App army promises new tech revolution

App sales are booming at a time when corporations are cutting tech spending and consumers are pinching pennies. Indeed, veteran industry executives, investors and analysts are calling the shift to Internet-capable devices and the apps that run on them a once-a-decade leap in technology, on a par with the great personal computing boom of the 1980s and the debut of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. No company is more central to the shift towards the mobile Internet than Apple, which enjoys a wide lead in distributing applications. More than 100,000 apps are available on its App Store and more than 2bn have been downloaded in less than a year and a half. To keep that gusher flowing, Apple has sought to inspire more outsider developers with the rare rags-to-riches stories - like that of Steve Demeter, a bank programmer who earned $250,000 in two months of 2008 after launching a simple game called Trism. But just as many from the front lines of the dot-com revolution were left on the battlefield, not all of those writing for the tiny screen will make it big.