The Mobile Business App Market Explodes: Figuratively If Not Yet Literally

Who has the time?

The number of mobile apps designed for business users is expanding exponentially, as are the companies being funded to generate them.

This is reminiscent of every land-rush moment in tech: everyone seems to see an opportunity simultaneously and then sprints to get their solution to market before all the others, usually to discover that they are flooding an already over-saturated consumer base.

Business productivity, especially sales productivity, appears to be an especially popular feature. As the article below explains, the people who track this stuff have already sub-divided that subject into five categories - and that doesnt even count sales.

The question beyond who has the time to research all this stuff is, who has the time to familiarize themselves with it - and then use it. Oh, and who has the budget to pay for all of it? The answer, of course, is no one. At least no one with a job description that does not include evaluating mobile business apps.

Now, before we are accused of being too jaded and cynical, let us acknowledge that mobile 'utilities' are going to become increasingly focused, invaluable and available. That is not the point. Those for whom these functions are intended will eventually figure out which ones are best and there will then be the usual consolidation in the industry segment. In the interim, the spate of innovation will no doubt spur all of those in this space to be even more creative and effective. It's just that there are a lot of them, so realistically, no one should assume that this is all going to end happily for everyone. JL

Kevin Spain reports in GigaOm:

Over the last six months we have witnessed a surge in mobile apps designed for business users.
In connection with a recent Emergence event dedicated to the entrepreneurs building these apps, we updated our Mobile Business App Landscape. Back in May, we had 90 companies on the on the landscape. Today we have over 150. We are excited to share the latest version:

The changes we’ve seen in the mobile business app market over the past six months fall into three key areas:

• Two verticals, healthcare and real estate, have experienced a surge of company creation activity. We added six new companies to the healthcare category, including Biomeme, Tiatros, Nephosity, Mediagram, and Smartindoor. Within the real estate vertical, we could barely fit all of the new companies in one box. New companies include FotoIN, FotoNotes, Dotloop, Geedra, Reesio, Aptexx and TouchCMA.
• We also noticed a dramatic increase in the number of business productivity apps. As a result, we decided to split the productivity category into five sub-categories: content, communication, task management & calendar, mobile forms, and other. Communication represents the biggest sub-category and includes a number of new enterprise communication apps such as Cotap, Zula, and Branchout. In addition, we’ve seen a significant number of new tablet-based presentation creation and viewing apps emerge since our last landscape.
• When it comes to apps that target specific business functions, we’ve seen the most new companies created in sales, marketing and service. In particular, we noted the introduction of many new apps focused on increasing the productivity of sales reps. At Emergence, we are excited to continue tracking the fast-growing ecosystem of mobile business apps. Our next landscape update will be published in the second quarter of 2014.