The programmers using silence as their unique selling point

Against multitasking, reflection; against noise, silence. In contrast to the thousands - no, make that millions - of applications that let you do myriad tasks, Ommwriter creates nothingness, solitude, silence, and sells it. Peace and quiet are the hardest things to find when you are sitting in front of a computer that's connected to the internet.

Rafa Soto and Marzban Cooper are masters of the new forms of advertising. "Ommwriter was born to solve an internal problem within our company: it was hard to concentrate when you had to type on the computer," explains Cooper, a 42-year-old native of Mumbai.

"What with email alerts, SMS, Twitter and Facebook, you're constantly getting distracted," adds Soto, who is the co-owner of the advertising agency Herraiz & Soto. "You become increasingly less lucid and are not even aware of it."

The solution to this problem is Ommwriter, a program that creates a void. "It's as if we cut off access to the web, to the things that besiege us. When you turn on Ommwriter, you still get your email and your tweets, but without the alerts."

The program allows users to select a background, a soundtrack and the font they want to write in. Pastel colors are favored over the bright whiteness that can hurt your eyes. The second element is ambient sound. Ommwriter provides a choice of zen bells, the sound of crickets, a baby floating in the womb and the sounds of a public library. The third element is the font. And that's it.

Generosity on the web

After an internal trial run, the application was uploaded to the iTunes store in November 2009, free of charge, and only for Mac platforms. "To our surprise, and without lifting a finger to advertise it, it was downloaded 125,000 times," Cooper recalls. Around the same time, they started getting thankyou messages from frustrated writers who had found inspiration again thanks to Ommwriter.

Given the success, the advertising firm now has a dedicated team whose job it is to develop the Omm philosophy. The definitive Ommwriter came out last September. It continued to be free, although donations were accepted, starting at ¤3.

"That was our second surprise," says Cooper. "On average, people pay almost $7 [nearly

¤5], and 25 percent pay more than $10 dollars." The Windows version came out in March, and the same thing is happening all over again: people who do pay dish out nearly $6. In just 18 months, Ommwriter has been downloaded 250,000 times. A quarter of those downloads were paid for. "By the end of the year we'll have made ¤

500,000, without advertising," says Cooper. "Around 95 percent of downloads are from outside Spain, mostly the United States, England and Japan."

"The web is ready to be generous," says Soto. "If you do something good for people, they will give it back to you, either by paying or by talking about you favorably. After all, every one of us is a media outlet."