Official: iPhone app investment gold-rush begins

 First signs that investors are beginning to chase the potential gravy train that is iPhone application development emerges in force today with news that New York’s Pinch Media has attracted initial funding from Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and a few other investors.

Founded in April by Greg Yardley and Jesse Rohland, the company today introduced its first product. Aimed at iPhone application developers, Pinch Analytics is a free hosted analytics service that lets iPhone developers track how their applications are used. Developers must integrate the software within their iPhone SDK application, once it is it will track handy statistics such as the number of unique, active users, the length of time your application is being used, and if enabled, the geographic location of your users. The software should help developers understand how many people actually use their applications.

“We’re ridiculously pleased to get this out to developers, so we can see how it performs on a wide variety of applications. If you’re building something with the SDK, check us out – we’d love your feedback. We’re already working on our next iteration of Pinch Analytics and our additional products for iPhone apps, and getting ready for WWDC in early June,” the company said.

Pinch Media wouldn’t exist without the revolutionary nature of the iPhone and its software development kit – for the first time, mobile is moving unambiguously from a medium that does less than the desktop to one that does more, with the iPhone leading and forcing change throughout the entire market. “We’ll be discussing the implications of the iPhone and its SDK here in much more detail in the weeks ahead,” they explained.