No news is good news?

I seldom take a train but what I read in the papers supports my little experience: you don’t get much for your tax dollars with Sydney’s trains.

If I ran Sydney’s lamentable railway service I would be falling over myself to help commuters. I might hand out plastic seat covers so they could sit with confidence that their trousers weren’t soaking up last night’s vomit; or I might give them free newspapers so they had something to read other than the smutty  graffiti encouraged by discounted student travel.

What I would not be doing is paying lawyers to menace iPhone app developers who are doing nothing more sinsister than offering rail timetables in a contemporary form. I wouldn’t be doing it for at least three reasons:

Firstly, I’d probably be very, very busy trying to clean up the trains and get them to be punctual. I wouldn’t have time to be threatening commuters and developers with legal action.

Secondly, I’d probably be too embarrassed to spend even more taxpayer money than I already do, especially on lawyers threatening some of the few supporters I do have.

Thirdly, I’d think to myself: hang on, this will save me a dollar or two on developing my own application (see above point about frittering away taxpayers’ money).

“RailCorp‘s primary concern is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

“This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, trackwork and other changes. Third-party RailCorp timetable applications may contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.” via SMH

This is certainly a sensible argument with which one can’t find fault. After all, on the few occasions I have taken the train I have seen RailCorp staff running around with red pens offering to update commuters’ hard copies and printouts of timetables with details of “service interruptions, special events services, trackwork and other changes.” In fact, RailCorp has disabled the “print version” feature of its online timetable so you can never have anything but an up-to-the-minute electronic version. Hang on, no they haven’t, my mistake. But this is all very sensible nonetheless. Really. Why on earth should the public be able to take public information from a public service and make it available to the public? Christ almighty, next step End Times.

Contrast Railcorp’s thick-headed approach to this issue with the Bureau of Meterology‘s enlighted embrace of Graham Dawson’s OzWeather iPhone app. As Graham told our packed-like-a-5.17-commuter-service seminar Entering the Mobile Ecosystem, BOM simply forks over its data to him, no charge, no drama, no issues.

It’s almost as if BOM thinks to itself, “We’re paid for by the public, maybe the information we generate by spending that money should, you know, belong to the public.” Communists.

Maybe, and here’s some real craziness, RailCorp should be spending its time and money making the trains run on time, not worrying the public might be “misled” if iPhone app developers give them access to the published timetable. Or, and now my brain is really starting to hurt, they help these guys to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into the app because it is, you know, web-enabled so that would be an — argh! the pain, the pain! — a win-win.

Now, we would say it was exceptional, wouldn’t we? But when you’re playing to a standing-room-only crowd of the most networked people in the country, you couldn’t get away with an untruth.

You can see everything that participants had to say by checking out our #silfed hashtag on Twitter. The most rewarding part for us — other than a capacity crowd! — was that participants agreed we lived up to the promise we make in our guiding principles:

Our contributors commit to:

• Sharing their experiences generously
• Giving practical advice
• Using real-world examples, Australian where possible
• Answering questions

We were also pleased to get tweets from Melbourne during the event asking if we could bring Entering the Mobile Ecosystem to Victoria.

We can and we’d love to. If you’d be interested in coming to an encore presentation of Entering the Mobile System, please leave a comment, send us an email or @ us on Twitter.

OzWeather, best-selling Australian app for the iPhone

In January Apple announced there had been 500 million downloads from its app store. That would have been a wonderful result for a store that had been open for only half a year; but it’s astounding when the figure stood at “just” 300 million downloads a month before.

OzWeather is the most successful Australian iPhone app in the Apple store. Priced at $2.49, it hasn’t been out of the Australian store’s top 10 since its launch in November last year. At the time of writing, it had the top spot.

It’s author, Graham Dawson, is a self-taught app developer, having made a career from developing niche software on other platforms. He estimates development costs at $15,500 (the amount he would have had to pay another developer to do what he did). That put the break-even point at just a few months from the release date. (After taxes and Apple’s cut, Graham makes roughly $1.60 per copy sold.)

“There’s certainly a market for more Australian apps,” Graham told me. “Every country has its own needs and cultural aspects. There are lots of niches out there.”

Aside from proving a demand for local apps, Graham has shown that users will pay for Australian content even when they’re getting something similar for free: the iPhone comes with a Yahoo-powered weather app as standard but its data is not as authoritative as OzWeather’s, which comes directly from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. There are plenty more sources of trusted Australian data that could be converted to an app.

“You just have to go out and look at what those niches are,” says Graham.

Beyond sales, there is the benefit to companies developing apps of getting their content in front of influential customers who will pass on what they like, making recommendations to their friends.

“iPhone users are passionate, viral, they’ll share their information and their findings,” says Keith Ahern, CEO of Australian-based Mobile 2.0 developers MoGeneration. “It’s easy to think iPhone owners are just 300,000 users out of a population of 19 million they can — and do — use iPhone apps to share content with people who don’t have iPhones. So they’re ‘only’ 300,000 people but their sphere of influence goes well beyond that.”

Graham seen first hand the passion of the mobile community. “Typically I get half a dozen emails a day from the feedback button in the app,” he says. “It’s extremely valuable.”

Graham Dawson will be speaking at our Entering the Mobile Ecosystem seminar on 2 February.