Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org:
And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere (“an ambient way to see your weather”) is now being built. Ryu and friends also produced something called MacHeist where they bundled shareware applications and sold them for $49, donating 25% of proceeds to the buyer’s charity of choice. MacHeist raised $200,000. Pogue got it right when he said the future of the tech looks good if it is in the hands of kids like Phillip Ryu.
The story is not quite that simple. Yes, they raised money for charity, but many people are upset that the developers got a fixed price, while MacHeist sold far more than expected and made a killing. The cooperative model would have been to share a percentage of the profits with the developers. For a summary, see this Wired story. For the details, read Jon Gruber’s always-amusing posts (1, and 2) at Daring Fireball.
There’s no doubt this project was a marketing masterpiece. Ryu and team probably made north of $400,000 in one week. [Yeah, four hundred, not forty.] But that doesn’t mean I’m excited to put the future in their hands.