My cofounder and I started RiffWare in 2004 with our eyes set on BREW. Carrier billing was the reason... and if you made it onto the carrier store, you did wel

My cofounder and I started RiffWare in 2004 with our eyes set on BREW. Carrier billing was the reason... and if you made it onto the carrier store, you did well. So many great stories. We didn’t have experience in games, so our thesis was to make the dumb phones ‘start.’ We actually have quite a few ‘firsts’ (to our knowledge) and ended up with several of our own apps in the Best Sellers list on Verizon. We were responsible for the first BREw certified app to use the camera (for bar code reading) via a consulting gig. We launched a Guitar Tuner that was actually quite high quality despite the cheap hardware. It quickly became a best seller and shocked the Verizon rep when people would buy it for $25. We also launched a Do Not Disturb app that was fantastic. We tried to port that to the iPhone in 2010 but Apple wouldn’t allow it. I am convinced we were also the very first people to honestly lose and recover a phone using tower based location services while testing a new app we called Secure Phone. Verizon wouldn’t launch that app though because they were concerned about privacy. 2 years later that was a moot point. Another fun fact about that, Sam Altman launched Loopt during that time. I asked him how the heck he got Verizon to approve it... ‘board member’ was his answer. Smart money for the win. Not a bad run for a small group of indie developers with no backing. Great memories.