It’s time for http://csjconferences.org/socon11, the 5th annual social media conference at Kennesaw State University. The dates are Friday and Saturday, Feb. 4-5, 2011. The theme is Social Media Meets Mobile.

I was a founding member of the SoCon conferences, so they are dear to my heart and Appcelerator will have a part again this year as sponsor and our own Appcelerator partner, Andrew Zuercher, Titanium Evangelist, will be running a breakout session entitled: Use Your Web Skills to Develop Native Mobile Apps.

He will be joined by some 25 other presenters and discussion moderators, including social media gurus from Ford Fiesta Movement, CNN, AT&T, Edelman, and the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Here is the full information http://csjconferences.org/socon11/ , including how to register for the Friday Night 5th Anniversary Mixer, Social Networking party at the Carter Center. It’s your chance to network with some of the Southeast’s most influential figures and enjoy food, music, and lots of cool stuff.

Register now, last year, they closed down registration two weeks before the event. So this next week is fairly crucial if you definitely want to attend. You can register now at http://csjconferences.org/socon11/

Unfortunately, this year, unlike all the previous years since we started SoCon, I won’t be able to attend.  However, I’m very excited about how the event has grown and wish Lenn and the rest of the gang a great event – it looks to be the best and biggest yet!

At Appcelerator, we recently received permission from Apple to gain access to their full iTunes catalog which we receive through nightly updates.

I’ve been playing around with the data to see what kind of useful information I can gather to better understand the applications within the store; both today and over time as it matures.

Here’s some initial information about the iTunes marketplace as it relates to iPhone and iPad applications.  This data is from September 15th, 2010 for the US iTunes store.

What’s the average price per category?

The top 5 categories by average price are:

Medical – $7.65

Navigation – $5.08

Book – $5.07

Reference – $3.51

Education – $3.27

What’s the most expensive apps per category?

The top 5 categories by maximum price are:

Business – $999.99

Education – $999.99

Utilities – $999.99

Lifestyle – $999.99

Medical – $499.99

The bottom 5 categories are also interesting:

Weather – $9.99

News – $34.99

Social Networking – $99.99

Healthcare – $99.99

Travel – $109.99

How many apps are in each category? (i.e. how many apps am I competing against)

What’s interesting in the latest statistics is that Books have pulled way forward beyond Games recently.  There are now 45,542 books in the iTunes application marketplace vs. 38,033 Games.  Books represent 17.5% of all applications in the store and Games represent 14.6%.

The top 5 App categories:

Book – 45,542

Games – 38,033

Entertainment – 29,285

Education – 20,228

Lifestyle  - 16,592

The bottom 5 App categories:

Weather – 1,030

Medical – 3,941

Finance – 4,023

Social Networking – 4,138

Photography – 4,695

What are the average size (in MB) of each app by category?

The size of the application (in megabytes) has an interesting perspective since the size determines how much bandwidth is used to download an application (assuming over-the-air, which I believe most people use).  It also determines if you must download from the web and synchronize (apps over 20 MB).

The top 5 categories by size are:

Navigation – 50MB

Education – 26.8MB

Travel – 26.0MB

Healthcare – 24.5MB

Reference – 17.3MB

Wow, what’s interesting about this statistic is that 4 out of 5 of the applications in these categories cannot be downloaded over-the-air from your phone – they must be downloaded from within iTunes and synchronized to install them.

The smallest applications on average by category?

Utilities – 2.3MB

Weather – 2.9MB

Productivity – 3.2MB

Social Networking – 3.5MB

Finance – 4.5MB

The average application on the iTunes store is 14.85 MB.  This means that the average application in the iTunes marketplace is storing a lot of content inside the application and taking advantage of the fact that these applications are resident on the device and don’t necessarily need to connect to the Internet to retrieve content.

What’s the largest application in the store?

The winner up is G-Map U.S. & Canada by XRoad Co., Ltd. at 2.12GB.  Yes, that’s right, Gigabytes.

This looks like an awesome application.  It costs $49.99 and has live traffic and text-to-speech.

What’s the smallest application in the iTunes store?

iJustLight comes in at the featherweight size of 14K.   It costs $0.99 and appears to — well — present a light to help you see.  I love their screenshot – it’s simply a white image (I can’t even insert it here, you can’t see anything).

Which developers has the most applications in the store?

We all know it’s not about quantity, but quality.  But which publishers creates the most applications in the store (based on total number of apps)?  Here’s the top 5:

Iceberg Reader – 7,708

Brighthouse Labs – 4,407

Andrews UK Limited – 2,604

PraiseMorgan – 1,720

Your Mobile Apps Inc. – 1,703

Who are the top game publishers by the most applications in the store?

Alain Fernandes – 333

Brighthouse Labs – 251

Quizicals – 207

M5 Systems LLC – 165

Gameloft - 161

Who are the top eBook publishers by the most applications in the store?

Iceberg Reader – 7,701

Andrews UK Limited – 1,723

Libriance Inc – 1,646

Your Mobile Apps, Inc. – 1,613

For-side.com – 1,550

How many unique application publishers are in the iTunes marketplace?

There are 52,354 publishers and 260,119 applications in the iTunes marketplace (US).

The top 50 publishers on average have produced 49,335 apps and an average of 986 apps per publisher.

The top 50 publishers produce 19% of all applications in the store.

The top 100 publishers product 24% of all application in the store.

This is a typical long-tail distribution of application publishers to applications.

What’s the breakdown of applications by content rating?

Publishers must rate each application according to a content rating. What’s the breakdown of applications by content rating?

What’s interesting is that 2,603 applications have no content rating – probably when Apple didn’t require it.

Here’s the breakdown:

4+ – 203,886 (78.38%)

9+ – 16,280 (6.26%)

12+ – 21,649 (8.32%)

17+ – 15,701 (6.04%)

None – 2,603 (1.00%)

This means that almost all publishers are trying to reach the youth/teen or above market with 93% of all applications rated 12 or above.

In Summary

If you’re an application developer, it’s good to understand the economics of the app store.  Of course, these statistics above are specific to an individual day and only good for the U.S.  In the future, I’ll try and expand these statistics to include more regions and over a longer period of time.

Of course, if you’re not already building a native mobile application and would like to find out how, you should check out Appcelerator Titanium.  Titanium gives the power of building native applications to the web developer.

As of today, Titanium Developers have built over 4,453 applications for the app store – making Titanium developers collectively the 2nd largest publisher in the App Store. Congrats to the Appcelerator team and all the Titanium Developers!

We have been working closely with Yahoo on a number of fronts and we’re pretty excited about the Yahoo YQL integration in Titanium we released in the 0.8 release. More stuff will be coming soon.

Here’s a video that Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) featured about Appcelerator and Yahoo on their blog. Enjoy.

Today was a historic day in computing history. While the techno-geeks will argue for the next several months what this really means and what the Apple iPad is missing or why it’s only a large screen iPod Touch, I’m going to be focused on what I think this really means to some key industries and how Appcelerator can help. From my perspective, web developers are talking up and overwhelmingly are planning new application experiences for the new iPad. We surveyed just a small sample of our community of developers and found that over 90% of them plan on building an iPad application in the next 12 months.

But what’s probably more interesting, and certainly makes sense seeing the iPad today, is that this new device offers new innovations that could be much different (and quite possibly, better) than the existing iPhone/iPod.

We are seeing huge opportunities for developers to build applications that really leverage the unique and native device features of the iPad. Today, Steve Jobs demonstrated the new ebook system built-in to the soon-to-be-released iTunes “bookstore”. But, think about the application possibilities for publishers, media companies and companies such as ad agencies and interactive digital agencies can create. In fact, Steve Jobs might have single handily gave a life-line to the entire media world as it struggles to find a monetization model as they move from traditional print to digital. With over 175 million users ready with credit cards in the iTunes ecosystem and more than four years of micro payments of .99 and beyond, Apple may be able to turn over an industry struggling to find a path to transactions. The iPad offers an experience and consumer base that is already purchasing digital content and an compelling advantage that the normal web doesn’t offer. Users on the desktop web have had over 10 years of conditioning of “Free”, adding “Paywalls” to their websites are already offering significant challenges for some publishers. The iTunes ecosystem may be their new savior.

What’s also different spending the day with the Tablet SDK is that most of the current 100K apps will be completely re-tooled for the new device. While Apple is reporting (and in fact, in today’s testing with the SDK, fulfilling) that they’ll run all apps in the App Store unchanged, it’s very clear that apps will need to be rebuilt completely to take advantage of the new UI, new native features and the use cases that will be more appropriate for the new iPad. In fact, I think in less than 6 months after the devices are available for purchase, most of the apps that are used on the device on a day-to-day basis will be new iPad versions. It’s clear from the way the “emulated” iPhone apps are running on the tablet that developers will quickly move to change their apps to better adapt and that user’s will quickly find paths to one’s that take full advantage of the new device. This offers both a challenge and huge opportunity – not quite the same opportunity as the original iPhone – but close.

I’d advise developers and publishers that are on the iPhone today to start now at moving their apps. If you’re not on the bandwagon, you’ll really want to get on to it today. In either case, you’d really benefit from checking out Appcelerator as a way to help you move quickly to the new device and preserve your existing investments.

What are we doing at Appcelerator to support the iPad?

Like all iPhone apps, your Appcelerator Titanium-based apps will run on the iPad as-is in emulation mode. Today, we verified that the upcoming 0.9 release runs great both under emulation mode as well as the full native mode. We’ll have more details about that soon but we’ll be fully supporting new iPad projects in the 0.9 release and expect full support for the iPad native features soon thereafter. Because of the Apple NDA, we’ll not be able to talk specifically about the native features we’re working on for the iPad, but they’ll be awesome.

So, I’ll have more on this soon. I promise to try and blog more these days…

I’ll leave you with some parting thoughts I shared with Robert Scoble the day before the announcement.

Yesterday I gave a presentation about the future of mobile development at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Mountain View, California. It was the battle of the current emerging players in the space (if you could call it a “battle”) : Appcelerator, Rhomobile and Phonegap. Of course, all three of us have much different approaches to the market and different business models. And, consequently, I think all three of us are doing fine thank you very much. I like to think that we’re helping the entire industry improve by making it easier, cheaper and faster to build next generation mobile applications using web technologies.

Embedded below was my presentation, updated with some of the new stuff that has just come out in Appcelerator Titanium 0.7.

In Titanium 0.7 we released some super awesome mobile goodness like native Social APIs into Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter, module extensibility (see the awesome OpenGL demo or camera overlay demo) and lots of new UI widgets.

Today was a very busy day. I spoke about Appcelerator Titanium at the O’Reilly/360 Inside Mobile Conference in San Jose and later served on a discussion panel with Daniel Brusilovsky (Teens in Tech, Techcrunch), Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) and Christian Sepulveda (Pivotal Labs).

I then spoke tonight at the iPhone Business Meetup in Santa Clara. Tonight, I spoke a little bit about iPhone and the Enterprise and gave some perspective on the opportunities and challenges for developers considering iPhone in the Enterprise.

Below are my slides from the presentation. As always, I generally try and post all of my public presentations on my Slideshare Slidespace.

iPhone in the Enterprise offers a lot of interesting opportunities and some big challenges today. However, some of the challenges are not just inherent in iPhone – they are overall challenges of a rapidly changing marketplace. We’re seeing a massive change in the dynamics of the mobile ecosystem. These changes aren’t just with the emergence of iPhone and Android – new mobile devices that have changed the smartphone marketplace almost overnight – but also in how these new entrants are disrupting carriers and handset manufacturers. In addition, we’re seeing new mobile handset entrants like HTC and Dell Computer also come into play. Of course, we’re also seeing old players like Palm make a play with WebOS in a very exciting way.

It’s an exciting time to be a web developer. I believe web technologies will continue to emerge as the most important pieces of the technology landscape. It’ll be fun to watch how this emerges. I think in the next 24 months we’ll see some pretty big ecosystem changes.

If you’re considering building an iPhone and/or Android application, please consider taking a look at our Appcelerator Titanium product. Titanium allows you to build native mobile applications using web technologies. That’s right – HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These are technologies, tools and skills you have today.

I gave a talk this week at the Mountain View JavaScript meetup hosted by Google at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Thanks to Michael Carter who hosts this event on a monthly basis. The event was also video recorded by Google and is being made available on Youtube, although I don’t yet have a URL for it. Below are my slides from the talk, available on Slideshare.

If you haven’t yet tried Appcelerator Titanium, I would encourage you to do that now. It’s a pretty awesome product and makes it much easier and faster to bring the world of desktop and mobile applications to Javascript / Web Developers. Titanium Mobile provides a web platform for building native iphone and android applications using web technologies.

Today, Titanium Mobile is still in private beta. However, if you’d like early access, please email me or get in touch with me through Twitter and I’ll be glad to activate you.