Starting this fall, it plans to offer teachers across the country an education-focused Android app store, called Google Play for Education, which has been in pilot testing with various schools.

“There’s a big part of all of our lives – and the lives of our kids – that mobile technology hasn’t touched. When I visit my kids’ classroom, it looks pretty much like it did when I went to school,” said Chris Yerga, an engineering director at Google. “Google Play for Education was built from the ground up to meet the unique content needs of educators.”

Through the new store, teachers will be able to search for educator-recommended apps appropriate for their grades and subjects. And, as long as each student has their own Google account, teachers can deploy their app selections to the tablets for an entire class or grade from their own account.

Apple is also pushing aggressively in education — last year, it sold 4.5 million iPads to schools and reported one billion downloads for iTunes U. But Google is clearly getting ready to take on its Silicon Valley rival in the education market in a bigger way. Google’s existing school presence through its Apps for Education, which has more than 20 million users, could help the company in its latest effort, as could the seemingly teacher-friendly management features built into Google Play.

Ahead of the launch this fall, Google said it would start accepting app submissions from developers this summer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A look back at mobile in Q1
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile

I feel like we are on the cusp of a similarly fundamental shift in business software. Once again, the change is about rethinking business applications, but this time it is with a mobile lens. When talking with companies that don’t have a specific mobile strategy, I keep hearing about how mobile is just a feature of cloud-based applications. Yet when we meet with entrepreneurs who are building “mobile-first” business apps, we can see a completely different way of thinking: Leveraging the unique capabilities of mobile devices is at the core of every decision they make.

At Emergence, we have put together a first cut at defining the emerging mobile business app landscape based on conversations with over 100 early stage companies. Here’s a look at our findings:

Vertical apps: field-based, on the go

Vertical apps are defined by their singular focus on industries that have a substantial cohort of non-desk workers. Real Estate is a great example. The industry has been notoriously slow to adopt new technology, but in the last two years there has been an explosion in mobile-first technology solutions. For example, Cartavi’s mobile solution for real estate transactions gives agents, buyers, sellers, and related parties (mortgage banks, title companies, etc.) the ability to store, access, update and share transaction documents in the cloud.

On the construction side of real estate, PlanGrid is eliminating reams of paper-based blueprints and change orders with a rich mobile app built specifically for the iPad. Given the field-based nature of the work and its traditional reliance on paper-based solutions, it makes sense that real estate is one of the most crowded boxes on the Emergence mobile business app landscape.

Healthcare and education are other verticals that are particularly well-suited to mobile business solutions. In these sectors, most mobile business apps are enabling entirely new forms of communication, rather than replacing paper-based solutions. Doximity offers a professional networking solution for physicians that hasn’t existed before (Disclosure: The author’s firm, Emergence Capital Partners, is an investor in Doximity). More than 160,000 doctors have joined the network and over 75 percent of their engagement is through mobile devices.

Other vertical categories including restaurants, transportation and hospitality have begun to attract attention, and we predict that we will soon see more apps in the manufacturing, retail and agribusiness verticals, given the “always on their feet” nature of the workers in these sectors.

Horizontal apps: innovating on existing services

Looking at horizontal apps, most start-ups emerge in three sub-sectors: productivity; mobile marketplaces; and sales, marketing and services. A defining characteristic of the companies in the productivity space is their focus on leveraging the native integration of email, desk and calendar in mobile devices. For example, Tylr Mobile has recently launched a new mobile app for salespeople called Workinbox that directly connects salesforce.com data with email. Another young company, Cloudmagic, has developed mobile search capability that allows users to find names, documents, or other files stored in any of your cloud-based applications (e.g. email, calendars, Box, Evernote).

In the mobile marketspace sector, many business apps share a heavy reliance of location-based services. There are several promising car service companies such as Uber, Flywheel, Hailo, and Taxi Magic that enable drivers to find passengers through a marketspace leveraging GPS data. Another interesting company, Quri, has developed a mobile platform that uses both GPS data and mobile cameras to crowdsource in-store intelligence for consumer brands.

Within the sales, marketing & service, ServiceMax, has developed a mobile solution that helps companies manage the entire field service process including scheduling, parts and contracts (Disclosure: The author’s firm, Emergence Capital Partners, is an investor in ServiceMax). The company sells into over 20 verticals, and its bookings increased over 150 percent relative to last year. As we think about the other horizontal sub-sectors, some companies that stand-out have found innovative ways to use mobile cameras (Expensify, Flint), alerts (PagerDuty), and even the headset jack (Square).

Unsolved challenges remain

At Emergence, we feel optimistic about the tremendous growth in mobile business applications that we have seen over the last 12 months. However, like all nascent categories, there are many unsolved challenges. Distribution issues come up during every conversation we have with entrepreneurs. All mobile business app entrepreneurs want to figure out how to leverage mobile app stores more effectively, but most struggle to do so.

In addition, founders are working through the question of whether to native-build mobile business apps or to use a browser-based approach. To date, I have found that native apps tend to provide a better user experience. Further, business users often like access to their applications even when they don’t have connectivity – which makes native apps a better choice today. However, developing and maintaining native apps across multiple platforms is challenging and costly. I am hopeful that the evolution of HTML5 will help entrepreneurs achieve the benefits of both.

As we look ahead, we know the mobile business app landscape will continue to evolve. We realize that we have likely missed some great companies, so please let us know if we missed you. Or if you are thinking about other ways to categorize the companies, it would be great to share ideas.

Kevin Spain is a General Partner at Emergence Capital Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on Enterprise SaaS. He sits on the board of several companies, including Doximity, Viglink, and Welltok.

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Photo courtesy Praisaeng/Shutterstock.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013

Nintendo’s Wii Fit Balance Board can measure your weight, in addition to being used for sports games and exercise apps on the Wii console. The MoDaCo blog notes a free Android app called FitScales taps into Nintendo’s accessory without wires, enabling you to use the device as a smart scale.

After installing the app and providing it with your height, you can sync your Android with the Balance Board and then stand on it to have your weight captured. Thanks to the wireless connection, your weight will appear on your phone. Even better: FitScales uses the available APIs to send your weight data to either your FitBit (see disclosure) or RunKeeper account, just like a traditional web-connected scale would do.

Note that FitScales supports Android 2.1 to Android 4.1, so if you’re running Android 4.2, you’ll have to wait for an upgrade before your device is supported. And there’s one user experience challenge in the app: You have to sync the board and phone every time you use the app, which is a bit of a pain.

I don’t know how many Wii Fit Balance Boards have been sold by Nintendo, but I think this app is brilliant. It extends an older piece of hardware at a time where health gadgets are picking up steam. Effectively, we can repurpose our own Balance Board, which is collecting dust right now, saving the $100 or more it would cost to buy a dedicated Wi-Fi scale.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?

For $99, project backers get a Skycam webcam that can record video on a micro SD card. Of course, you can access the camera remotely in real-time from practically any connected PC or Mac, tablet or mobile phone running iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry. The secret sauce here is the use of Skype.

To set up the Skycam, you simply add it to your Skype account where it becomes one of your favorite contacts. Want to pop in and check on the pets? Just call your Skycam through the standard Skype application:

I’ve actually set up several different remote access webcams in my home over the past few years and I have to say: I think more simplicity is needed for these products. Each camera I’ve used has its own software, which typically isn’t the greatest quality. I often rely on third-party apps to access the cameras, but even these have their quirks. And gaining true remote access to a home-based camera typically requires firewall configuration, static IP addresses and — in some cases — a third-party DNS solution.

That’s why I think this project is on to something. It alleviates all of the challenges I just outlined and makes a remote webcam more of an easy to use appliance. And it does so with software that’s commonly used already. I also like how this isn’t a standard webcam you’d typically use for video chatting: Skycam can be used to monitor a dark or lowly lit room; a feature I like on my existing webcams.

With a built-in microphone and speaker, you can even use Skycam to chat with someone nearby the camera. Of course, you’ll see them, but they won’t see you. I do wish the Skycam had tilt and pan capabilities, but that would be tricky to implement with Skype as the underlying transport solution. And it would complicate what looks to be an economical and simple way to monitor a remote area.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom

To enable the features over 3G and 4G networks, the AirDroid folks are running servers to act as an intermediary. That means you’ll need an AirDroid account. Although the app is free, remote access to your phone through AirDroid on mobile broadband is limited to 1 GB for file transfers and such. Take a peek at how the app works:

The biggest feature is surely the access via non-local networks, but there’s plenty of other new features including: find my phone, remove device wipe, and a way to remotely enable the front-facing camera on your phone. This is handy if your phone is stolen or lost because there’s no indicator on the phone to tell someone that the camera is on.

Why Google hasn’t outright bought this app is beyond me, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from grabbing a download; especially now that it’s usable on any data connection.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?

Why participate in OpenSignal’s crowdsourcing operations? Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – consumers get benefit out of the app’s features as well. You can use the app as a speed test tool to see if your carrier is living up to its mobile data claims, and it will keep a record of your own data, text, and minute usage.

The app also serves as a signal finder. It will point you in the direction of your carrier’s nearest cell tower and even find nearby open Wi-Fi access points if you’re looking for a faster connection. And if you happen to be shopping around for another service provider, the app will let you compare the performance of different carrier networks in your area.

Ironically, U.K.-based OpenSignal has been using its Android app data for years to extrapolate iPhone performance on U.S. networks. With the new iOS software, it will be able to track iPhone performance directly, as well as tap into a potentially huge pool of new crowdsourcers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A look back at mobile in Q1
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• What to watch in mobile in 2013

Rackspace General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum detailed the legal challenge in a blog post on Friday. You can read the details there and in its petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but the gist is that Rotatable sued Rackspace (as well as Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods Market and numerous other large companies) and then told Rackspace it was ready to settle the claim for $75,000, possibly less. Classic troll behavior.

And even though its USPTO challenge will end up costing much more than $75,000, Rackspace decided to stick it to Rotatable and stick up for everyone else who has developed a rotatable mobile app. Some already have been sued and others might be, and all they did was utilize a feature of the operating system their apps run on. It’s the equivalent of suing Microsoft Office users for infringement if you thought Office had infringed your patent.

As Schoenbaum explained during a phone call, this is standard operating procedure in patent troll cases. Because of a legal theory called patent exhaustion, patent holders who sue and lose or settle with and grant a license to upstream defendants (e.g., OS or device manufacturers in this case) can’t then go after downstream users such as Rackspace or Whole Foods. It’s often a lot more effective to shake down lots of those downstream users — be they individuals, small businesses or corporations — for relatively small settlements than it is to target one or two big upstream infringers.

Small businesses, especially, are often ”perfectly situated sitting ducks for lawsuits,” Schoenbaum said. However, he added, “[Rotatable] probably shouldn’t have started with us.”

Going on the offensive against trolls

This isn’t the first time a large company has decided to stick it to a patent troll in the name of justice rather than settle, though. Last week, Rackspace decided to sue a troll called Parallel Iron that claimed Rackspace committed patent infringement by using the Hadoop Distributed File System. As part of its lawsuit against Parallel Iron, Rackspace is seeking a declaratory judgment that the patents involved don’t actually relate to Hadoop — a decision that could come in handy for other Parallel Iron defendants such as Facebook, Amazon and Oracle. (IP Nav, an alleged troll associated with Parallel Iron, gives its account of the situation here.)

In 2012, Cisco, Netgear and Motorola joined forces (albeit unsuccessfully in the end) to file a federal racketeering complaint against a patent troll demanding payments from hotels and restaurants for using WiFi.

And, of course, there are some more-defensive attempts to tackle the problem of patent trolls, such as Google’s decision to pledge non-assertion for a number of patents related to its MapReduce technology. That decision essentially freed up anyone to use the processing components (but, obviously, not the storage component) of the Hadoop platform without fear of infringement claims from anybody.

Covering the Rackspace-Parallel Iron news, I suggested more large companies serious about fighting the alleged scourge of patent trolling should do exactly what Rackspace is doing with Rotatable — and it’s possible that might happen. Rackspace is attacking Rotatable thanks to a provision of recent patent reform legislation that lets third parties (like Rackspace in this case, because it’s not claiming any patent ownership) to challenge the validity of a patent based solely on the existence of prior art. Prior art that would refute the novelty of a patent has historically been difficult to track down, but new tools such as Google Patent Search are making it an easier process.

In this case, Schoenbaum told me, the amount of prior art available made it a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the new law.

One of many pieces of evidence in the Rackspace petition.

However, he noted, just because the recent patent reform legislation was a step forward, that doesn’t mean the system is perfect. Patent examiners are still overloaded with applications, and in difficult-to-parse software and business-process patents there’s probably a bias to grant rather than deny. He’d also like to (and is optimistic he will) see Congress take up patent reform once again to give end-users (like mobile developers in this case, or WiFi users in the Cisco case) immunity against patent infringement suits.

Whatever happens in Washington, though, it appears Rackspace will keep on taking the fight to patent trolls. Just like Red Hat before it, new open source champion Rackspace wants to do what it can to defend the open source community, Schoenbaum said. “We want to start a movement.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Denys Prykhodov.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

Wal-Mart eCommerce is the largest startup in the world, executives said. Employees participate in hack days and work in small teams to launch digital products in months. But with 10,000 stores internationally, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer by revenue in the world — Amazon’s annual net sales is about 13 percent of Wal-Mart’s — and therefore has much to lose. Fierce online retail competition from Amazon, Google and others pose challenges, as customers have no problem buying from a different company if the price and the product are right.

As same-day shipping and other retail breakthroughs become possible, the Wal-Mart eCommerce crew is taking steps to do as good of a job or better of meeting customers’ retail needs online as it does in store, and it’s also trying out the sorts of projects that could secure repeat business from a more up-market crowd.

How? Employees in San Bruno are adding features to desktop, tablet and mobile web presentations. They’re letting internal buyers take advantage of real-time social-media activity, sales information and other data. And they’re building out an international development platform that will be common to all the tech stacks under the Wal-Mart Stores umbrella, enabling quicker deployment of more useful searching and browsing tools and other online features.

What customers see online

Last year Wal-Mart premiered a fine-tuned search engine called Polaris. The search engine has since increased sales resulting from search engine use by 20 percent, said Joel Anderson, president and CEO of the United States Walmart.com site.

If customers want to browse instead of search, they will soon have more ways to do so. A new homepage being rolled out lets customers check out hot items in different categories. A more personalized experience showing the top buys in geographical regions could be coming, too. (Amazon, for its part, surfaces new and popular items in categories and makes suggestions based on customers’ product-browsing history and stated preferences.)

Category-specific pages that came out on Walmart.com last year display the products available through the site that got the most pins on Pinterest. Later this year the model will become more powerful and widely available. Customers will be able to see the top products and colors being pinned on Pinterest, for example.

The Pinterest method shows site users the sorts of products they might not necessarily think of when they think of buying from Wal-Mart. (A different @Walmart Labs initiative, the Goodies subscription service for delivery of cool gourmet foods, could also appeal to a different demographic of customers than the usual Wal-Mart shoppers, as my colleague Ki Mae Heussner wrote last year.)

Wal-Mart has been throwing resources behind search-engine optimization, too, to make sure consumers can spot its websites and products in the first place.

A forthcoming Walmart.com mobile app will let customers speak into their mobile devices or scan barcodes on products at home to start shopping lists. When customers enter stores, the app will display the aisles where desired products sit on shelves. It also will allow customers to summon associates for assistance, apply coupons, scan items for prices and store digital copies of receipts. The existing Scan & Go feature, which entails scanning everything while walking around a store and then using a smartphone to transfer the order to a register, has caught on with customers, and Wal-Mart is tripling the number of stores where it’s possible, to more than 200. @Walmart Labs acquisition of Grabble laid the groundwork for this technology, and now Wal-Mart is building on it.

What Wal-Mart’s buyers see

Wal-Mart’s buyers can get a sense of what they should stock online and in stores by checking out pins on Pinterest. Top pins feed in to a new social-media analytics dashboard for buyers. So do reports from Twitter that engineers have carved out from the entire Twitter firehose, allowing for better insight into consumers’ thoughts on products. They can see when the number of tweets on, say, gel nail polish peaked and see which colors were the most popular in which locations.

On top of that, Wal-Mart’s buyers have access to sales data, which they can overlay on top of Twitter graphs. That way, they can anticipate demand and respond to it with supply.

The social feeds show buyers the desires of more social media-savvy customers, so buyers can venture beyond traditional top sellers with a bit more assurance of what customers say they want.

Integrating the back end

For years, engineers on the back end of Walmart.com, Sam’s Club and other online entities of Wal-Mart Stores subsidiaries have worked with a wide variety of software, and now they are unifying it all on one simple in-house platform called Pangaea.

Engineers are “trying to set up systems that will connect every product in the world with every customer in the world,” said Jeremy King, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Wal-Mart Global eCommerce. And that means technology needs to be uniform for desktop sites, mobile sites and stores.

As online and offline orders come in around the globe, Wal-Mart needs to be able to track inventory and move around products on the fly. That ability has been introduced to Sam’s Club and other properties, and it’s now being expanded.

Different sites have different methods of operating shopping carts, checkout, payment, fraud, tax, personalization and wish lists, often relying on third-party offerings. “All these sort of core capabilities … are being built,” King said. But there needs to be wiggle room. In some countries, customers don’t plunk down the total amount for a big purchase, such as a television; rather, they pay in installments. Sites need to be able to handle a variety of payment structures.

Pangaea will also enable Wal-Mart subsidiary sites around the world to take advantage more easily of the algorithms and user-experience improvements coming out on Walmart.com.

The advantages can benefit operations internally, and customers can get better service, too, said Sri Subramaniam, vice president of @Walmart Labs.

Online work apparently paying off

At first, the whole startup vibe evident at Wal-Mart eCommerce is jarring, because it’s so different from the conventional Wal-Mart retail experience. But the Wal-Mart annual report released Tuesday suggests that the company is heading in the right direction. The company posted $466.1 billion in net sales in its fiscal year that ended on Jan. 31. The United States portion, comprising 59 percent of net sales, was up almost 4 percent over the previous year, beating the roughly 1.5 percent rise from the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2011, to the one ending in 2012. To ensure that Wal-Mart Stores doesn’t lose customers to Amazon and others, the company will have to keep improving its digital front and back ends. Scalability challenges make it interesting to watch on the tech side, and Wal-Mart competitors could pick up some ideas, too. The question is what customers will think of it all.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• How to stand out in the app development game
• Google doesn’t like walled gardens — except its own

Google says the offline translation dictionaries found in the new version “are less comprehensive than their online equivalents” but that’s a small price to pay. And in the future, I could see the offline language data grow in scope as flash storage decreases in cost while expanding in capacity.

While the new feature is handy in areas with limited data coverage, I see the biggest use case for travelers. Often finding, paying for and configuring connectivity on a smartphone can be challenging in another country; particularly for users based in the U.S.

By pre-installing the proper offline language packs, you can be chatting and translating right away upon arriving in a new land. The limited translations should get you communicating until you can find a persistent connection and then you can use the app’s full online capabilities.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?

Inside the Chatter app for smartphones and tablets, users will be able to view and edit the status of deals in progress, share and view files, assign tasks, start polls and see updates in real time. Some of those abilities are available now, and others will come in the second half of the year. Until this week, though, users have been limited to viewing and posting status updates and browsing through user profiles.

The new functions let salespeople and other employees do more of their work and keep track of projects on the go, whether during the morning commute or outside the door of a potential client. The most talented salespeople might not want to be tethered to a desk to use legacy customer-relationship management software; they want to work with the mobile devices they know, said Anna Rosenman, senior manager of product marketing for Salesforce Chatter.

The rollout follows a Salesforce announcement last month about new live chat and co-browsing capabilities for mobile users of the company’s Service Cloud product.

Stay tuned for other mobile announcements from Salesforce later this year, a spokesman said. How will the company execute on its mobile strategy? Look for it to make acquisitions, as it did for the co-browsing technology. As my colleague Barb Darrow reported last month, Salesforce will “be aggressive and look at everything” in terms of acquisition prospects, CEO Marc Benioff told analysts.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro