I recently had the opportunity to do interviews with two online sites. Below you will find direct links to both articles.

CasualGaming.biz – “Interview: Oceanhouse Media”

Appmodo – “Appmodo Interviews Oceanhouse Media, Inc., Creators of Dr. Seuss Apps”

Adventure Classic Gaming has posted an in-depth interview, including myself, Tommy Yune and Roland Gustafsson, regarding work on The Journeyman Project right up to the recent Mac OS X update of The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time.

People often ask what tools we are using to build Oceanhouse Media. One area of particular interest has to do with royalty accounting. When you deal with lots of contractors (as we do) you need a dedicated system in place to manage royalty payments. Simple royalty calculations can be done in Excel, but the problem gets exponentially more complicated every month. Apple delivers 7 statements a month (one per territory). Some statements are calculated in currencies other than US dollars. As you start to multiply the number of statements times the number of apps times the number of contributors you quickly get an Excel nightmare. A few months ago I did research into this topic. I thought it would be good to share my findings with other app developers.

The closest model that I could think of for app royalty accounting was the book industry model. Book publishers deal with hundreds of products written by a large number of authors. It seemed logical that a good book accounting package would work for apps as well. As I researched a half-dozen websites, I was encouraged that I’d have many products to choose from. However, as I started to test drive them (usually under a 30-day license) I found that many fell short of basic needs for app developers. Thankfully, there was one product that worked well. To my surprise, it was also one of the more reasonably priced packages.

Dashbook (by Financial Softworks) is a fairly new package that runs $249. It was originally designed for book and music publishers. Dashbook has the ability to track hundreds of products and plenty of authors (artists, programmers, etc). Royalties can be calculated as a flat rate percentage or on a sliding scale. Advances are handled properly as well (assuming that you may need to pay and track them). Dashbook imports Apple iTunes royalty statements without modification (this alone is a fantastic feature). At the end of each month, I simply pull down to “Pay all Authors” and the system lets me know exactly how much money is due to each individual. Put simply, Dashbook addresses all of my royalty accounting needs.

My issues with Dashbook are minor, but they are worth noting. First, the software runs only on Windows, so you’ll need to install Windows on your Mac. I use VMware Fusion 2 and Windows XP. Second, all of the terms/presets are designed with the book industry in mind. You’ll want to use SKUs instead of ISBN numbers. You’ll need to use the “Sales Commission” field to track “Wire Transfer Fees” if you want the fees proportionally subtracted from the statements. Engineers are listed as “Authors.” None of these are major problems. You can still pull all of the calculations that you need, it’s just that you need to twist your head around a few things and ignore many of the other features (inventory tracking of physical products, etc). Hopefully, with time, some of these things can be changed by the user, or perhaps a master setting will allow the user to be in “App Publisher Mode” instead of “Book Publisher Mode.”

To their credit, the developers have been very responsive to my requests for changes. They see the value of serving the app development industry and they appear willing to do what it takes to make Dashbook robust enough for app publishers. All in all, I do recommend Dashbook for anyone needing to track royalty payments based on iPhone app sales. If anyone else can recommend additional tools that would be worth looking into, please let me know.

Let’s hope so! A new article posted on CNN.com today makes a prediction that AT&T will lose it’s exclusive grip on the iPhone sometime this calendar year. Apple has been shying away from exclusive deals in the rest of the world recently and their market share has risen from the teens to over 40% in some countries.

If (when) that happens in the US, it will cause a major boost in all things iPhone. Needless to say, all of us at Oceanhouse Media are crossing our fingers and toes hoping that this will happen… and soon! Bring on Verizon!

Link to article

It has been 7 months since we started Oceanhouse Media. The challenges that we face today are not the ones that I would have predicted. Back in January, I would have guessed our three biggest challenges to be…

1) Constructing a fast production pipeline

2) Securing good licenses

3) Building a large enough team

Fortunately, these have not been an issue. The universe has provided great answers/solutions/people for all three.

So, you might ask yourself, “What are the biggest problems for Oceanhouse Media today?” Well, it turns out that the iPhone app market is getting crowded even faster than we had predicted. When we started OM there were about 10,000 apps in the App Store. There are currently 70,000 apps in the App Store. Recent estimates are that 200-300 new iPhone apps are introduced per day! Therefore, our three biggest hurdles today can thus be summarized as follows…

1, 2 & 3) Visibility, visibility and visibility.

To this end, we have learned that the App Store itself is a poor place to expect app visibility. Unless an app is in the Top-100 of a given category it will not be seen. (The only exception to this rule is Games, which has multiple sub-categories providing additional visibility.) In order to drive sales you have to expect that 95%+ of your traffic must come from external sources. As with just about every industry out there, in the end, it all comes down to marketing and product awareness.

Here are a few ways that we tackle this problem today…

1) We develop products that have built-in brand awareness.

2) We use existing apps as viral vehicles to cross-promote our other apps.

3) We encourage user reviews.

4) We participate heavily on social marketing sites like Facebook and Twitter.

5) And we now have a new technique… We have just released our first FREE app aimed at generating awareness. The Hay House Card Sampler is an app that is a catalog for our other apps. The sampler allows people to touch, feel, read and experience one card from each of our Hay House card apps. If they like a particular author/image/saying, one touch on the App Store button will launch them straight to the purchase page for that app. Elegant. Simple. Of course we will update the Sampler app regularly to always ensure fresh content. We have high hopes. We log all traffic, so we’ll know in a few months if this technique pays off.

We have a few other ideas in the works. You’ll hear about those soon enough. At the core, it seems that this is a word-of-mouth business. Given this, we find ourselves asking the question, “What is the best way to encourage satisfied customers to tell their friends about Oceanhouse Media products?”

If you have ideas that we are not already exploring, we’d love to hear from you.

The folks at Hay House Radio invited me to their studio recently. The topic of conversation ranged from current Hay House iPhone apps to future releases. The segment is scheduled to be broadcast towards the end of August, but you can listen to a sneak peek right here. Enjoy!

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It has been a very exciting week for all of us at Oceanhouse Media. Let me highlight a few items that we are particularly excited about…

- We shipped 10 new apps last Monday. Yes, 10 new apps! That increases our catalog from 16 to 26 apps. Among the new apps are 8 Louise Hay affirmation sets (priced at $0.99 each), a new app from Anne Wilson Schaef (based on her best-seller “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much”) and a new app from Suze Orman called “Money Cards.”

- We had some of our best sales days this past week. Part of this is simply having more apps to sell and part is increased awareness about Oceanhouse Media apps.

- People are really starting to use the email feature in all of our card and calendar apps. If you haven’t tried it yet, go do it now. Open the app, select a card and press the button on the lower left. Send an inspiring message to a friend. You may have a real impact on someone’s day!

- We amended our agreement with Hay House to include even more wonderful apps from prominent authors. We also agreed to develop more than just card and calendar apps for them. We have some very exciting new designs for fantastic apps coming.

- We are about to sign our second major license agreement (another major book publisher) and we delivered a very large pitch to a third company that we are very excited to work with.

All in all, we are thrilled with how things are going. We are continuing to focus on developing high quality apps that uplift, educate and heal the planet. Thank you all for your continued support. And remember, if you like our apps please review them on the App Store. Reviews really help a lot.

We received a small write-up on Entrepreneur.com. Click here for the link.