That’s why Blaast, who we covered earlier this year, has just launched on Android. The Finnish firm’s platform provides versions of popular apps that run partly in the cloud; mixed with clever compression techniques, this means lower data use. Think Snappli or Onavo‘s data shrinkage, but baked into the apps themselves for deployment in partnership with carriers.

Before now, Blaast has only been rolled out by operators in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh on their low-end Java featurephones – a similar approach to that taken by the Eric Schmidt-funded biNu, but offering an app store rather than a fixed suite of apps. And even before this shift to Android, it’s already been a big success.

“We are bundled on over 50 million SIM cards,” CEO Joonas Hjelt told me at the Slush conference in Helsinki on Tuesday. “We have over 4,000 developers, and over one million chat messages per week in just one app. That’s how we’re doing with featurephones.”

Now, those are very basic, lightweight apps. Stepping up to Android means more complexity, and Hjelt claims Blaast pretty much halves the amount of data those apps use, on average.

So how big is that data problem, really?

“In emerging markets, it’s as expensive as having an AT&T subscription and roaming in Indonesia,” Hjelt said. “That’s what it’s like for the local people. [In terms of spending power] it’s six to ten times more expensive than in the U.S.”

Here’s the deal at launch. Indonesian operator XL is bundling the Blaast store alongside the Play Store on its Sony Xperia J. The carrier is rolling out a $5-per-month tariff for the use of Blaast apps – that’s around half of the previous cheapest option in Indonesia. Alternatively, customers can opt for even cheaper deals that give them a la carte access to specific apps, such as Facebook or WhatsApp.

“By promoting this as a channel, the operator benefits – they can lower their entry price and get more data subscribers,” Hjelt said.

Bye-bye browser?

There may be an interesting side-effect of this whole approach.

Consider this. For people in emerging markets, the handset is the personal computer. Many have never had a desktop and, chances are, they never will.

But, with data being expensive and platforms such as Blaast representing the cheapest way to get online, these people may find themselves limited to a subset of apps. (It should be noted that XL’s launch deal for Blaast also includes data for general use, but that may just be a promotional offer.)

Where data is more reasonably-priced, the browser is one of the most important elements of any smartphone or tablet. Take it out of the picture, and you excise the open web; we’re talking about a curated, closed experience. Better than nothing, for sure, but not open.

At some point, the cost of data will level out in such regions (although Hjelt maintains that “making things faster and more affordable will never go out of fashion”). Until that happens, we may be looking at a serious geo-economic split in the way people use and experience the internet.

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That’s why the idea of cloud-based app platforms is taking off. These platforms run their apps partly on the device, but the heavy lifting is done on some remote server. You’d think this would result in more rather than less data usage, but heavy compression – not dissimilar to that used by Amazon’s SilkBrowser or Opera Mini – takes care of that problem.

One such platform, Finland’s Blaast, launched in Indonesia in January, in partnership with local operator XL. Now it’s opened up customer and developer availability to the rest of the world as well, and also has a couple of other tidbits to share: two more as-yet-unnamed South-East Asian carrier partnerships have been struck (creating a total market of 76 million potential customers), and an Android version will be coming out by the end of the year.

Blaast’s app, which is funded by investors including Skype’s founding engineers and ex-Nokian Pekka Vartiainen, can be used on more than 2,000 handset models, as all it really needs to run is Java.

However, the company does have competition in the form of the Australian biNu platform, which picked up $2m from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures this month, and the U.S.-based Peek.

Although all offer a similar kind of service, they diverge quite radically in their monetization strategies. Peek goes straight to the manufacturers of very low-cost phones, biNu makes money through its own virtual currency, and Blaast charges subscription fees (per day, week or month) that average out at around $1.50 per month.

For that fee you get access to more than 100 apps, including Twitter, Facebook, social games, Wikipedia, news and so on. That strategy appears to be working. Even before the fresh push announced this week, Blaast has attracted four million downloads and four thousand developers, who are writing apps tailored to the Indonesian market.

“Our approach has really struck a chord with developers as well as operators looking to extend their reach both geographically as well as to the low-end device segment,” CEO Joonas Hjelt said. “In fact, we are on course to support over 500 million Blaast-enabled feature phone by 2014.”

Now, about that Android version. Details are still sketchy – Blaast hasn’t yet said whether or not its roughly-30/70 revenue split with developers will extend into this market – but the company has an interesting pitch here.

Not only is there the data thing (a serious issue when data costs four or more times than it does in the U.S., relative to purchasing power) and the relatively low spec of the cheapest Android handsets, but Blaast reckons its subscription model has advantages over the traditional app store model.

This is an assertion that makes some sense when you consider its operator partnerships, and the fact that app stores tend to require credit cards. So developers who want to address these markets may want to take note.

As biNu suggested to Ryan recently, there’s around three to five years of play left for this kind of business, until smartphone economics even out for developing world customers.

But there’s a huge amount of money to be made in the meantime. And getting on board with the carriers, as Blaast is doing, seems a pretty smart way to make it.

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That’s where biNu, an Australian startup has been making its mark. The company launched a mobile app 18 months ago that allows Java feature phone owners and low-end Android users to access more than a 100 apps including Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Search and others, on their phone. The biNu app not only delivers a host of smartphone apps to feature phones, it also compresses the data, using 10 times less bandwidth than normal, which is also helpful in countries with rickety mobile networks.

The startup has gotten the attention of Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, which is leading a $2 million Series A round along with other American and Australian investors. The company will use the money to build out the services and apps it provides, grow its user base and focus more on developers, who can also build directly on biNu.

BiNu has attracted more than 4 million monthly active users, most of whom are based in Asia and Africa and the number of users is growing by 10 to 20 percent a month. It is also generating more than 800 million page views a month. In addition to popular apps like Facebook and Twitter, biNu also offers a range of content like the Bible, the Quran and access to news, sports, weather and book reading services. More recently, biNu has been evolving into its own social network for users, who can message each other, create profiles and share content.

BiNu isn’t the only one trying to tap this opportunity. Peek in the U.S. and Blaast, a Finnish startup launched by a former Nokian, have also introduced platforms that bring smartphone capabilities to feature phones. It’s a big opportunity considering feature phone still outnumber smartphones by 5 to 1 globally. As Schmidt talked about earlier this year, there’s still another 5 billion people that have yet to get online and mobile will be how many of them do it for the first time.

BiNu co-founder and CEO Gour Lentell told me biNu’s current offering will be relevant for at least three to five years. But he said the larger goal is to build a cloud platform for delivering apps. The company, which has previously raised more than $5 million, monetizes through its own virtual currency and is also exploring advertising.

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In many African countries, 80 percent of the population owns a cell phone. Up to now, Worldreader has focused on distributing Kindles to classrooms (the organization’s founder is former Amazon exec , but by making e-books available via cell phones the organization can reach a much wider group of readers.

Worldreader’s app, now in beta, was developed by Sydney-based startup biNu. The Bookseller explains that the app uses “cloud-based data compression technology to enable any Java-enabled ‘feature’ phone (non-smartphone) to download e-books and access news websites and Facebook over an ordinary mobile signal.”

In this video, Worldreader director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood explains how the app works.

Worldreader partners with international and local African publishers to make e-books available for its e-reader program and for the app. It also offers public-domain books. In some cases, Worldreader digitizes African publishers’ books for the first time. Here’s a list of the books the company offers for free or at a very low cost.

The Worldreader app

The ultimate goal is to have “thousands” of e-books available on the app, Worldreader’s director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood told The Bookseller: “Yes, this is a leap of faith for publishers, giving away some of their content for free. But once you give these kids in the developing world the tools and hook these kids on books, they will become book buyers.”

A new classroom tablet from Intel?

Separately, Digitimes reports today that Intel will release an educational 10-inch tablet, the “StudyBook,” into emerging markets and regular retail channels this fall. The company has already released a basic laptop, the Classmate PC. The report says the StudyBook would target China and Brazil — countries more prosperous than those in Africa.

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