Interview: FunMobility’s Adam Lavine Explains The Economics Of Selling Apps In These iPhone Times

imageLast week, Adam Lavine the CEO of FunMobility offered me a glimpse of his world. For the past 10 years, the Pleasanton, Calif.-based company was used to doing business the carrier’s way. That has meant creating mobile content to meet their specifications, accepting their revenue splits, and then porting each wallpaper or mobile application to every handset in their portfolio. And then, “rinse, later, repeat.”

But now he says the industry has been turned on its head. Carriers have started questioning how much money they can demand from content providers and how many handsets is reasonable to ask developers to support — all because of the iPhone. Lavine: “A good analogy is that you have this mobile content pond with a bunch of creatures swimming in it and then Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) walked up to the pond and threw a rock into it. So now the water is turbulent and cloudy. Everyone is still in the pond, but the landscape has changed.”

Because of this, Lavine’s looking to increase their market share by picking up the company’s pace of development and considering acquisitions. To date, some of FunMobility’s most popular applications have been Wallpaper Universe, Ringtones Universe, TrueTones Universe and America’s Best Mobile Pix, but going forward he sees a new opportunity evolving in using mobile content to communicate. As a company that has been successful at selling both content and apps through the carrier and the iPhone, Lavine breaks down the economics of both…any guesses on which one makes more?

Excerpts from the interview after the jump…

Here’s excerpts from our conversation:

Q: So, is Apple’s iPhone good or bad if your business has been based on the carrier model?

Lavine: “Apple

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