By Gretchen Glasscock

One has to do no more than look down at your iphone or pull up Itunes app store to see where the web is headed.  Whether on a Blackberry, Nokia or Iphone, mobile usage has surged 600% in the past year, according to mobile analytics specialist, Bango. This coincides with the spread of Wi-Fi hot spots and possibly the fact that it is becoming ever more acceptable to discretely be checking your smartphone during business and social meetings.

In fact, financial services firm Morgan Stanley, predicted  in April that the mobile Internet would outstrip the desktop by 2015. This is due, in part, to the fact that there are a lot more mobile device users than PC owners. Even in the U.S., particularly in pockets of inner city areas, there are many families without a computer in their homes but rarely will you find a living, breathing person, however dire their straits, without a mobile phone.

Consider this from wikinvest.com: “Penetration rates for the U.S. cell phone market are greater than 75%, and in Western Europe, Japan and Hong Kong penetration has already exceeded 100 %(multiple cell phones per subscriber). Although there is still significant growth to be found in these markets, much of this growth will take the form of selling increasingly sophisticated services (e.g. video, GPS) to existing customers rather than growing the overall number of subscribers. Meanwhile developing countries/regions (who’ve not fully built out their  telephone infrastructure ) such as Brazil, India, China, Africa and Latin America have demonstrated blistering cell phone growth in recent years”.

So here we have a powerful trend showing explosive growth with no end in sight.  But every market has a sweet spot. And for those who recall the Gold Rush to the Net in 1995, and subsequent crash in 2001, if you didn’t catch the gold ring then, now’s your chance again.  The Gold Rush in mobile business app development is definitely on.  And the good news is you don’t have to be a monster success like Facebook, or a global game changer like Google to profit from it.  All you need is a little tech savvy, a good idea and a fresh and attractive user interface.  ( Want to know more? The folks over at 37 Signals, who designed Basecamp and Backpack and other great software, offer a free online book “Getting Real”at http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php which lays out a “ smaller, faster, better way to build simple, focused software.” Just reading the Table of Contents tells you  a lot.

Fortunately, a collateral business has sprung up with DIY, do it yourself, app development tools for the rest of us: Google’s App Inventor for Android apps, web based Iphone app maker AppMakr, SwebApps, BuildAn App and the very hot new star, Appcelerator’s Titanium which is free and opensource for cross platform development. Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator’s VP of Marketing says most users can build their first app in about six weeks and cut that down considerably when they tackle future apps.

That leaves one with the question: “What kind of app should I build?”  As Appcelerator says: “If you can dream it, you can build it.”  But let’s get a little more specific.  Another surging trend is integrating your mobile device into your internal business operations so you can actually run your business from your cell phone, without being tethered to a desk.  Good idea, right?

Here are 10 Ways to Use Mobile Devices to Run Your Business To expand on that, here’s a directory of web apps for small business, : everything from analytics to sales lead generation and version control. Many of these providers have peeked out of their silos and presented their apps as working with complementary apps to create a smoother, more effective experience for the customer.  Business Week says “The Small Business Web represents a fundamentally different way of doing business.”  For example:

• “Send the business cards you’ve collected to Shoeboxed
• Shoeboxed will create a digital file from those cards
• Save your Shoeboxed list directly into your BatchBook, social CRM account
• Or export to Jigsaw, sales lead provider
• Use your shoebox for your rock collection!”

How’s that for ditching the grunt work?

What you want to do is identify “points of pain” in the business process, then come up with a solution.  That will be your business model.

Take a close look at the list of web apps and see if there’s something you don’t see there. And that might be your opportunity.  Go to Itunes and see if you can find an app for that; an app that doesn’t suck.

The question is “What is it that hasn’t been done, or done well” to help people with their work?

When you’ve identified the answer to that question, you’re ready to begin.

(Be sure to write in and let me know all the “points of pain” you’ve found and the apps you are making…we’ll write about them here.)

Related articles

• Mobile Commerce Gets Easy With Appcelerator and PayPal (programmableweb.com)
• Appcelerator and PayPal Team up to Make Cross-Platform Mobile Commerce Easy for PayPal Merchants (eon.businesswire.com)
• Irkafirka iPhone App Built With AppMakr Is The Independent’s Top Picks (prweb.com)