In the socialist hell-hole (/s) I live in, I pay taxes for a fairly comprehensive trash and recycling service run by my local government. The service operates weekly. However, they only take care of trash that fits into their standardised trash bags or containers. They will not pick up anything that is too heavy for their workers to lift, such as a broken TV, or too big for their trucks, such as a mattress. Thus, there are additional private services here that have sprung up to take care of non-standard trash, and they do quite well out of it.
It's a fairly short game, much shorter than their Doom Resurrection which sold for $9.99 on release. I also recall JohnC saying that the iPhone game offers a fantastic marketing channel for their bigger Rage console game, so they wanted to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if id seriously considered offering the iPhone game for free.
This was linked at the top of the blog post linked to by cwan.
EDIT: I should add that while you're right about the source of the graphs and numbers, the scare-quoted "facts" in my first paragraph referred to way in which the post simply reprinted Ian Wishart's assertions as fact.
The individual graphs obviously come from official sources, but they are arranged in a very duplicitous way. I'm not sure how you can build a case from just two graphs and a few emails when there is an absolute torrent of data available. I assume it would be quite easy for me to find two more graphs that "prove" that the world will be covered in water in only five years and that we're all doomed.
The source of the "facts" in this blog post is none other than Ian Wishart, who is regarded by many in New Zealand as a crackpot. He is anti-gay, anti-science, anti-evolution, and very right wing. If you cross Murray from "Flight of the Chonchords" with Glenn Beck, you'll have a pretty good idea of who the guy is. Here's a review of one of his more recent books:
Ian Wishart will not be very well known outside New Zealand, so I just wanted to point out that he has a massive agenda, as well as a reputation for relentlessly cherry-picking facts to support his points of view. Very few in NZ take him seriously. I strongly encourage all of you to treat his writings (which were mostly just reprinted in the link posted by cwan) with an extreme level of skepticism.
Finally, the New Zealand scientist mentioned in the post, Jim Salinger, does have an excellent reputation in New Zealand and around the world. He was part of the IPCC group, for example. It is a real shame, but I have a feeling his name is about to be dragged through the mud by these crackpots. I was very, very surprised to see his name associated with science as bad as that mentioned in the original blog post, until I saw that Ian Wishart was the source of the information.
Ernest Rutherford - Discovered the proton and originated the orbital theory of the atom. Director of a lab that launched the careers of many other famous physicists.
William Pickering - Director of NASA's JPL during the moon years. Held the position for 22 years.
Peter Jackson - Created a movie industry out of nothing in a country thousands of miles away from Hollywood.
Sir Edmund Hillary - Helped build hundreds of schools and hospitals in Nepal. Climbed Everest. Crossed the Antarctic in a hacked together tractor. Jet-boated up the Ganges.
Charles Upham - Won the Victoria's Cross twice during WW II.
B.Sc (Computer Science) and an incomplete B.A (Philosophy/Classics). University of Canterbury here in New Zealand. Currently programming for my startup.
Yeah - so far there are about 3 clear leaders (30-40% higher than the others). I probably need to run the ads for another two weeks before I know for sure, though.
Has anyone tried taking an analytical approach to finding a name? This is an approach I am currently trying - registering a lot of domain names and then using Google adwords to find out what name most people click on. Have no idea how well it works yet, but it seems much better than relying on your 'gut' to choose a name. Here's the approach:
1. Find some available domain names that are, at the very least, easy to pronounce and spell. Easier said than done of course, but I still think it's possible to find some good stuff. For example, this website - http://www.5letter.com/domain-names/ - allows you to search through all available domain names that are exactly 5 letters long. There are some surprises there.
2. Register as many domain names as budget allows. If it sounds good and its available, grab it.
3. Throw together a website with a bit of info about your product and a box for people to enter their email address to find out when you're launching. I'm sure you have seen these kinds of sites before. The whole point of doing this is to make sure people have something to look at when they click your ads, and you might get to collect a few email addresses to notify when you DO actually launch.
4. Go to Google adwords and set up an account (http://adwords.google.com). Create an ad that explains something about your product. Clone this ad for each of your domain names - ensuring that the ad title contains ONLY the text in each of names to test. For example, if your domain name is XYZ.com then put XYZ in the title. The point of this is that all your ads will be identical EXCEPT for the title, which contains a potential product name.
Make sure all the ads point to the website created at step 3. Choose keywords that people in your target market will be most likely to search. Make sure your budget is high enough to ensure a reasonable statistical sample for each ad. You need enough, in my opinion, to collect at least 100 clicks per ad. Google can handle all of the ad rotation for you, though there's no guarantee that impressions will be equal for all ads.
5. (I'm currently at this step). Launch all of the ads. Wait for a couple of weeks or for however it long it takes to get a statistically reasonable number of clicks and impressions. Once you're happy with the numbers, look at the click/impression ratio for each ad. Basically, the ad with the highest ratio of clicks to impressions "wins", and the name in the ad title is your product name. If there's no clear cut winner, the idea is to cut all the losers and re-run the top 2 (or 3 or whatever it is) until a clear winner is found.
A couple of things about this method:
a. The method costs a bit and can take up a bit of time. I've spent about $300 so far, and some of the ads still haven't got enough impressions yet after two weeks.
b. You obviously don't need to actually register all of the domain names, but I still think it's a good idea just in case you miss out on a good one. You don't need to create the website either, but I think it's a good idea if you're serious.
c. I'd imagine this process might work well for product names in general.
d. There's a chance you'll get to a sort of local maxima with your choice of names. No idea how to resolve this, short of coming up with as many different ideas as possible.
e. Probably won't work too well for products aimed at hardcore geeks, as they don't tend to click ads or block them altogether.