Getting mobile applications to market can be intimidating. In taking their businesses mobile, online content providers, communities and marketers are faced with a choice; either develop their own mobile applications, or license their content or community to a third party aggregator that creates and manages mobile applications. Unfortunately, neither option delivers the key benefits these businesses need:

• getting their applications to the mobile market fast
• giving them flexible control of rich content on mobile devices
• ensuring that their applications reach the majority of mobile end users

Developing a mobile application that can run on a majority of mobile handset devices and platforms is a complicated and time-consuming endeavor. Ensuring that your mobile applications reach a majority of end users is critical, but creating applications that run on all six of the mobile platforms, more than 50 mobile carriers, and hundreds of different handset device models is daunting. Such a development effort can take a team of experienced programmers six months to a year or more to get your application running on just half of today's mobile handsets – and the development costs are enormous.

The alternative to developing your own mobile applications has been to license your content or community to a third party aggregator who creates and manages mobile applications. But, surrendering control of your content is tricky. First, putting your brand image in someone else's control is risky. Second, you must rely on someone else each time you need to update your content or application. This costs you money, time, and, because your mobile content will be out of sync with your website, brand consistency. Just as importantly, few, if any, third party content aggregators can ensure that your mobile application will run on a majority of the mobile handset models currently in use so your content will not reach a majority of mobile end users.