructure investments.  More details of the contest can be found here.

Our submission:

“Player Search is a vertical search engine for sports that searches local and national news, video, photos, stats and more for content targeted to individual professional, collegiate and Olympic athletes.  Player Search leverages Yahoo BOSS APIs for its site search and news search categories as well as photos from Flickr.  Player Search searches the full spectrum of on-line sports content from mainstream sources such as Yahoo and CBS Sports to local newspapers, team websites, and sports blogs as well as the latest video highlights from ESPN, NFL Network, MLB.com and many others.”

Voting (in case you missed the link above!):

You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Thank you to Matt Schauf at FantasySportsBusiness.com and Derrick Eckardt at RotoNation for their posts and support.  Much appreciated!

Thank you for your support!

Ted