If you’ve been following tech websites recently, you will have heard a lot about application stores and applications over the last year. Apple did it and everyone followed. Developers have made money and customers have enjoyed a huge range of software solutions. A year ago, Intel announced that they too were getting into the app-store game. With 30 million netbooks out there and a clear strategy to push into TV, smartphones and cars,  it wasn’t a bad idea at all. Last week Intel took us to San Francisco to get an update on the progress so far.

Since last year we’ve seen some progress by the teams to roll out a client to Windows and to seed some apps by offering prizes for new apps. They’ve also seen progress in the netbook market which has now grown to 70M with another projected 40M to come on top of that in the next year. They’ve also seen the tablet opportunities take off as Apple proved that it could actually be a successful form factor. Clearly Intel are doubling-up their efforts too as we experienced an unprecedented amount of marketing for a software product. Keynote mentions, an AppUp store in the high street (the former Sony Style store no less) and an additional 2-day conference dedicated to everything AppUp.  Full disclosure must be given at this point we had a fantastic time at the ‘Elements’ social event on Wednesday!

So it looks like AppUp is getting the support from within Intel but does it really stand a chance? Do we need software store on Windows? Possibly not but AppUp is a bit more than just a repository and spreads further than just netbooks.

Key Features of AppUp

• Write native code C++, QT
• Assistance for porting iPhone apps is available (Angry Birds is coming soon!)
• Write Flex apps (Adobe flash or Adobe Air)
• Silverlight support is being worked on
• Intel are managing the payment back-end
• Intel are managing the app authorisation
• There will be multiple branded and tailored stores. (We’re hearing that there could be 10 or more by the end of the year.)
• Tailored stores do not have to show a complete catalogue
• Intel are introducing a curation system where partners can highlight good apps. (this could extend to community members)
• Sega, Konami, Unity and other game creators are on board
• Device manufacturers are on board (Asus and Samsung will distribute the store with netbooks)
• Device distributors are on board (Best-Buy, Currys and others have announced they will promote the app store)
• The future includes media distribution
• The future includes affiliation schemes (this is a killer feature in my opinion)
• The hardware platforms we’ve seen so far are blowing away anything you’ll see on a smartphone in 2010.

AppUp is out of beta and available for Windows and Moblin (MeeGo coming soon.) You can download it here.

Over and above all that, there’s a significant point to note this isn’t just a Windows-based product. Intel are pitching this as a value-add feature for MeeGo too and that means tablets, smart devices, smartphones, Smart TV, Google TV, MeeGo TV and products like Boxee that have announced they will ship a product on Intel Atom. Total addressable market for AppUp is quoted as about 500 million end user devices by end of 2013. With sales of netbooks due to reach 200M by that time I’d personally put it much higher. Develop today and you could be looking at some serious opportunities by end of 2011. I’m not joking when I say that i’m seriously looking at going back into writing software!

Problems Solved

It looks like Intel will have enough installed user-base before mid-2011 and with Intel’s marketing power and a big number of manufacturers and retail partners will solve the problem of activating those end-users. They also seem to be on track to seed applications by offering an easy route for porting from existing platforms. The Adobe Air route is almost too simple and I expect to see hundreds, if not thousands of flash games being optimised over to the platform (along with a new monetisation opportunity) in no time at all.

The problem of having compelling end-user products seems to be well on its way to being solved too. I see Windows as a barrier until MeeGo products hit the market but with Intel’s Atom platforms growing to cover the 4 inch to 42 inch+ screen range, there’s a tidy set of silicon, software and solution stacks forming. We’ll see interesting products in 2011 for sure. Google TV and the current tablet craze will make sure of that.

Getting the word out to developers shouldn’t be too hard either. Once the installed user-base is in place and once a few MeeGo products are on the market it will only take the existing media channels, blogs, forums and some Intel incentives to get the developers interested. If there’s one thing thats for sure, there are a huge number of fickle devs out there just looking for the next revenue opportunity.

Guy Kawasaki, Scott Hershkowitz, Ben Parr, Loic Le Meur, Regan Fletcher at AppUp Elements

The 5 Challenges.

Challenge 1 is to seed the application store with quality applications that have been written with the end platform in mind. Right now we’re seeing apps ported over from other platforms (Windows Mobile, AIR, iPhone) to the netbook. While these apps seem to be taking the netbook screen into account, most of them are ignoring much of the screen space, processing power and graphics opportunities. I certainly didn’t see anything that blew me away at IDF and Elements.

Challenge 2 is to prevent the problem of applications appearing on the wrong platforms. An application written for MeeGo on a tablet may be looking for an accelerometer that just won’t be there on a netbook. I have no idea how AppUp will handle that.

Challenge 3 is time. iOS 4 is already making huge inroads in this area and if Apple dial-in new products, the momentum won’t stop. The same is true of Android 3.0. Application developers that have had success on these platforms may choose to concentrate on these opportunities first. Chrome OS and HTML5 is also something to watch during 2011 too.

Challenge 4 is Intel itself, While the Elements 2010 evening party was an impressive show of marketing that made me love Intel more and more during the evening, that is not going to make Intel ‘cool.’ How are they going to dial-in the magic that makes people sit up and take notice? AppUp itself is losely branded and likely to appear branded under other names but this sort of fragmentation could actually make it harder to market the solution to developers.

Challenge 5 is MeeGo and Ovi. MeeGo isn’t just an Intel project, it’s Nokia’s baby too and MeeGo for ARM could be huge. If AppUp is dropped on top of ARM MeeGo to make it even more compelling then the whole AppUp project would have bit the Intel boys in the bum. AppUp could limit itself to i86-only but even then, Ovi could come along and boost the products. Remember, ARM and Intel are playing in the same product space with Cortex and Atom,

Peter Biddle Head of AppUp Development for Intel

Exposing the Tail and Developer Feedback.

We were wined and dined, educated and stimulated by Intel in San Francisco but however long I sleep on this article I still see huge opportunities and an incredibly flexible application store framework. Curation and affiliation could be killer features and if you take a look at the slide on the right (click to enlarge) you can see that Intel sees the value in exposing the long tail. I wholeheartedly agree with that.  The biggest take-away though is the feedback from the developers so far. It’s all very positive and exciting and you can experience that first hand of a video we shot at the Elements event. Check the video out [Coming Soon] and get another opinion about what’s going on here.

It looks like we’ve really got quite the challenger here. As Paul Otellini said in his keynote last week, it’s about providing computing solutions and not just silicon now. Yup, it’s all about the apps, stupid!

The AppUp client is available here.

We’ve spent a week in San Francisco at one of the biggest developer shows of the year and haven’t posted a single article on Carrypad yet and that’s because most of what we saw was Windows-based. That, in our eyes, isn’t exactly the ideal solution for consumer-focused solutions we would be reporting on at Carrypad. The Dell Duo was cool but it’s Windows 7 on a netbook platform with a launcher. The ExoPC was cool but once again, it was a Windows 7 netbook without the keyboard. The Ocosmos OC1 was amazing but once again, its a Windows 7 device.

Only one item stood out for me in terms of consumer-focused solutions and I haven’t reported on it yet Its an Android tablet…on Intel.

More images in the gallery.

We don’t know too much about the device yet because the NFS NPad was being used as a demonstrator by another company but from what we see, Moorestown is going to enable far far better consumer-focused solutions than the N450 and N550 solutions we’ve been seeing running Windows. It was thin and very light (comparable to the Archos 101 which runs on an ARM Cortex core) and surprisingly, running Android. A quick look around the net tells us that the NPad also appeared at Computex and has also been spotted running Red Flag’s MeeGo-based Linux distribution. This is a sign of what might happen when MeeGo meets Moorestown so if you’re not worried about Windows but still want a powerful tablet, this could be worth waiting for.

Photo via Ken Kaplan

Update: Video and specifications now avilable

JKK and I are meeting the Ocosmos guys at 4pm this afternoon but I just wanted to give you a heads-up on something that could appeal to many of you. Not only is this an interesting design for productivity, it’s also designed on Oaktrail. That means it’s not going to be in the market until late this year or early this year but it might be worth the wait because Oaktrail is going to bring you more battery life (expected average 20% in-use improvements) but also some higher clock-rates, potential standby or idle power savings, HD encoding and much cooler devices. Oaktrail is smaller too so we should see the improvement in size and space for battery capacity.

Intel have rounded up some key partners here at IDF 2010 to talk about the recent AppUp announcements.

Notes taken at the panel session:

Appup is ‘gold’ Out of beta and ready to go. New version is now available. Much faster!

Dixons (Garry Hearns) on App Stores:

Bringing life to technology. AppUp store crucial.

Tapping into unrecognised needs through developers.

Gary talks about safe application stores.

Q. How are you going to help developers.

Eric Wittman (Adobe)

We have Project Melrose Flash and AIR developers can put their apps into AppUp

Joe Morris Konami:

Migrating from console to digital. Fragmentation has been difficult in the mobile space. “We see AppUp as solving the fragmentation problem, creating an ecosystem in which developers can prosper. inch

Gary Hearns Dixons

Open questions:

Question from Sascha When are you releasing AppUp center on EeePC line
Asus: AppUp on Asus netbooks in retail stores in Novemeber.

Question from Darren Waters: How will the app store be branded, marketed in Dixons.

Dixons: Co-branded store. Pre-Christmas awareness. Online marketing on websites. DM customers. Strong in-store presence. After Christmas: Where appropriate will be installed on Advent computers.

Question: Are you doing anything to promote business apps.

Biddle: Consumer space is our focus. We’re not going to turn away productivity apps.

Summary: Clearly these are partners that already committed to AppUp so the message will be very positive but its good to see people finally announcing products, software and marketing. Its a commitment from outside Intel and that’s a very important first step.

The AppUp store can be downloaded here.

My current laptop is a netbook. I’ve been using it as my portable computer for well over a year and I’m very happy with it. I’m using XP, it’s got a 2GB RAM upgrade and a fast SSD and a great built-in 3G module. The only issue with it is that any other netbook out there is a downgrade for me because switching to Windows 7 on a standard netbook is noticeably slower.

That all changed today when I took on the Acer D255 as a loaner for the Intel Developer Forum I’m attending this week. [Thanks to Intel They paid for the trip over here] It’s truly the first netbook I’ve used that gives me a smooth and reliable Windows 7 experience and having already tested battery drain, 720p playback, Crystalmark and video rendering performance, I can say that it really does well, It’s light and Sascha (Netbooknews) tells me it only costs 350 Euros. That’s a stunning price for 6-8hrs of dual-core action.

Here’s a little look-round on the device. See below for some early benchmark results.

I’ve done three benchmarking tests on the device. The first is a battery drain test and I’m pleased to see that Acer appear to be getting the best possible out of the platform. With screen brightness at minimum and Wifi off I was able to get a figure of just 4W. With Wifi on, that went up to 4.6W. Average drain for web browsing is around the 7-8W mark which means that the 49Wh battery is going to give a good 6hrs of action. Rendering a video with all cores and at 100% i was 11W of drain. For a device that weighs 1250 grams thats pretty good. A better quality 6-cell battery could yield even better results.

I terms of CrystalMark, I’m seeing results that will make anyone happy. 35K is not a figure we see often in the mobile computing world. The hard disk is impressive to.

My final benchmark was a video rendering test. It looks like I’m going to save 25-30% in terms of time on rendering and that’s well worth the 50-euro premium that a dual-core Atom netbook is costing.

We’re getting a clearer picture of the operating system strategy from Google today as PCMag reports on Eric Schmidt’s closing keynote at IFA in Berlin. Apart from talking about the future of search, location search, fast search, personal search and the growth in mobile web and smartphones, he confirmed in a Q&A that Chrome OS is targeted at netbooks.

The next question is ‘what is a netbook’ but at least the strategy for Chrome OS aligns with what Google said on day one. If we consider Chrome OS to be a very fast way to access Google search and web applications and add the web application layer/web app store then you have a basic framework for a web-based user interface and application layer for a simple Linux-based PC. Interestingly, that Linux-based core could come from the Android space, from Linaro, from MeeGo or any of the other mobile-focused Linux platforms and could even contain an Android environment as part of the user-layer but we get the impression that Google is going it alone on this as a separate project. It will be interesting to see what netbook manufacturers pick it up and work their drivers and customisations into it because at the moment, the Intel/Nokia-backed MeeGo appears to have the better position.

With Chrome OS targeted at netbooks it would be easy to summise now that Android 3.0 is for next-gen high-end smartphones, tablets and smart-books. We need to be a little careful though because Google is also putting a lot of effort into TV and Eric Schmidt confirmed in his keynote that Android is a part of Google TV. Could this be the target for Android 3.0? Whatever the strategy here, the key point is that Google will open Android up to new screen sizes. Its a clear signal for developers to start thinking about large-screen applications.

When will this happen? Chrome partnerships will be announced later this year but Android 3.0 timescales are less clear.

With companies like Samsung, Dell and Toshiba moving real products into this space now and with Samsung pushing for 10M sales of the Galaxy Tab [That seems way too high to me Chippy] there must be people at Google thinking about speeding up the Android 3.0 process. Major changes to Market and their app suite would be needed so this isn’t a minor task but with HP, Nokia, Intel and others breathing down their necks, it has to happen soon.

See also: Question Marks that Remain Over Q4 Tablets

Sidenote: Intel are working on an X86 port of Android for their ‘always-on’ capable platforms for 2011. These platforms are targeted at the 4-10 inch screen space and so clearly something has to happen with large screen support. With Intel and a key member of the Open Handset Alliance and a close Google partner (Google TV for example) we should also watch for clues from that side of the camp. Intel are likely to have X86-Android ready for mid-late 2011 and this, according to Intel, will be offered up as an official X86 Android. Some of this Intel/Android work is also likely to be part of Google TV.

The full and very interesting keynote is available here.

Via netbooknews.de

We’ve got a day off from the chaos of IFA today while we participate in the Intel Developers Day in Berlin.(Facebook page)  We’re hearing about Atom, Meego, AppUp and other elements of the ecosystem. We’re also trying our best to stream it out via MeetMobility. Check out Meetmobility Live for the current stream. Some will be  in German and we’re at risk from bandwidth limitations.

WeTab is also here:

AppUp is the Intel-designed platform for app-stores on Windows and Maemo/MeeGo devices that utilize their Atom products. Smartphones, netbooks, tablets, UMPCs and MIDs navigation devices, Internet TV and in-car entertainment all fall under that banner which make AppUp an interesting move as we consider the addressable market over the next 5 years.

Progress continues (AppUp was only born just over a year ago) and we expect to hear a lot more about it at the Intel Developer Forum in Sept but there have been two announcements recently that are worth updating you all about. I know there are some developers out there and a lot of Atom users!

Firstly, Intel and Adobe have announced that support for AIR apps is now working. This is particularly interesting as it gives AIR app developers a place to monetize their apps. Up until now, most of the popular AIR apps have been free so although we’re unlikely to see those app developers start charging, it might stimulate them to think of other possibilities within the multi-million netbook market. I know the Smartphones haven’t arrived yet but developing an AIR app that could be sold in multiple markets with simple UI changes sounds attractive for developers. Intel provide more information here. Let us know if AIR is something you’re considering. [Via Liliputing]

If you’re a gaming type of person, the second announcement will interest you because it’s all about getting games onto the netbook platform. I’ve long wondered why people like Electronic Arts don’t go through their back-catalogue and release netbook versions of their old classics. With over 50 million netbooks out there, you’d think there would be some opportunities for them. At Computex, Konami announced that they are looking at AppUp but this new competition should drive even more interest. The Games Creators, a site sponsored by Intel, is offering a pot of $8K to games developers. Obviously the criteria is netbook focused which means you’ll need to be getting the best out of the screen size, the processing power, controls and also targeting the netbook user. We’re probably not talking about hardcore gamers here but think about the 1-hour time-period and the places that netbooks get used. Trains, planes, sofa, bed and coffee-shop. How about a game that finds other netbooks in the area using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and social media like Foursquare and Twitter. Get the game to run in the background, check into Foursquare and put out some sort of signal on Twitter that other people running the game would automatically pick up. You’d have a cool network of like-minded location-focused casual gamers in no time! Come to think of it, maybe that’s something that Starbucks should sponsor. You heard it here first!

Anyway, all the details are in the pages here. Good luck and please let us know if you’re interested in this. We’d love to find out about your experiences. [Via Liliputing]

Stay tuned over the next month for more AppUp news. We’re expecting AppUp for MeeGo to be announced along with more competitions and updates on progress. More on AppUp, here. The AppUp forum is here. We’re also at AppUp Elements, a 2-day AppUp conference on the 15th and 16th of September (invitation only, no-less!) where we will be attending some unique sessions and presentations. We’re not software developers ourselves but we’ll be trying to pick-up and relay key information about how to develop, port and make money with AppUp. We’ll also be sharing some of our experience from end users and developers so if you’ve got thoughts you want us to take to Elements, let us know in the comments.