I-phone Junkie….

After years of fighting the urge to cave in and switch to an iPhone, I finally jumped in with both feet roughly 10 days ago. I was able to resist its allure for so long due to the horror stories I would hear from people about AT&T’s shoddy coverage, dropped calls, etc. Many, I’m sure, were overblown, but they were still concerning enough to keep me from making the transition. However, I had toyed with my friends’ iPhones for quite some time and loved the user-friendly interface, resulting in an immediate case of Apple envy.I became a Droid man in the interim and kept trying to convince myself that I wasn’t in fact jealous…..that I liked my snazzy phone just as much. Clearly I was only kidding myself, because once the iPhone was released to Verizon customers I lasted just over a week before I made the purchase……what a pushover.

New phone in hand, I felt like a new man. After perusing the app shop and playing with the phone’s new features for longer than I care to admit, I got to thinking……it really is amazing how big of an impact smartphones in general have on our everyday lives.I don’t know how I survived for so long without that coveted internet access on my handheld device. So, I started to do a little research…

Nielsen released a study saying that there are close to 230 million cell phone users over the age of 13 in the US as we speak, and a staggering portion of these folks (close to 35%) are holding smartphones in their hands. This number is expected to double up in the next few years, creating a huge market for ambitious entrepreneurs to target for the foreseeable future. In the process, a big destination for venture funding has formed.

While talking to one of these aforementioned entrepreneurs this week, he made reference to a Gartner study stating that there will be close to $15 Billion in revenues generated by application stores this year alone….$15 Billion! Obviously this figure is only going to climb steadily in the foreseeable future, and the resulting push for organizations to mobilize their content is in full swing. If they opt not to, they run the risk of being left in their competitor’s dust. This has led to a huge number of organizations creating customizable, user friendly platforms to help this needy customer base make the transition to the mobile world.

With a little expansion capital under their belt and the right go to market strategy, these young, growing companies stand to reap huge financial benefits in the years to come.