Have a problem? There's a mashup app for that.

You know 'apps', right? Those easy-to-pickup, easy-to-use, easy-to-share mini-applications that you can get through your phone, your portal and even your desktop.

I am a big user and an even bigger fan of apps. So I was quite excited to meet my first app creator last week. By day, Jon Conway is a consultant and a member of our Mashup Developer Community. By night, Jon creates apps for the iPhone, like iPotato and iPoke the Hibernating Bear.

I knew how to consume apps, how they were distributed and socialized. But after I chucked a few iPotatos I realized I had finally a representative of the ‘other half’ of the lifecycle of an app. Now I appreciated where they came from.

That's when a post from Dion Hinchcliffe, master of all things '2.0', really came alive for me. Dion believes the app store is destined to move into the enterprise. He recently wrote about the opportunities and issues associated with the application of the app store model in the enterprise. Here's the summary, in his own words...

The premise of an app store model for enterprises is simple: By removing the middleman, the famous bottleneck between the business and IT demand can be reduced in many cases. Application backlogs can shrink, consumption of internal and external IT resources will increase, and fierce competition to provide the best solutions to niches can greatly improve overall quality (the long tail of IT argument), all while reducing costs.

In case you’ve missed the whole app phenomenon until today, the most important part of the app isn't the app itself. It's the place where app users (like me) and app makers (like Jon) exchange these magical nuggets of productivity, entertainment and utility. The folks who do the marketing call these places 'App Stores'.

They are simple online marketplaces that make it easy to find and select/download (and in some cases pay for) the app. Blackberry, Nokia, Microsoft and Palm all have app stores for their mobile devices. Google just launched their Apps Marketplace, presumably for browser apps. The Apple App Store is the most prolific of the bunch, with over 100,000+ apps and over3,000,000,000 app downloads. Yes, 3 billion. That certainly sounds like a model that works.

But the model is somewhat different in the enterprise. Where will the apps in the enterprise app store come from? The title of Dion’s blog gives the answer: ‘The Enterprise App Store And Self-Service IT: How SOA, Saas, And Mashups Will Thrive’. ‘Self-Service IT’ is shorthand for ‘they get created by the people who want and need them’. In other words, they won't necessarily come from the ‘software people’ or ‘IT’.

Unlike the consumer world, the apps makers and the app consumers will be the same people. They’ll get created in visual mashup-making tools by your techno-savvy business users (and their line-of-business developers, perhaps), for themselves, and then shared with others like them.

Let me give you a working example of this enterprise app store thing. JackBe has begun a ‘Mashup App Store’ experiment with the launch of our Presto Cloud (Community Edition). The premise is simple: Presto Cloud (Community Edition) is a shared version of our Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform (on Amazon’s EC2) that lets users create, share, and reuse mashup apps with each other.

And our experiment would be incomplete without a ‘Mashup App Store’ showroom for the folks who only want to browse/use the mashup apps, not make them. So we’ve create a ‘Mashup Wall’ in our Mashup Developer Community where you can browse, comment, rate (and, yes, download, if you want) the mashup apps created by the users of the Presto Community Edition.

We're going to treat this as a ‘perpetual beta' and all of this is simply ‘Mashup App Store 1.0’. There’s more to come. Try it out and share your feedback in our Community Forums.

Get your mashup app on!