BeerMap, one of the projects I’m currently involved with is a free iPhone app which we have always intended to monetise once it reached maturity. We’ve recently started to discuss charging in iTunes however it gave us a few concerns:

1. The application relies on user collaboration in order to generate data, charging for the application would probably reduce the uptake by new users.
2. The application will take some time to reach maturity and is dependant on the feedback of our loyal user base.

We therefore have resisted charging for the app and instead have begun to investigate other avenues.

Last Saturday was a BeerMap development day during which we discussed the possibility of monetisation using in-app purchases and we think we may have come up with a novel solution; Pay What You Want.

Pay What You Want is not a new concept; in 2007 Radiohead allowed music lovers to download their new album and choose how much they want to pay. More recently 2D Boy used the same model when celebrating the first birthday of World of Goo, achieving a large number of sales and yielding a surprising profit.

Combining pay what you want and in-app purchase capability in BeerMap would allow users to decide whether they want to pay for the app or not! Apple provides payment tiers to which we will be limited so it won’t be 100% pay what you want, however these represent reasonable prices which users will be familiar with.

We plan to incentivise payment, potentially by giving the user access to extra features or awarding them recognition within the BeerMap community.

We hope this model will ensure we don’t scare off new users who don’t want to and will never want to pay, while providing people with the option to support the project and to show appreciation for our work.

Image credit: Alex Osterwalder

One of the projects I have been working is BeerMap, a location aware iPhone application which shows you nearby pubs, how people have rated beer and lets your add to the database by uploading reviews and images.

My role in this project was to produce the web service to manage all of the information, and I thought it may be useful to give a summary of the technologies used.

PHP & The Zend Framework

The Zend Framework is an extensive PHP library providing the MVC approach to code structure which is also recommended for iPhone development.

I also heavily extended the Zend_Controller_Action class to incorporate authentication and context switching depending on the response type needed.

MySQL Stored Procedures

All our data is stored in a MySQL database, so it was logical to also create a mechanism within the database to calculate distances depending on longitude and latitude. This calculation can be relatively expensive so I am looking a ways to further optimise this process, however it appears to be working relatively efficiently at the moment.

Plists

Web services generally will provide a response in XML or JSON, however using these response formats would require additional libraries to be included within the iPhone app, increasing its size and complexity. However, by generating a Plist response, the iPhone can read this without any complex parsing or processing.

For this we modified a version of the CFPropertyList library and added a better mechanism for guessing variable types which I hope will be integrated into the original library at some point soon.

Further Information

Above is just a very brief summary of the technologies used, however please contact me for more information and take a look at the websites below:

• Matt’s Blog – more information about iPhone development
• BeerMap – the product site
• Zend Framework – a good place to start with the Zend Framework

Photo Credit: Will Ockenden