After reading our post earlier this week about five mobile applications aimed at making your commute less hectic, the folks over at Washington, D.C.-based Mobomo emailed us about their latest location-based app for the iPhone, TrafficTweet, which publicly launches today.
The app harnesses the real-time power of Twitter and crowd-sourcing by letting drivers tweet about traffic conditions, road closures and speed traps to other TrafficTweet users with just a couple of clicks on their iPhone. The information drivers send through their tweets is used to update the interactive map within the application (which is available for 99 cents) in real time, so it gets better as more people use it. While TrafficTweet joins a string of mobile apps made for the road, it’s uncertain whether developers will be able to make money off these clever applications — especially since many of them are free. Developers will have to sell tens of millions of these apps to make a profit. Though the iPhone — one of the leaders of the smartphone market — sold a whopping 11.4 million devices last year,those impressive sales numbers still aren’t enough to fill developers’ coffers. To break even, developers will have to come up with innovative ways to monetize their apps. More importantly, they need to quickly develop versions of the apps for other smartphone platforms such as Google’s Android, Palm’s webOS, Symbian and BlackBerry.
Although smartphone sales are expected to remain strong over the next four years, we have a vague picture of which app developers will actually grow their revenue and become profitable, and which won’t make enough cash to survive.
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Images courtesy of Mobomo and iSmashPhone.

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