When an industry gets big enough to spawn other sectors that grow parasitically on top of it, then you can tell it has some decent critical mass. And in many cases, that's where to look for jobs, or even start your own small venture.

Take mobile applications, for example. We all know that the iPhone has done exceedingly well as an application platform. So well, in fact, that start-ups are now forming with the sole purpose of measuring just how well. One such startup, Distimo, focuses on analysing trends in the mobile application space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it found that Apple leads the field by an order of magnitude. At the recent World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Distimo said that there are 150,000 applications in the iPhone app store, compared with just 20,000 in that of its nearest competitor, Android.

Let's face it, iPhone apps are so accessible that someone might download one for 99 cents sitting on the toilet, instead of leafing through a back copy of National Geographic. Their accessibility can convert into serious amounts of money for developers. Tapulous, a 20-strong development company that makes games and social software for Apple's Jesus-phone, is now making $1 million each month from them. Not everyone can be that successful, but most of us would take just a small slice of that particular pie.

What makes it so bizarre is that Apple is such a fascistic company. People can write any application they want for Android, and upload it to the app store without any third-party arbitration. Apple, on the other hand, has a notoriously draconian app approval policy. For example, it took an arbitrary decision to remove almost all sexual applications from the app store this month -- but chose to leave in apps from organisations such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy. This is unlikely to make developers happy -- but with such a lot of money at stake, who's going to complain very loudly?

The unknown quantity in mobile applications is Microsoft. It chose Barcelona as the venue to announce the mobile edition of Windows 7, which is a marked improvement on all previous versions of Windows Mobile. It's a beautiful looking system, with a sleek user interface, and promised links into services such as Xbox Live, which will be like flypaper for consumers. But not everyone is convinced that developers will support the platform. Beejive CEO Kai Yu is quoted here as saying that the company has simply ruined its reputation with mobile developers too much in the past. There's also the fact that we won't see the first of these phones until the fourth quarter, which puts Microsoft way behind the curve compared to the competition.

But whether you choose the iPhone, Android, Microsoft, or another competitor such as the recently open-sourced Symbian, there are worse ways to make money than by developing a mobile application -- even if you do it on the side, rather than taking it up was your day job. If you can avoid the hundreds of me-too applications out there and do something truly original, perhaps you could even be the next Tapulous.

Not the imaginative type? Worry not, my developer friend. Such is the momentum behind this industry that you can even get away without having an original thought in your head. Organisations such as iPhoneAppQuotes are springing up to connect creative thinkers with the software developers who can make their ideas an reality. But my advice: if anyone comes to you suggesting the ultimate iCleavage app for the iPhone, you might want to think twice.

How do you find IT jobs these days? Back in the day, the print publications were the main source. The first section that most IT professionals turned to when they got Computer Weekly or other trade magazines in the mail was the jobs part at the back. These days, the Internet has taken over as the main source for job seekers, but the signs are that employers and recruiters may not be taking advantage of it as much as they could. And that's potentially damaging, because innovation in online recruitment is speeding up.

Thanks to the economic crash, and the effect on information-centric industries such as financial services, jobs in IT these days are still relatively hard to come by. Almost a third of recent graduates are unemployed, and more than a quarter of those that are in work gross under £10,000, according to CWJobs' recent survey of 5000 jobseekers.

No wonder, then, that IT workers are turning to the web, with its high volume and fast turnover, to track the latest opportunities. Around 70% of respondents use general job sites on the Internet with lots of different vacancies. Around half of all candidates look for job opportunities specifically on a potential employer's website. Just under half of them go to specialist industry web sites to find their next appointment.

Worryingly though, a third of candidates interviewed by CWJobs said that they received no response when submitting a job application online. As the survey points out, graduates who have less job seeking experience may well take that lack of response as a negative sign, and not bother trying again.

As one respondent said: "The key problem is receiving no response. It feels like my applications disappear down a black hole." By not acknowledging responses and feeding back, recruiters risk alienating a valuable segment of their potential candidate base.

While recruiters struggle to nail down even these basic online skills, social media is raising the stakes for candidates and employers alike.
 
Twitter has dramatically grown dramatically in significance in the past couple of years. Whereas it used to be a site for inane chatter about what you had for breakfast that morning, it is now a site both for that same inane chatter, and for more serious things, such as passing on news links, asking questions of your community - and finding jobs.

Take TwitJobSearch, for example. This tool aggregates job postings on Twitter into one easily searchable place. A quick look shows 2000 job postings harvested in a single hour. These are jobs across the world, and in many different sectors, but there is still plenty of opportunity for finding the position that fits you. The site lets you save jobs to your Twitter account, and add your online CV. It also highlights the recruiters who are savvy enough to be using Twitter to post new job opportunities (hello there, @jobs_in_the_uk, and @itjobsldn!)

Still, we have a long way to go before people realise the significance of sites such as Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn were by far the most-used social media sites among the CW Jobs survey base.

LinkedIn is used more by contractors than permanent staff (roughly a half vs just over a third). This is probably because contractors need to score gigs far more regularly than full-timers, meaning that they have to network more. Services such as Twitter garnered around 10% in both camps.

But 29% of jobseekers surveyed say that they don't use social media sites at all, although given the incredible growth in the popularity of these sites, and the dire situation of the economy following the financial crisis, that is likely to change. As individuals begin to realize that it is possible to find jobs using these outlets, they're likely to catch on and begin firing up sophisticated (and free) social media management tools such as Hootsuite.

So, for recruiters and candidates alike, if you think that social media is for teenagers, now's the time to think again. The web will continue to play an increasingly important part in the recruitment process - and those who choose not to play will be missing out on a big opportunity. 

Microsoft has made a release candidate for Visual Studio 2010 available for download, and the rumour is that the final build should be ready in time for the official launch on April 12th. Should you care?

I'd argue that Microsoft's platform is in decline, despite good financial results recently on the back of the success of Windows 7. Windows-only development is increasingly unattractive in a world where Macs, iPhones and Linux devices such as Android and some netbooks jostle for attention alongside the once all-conquering Windows PC. Microsoft does internet too, of course, and even cross-platform for the desktop if you count what is coming in Silverlight 4.0; but even after the launch of Windows Azure this month, the company is not the first to come to mind when you think cloud.

That said, Visual Studio 2010 is a mighty impressive release. It is not just a new IDE, but also includes .NET Framework 4.0, the first complete update since version 2.0 in 2005. Versions 3.0 and 3.5 used the same underlying runtime as 2.0. The Chief Architect is Rico Mariani, Microsoft's .NET performance expert, which has no doubt helped in the tricky transition to Windows Presentation Foundation for the Visual Studio editor and shell; and much of the product is under the oversight of VP Scott Guthrie, one person who still knows how to communicate with developers, and whose presentation on Silverlight 4.0 rescued last year's Professional Developer's Conference from tedium.

Leaving aside the people involved, there is a ton of interesting stuff to explore, including the new F# language, IntelliTrace debugging that lets you step backwards through code, standard UML diagramming, source code management and issue tracking through Team Foundation no matter how small your team, greatly improved libraries and tools for concurrent programming, and if you have the Ultimate edition and the patience to set it up, an extraordinary thing called Lab Management which integrates virtual machines into the automated build and test cycle so that you can verify clean installs into complex multi-machine environments on every build, and use snapshots to analyse bugs at the moment they occur. This is also the first release to be designed with ASP.NET MVC in mind, and to have a full visual designer for Silverlight. Microsoft has also done some good work with Windows Workflow Foundation, in conjunction with a new runtime for the IIS web server called Windows AppFabric, making it easier to build and deploy applications that depend on long-running state management.

There are some disappointments. One is that Visual Studio is out of synch with Silverlight 4.0, so despite developer attention having largely shifted to the 4.0 release, Visual Studio 2010 will ship with Silverlight 3.0 support. There will be an add-on in due course that will put that right. Another is that Windows Azure development is not as smoothly integrated as I had hoped. SharePoint development, while much improved, remains an arduous process that tends to take over your development machine; and there is not much new in mobile development as yet. I am sure there will be plenty of other problems and frustrations; so much here is new that it is nearly inevitable.

These issue have not stopped me from enjoying my work so far with the beta and now the RC. If you have any interest in Microsoft's platform, I suggest you take a look.

 

Well, Apple's iPad was something of a letdown, wasn't it? The most anticipated product since the iPhone launched onto the global stage not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with what can only be described as an embarrassed shuffle.

You could tell that things were starting to go awry even as Steve Jobs sat down in the comfy chair onstage to carry out the demo. He was scrolling happily through several web pages, blissfully ignoring the fact that the first one he went to - the New York Times - simply didn't work as it was intended. Why? Because apparently, just like its smaller brother, the iPad doesn't support Adobe Flash.



Tim Anderson wrote recently about the need to develop for the mobile Internet. Mobile search and location-based services will drive the mobile web. Mobile advertising has been growing slower than expected -- recently, research firm EMarketer anticipated a $1.1 billion spend by 2012. The financial downturn has slowed developments, but the potential for mobile Internet revenues is staring us in the face, nevertheless.

This is why Jobs' demo last Wednesday is so significant. The iPad is flawed in many respects. It has no camera. There are no standard ports on the thing. It costs more than many net books, and yet its operating system is locked down. But one of the biggest flaws is that without Flash, many of the sites that we would like to visit are not available.

Such is Adobe's chagrin that its platform evangelist Lee Brimelow published a list of websites including Google Finance, Disney, CNN, popular American media streaming site Hulu, and Facebook application Farmville. None of them were without Flash, meaning that none of them will work on the iPad.

Apple's decision to eschew Flash on the iPhone was irritating enough for Adobe, but to do it on a tablet device that Apple hopes will replace the laptop for many consumers sitting on the couch in the evenings is no less than a declaration of war. Adobe needs to promote itself in new markets like this one, where everything is at stake, and Apple is making it very difficult.

Adobe definitely has cause to worry. Apple's share of the mobile market is only 2.7%, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. On the other hand, it sold 99.4% of all mobile applications last year. People buying Apple's mobile devices use them in ways that users of other mobile platforms do not, and Adobe will be well aware of this, as will Microsoft, which offers the competing Silverlight technology.

And looming on the horizon is a potential game changer: HTML 5. This as-yet unratified technology is nevertheless being supported in its unratified perform in many browsers. It is vastly more functional than HTML 4. Web developers can display video using it, without having to resort to Flash. They can produce HTML-only pages that enable you to drag and drop anything, and edit any content. This is why Google Wave, the search engine giant's revolutionary new online messaging system, was built in HTML 5. It looks and feels like a desktop application.

HTML 5 cannot claim to do as much as Flash can, but it may do enough. Apple, which itself likes to dominate all aspects of its business, doesn't like it when other companies like Adobe dominate a single part of the online experience. What Jobs may have been imagining when he scrawled through that broken site last week was a world in which it used HTML 5 -- and in which Adobe was increasingly irrelevant.

What does that mean for IT professionals and web developers today? It means that understanding HTML 5 as it develops, and honing your skills in this exciting new technology, might not be a bad bet. As this new decade rolls on, you will find it looking more and more attractive on your CV.