I would be rather upset if I built a successful application, it started bringing in substantial cash, and I couldn't put that in my pocket because I'd taken some money from outside investors, who now expected me to use that cash to scale up the application to something 'venture-capital-sized'.
Applicants to this sort of thing (assuming it works like a normal investment) should be fully aware of what they're getting themselves into - this sounds great for those you want to go big or go home, not so great for everybody else.
Does this feel sketchy to anyone else? This is supposed to be a multi-million dollar fund, but their website looks like that? It feels pretty unprofessional.
Berkshire-hathaway's core competency is not digital or web-based. This is not a financial site. It is a site designed to entice entrepreneurs (its version of consumers.) Berkshire-hathaway is 44 years old and a fortune 500 company. Appfund is brand new and needs to build its brand/trust.
If you want your money to look pretty, you have it all wrong. And brands/trust are based on reputations of principals in the finance world, not on the website. Hell, I don't know why they have one in the first place...
I think selling to parents for use in educating children is not the best idea in the world. They're generally looking for edutainment, which means you can #import all the reasons why game development sucks for a small developer (huge asset budget, quick content rot, lack of a good search marketing hook) and then add "And by the way, they will not under any circumstances pay more than $20 for this."
However, there is a lot of opportunity in selling "boring" applications directly to teachers. In particular, I'd suggest addressing pain points like "Prep takes too much time." One idea I keep coming back to is "Keeping parents in the loop takes too much time" but I don't know if I'm in a good position to execute on that. I think it could potentially be a hit if done well, though.
Also, homeschool folks need a whole range of curricular/admin support services and the portion of them which actually spend money have a much, much better sales cycle than school districts would want for equivalent services.
That's pretty cool. There are some good ideas that can be implemented for the iPad, and if several iPhone devs could get together and apply together, I think this would be quite an opportunity.
I am skeptical because none of the areas that they are concerned with seem like they will lead to innovation. Do we need another Yelp app? It seems like that's the type of thing they would (of course) love to fund (and make money off of).
Games are very competitive, appeal to only a a specific demographic, and most of the time do not have in-built virality. I don't think games are a good money maker if you're not already established there.
I would guess that while games are very high grossing, gaming is pretty well understood and is unlikely to be a breakout new category of application on the iPad. For games, it's just going to be another handheld platform, maybe incrementally better than the iPhone or Nintendo DS or PSP, but not fundamentally different.
On the other hand, other types of software are almost completely unexplored on the iPad, and might open up new markets. If I were investing, that's what I would be interested in.
okay I think it's not the right place and the right moment. Why not create a new thread for iphone developers seeking for work and iphone apps managers seeking for developers?
Applicants to this sort of thing (assuming it works like a normal investment) should be fully aware of what they're getting themselves into - this sounds great for those you want to go big or go home, not so great for everybody else.