Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

If I had any pluck, I would invest in apps. "What are apps?", you ask, silently. Apps, or applications, are special programs for your phone which give you maps for the strange city you are in, let you follow the temperature, the news, the stock market or the hit lists. The app is what makes your smart phone smart. There is an app for everything and everyone buys apps. The market is estimated to be worth around $ 6 million this year, which is a doubling of last year.

Just a few of the iPhone apps

At the moment Apple is hogging most of the shares through their iPhone app flora, but recently 24 operators and smart phone manufacturers have joined forces in the Wholesale Application Community (WHAC). They want to create an open platform to compete with Apple, a platform from which Apple is excluded. As it is, only iPhones take the Apple apps, but WHAC envisions a more adaptable set of apps which not only gives the customer more choice and vitalises smart phone development, but also diversifies the market and promotes competition.

For now, smart phones constitute only about 20% of the market, but as both the smart phone and the app market is expanding at an astonishing rate, it would probably be a good idea to invest in such stocks as early as possible.

Sources: CNN, http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/images/set3/apl10.jpg, last visited 15.2.2010