TV apps are moving quickly from a novelty feature on some internet-enabled HDTVs and a few cabe systems to what will soon be a standard capability. Forrester is predicting that 43 million homes will have connected TVs by 2015 leading to a huge predicted growth in revenues from apps on TVs.

But what is the current state of the TV apps market and how can developers; IPTV providers and manufacturers make sure they are part of its future growth?

Apps World Europe (29-30 November, London) is the only mobile event to dedicate an entire day of the agenda to the development of TV apps. The TV app track will focus on the growth of the TV apps business, monetising TV apps, alterations to viewing habits, the convergence of tablets and TV and the implications for content providers. Speakers include leading experts from BT, Deutsche Telekom, BSkyB, Zeebox, Shazam, Rovi, Skinkers, Accedo Broadband, Samsung,  and Orange.

The session sets out to answer the following:

-          Where the TV apps market one year on and where is it going?

-          How can Pay TV operators’ monetise apps operations?

-          How will TV app stores evolve, will all IPTV providers need to launch stores to compete?

-          What hardware is already being distributed into the market and what is the life-cycle expected to bring this technology into homes?

-          How are tablets and mobile affecting how viewers watch and interact with TV?

-          How will apps make TV a more social experience?

-          What potential advertising opportunities will TV apps create?

To attend the TV apps track and the other 2 tracks focussing on the mobile application industry that will make up Apps World Europe held at Olympia 2 on 29-30 November 2011 register for your workshop pass here http://www.apps-world.net/europe/register/workshop-registration. Save 15% on the cost of a workshop pass with the discount code TVAPPS15

With some of the largest app players halting their in-app sales after new Apple guidelines were re-enforced this week, does Apple run the risk of causing damage to the app start up industry before it even takes off?

Apple, who current takes 30% commission from all digital content bought through iOS apps have this week flagged up their new guidelines (released in February 2011) which requires publishers and retailers to remove all links to their own websites to prevent potential in-app sales taking place outside of the app, to protect Apple’s commission results.

As a result Google temporarily took down its ebook reading app and Amazon updated its Kindle app removing the link to its store, both parties advised customers to visit their e-stores outside of their apps via Safari.

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, said: “Our philosophy is simple – when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share – when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing.”

Whilst it’s possible for Amazon and Google to have confidence that customers will make the extra effort to visit their websites to make purchases,  does Apple risk crippling small independent start ups with its hefty commission?  On the flip side can you really put a price on the exposure and access to the mass market that comes from being associated with Apple and iOS? It seems, for now anyway, you can – and it’s 30% commission.

This topic and the broader topic of monetising apps plays a key role in day two of the Apps World Europe agenda.

To register for your place now click here.

We’re pleased to welcome Imano as one of latest exhibitors who have confirmed that they will be joining us at Apps World, on the 30th Nov & 1st Dec.

Imano will be demonstrating some of their recent apps for high profile brands such as O2, Conde Nast and Ray-Ban in the exhibition, not to mention TVGuide.co.uk, the UK’s leading TV listings app

Mark Lister, Managing Director for Imano, will be sharing his ten top tips for launching a successful mobile app to promote your brand.

Mark’s 20 minute speech will be taking place at 1430 on day two in the marketing stream.

Jane Linton, Business Development Director for Imano will also be presenting (on day one at 10.30) talking about their recent Stella Artois Case study – ‘Building an iPhone app with location based augmented reality’.

A bit more about Imano – Imano are a full service digital agency with a strong heritage in e-commerce, creative, digital marketing and, over the past two years, significant success in the design and development of iPhone and iPad applications. These core strengths enable Imano to retain clients for the longer term. Imano work with ABInBev, Citi and Nestle and have launched apps for high profile brands such as General Motors and TSL (the World University Rankings).

acrossair is the R&D arm of the company and specialises in developing innovative solutions for iPhone & iPad, including augmented reality.  Their first application was TVGuide.co.uk, which reached No.1 in the UK and has over 1 million downloads.

Click here Imano to arrange a meeting with Imano at Apps World later next month.

Bored with iPhone OS?  Frustrated by Apple’s death-grip platform control?

Well David “planetbeing” Wong may have an answer for you. He’s successfully dual-booted Android on an iPhone. Yes, really! In IT Blogwatch, bloggers look on, in slack-jawed amazement.

It would appear that a way to run the Android OS on an iPhone has been discovered.  This is massive news for iPhone users waiting for the new iPhone OS 4.0 and all the features that are available with that platform.

Googles platform has been hard on the heels of Apple for quite sometime, and despite some good features has so far been shunned in favour of the iPhone OS.  Android however has seen a growing interest over the past few months with many predictng 2010 to be the year of Android.  The Android App sotre now has in the region of 30,000 apps with 9000 apps added in March alone.

News of a way to run Android on an iPhone will only fuel speculation that Android is becoming the must have OS for your smart phone.

For more information on this story visit http://blogs.computerworld.com/15980/android_on_your_iphone_theres_an_app_for_that?source=rss_blogs.

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]

The Social Shindig party, the official networking party of Social Media World Forum will be taking place on the middle evening of the event.All conference pass delegates are invited to head over to the Archangel venue situated opposite the Kensington Royal Garden Hotel.  The venue is a10 min walk from Olympia & The Hilton Olympia Hotel – the official event hotel and 5 m ins from High Street Kensington Tube Station.

Please Note: Open only to full conference pass holders – wristbands will need to be shown to gain access Networking Party Partners

About Social Media UK

‘Social Media UK’ is a networking community based in London consisting of a LinkedIn group of 850+ members, a crowdsourced blog www.socialmediamonday.co.uk and a monthly networking event ‘Social Media Monday’ with presentations & plenty of ‘social’ till late… (follow @SocialMedia_UK & tweet about #SMUK)

We’ve grown tremendously over the last 6 months and we’re really proud to be continuing these talks in the Workshops at the Social Media World Forum 2010.

‘Social Media UK’ is organised by the Digital / Social Media recruitment specialists; Fresh Resources. We’re ridiculously passionate about all things digital and absolutely believe that being an active part of the community and contributing towards the industry we specialise in, means we’re poised to consistently deliver precision services to our much adored clients. 

#SMUK loves social media, that why even this description is wrapped up in 140 words!

Monterosa (www.monterosa.co.uk) have confirmed their attendance at the Social TV Forum Europe, (www.social-tv.net) taking place on the 15/16th March 2010 at Olympia, London.

Monterosa are a creative and technology company based in central London. We’re a team of experienced producers, project managers, software engineers and designers with range of backgrounds backgrounds in broadcast, advertising, games and software development.

Ooyala’s player has always supported sharing to popular social networks sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Ooyala now supports deep linking which allows a viewer to share only a particular video within a playlist or a specific scene within a video. These deep linking sharing options are available for its player embeds, its sharing links to social networking sites, as well as the newly released URL link, also available in the player. What’s great about this is that it does not require any custom development work. A publisher can easily enable the various sharing options in Backlot for all their viewers.

Ooyala is a leading video technology company, for details visit www.ooyala.com/blog