Mobile Groove

Give yourself a chance to win with apps that have impact. BlackBerry developers everywhere on the planet have until FRIDAY (April 27) to enter their app in AppCircus at BlackBerry 10 Jam, an app competition powered by AppCircus,  the global showcase of apps organized by the great guys over at dotopen.

The competition is open to all developers who are developing or have developed a BlackBerry® WebWorks™/HTML5, Adobe® AIR® or Native Gaming app for the BlackBerry platform. An international j…

At M-Pulse it’s a month dedicated to mobile developer issues and we talk mobile app business basics opportunities with Ray Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Bango, a U.K.-based billing and analytics company that enables mobile developers to collect money for their apps.

But it’s not just about providing a platform that makes it possible for mobile app developers to sell apps and collect payments using carrier billing. Bango has cleverly inserted itself at the center of the burgeoning App Economy, collecting data and insights (about how users pay and how they prefer to be treated when they make their next purchase). It’s a stockpile of anonymized data that allows app

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING USERS WILL NUMBER MORE THAN 641.6 MILLION by 2013, according to the latest predictions from Informa. A new report from the company says that at the end of 2008, there were just 92.5 million users of mobile social networking services, but that will skyrocket to between 641.6 million and 873.1 million by the end of 2013. It adds that the most popular mobile social services

In brief: App stores are hot, but what are the challenges and where is the opportunity? This analysis draws from a variety of sources – including a recent Airwide Solutions survey, an exclusive interview with Vodafone UK’s Jonathan Kelly, and a thought-provoking post from Alfred DeRose, Co-founder & Managing Director of Tego Interactive, a Web and mobile product and services company providing development and integrated solutions for the needs of major brands, content publishers and mobile network operators – to provide some practical answers.

App store frenzy? That’s what comes across when you connect the dots in the raft of recent announcements. Mobile operators ranging from U.S. mobile operator Verizon Wireless (which has borrowed a page from parent company Vodafone to launch a carrier-wide app store based on Java ME that can target more than one device) to China Mobile (which tells TelecomAsia.net that it’s moving full-steam ahead on its Mobile Market app store where it plans to take 50 percent cut of app sales revenues) are jockeying for position and a piece of the action.

Interestingly, much of the operator excitement centers on the new mobile advertising opportunity app stores represent. As Jonathan Kelly, who heads up Vodafone UK Marketing, recently told me in a briefing: “I see some quite interesting opportunities in apps and widgets. A likely scenario could involve a sponsored widget, where the brand actually works with us to create a widget or application that we then prominently place in our app store.”

Beyond that, Jonathan sees other opportunities around actually embedding advertising within a widget. “You could have some sort of utility widget that’s providing weather, and there’s no reason why certain relevant companies may not wish to have some advertising embedded within that.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Apple’s App Store, RIM’s BlackBerry App World and Android’s Marketplace may have been the first to the party, but they have company. The recent JavaOne conference kicked off its annual convention by opening the doors of the Java App Store, a global marketplace for Java apps headed by Sun Microsystems. It comes on the heels of other app store news elsewhere in the industry including Nokia’s launch of the Ovi app store, a storefront offering available in Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and the U.K, offering 20,000 titles (a fraction of which are apps) to an estimated 50 million Nokia devices globally.

You know the specter of the downturn has hit mobile when a super power like Google claims it can’t attend participate in industry events because of budget constraints.

However, smart companies know that a sluggish economy spell opportunity for businesses that know how to move forward when the economy is standing still. Indeed, the doom-and-gloom mood hasn’t stopped 50+ industry heavyweights from around the world from meeting in London in June for an executive brainstorm about the future profit opportunities in an open mobile world.

I am reminded of the recent MSG podcast with Tom Huseby, Managing Partner, SeaPoint Ventures, and his observation that there is plenty of money and opportunity in mobile, but it’s up to entrepreneurs to structure their good ideas so VCs get it. Mobile has enjoyed an exceptionally high growth trajectory and even the credit crunch can’t discourage VCs from investing. “On the whole, venture capitalists have not run out of money. The bars are high and it’s difficult, but my gosh, my advice to entrepreneurs is keep working on your idea until it does appeal to the money, or don’t use the money to do it.” What has VCs excited? Open systems, open storefronts and open operators – and lots of apps.

Against this backdrop, the timing couldn’t be better for an industry event sharply focused on what open is (and isn’t). Yes, it’s about new and increasingly open business ecosystems (where mobile operators can still play a central role provided they play according to the new rules). But open means much more. It’s about the convergence of platforms and devices to blur the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds, and transform communication, content, advertising, search and retail.

More importantly, open is about the shift from command-control to coordinate-cultivate, a seismic shift in how we do business and make money.

How do we get there from here? What models are sustainable and which are hype? There are no easy answers. However, the Open Mobile Summit (June 10-11 in London), produced by Robin Batt, an independent consultant with 13 years experience in the space, certainly covers all the bases to offer attendees insights that will allow them to take charge of the wave of change rather than be crashed by it. (In fact, even Google is attending!)