BUSINESSWEEK — It's easy to shrug off the kooky world of apps. The bite-size software programs people load onto their mobile phones or tap into on the Web seem mostly to be silly games and pointless novelties. But look past the beer-drinking apps and flatulence programs and you'll see something significant taking shape: a bustling app economy that's creating new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changing the way business gets done. It's happening with dizzying speed. Just two years ago, almost none of this existed...

BUSINESSWEEK — Two of the dominant trends of the Internet over the past decade, social media and e-commerce, have overlapped very little and without much success. Retailers have tried to cultivate communities of shoppers with similar interests on their sites, without much uptake. Plenty of brands set up Twitter and Facebook pages, only to find that marketing to consumers in a social venue does not necessarily spur conversations about those brands. Online stores shouldn’t give up on social just yet, according to the results from a recent survey of over 45,000 users of the social network myYearbook...

BUSINESSWEEK — John Borthwick speaks softly, but he can't hide his excitement. Co-founder and chief executive of the New York Internet media incubator betaworks, Borthwick is an investor in the microblogging phenomenon Twitter, where people exchange short public messages called tweets. Betaworks is also building or investing in at least 21 other companies mining the "real-time Web." That's the term coined to describe the exploding number of live social activities online, from tweets to status updates on Facebook to the sharing of news, Web links, and videos on myriad other sites. "It's a whole new layer of innovation that's opening up on the Web," he says...

Ross Kimbarovsky, the co-founder of online design studio CrowdSpring.com, faced a dilemma last December. CrowdSpring, which matches designers with companies that need Web site graphics or logos, was less than a year into existence and needed to promote itself on a limited startup budget. Kimbarovsky took a page from his own social Web playbook. He asked a group on one of CrowdSpring's online forums for marketing ideas; one user suggested designers contribute a Web site to a nonprofit group free of charge. The group picked a charity that helps fathers of children with autism. The project garnered attention—enough that Kimbarovsky landed a major new client, LG Electronics, within several months...

It's hard to get tangible results from social media. Giants from Coca-Cola to Wal-Mart Stores have set up Web sites where customers can share their interest in the brand. But many of these sites don't attract enough visitors to form a real community or have been slammed by critics, as was the case at schoolyourway.walmart.com. The retailer killed it in 2006 after just three months. Unlike many other companies, however, Intuit seems to have figured out a way to benefit from social media...