I just wanted to take a brief moment to talk about startups, entrepreneurship and lifestyle. As I’ve been working on my mobile app to help the bullying problem, the common wisdom is that I should get investors and build a company. The company would sell the software and/or sell the data that is collected to schools.

I recently read an article that said the rough ‘burn rate’ per developer is $10k/month, so with 4 developers the burn rate is $40K/month or roughly $500K per year. That means you have to make $500K per year just to break even. With varying amounts of staff, experience levels, and roles these numbers could be less or more of course.

Another option could be to team up with a group of people who are partners and perhaps don’t draw a salary at first. But at some point the revenues you earn would have to be split, and therefore increasing the revenue requirements (4 partners = 4 times the desired revenue).

These options aren’t that attractive to me because you’d have to spend a lot of your time chasing investors, being subjected to their direction, having high overhead, having to earn huge revenues and so on.

Another option that also incorporates a desired lifestyle and control is to develop a software product on your own and either try to sell it (to clients or in the app store), or release it open source. An open source project could result in a lot of consulting work as you help businesses or governments, install, configure and modify the code.

I like this option for a few reasons. It gives me full control, it keeps me coding, and developing my software skills (which is good for future contracts), and it helps society by providing open source software to the world. This may be ‘thinking small’ to some people, but at this point it makes a lot of sense for my particular situation.

They say being lazy is a good thing for programmers. This laziness will cause you to avoid reinventing the wheel by finding an existing solution out there. I spent weeks trying to find a better solution to mobile programming than Objective-C (and related languages for other platforms). Luckily there are things like PhoneGap, jQuery mobile and HTML5.

As I think about mobile apps and worry about scalability (perhaps prematurely) I’ve been trying to find creative ways to leverage existing services. At a basic level, you could use Google’s App Engine but you’d have to consider the languages they support (Python, Java, Go).

With the recent Vancouver riots, police have been using YouTube videos and pictures to arrest people that committed crimes. In the Middle East, people were using Twitter to post events as they happened or to set up meets. This got me thinking that I could use Twitter as my application instead of building my own. It’s essentially a database with rich RESTful APIs and handles the scalabliity issue for you.

So instead of using your own app and database, you could use Twitter for apps that require geolocation. You could post information to Twitter and leverage the geolocation capabilities, Places, hashtags. You can use their REST API to POST information and query the results using GET requests.

Posterous is a weblog site so you could use that to post photos, text, videos for a community site where content is user generated. Many of these apps do things already that you would have to spend a lot of time creating yourself. Foursquare is another location based service. Can you leverage their APIs in your own application?

If these sites can not be leveraged it is at least a great exercise to impose constraints on yourself and see what you can come up with for a given problem.

Well, I was finally successful at getting an app I developed on my iPhone! This is done via the Developer program not the App store as you’ll want to test your app out on actual phones before you submit it to the store for approval.

I’ve had all sorts of problems as the original app could not be deployed to my phone because it had iOS version 5.x on it and the app was built with xCode 3.2 for Snow Leopard. Luckily they have v4.2 for Snow Leopard (I originally thought I’d have to upgrade my OS to Lion, which I might do at some point anyway).

So after I installed xCode v4.2 I had start errors. I then uninstalled xCode and reinstalled, then rebooted. I still got errors on boot up and the confusing thing for me is that there are multiple xCode icons in my Finder so when you right click on one it will say what version it is. The one that was giving errors was v3.2.6 to I moved that to trash.

Then I tried copying previous projects into xCode and it would build okay but wouldn’t go on the phone. I wasn’t sure with the reinstall if I lost some things but I rebooted and restarted xCode a few times as suggested during Google searches but that didn’t help. So I created a new project from scratch and copied the files over (from PhoneGap) and presto it went onto the phone!

With all the Developer provisioning profile stuff you have to do on Apple, at the end of the day you get a bundle identifier that you need to use in your app plist file.

When you drag the www folder from another project over you have to make sure it highlights your project and keeps the references. I find using a previous project directory is ripe for problems so try to start everything fresh. A huge pain but it’s great to now have an app on the phone to test. And with phonegap you can copy over different apps and test them in the same project if you want to avoid creating new provisioning profiles. I haven’t fully mastered this area yet but I have it working so I’m super pumped.