ReadWriteMobile

Last September, during the f8 Developers’ Conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that the company had no plans for a “central app repository” – an app store. Today, Facebook is changing its tune. The social giant has announced App Center, a section of Facebook dedicated to discovering and deploying high-quality apps on the company’s platform. The App Center will push apps to iPhone, Android and the mobile Web, giving Facebook its first true store for mobile app discovery. 

App stores are frustrating, cluttered places. Even with Apple’s prescreening process of every app that passes through its iOS gates, the App Store, it is often hard to find what you may want or need. This is a problem for consumers - but an even bigger problem for developers that often rely on these apps to make a living. For every successful app that makes millions for its publisher, there are thousands of apps that will not rise above the mess.

So, you are an app developer and you have figured out your next big idea. Dollar signs and millions of downloads float through your head, like so many sugar plum fairies. If you build it, users will come... or so the thought goes. But there is really a lot more to it than that.

It's on some 450 million small devices - mostly smartphones - but the owners of most of those devices probably don't even know they have it. Which could make QuickOffice one of the most successful yet little-known software applications in history. A big change to its work environment and pricing model could draw folks' attention to it.

Even as the battle rages over native apps vs. the mobile Web, the real question is already becoming "What comes next?" Developers are looking for ways to disrupt the so-called "App Economy," especially as it pertains to Apple's handling of the App Store. Assuming that the mobile Web's cross-platform openness carries the day, as it has so many times before, what would such a mobile "Post-App Economy" look like and what would it offer for developers and users?

The allure of making millions, perhaps even billions, of dollars developing mobile apps for the consumer market is obvious. Instagram just got a cool $1 billion from Facebook. Path has a $250 million valuation. Even Twitter was started as a mobile, text messaging-based service.

Venture capitalists are always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing when it comes to consumer apps. But fledgling entrepreneurs may find a higher likelihood of creating a sustainable business and attracting VC dollars in the business-to-business (B2B) market.

"Backend as a Service" (BaaS) companies provide easily integrated cloud-based backends for mobile app developers. Though not as well known as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the BaaS ecosystem has quickly evolved from a niche vertical into an important industry segment.

The industry segment took another step toward maturity this week with mobile development platform Appcelerator's announcement of its Titanium 2.0 SDK, with significant backend cloud services tied into it. Meanwhile, Boston-based mobile cloud provider Kinvey also released its platform to the public.

It was dinner at a fancy restaurant in Boston. After the last sip of Scotch was polished off, the waiter came over with the check... and an iPad. It was to take a survey about the quality of service, but it just as easily could have been used to pay the bill.

Tablets, especially Apple's iPad, are increasingly finding homes in restaurants and local businesses. They are changing how businesses conduct transactions and receive customer feedback. In a data-driven world, Main Street retailers are on the verge of a significant evolution.

Since Research In Motion made BlackBerry synonymous with smartphones in the early aughts, the company has taken a pounding for mis-steps, delays, intentional blindness, equivocations and most tellingly, mediocre products.

Those brickbats have often been well-deserved, but RIM should also have earned some respect, if not love, for the important role it played in smartphone development and popularization - not to mention a string of iconic-at-the-time devices that significantly advanced the state of the art.

The nature of work has been changed by the mobile phone. This is an undisputable fact. It's also a fact that organizations and enterprises have not always coped well with this revolution.

The early stages of mobility in the workplace were fairly simple: A couple top executives had private cellphones with numbers that only the most important people could reach. The wall between the C-suite and the rest of enterprises began to erode with the rise of the BlackBerry, as mobile email became pervasive through the entire corporate structure. But we're still waiting for the next step.

One of the largest software companies in the world just made a series of moves that could make it one of the most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world. Hidden within SAP's Hana database platform announcement yesterday was the fact that the company signed three strategic partnerships with leading U.S. mobile development firms, signaling what could be a huge shift in the balance of power in the race for enterprise mobile dollars.