'App Economy' credited with contributing nearly half a million jobs to US

Los Angeles, Feb 9 (ANI): 'App economy' could become the future job leader in the US as it has led to the employment of 466,000 workers in the last five years- a trend that will only continue to grow, a new study has revealed.

The new report commissioned by TechNet, a bipartisan and political network of technology CEOs, explains the App Economy as a compilation of interlocking ecosystems that comprises a core company, which creates and maintains a platform and an app marketplace (Amazon, Google, Blackberry, Windows), as well as small and large companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform.

The report also mentions that companies can belong to many ecosystems and often does.

"Every major consumer-facing company, and many business-facing companies, has discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business," the LA Times quoted Michael Mandel, the former chief economist of Business Week who authored the report, as saying.

"In some sense, that makes the App Economy the construction sector of the 21st century, building a new front door to everyone's house and in some cases constructing a whole new house."

In order to find out how many jobs were created from Apps, Mandel drew on information from the Conference Board Help-Wanted Online (HWOL) database - which is a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute collection of want ads.

By searching the HWOL database for certain keywords, and then applying historic ratios to the number of want ads in the tech occupation and the actual level of tech employment, and also looking at estimates of spillover effects to the broader economy, he settled on the 466,000 figure.

Apparently, this economy did not exist until 2007 when the iPhone was introduced for the first time.

Programmers should be very psyched, but also people lacking hard tech skills should find this news promising, because as App companies grow they also need human resource experts, sales people, marketing people and other people to fill non-tech functions.

"A careful examination of want ads placed by midsize app developers suggest that a 1 to 1 ratio between tech jobs and non-tech jobs is not unreasonable," Mandel added. (ANI)