Story about an Android contest winner

billingsgazette.net

7 pointsevanlong1 comment

This guy built an app that takes in a picture of a bar code and then looks up information online about the product. Very neat.

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The interesting thing about this, to me, is that this product already has been built several times over, but it has never caught on; this guy still got $375,000 for building a new implementation of an old idea.

It is the same thing with the Apple App Store. Nokia has had Nokia Catalog installed on all its phones forever but it never made any money with it. Then, Apple builds the second coming of Nokia Catalog, names it the "App Store," and starts raking in the cash.

Just because somebody else has done it, doesn't mean that it can't be done (again) more successfully.

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