Recipes in Dutch? There's an app for that

A business that’s both virtual and global, with just six paid workers, is running on Isabelle Duston’s dining room table in an unassuming house off Boonsboro Road in Lynchburg.

The table is an appropriate launching pad for her enterprise, which got its start in recipes.

The office equipment primarily consists of an Apple laptop, an iPhone and an iPad tablet computer, which came on the market in April.

The workers usually aren’t at the table, of course; they’re working from their homes or some place in the virtual, Internet-linked world.

Some of the workers are translating recipes into multiple languages for iPhone users around the world. Others take care of bookkeeping chores. A programmer in Utah, whom she’s never met, built the digital platform for the cookbooks on a contract basis.

Duston, a fast thinker who speaks five languages and has an MBA from a multinational European management school, noticed a year ago that few recipes were available to iPhone users.

In November she opened Apps of All Nations, an iPhone application company. It offers 10 cookbooks, some of them available in five languages. Another 10 cookbooks should be available within a year and in five more languages, Duston says.

“I have someone on my team who only does that, who takes care of doing all the translation or getting it done,” Duston said.

Sales, at 99 cents per download, “did pretty well in December,” Duston said. In the first four months of this year, about 60,000 books were loaded into iPhones.

But the U.S. market is already crowded with iPhone cookbooks; a Google search brings up several recipe providers.

Duston’s business strategy is twofold. First, she decided to sell the cookbooks in other countries where iPhone users have only a few applications in their native language.

“My thinking is that here in the U.S., there are so many applications” for the iPhone that ventures like hers can get lost among them, Duston said.

But, “if you come up with an application in Dutch — nobody makes applications in Dutch,” and iPhone users who speak that language find the application quickly, Duston said.

Browsing her list of recent sales, Duston found that a cookbook she first offered in Portuguese at the end of April was selling well in Brazil.

“I sold 26 apps in Brazil yesterday. I launched it three days ago and it’s in position No. 3” in the lifestyles category of Apple downloads in the Brazilian market, she said.

With the iPhone application up and running, Duston now has a new venture into children’s picture books on her front burner.

Her still-developing concept is built around the iPad, a hand-held, touch-screen computer that is aimed at filling a gap between cellular phones and laptops.

Last week, she was letting her children look at a storybook on the iPad screen and using their suggestions for ways its images could be animated at the touch of a child’s finger.

Dogs move and talk. Bees fly and make buzzing sounds. Campfires flicker.

Youngsters turn the page of the book by stroking the screen.

The first of those products will be available for purchase this month, Duston said, and is marketed by Brighter Minds Media, a company that produces educational materials on CDs and other electronic methods.

“We’re sharing royalties,” Duston said.

Her business plan emerged from a personal need. A citizen of France who was in Lynchburg because of her ex-husband’s work at the nuclear company Areva, Duston was suddenly single and in need of her own visa so she could stay in the U.S.

“I was there sitting down and saying, ‘I’ve got to find an idea; you have to start up a company and make some money, and invest and hire people.

“I had an idea for making a cookbook for the iPhone.”

She quickly realized one cookbook wouldn’t make enough money to sustain the business, so she developed other cookbooks for desserts, salads and other specialties.

She also decided that other languages were the best way to increase her market base.

“That’s how the process really started,” she said.

“So I went to France 10 days ago and got my visa. It is an investor visa, which they rarely give, and it is for five years,” she said.