At the ScreamingToaster consulting practice, I have been talking to small, mid, and large size businesses, in every imaginable vertical, for the last 3 years. The need for mobile initiative rollout was nonexistent for the last few years (since 2008). However, with 2011 everything has changed. IT and investment budgets are thawing and there is a huge market opportunity to leverage to make a lot of money in the smartphone software and services space. Hardware companies and telcos are leveraging this market and making a lot of money from it. Software on the other hand, is woefully outclassed and outpaced by hardware and infrastructure.

If you join us, with the simple solutions outlined above, we can turn this problem into an opportunity and reinvest out way out of this decade-old rut of web-complacency!

As the smartphone segment continues to grow, and more consumers become accustomed to the greater capabilities delivered by these cloud connected mobile platforms, your business has to evolve as well to meet these expectations. This not a question of technology. It is a question of keeping your business competitive, and leveraging the new revenue streams that are now possible, as tens of millions of smartphone users use their devices in their daily life, and spend a lot of time, energy and money on them and through them.

Introduction
The term mobile web is used interchangeably with the word app, but in reality they are not at all the same and these terms cannot be used interchangeably. They really aren’t mobile apps at all, they are just tiny webpages you view in your smartphone’s web browser. Mobile websites are a cheap and easy way to let people view some parts of your website on their smartphone, and they are inexpensive to build. However, these mobile websites cannot do very much, and usually only allow people to read static content and do not integrate with a smartphone’s native applications or functionality. They are VERY basic and very “one way” as in the content flows from the owner of the website, to the reader.

Building mobile apps is a hype-based decision, and Apple is the one generating this hype. It is not a business decision. Apple has made it super easy to make simplistic mobile apps, most of which are just mobile web views. Most iPhone apps on the App Store are simplistic, meaning they don’t really do anything interesting, and don’t take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities. Companies are doing the least amount of work and build the simplest app they can, just to be part of the hype. The simplistic iPhone apps more companies make are just an attempt to be part of the cool crowd and the hype. They are not a commitment to mobile, and don’t involve any real risk, investment, or foresight. iPhone development is so easy that many web developers are able to create simple web view “mobile apps” and this is good enough for most companies because they just need something to show to be part of the crowd.

My hope is that this article will help people get a more realistic sense of pricing for their next mobile/smartphone project and initiative. Smartphones are new. This space is constantly evolving. It is always expensive to create novelty. Smartphones are not even close to being a commodity yet, so don’t make the mistake of applying commodity pricing models to it.

The smartphone market is still in its infancy right now. While there is a lot of buzz around smartphones, it’s important to keep in mind how small this market really is. The number of smartphone units sold annually in the US are measured in the order of 10’s of millions. Of the 350M or so US citizens, around 30M have smartphones (that’s less than 9%). In contrast, feature phone sales are measured in the order of 1000’s of millions of units sold worldwide. Laptop sales are in the order of 1000’s of millions of units worldwide, as well. So, this is still an emerging market. Not to say that it is not growing rapidly, and faster and stronger than anyone would expect, given the recent global economic crisis, and US economic meltdown.

The first step is for you to select the right mobile platform for your mobile initiatives. The following table outlines the major differences between the major platforms and can act as rough guidelines to help you match your requirements to the right platform for you.

We use the Zen Application Framework exclusively to build our mobile applications, and so can you. Zen is free for all ScreamingToaster Consulting clients, and its source code comes as part of the deliverables at the end of every consulting project. Zen training courses are available upon request to consulting clients only. ScreamingToaster has a commitment to open source software (OSS) and democratizing knowledge for the good of the developer community, and humanity as a whole, which is why we give Zen away for free to our consulting clients. Our clients can make changes or additions to the applications we build them, and they can also use Zen to build applications in-house after taking our BlackBerry developer training courses.

I hope I provided some insight into how we polish and refine our products before they are made ready for public consumption. This is also why we don’t believe that giving our apps away for free is a sustainable business model for us. There’s more to an app and a company and people than the price tag. As savvy consumers, you have to look at all that you’re getting. You’ve paid a lot of money for a BB, and even more for the voice/data plan just to make it go. When you put an app on it, make sure that this app will add value to your purchase, and not take away from it by bricking the device, making it unresponsive, etc. Some people like to think about the upfront cost of an app, while forgetting the entire lifecycle cost. We don’t. We are committed to delivering a tremendous amount of functionality, fantastic customer service and support, at a great value. Doesn’t mean it’s free, but if you add up what you’re paying for what you’re getting, you will be happy at the bargain you are getting it at.

SproutCore is Apple’s open source JS library. Pundits claim that it will kill Flash and it can be used to write desktop apps for web browsers. Using a JS library that uses CSS styling that makes it resemble OSX’s look and feel doesn’t make it a desktop app .