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When Wolfram Research released its iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha earlier this week, most of the attention quickly shifted away from the features of the app itself and towards the high price of the app. At $49.99, Wolfram Alpha is far more expensive than most apps in the App Store today, where only a small number of highly specialized apps sell for more than $9.99. Today, we got a chance to discuss Wolfram's pricing strategy with Schoeller Porter, the product manager for Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app.

When Smule's Ge Wang, Lyricfind's Darryl Ballantyne and Tapulous' Bart Decrem got together to discuss mobile applications at the San Fran Music Tech Summit, the hottest subject was application pricing. While music publishers have searched far and wide for better monetization strategies, few facets of the business have shown the same revenue growth as mobile apps. Thanks to the iPhone, customers are used to paying for mobile applications and according to Appsfire, all but one of the top grossing apps is priced above $2.99.

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes.

The Android Market was designed to be the one-stop shop for all G-1 users to download applications for their mobile handsets. As such, it had a great deal in common with the Apple iTunes App Store - save for one specific feature: the ability for developers to charge for their apps. Now, even that feature will be common between the two application stores as the Android Market prepares to release support for priced applications.

Linking the value that a product or service provides to a price is an art, rarely a science. Software pricing, in particular, has suffered from this being done poorly. The old licensed-software model does not cut it anymore. Businesses won't stand to pay for a large number of software licenses they may or may not use, and then pay for maintenance on top of that.