The iPhone application store has allowed people other than Apple to profit off of the company's innovative product. And what the New York Times calls the " iPhone Gold Rush " is on. The Times profiles a former Sun Microsystems employee who has now started his own company (he's the only employee) after making big money off of a target-shooting game he developed and sold on the app store. While it is easy to envy a guy like Ethan Nicholas --who has made nearly a million dollars off of his game, iShoot , it is hard not to see the benefit to Apple: the company has thousands of people investing their time in the success of their product: There are now more than 25,000 programs, or applications, in the iPhone App Store, many of them written by people like Mr. Nicholas whose modern Horatio Alger dreams revolve around a SIM card. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: the Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and fresh inventory keeps arriving daily. Many of the simple but clever concepts that sell briskly — applications, for instance, that make the iPhone screen look like a frothing pint of beer or a koi pond — are already taken. And for every iShoot, which earned Mr. Nicholas $800,000 in five months, “there are hundreds or thousands who put all their efforts into creating something, and it just gets ignored in the store,” said Erica Sadun, a programmer and the author of “The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.” Whether the applications sell or are ignored, the programmers are part of the marketing success of the iPhone and the app store. They assure that the owners of the iPhone are always finding new uses for their big purchase. And that helps explain Apple's creation of a $100 millon investment pool for program developers--the iFund. Read the full article here .