Creating mobile applications has suddenly become sexy and a very in-thing after the success of some very cool applications at iTunes App Store. Developers have found an opportunity to make it big by creating mobile applications. The focus has only recently moved to Smart phones when biggies of web world (say Google & Apple) decided to plunge into it.

Google is not creating any mobile phone but its mobile Operating System Android will debut this year and users will demand more and more mobile applications to stuff into their mobile phones. The fact that some of the developers who created mobile application for iPhone have struck gold is a reason enough for others (not just developers) to jump into development bandwagon. Two companies are trying to make development a child’s play for all those netizens who want to create applications but don’t have the know-how.

Cascada is one firm which claims to provide the simplest method for creating and distributing applications. Cascada’s Breeze platform allows anyone with basic knowledge of programming to create applications which can then be run on any Java enabled mobile phone. the mobile version of Java, J2ME is supported by billions of mobile phones in the market today and Cascada seeks market in consumers using such mobile phones. Cscada has done its homework pretty well as they have a developed a dedicated portal for all the applications which I though is inspired from Firefox extensions page. The Mobile application portal of Cascada makes searching the required or relevant applications pretty simple with sorted columns according to popularity, rating etc. and downloading it is breeze just like name of platform. The mobile phone users can either download applications from the mobile browser or they can just submit their mobile phone number and the downloading link will be sent to them. Unlike the Apple iPhone apps the mobile applications made using Breeze will be free and money will be made through mobile advertisements. Cascada is definitely looking for bigger things and the only challenge will be to entice somewhat good and better developers.

The second company doing things in this domain is Iceberg which is more experienced and they have created quite a niche in the industry. However the interest of Iceberg has been towards making programming (not just mobile application programming) accessible to more and more users. Iceberg sees future of Web (Web 3.0) as an era when everyone would be a programmer. Developers creating application can either sell it or just dole away for fun.

I see a great potential in this domain and we can expect more companies jumping into it with better platforms. Creating mobile applications however has not been easy because of relatively very high degree of variance in the core and structure of mobile phones. Developers could not afford to test their applications on ever single goddamn mobile platform and Apple iPhone gave them the first opportunity whetre they didn’t had such problem and we could see similar thing happenning on Android or even Cascada Breeze because the strength of Breeze is the availability of J2ME on most mobile phonesthat are available in market.

Future is definitely exciting and mobile.

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