Unless you follow the doings at Apple Corp. as obsessively as my kids do, you may not have realized that the company has invited its customers to write applications (software programs) for its iPhone. If they accept your app, they give you 70 percent of the revenues. What’s that got to do with construction?
Nothing until just recently when a carpenter/deck builder wrote a program that lets you instantly calculate the spacing of deck balusters on an iPhone. This guy probably won’t make enough money to retire on, but the whole concept of letting outsiders into your business development is a significant trend that will rewrite the rules in the future. If you’re interested the book Wikinomics, explains the trend in some detail. And if you have an idea for a cool program you’d like to sell to Apple, construction related or not, here’s the Apple iPhone developers website for more information.
