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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Ambient Sound — an investment group started by four of the engineers who built Skype — is believed to have led the funding, which could be as high as €2.6 million ($3.6 million USD).

Helsinki-based Blaast is remaining quiet and won’t share details of its technology with the public or the press, but there are a few clues about what it’s up to on its website: most obviously, the tagline that suggests it wants to provide “the world’s first cloud-based mobile platform”.

That’s an audacious claim, not least because it surely has to square up against similar descriptions of Android (which is heavily reliant on Google’s cloud-based services) and Palm/HP’s WebOS (which has major cloud components). But from what I’ve been told, Blaast’s system is not just for high-end handsets. Its major selling point may be that it allows dumb phones to become a lot smarter by pushing out some of the more complex functions into the cloud.

Ambient Sound, which is based in Estonia, confirmed that it now has a seat on the board, but further research suggests that it isn’t the only investor backing the company. Moaffak Ahmed of Finnish seed firm Veturi is listed as an adviser on LinkedIn, while Sunstone Capital’s Pekka Vartiainen, a former senior VP at Nokia, has confirmed that he is involved as an individual angel investor.

With details so scarce it’s difficult to know what to expect, and until we see exactly what the company means by “cloud-based”, judging whether the company is a big deal is tough. There are a few pointers that suggest it’s worth watching, though.

For a start, the company’s about page lists two founders who both have good track records in the field: Joonas Hjelt, who was the founder of cloud infrastructure company Nervogrid and an executive at Nokia, and Vesa Kemppainen, former COO at telecoms services firm Tecnotree.

And it’s increasingly clear that the number of mobile services that make use of the cloud is going to grow very quickly over the next few years The Wall Street Journal recently quoted ABI Research analyst Mark Beccue suggesting that the number of mobile phone users who access apps through the cloud will rocket from 42.8 million in 2008 to nearly 1 billion by 2014.

I understand Blaast — which formed last summer — is aggressively hiring to expand its current team of 20, and is already testing its software while in negotiation with handset manufacturers and wireless operators to get Blaast onto handsets.

Could be one to watch, especially as we see a wave of mobile startups spring out of Finland in the wake of the Nokia-Microsoft compact.

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