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.

Matthaus Krzykowski has posted an article on Venturebeat about the current trends of mobile social networks and discussing who will end up being the leaders in the space. Currently Facebook and Myspace are the dominant mobile social networks but many are wondering if any of the mobile-only social networks will give the already dominant players a run for their money.

Matthaus points out the mobile only social network Mocospace who has over 1 billion views worldwide so far. This is in contrast to Myspace mobile who had 1.4 billion page views last month alone. Myspace is currently the most dominant mobile social network according to a report out by Nielsen yesterday. Facebook has also experienced explosive growth through the iPhone version of the site as well as the Blackberry application.

There is also a whole suite of existing social networks which are only for mobile and you probably haven’t heard of (I know I definitely haven’t). This includes AirG, Jumbuck, Buzzcity, MyGamma, Bluepulse and Zannel. This space has a ton of diversity and still a massive amount of growth left. I would argue that this space will be growing faster than the web based social networking sites over the next few years.

Currently there are physical limitations to how robust the social networks can get but as this space transforms it will be extremely exciting. Are there any mobile social networks that you use? What do you think are the best ones so far?

Back in 2005, Dodgeball.com which at the time was a rapidly growing company was snapped up by Google. By 2007 the developers called it quits and ended up leaving Google with some negative words for the global behemoth, “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.”

What did Dodgeball.com do? Well pretty much the same thing Brightkite.com does: let’s you know where people in your network are located. The benefit of BrightKite.com is when you check in to the system with your location, you are occasionally notified if there are other people in your network within a given radius. I tried it out but unfortunately when I tried to check in for the first time via text, I couldn’t figure out what to type. It didn’t understand what I was typing in.

I think that was more of me not understanding how the system works but honestly it should have been able to find the restaurant I was at by me providing the restaurant name, city and state. One of the major downfalls of DodgeBall.com previously was that it didn’t work for cities that were more spread out. Perhaps that was because there weren’t enough people in the network.

Whatever the reason was, Brightkite could very well suffer the same fate as Dodgeball. The founders don’t seem to think so though. Nor do the investors in the company. This is another company that has come out of the Denver area and was part of the highly successful TechStars program. My guess is that this team has a good chance of success but I’m still not sure how they’ll solve the problem of wide spanning cities.

One last challenge that I see for this company is the problem of dealing with large convention centers and college campuses. We want to be able to specify our location within areas that share the same address. Ultimately, my guess is that they’ll eventually integrate GPS into the phone. Have you used the program? Do you find a lot of utility in it?

I just got back from a great lunch with a local executive who helps run a mobile application company. One of the primary things they are specializing in is building mobile social networks and helping other companies plug into those networks. We had a great conversation about the future of mobile and social networks and the challenges that social networks currently face in entering the mobile arena.

It is also common knowledge that social networking sites already face a challenge within their businesses to effectively monetize their sites. So far, nobody has been extremely effective at it. Facebook has been pulling in new executives to try and make an attempt at new monetization strategies but ultimately working to monetize a site which I argue will not be a central destination point a few years from now is relatively worthless.

Instead, the social network sites are going to turn to mobile as one of the central locations for monetization. Text messages and subscriptions are the norm on mobile carriers. This leads me to believe that perhaps social networks will potentially become a subscription service. The only counter argument to this is that Twitter is not currently monetizing their site aside from one ad that’s displayed on the Japanese version of their site.

While there are no answers as to what will happen in the future, I think a lot of potential for social networks exist on mobile. The real question is if the mobile applications will be monetized or if Twitter is destroying the opportunity for future players. How do you think social networks and mobile will work together?

Late last year an iPhone version of Facebook was launched and received a ton of positive user feedback. Jake Marsh just released a video of MySpace for the iPhone. The applications looks amazing but the one thing that I don’t understand is how Jake plans on accessing a user’s inbox. Additionally, according to the demo displayed below you can access band music from the application. I’m not quite sure how this works because the songs aren’t technically accessible via the API and the URLs are not accessible via the page source code.

Jake now has over 12,000 Twitter followers thanks to this video becoming a hit on Digg. Jake Marsh decided to create his own API for MySpace using screen scraping. If this application is for real, Jake will more than likely have his app acquired since he is doing most of the work for MySpace. There are a lot of great features and it’s a duplicate of the iPhone application developed by Facebook. This is highly impressive and it would be great if other platforms produced something similar.

I think the real breakthrough will come when each of these platforms begin to offer mobile platforms in which applications can run. While Facebook already offers a mobile platform it is highly limited. I have a feeling that we will see a lot more applications developed for mobile as the standards for mobile applications become much simpler and phone begin to offer better interfaces for users to interact with.

Today is mobile friday (I wanted it to be mobile monday but what can I do?). According to their press release, Verizon Wireless customers can now access MySpace Mobile on all Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones. I’m not quite sure what Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones are but apparently it is a Verizon service. The new service enables customers to access:

• Message Management - Just as it is called, users can read their messages as well as send in reply with all their friends as well as respond to friend requests. This is greater then the services currently provided by Facebook’s Blackberry application.
• View Photo Albums - You can browse through your albums on your phone. There was no comment on whether or not you can view your friends pictures.
• Viewing Friends - Just like on the standard version of MySpace, users can browse through all of their friends’ profiles from their verizon handled device.
• Friend Search - Not only can you browse through your friends’ profiles but you can also search for others. So if you want to spend time looking at random peoples’ profiles on your phone, now you can!
• Comments & Blog Postings - Just as you can do on your PC, you can post comments and update blogs. Also, “any new information entered will be posted to a member’s mobile and online MySpace profile simultaneously.”

From my recollection, this service is a premium service and users need to pay a monthly fee to access MySpace. It is most likely combined with their “Mobile Web 2.0″ service which, has a pretty horrible name. This news highlights the rapid growth of the mobile space for social networking. 2008 is going to most definitely see continued growth in the mobile space. Are you a “Mobile Web 2.0″ subscriber?

When I began writing this post I had the same attitude I always have on location based social networks: what’s the point? Well I went and checked out the mobile social network, Loopt, after reading about their new partnership with Verizon and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

Initially I figured location tracking services would be only useful for parents that want to keep track of their childrens’ activities. Loopt on the other hand enables you to mash together text messages with location. This is really useful for close friends because rather than texting somebody, you could simply walk on over and say “Hello!” For now Twitter has worked sufficiently for knowing what my friends are up to but perhaps my voyeuristic needs will grow over time.

While I think automatically being updated of my friends locations is weird on its own, combining location with messaging makes a lot of sense. If I was on a camping trip and lost in the woods, it would be helpful to see my location relative to my friends. Then again if I knew my location, I wouldn’t be lost! As we make the transition from desktops to mobile, I have a feeling that we will see in an increase in location based offerings. Do you think location based services are useful? Would you use them?

For the past few years, the U.S. has been light years behind the rest of the world when it comes to mobile phones and applications. It looks like things are beginning to perk up with the support of three web industry leaders: Google, Apple and Adobe. Today there have been two news stories that illustrate the mobile tipping point domestically. The first is a report is a statement out of Google today which states that we have “hit a watershed moment in terms of internet usage.”

The growth is being fueled by the expansion of unlimited data plans by mobile carriers as well as the launch of the iPhone which Google previously reported as driving a surge in traffic to their various internet properties. While Google’s statement may have been part of a new product launch which “conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen” of Windows Mobile devices, a second announcement fueled the mobile related buzz.

According to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, there will soon be a version of Flash for the iPhone. This is a massive revelation and will surely transform the future of mobile development. For too long it has been overly complex to develop robust applications for mobile devices, but with the launch of a flash support for the iPhone could immediately simply development a start a mobile revolution.