Welcome to the Wild West world of the app—those stamp-sized software applications that iPhone owners download at a voracious pace. With 150,000 apps now available through iTunes (up from only 10,000 a year ago), Apple has deftly ignited an entirely new market. It’s easy and inexpensive for entrepreneurial developers to create apps that run the gamut from the utterly inane and gimmicky to the relentlessly practical. Some of them go further, providing novel ways for companies to connect with increasingly transient consumers.There’s no question that Apple dominates this space. But in the past year, Nokia, Samsung and Research In Motion have all rushed into the app business because, as Mark Beccue, a consumer mobility analyst for ABI Research, says, most consumers “now know they can do much more than just phone and text. Everyone with a smartphone is thinking, ‘I can do something else.’” Google, for its part, has further upped the ante, introducing its own smartphone platform, Android, which leverages the search giant’s fast-growing inventory of apps as well as its proficiency with online advertising. And in March, Sony announced it would launch a smartphone that will allow users access to the company’s vast inventory of games.According to the tech industry research firm Gartner Inc., smartphone owners will download 4.5 billion apps in 2010, up from a trickle two years ago. This virtual market is worth almost $7 billion (all currency in U.S. dollars), and will balloon to nearly $30 billion by 2013.With that kind of traffic, product marketers can no longer ignore the mobile consumer, any more than they can avoid the conventional Web. Indeed, as established corporate brands begin to make forays into this frenzied environment, a key question looms: Will the app universe continue to be dominated by digital ephemera, or will it become an important new commercial frontier? Given the worldwide proliferation of creative energy spawned by the iPhone, it seems it is only a matter of time until the next Jeff Bezos happens upon a disruptive, game-changing app that will do for the frenzied world of mobile computing what eBay, Amazon and Google did for the Internet in the last decade—that is, change everything.

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