Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Royalties for iPhone Developers

I have just learned that Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media will be giving a talk this Friday at MacWorld 2010 on the subject of "Building an iPhone Publishing House."  What makes this session particularly interesting to me is that he will be discussing the securing of intellectual property such as content to quickly bring value to one's App, and after his exhaustive research of software to handle tracking such license payment requirements, Oceanhouse Media chose DashBook!

When Michel first approached us about using DashBook, we had only recently introduced our version 3 that supported importing sales reports to use as the data for royalty calculations.  However, we did not yet have an import for Apple's iTunes sales reports.  With Michel's input and the use of DashBook's extensible import mapping architecture, we were able to quickly send him an import map that allowed his trial version to import his sales from each of the seven regional reports that Apple generated.  Needless to say, he was impressed with our rapid response.  Of course, already having an import that could convert currencies, along with the existing royalty calculation abilities that supported multiple payees per product helped, too!

After Oceanhouse Media purchased a license to DashBook and began using it, they continued to offer great suggestions to refine DashBook for the market of iPhone and iPod (and now iPad) developers.  One of his requests was the ability to easily specify the deposit fees that were charged, and automatically spread those costs across the apps sold in that period and region.  Fortunately, DashBook already had an option to reduce the amount received by various costs, so he was able to bend it to his will.  However, DashBook v4 will soon be released which will provide a simple entry during import to a cost item whose name will makes sense - "Payment Fees."

We are very happy to work with companies such as Oceanhouse Media who seek perfection in their operations.  DashBook is a powerful system built on a flexible architecture, and our team is committed to providing the best system there is.

Thanks to everyone!

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