As many of you know, I formed a new company and am in the final stages of launching a new app for the Apple iPhone. We recently realized that our Apple Developer agreement was not registered with our official name in the contract. How could it have been? We initially were christened as ‘The iPhone App Company’ but Apple didn’t allow that for trademark reasons. Lucky for us, ‘TheAppCompany.com’ was available and actually works out better since we will be making apps for all popular mobile platforms.

So it shouldn’t be too difficult to change the name in the contract. Right? Not right! The first hurdle is contacting Apple. The developer portal on the their website lists no contact phone numbers so we used the email form on the website. Fast forward a week and we still hadn’t heard from Apple. We did some searching around and after about an hour of surfing from page to page and reading how everyone agrees that there isn’t a phone number we finally found one. It’s clearly very, very difficult to get this number because a guy from Scotland answered the phone on one ring and was extremely helpful — he must not receive many calls!

I gave my new Scottish friend my reference number from the email I sent and he explained how it can take weeks to get someone to read the email, but now that I’m speaking with him I’ll jump to the front of the line. He was right, because that day I heard from a rep that the change is being processed and today I was asked to fax the appropriate documents to prove that we are in fact who we claim to be. Three days later and I received the official notice. THE APP COMPANY is now an official iPhone developer!

I’ll give you more details shortly about the app. You can visit theappcompany.com for a bit more information. Be sure to read the ABOUT page to learn about my fantastic partner Jason Moskowitz.