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I just realized that equation could actually be true. Let me explain:

TUAW covered (rather re-re-covered) a story about DWA/iNotes ultralite for the iPhone. In the article, they mentioned that there are 140 million people using Notes.

Earlier today, I referenced another TUAW article that talked about sales figures for some of the iPhone applications. In this case, they showed that two products from a company called tap tap tap produced revenues of $52,815 in 24 days.

The current iPhone applications that run either parts, or all, of Lotus Notes mail, calendar and contacts functionality range in price from $2.99 to well over $100 plus monthly fees. And all of those apps have some goofy element of them. Either they don’t work with the iPhone’s built in calendar, mail and/or contacts applications; or they require PCs and servers to act as conduits; or they flat-out don’t always work.

So that led me to a crazy idea: why doesn’t IBM/Lotus build their own native iPhone application that integrates Lotus Notes email, calendar and contacts into the iPhone’s application set? I know, crazy isn’t it? In my idea, this would be a true application, not just a website you have to authenticate to, navigate through, etc. via your browser.

Let’s do some unrealistic math. Let’s assume all of the 140 million users bought an iPhone and paid $9.99 for the Notes application. Boom! $1,398,600,000. But that’s a big assumption.

How about some more conservative math. Let’s assume 1% of the 140 million users (1.4 million) get an iPhone and pay a fee for the application. Let’s look at some pricing models:

1.4 million X $9.99 (a low-cost price-point for the software) = $13,986,000
1.4 million X $29.99 (a fair average) = $41,986,000
1.4 million X $99 (the equivalent of GOOD’s license cost) = $138,600,000

Now, to be fair. That’s not instant revenue because you’ve got to tell businesses that the iPhone is now a device that can be supported and that they should ditch their Blackberry for it. Still, those are some big numbers and I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think it would cost them anywhere near any of those numbers to develop the software.

I could be all wrong, but I enjoy doing math. By the way, these calculations were brought to you by my iPhone.

Tags: dwa, inotes, iphone, math, ultralite

Last week someone suggested something really simple while we were at an off-site meeting (at a WiFi challenged location): “go open that file on Quickr from your iPhone.”

I have to admit, I hadn’t thought to do that before.

Oddly enough… it works pretty well! The iPhone’s ability to size your browser screen allows you to easily navigate around Quickr’s web interface. The iPhone’s ability to open just about any file type your office uses means that you can drill down to a file, open it, get the info you need and move on (here’s a YouTube video of someone doing exactly that). – How handy!

Of course, as I type this, I’m thinking it would be awesome to have an ultralite mode, but that’s sitting down a ways on my Top 10 list of things I wish Lotus had for the iPhone.

Which reminds me… an email showed up this morning from a person within Lotus (who asked to not be named beyond that) who said I should have looked more closely at the Lotus.com page regarding iPhone/iNotes functionality. My last post mentioned the inability to create calendar entries, and as this emailer mentioned, Lotus was careful to use the words “create” and “view” in a precise manner. As you can see, calendar items are mentioned only as “view” not “create.” As he jokingly wrapped up: “you need to read carefully so as not to get your hopes up.”

Tags: dwa, inotes, iphone, lotus, quickr