I'm a product manager that oversees several hundred apps over roughly 25 stores on 8 platforms (Android, iOS, BlackBerry/QNX Windows, Symbian, Bada, Brew, J2ME).

We are do a steady 2.5 million in sales per year, aiming for 4m next year.

The problem is that startups in the Valley are extremely narrow minded and aesthetically snobbish in their mobile approach.

1) There are 1 billion feature phone users around the world who have perfectly usable app stores.

2) You need to launch in more languages than just english, and on more app stores than just the US market -- Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese at a minimum.

3) Apps that are not SAAS are throw away, impulse buys. They should be developed with that in mind.

4) Apps have a short lifespan and sell based on timeliness.

5) If you want guaranteed profit in mobile, build mobile extensions for established brands, don't try to build the next Angry Birds or Apple App clone.

6) Design matters, but not that much. Touch interface has made UI far more visceral, but the sale happens long before the user judges the design

7) IAP -- its icky but it works

8) Try lots of stuff rapidly and fail fast. 2-3 month cycles. You can get up to about 10 apps a month if you have a larger team and a good process.

Finally, this is nothing like 1999. Companies were failing with no product, spending 1 year + and not even launching. There were late round fundings for companies that literally had products that were figments of their imagination.

Now two guys in their garage can build a hit app with two macs and no funding what-so-ever. Don't confuse a highly active, easy to penetrate market with a bubble.

Horrifying.

The point about the coffee cup comparison isn't that cups of coffee are the benchmark experience for product pricing; if that were the case, my next root canal would cost $0.20.

The point of the coffee cup comparison is marginal utility: the money you spend on an expensive cup of coffee almost certainly has very little utility at the margin, because you are happy to chuck it away for a bad cup of coffee.

Oh, you really like Starbucks coffee? That's unfortunate, because it's pretty bad, but more importantly: you militantly miss the point of the comparison when you benchmark the experience of installing a new app against the enjoyment you get from a cup of coffee.

This place has an enormous problem with pricing and economics. Unlike Patrick, who really does sweat the fact that developers are making small fractions of their overall worth due to underpricing their offerings, I should be overjoyed at the fact that the biggest collection of new software entrepreneurs on the Internet hangs out at a meme generation engine for exploitable market inefficiencies. But unfortunately, I'm an obnoxious nerd, so all I can think to do about this is yell. ARGH.

A dollar at the margin for a person with a $600 phone on a $50/mo data contract is not an enormous gamble. It is a pittance too trivial for that person to even contextualize. The problem isn't that people are unwilling to give up $1 for apps; it's that they're hesitant to give up $0.25 for anything online. When you start with the understanding that there's huge impedance at "anything above free", it's clear why "$1" is not a particularly great price point, and why "better strategies to motivate people to part with $1" is a terrible meme to propagate.

I'm renouncing my Amnesty International-funding credit card on this. The silence on their part, when this charade goes on on their doorstep in London, is deafening.

The same goes for LibDems and Labour, but I've given up on them a long time ago (and to be fair, Labour are not even in power). Human/civil rights was just about the last platform where LibDems had a shred of credibility, and now it's shot. To maintain a few perks, they will let the Tories destroy centuries of civilisation - the Vienna Convention is a cornerstone of international relations, and hence, of world peace; threatening it over a silly man is just irresponsible. Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador and old-time LibDem, is just about as shocked as I am, and it's the only reasonable voice I've heard in the last 24 hours: http://pastebin.com/s98KhnYD

Supporting journalists in Belarus, China, Syria, Iran without supporting Assange is not grassroot activism: it's cynical, masqueraded foreign policy.