Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers for Twitterrific, has written a post on Stack Overflow estimating what it costs to develop a similar iPhone application.

We worked some pretty long hours. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that’s pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I’m going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.

Anyone who’s done serious iPhone development can tell you there’s a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don’t forget they didn’t have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.

There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we’re at $250,000.

You can read the entire post at the link below…

Read More [via stroughtonsmith]

One of the first big “wow” apps for the iPhone was Shazam — hold up your phone to the radio or TV and BAM, find out what song is playing. Likewise, the Last.fm iPhone app was one of the first apps in the App Store for music fans. Today Shazam and Last.fm are partnering to bring features from both services together.

When Shazam launched its premium versions, Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM)RED, last fall, it was unclear if the new features would be worth the $4.99 price tag. The new Last.fm-enhanced features significantly change the value proposition.

Here’s what you can now do with the Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM)RED apps:

– You can listen to Last.fm stations directly from your tagged Shazam tracks.

– You can create new stations from those tracks in Last.fm, provided you have the Last.fm iPhone app installed.

– You can view ticket and tour info for tagged artists with geolocation support to see when your favorite band will be near you.

To us it makes sense to combine a discovery engine like Shazam with a music aggregator like Last.fm. It takes away the need to go the extra step of researching an artist, and also lets you find other artists with similar sounds.

What do you think of the combination of these two services? Comment now!