Thank you for downloading this programme. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davison guests unwrap the app.

Hello and welcome to the programme. Now, people fret that Western economies have lost their dynamism in recent years.

So perhaps they should take heart from the rise of the app. Software for smartphones or tablet computers.

It's an industry that didn't exist a few years ago,

but which has seen entrepreneurship, technology and creativity combine,

to offer consumers hundreds of thousands of choices of apps to buy,

and which has seen billions of items sold or given away.

So today we unwrap the world of the app and see how the market works.

It spawned a brand new breed of entrepreneur, the apprainer, and I have three of them with me today.

Anthony Steed, Barry Mead and Max Whitby. Good day to you all gentlemen.

Now before we talk about your apps, your own apps, I want just a

little bit of history about the sector, where it came from, where the word apps came from,

and whether it was foreseen that it would end up where it has. Max, why didn't you start us off?

When did you first hear about an app? Well, apps, I think, came into currency about five, six years ago. The word, of course,

derives from application. And they're little programs that run on your mobile device, and they have

two really interesting properties. One, they contain a rich mix of media. So you have sound,

you have vision, you have video. But the other is there's a channel

for distributing them to the world. And the manufacturers of the devices provide stores,

usually international stores. And so if you are an apprainer producing things, you can get to your

market. And you don't have to have a warehouse full of physical stuff. You have a server sitting somewhere in the cloud

and your publishing goes straight to the world.

Okay, so Anthony and Barry, when did you first realize

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