According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform’s app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora. Sponsor Mplayit also found that one of the fastest growing app categories across all the major platforms are barcode scanners. Apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser have clearly hit upon an unfulfilled need. Size Doesn’t Matter According to Powers, asking how many apps exist for a given platform is now a moot question. All the major platforms now offer more than enough apps and as long as people can find the apps they are looking for – and as long as these apps are good – most consumers will be happy. Most users simply don’t need 50 different apps to write their grocery lists. Looking at Mplayit’s list of the most popular apps across the top platforms, it also becomes clear that quite a few of these categories are being dominated by known brands like Shazam, Pandora, Evernote and Facebook. Mplayit, of course, is in the business of giving app recommendations across platforms and doesn’t fail to note that it’s own store is a good alternative for finding apps outside of the standard top 20 charts. Or Does It? To some degree, Powers’ comments about the size of today’s app stores rings true. Maybe it really doesn’t matter that the Android store only features about 20,000 apps and that the Apple App Store now holds more than 100,000. Maybe it is true that consumers tend to gravitate towards the same brands on all platforms. At the same time, though, having more apps in the store also means that there is a more active developer ecosystem around a given platform. While iPhone developers rightly gripe about Apple’s approval process, we’ve seen a lot more innovative apps for the iPhone than for Android. Is the size of the Android market holding you back from making the switch? Do you think Android has enough good apps that make up for the smaller app store? Do you think the quality of today’s BlackBerry apps is good enough? Feel free to let us know in the comments. Discuss

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Do the Size of Mobile App Stores Still Matter?

Whatever Google’s reason for threatening to leave China , the latest numbers from StatCounter , a free online stat service, show that it certainly isn’t for lack of opportunity. Google has been steadily gaining ground on China’s premier search service, Baidu, since last August. Sponsor According to StatCounter , Google held just 28% of China’s search market back in August and since has climbed to nearly 43%. That’s a 15-percentage-point gain in just four or five months. Yahoo and Bing account for just over 1% of China’s search engine market. While estimates put Google’s projected 2010 income from business in China at around 2% of the company’s entire revenue, the long-term implications of pulling out of the country are much larger . If any company should just give up the ghost and get out of China before making any more PR (and human rights) gaffes , maybe it’s Yahoo. Discuss

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Google Gained Ground on Baidu in 2009

You’re hard pressed to find any sector of the tech economy that is getting more financing than cloud computing. Today’s announcement by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft is a good example. The two tech giants announced a partnership today that is valued at $250 million. Why are these ventures getting such an influx of revenue? If content is king, then infrastructure in the castle in the cloud. Sponsor Castles cost a lot to build and so does a cloud service. The Microsoft-HP deal is a case in point. The two companies are building a cloud infrastructure that spans hardware and software integration. They are developing their own applications. It’s like an effort to build a massive data center network that works as one giant computer. The investment includes the use of HP servers for Azure, the cloud platform developed by Microsoft. In return, Microsoft software, database programs and other applications will be loaded on the HP machines. Both companies want to own the enterprise. It’s apparent that the two feel this can only be done by having a deep cloud-based infrastructure that bundles a full suite of software and tools to optimize systems for business customers. Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm makes an excellent point in asking if optimization is the new code word for proprietary systems. There’s a danger in that for customers as it can lead to vendor lock-in. But Microsoft and HP obviously see a need to form their own partnership to compete with the likes of Cisco, which has a deal with VMWare. Oracle, for its part, is still waiting for approval on its deal with Sun Microsystems. Enterprise customers should be wary of these mega deals. The castle in the cloud may look nice but the enterprise customer may find itself in the dungeon if it makes too heavy an investment in proprietary systems that lock them into specific vendors. Discuss

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Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Deal: The Cloud is not Cheap

Entrepreneur Eric Ries, who previously co-founded the 3D avatar-based chat client IMVU , is also widely credited with coining the phrase ” lean startup ” in 2008. Ries recently gathered as many resources as he could muster for lean startups and shared them on his blog, Lessons Learned . A lean startup is one that takes advantage of open-source technologies and other products to push a product to market at a “low burn,” while at the same producing continual revisions to its product based on customer feedback. Ries provides a wide consortium of links to wikis , mailing lists , meetups , and bloggers all focusing on the lean startup initiative – a collection of great value to any startup that wants to lower costs while feverishly iterating their product. Sponsor Ries, who is often invited to speak about lean startups, says that this type of development is what helped IMVU achieve its loyal following. Timothy Fitz, a software engineer at IMVU, says the developers average 50 new code iterations per day. “That’s 6 deploys an hour,” writes Fitz on his blog . “Even at that pace we’re often batching multiple commits into a single test/push cycle.” The inspiration for this new methodology? Ries says it came from books like Lean Thinking , which outlines ways companies can reduce waste and boost revenue, but Ries is quick to point out that a lean startup and a lean company are two different things. According to Ries, lean companies attempting to trim the fat are striving to create value for their customers, but value is not the foremost goal for the leaning of startups. “Lean startups operate by a different standard,” says Ries. “I suggest they define waste as ‘every activity that does not contribute to learning about customers’.” Photo by Flickr user Usodesita . Discuss

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Built For Speed: Turn Your Startup Into A Lean, Mean Iterating Machine

According to a new study , enterprises continue to deploy social networking tools at an increasing pace. At the same time, though, this Cisco-sponsored study also found that a surprisingly small number of businesses have implemented formal processes and policies related to their use of social media. IT departments have also been left out of the loop when it comes to the adoption of social media tools. Only 10% of the respondents currently involve their IT departments as primary decision makers when it comes to choosing technologies for externally facing social networking initiatives. Sponsor This study was sponsored by Cisco and carried out by the IESE Business School in Spain, the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S. and the Henley Business School in the United Kingdom. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 100 companies in Europe, Asia and Africa. These businesses were selected because they were early adopters of social media tools. Most of the interviewed companies are using social networks (75%) and micro-blogging tools (50%) as their primary tools to reach their audiences. The study found that social networking tools like blogs, Yammer, Facebook and Twitter are now being used by almost every department in these businesses. The Honeymoon is Over As Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology and one of the lead researchers of this study told us yesterday, it is also important to note that “the honeymoon period” for social media in the enterprise is coming to an end. Early projects were often led by one or two early adopters who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of using social media tools in their companies. Now, more and more companies are seeing social media as an integral part in how they communicate with customers and vendors. Missing Pieces: Governance and IT Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between “the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight.” Very few companies (1 in 10) report that their IT departments are directly involved in their social networking initiatives. As these tools become more important, however, the the demand on IT to integrate these tools into the existing infrastructure will surely rise as well. Discuss

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Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released. Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives. Sponsor Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.” Discuss

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Sunlight Brings Congress to Your iPhone

Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One , its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn’t look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but its first week sales numbers fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry . Sponsor While Flurry’s own analysis of the numbers makes sure to point out that the statistics may not provide an “apples to apples” comparison, the Nexus One’s first week sales were a fraction of its top three competitors. Flurry details the methods used to arrive at these numbers in its blog post and is certain to call the data an estimate, but if they are even close to correct, the Droid outsold Nexus One by more than 12 times, myTouch 3G by 3 times and iPhone 3GS by 80 times. Whether it was Google’s lack of marketing, the fact that the phone was only available for purchase online, or its $500-plus sticker price without a service contract, Flurry identifies a number of reasons for the slow start. The company also points to the post-holiday release date and the fact that Google did little compared to Verizon’s $100 million marketing of the Droid. We see a few other points that could have contributed to the slow start. For those using AT&T, the Nexus One works in slower EDGE mode, not 3G. And for the contract weary, news about Google charging additional early termination fees certainly holds some scare factor. We’ll have to keep an eye on these numbers as time goes on, but we’re curious – what, if anything, has kept you from taking the leap? Discuss

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Nexus One, Week 1: Outsold by iPhone 3Gs 80-to-1