Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/entrepreneurship-theres-an-app-for-that Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript While the recession has battered most industries, it has sparked innovation across a range of many others. Case in point: the cell phone application market. Simon Marks reports. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: Now another in our series on how people are innovating in a bid to overcome the recession — tonight, a report — a report from NewsHour correspondent Simon Marks on a cottage industry for the digital age. SIMON MARKS: The movie "Wall-E" has been called many things. The New York Times' reviewer said it's an earnest ecological parable. The New Yorker called it a classic. But it hasn't previously been thought of as inspirational, until last year, when two young men did what thousands of tech-savvy, design-minded individuals have done.Using the computer animated film as a muse, they created an application for the iPhone, a software program that runs on the phone. Theirs was designed to help people manage their weight. And then they created another, a program that converts units, dollars to pesos, for example, or meters to miles. MARK JARDINE, Tapbots: I'm sure there's a certain number that they… SIMON MARKS: Mark Jardine is the designer, Paul Haddad the programmer. Mark drew two designs that were clean, white, robot-like. Paul wrote the code. Their initial investment cost them next to nothing. PAUL HADDAD: We released the application and I think, within about a month, we found out that, you know, hey, we're really making a good amount of money, more than certainly we expected at the time. SIMON MARKS: After selling about 200,000 copies of their applications at less than $4 apiece, they had enough money to start their own company, Tapbots. Aspiring developers everywhere are clamoring to do the same.The apps industry, which is dominated by Apple, has become a multimillion-dollar business. Apple now has more than 65,000 applications available to its users. BlackBerry has more than 2,000. And the Google Android has roughly 6,300.A few months ago, more than 5,000 techies weathered the long lines and buzzing crowds to attend Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And, last fall, Stanford University partnered with Apple to a course on how to build iPhone apps.By May, one million people had downloaded a video of the class. Stanford Professor Mehran Sahami was the faculty adviser.