On any given day, about a dozen people around the world buy a copy of Mach Dice. But on Monday, a whopping 44 people bought copies of my dice app! That was pretty surprising, so I checked around to see if I could see what caused the bump.

There was a nice article on 148app.com that mentioned Mach Dice last week, but it didn’t have that much of an effect on sales. And I couldn’t find any other recent articles on it. But then I looked at the sales report and noticed an unusual icon.

Apparently, some educational institution purchased 31 copies of my app. Pretty cool, eh? So they get my app at half price and I get a nice little bump in sales. And if you happen to be one of the people who got Mach Dice through the educational discount, let me know! I’d love to hear more about it.

Remember that starfield app I was working on? The plan was to make a free iPad app that had iAds on it. But there’s one little snag. iAds is only available on iOS 4.0 and later but the iPad only goes up to iOS 3.2 for now. So in the interim, I’m creating ads for my own apps with links to buy them in the app store.

This does bring up an interesting question, though. Once iAds is available for the iPad, will I get more revenue from running other people’s ads or from running my own and having people purchase one of my other apps?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPV9bRF6I2E
I’ve noticed that no matter what I give my baby — whether it’s a wooden block, a bottle of milk, or a stuffed toy — he always responds in the same way. Woe betide any intrepid small creature attempting to befriend him.