application to the various mobile and Web operating systems by using the application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) provided by the manufacturers. In addition, the company has built connectors to more than 100 services such as Facebook and Groupon. Eight of the company’s 13 employees are developers, including Java programmers. Programmers with mobile application development skills are expensive and in short supply, says Janer.

But companies like Spring Partners can catch a break on the cost of computer resources by going, at least initially, to a cloud service. The company has no data center and uses Amazon’s pay-as-you-go cloud service. “For our 1. 6 million users,” says Janer, “we have one person on staff to run our IT operations.” Amazon’s big outage in April knocked Spring Partners offline for 30 hours, which was painful, says Janer. Still, he says if Spring Partners goes in-house for processing, it will be based on the economies of scale for a larger company, not the risks of being based in the cloud.

In Memoriam
Robert
Morris,
1932–2011

instant Cocoa

This Seattle-based startup is not so much a company as it is a hobby started by Eric Maland in his spare time while working full time at Google and then Twitter. But Maland, who is currently unemployed, says he’s devoting his efforts to taking Instant Cocoa to a new level.

Several years ago while at Google,
Maland took an Apple Mac program-
ming class and for fun wrote a desk-
top application called Wordplay that
would solve crossword puzzles. He
put it on his Web site, free of charge.
When Apple introduced the iPhone,
he started developing for iOS. “I didn’t
actually have an iPhone,” he explains.
“I just downloaded [Apple’s] SDK and
wrote my first couple of apps in that.”
He spent a week writing pTerm, a
simple SSH (Secure Shell protocol)
client and terminal emulator for the
iPhone, and he placed it at the Apple
App Store.

many internet-based companies offer goods and services to consumers for free based on an expectation of associated advertising revenue. the effects of advertising, however, are notoriously difficult to measure. “there’s a lot of hype around mobile apps, but not necessarily a lot of dollars as the advertising models haven’t been proven yet,” says aaron masih, director of the mobile developer program at nuance Communications.

But the model, at least in aggregate, seems promising. gartner says the advertising revenue from mobile app stores has been modest, but is growing rapidly from $15 million in 2008 to $269 million in 2010 to an estimated $1.5 billion next year.

“there are many proven and profitable online ad models for search, content, referral, and user-generated community sites,” says Jeff Janer, cofounder and CeO of spring partners. “in our case, where consumers are overtly signaling the products and services they’re interested in, the brands view this signal as high-value lead generation and are willing to pay more than standard display ad rates to reach consumers who have expressed intent.”

Advertising Revenue
Keeps Growing

Cryptographer and Unix
operating system co-creator
robert morris died June 26
in lebanon, nh, at the age
of 78 from complications of
dementia. morris was a pioneer
in developing operating
systems and computer security.
he also purportedly played a
role in one of the world’s first
cyberattacks during the 1991
persian gulf War.
morris, who started his
career as a researcher for
at&t’s Bell laboratories in
the 1960s, initially focused
on the development of
compilers that could turn
programming instructions into
machine readable code. later,
he helped develop the Unix Os,
which now resides in a growing
spate of devices, including
apple’s Os X, the iphone, and
google’s android.
during the 1970s, morris
played an important role in the
development of key computer
security features, including
encryption and password
protection. he continued to
explore cryptography, eventually
unlocking an early german
encryption system. from 1986
to 1994, morris served as chief
scientist for the nsa’s national
Computer security Center.
although his role in the
1991 persian gulf War remains
classified, it has been widely
reported that morris helped
launch cyberattacks against
key government and military
systems in iraq. experts have
speculated that these attacks
destroyed command and control
systems before the actual
assault was launched against
saddam hussein’s regime.
morris gained international
attention in 1988, after his son,
robert tappan morris, then a
graduate student in computer
science at Cornell University,
wrote a computer worm that
ultimately froze about 10% of
the 50,000 computers then used
on the internet. the code was
intended to be innocuous but
spread because of a design flaw.
morris retired in 1994. he
is survived by his wife anne
farlow morris, a daughter, and
two sons.

—Samuel Greengard