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!

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.