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Tim
Schumacher and Ulrich Essman,
two of the four college friends who
founded Sedo
back in 2001, have gotten involved in an
ambitious new venture - helping build a
"Sedo for Apps" at Apptopia.com.
Sedo grew into a domain trading and
monetization powerhouse that the founders
eventually sold to United Internet.
Now Schumacher and Essman think they can
replicate the Sedo model in the booming
apps world by getting involved as investors
and advisors at Apptopia, a
rapidly growing marketplace where buyers
can purchased fully developed apps,
just as domain buyers can purchase domains
and developed websites through Sedo. While
smartphone and tablet users buy a copy of
an app to run on their mobile device,
Apptopia sells all rights to the app
itself, with the buyers then able to
market and sell the apps in the Apple
and/or Android stores (where they
are already offered by the current
owners). Buyers include income
investors who are buying an
existing revenue stream, marketers
who think they can take a good but perhaps
little known app and increase sales and developers
who think they can make an existing app
better to boost sales and profit in
that way. Boston-based
Apptopia is also a great place to cash out
for people who are more interested in
developing new apps rather than marketing
ones they have already built. Apptopia has already
paid out more than $5 million to
developers who have sold thousands of apps
through the marketplace. To
get involved, Schumacher and Essman, who were
named 'Entrepreneur of the Year' by
Ernst & Young Germany in
2007, made an unspecified cash
investment in an Apptopia bridge
financing round that also included Eric
Kagan, Telegraph Hill Capital and
Rothenberg Ventures among other
investors. In a join
statement, Schumacher and Essman noted, "Apps
have become the prime mobile navigational
items, just like domain names on
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Tim
Schumacher
Ulrich
Essman
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