I was going to buy the Sprint EVO but

[2sls]

I decided to wait for the next Iphone instead just because of Pleco. I've been taking introductory Chinese for the past year and it's been a pain trying to look up a word that I don't know from a book. I've resorted to 1)scanning text, 2)ocr, 3)google translate and I wished for something that would just let me draw the freaking character and translate it for me.

BTW Mike I think you should more aggressively market this stuff to college students. I think pretty much every undergrad here(you can check my email for which school) has an Iphone. I think you should have a slightly higher discount for students though, and in order to combat the pooling problem, maybe you can implement some system where you pay full price and then get a rebate if you send an email using a .edu address or something.

 

[mikelove]

Great! Though I'm honestly not quite getting all of the fuss about the EVO yet - wait until the end of the year and there should be much better 4G options available, Verizon could very well have an LTE Android phone and an LTE iPhone by Christmas. (and maybe even an LTE phone running Windows Phone 7 for good measure, though I'm betting T-Mobile will get a few months of WP7 exclusivity)

The tricky thing about marketing to college students is price. Pleco is perceived by many (wrongfully, IMHO) as a "luxury product" - a very expensive Chinese dictionary for which reasonably-good free / low-cost substitutes (including our own) are available - so a lot of college students are likely to feel like they have better things to do with $100. We can't do much better than our current educational discounts, sadly - between Apple's 30% cut and the not insignificant number of licenses on which we pay a fixed per-copy royalty regardless of what sort of discount we offer (so i.e., aside from Apple's cut being 30% of a lower number the discount is coming entirely out of our profit margin) we've gone about as low as we can go.

In some ways I think the high school market may actually be more fruitful, since there's more of a willingness there (by parents at least) to spend money on tools that help with one's studies beyond the required textbooks / pencils / etc; extra point on the AP Chinese = 5% better chance of getting into such-and-such Ivy, etc. And hence we've got a number of plans in the works for marketing to Chinese teachers, and were very happy to get our parental controls rating bumped from 17+ down to 12+.

The best strategy for college students would probably be to offer some sort of a referral commission, but at the moment that's impossible for our iPhone software at least - if Apple ever gets around to extending their iTunes affiliate program to cover In-App Purchases it'll get much easier then, but for right now if we want to pay people to sell Pleco for us we'll have to do it on spec.