Rob Cell Phones

(Computers in Libraries Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Drawing Down Big Info Into Little Apps

Mobile apps are a delivery option that libraries need to consider when developing service and content for their users.

In the past 5 years, cloud computing has gone from an abstract idea to state-of-the-art storage, transforming the way organizations structure their information services and making ubiquitous just-in-time (JIT) information a reality. Untethered from landlines, ethernet ports, and other tangible signs of connections, users can connect to information, entertainment, communication, and networking at the click of a key on a laptop, netbook, and – increasingly – cellphones, tablets, and PDAs. Today’s mobile devices provide far more than communications on-the-go – they often include video and still cameras, microphones, computing power, video and audio players, and GPS systems. Mobile apps are also revolutionizing the potential for rapid information dissemination and access.

“Mobile will continue to grow rapidly over the next five years,” notes IBISWorld industry analyst Kevin Culbert. “Over the past decade, people have continued to shift consumption of media online. The ability of today’s phones to display full webpages has furthered this trend while the continued adoption of smartphones will boost mobile app and advertising spending in the years to come.”

The Growing Appetite for Apps

Mobile applications, or apps, are pieces of software that can run over the internet or on your computer, cellphone, or other PDA-type device. An IDC research study released in June 2010 estimated that 107 billion apps were sold or acquired in 2010 and predicted the number of apps would rise to 182.7 billion by 2015. In June 2011, Google announced that its Android mobile operating system had recorded more than 4.5 billion app downloads – impressive, yet well behind Apple’s estimated 14.5 billion app downloads.

Apps first became a profitable enterprise with the launch of the Apple App Store to support iPod, iPad, and iPhone applications. In the early days, apps were made available through stores established and controlled by the cellphone makers – Google for Android devices, Apple for its iPhone and iPad, RIM for its BlackBerry devices – and app development remained the stuff of professional software developers.

Apple’s move into the app marketplace provided the impetus to move the market forward rapidly. From the start, iTunes’ apps proved accessible, compelling, and fun, accelerating the market’s development. It also legitimized the system for app distribution via device-hosted stores.

Writing on a NYTimes.com blog, David Pogue notes that there are 90,000 iPad apps, “not counting the 475,000 apps for the iPhone,” clearly more than for any other platform. “Although it will be hard for newcomers to beat Google or Apple as mobile application distributors,” Culbert notes, “the market for app developers is flourishing.”

More than half of all apps listed in the various app stores are free or even public domain. Credit for this is due to the wide variety of development tools that have come to market that make it possible for most people to create their own apps. With the release of Google’s App Inventor for Android, though still officially in beta, the company sought to make app development “simple but powerful” so that teachers could create study tips and quizzes, anyone could create geographic information systems (GIS) to help people find their way to some destination, and people could communicate over the web and “have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you.”

The proprietary nature of Apple’s operating system and its desire to control the process has not been universally applauded. Apple actively filters all developer app submissions, selecting the ones it wishes to sponsor on its site, and sells only those programs that work under the Apple OSI format (iPhone, iPod, and iPad), freezing out anyone who doesn’t have an Apple device.

“Apple and Android have really been the driving forces behind app growth in the last couple of years,” Culbert explains. “The biggest difference between the two is the ‘walled-garden’ approach of Apple and the more open nature of Google’s platform. The walled-garden approach is generally taken to produce higher-quality, more stable applications – indeed, Apple has a notoriously stringent acceptance policy for applications submitted to its App Store. In spite of this, many developers have apps on each platform. For example, the Weather Channel has apps for each Apple, Android, and Blackberry”

If Apple users try to tweak their phones to allow for apps from someone besides the App Store, Apple voids their device warranty. Called “jailbreaking,” this form of user control has gained a great deal of popularity in the past few years … so much so that Apple itself began selling “unlocked” versions of its iPhone 4 – not just to deal with potential piracy or to shore up its Western markets but also to ensure greater success as it moves into Chinese and other global markets.

Moving Information Into the Cloud

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s head of global public policy and government affairs, believes that “one of the most important transformations the federal government will go through in the next decade is what’s called a shift to cloud computing; treating computer storage and processing like a commodity – like water or electricity – and allowing people to build applications on top of the infrastructure in a very flexible, open, and powerful way.” Mobile apps represent one of the first, major development trends in this cloud environment.

“A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information,” notes Stephen Baker in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek piece. “At the most basic level, it’s the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.”

2010 – A Pivotal Year

2010 was the year that saw Apple’s iPad become the compelling technology of choice for adults, with estimates of anywhere from 5 to nearly 9 million sold since its release, with half of those sold in the U.S. alone. When Google’s Android operating system for smartphones was released in 2007, few phones were available to use the system – today, Android is the fastest growing mobile platform in the world. Gartner found 3.5% of all phones ran under Android in 2009 and predicts that by 2012 Android will hold almost 50% of the market share for smartphones.

Equally significant is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent action on Net Neutrality. In its extensive (194-page) ruling released in December 2010, the FCC determined that mobile wireless providers can’t block applications that compete with the provider’s own voice or video telephony services. Although this would appear to give app developers more latitude in developing and selling their wares, many believe that the language of the ruling leaves too many issues unclear.

However, the real game-changer in the mobile market has been the explosion in the number, breadth, and quality of mobile apps available. Mobile app downloads – free or feebased – have grown dramatically. App developers now routinely develop products for all popular platforms to ensure a maximum authence. In a November market study, IDC projected “annual mobile app downloads to increase from 38.2 billion in 2011 to nearly 182.7 billion in 2015 as developers create apps for virtually every aspect of a mobile user’s personal and business lives.”

Mobile app developers will ‘appify’ just about every interaction you can think of in your physical and digital worlds,” explains IDC vice president Scott Ellison. “The extension of mobile apps to every aspect of our personal and business lives will be one of the hallmarks of the new decade.”

Curated Content

All of this technological change is enabling a new phenomenon: user curated content. “Unlike user generated content, which is the established name for popular content created and uploaded to the Web on blogs, Flickr pictures, Youlube videos and so on,” explains Eurocloud’s Phil Wainewright, “user curated content is already-existing content which a user or provider has filtered, flagged, or organized in some way.”

Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk notes that the “Kindle, cellphone, MP3 player, GPS and other specific-purpose devices curate functionality in order to deliver a better experience than a general-purpose desktop computer could ever deliver. This holds especially true for devices designed around consumption, such as portable MP3 players or big-screen televisions.”

Van Buskirk believes “We live in the Age of Curation, of which the iPad is just a recent manifestation.” However, with so many devices, so much information, so many diverse authences, the issue of curation will continue to be critical for information providers and individual users alike.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rottman Epps sees curation as giving less choice but more relevance to users while diffusing editorial power to users themselves. Epps explains the concept this way: “A consumer can do anything with a Windows PC or Mac, like run commands, install robust software, connect easily to peripheral devices, and save files locally. The iPad operates very differently. Its operating system works more like a jukebox than a desktop – consumers choose (and pay for) applications from a predetermined set list. Each of those applications is, in itself, also curated; the publisher selects content and functionality that’s appropriate to the form factor, just as a museum curator selects artworks from a larger collection to exhibit in a particular gallery space.”

Curation isn’t just for professionals or publishers providing curated content for users – it also allows users to create their own. Today, notes New York University’s (NYU) Clay Shirky, “Everyone is a media outlet. The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view now. Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”

The “curation” label and discussion began with the design of the iPad. Van Buskirk notes that “curation is the positive flip side of Apple’s locked-down approach, decried as a major, negative development in computing by many observers . . . Who would have thought that in 2010, so many people would pay good money for a computer that only runs approved software? It runs counter to the idea, prized by geeks, that computing equals freedom. If it were Microsoft doing this, we’d all be storming the Gates with torches and pitchforks.”

Mobile apps provide not only just-in-time ready reference anytime anywhere, but they also provide both an alternative, targeted delivery model and a challenge to information organizations that need to work with these evolving technologies and models as consumers ourselves – and, hopefully, as designers of newer products and services for our users.

Information as ‘Constantly Updated Conversation’

We are seeing faster and faster changes in the technological landscape. With Apple’s release of the iMac in 1998 – and lacking any internal floppy drives by design – you can mark the beginning of the end for the floppy diskette. Streaming video services such as Netflix, YouTube, HuIu, and so many others seem to signal the end of the DVD era. Today cloud computing appears to mark the evolution to a whole new way to conceptualize storage and information access.

“I call apps post-browser publishing,” notes practical futurist Michael Rogers. “Ever since 1994 we content producers have been stuck inside the browser, which not only took up valuable screen real estate, but tended to commoditize everything. Around 2000 or so I found myself beginning to resent the browser. The very name ‘browser’ works against long-term attention to a single publication – the evolution of browsers over the years has been toward making it ever easier to leave one place and go to another. Apps are a huge step forward for content producers.”

Social media – and even more so with apps – are now turning information into “living documents” that constantly evolve, grow, and change. What is the implication for information curation and verification?

“Obviously, information in many ways is already turning into a constantly updated conversation,” Rogers believes. “Taken to the extreme, you could argue that the traditional newspaper pyramid structure (overview at the topic, increasing detail as you read further) should be replaced in all cases by the Hog’s reverse chronology, since news is almost always changing.”

“But I think that ultimately we’re going to find that the crucial question in information will be ‘What’s your frequency?’ If we are going to create information that includes verification and analysis, it will necessarily take longer to produce. Asidebar to that information might be continuing updates, but the authence will need to know and appreciate the difference between what takes 5 minutes to produce and what takes a week to produce. Content producers will state their frequency at the outset, and contour the content appropriately.”

Each major change forces information providers to reconceptualize and alter their services and resources. Today, for information providers, keeping up with technological change is daunting but critical – just as it is for information professionals and libraries. Mobile apps are just the latest kinds of technology that offer this challenge and opportunity for change.

Content Is Key

Malcolm Brown, director of EDUCAUSE’s Learning Initiative, is immersed in issues of learning principles, learning styles, evidence of impact, and the evaluation and promotion of new learning technologies in higher education. Do mobile apps represent a major advance for education? “The average mobile device is still something that will never allow for [students] to write their papers or read most textbooks. The phone is able to give you content on an anytime, anywhere basis. The question is that if you improve access does it have ramification[s] for the quality of learning that goes on. The issue of whether learning is improved is a huge and complicated issue. The real question is whether or not something will happen with mobile apps beyond being able [to] access information with a bit more rapidity. Or does that, by itself, also contribute to the learning experience in a positive and, perhaps, meaningful way.

“The way I think of it is that we aren’t really talking about mobile devices but mobile computing. I think that the laptop was the first stage in that. If you think of all of the things that an academic or student or librarian needs to do in terms of computing, that was all done on desktops just a few years ago,” Brown explains. “Then the laptop came along, able to do anything that the desktop could do with the advantage of being portable.

“Now we are moving to even more mobile devices, with the iPad able to enable an even larger set of those computing functions to move to a highly mobile device. So, ownership is increasing but I think you need to move on to consider usage of those devices,” Brown continues. “It is interesting to note that even though many own these devices, only a subset use these features on even a weekly basis, and an even smaller subset use them on a daily basis.

“Right now, for mobile devices, the main use is for quick check-in and check-out for updates to Facebook, email or to see if the professor posted anything new on the course page. For the more in-depth applications, working with content, the mobile phone may not be the best device. That’s why I think the iPad changes the game a bit, allowing for more functionality and greater storage and display options.”

Whatever the case, mobile apps are a delivery option that libraries need to consider when developing service and content for their users. From information on physical locations, hours, and other directional types of resources to distilling key information on collections and services for busy users on-the-go, mobile applications are a critical technology to be considered.

Apple has hundreds of thousands of apps for the iPhone.

A Sampler of Available App Development Tools

App development tools are widely available today- often in limited trials oras free versions- to help anyone translate programs, tools, tips, or other information into the cellphone SMS (short message service) format. This is still serious complicated work, and many products are designed for a particular operating system. Here are just a few, with notations on which platforms are supported:

App Inventor (Android)

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com

This is an excellent, well-documented free system (with registration) from Google.

Appmakr beta (Apple)

www.appmakr.com

This development tool, available in free or fee-based versions, “enables anyone to build rich content based apps using a point and click solution.”

BuildAnApp (Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, mobile web)

www.buildanapp.com/home.action

A free 30-day trial is available on this system, which uses a six-step wizard to help the novice through the development phase.

Canvas (multiple)

www.gocanvas.com

“Build it yourself or find an App in our ever growing Application Store … either way all of the Canvas mobile apps work on the widest variety of Smartphones and mobile devices in the market.” Canvas has a monthly service charge per device for unlimited apps from its site.

goMobi

http://gomobi.info/home.html

This service translates existing websites into mobile-ready websites, more easily viewed on the small screen.

ShoutEm

www.shoutem.com

Another real-time, location-based app development tool that lets you “make your web site go mobile, with our rich set of mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry and Java enabled phones. Android should join the gang soon. Supported features are: Friend finder, location sharing (Check in), Augmented reality, status and photo updates, link and video sharing and much more.”

Socialight

http://socialight.com

“Socialight is a platform for communities that want to create, and interact around, location-based content, letting developers build location-based applications for any internet-connected device or website.”

SwebApps (Apple)

http://swebapps.com

You can “build your own iPhone app in minutes,” using this fee-based product.

Finding the Right App

Apps are available in many places today-from producerwebsites to specialized lists or the catalogs of app stores sponsored by the various cellphone makers. Here are justa few, mostly device-centric, that include free, fee-based, and public domain titles:

Android Market

www.android.com/market

Android platform

Appia

www.appia.com

Open apps store including Palm OS, WinMo, and Symbian

Apple Apps Store

www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone iOS-based apps only

BlackBerry App World

www.blackberry.com/appworld

BlackBerry (COD)-based cellphones

Cydia

http://cydia.saurik.com

Apps for jailbroken iPhone/iPad/iPods

Nokia’s Ovi Store

www.ovi.com

Covers Flash Lite, Java, Maemo, Linux, and Symbian platforms

Palm App Catalog

www.palm.com/us/products/software/ mobile-applications.html

Palm’s web OS platform

PlayNow Arena

(Sony Ericsson)

www.playnow-arena.com

Java, Flash Lite Symbian, WinMo platforms

Samsung Apps

www.samsungapps.com

Android

Windows Phone Shop Apps

http://marketplace.windowsphone.com

WinMo

Nancy K. Herther is the anthropology/sociology librarian at the University ofMinnesota Libraries with a longtime interest in information technology trends. She can be reached at herther@umn.edu.

(c) 2011 Information Today, Inc.

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September 07, 2011 —

Utrecht, The Netherlands (PRWEB) September 07, 2011

Distimo (http://www.distimo.com), a globally recognized leader in app store analytics, announced today that Distimo Monitor, the free cross-platform app store monitoring and analytics tool for developers, now offers a variety of deep benchmarking capabilities to help developers maximize their app store revenues across eight different app stores and extend the global geographic reach of their apps.

Distimo Monitor (http://monitor.distimo.com) is a free app store analytics tool that allows any developer to monitor their daily downloads, revenue, rankings, and reviews on a global scale using aggregated transactional data extracted directly from the app stores. Monitor collects all relevant statistics about mobile applications, and allows developers to benchmark their download volumes and business models against all the apps in the market in any country. Developers gain insight into where opportunities for their own apps exist, and can use this knowledge to adjust their country focus and pricing to maximize the growth and revenue of their apps.

Distimo Monitor offers developers the following features and benefits:

•     Cross platform support for multiple stores including: Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, Apple Mac App Store, Google Android Market, BlackBerry App World, Nokia Ovi Store, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Amazon Appstore and GetJar
•     Free, unlimited use with no code integration required
•     Comparison of their download volumes per country alongside the total download volumes of all apps in the market revealing in which countries opportunities lie and where their apps are outperforming the market
•     Track their download volume growth by country over time and benchmark their apps against the market, making it easy to identify new and emerging markets where they can start selling their apps
•     Benchmark pricing points and business models of their apps against those of the top grossing apps in the market to see what model and pricing point works best
•     Customer reviews from any country automatically translated into English
•     Comprehensive data analysis for developers including data exports
•     Compatible with touch-enabled devices including the iPad and other popular tablets

The app store marketplace is a widely fragmented market filled with equally fragmented information and statistics which makes it incredibly challenging for mobile developers to understand the best marketplaces and ways to distribute their products and services to mobile consumers, stated Distimo CEO and co-founder, Vincent Hoogsteder. Distimo Monitor solves this challenge by providing free benchmark reporting and dashboard tools that remove all of the manual work required with distributing an app in multiple app stores, and helps developers maximize opportunities for monetization and growth.

About Distimo
Distimo is the innovative app store analytics company built to solve the challenges created by a widely fragmented app store marketplace filled with equally fragmented information and statistics. Distimo Report provides in-depth customized reports for carriers and operators and offers valuable insight into important trends happening within different application stores around the world. Custom reports are currently available for the Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple App Store for iPad, Apple Mac App Store, Amazon Appstore, BlackBerry App World, GetJar, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Distimo Monitor is a free, cross-platform, app monitoring tool for developers that enables them to monitor their own and competitive applications across all app stores, without any adjustments needed to their applications code.

Founded in 2009, Distimo is a privately held company based in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Learn more at http://www.distimo.com.

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Con: The HP TouchPad is easily downed by the camera facility it offers. The iPad 2 comes with a 1 MP rear and VGA front-facing camera. The TouchPad, in comparison, comes only with a front-facing 1.3 MP camera that enables video chat. A rear-facing camera is missing.

2. Pro: The TouchPad comes with an intelligent innovative onscreen keypad where the numbers are placed on the top half of the screen. They can even be seen clearly without switching the keyboard views. The iPad, however, doesn’t have any such feature. The keyboard can even be customized according to the user’s thickness of the finger.

Con: The TouchPad has major issues with connectivity as the tablet is built only to support WiFi. The tablet does not support 3G. The iPad, in comparison, is both WiFi and 3G enabled and hence will continue to dominate the tablet market. Although HP had promised a 4G compatible tablet computer alter this year, the chances are now over.

3. Pro: One of HP TouchPad’s strongest features is its Notification feature which Apple is yet to master for its iPad. When a notification is delivered on the TouchPad, the device’s top bar lights start glowing softly. The iPad, in comparison, is late to react and the user won’t even have the slightest clue that a notification was actually delivered a long time ago.

Con: Customers have often complained about the glitches and slowness that come along with the TouchPad. Although the device is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, such complaints are very common. Frequent crashes have also been reported previously. Other glitches in the TouchPad include reported problems with the device’s email app (messages may not show properly), image viewer (images take time to rotate when you turn the screen). The iPad, in comparison with its dual-core A5 processor doesn’t have such complaints as such.

4. Pro: The TouchPad’s OS, WebOS, is a dedicated multi-tasking operating system. Multitasking is one of the finest features the TouchPad brings to the user. It is undoubtedly one of the best features that webOS has to offer. You can move freely between texts, calendars, photos, or one of the 20 other tasks that you can leave open. The tasks keep running and there is no lag or interruption once you return. The technology is similar to the Alt+Tab theory of Microsoft’s Windows 7 which makes swiping through open apps easier.

Con: The TouchPad’s battery has problems as is nowhere near what iPad has to offer. The iPad 2’s battery offers nearly 10 hours of surfing the web on WiFi, listening to music, or watching video. It even offers up to 9 hours of surfing the web using 3G data network. Don’t expect anything like this on the TouchPad.

5. Pro: The Palm App Catalog, in comparison to the Apple App Store’s 100,000 iPad dedicated apps, has only 300 tablet-optimized apps and 8,000 apps for WebOS altogether. But HP has promised that their WebOS applications will grow.

Con: On the other side of the coin, however, people aren’t as patient as they used to be. Out of the 8,000 apps in Palm’s App Catalog, about 700 don’t work on the TouchPad. Popular apps like Google Maps and Netflix are yet to be found on the TouchPad.

6. Pro: The Touch to Share feature lets you share content from the tablet with the webOS-powered Pre 3 (recently cancelled in the U.S.) smartphone. The webOS devices work better when they work together. A simple touch on the tablet lets you read websites on a larger screen.

Con: As HP has now decided to exit the PC business, TouchPad users will have nobody to ask for technical support. The maximum problem will be faced with the demand of a replacement product or spare parts. Bugs, later found, may also cause problems.

7. Pro: What better time is there to grab a TouchPad than now? Especially when it is being sold for $99. This is a good deal if you want a functional tablet that comes with accelerometer, light sensor, gyroscope and digital compass at a cheaper price. The TouchPad is a convincing buy at $99.

Con: The TouchPad definitely lacks that feel good factor as one of the greatest drawbacks of the tablet is its design. Its rivals, Apple and Samsung, in comparison, produce sexier and appealing devices. The device is also heavier than most of the tablets in the market at 1.65 pounds.

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(La Prensa (Toledo, KS) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) In celebration of National Library Week (April 10 – 16), Cuyahoga County Public Library is taking convenient borrowing to a whole new level with a first-of-its-kind mobile smart phone app that allows its customers to access reviews and check out materials by simply scanning the item’s barcode. CCPL is the first public library in the United States to deploy this multi-platform mobile app developed by Boopsie Inc.

The CCPL Mobile app is available to CCPL cardholders for free download from the app stores of all major mobile operating systems, including Android, BlackBerry, J2ME, Palm OS, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iTouch and iPad. Android device users will be the first to be able to take advantage of the new check out feature. Support of iPhone and select Blackberry devices will follow shortly.

With CCPL Mobile, library customers can also:

* Search for items in the Library’s catalog quickly and with minimal key-strokes.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs Service Providers at The World’s Communications Conference, ITEXPO West. September 13-15, 2011 Austin, Texas

* Read item reviews and summaries.

* Access their cardholder account to renew and reserve items.

* Use the GPS-aware locator to find Library branches and hours of operation.

* Access “Know It Now”, the 24/7 online reference service, get live research assistance from a librarian, reading recommendations and answers to questions.

* Connect with Cuyahoga County Public Library on Facebook and Twitter.

CCPL has a history of innovative mobile services. It was the first library system in the United States to offer text message notification and renewal services to its customers free of charge, and in 2010, CCPL received the Urban Library Council’s “User Experience” Innovation Award for its “Renew by Text” service.

“We are delighted to have found a business partner in Boopsie that is willing and able to help us become the first public library to offer this amazing new app,” said Sari Feldman, CCPL Executive Director and past president of the Public Library Association. “Our vision is to be the most convenient library in the nation, and this interactive, innovative new technology represents the pinnacle of convenience for our customers. This app will enable us to broaden the reach of our services to the mobile community, and it’s an absolute thrill to launch it during National Library Week.”

(c) 2011 La Prensa Newspaper

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April 28th, 2011, 19:41 GMT| By Ionut Arghire

With Apple clamping down on incentivized downloads, white-label mobile app platform Appia (formerly PocketGear) has launched a new performance based advertising network for app developers to increase app downloads and only pay for results.

In case you aren’t familiar, Appia powers a white-label content and commerce platform for everyone and anyone who needs a mobile app store. The company now powers mobile app storefronts for more than 40 partners, including four of the world’s top five handset manufacturers (Samsung, T-Mobile, ATT, and Verizon Wireless). The bonus of using Appia’s white-label offering is that it enables its partners to deliver apps to more than 3,200 different mobile device makes and models. Via its partnerships, Appia currently powers more than 500,000 downloads a day from a catalog of 140,000 apps with projections to double by mid-2011.

Appia’s ad network allows developers to access a pay-per-download service that allows developers to promote their apps by targeting ads by country and platform (Android, iOS, Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Palm). Developers only pay for actual downloads of their apps.

Developers will now be able to target consumers across Appia’s distribution network, which delivered 22 million downloads in March. The network now reaches more than 200 million mobile subscribers in over 200 countries. Appia’s performance based advertising network is directly integrated into the Appia Developer Program. Once an application has been uploaded to the the Appia developer portal, the developer simply sets the bid price they want to pay per download, chooses the geographies they want to target, and select a payment method. Appia’s online reporting shows campaign activity broken down by platform, device and geography; giving developers insight into where their campaign is driving app downloads.

Prior to today’s launch, Appia’s performance based advertising service has been in private beta since February but has already delivered high value sponsored downloads to trial partners including Flirtomatic and Blue Lion.

While Appia’s app platform doesn’t have the same scale as the Apple App Store, it certainly is an outlet for developers to advertise and profit. And the company’s reach is steadily increasing. Appia recently announced partnerships with Opera Software, to power the Opera Mobile Store for more than 100 million users, as well as with Telcel, Mexico’s largest operator, to power the Ideas Appstore for Telcel’s 64 million subscribers. Incentivized downloads have become a big business, and it should be interesting if developers expand to Appia’s platform to capitalize on this.

Editor’s note: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers.

HP has been in the news a lot lately touting its vision for a WebOS-filled future.  While it’s debatable if we’re in the “post-PC” era, there is no doubt that we are indeed still at the early stages of mobile application development.

A quick glance at the mobile platform landscape has my company, the interactive agency POP, learning from our first Windows Phone experiences, continuing to sharpen our skills on iOS, chasing down Android and all of its versions and devices, and assessing Blackberry’s Playbook amongst other technologies.  Platform preferences aside, if you don’t like innovation and change, stay away from mobile.

We have been watching HP carefully since they started talking more publicly about WebOS.  We were all fans of Palm back in the day, right?  While consistent commercial success has been hard for them to achieve over the years, as a technologist, you have to tip your hat to the innovative ecosystem that is just now beginning to be holistically unveiled.

I’m not here to predict the success or failure of webOS, but rather to highlight some things the other platforms can learn from it:

Enable application development across all platforms

If you want to build an iOS app, you need a Mac.  If you want to build a Windows Phone app, you need a PC.  If you want to build a Blackberry Playbook app, you can be on either (Windows for other Blackberry devices though).  So, what’s the best way to reach the development masses?  Make the OS irrelevant.  WebOS application development only requires your IDE of choice (or HP’s Ares development environment) and a WebKit-based browser.

Make application development more accessible

Java, Objective-C, Silverlight, XNA, Adobe AIR, ….  WebOS only requires that you know HTML/JS/CSS.  The Enyo JavaScript framework does the heavy lifting for you.  Personally, I like the strategy of widening mobile application development to the most widely used Web development technologies.  You still have the option to dive in deeper and build a truly custom interactive experience.  However, at what cost do those experiences come at and how much does it cost to maintain over the lifespan of an app and over various OS versions and devices?

Hardware acceleration for Web apps

WebOS apps are Web-based technology applications that can take advantage of hardware acceleration.  Other platforms offer native OS, Web (browser), or hybrid (mix of both) application styles.  Hardware acceleration for mobile browsers is definitely starting to become more commonplace but Web experiences within native shells generally are not.  HP avoids these variances in performance altogether by supporting standards like CSS3 accelerated transforms and by also having a hardware accelerated application framework.

Ship with built-in aggregators for cloud-based content

HP is continuing the industry’s efforts of improving mobile access to people’s pictures, music, and documents that are stored in various cloud-based repositories.  This is a good thing because there is still a long ways to go.

Resizeable interfaces

Apps built for iPhones don’t look all that great on iPads.  They are two similar but distinctly different experiences and thus we need to write two versions of apps to create form-factor aware experiences.  WebOS takes a very different approach: Design once and scale the functionality to the form factor.  On a mobile device? No problem. You see a smaller, lighter version of the app.  On a TouchPad?  No sweat. The app resizes, panels expand or collapse as needed, and the experience is instantly richer.  HP’s webOS is like the Swiss Army Knife of platforms – whatever you need, it’s built-in which makes our application development budgets stretch farther.

Devices are social

Welcome back “beaming” (the old Palm Pilot method of sending data over infra-red connections)…well, kinda.  The 2011 version of beaming is “touching,” and webOS lets you “touch” links (for now) from one device to another using their Touchstone technology.  This nifty little feature has potential for just about everyone – in the future, gaming companies could have consumers sharing games with each other and when the trial runs out, you (hopefully) have a rapid purchase path waiting for you.  Retail brands could have customers sharing coupons back and forth.  My mind is racing…social networking, information worker multi-device productivity improvements, and what’s a business card?

Beyond the list above, webOS is sneaking its way onto printers, phones, into data centers, and onto Windows desktops.  Does the webOS App Catalog on Windows equate to a Windows App Store?  Interesting.  What to make of this?  That’s probably a topic for another day so while it remains to be seen if HP’s webOS strategy will be an overwhelming commercial success, an also-ran technology, or an eventual high-profile failure (ok…maybe I’ve oversimplified the options), I do think they are doing some nice things the other development platforms can learn from (checkout how they handle notifications too).  Nice work HP and we’ll see you at the TouchPad’s launch.

Matt Joe is the VP of Technology at POP, an interactive agency. He submitted this story to VentureBeat as part of a series leading up to our Mobile Summit later this month.

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Tags: Android, Blackberry, iOS, iPhone, Pre 3, smartphones, tablets, TouchPad, webOS

Companies: Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, Palm, POP, RIM

People: Matt Joe

The free app for Apple’s iPhone will provide users on the go — from students and faculty to football fans and campus visitors — a simple way to access an array of information about the university.

“This is not just a student app,” said Ivon Foster, UA’s assistant to the provost for special projects. “It’s intended for use by the entire UA community.”

The app, which debuted over the weekend, is actually a collection of 12 mini-apps. After searching “University of Alabama” in Apple’s online App Store and downloading the app, users are presented with a simple menu with 12 crimson and white icons. From there, the user can choose to view a campus map, browse UA’s library catalog, search available courses, locate the nearest Crimson Ride bus or browse through the university’s entire campus directory.

The app’s map function could provide a service for new students and others new to the campus. After selecting the “Maps” icon, a Google map of the campus appears along with a search bar. Type in the name of a building on campus (many times the name of the building will pop up before the user has finished typing), and the application will locate it and place a pushpin in its location.

Users can push another button at the bottom of the map to find their location in relation to that campus building.

Foster said the university worked with Google’s MapKit to create a custom map of the university for the application.

Further implementation of the “Maps” mini-app can be found in the “Courses” mini-app. There, users can search for a course by typing its name, or browse through each college and major the university offers. Once a course has been found, a tap takes the user to another screen, where each of the course’s sections can be seen. Tap a section and the app provides its day and time each week, the instructor and where it’s located.

Tap the instructor’s name and you’re taken to the contact info in the app’s “Directory” mini-app. Tap the name of the building the course is housed in and the app presents its location under the “Maps” mini-app.

Courses can also be bookmarked within the app for access later on, which could be useful to students in the first week of classes each semester.

In addition to those features, the “Library” mini-app can be used to check whether a book is checked in or out at the campus libraries while the “News” and “Athletics” mini-apps contain the latest news releases.

Since the app’s release on Saturday, it has been downloaded 582 times, Foster said Tuesday afternoon. She stressed that the current version of the app is only “the foundation” of what UA wants to do with smartphones.

For starters, Android and BlackBerry versions of the app are coming “very soon,” said Foster, who recently received the test build of the BlackBerry app. The university does not plan to develop a version for HP’s Palm phones and other WebOS devices. And though the iPhone app can run on Apple’s iPad, Foster said an iPad-specific version is not in the plans.

Several UA departments, including the library, registrar’s office, public relations and athletics, assisted the educational technology company Blackboard in the app’s development.

“Blackboard is the company that handles our university’s course management, our campus alert system and Action Card system, so we’re very familiar with them,” said Foster, who worked as a liaison between Blackboard and the university. “A lot of institutions are going in this direction of providing mobile apps, so about a year ago we began the discussion about releasing our own.”

Foster said that when development of the app began last July, UA wanted it to have a unique feel from iPhone apps Blackboard has released for other schools.

“We didn’t want to look like every other app from Blackboard’s mobile division. They all have a similar look,” Foster said, going in and out of the numerous apps from other schools loaded on her iPhone.

UA is still developing the app and looking to implement more and more features. Foster said future versions will allow students to access their class schedule and their Dining Dollars and Bama Cash accounts after signing in.

Foster said UA also hopes to add a more extensive app for Crimson Ride (the app currently accesses a mobile website to provide the bus locations), including a feature that allows students to requests rides from 348-RIDE through the app when buses are not running.

The battle of the app stores is hotting up, with Apple looking like it could be knocked off its perch as soon as this July.

A report issued on Wednesday by Distimo, an app analytics company based in the Netherlands, says Google’s Android Market is poised to take the top spot in terms of the total number of apps available to consumers.

Distimo’s comprehensive monthly study looks at all of the app stores operating in the US today: Apple’s App Store for iPad, Apple’s App Store for iPhone, the Mac App Store, BlackBerry’s App World, GetJar, Google’s Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog, and Windows’ Phone 7 Marketplace.

You’ll probably have noticed that the Amazon Appstore for Android, which only launched last month, is not included in the analysis. This is because that while Distimo’s report is issued on a monthly basis, it uses data from the previous three months to better understand underlying trends in the market. So expect to see Amazon included in future reports.

In terms of the number of free apps available, Google has already coasted past Apple’s iPhone app store. Google currently has 134,342 to the iPhone’s 121,845.

Distimo says that if the app stores continue to grow at their current rate, then in around five months time Google Android Market will move into first place in terms of the total number of apps available. In next place would be Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad, followed by Windows’ Phone 7 Marketplace, BlackBerry’s App World and Nokia’s Ovi Store. There’s some good news for Microsoft too: “The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace will also be larger than the Nokia Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World prior to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace being available for even a full year.”

The report also takes a look at specific tablets. Apple’s iPad, released a year ago, now has more than 75,000 apps by almost 22,000 publishers. Distimo reports that “Daily downloads in the Top 100 Overall paid and free applications for iPad combined exceed 500,000, while the daily revenue in the Top 100 paid is approximately $400,000 excluding in-app purchases.”

Many of the top iPad app developers don’t produce apps exclusively for Apple’s iOS, preferring, understandably, to take successful products to other platforms. “Fifty-eight percent of the 50 most popular publishers have already developed applications for non-Apple platforms,” says Distimo.

Apple will probably have to get used to being in second place, at least on this front. The increasing popularity of Android smartphones will only serve to increase the customer base for Android apps, which will in turn attract more app developers to Google’s operating system.

IHS Screen Digest has published its latest forecasts for the global apps market, and it predicts that Apple‘s App Store will remain in pole position when it comes to app revenues through to 2014.

The topline figures: IHS expects 18.1bnn apps to be downloaded in 2011, up from 9.5bn in 2010. When it comes to revenues, the company has chosen to focus on the four largest platform-owned stores: Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, Nokia‘s Ovi Store and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry App World.

IHS claims that between them, those four stores will generate $3.8bn in 2011, with Apple taking a 76% share of those revenues ($2.9bn). The report suggests that Android Market will account for $425.4m of app revenues in 2011, ahead of BlackBerry App World ($279.1m) and Ovi Store ($201.5m).

“With consumers continuing to show robust, unflagging interest in downloading games and other applications to devices like smart phones and tablets, collective revenues from the four stores will climb sharply this year,” says IHS’s mobile media analyst, Jack Kent.

The company thinks that in 2014, more than 33bn apps will be downloaded overall – this is from all stores – with the big four stores generating $8.3bn of app revenues, of which Apple will still take a 60% share.

SOURCE: IHS Screen Digest Research, May 2011

What isn’t included in that prediction is Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace, HP’s Palm App Catalog, independent stores like GetJar or the mushrooming number of operator-owned stores. Making predictions for Nokia’s Ovi Store in 2014 is particularly risky, since it is still unclear what kind of role the store will play on the company’s Windows Phone devices in the coming years.

IHS Screen Digest is far from the only company making app predictions. In late April, ABI Research made its own forecast of 44bn cumulative app downloads by 2016, hailing competition for iOS from Android and Windows Phone as the key drivers for growth in the next five years.

Meanwhile, Portio Research has just published a report that claims there will be nearly 256m mobile app users by 2015, with app revenues growing from $6.6bn in 2010 to $23bn by 2015.

Developers tend to be cynical of the numbers in these kinds of reports, despite (or more likely because) of the way they are fuelling the excitement and hype around the apps market from brands, investors and other industries.