Jay Marcyes

Great story about Spyglass, who licensed their browser to companies, including Microsoft who used it for the early versions of IE. Some cool quotes.

Talking about Microsoft dominating...

We sold our browser technology to 120 companies, but one of

them slaughtered the other 119.

How many people worked on IE...

"The original Internet Explorer team was just five or six people. By the time

Silverberg and others decided to rewrite the browser almost completely for

version 3.0, released in 1996, the team had grown to 100. By 1999, it was more

than 1,000."

On when he decided Browser War I was over...

Scott told me that the IE

team had over 1,000 people. I was stunned.  That was 50 times the size of the Spyglass browser

team.  It was almost as many people as Netscape had in their whole

company.  I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on

that day -- no other outcomes were possible.

His name is Steve Yegge and he is pretty funny (and evidently well known, I had never heard of him though) for a tech guy.

Interesting post with limited stats on whether it is profitable to charge for an iphone app, or to just have advertising.

The problems with there stats is they started out free with no ads, then later charged .99, and when the downloads dropped dramatically, they went back to free, but this time with ads. So even though they now have ads, their install base with the ads is relatively small compared to the overall install base of the application.

Another problem is this app is a re-hash of the old break bricks game I used to play on my Atari back in the day. An app I myself would be less likely to pay for since it isn't new or original.

Overall though, it is nice to see a company be public about their numbers. I would like to see more hard stats (even though no overall conclusions can be reached) then opague stats and posts like "developer makes million dollars a month on iPhone app" or "Ad network say some of their clients make $250,000 a day" with absolutely nothing to back it up.

Update 3-25-09: Here is some more good info on indie game development (via) and the market for older game clones on the iphone.

Update 4-7-09: Here is an inspiring article about some freelance game programmers that made serious money making an iPhone game

Dan Lyon's thoughts on a current tech bubble...

if you characterize a bubble as something that can only take place in
public markets, fine, there is no bubble. If you characterize it more
broadly as a phenomenon in which companies with no profits and
unworkable business models are able to raise millions of dollars in
venture money, and then when each unworkable company leads to six or
eight copycat companies that also get funding, and when a company like
Facebook is valued at $15 billion — um, in the broader sense of the
term bubble, I’d say that would be one.

Tech blog, there was some interesting enough posts that I decided it was worth a bookmark