We’ve just started selling a few partner products – titles developed and maintained by other companies. You may have seen other of the mobile sites doing this already, and you’ll probably see more over the next few months. We’re still a pretty small industry, and at least some of us are trying to work more closely together and give each others’ titles some extra exposure and sales. Plus, like Amazon selling shoes and hairdryers (both of which I’ve bought from them recently), we’re hoping that our featuring other titles will make it easier for visitors to find what they want, even if we don’t make it ourselves.
The support for any partner products on our site will be provided by the company that makes it – PocketInformant by WebIS, 1-Calc by OmegaOne, etc. – but we’re only selling titles that we know are well supported, and that we know we can always reach the author of. The sales will go through the Handango engine that’s the backend for our own title’s store as well.
It’s an experiment – if it doesn’t work well for us, for our visitors, and for the other titles’ authors, we’ll take it down. If it does, we’ll add more titles. We’ll never turn into a big software portal – believe me that we’ll never turn into a big software portal – but we’re hoping we can expand just a little and help our our visitors as well as ourselves and our friends.