Apple announced Tuesday that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months–this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

The news comes nine months after it hit 1 billion downloads, with the second billion taking a further six months.

When the 2 billion mark was reached, Apple also announced that 85 000 apps were available in the App Store at the time. This time, the company chose to stick to download numbers only.

However, in November 2009, Apple did say that 100 000 apps were published to the store.

Application stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010

App Store

Consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile application stores while advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide, according to Gartner. Analysts said mobile application stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010, eight out of ten of which will be free to end users.

Gartner forecasts worldwide downloads in mobile application stores to surpass 21.6 billion by 2013. Free downloads will account for 82 per cent of all downloads in 2010, and will account for 87 per cent of downloads in 2013.

“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads,” said Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. “Games remain the No. 1 application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money.”

An application can be free because the developer is offering it at no cost to the consumer while charging for other things within the application. There are also applications that are free to use but that charge for physical goods that you can have delivered through the application. There are many applications that are free to users and derive their revenue from advertising. This can be done with banners as well as full page advertising between game levels for instance.

Worldwide mobile application stores’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. This revenue forecast includes end-user spending on paid-for applications and advertising-sponsored free applications. Advertising-sponsored mobile applications will generate almost 25 per cent of mobile application stores revenue by 2013.

High-end smartphone users today tend to be early adopters of new mobile applications and more trustful of billing mechanisms, so they will pay for applications that can meet their needs. Average smartphone users will become less tech-savvy as smartphones come down in price to have a mass market appeal and these users will be more reluctant to pay for applications.

“Growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising-funded,” Ms Baghdassarian added. “The value chain of the application stores will evolve as rules are set and broken in an attempt to find the most profitable business model for all parties involved.”

“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among mobile devices platforms,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. “Consumers will have a wide choice of stores and will seek the ones that make it easy for them to discover applications they are interested in and make it easy to pay for them when they have to. Developers will have to consider carefully not only which platform to support but also which store to promote their applications in.”

There’s been some useful discussion recently about using the app store model for distributing enterprise software and services within organizations. Up until now, most IT needs in the majority of businesses have been met through one-size-fits-all delivery of solutions that are either hand-crafted or purchased and then imposed on all. It’s been this way for at least three decades, but now this aging and inadequate process is beginning to improve.

The premise of an app store model for enterprises is simple: By removing the middleman, the famous bottleneck between the business and IT demand can be reduced in many cases. Application backlogs can shrink, consumption of internal and external IT resources will increase, and fierce competition to provide the best solutions to niches can greatly improve overall quality (the long tail of IT argument), all while reducing costs. At least, that’s what is possible if we look at what’s happening to the non-enterprise software market today.

Related: The app store: A “must-have” new digital business model

Fellow Enterprise Irregular Jevon MacDonald posits this as a likely outcome of the emerging Personal Enterprise. Current trends involving the mass personalization of services and the consumeration of enterprise IT have come together and resulted in ready-to-use catalogs of IT solutions that are much easier to acquire and consume today than they from traditional channels. Jevon cites Force.com, Intuit Marketplace and Get App as current examples of app stores for enterprises and SMBs, to which I’d definitely add IBM’s Smart Market. Google is even rumored to be ready to release an enterprise app store of its own soon.

Distributing SOA, SaaS, & Mashups with The Enterprise App Store

Even the Web itself has become a sort of ad hoc app store writ large in the cloud with thousands of SaaS applications available today that most enterprise users can acquire and use with little or no provisioning or support from IT.

In this view, monolithic enterprise deployments become rarer and IT solutions begin to look more like their counterparts online: smaller, more specific apps that fit the local conditions better (and are usually cheaper too). That this might actually happen is evidenced not only by the already existing enterprise app stores today but by the work currently going into rethinking of IT in terms of emergent enterprise architecture (intentionally) and the growing use of shadow applications in the cloud (grassroots).

App Stores: Not Just For Apps

ebizQ’s own Joe McKendrick recently explored the app store’s applicability to service-oriented architecture (SOA) this week, quoting George Ravich, who promulgates the SOA-as-a-store approach to enterprise users in the same way that iTunes is available online to get whatever one needs at the time: “The SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music.”

SOA has always been an approach that promotes reuse and interoperability between existing IT systems. Those who have adhered to SOA principles have been able to project their services and data into widely distributed and far-flung IT solutions, both within and between organizations. But successfully driving SOA consumption has been hard, and the focus is too often on opening up services instead of focusing on increasing usage. But the SOA industry quickly hit upon a potential solution. Proving that what is old is new again with the app store model, there have been commercial service directories for a long time now that have have helped organizations maintain open inventories of services, such as StrikeIron or IBM Mashup Center…

Social news aggregator Digg.com has released its free iPhone app in the App Store. Packed with a slick, feature-rich interface, the app is a strong start for the popular website, though there’s plenty of room for it to grow.

Source: (Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/digg-iphone-app/#ixzz0jIb7zwIa)

Launching the app, you’ll be able to immediately browse popular stories on Digg. You can also view popular stories by topic (e.g., technology, business, science, etc.) or upcoming articles that are about to go popular. You can search through stories by typing a keyword in a search field.

The best part of the app is it makes it really easy to Digg or bury a submission. Tapping a link launches the story inside an in-app browser, and a bar below contains thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to cast your vote. There’s also a button to save a story for reading later. The entire interface is snappy; from my testing on an iPhone 3GS, stories loaded quickly inside Digg’s browser.

With that said, there are some features missing that I’d like to see in version 2. One major minus is you can’t comment on stories like you would on Digg.com. You can view comments, but you can’t actually write any. According to Tap Tap Tap, which developed the app with Digg, the public Digg API doesn’t support adding comments yet. So hopefully we can expect this feature in a later version.

Also, there’s limited interaction between the Digg app and other apps. For example, if you’re browsing your Twitter feed in Tweetie and you tap a Digg link, it doesn’t launch the Digg app. Instead, you’re stuck with viewing the Digg link in the Safari browser. To be fair, you can hit a button to share Digg links through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, but the inability to use the app to view others’ shared Digg links is stifling.

The free Digg app is downloadable now in the App Store. A video demo of the app is below.

News release [Digg]

Buongiorno

Mobile Communication, like the printing press, personal transportation and the advent of mass media – is delivering new levels of personal independence, choice and opportunity. Through the most popular gadget in history, billions of people are beginning to interface with their world in completely new ways. More than 3 billion people now carry personal mobile devices, which can offer far more than just voice and text.

Social networking has clearly been an exciting, if unexpected, success on the web. This success has attracted hundreds of millions of users who connect to each other on their own terms, actively creating content and defining the links between this content. Social networking has proven to be the natural expression for the Web 2.0 movement, allowing users to wrestle the publishing power from established media to become both consumer and supplier.

Buongiorno believes the success of web social networking is but a pre-cursor to the explosion of mobile social networking. The mobile phone is the most prevalent social networking tool on the planet, combining media capture with always-on connectivity, portability, simplicity, personalisation and individuality. Quite simply, the mobile phone is the medium of friendship. From a business standpoint, aiming at a market of mobile community users that will grow by a factor of 10 by 2012, to 428 million[1], opens up a huge market where mobile devices will rapidly prevail over PC-based devices .

Mobile internet connectivity is now a reality , which, when combined with the ubiquity of devices, networks and internet “understanding”, will transform mobile behaviour. Research predicts the rapid growth of mobile broadband access, as users expect high-performance devices and faster mobile networks to deliver better user experience and data capacity – all amidst a cheaper pricing environment and the pervasive use of Web 2.0 services. A similar revolution is taking place on handsets, as users increasingly demand a rich experience based on seamless access to messaging, search, entertainment and content. These users are redefining their needs – needs built around “diversion” and ever-richer “connection.”

Clearly, existing web players understand this new and potentially game-changing opportunity, and will be offering mobile features to their services. Will they be successful? That depends on the nature of mobile social networking – will the future deliver social networking through mobile (the status quo) or true mobile social networking (the new)?

Mobile social networking will offer something new, and this offering will not come from a web incumbent. Instead, it will be a mobile native solution from a mobile specialist, a company which understands the power of the medium, the technical environment, user behaviour and the needs of consumers. The environment is now right for an explosion in mobile social networking; the devices, network capabilities, and user understanding and desire is all in place. Until now, what has been missing is a mobile-centric solution from a mobile expert.

To learn more about Mobile Social Media visit – Mobile Social Media Show (www.mobilesocial-networking.com)

The Cloud Computing Congress (http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com/), has just announced a range of free to attend workshops on mobile cloud computing, co-located with the Mobile Social Media forum (http://www.mobilesocial-networking.com/).

The workshops examine why mobile and cloud computing are the perfect fit, and how this can be used to generate the next generation mobile experience. The workshops also cover practical demo of hybrid and mobile cloud computing, and how core functionality can be expanded to mobile devices for the cloud. View the free to attend workshops here: http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com/exhibition/workshops.html

“Cloud computing technologies look like they will become a changing force in the mobile world, facilitating mobile solutions to be offered to a much broader audience of mobile subscribers.” commented Ian Johnson, MD, Six Degrees Events. “We are delighted to announce a range of free to attend workshops, and think that  the mobile social media event will help outline the next generation in mobile cloud applications, new business models, and the obstacles to be overcome.“

“In the mobile Web device detection, media adaptation, and optimized content delivery are challenging tasks as there are so many different devices out there. Mobile cloud computing gets all these hurdles out of the way. Using a web-based mobile publishing platform, it’s not only more cost-efficient, it also delivers much better quality output on a broader variety of handsets.” (Michael Neidhoefer, CEO, Netbiscuits)

“What if you could build applications based on web standards, move the processing associated with the applications off the mobile device to powerful, centralized platforms and then use the Internet to access the applications, in essence moving these applications into the cloud?” (Mark Beccue, ABI Research)

Additional workshops at the event include cloud application development, Microsoft Azure overview and more.  To register for the free to attend workshop please go to – http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com/register/free-exhibition.html

Learn which mobile applications will lead the growth, the key technologies, players and initiatives involved, new business models that will be introduced, and the barriers that must be overcome. Additional free to attend workshops with Facebook and other partners are co-located @ the social media world forum, please see agenda – http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/exhibition/workshops.html

Cloud Computing Congress & Mobile Social Media is co-located with the Social Media World Forum (http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/) an event that encompasses the entire spectrum of Social Media.  It will take place at Olympia, London on the 15/16 March.

Intersting article on the shelf life of apps stores looking at how developers are promoting themselves in an ever crowded market.  Bango are a mobile analytics company that provides the technology that powers commerce for businesses targeting the growing market of internet enabled mobile phone users.

Bango are Silver Sponsors at Mobile Social Media on the 15/16th March at Olympia, London.

(Bango – 03/02/10)

With the intense coverage that mobile applications continue to attract, the content developers are already starting to investigate alternative distribution channels to the App “Stores” themselves. In the rush to follow the now crowded mobile apps market, developers are starting to realise that after all their efforts to build a mobile app, to get noticed and survive they need to look beyond the app store.

Distribution is no longer about being in the top 10 – almost impossible amongst such fierce competition and undocumented selection methods by store managers. It is now about maximizing distribution and revenues. This is precisely what a recent survey by Bango uncovered. Bango surveyed over 400 developers and content providers in the USA and Europe, and the results revealed:

• 45% of developers plan to monetize their apps directly, in other words outside the app store

• 48% think that although app stores will grow in importance in five years time, these channels will coexist alongside the mobile web

• iPhone tops the list, followed by Android and BlackBerry, for the most important handset/platform to develop an app for in 2010

• Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian also listed as an important development platform

This doesn’t come as a surprise, as fragmentation in mobile platforms increases the challenge of reaching a mobile audience. With mobile web browser capabilities continuing to improve many are starting to see the benefits of browser-based distribution, over which they have more control.

However, as a distribution channel, Nokia’s Ovi store lags behind and hardly gets a mention in the list. Despite their many attempts to develop a successful app store, the journey for Nokia to achieve this has been very testing. For consumers, as with many other app stores, the Ovi checkout process can be a frustrating experience. In order to purchase content, you must pre-register details on multiple pages to complete the task and make the payment.

Another absentee from the list is Vodafone’s “360” app store. Vodafone is aiming to attract the attention of its 315million subscribers, but as of the date of writing, there are only a few devices supported – It recently announced that it expects 2m 360-capable handsets by the end of March. As many developers know so well, fragmentation is a major headache and Vodafone – which supports the iPhone store, Google’s Android marketplace, the Ovi store and now its own app channel, will need to determine if yet another app store helps move more developers into the mobile marketplace.

What the Bango survey does show is that developers are already looking beyond the app store, and want to reach their customers directly. This is good news for the long-term prospects of the mobile industry and for the billions of customers who eagerly await the next best app.

Mobile Social Media (www.mobilesocial-networking.com) taking place at Olympia on the 15th March will focus on the latest developments being made in Social Media and mobile devices.

Topics being addressed are: How far has the Mobile Social Networking market come in the last year? Mobile Internet and Social Networks – a perfect marriage, Monetising your mobile offering and Mobile multimedia 2.0: Developing the ultimate handset.

Key Speakers include:
•    Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Development & Innovation, Orange UK
•    Shaun Gregory, Managing Director, O2, Media Business
•    Yoel Flohr, Head of Mobile, Bebo
•    Angel Gambino, Vice President, Sonico
•    Bob Rapp, Head, User Communities, Vodafone Group
•    Peter Ward, Co-founder & CEO, WAYN
•    Cian O’Sullivan, Editor in Chief, GoMo News
•    Claudio Venezia, Researcher, Telecom Italia
•    Matt Dicks, CMO, Flirtomatic

Co-hosted alongside this conference will be an exhibition with representatives from leading players from Mobile, Social Media, Broadcast and Telecoms.   This will cover all aspects of Social Media on mobile and shows the diversity of the industry.  The exhibition will also feature a series of free workshops that will add additional content to people attending the exhibition.   Workshops will be run by Facebook Developers Garage, Social Media UK, RealWire and the DMA and NMA

The Mobile Social Media conference will be held in conjunction with the Social Media World Forum 2010 (www.socialmedia-forum.com).  This is a leading Social Media event that brings together all facets of industry connected to Social Media featuring 4 conference streams, Social Media (www.socialmedia-forum.com), Social TV (www.social-tv.net), Enterprise Social Media (www.enterprisesocialmedia.net), and Cloud Computing (www.cloudcomputingcongress.com). These are based around a central exhibition.

To be in for a chance to attend the “Must attend” Social TV & Mobile Social Media event of the year FREE, simply take part in our Re-Tweet competition!

It’s Really Easy to Enter

All you need to do is put your social media skills to the test and re-tweet our competition tweet on your twitter. Just make sure your tweet contains our Twitter name (@Social_T_V so we can track you as a contestant) and link to this blog post

Tweet – “I am tweeting to win a free pass @socialt_v, http://bit.ly/7gaYjk”

That’s all you have to do!

Winner Announcement

The winner will be selected by random on the 22nd January 2010 at 12.00 GMT. We will announce the winner via Twitter the same day (so we highly suggest you follow us and will contact the winner through DM. The winner will win a two day pass to the Social TV & Mobile Social Media event taking place on the 15^th & 16^th March at Olympia Conference Centre, London.

Please Note: The winner will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs.

Rules of Competition

In order to participate, you must have a Twitter account, and have accepted the Terms of Service of Twitter. Members from every part of the world can enter the competition. In order to participate, you must send a valid Twitter message. A valid Twitter message, or tweet, contains our Twitter name (@Social_T_V so we can track you as a contestant), and a link to this contest page (of which http://bit.ly/7gaYjk is a short version)

For more information about our events please visit: www.socialmediaseries.net www.socialtvseries.com www.cloudcomputingseries.com

The Social TV & Mobile Social Media Series Team are getting in the festive spirit and have decided to extend the 25% early bird discount until the 15th Jan, providing you with a couple more weeks to take advantage of this great saving!

The Social TV & Mobile Social Media World Forum will be taking place on the 15th & 16th March 2010 at Olympia, London. With over 3000 visitors over the two days, this really is the place to be!

Our Early Bird saving can save up you to £340* if you book before the 15th January 2010!

Our gold conference pass includes access to all conference streams (Social Media, Social TV, Cloud Computing, Mobile Social Media & Enterprise 2.0) sessions taking place over the two days, expo hall, complimentary Wi-Fi access, hot food & refreshments and access to the official networking party taking place on the middle evening.

Conference passes for just the Social Tv & Mobile Social Media streams are available too.   For full pass opportunities please visit here

Book you conference pass today!

Merry Christmas from the Events Team

*applies to Gold Pass Savings