To my mind, the greatest spur to the entrepreneurial revolution of the 1980s was the cellphone. By enabling entrepreneurs to stay in touch with customers and employees, mobile phones enhanced their ability to monitor, direct and grow their companies.

Today, we're witnessing another entrepreneurial revolution. And again, your cellphone (the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphones) is in the middle of it. But so are the iPod, Google's Android operating system and 350 million social networkers on Facebook.

If you have played Mafia Wars (or the more bucolic Farmville) on Facebook, pretended to pour an iBeer on your iPhone, or used your BlackBerry to check the weather, you're a charter member of the App Economy. Around the world, independent software developers are creating ingenious new applications for these robust, open-source technologies. Apps come in all shapes and sizes, many of them free (although they may expose you to gimmicky advertising), many priced at 99¢ and few costing more than $10. Some are marvels of technology, many are "social" games to play with friends and others are plain dumb. As comedian Jimmy Kimmel said recently, "If everyone in America gives as much as they spent on the iFart app, Haiti would be saved."

(Speaking of which, look at London, Ont.-based Tall Tree Games, developers of the Fish World aquarium app for Facebook, with 1.5 million players a day. Its recent promotion exhorting users to buy a new fish for their virtual tank, the Haitian cichlid, raised $20,000 for Haitian relief in one week.)

The advent of apps has created amazing opportunities. In marketplaces such as Apple's App Store and Research in Motion's App World, thousands of developers working from studios, homes and dorm rooms are now developing games, calendars, music programs and productivity tools, and marketing them to millions. Apple, RIM, Microsoft and other hosts look after distribution and payment, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on product design and marketing. Your hosts get 20% to 30% of the sale price, but that's only fair: they built the store and the audience.

"It's a new way of doing business. It's drastically altered the traditional structure of software development," says Kevin Talbot, an RBC Venture Funds manager who also co-manages the BlackBerry Partners Fund, which invests in new technologies for mobile platforms. "We're seeing a compression of the supply chain: How you get to customers, and how you distribute your product, has all been taken care of for you."

But not just software developers benefit from the app economy. iTunes, the forerunner of Apple's App Store model, helped musicians and video artists reach a global entertainment marketplace. The new iPad tablet computer creates opportunities for large and small publishers seeking alternatives to print. And Ford Motor Co. is about to open its three-year-old Sync media-management system to outside applications. Designed to give drivers hands-free control over their phones, e-mail devices and music players, Sync should attract a variety of third-party applications, from games to audio Internet services and navigational aids.

Ford hopes the fun and functionality that bubble out of the app economy will sell more cars. Ford marketing executive Jim Farley told journalists in January he's counting on entrepreneurial developers to produce more creative applications than Ford engineers could dream of. Farley's goal: "When you enter your car, it should be as cool as your iPhone."

But the distribution revolution extends beyond bits and bytes. Wired magazine editor and "Long Tail" evangelist Chris Anderson says the next frontier is do-it-yourself manufacturing. Using the latest information and manufacturing technologies, today anyone can transmit product specs to "microfactories" in China and order bargain-priced prototypes or short production runs. No costly equipment or inventory. "The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals," writes Anderson. "The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is now about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into entrepreneurship, no tools required."

Where do Canadians fit into this brave new world? Not as centrally as they should. The BlackBerry Fund has invested in homegrown developers Viigo and socialDeck, but Talbot sees few other contenders on the horizon. He wants Canada's computer schools to start offering app-development courses to undergrads now to help Canadian companies catch up in a few years.

Albert Lai, a 31-year-old serial entrepreneur who commutes between Toronto and San Francisco, insists the app economy is tailor-made for Canadians: we're creative, we "get" mobile, we already produce great video games, and development costs are generously underwritten by Ottawa's R&D tax credits and many provincial new-media initiatives. Lai's newest company, Kontagent (pronounced like "contagious" since the app world is viral), creates systems that help developers market apps more effectively - so all they really need to do is create great ideas and solid code.

Lai knows Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have made millions of dollars a month with Facebook apps - and says the opportunity will grow as consumers extend their Facebook identities to sites across the Net through its Facebook Connect initiative. This is what we've dreamed of: a business in which fortunes are earned on product excellence, not on who you know or how close you are to a saltwater port. Pour yourself an iBeer and toast the App Economy.

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