Thursday, August 19 – The EpicWin iPhone application was released to the Apple App store. EpicWin is a great to-do list application (with an RPG twist) but like most new apps it was not without a few minor bugs.

Friday, August 20 – Early this morning the EpicWin team declared on Facebook that the bugs had been fixed and the app had been sent to Apple for approval.

Monday, August 23 – No EpicWin app approval.

Tuesday, August 24 – No EpicWin app approval.

Wednesday, August 25 – No EpicWin app approval.

Thursday, August 26 – No EpicWin app approval. App APPROVED this evening! (finally…)

On the other hand…

Thursday, August 19 – Facebook released v3.2.0 of it’s iPhone application complete with Places integration for US users (booo!).

Friday, August 20 – An update, Facebook v3.2.1 is available for download, not a bad turnaround presuming the build was submitted after 19th August.

Monday, August 23 – Yet another Facebook update, this time build v3.2.2!

EpicWin = small developer, 1 release, 0 updates in 3 business days.

Facebook = big developer, 1 release, 2 updates in 3 business days.

Funny things going on over there….

We should all be using 12-character password now according to a report published this week by the Georgia Institute of Technology. Researchers at the institute modified computer graphics cards to attempt to break passwords. Here’s the scoop on the results:

8 Character Password = 2 hours to break.

11 Character Password = Approximately 180 years to break.

12 Character Password = Approximately 17,134 years to break.

How long is your current password you use for email? Your system at work? Bank? Credit Card? Facebook?

These estimates include the use of special characters (e.g. $, %, !, *, <). If you don’t use this, slash those estimates, by a lot.

Researchers recommend using full sentences. My security professor from college used to recommend phrases from the old finish language, which had some words with so many conjugation possibilities that it made any password almost impossible to break. Next time you log in to whatever online, think “what if this account were compromised? How would this affect my life?” You may now go and change those passwords.

Ruben Gamez from Bidsketch took time out to share his experience on the free vs. paid model on Softwarebyrob.com. I found his experience really interesting. I use a number of online software services for various different things. With some of them I have a simple free account while with others I gladly dish out the money to pay for the premium account. I think that most users who are looking for a service provider are willing to pay for the extended features if it’s something that they REALLY need to use and there are no alternatives to it.

I’ll use my Pandora account for example. I love Pandora. I don’t however, use Pandora every day, nor do I listen to my Pandora stations for hours at a time. For me, it’s not worth paying for a premium account with its full set of features. If Pandora were to limit the length of time you could listen to your stations per day or limit the number of stations you could create on a free account would that make a big difference to me? No. I’d still keep my free account. However, the user who LIVES with their Pandora station on every day, or the place of business that uses Pandora to stream music at their place of business, they are much more apt to go for the paid account.

In the end, it’s really dependent on what how your users use your service and if there are alternatives for them out there on the Web. If Pandora eliminated their free accounts altogether would I immediately upgrade? No. There are plenty of other service providers out there that offer a similar service for free. Pandora knows that and just finds a way to capitalize on their free accounts. That’s that key. Learn to make money even off of your free account users. The revenue doesn’t even have to pay for the costs of the free accounts, just brining in a little bit is a great start.