By the time you read this, the counter on the iPhone website will probably cross a billion.  That's a billion downloads of iPhone applications.

More and more people are getting iPhones -- of the 17 million iPhones in circulation, 13.7 million were sold in 2008.  Apart from all the usual mobile phone things you can do, Apple had the wits to open up its platform for user-generated applications and in just a short time, more than 25,000 applications are now available with more than 200 more coming in everyday!

Thanks to Fred, Hitesh, Anand, Neil and our tech crew, we've also joined the early-adopter bandwagon.  Our first iPhone app? DailyGood. :)  It went live earlier in the month, Jenny was among the first to download it on the East Coast, our resident monk wrote a review for it, and in just 10 days (without any active outreach), we had about 300 downloads and random folks like started blogging about it. :)

Naturally, our price is free, but technically people can charge for it too.  If you charge, Apple takes 30% of the cut.  Initially, no one knew what price distribution curve to expect for mobile apps, but it turns out that prices are tanking -- with top 100 paid apps selling for $2.55.  A free app is used 6.6 times more often than paid ones, but its usage typically levels off after 12 uses.  Wall Street Journal just announced that it is going to make all its paid content available for free (w/ads of course) via an iPhone app.   It's a relatively young market, but it shows lot of promise as young engineers are heading towards the iPhone gold rush and many nonprofits are jumping on board too.

So what does all this mean?  300 people have downloaded the DailyGood app in 10 days, and they are expected to use it 12 times before losing their attention for the next cool application. :)  On one hand, I worry about the cultural ramifications of this mobile culture, but on the other hand, I'm glad we supported 3600 reads of positive news in 10 days.