Eideard

It’s no secret that the rise of smartphones, tablets and social networking has fostered an entirely new market for app developers, but a freshly released study has now attempted to quantify this impact, in terms of real jobs.

According to TechNet, a bipartisan network of tech execs, the so-called “App Economy” has created an estimated 466,000 jobs since 2007, when the iPhone was first unveiled.

The report specifies that this estimate includes all jobs at Facebook-focused companies like Zynga, as well as dev gigs at Amazon, AT&T and Electronic Arts, in addition to the obvious heavyweights, Apple and Google.

As far as geography goes, California leads the way as the most app-friendly state, though New York City tops the list of metropolitan areas. It’s not an entirely bi-coastal affair, though, with some two-thirds of all app-related jobs located outside of California and New York.

TechNet acknowledges that the App Economy “is only four years old and extremely fluid,” so it’s likely that these numbers will fluctuate in the years to come, though the organization says these numbers underscore a fundamental principle: “Innovation creates jobs, and in this case, lots of them.”

You can read the full report at technet.org.

And don’t get your shorts bunched figuring the numbers are going to diminish or decline. When it comes to the predominance of the mobile web – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Apple has expanded its efforts to curtail the unchecked expansion of shovelware and scamware in the iOS App Store, focusing on keeping the store’s library attractive rather than simply aiming to maintain the biggest store in terms of raw numbers.

The company’s latest effort at curation has banned the practice of “incentivized app installs,” a gimmick used by some game makers to induce players to install specific other apps in order to continue playing. The practice is similar to “offer walls” promoted by free web games that ask players to participate in offers (such as buying a product or signing up for a trial service subscription) in order to obtain in-game currency required to continue game play.

Apple has banned the practice to prevent companies from artificially distorting the popularity of apps that are only being downloaded because of the incentives…With incentivized installs, one developer pays another an install fee (usually through a middleman pay-per-install network) to induce its users to download other apps. This is used to rapidly promote a new title into iTunes’ App Store rankings, a coveted position that results in exceptional visibility and exponentially higher sales…

While Apple initially advertised downloads and library size milestones for the App Store to note how fast it was growing and how far it was ahead of competing app markets, the company has already begun talking about other competitive metrics, particularly the billions of dollars it has paid out to developers…

Actual performance figures of mobile software stores demonstrate that the revenues earned by developers are not necessarily tied to the overall quantity of the devices running a platform (the installed base or market share), nor the raw number of downloads or library size…

Not only does this make sound business sense – it fits in well with Apple’s overall marketing style. If I was selling apps, it’s the way I would approach consumers. Short-term and in the long run.

In line to enter the World Wide Developers Conference 2009
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A decade ago, San Francisco’s trendy South of Market district was the birthplace of hundreds of web design firms that have since gone under or been swallowed by rivals.

Now it is the turn of the “app army“, the scores of companies devoted to churning out small programs known as applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and rival devices, as well as on regular computers for users of Facebook and similar websites…

Indeed, veteran industry executives, investors and analysts are calling the shift to internet-capable devices and the apps that run on them a once-a-decade leap in technology, on a par with the great personal computing boom of the 1980s and the debut of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

“The ramp [growth rate] of the iPhone and iPod touch in the first eight or nine quarters is more than five times the ramp for the internet,” says Kathryn Huberty, Morgan Stanley tech analyst. These devices, and faster wireless networks, are both now reaching about a fifth of the global population, she estimates, which will drive much more rapid development : “Globally,” she says, “2010 is the tipping point.”

No company is more central to the shift towards the mobile internet than Apple, which enjoys a wide lead in distributing applications. More than 100,000 apps are available on its App Store and more than 2 billion have been downloaded in less than a year and a half.

To keep that gusher flowing, Apple has sought to inspire more outsider developers with the rare rags-to-riches stories — like that of Steve Demeter, a bank programmer who earned $250,000 in two months of 2008 after launching a simple game called Trism…

The advantages the bigger companies have over the smaller developers — scale, expertise and marketing know-how — mean there may not be any “app millionaires” in the years ahead, says Matt Murphy of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who runs a fund devoted to backing iPhone developers.

But small groups that have multiple successes will be pursued by bigger companies. “There will be teams of people who get a hit franchise acquired for north of $1 million,” Mr Murphy says.

Useful article. Beaucoup information.

As visionary as their leadership may be, this is a phenomenon that, after all, even surprised Apple.

Google has unveiled a new version of its search engine which it says will be faster and more accurate than ever before.

The upgrade, which insiders have dubbed “caffeine”, was announced on Monday after the company opened up access to web developers. It is intended to replace the technology giant’s main search engine after tests have been completed.

Although little about the surface appearance of the new version has changed, engineers promised that radical changes behind the scenes would vast improvements for ordinary users…

The company claims that significant changes to the way the system works will improve the experience for users – although it will also send shockwaves through the community of marketers who try and optimise their results to appear higher up in Google’s index…

Caffeine allows Google to index the web at a higher pace – gathering more information and doing it faster – but the company’s search quality specialist, Matt Cutts, rejected claims that it was developed in response to the actions of rivals.

“I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months,” he wrote on his blog. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward.”

Whether the upgrade will have a significant impact on Google’s business has yet to emerge, but Martin McNulty, director of search marketing specialist Trafficbroker, said that it could give it a significant boost.

“Google’s Caffeine is undoubtedly faster, almost twice as fast at times. It’s like a Google Gti,” he said.

Rock on, Google!

Quality always supersedes speed on my own desktop. Add new speed as an additional quality and a winner becomes harder to catch.