By Joe Padre
21st September 2010. 20:09

Prediction at APPNATION 2010 – One million mobile apps available for download by 2012

APPNATION 2010, Day 1

I recently had to opportunity to attend the APPNATION Conference in San Francisco, CA, USA on Sept 13-14. My main purpose for going was to provide general media coverage on behalf of the Sony Ericsson Developer World for this two-day event. The show was comprised of over 1,000 app developers, media companies, mobile ad networks, venture capitalists and other players in the app ecosystem. One interesting estimate came from Drew Ianni, chairman and founder of APPNATION, who reported recent research that there will be one million mobile apps available for download by the year 2010.

Day 1

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom delivering welcome speech

Registration check-in was faster than I thought, so I headed down from the Moscone Center lobby to the showroom floor. With 45 minutes spare before the event started, I decided to get the best seat in the house – front row, just off to the side of the podium. It was early enough that I happened to get there at about the same time as the first scheduled speaker, Jonathan Carson, CEO of the Telecom Practice division of The Nielson Company. Since he took a seat nearby, I decided to introduce myself and ask him about his presentation. He gave me a brief summary and I wished him good luck. I probably wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to chat informally with a keynote speaker at a larger conference. Drew Ianni, founder of the event, gave his opening remarks, mentioning that any app has the potential to become a platform almost overnight, with Facebook as an example. Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, followed his old college SCU buddy with an official welcome speech.

The first keynote presentation was The State of Apps, Fresh Insights from Nielson’s Mobile App Playbook. Jonathan Carson explained that it was a joint white paper with APPNATION that reported on statistics from an August 2010 survey of 4,000 mobile subscribers; among the findings – that America had a growing appetite for mobile apps. The next presentation, Titans of the App Economy, involved a panel from various media channels (print, TV, radio) and discussed how each channel used various communications devices for their consumers, and the associated financial costs for content delivery. Presentations attended later in the afternoon also followed the monetization theme. 

Day 2

The first presentation of the day was a keynote interview with Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which is the internet and interactive branch of the league. The remainder of the day’s presentations focused mainly on monetization and marketing strategies for companies in the mobile applications development space. These presentations had panels made of up advertising executives, investors and VCs, and mobile ad agencies.

Mobile gaming panel, Day 2

One notable and highly entertaining exception was the presentation Gamer Nation in the Age of Applications. Moderated by Yukari Kane, a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the keynote panel included management from notable mobile gaming companies – hi5, Zynga, ngmoco, and gWallet. It was interesting to hear each company’s perspectives on the habits of their mobile phone games. It got really interesting when Alex St. John, CTO hi5 got into a heated discussion with Mark Skaggs, Zynga VP of Product Development. Alex essentially criticized Zynga’s revenue model and overall relationship with Facebook, while Mark was quick to defend their partnership, replying that the arrangement was working out just fine. The tension between the two was obvious, but both kept their cool and no fists were thrown.

Overall, APPNATION 2010 provided a tremendous opportunity to hear from a great lineup of keynote speakers, to meet aspiring app developers on the exhibit floor, and above all, to keep up with the pulse of the mobile application nation. Read the accompanying Developer World news article here.