Applications Economy

Report: WHERE THE JOBS ARE: The App Economy. Michael Mandel. TechNet, 2012

URL = http://www.technet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TechNet-App-Economy-Jobs-Study.pdf

Findings

"by Todd Bishop:

"A new study out today documents the impact of apps on the U.S. economy, concluding that 466,000 jobs have been created by the “App Economy” since 2007 — including programmers, marketers, interface designers, managers and support staff working on apps and infrastructure for platforms including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry, Facebook and Windows Phone.

The New York Metro area has the largest proportion of jobs in the sector, at 9.2 percent. The Seattle region is fourth, at 5.7 percent, behind San Francisco and San Jose.

The research was conducted by economist Michael Mandel for industry group TechNet based on trends in help-wanted ads, in addition to other economic data. A summary of the findings is available here.

The report says, “Every major consumer-facing company, and many business-facing companies, has discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business. In some sense, that makes the App Economy the construction sector of the 21st century, building a new front door to everyone’s house and in some cases constructing a whole new house.” ((http://www.geekwire.com/2012/study-app-economy-created-466000-jobs-2007))

Excerpts

"‘App’, in the sense that we mean it today, did not exist before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Apps are relatively lightweight programs, specifically designed to run on mobile platforms such as the iPhone and Android phones. In the past couple of years, the term ‘app’ has been extended to Facebook applications as well.

In the prospectus for its initial public offering, Zynga described the App Economy in this way:

- In order to provide users with a wider range of engaging experiences, social networks and mobile operating systems have opened their platforms to developers, transforming the creation, distribution and consumption of digital content. We refer to this as the “App Economy.” In the App Economy, developers can create applications accessing unique features of the platforms, distribute applications digitally to a broad audience and regularly update existing applications”

The term ‘App Economy’ started coming into use in early 2009, and was popularized by a prescient November 2009 BusinessWeek cover story.

The combination of ease of development and ease of delivery makes possible a stunning variety of apps. To just give some examples: You can take verbal notes; make your voice sound like a robot; schedule plane flights; play a baseball simulation; have customized news delivered to your device; create a digitized voodoo doll; and edit Microsoft Word documents.

But the App Economy is much more than a better delivery channel for software. From the economic perspective, we can think of the App Economy as a collection of interlocking innovative ecosystems.

Each ecosystem consists of a core company, which creates and maintains a platform and an app marketplace, plus small and large companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform. Businesses can belong to multiple ecosystems and usually do.

The key platforms in the App Economy today are

• Android, anchored by Google; • Apple iOS, anchored by Apple; • Blackberry, anchored by RIM; • Facebook, anchored by Facebook; • Windows Phone and Windows Mobile, anchored by Microsoft

Every major consumer-facing company, and many business-facing companies, has discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business. In some sense, that makes the App Economy the construction sector of the 21st century, building a new front door to everyone’s house and in some cases constructing a whole new house."

More Information

Full report: http://www.technet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TechNet-App-Economy-Jobs-Study.pdf