Here is a delightful story of an iphone app called ibird, a field guid to birds.
Mitchell Waite plays sounds from his iBird application for the iPhone to attract birds to feeders in his yard.
MITCHELL WAITE could think of only one reason that Apple’s legal department would leave a voice message last February asking him to call back: he was about to be sued. Mr. Waite has a tiny software company bearing his name — it has no full-time employees — whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.
IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from $4.99 to $29.99.
“I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Mr. Waite said.