If you missed it the king’s of the movie rental business, Blockbuster, is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. I guess the news wasn’t totally surprising. After all Oregon’s very own Hollywood Video, bought by a Texas company called Movie Gallery, went bankrupt a few months ago. And every little movie rental place in the area is gone, opening up what I am sure is tens of thousands of retail square feet nationwide.

15 years ago there were few choices. If you wanted to watch a movie without interruption you were stuck with premium cable channels, buy it at a store, a movie theater and places like Blockbuster.

Now I have these choices plus so many more. I can watch instantly on Netflix, download one from various sharing sites via BitTorrent, and rent one from Redbox or Netflix. A decade ago it costs me $4 to rent a movie. Now I can get one at Redbox for $1.

And so it goes. Yesterdays killer company becomes today’s roadkill.

So let that be a lesson for all of us. Stay up-to-date. Adjust to the competition. Don’t bite off more then you can chew.

Even focused solely on developing killer calculators for the iOS platform, it is more than a full-time job. Over the past few months all we have done is kept up with Apple, developing powerOne for iPad, re-developing for iPad and, approved by Apple last night, now ensuring iOS 4 and iPhone 4 compatibility.

But it isn’t enough to keep up. Our next step is to leave them all in dust. And so we begin to develop powerOne version 2. I can’t wait!

How exciting to wake up in the morning and see that the sales have doubled. I never expect it but it has happened a couple of times. After a moment of shock, I now know to go check out the App Store and see what honor we received. For the first time, starting last night, powerOne was a staff pick!

A few images to commemorate the occasion. Thank you, Apple!

When I started in this business (1997), advanced calculators — scientific or financial — were expensive. The cheapest full-featured scientific calculators were $20-30 and easily ranged up into the hundreds of dollars. Real financial calculators were $40-120. So we wrote financial and scientific calculators and charged money for them. Our first financial calculator was $39.99, written for PalmPilot, and our first scientific calculators were $29.99 and $49.99 for basic and advanced models.

Fast-forward a decade and our latest calculator for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is currently $5.99. The product is far more powerful than anything we wrote in the late 1990s and early 2000s but the market has changed. Calculators, especially scientific ones, have become a commodity in the software world. There are hundreds of them, most of them cheap-looking, poor-quality products.

Instead of fighting this trend we have embraced it by releasing powerOne Calculator Lite Edition. It is Lite as it has only a couple of templates and restricts how many you can create (1) rather than the 60 we include plus endless number you can create with the full version.

The calculator included with powerOne Lite functions in standard and RPN input mode, performs real, fraction and feet-inch math, and includes power, logarithm, and trigonometric functions. It includes a history of computations plus ten memory locations for storage. The same application runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

In addition, powerOne Lite Calculator includes templates — think mini-spreadsheets — for calculating percent change, tips, date conversions, exchange rates (with auto updated data), and summary calculations like average, max and min. In addition, you can create one for yourself, taking advantage of powerOne calculator’s simple formula-based language.

The full version includes all this plus 55 additional templates for conversions, finance, investing and real estate. You can also create an endless number of templates. [link to App Store]

The trend toward less expensive calculators is pervasive now. Everyone deserves a high-quality, beautiful calculator to call their own. And we will move where others won’t follow: ability to create your own templates, add-on templates and choose from those calculations that meet your specific needs for business and school.

The good times continue here. Now we aren’t talking dollars to retire on, but it is nice to actually be able to pay the bills. I will be the first to tell you that making things happen in Apple’s App Store is hard to do, but for once we were out in front. Being on the iPad on day one with powerOne calculator was the best decision we have made in the last couple of years. A few more screen shots to commemorate the first two weeks of iPad App Store success:

We are #1 in the Finance category for both Top Paid and Top Grossing, we cracked the Top 100 for iPad Top Paid and Top Grossing overall, and because it is a universal app, it has also had a profound effect on our iPhone sales, pushing us as high as #12 in the Finance category for iPhone rankings.

On top of these nice sales, we were also — to our surprise — featured in a keynote slide by Larry Tesler this weekend at iPad Dev Camp in San Jose!

The best of all, though, is this picture. Me with my daughters, Laura (age 4) and Jenna (age 2), running powerOne on the iPad for the first time!

Wow! This has been a great couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we were still discussing an iPad version of powerOne calculator. Since then I have had lots of meetings, a trip to Apple HQ (with Dick Luebke), shipped an iPad version of powerOne (universal as the same version works on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad), a new device arrived (the first time in my personal history I have ever bought a first generation technology — I’ve been dying for a tablet device like the iPad for a decade). Finally we were featured in the iPad App Store and… a #1 ranking in the Finance category!

A few pictures to remember these couple of weeks by (click on a picture to enlarge it):