Hoping to make iPhone toys as a full-time job

Jenna Wortham 

    Is there a good way to nail down a steady income in this economy? Try writing a successful program for the iPhone. 
    Last August, Ethan Nicholas and his wife, Nicole, were having trouble making their mortgage payments. Medical bills from the birth of their younger son were piling up. After learning that his employer, Sun Microsystems, was suspending employee bonuses for the year, Nicholas considered looking for a new job and putting their house in Wake Forest, NC, on the market. 
    Then he remembered reading about the guy who had made a quarter-million dollars in a hurry by writing a video game called Trism for the iPhone. “I figured if I could even make a fraction of that, we’d be able to make ends meet,” he said. 
    Nicholas, 30, had never built a game in Objective-C, the coding language of the iPhone. So he searched the internet for tips and used them to figure out the iPhone software development kit that Apple puts out. 
    Nicholas decided to write an artillery game. He sketched out some graphics and bought inexpensive stock photos and audio files. For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night”. After finishing the project, Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on October. 19. 
    On the first day itself, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically “dancing in the street,” he said. 
    In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. 
    To people who know a thing or two about computer code, stories like his are as tantalizing as full of promise. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: The Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and fresh inventory keeps arriving daily. For every iShoot, which earned Nicholas $800,000 in five months, “there are hundreds or thousands who put all their efforts into creating something, and it just gets ignored in the store,” said Erica Sadun, a programmer and the author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook. 
    The rush to stake a claim on the iPhone is a lot like what happened in Silicon Valley in the early dot-com era, said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who oversees the iFund, a $100 million investment pot reserved for iPhone applications. “It’s still early days for mobile development, but those days are coming.” NYT NEWS SERVICE

Economic crisis drives inventions

Geneva: Crisis is the mother of invention, if one believes the bright sparks behind the gizmos, contraptions, novelties and potions at the international inventions exhibition in the Swiss city of Geneva. 
    While others fret over the economic turmoil, many of the 710 exhibitors from 45 countries here relish it as a driver of innovation, whether they are trying peel shrimps, save coral reefs, build robots or cart skis around. “Look at World War II: when people had tough times, that’s when they found the simplest or cheapest solutions,” said the inventor of the “skikart” ski carrier on wheels. 
    He came up with the idea on his way back from an arduous skiing trip in Austria. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” grinned the greying South African, who was on the lookout for a business partner. 
    Calexium, a French internet peripherals firm, was touting an email server that does away with any size limits on attachments. “We’ve always financed ourselves, without the help of banks, so whether there’s a crisis or not. We’re more likely to take advantage of the economic climate, to judge by the strong interest of our dealers,” said company founder David Rene. 
    The Salon International des Inventions, the 37th of its kind, has gained a more professional aura in recent years. Of the 70,000 visitors expected through April 5, more than half are industrialists, distributors and businesspeople. 
    Some 48 inventions received awards. The ‘Grand Prix’ went to Romanian firm MBTechnology’s mobile scanner, which can speed up trade by helping customs officers search trucks or containers without the need to open them up. It weighs seven tonnes and can detect objects just four millimetres long through 18 centimetre thick steel. While some institutional participants stayed away this year, Vincent pointed to a flow of “inventors stimulated by the urgent need to find solutions”. AFP

Way to prevent early birth found

Altering Two Types Of Oestrogen Can Help Control Time Of Labour

Washington: Researchers have found that changing the balance of two hormones could help in controlling the onset of labour in women, a major finding which, they claim, might prevent premature births. 
    “The trigger for the onset of labour in women has been a puzzle for a long time. Our findings show we have an answer, and furthermore may be able to delay or advance labour,” lead author Roger Smith of John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle said. 
    Humans have two types of oestrogen—estradiol (E2) and estriol (E3). When E2 and E3 are in roughly equal amounts there is no drive to labour, but the opposite holds true once one becomes in excess than the other. 
    In their study, the researchers evaluated the ratio of E3 to E2 in 500 pregnant women and found it went up rapidly as labour approached indicating that E3 could stimulate the onset of labour. 
    They then sought to understand what was causing the increase in E3 and they believe they found an answer. 
    In a previous study they showed that a hormone in the placenta, called corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH), rises rapidly through pregnancy, peaking at the time of labour. CRH levels rise earlier in women who deliver prematurely and later in women who deliver late, forming a biological clock which regulates the length of pregnancy. 
    The researchers also showed that CRH can act on the adrenal glands of the foetus to stimulate the production of a steroid hormone which the placenta uses to make E3. 
    This study showed a strong relation between CRH levels in mother’s blood in weeks before birth and levels of E3 supporting the view that CRH increases E3.
    Smith said: “CRH may be the catalyst for the onset of labour, by driving steroid hormone production in the foetus, which then leads to an increase in E3 so that it exceeds E2. 
    “If this progression is correct, it may explain why women with a baby who dies in utero can still go into labour. In this scenario, levels of E3 would drop making E2 more dominant and triggering the onset of labour. 
    “It may be possible to delay or advance labor by varying the ratio of E3 to E2 by giving either E2 or E3 to the pregnant woman. It may also be possible to predict the timing of birth by monitoring this ratio between the two estrogens.” 
    The findings are to be published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. PTI