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The rise of the app store has fundamentally changed the concept of software delivery. Gone are the days when zealous software companies sent users discs in the mail (oh, AOL, we remember you well) that ended up making better coasters than promotion. Many computers these days do not even ship with a CD-ROM drive and smartphones have never seen any type of physical downloads. The delivery mechanism of the application store is an often-overlooked revolution of the mobile era.

A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

A patsy is a person that is easily taken advantage of, the guy that gets set up to take the fall so the big wigs in power can extricate themselves from a situation free from blame. As you may have heard, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has named a new CEO today, Thorsten Heins. He takes over for co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis who are both moving to non-operational seats on RIM's board of directors. Poor Heins. This is a big break for a guy that started his career as an engineer. Yet, Balsillie and Lazaridis are setting Heins up to fail. RIM has a new patsy.

Back in the early 1990s, we didn't have BlackBerries or any kind of wireless data devices. Phones weren't very "smart," and dial up still ruled the land. Then a trio of companies came together to invent the Viking Express which was a combination of an Ericsson Mobidem wireless data modem that was the size of a small brick, an HP 100 pocket-sized computer that looked more like a big calculator, and software from a company called Radiomail that ran on the DOS operating system of the HP. The world of wireless hasn't been the same since.

I remember sending an email from my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, pulling over after I passed through one of the toll barriers. A cop came along and wanted to know what I was doing. It was probably the first time he had seen such an assemblage of devices.

The barrier for entry for creating software for computing devices has never been lower. This has a lot to do with the mobile revolution. According to a report from VisionMobile, the time to market for applications has decreased from 82 days through traditional channels to 36 days with the advent of the app store. Developers have more reasons to publish to apps stores now than ever before, with curation, distribution, billing and monetization, discovery and feedback opportunities from users higher than ever.

There are several kinds of mobile developers. There are independent software vendors, contractors, hobbyists, moonlighting engineers, entrepreneurs, in-house and B2B/B2C focused developers. The strength a given mobile platform has much to do with how many quality developers it can attract to it.

Research In Motion wants you to believe that there is a good reason developers should write apps for the BlackBerry platform. RIM touts that sales are up 44% in the last year from 50 million to 70 million and that the BBX with the BlackBerry Messenger Connect provides an easy to develop for platform that can help developers get paid.

Developers and the purchasing public are not quite buying it yet. The approach to RIM right now is a "let's wait and see" approach, especially with the release of BBX coming sometime in early 2012. RIM's developer strategy is tied directly to HTML5, perhaps to the detriment of native BlackBerry applications. RIM needs to get its story straight for developers moving forward is the BBX ecosystem is to flourish.

Cloud printing vendor Electronics for Imaging (EFI) announces today a new PrintMe Mobile version. The only issue is why has it taken so long to get printing to these smartphones and tablets?

As we close down 2011, we can reflect on (and learn from) the numerous, high-profile outages that occurred: Bank of America in March; Amazon EC2, Verizon LTE and Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft in April; and then Apple and Microsoft in August. In analyzing these disasters, I've come up with four lessons to be learned - they'll help protect your company's reputation, technical integrity and customer satisfaction during technical crises.

What we were not seeing last week during Research In Motion's BlackBerry and PlayBook developers' conference were any definitive signs of what the company's existing operating systems might look like as soon as next year. This morning in a post to the corporate blog, RIM confirmed what the lack of evidence clearly revealed: The shipment timeframe for a new edition of the current operating system for RIM's PlayBook is now February, and even then, it won't contain the complete messaging capability that users expected.

Now that we've seen Research In Motion's vision for a vivid, rich mobile operating system for some kind of device -- probably a PlayBook, maybe a phone or two -- does BlackBerry have a chance by 2013 to regain the level of relevance it had in 2009? ReadWriteWeb talks at length with the world's best telecom and mobile platform analysts (pictured above, left to right):

Ross Rubin, Executive Director and Principal Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence

Al Hilwa, Program Director for Applications Development Software, IDC

Jan Dawson, Chief Analyst, Ovum

Carmi Levy, Technology Analyst, CTV News Channel

At Research in Motion's barely noticed developer's conference this week, they unveiled the next gen of their OS, BBX. Are you tempted to purchase a Blackberry now? On the poll, most people are in the "Meh" to "No" groups, but a few of you are standing in solidarity with Blackberry.

At least one of our writers believes Blackberry may be paralleling a much loved, but dead, video game company. But what about you? Will you give Blackberry another try, now that you've seen BBX?

We asked you earlier today and we culled your responses from Facebook, Google Plus, the original post and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.