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vindigo's new business model

while no one was looking, vindigo, inc, developer of vindigo 2.0, which imo is the best mobile city guide available, has started developing other productivity apps on the BREW platform under the name "vindigo studios". in the last few weeks, they have snuck a few other great productivity apps into verizon's "get it now" service, where subscribers can download BREW apps over the air, and have them automatically charged to their account, with no wallet to deal with, and no WAP browsing necessary to locate applications.

vindigo has released MapQuest mobile, an BREW based front end to MapQuest for directions and maps, and MovieGoer, which offers the same for finding theatres and movie times. I've tried both of these out on verizon's network and both work great.

and for the price, they had better! MapQuest Mobile is offered at $3.99/month or $2.49/day. that is, you can choose a monthly subscription and pay the monthly price, or buy a 1 day subscription that expires the next day. definitely pricey, but very useful - and your success rate will be much higher than if you had tried this on the WAP based versions of the same apps.

the way the revenue split works with BREW is you sell your app to an operator at a wholesale price, which the operator marks up. then the developer gets 80% of the wholesale price per unit sold, qualcomm gets 10% and the operator gets 10% - so it's very developer friendly, and suggests a strong postion for developers in the BREW vs J2ME argument. i've heard that vindigo was making 4 times the revenue on their BREW version of vindigo vs the J2ME version that runs on att wireless' mMode service, so it's no surprise to see them expanding their line with vindigo studios, as well as doing custom development for other operators.

nextel has a similar revenue split for their J2ME developers, so this model seems to be setting the market here in north america. we'll see if other operators that offer J2ME and mophun applications follow suit.