Wireless

Sony is planning a new online store a la Apple's iTunes, but with a few twists.

Announced at a strategy meeting in Tokyo on Thursday, the new service will hawk music, movies, books, and other downloadable content geared for its various electronics, including TVs, mobile phones, music players, and computers.

The service, which Sony aims to launch next year, will link the company's devices and digital content that it produces--setting it apart from other online stores.

"That's the kind of combination that I think is not seen anywhere else," Kazuo Hirai, Sony executive vice president for networked products and services, said in an interview with the Associated Press. "That I think is where our core competence lies, and that's a differentiator for Sony."

Hirai also spoke about the new service with BusinessWeek, saying that it won't just sell products but also tap into social networking by letting people upload their own photos or videos and connect with each other.

"It's not just access content, stream it, and enjoy," Hirai told BusinessWeek. "What are your friends watching right now? There's a screen that says all the programming that's available. It highlights all the things that your friends are watching, for example. It's a community experience."

Called the Sony Online Service for now, it will model itself after the company's successful PlayStation Network, a free service that has captured 33 million registered users who download movies, access social networks, and grab games for the PS3 and portable PSP console. Hirai said that gamers will be able to access the new online service directly through their PlayStation Network accounts.

Of course, Sony has been down this road before in 2005 with its late Sony Connect music service. The aborted iTunes clone was done in by internal politics and a failure to connect with consumers, forcing the company to shut it down in 2007.

But with a new, more cohesive management team put in place by CEO and president Howard Stringer, Sony is hoping to avoid the in-fighting that helped kill Connect.

Sony needs a shot in the arm at this point. Though the company pioneered the portable music concept 30 years ago with its Walkman, it has struggled to compete in the Digital Age. Continuing a string of quarterly losses, Sony took a $292 million net loss in its recent second quarter. Despite cost cuts and layoffs, the company is projecting a total loss of $1.3 billion for the full fiscal year.

I'm sure you've heard of Apple's App Store for the iPhone. But have you ever heard of an independent mobile app store called GetJar?

No? Well, that's not surprising. The tiny company now based in Silicon Valley has done virtually no marketing. And yet in the nearly five years it's been around, the company has managed to build the second largest application store front for mobile phones in the world, likely making it the biggest mobile app store you've never heard of.

The privately held Getjar claims it has nearly 57,000 applications in its store, making it second only to Apple in terms of total applications. Apple just announced this week that it now has more than 100,000 applications in its store.

Google's Android Market, which launched earlier this year has more than 10,000 applications. Research in Motion's BlackBerry App World has just more than 2,000 applications available today, according to estimates.

Since Getjar's virtual store went live in early 2005, about 650 million applications have been downloaded. And momentum has been growing. For the month of October, Getjar executives say the company saw its users download 55 million applications, which is a 267 percent increase over the same month a year ago when 15 million mobile applications were downloaded. And the company says that it has more than 300,000 registered developers uploading applications to its site.

Meanwhile, Apple's much-hyped and heavily marketed iTunes App Store, which is nearly twice the size of Getjar, as of September had more than 2 billion app downloads since the store was launched in July 2008. And executives at Apple recently said the company had 125,000 developers on its roster. By comparison, the Android Market has had an estimated 40 million downloads since it went live earlier this year.

GetJar got its start not as an application store but as a beta testing Web site for mobile developers. GetJar founder and CEO Ilja Laurs had started the site to allow developers a way to test their applications on a variety of handsets.

"Originally, we were trying to help developers who couldn't get access to certain phones for testing," he said. "But then developers came to us and asked if they could use the site to also distribute their applications."

And so the GetJar application store was born in early 2005. At first, the site attracted mostly hard-core mobile application fans. But over the years, word of the site has spread, and users all over the world come to GetJar to download different applications.

Unlike most of the other application stores that have been announced recently, GetJar's store offers mobile applications for almost any phone.

"With the GetJar store, consumers don't have to worry about whether they have an Android phone or a Java phone," said Patrick Mork, vice president of marketing for GetJar. "They don't need to know which model Nokia they have. We take the fragmentation out of the equation by auto-detecting what apps can run on which phones and offering consumers those applications."

The way it works is that GetJar is able to detect the type of phone a wireless subscriber is using when they connect to the GetJar mobile Web site. It can also detect the type of phone used from the regular Web site using a wireless subscriber's phone number.

A screen shot of a GetJar download page for the Facebook shortcut link.

(Credit: GetJar)

Based on this information, GetJar is able to direct app shoppers to the applications that will work on their phones.

"If there is a BlackBerry app available and you are using a BlackBerry you will get that application," Mork said. "But if you're on a feature phone, you'll likely get a shortcut link."

This is yet another important differentiator for GetJar. Unlike device or operating system specific app stores, such as Apple's App Store or Android Market, GetJar also provides millions of consumers using basic feature phones an app-like experience, even if a specific application hasn't been developed for their particular phone.

For example, GetJar has worked with Facebook to provide a downloadable shortcut link that leads to the Facebook mobile Web site for wireless subscribers who are not using a smartphone for which a special Facebook application has been developed.

While the link is not really a native application for that specific device, the link appears on the phone's menu and provides access via the phone's browser to a mobile Web site. For consumers, the experience is very similar to that of a native application that has been downloaded to a smartphone.

"Facebook didn't have a strategy for developing applications for Motorola Razrs and Samsung Instincts" Mork said. "So they teamed up with us to get around that problem by providing short cut links. It's really not an app. But the beauty of it is that it allows any company to play in the app game from a shortcut."

And for brands, such as Facebook, the shortcut increases their mobile presence. Before it started working with GetJar, Facebook would get between 100,000 and 150,000 downloads per week from its mobile site. After the shortcut, links were available on the GetJar site and on Facebook's site, Facebook started to see 1.5 million mobile downloads per week, Mork said.

But GetJar does have some limitations. One major limitation for consumers in the U.S. is that GetJar cannot offer applications to most phones operating on Verizon Wireless's network. The reason is that Verizon uses a closed platform called BREW on many of its phones. And there is no way for third-party application developers to create applications for these devices without going through Verizon's BREW approval process. But BREW is a legacy platform for Verizon, and newer smartphones on Verizon, such as BlackBerry devices and the new Android phones, will be able to access applications from GetJar.

GetJar also doesn't explicitly serve apps to iPhone users, again because the iPhone platform is closed. But iPhone users can use the GetJar store to discover new applications and GetJar can redirect those users to the Apple App Store, where they can download the applications.

Yet another limitation is that GetJar does not offer developers the ability to charge for applications. The company has not yet figured out how to bill for these applications. Instead, application developers can monetize their applications by incorporating advertising into the application or using the app on GetJar to up-sell consumers to a more robust application in a different application store.

But GetJar does allow developers to promote their applications, and the company has developed a marketplace so that developers can bid for top promotional spots on the Web site. GetJar gets paid based on how many users download these applications. Most other application stores today do not offer developers a way to promote their applications, which makes it difficult for smaller developers to get their applications noticed.

While there is no question that Apple dominates the mobile application market today, Mork admits that Apple's push into applications has been a boon for GetJar, and likely for other app stores.

"It's undeniable that Apple has had a positive effect on our business, especially in the U.S.," he said. "But we don't really compete with Apple. Still, it's clear that the mass market is just starting to catch on. And that is largely thanks to the success of Apple and its App Store."

One App Store to rule them all?

(Credit: Apple)

Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.

We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.

I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.

They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").

This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you?

Palm said Tuesday its WebOS developer program will open in December with an "unparalleled level of transparency" in a not-so-subtle dig at Apple.

The company, which is playing catch-up to Apple with its applications store, kicked off its App Catalog beta program on Tuesday.

Among the key details of Palm's developer program:

• A 70/30 revenue split. (Palm gets 30 percent.)

• A $99 annual fee. That fee is waived if you submit an open-source WebOS app.

• The company will review every application and developers will pay a fee of $50 for each app.

Read more of Palm developer program set for December lift-off at ZDNet.

The long-awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.

Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.

Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple's App Store has had more than 1 billion downloads after only being around for a year means that smartphone users are hungry for applications that make their phones more useful and fun. But developers, whether they are large or small, have limited resources and time, and they must choose which platforms to develop applications for first.

So far, it's clear that the iPhone is the first platform developers target. As a result, Apple now has the largest mobile App Store on the market with over 75,000 applications. What this means for consumers is that it's more likely that the newest and hottest applications are available on the iPhone before other devices.

And the reason developers choose to develop for the iPhone is simple. It has the largest base of interactive users. It also has an easy and efficient distribution channel using the iTunes store. And it's easy to develop for given that there is one screen size and a single version of the operating system.

"Developing for the iPhone is a no-brainer," said Noam Bardin, CEO of a mobile app company called Waze, which has developed navigation applications for the iPhone, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile platforms. "You get more bang for each line of code you write for the iPhone. But then the question becomes, which platform do you develop for next?"

Right now, it seems like the big developers are creating applications for Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices. And then they move to developing for Google Android.

"What's happening is Android is the third platform for people to think about," said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail, a free, visual voicemail service that is available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. "The way we have done it is as YouMail has gotten a larger and larger audience, we've started to see 4 percent or 5 percent of our audience on Android. And we've built an Android app to satisfy those folks since it's relatively easy to do."

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced a Flickr application for the iPhone and two other Yahoo applications for iPhones and a handful of BlackBerry devices. The company said it plans to release versions of these applications for other phones, such as Android phones, later.

"We will make these applications available on Android devices and the Palm Pre later," Sandeep Gupta, senior director of mobile applications at Yahoo said. "We're not waiting until these devices have critical mass, but we do have to prioritize. And that means developing apps for devices with the most interactive mobile users first."

Android's potent potential
The iPhone and the BlackBerry are the two leading smartphones in the U.S. market, so it makes sense for developers like Yahoo to develop for these devices first. But as more Android phones come on the market in the coming months, the priorities among developers could change. Apple, which has at least a two-year head start on the rest of the market, will clearly be the first priority for developers for a long time to come. But Android will likely garner some attention as well.

"You'll see a slow but steady increase in development for Android," Quilici said. "And it will be driven by people porting existing applications or extending applications that are interfaces to services."

Android Facebook app photos

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This week, two of the most popular mobile applications, social-networking site Facebook and the online radio service Pandora, each released applications on Android Market. These applications have been available for months in the App Store and the BlackBerry World.

In many ways, Android has the potential to be an even bigger platform for developers than the iPhone. Many developers have already been impressed with Google's open approach to the market. Not only is the source code freely available to developers, which makes developing for the platform easy, but developers can also post their applications directly to the Android Market. This means developers can get updates and new versions of their applications up immediately, instead of waiting to be approved by Apple.

The one thing that could hurt Apple in the long run is the fact that the company approves every application that gets into the App Store. Developers have often complained that the process can be long and applications are often denied without any particular reason given.

"The biggest challenge for a developer when it comes to Apple is getting their application certified," Bardin said. "The whole process is a black box. You don't know how long it will take or if your application will be approved."

Meanwhile, BlackBerry may have the biggest audience in terms of smartphones in the U.S. market, but developers say that it's the most difficult environment to develop applications for because there are so many different versions of devices with different screen sizes and screen resolutions and even slight differences to the operating systems.

The new BlackBerry AppWorld store also hasn't really taken off yet, in part because it's not as easy to use as the App Store for the iPhone. Payments are made through PayPal and the audience is more likely to pay for productivity applications, rather than games and other applications, according to Quilici. The other problem is the AppWorld store isn't available on every BlackBerry, which means discovery is easier for some users than it is for others.

Then there is Android. The platform is considered the easiest to develop for. But the market thus far has been small because there have only been two devices available in the U.S., the G1 and MyTouch, both made by HTC and sold by T-Mobile. Sprint also announced it will offer an Android phone on October 11. Internationally, Android-powered devices have been launched in 21 countries with 32 carriers in 11 languages.

The lack of Android devices has likely prevented some developers from spending the money and effort to develop applications for the Android Market.

Google has confirmed that the Android Market has more than 9,500 apps--some that are free and some that are paid. That's just a fraction of the number of applications available in the Apple App Store. Still, Android users are quite active, Google has said. Users have downloaded an average of 40 applications on their devices, and four out of five users download at least one app per week.

Now that manufacturers are finally rolling out new Google Android devices, there could be a much bigger audience for developers to reach. Motorola is expected to announce two new Android phones on Thursday. And Chinese manufacturer Huawei has announced a prepaid Android phone for Europe. Other manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony Ericsson, are also expected to launch new Android phones later this year.

The big question for developers going forward is whether or not all these new Android devices will work with apps in the Android Market.

"There won't be just one screen size or resolution. CPU utilization might different," Bardin said. "These are all different devices made by different manufacturers. And right now we don't know what is going to happen. We don't know the changes that each manufacturer has made to the OS."

The one thing that could make Android a phenomenal success is if Google can crack the mobile advertising market through its application store. In June, Google launched a beta version of AdSense for Mobile Applications, which allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image ads in their iPhone and Android applications.

"If consumers don't have to pay for applications because they're subsidized by advertising," Bardin continued. "And if developers can make money through advertising, it's a home run for Android for sure."

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Vonage announced Tuesday that its mobile voice over Internet Protocol app has been approved for use by Apple on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Internet telephone service provider said it's conducting a beta test of the app and that general availability will be announced at a later date.

Last week Apple confirmed that Vonage's request for app approval was being held up by technical issues with the Vonage software. An Apple spokesperson told CNET News at the time that Apple was working with the developer to resolve the issue but would not elaborate on the nature of the issue.

That delay came to light on the heels of federal regulators opening a probe on Apple's decision to keep the Google Voice application from the App Store. AT&T--Apple's iPhone partner--has denied playing a role in that decision.

Google Voice, which allows users to receive calls placed to a single telephone number in multiple places and make cheap international calls, was deemed unfit for App Store inclusion in July, after it was released for BlackBerry and Android smartphones.

Apple, however, has said the Google Voice app was never actually rejected.

For the second time in less than a week, Apple executive Phil Schiller has responded via e-mail to criticism of the company's App Store.

Apple senior VP Phil Schiller

(Credit: Apple)

The latest response from Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, came in an e-mail over the weekend to Steven Frank, co-founder of Mac developer Panic.

In a recent post to his personal blog, Frank had said that Apple's rejection of Google Voice was the last straw for him, reported TUAW, which stands for The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

"My position is not that every app should be approved -- it's that rejected apps should be rejected for reasons that at the very least make consistent, logical sense, without garbage form-letter rejection notices that explain nothing, and with at least some sort of guidance available to the developer about how to fix the problem instead of meeting them with a brick wall," Frank said on his blog.

The complaints expressed by Frank have been echoed many times by other developers who see the approval process for the App Store as arbitrary.

However, Schiller offered some hope. "We're listening to your feedback" was the gist of the weekend e-mail, according to Frank, who choose not to make the entire e-mail public.

Schiller's other recent decision to reach out happened Thursday when he responded to a post on Daring Fireball that criticized Apple for rejecting a dictionary application from the App Store.

Apple's iPhone may not have the largest share of the smartphone market, but it certainly grabbed a hefty piece of the profits.

According to Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who was quoted in an AllThingsD post, Apple managed to take 32 percent of the overall profits for the smartphone market. Sacconaghi also said in a research note to clients that Apple achieved that percentage of profit while only accounting for 8 percent of the industry's revenue, according to the report.

Sacconaghi goes on to talk about the advantages Apple has in the smartphone market, particularly the ecosystem it has developed in the App Store over the past year. Apple said in mid-July that it had 65,000 apps in the store and users had downloaded more than 1.5 billion apps in the first year the store was operational.

The iPhone's popularity is evident in the company's quarterly earnings posted on July 21. Apple reported selling 5.2 million iPhones, a 626 percent increase over the same period last year.

"Apple has the potential to become a de-facto standard of sorts in the consumer smartphone market, much like it became in the portable media player market with iPods, due in large part to its first mover advantage and tight software and hardware integration," said Sacconaghi, in the AllThingsD post.

The integration is something that Apple has lauded as an advantage it has over its competition for many. From the days of the Mac and applications like iPhoto and iMovie, to the iPod's integration with iTunes and the music store, Apple has always tried to give users a simple way to interact with its hardware and software.

The mystery surrounding Apple's approval process on the App Store is legendary. What gets approved or rejected on any given day can be a source of bewilderment for developers and consumers alike. But the company still surprised everyone when it rejected Google's Voice app for the iPhone on Tuesday.

(Credit: Apple)

The story doesn't end there. Apple then proceeded to remove third-party apps from the App Store that it said duplicate features of the iPhone. One of those apps is called VoiceCentral, and the developer is understandably upset.

Riverturn's VoiceCentral has been available in the App Store for the past four months. The app integrates Google's GrandCentral and Google Voice with the iPhone.

Until this week, everything was going fine for the developer. He submitted the app and was approved by Apple. He released updates and they were approved by Apple. Then, all of a sudden and without warning, his app was pulled from the store.

What seems to be the most upsetting part of the whole situation is that the developer can't get any answers from Apple. In a telephone conversation with the Apple representative who was tasked to inform him the app was being removed, the most common answer from Apple seemed to be "I can't say."

In a blog post on Riverturn's Web site Tuesday, the developer paraphrased the call. At one point the developer asks the Apple rep if there's something he can change in the app so it can be resubmitted to the App Store. The response: "I can't say."

The developer then asks, "if we can't figure out the issue then how will we know whether to resubmit the app. And how will we know whether to invest in any other development efforts? Future apps could be impacted."

The response: "I can't help you with that."

As if that wasn't enough, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is reporting that the developer is now being flooded with refund requests from customers. The problem is Apple keeps its 30 percent commission, but the developer has to refund the entire amount to the customer.