Two billion mobile apps served ... and counting? Mobile applications have taken the world by storm, and in this issue of Engage, Daniel Odio, co-founder and COO of PointAbout, talks about how publishers can get in on the mobile-app gold rush early. Take a look at our video interview and the Engage blog for even more. If you get even one great idea, Engage is worth reading and watching.

INDUSTRY BUZZ

Magazine Audiences Increase by 8%

Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI) announced this week that over the last decade the total audience for leading consumer magazines has increased by about 8%. MediaPost compared MRI's annual spring audience figures from 2000 to 2009 for 81 titles in three categories: general interest, women's interest, and men's interest. Read the full story here.

71 Magazines Launched in September

Seventy-one new magazines launched in September, according to Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. Eighteen of those titles have a frequency of four times a year or more. According to Husni, that brings the total number of print launches to 528 so far this year. Read the full story here.

Apple's New Tablet

Apple is reportedly in talks with several media companies to negotiate content for a new electronic device said to “redefine print.” The tablet will hybridize content, drawing not just from the printed word, but from audio, video and interactive graphics. This next generation publishing device could be officially announced as soon as January 2010. Read the full story here.

Your Mobile Newsstand

Earlier this month, The Economist launched a mobile newsstand: New York readers sign up for weekly texts, listing each week's top stories and topics for the next day's magazine. If they're interested, they simply click on the link and order by 9 p.m. The Economist will be hand-delivered to their door by 6 a.m. the next morning, before newsstands even get them. Read the full story here.

Pop-Up Magazine: Live!

If you live in San Francisco, hopefully you're enjoying "Pop-Up Magazine," a live magazine "created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience" that has been "publishing" since April. Pop-Up Magazine unfolds like a magazine: short reviews, dispatches, and provocations anchor the beginning, then longer features follow.

New Online Ad Exchange

This month Google announced the launch of a new marketplace for online display ads, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The new service will allow companies to bid for ad space from different web sites in real time, establishing a stock exchange of sorts for online advertising. Keep an eye out for this service. A PDF of Google's explanation of the Ad Exchange can be read here.

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Gold Rush: There's an App for That

Just this Monday, Apple announced a feat that wasn't even imaginable two years ago: 2 billion mobile app downloads in the last year and a half; a billion of those downloads occurring since April. That's 6.3 million app downloads a day.

Talk about a gold rush: There are more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone, and tens of thousands more for other smart phones, including Nokia's BlackBerry and Google's Android. Research firm Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion app downloads will garner $4.2 billion in revenue by 2013, and advertising dollars will follow. A report released by eMarketer just yesterday predicts spending on mobile advertising in the U.S. will grow to $1.56 billion by 2013. That's almost five times what was spent last year.

"We're watching the establishment of the app economy," said Aileen Lee, a partner at Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which just announced a $100 million iFund for app developers, in an interview with AdAge. "It's a mistake for brands or other companies to not think of mobile totally different from the web."

Daniel Odio, co-founder and COO of PointAbout, a mobile applications company based in Washington, D.C., saw the light early, and the company is riding the wave of this new app economy. "Mobile is the way that people are starting to get content on a device they are carrying around with them all the time anyway," he says.

Watch Daniel Odio talk about developing mobile apps.

His company, PointAbout, is breaking ground by making it simple for publishers to produce mobile apps through "lightweight" or "disposable" apps: just upload your RSS feed, some branding, and away you go. It's quick, cheap, and a business model can be easily wrapped around it.

For many publishers, this type of mobile app is the shining light at the end of the tunnel-a new content distribution channel that can be monetized-even though, initially, "a lot of publishers don't want to spend money on mobile because they are not sure what the ROI is," says Odio.

Need proof? Just look at Rodale's Men's Health and Women's Health, which launched a series of iPhone apps a few months ago, offering everything from workouts to drink recipes. The paid apps have been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

The Rodale apps are "native" apps, meaning they are rich, interactive little pieces of software that users download onto their smart phone. Publishers can also take a wider approach by creating extensions for the mobile web, which will reach more than just iPhone users: According to a July Pew report, one third of Americans have a cell phone to access the internet for emailing, instant messaging or information-seeking.

But be prepared to invest. "Developing apps is expensive now, mostly because it's new," says Odio. "If you want to make a foray into mobile space, you can do it with $5,000, using an existing RSS feed with some branding. If you really want to get into the richness of the experience, you should budget $25,000 to $50,000."

Ready to get started? Check out our Best Practices for Mobile Publishing.

Best Practices: Mobile Publishing

Share your tips...