Kate pulled together a great set of numbers to put together an Investment in the Silicon Valley Mobile Industry report. Interesting stuff in there. The bump in social media investment was obvious to anyone working in the industry, so seeing that reflected in the category investment over time chart is a good sanity check. One interesting bit from the report: less money than expected is going into apps and software. I find that a bit disturbing. Money going into platforms and services, but people still hesitant about the apps themselves. Could be for a whole bunch of reasons – folks just need less money to try out app ideas, so they’re no longer as frequently venture based for instance. However, it’s also possible that everyone sees the potential of mobile, but once again, the rubber just isn’t quite hitting the road.

There are a bunch of success stories within the app stores. And the app stores are changing behaviors, making mobile a more hospitable environment than it was. For the most part. The overall question is how much of this is evolution and how much is revolution. The tectonic shift is still going on, and it’s hard to say if what we’re looking at in a year is going to resemble what we have in any way at all. Blowback from the policies related app store approval have some folks thinking about web distribution for mobile devices again. And from the looks of things maybe web distribution is what was really planned for from the start. We certainly have a much more hospitable web based mobile environment, at least on the platforms where app development is also an option.

Depending on how you’re looking at the market, there are very different monetization models and potential market sizes. See the iFund presentation from iPhoneDevCamp for one particular take on where the app market is headed. Other say they think there’s little money in app sales cause the overall volume of the app store sales is estimated to be about $500M for the year, Apple takes 30% of that, leaving about $350M for developers, divided up by market share – and for some folks that’s just not a healthy environment to build in. For instance if you want to build a billion dollar company, you can’t do it inside a market with a volume of $500M. Me, I don’t want to build a billion dollar company, I would be happy to trade lower overall value for a higher chance of success. So for me, building for the app store right now is just fine.

Looking forward to discussing more at the Silicon Valley MoMo meeting tonight. школа эротического танца владивосток