Our good friend Rudy de Waele has the latest edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists up at his m-trends.org site. He’s got a roundup of the best blogging about mobile from last week, so be sure and check it out!

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App stores abound these days: Apple’s well-known effort has been joined by BlackBerry’s App World, and more recently, Nokia’s Ovi Store, while pretty much every operator, handset vendor and used-car dealer has said they’re going to set up their own shop. A lot of this is based on the huge number of downloads by iPhone users, and the misperception that all those downloads equal easy riches.

Granted, the revenue path is better in the Apple store than others (assuming you can get your app approved by the great gatekeeper), but it remains that fewer developers are really raking it in than many people would believe.

This is largely because although Apple, and to some extent, the other players, have solved the distribution issue, but they haven’t cracked the discovery nut. Maybe browsing is a little easier on the iPhone, with its large display and easy scrolling, but that’s not exactly a solution. Browsing in the Ovi Store was so bad that I haven’t been back since I played with it at launch. And the problem of “Top Downloads” and “Most Popular” lists remains exactly the same: once apps get on those lists, it’s difficult to get them off.

It’s important for developers to realize/remember/remind themselves that app stores are just distribution channels — not marketing strategies. It’s no different than any other product scenario: getting that product in a distribution channel alone isn’t enough to generate and drive sales. People see stories like the guy who’s made a lot of money with an iPhone birdwatching app, but fail to read far enough to realize that he only got the big boost after his app got featured in an Apple TV ad.

So for developers: get your app in the various stores, and make sure users can find them easily with the search function in each one. Then get your marketing efforts going. You deal with fragmentation of the stores by being in all of them, and push users with “search for it in your app store”.

The takeaway for app store providers: get the distribution right, but if you really want to drive downloads and developer success, do it not only with the usual suspects like revenue-sharing levels, but give them some real marketing help, too.

Update: See this post over at GigaOM for some good insight into the long tail of iPhone apps, courtesy of AdMob data (AdMob being a great way to both publicize and monetize your apps, right Russell? ):

I suspect the success of a particular app relies on one of three things:

* You are already a huge, successful company, expanding on an existing product. See: AIM, Facebook, ESPN.
* Apple decides your app is worth promoting on the front page of the App Store.
* Your app is really good, and all your users rave to their friends about it.

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When thinking about the new new thing, it’s quite easy to lose sight of opportunities in older technologies, such as Voice. Voice was obviously the first service to emerge in mobile telephony (that was the only thing you could do with the early phones, Best Beloved) and is still easily the highest revenue earner for operators around the world.

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) pre-dates even the first mobile, being first deployed in the 1970s and really taking off in the 1980s. Uses ranged from annoying customers to screening calls in call centres (Press 1 to book a ticket etc), to voting, entertainment (and sex) and pre-recorded information, such as weather, horoscopes (and sex). To give you an idea of scale,Wikipedia claims that today “Currently, IVRs are serving more customers than all fast food and coffee chains combined”, although a citation or geographic area for the information is missing. But it’s big.

A parallel theme (bear with me a moment) is that in developing countries, the mobile is the de facto digital device for many people. In countries like India, Indonesia and China, many more people have leapfrogged the PC and do everything from make calls to surf the mobile web on their phones. AdMob has nearly 500 million page views a month in India, as an example, and it’s our second largest market. In China, 5 Billion mobile web pages are viewed every day.

Another theme we’ve been writing about is that companies like P+G are looking for their next Billion consumers in order to continue growing outside the saturated markets of the West - after all, it’s hard to get us to use more soap powder or toothpaste, but many of the developing markets represent virgin territory for these products. At the same time, traditional media has little reach and impact for many of these consumers - they don’t read the press, watch TV or have PCs. But they do have mobiles, making it potentially the only media option available.

So where am I going with this? One of the final megatrends in developing countries is illiteracy. India has 250 million people who can’t read or write. There’s at least another 100 million in China - and that’s the number they admit to. In reality, it’s probably far more. And in total an estimated 1.2 Billion people in the world are illiterate.

This raises all kinds of issues for us as a society as a whole. Illiteracy is strongly correlated to poverty. Illiterate people are usually poorly educated too, making them vulnerable to extremist ideologies and propaganda.

But while illiterate citizens might not be able to read or write, they can speak and understand speech, which means that mobile IVR is a perfect way to level the playing field for these people. They can compete and use telephone services on an equal basis to their literate compatriots, whether these might be mobile banking solutions to education programmes, or social media to job seeking.

There may also be a role for advertising to play in this programme, by doing what it always does - providing the funding model for free-to-consume media and services. Perhaps advertisers interested in reaching out to this market might be in a position to fund and produce the content. Could yesterday’s Soap Opera become today’s Soap School?

So if you’re reading this and looking for your next big idea, please have this one with my compliments. There’s an addressable market of 1 billion+ people out there, which by any definition is a big one.

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I’ve been a long time fan of Clay Shirky. For instance, I loved his seminal “Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data” essay back in 2003 - still a must-read if you haven’t.

He’s always great value as a writer and as a speaker, so if you haven’t seen his TED talk on mobile, twitter and a few other areas, watch the video I’ve embedded below.

Clay picks up on a lot of the themes we’ve been writing about for a long time at MobHappy, including the idea that mobiles will be one of the first technologies where reverse global tech transfer takes place. In other words, how people use mobile in developing countries will influence how we use them in the developed world. The example he gives is vote monitoring in Nigeria was transferred to monitoring the US elections, but we’ll see many more in areas like mobile payments, social media, recruitment and indeed, politics.

Another case study he gives concerns how politics is using social media. In Obama’s case, to establish meaningful dialogue (ie two way) and in China how the ruling party is losing control of the political agenda. I think that eventually, we’ll see Direct Democracy arrive to replace representative democracy, but that’s another story.

Have a look.

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I’ve written about microfinancing a few times in the past, most recently about Kiva, and now I’m pleased to see that microfinance has met mobile.

If microfinance is a new idea to you, it has really exploded in the last few years, ever since the Grameen Bank pioneered the concept in Bangladesh. Read more about Nobel Prize winner and founder of the industry Muhammad Yunus here, but the basic concept is lending tiny amounts of money to the poor in developing countries to enable them to start or expand businesses. It’s distinct from charity, as the entrepreneur is expected to repay the loan in due course.

Mobile Movement takes the concept to the mobile - actually a more relevant channel than the PC in many ways, certainly as far as the borrower is concerned. In developing markets, people are far more likely to have access to a mobile than a PC, as any MobHappy reader knows.

However, not only is mobile used to facilitate the loan and subsequent processing, it’s then employed to provide ongoing mentoring and support to the entrepreneurs via sms and email, as well as allowing the entrepreneurs to feedback progress, including via MMS photos. The MMS idea sounds fabulous, although not sure how practical inter-continental interoperability is in real life.

Read more at Springwise, but let’s hope that they’re on to a winner.

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In my Predictions for 2009, I suggested:

I think that this is the year when creativity comes to Location and some very interesting things happen as a result - albeit in a small way. We’ll start to move away from find-my-nearest and simple buddy trackers and start to see innovation.

So, I was interested to see Skyhook’s Ted Morgan’s presentation, which came out of the big Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona last week. I’d love to have been there, but had a clash. Hopefully next year!

Since January 2009, you can see that innovation has indeed exploded by doubling the number of location services in the market - largely led by iPhone, of course. Creativity has also come to call, with a whole bunch of services from tracking your location history when you’re out drinking, seeing claimed UFO sightings in your area and a kids’ car game based on spotting state licence plates (the furthest away states are worth more points).

Of course, one of the visions behind these types of services is hyperlocal advertising, which will provide an important part of the commercial engine, much as AdMob does today for many Apps, especially in Apple’s Apps Store. However, this has many logistical and supply issues to overcome , where technology can only help in a limited way.

Anyone interested in Location Based Advertising would be advised to read my free White Paper (email me for a copy), as everyone else in this game seems to have a copy. I’ve sent out more than 5,000 in the last 8 years!

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This week’s best reflections on things mobile can be found at Geoff Ballinger’s “Reflections on Things Mobile” - coincidence, or what?

Some great posts as usual, so head on over there to feast your eyes and delight your mobile soul.

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The good folks over at VentureBeat are holding their second MobileBeat event in San Francisco on July 16. I’ve been part of their illustrious board of advisors, so I can say that the speakers and topics they’ve lined up are top-notch, and it should be a great event. As a part of it, they’re hosting a startup competition, giving new companies a chance to get some great exposure in front of the crowd and on VentureBeat.

If you’re interested, be sure to enter by June 30. The entrants will be narrowed down to a list of 50, and then VentureBeat readers will vote on the final 14 to present at the event, and two winners will be picked by a panel of expert judges. So if you’ve got a startup, get yourself entered… and if you’ll be in the area on July 16, get yourself registered to attend.

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Raimo van der Klein, who among other things is a founder of the excellent MoMoNe (Mobile Monday Nederlands) has just launched Layar, the world’s first mobile augmented reality browser.

If your response is WFT? - maybe you shouldn’t be here? As chance would have it, I was writing about the very same idea this morning in my vision for mobiles in 10 year’s time, when I wrote that the display for mobiles would be via:

a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.

Layar enables V1.0 of that idea for Android phones. You start the app, which automatically opens the camera. You point the camera at the scene around you and the phone works out where you are (via GPS) and the direction you’re pointing in (via the compass) and thus, what you’re looking at. Then the digital world is overlayed onto the real world with anonated information on topics like bars and restaurant info, jobs, houses for sale and ATMs.

You can even go totally digital, as I suggested, if you want to look at say, a map view or drill down for more information.

Watch the video and let your inner geek marvel.

It starts in Amsterdam this month and tomorrow, the world. I think this idea has the potential to go all the way and coming to an iPhone near you, will have the scale to drive adoption.

Well done Rymo and team.

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I’ve been writing over at Opinions in Mobile for a while now. The idea is that they send out a question very week to a panel of industry thought leaders (and me) and everyone responds with a short and pithy post. There really are some heavyweight thinks from around the world involved - I won’t give you examples, as then I’d have to list the lot - so it’s worth checking out.

This week, we were asked the question “How do you think mobile phones will look like in 10 years?”.

This is something that I ponder quite a lot in the back of my brain and I thought I’d share my response here.

In 10 years, we’ll be well into the post PC era and laptops will seem as quaint and nostalgic as the ginormous brick phones of the 80s. We may even have blown ourselves up, been decimated by a new virus (manmade or otherwise) or even be in a post-Singularity world, in which case, all bets are off.

But assuming that the world progresses without a major Black Swan event (big assumption!), mobiles as visible, handheld devices will have disappeared. They’ll be replaced by a tiny ear piece, an equally tiny hand controller (let’s visualize that as a ring, for the sake of illustration) and a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.

Controlling these virtual mobiles will be by a mix of gestures and haptics, with a voice option for those of you reading this who never got the hang of fluent gesturespeak. A common sight will be middle aged people wondering around twitching, waving their arms around and bumping into things as they try to make a phone call. The froody 20 year olds will be in total command without apparently moving a muscle.

By that time, it’ll be impossible to live any kind of mainstream life without a mobile. Banking, payments, shopping, access to your house and car – all will be via your virtual mobile. All interfacing with Government bill be done via mobile too, including daily mandatory voting on key issues of the day as representative democracy is replaced by Direct Democracy – a result of the repeated parliamentary scandals of the Blair and succeeding Governments.

Over 50’s mainly opt to live in sheltered accommodation, which offer largely tech free environments, where they can be seen hunched over old-style netbooks playing Solitaire and wondering why the kids of today never reply to their emails.

Check out the other responses too.

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