More than a thousand people follow @mobileorchard on Twitter. When we publish new posts on the site, including posts about upcoming workshops, they get tweeted about. And, thanks to our audience’s positive feelings towards the site, a few people kindly re-tweet the workshop location announcements.

These re-tweets — and another generation of re-tweets of the re-tweets — ultimately account for most of the leads for the class. It’s this friend-of-a-friend endorsement (that’s then bolstered by the site’s credibility-building content) that puts butts in seats.

Want to see this in action? Help me fill a class in a challenging market:

I’ll be teaching Beginning iPhone Development For Rubyists as a sort of sister-class to the FutureRuby conference in Toronto on Thursday/July 9 and Friday/July 10.

Google Analytics tells me that, despite its size, Toronto isn’t a hot iPhone town. Word-of-mouth/friend-of-a-friend is going to be important to make this class a success. I’d be grateful if you’d tweet the following:

Thanks for helping me keep the kids in fruit snacks and new shoes.

As a follow-on to last year’s spectacularly successful RubyFringe conference, my friends Pete Forde and Meghann Milliard of Unspace are back with FutureRuby a weekend-long “congress of the curious characters.”

More “experience” than conference, RubyFringe’s format was different than other conferences: an avalanche of 30 minute presentations in a single track during the day and everyone’s invited parties in swank setting at night.

FutureRuby expands on last year’s format with a Soviet inspired crypto-futurist theme. When I started talking with Pete and Meghann about running an adapted for Rubyists version of Mobile Orchard Workshops’ Beginning iPhone Programing Class on the Thursday and Friday before the conference I wanted to fit its announcement into FutureRuby’s theme.

I toyed with east-west themes: diplomacy between western Mobile Orchard with eastern FutureRuby and space-race era Apollo-Soyuz docking. To emphasize the class’s big discount, one draft of the announcement had a “worker’s paradise” angle. These all had a trying to hard feel, so I went with a few labor codewords and eastern-bloc catch phrases and came up with this:

In an act of solidarity and comradeship, FutureRuby and Mobile Orchard, are pleased to present: Beginning iPhone Programming For Rubyists, a developers’ workshop.

Spend the Thursday and Friday before the conference learning to build polished, ready-to-ship iPhone applications.

Dan Grigsby, a speaker at RubyFringe last year, will be teaching a discounted, adapted-for-Rubyists version of Mobile Orchard’s renown beginning iPhone programming class.

Walk in Thursday morning with no previous Objective-C, Cocoa, or iPhone development experience; walk out — and over to FAILcamp — having built apps that incorporate location, motion and email. On Friday you’ll build table/ navigation style apps (e.g., Apple’s Mail and Contacts app) with persistent data storage, hybrid web/native apps, apps that consume ActiveResource RESTful APIs, and more.

The class mixes practical project examples with Objective-C and Cocoa-Touch fundamentals like memory management, protocols and delegates, properties and categories.

All are equal, but some more than others: seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis and fill up quickly. Normally priced at $1200USD, FutureRuby attendees who register before June 9 pay $699; $799USD thereafter. For details, or for details, visit http://www.mobileorchard.com/future

If you’re attending FutureRuby or are live in Toronto, consider attending. The FutureRuby discount makes it a bargain!

The beta class — and its 75% discount — were a one time event. Furthermore, at $1200 our class already priced at the low end of the market. However, I wanted to find a way to offer a discounted non-beta version of the class to those would-be attendees because the bulk of them were fellow hackers, would-be iPhone entrepreneurs and small-shop developers. In short, they’re people I identify with.

I mentioned this conundrum to Luke Francl, who provided a hotel-and-airfare inspired pricing solution derived from the book The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank:

Hotels and airlines provide deep discounts when the itineraries include a Saturday stay. Business travelers aren’t price-sensitive but are schedule-sensitive. They don’t shell out their own money, and when the dealing’s done they want to high-tail it back to their families. Leisure travelers, by comparison, are price-sensitive but schedule-flexible: they go out of their own pockets for travel expense and tend to include a weekend in their plans to maximize their fun-time.

So, I decided to try something similar and offer a “community edition” of the class: at $599 it’s priced at less than half the normal cost and it’s open to anyone but, because it’s given over the weekend, it’ll likely be more attractive to fellow hackers, would-be entrepreneurs and small-shop developers than to folks who need to learn iPhone development for a large employer. Same offering, different days, discounted price.

Visit this page for details on the class.

The Business Journal piece covered Minneapolis-based Digital River’s contract to handle payment processing for the BlackBerry App Store.

The Wall Street Journal piece (video) was about iPhone developers making a bundle with “crap apps” — deliberately pointless novelty iPhone applications.

The Governor was attending a conference in Germany, so the interview was with the Gov’s Director/Communications Brian McClung, and WCCO Sports Reporter and Anchor Mike Max.

You can listen to the interview, which starts half-way through the program, here. Let the player buffer for a minute and then you’ll be able to skip to the middle if you just want to hear my segment.

The other judges and I reviewed over 40 applications before choosing these 12:

Note that I’m not linking to their sites because, well, if they were great sites they wouldn’t need the help! I’ll post a follow up after the challenge to show off the results.

This is a great event. Thanks to teams and the sponsors for volunteering!

It’s a fun topic and I’m quite pleased with the materials. Enjoy.

I was curious about correlating price and popularity within product categories. Peter Cooper thought it’d probably follow a Zipf-like distribution, with more expensive apps falling off quickly.

(see article for larger graph)

Turns out, it kind of does and it kind of doesn’t. By and large, cheaper apps are more popular. That said, in every category there are exceptions: there are apps that are way more popular than they should be for their price. Can better apps fetch more?

While working on this, I started experimenting with combining price and popularity. Multiply them together and you should get a relative ranking of who is making the most, the second most, etc. You can’t get absolute numbers, but as a relative gauge it’s interesting.

Anyway, we’re working on a series of articles about this that’ll be posted to Mobile Orchard. The first one, Price and Popularity: The iPhone App Store’s Data Show Who’s Making The Most Money, went up today.

The article came out in this week’s issue. It’s a great article and features some kind words from Damon Allison and Tom O’Neill. Read it here.

Update: WCCO radio picked up the story for their “Business Brief” which you can hear here.

I sat on the questions for a few days because I wanted to answer modulo my worries about the current state of the word.

I know modulo sound (at best) nerdy and (at worst) smug, but it’s the best word to express what I’m after:

I wanted a view that had enough perspective to see past the turmoil that dominates any view whose granularity is finer than (I suppose) about a year.

When I wrote up my response a few days later I surprised myself with the optimism present in my answers — which were largely about solving curable disease and helping education in the third world, and electricity production. In short, a lot of the world needs help at the warm/clothed/educated/fed level and there’s reason to be optimistic here.

The questions and my answers follow:

Q: Over the next 10 years what will have the most profound impact on human life?

A: The most profound impact on human life over the next ten years will come from the work being done by the technologists-turned-humanitarians and social entrepreneurs.

Q: Name three person you regard as smarter than yourself
Q: Who today or in history would you call a genius

A: My answer are the same for both questions:

Bill Gates, in his role as chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fixing disease in the Third World is often less about cutting-edge technology than it is about simpler things like hygiene and logistics. The genius of what Gates has done comes not from the oft-discussed “balance sheet” approach to deciding where to investment will have the largest impact. Instead, it’s from what Anil Dash describes as “imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one-third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.”

Saul Griffith is solving the energy production equation at both the micro and macro level. He founded Potenco whose pull-cord power generators provide a power source for safe electric lighting [in the third world]. Saul’s latest venture, Makai Power, is pioneering tethered, high-altitude wind power generation and is supported by the Google Foundation.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus for MIT’s Media Lab and [founder of] the One Laptop Per Child education project [that is] at the heart of a mission to raise the bar in education in the Third World.

Q: If you could take a pill that boosted your IQ fifty points, would you take it?

A: In a heartbeat, but only if everyone else could too. Giving yourself a fifty-point boost is selfish; raising the planet’s collective intelligence is good for the species.

Q: Would you rather be street smart? Book smart? Business smart, or people smart? (Choose one)?

A: Street smart is synonymous with problem-solving, which is at the heart of anything interesting.

–

Thanks to Robert Stephens for suggesting me to the publishers.