Remember that thousand-dollar application that was for sale on the iPhone? Remember how it was shut down? Worry no more about meaningless applications being banned from mobile application directories with the soon to be released Android Market. This market place marks the emergence of the portable platforms, first released by Apple with the launch of their iPhone.

The first version of the Android Market may not have applications for sale but they soon will once a later version is released. How will applications be paid for? Not quite sure about that one yet but we can bet that Google is pushing hard for Google Checkout to serve as the backbone. I can hear geeks rejoicing as this platform is the first competitor to the iPhone directory positioning Google at the forefront of the mobile platform competition.

So where is Microsoft and Blackberry in this whole equation? Both companies have a massive reach but they appear to be falling behind when it comes to the latest technology. Almost overnight the mobile industry has been transformed from a battle of devices to a battle for the software running on this new wave of mobile platforms.

The Android Market appears to be the most open version of the market with no limits on the applications that can be displayed. This strategy mimics Facebook’s strategy when they first launched their platform last year which also resulted in a one of the largest shifts in developer attention ever. While I’m not sure how attractive the “open marketplace” is to most developers, there have been a ton of complaints about Apple’s restrictions in their directory.

Whether or not we’ll see a massive developer shift is still unknown but over the coming months Google and Apple are about to lead the battle of the mobile platforms of the future.

Today hi5 announced the launch of their mobile service. The social networking site is now available on mobile in 26 different languages. According to a release, users will be able to easily “send and receive messages, update status, view friends’ profiles, share photos, find out who is online and add new friends.” The service has been optimized to run on phones including the Apple iPhone, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.

26 languages on a mobile service is significant as many competing social networks do not currently offer such a wide offering via mobile. hi5 is one of the top social networks globally but still ranks below Facebook and MySpace. The site is growing quickly though and appears to have a relatively large global reach with over 56 million unique visitors each month according to the release.

Mobile is going to increasingly become the center of discussion when it comes to the social web as mobile platforms become ubiquitous. Currently we are still in the early stage of the social/mobile revolution but competition is heating up. Today’s announcement by hi5 only emphasizes the ongoing race to the handset.

In contrast to a downloadable version of the site, the new hi5 service is available directly through mobile web browsers.

I spent some time poking around at the new LinkedIn iPhone application this morning and I was fairly impressed. The application is simple but useful. It enables you to browse through your contacts, view your contacts’ latest activity, search for contacts and update your status. Apparently status updates have become ubiquitous across all the social networks making tools like Ping.fm a necessity.

LinkedIn As the Simple CRM

One thing that I find interesting about this services is that it could easily compete with Salesforce. With a few additions, LinkedIn could be the CRM solution for those that don’t know what a CRM solution is. Let me explain. Imagine waking up in the morning to find out that you hadn’t followed up with a recent contact that you added in at least 6 months. Now would probably be a great time to follow-up so the LinkedIn application would automatically alert you.

Want to keep track of that conversation you just had? The call will be automatically noted next to the contact in LinkedIn and you can write a quick note about what you just discussed. While the application doesn’t currently provide these features, it’s something that has been needed for a long time and I have yet to find a simple yet useful contact management system that handles all of my contacts.

Race to My Contacts

The existing solutions are overly complex. One problem with LinkedIn is that when I add a contact, I don’t have a note about how I met that person. For the first time I have found the ability to do so (as “Edit Contact” is currently a beta feature on the site) but when I approve a contact it doesn’t automatically prompt me to enter those details as Facebook does.

I keep saying over and over that the social platform race is a race to my contact list but there still isn’t an effective solution! I currently subscribe to Salesforce.com but paying $55 a month seems like a lot of money to spend on something that isn’t extremely easy to use and offers 10,000 more features than I’ll ever use.

Conclusion

The new LinkedIn iPhone application shows the power of simplicity. It’s not necessary to build a feature heavy application to be successful. LinkedIn has only touched the surface of its potential and given its reach in the professional world, LinkedIn has the potential to become an amazing service that I can’t live without. Unfortunately for LinkedIn, all my contacts are now adding me on Facebook but that’s not to say I’m the average case.

This is a great step and it shows that the company is quick to adapt. Now the company needs to start rolling out new features so that I don’t need to continue relying on SalesForce.com as my overly robust contact management system. If you have an iPhone I highly recommend checking out the LinkedIn application.

In the middle of a phone call today, something dawned on me. Just as there is a “digital divide”, there may also be a “mobile divide” based on the types of phones people have access to. Hear me out on this one. While a small portion of us debate (as pictured in the video below) the battle between iPhone and Google’s soon to be released Android Phone, a much larger portion of individuals still have phones that they don’t access internet on. While there is most definitely an upcoming shift, the majority of users still do not use their phone for browsing the web.

According to a recent study by Nielsen, only 15.6 percent of users in the U.S. access the mobile web and this country leads among all other countries. While a large portion of mobile users will begin accessing the mobile web, the majority remain disconnected. While this doesn’t impact the mobile disconnected population the same way that the lack of internet access at home does, having access to all information on the go most definitely provides an advantage.

It’s no wonder then that four of the top ten websites accessed via a mobile device in May of this year were e-mail sites. Business in general has become mobile and as such I would suggest that those not accessing the web via their mobile device are at a competitive disadvantage. My guess is that most people that visit this site have viewed a website on their mobile device.

It’s very easy to become spoiled with technology. While traveling, you’ll find me immediately turn on my phone as my airplane touches down and I’ll read my email and get all the latest news. I’m not alone as I frequently observe my fellow flight passengers doing the same thing. While being “hyper-connected” can create more stress, it also can improve productivity.

While mobile web usage will surely grow dramatically over the coming years, I think that it’s important to recognize that the majority of the world still does not browse the web or use mobile web services via their mobile device.

The big news last night was that the live streaming video solution Qik.com released their iPhone 3G compatible application. The only problem? You need to hack your phone to make it work. Talk about a crappy solution. The reason that you need to hack your iPhone is that the iPhone 3G currently doesn’t provide video support. This is a huge problem with the phone. When I first heard that the iPhone was 3G, I was excited to be able to begin streaming video.

Soon enough I found out that this wasn’t possible. Then again, given the current battery life, I’d imagine the video streaming time to be exceptionally short. Soon enough video streaming from mobile will be ubiquitous in the United States. We are still at the early stages but my hopes were high when I saw that Qik was now offering video streaming on the iPhone 3G.

Unfortunately those hopes were dashed when I went to view how to install it. It could be months before this application is accessible without jail-breaking the iPhone. I don’t have experience in cracking the iPhone or installing “Cydia”, the application that’s necessary to install this app. Check out how the Qik application works below. Have you experimented with jail-breaking your iPhone?

This afternoon I decided to try out the Evernote application for the iPhone. In the process of installing the application, I had to go through a registration process. As I went through the process, I got to a reCaptcha form as displayed in the screenshot below. Why on earth would an iPhone need to display a captcha form on an iPhone only registration form?

This was probably one of the most annoying steps in the registration process. Typing a captcha form on an iPhone is especially annoying. Perhaps that’s because iPhone has a less than intuitive keyboard. Whatever the reason, I’m not quite sure why an application would place this on an iPhone registration form. Have you had this happen to you?

While I think that iPhone applications have transformed the mobile industry, I don’t think that all the applications have been developed with the end user in mind. Applications should make it extremely easy to register (if necessary) via a one-click registration method. Is there some type of spam that iPhone applications are subject to that I’m unaware of? Who are these unknown iPhone spammers?

According to TmoNews, reports of the GPhone being delayed may not be accurate and Google may still be planning to release their new phone in September. I’ve spoken to a number of people connected to the company and t least one has suggested that rumors of delays until next year are unfounded. If the OS is being released on the rumored HTC Dream (embedded below), Google may have a shot at taking on Apple.

The new phone resolves one of the primary issues with the iPhone: the lack of a keyboard. There are few other details but TmoNews does claim that the G1 (the name of the Google Phone) will cost $399 but T-Mobile customers will be able to grab it for $150 when it’s released. The battle is on to offer the most open platforms as Apple has done for mobile platforms what Facebook did for social platforms last May.

The coinciding reports about the GPhone release and T-Mobile’s rumored application directory which will compete with iTunes suggests that something is likely to happen in the near future. We are rapidly beginning to see the creation of a digital-mobile economy but in comparison to the Social Web Economy where ad networks are substantial players, ad networks may be less relevant.

The primary reason is that many of these applications already have monetization models based on software sales. Whether or not Google is about to enter the market immediately, it’s clear that the mobile industry has been shaken up by the launch of the iPhone. The next 12 to 24 months will be exciting as competitors race to adapt to the rapidly transforming market.

Apple knew they had a big opportunity on their hands when they released the iTunes application store for iPhones and the iPod touch. How big the opportunity was exactly nobody really knew. Today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that “in the month since Apple opened [..] the App Store, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone.” The article continues to state that “Apple sold an average of $1 million a day in applications a day.”

Compare that to social platforms where all the money is generated through advertising revenue. While all that may change with the launch of a Facebook payment platform, the creation of a sizable industry overnight will most definitely attract new developers. It will also definitely attract competing platforms. Google is still rumored to be launching the Gphone but one report has said that the phone launch could be delayed to next year.

According to mocoNews, “Starting this fall, T-Mobile USA will take the extraordinary step of ditching its traditional deck on the phone and replacing it with a platform that’s open to almost any developer”. You can also guarantee that Microsoft is not just going to remain idle while Apple creates an entire industry. The result is that we are about to witness the mobile platform wars since as Steve Jobs states, “the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”

It has only been a little over a month since the iPhone launched but it appears to be living up to the hype and doing what was expected: transforming the mobile industry.

According to a new report released to day by ABI Research today, location-based social networks will generate a whopping $3.3 billion in revenue by 2013. This comes from companies like GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt a few of the new location-based offerings that are now also available on the iPhone. While the report didn’t say it, the iPhone is a likely catalyst for the growth.

As Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider points out, “It’s hard to put much weight in pie-in-the-sky predictions like this: It’s one thing to take an existing market and plot out a growth chart. But right now the industry is a goose egg, give or take a couple million.” I decided to have a little fun and plotted out what that growth chart would look like below.

As you can see much of the absolute growth comes in 2011, 2012 and 2013. We were able to generate this chart by looking into our crystal ball which has in the past been extremely efficient at generating accurate predictions. While this chart could change in the next 6 to 12 months we figured that this is good enough guidance to include in your upcoming business plan for a location-based social network.

In all honesty though, there is a lot of potential for location-based social networks. The theory is that users of the networks can get extremely targeted local ads. This idea has been around for years but thanks to new advances in mobile technologies (within the U.S.) the ability to create locally targeted advertisements is now a reality.

It still remains to be a test of time to see if these ideas will be put into practice. These “pie-in-the-sky” predictions resemble forecasts of socially relevant advertising technology generated over the past couple years. While the technology that increases conversions based on social relevance has yet to be developed (as far as we know), it’s still possible to make ridiculous predictions of the future.

Do you think location-based social networks will meet the breathtaking forecasts generated by this study?

Today the iPhone application directory crossed the 1,000 applications milestone. It’s a significant announcement for any new platform and the iPhone appears to be racing to the forefront to potentially become the leading mobile platform for developers. One of the most buzzed about platforms recently is the Facebook platform which has, according to Facebook’s statistics, attracted over 400,00 developers. The iPhone platform is rapidly proving itself to be a significant opportunity as well.

The most significant challenge for the iPhone platform is user adoption. While Apple was able to sell millions of iPhones, the number of total users pales in comparison to other platforms. That doesn’t mean that the platform is one to sneeze at though. Just last week it was reported that the iPhone Facebook application had been downloaded by 1 million users.

While nowhere near the more than 90 million users installed by top Facebook applications, these numbers are still significant for an early platform. Numbers aren’t all that matter though when it comes to comparing platforms. If you take a look at the quality of applications being developed on Facebook versus the quality of applications being developed on the iPhone.

On Facebook, most of the top applications are relatively simple (although they have been improving in quality since the initial launch). At launch, the iPhone provided an immense number of applications which have proven to be extremely useful or at least entertaining. Whether I’m using Shazam to figure out what song I’m hearing in a bar or restaurant, or looking to waste some time playing Labyrinth, BubbleWrap or Monkey Ball, there is a huge value offering.

Also while I was eating lunch in Miami this weekend, I was able to figure out what we would be having for dinner by pulling up the Yelp application and finding nearby, top rated restaurants. The bottom line is that there is a huge value proposition for the iPhone platform regardless of the number of users that have purchased it. Apple will most definitely fill this gap by continuing to sell out of iPhones for the foreseeable future.

As forecasted by many, I believe that the iPhone is the phone to transform the mobile industry in this country and help mobile computing take a huge leap forward. While venture capitalists are warning entrepreneurs not to invest everything in the iPhone, at this point I think it is too large of an opportunity to ignore.