Developers looking to cash in on the next big thing may want to look to the smartphone platform. According to Computerworld, in the next few years the market for applications on iPhones, BlackBerries and the like is set to skyrocket.

A quick look at the keywords iPhone or Blackberry on Dice shows you companies developing smartphone apps are popping up all over, and they're offering a goodly number of positions for developers with the right skills.

So what exactly are the "right skills?" Can you leverage your current experience?  If you have a good OOP foundation, you can probably spool up pretty quickly.

Both Android and BlackBerry development can be done in Java, so there's no huge learning curve for Java engineers. Palm development is done within the Mojo framework running on top of webOS, so you can leverage your Web development skills to begin creating Palm applications fairly quickly. iPhone development involves using Objective-C, which is a sort of Smalltalk/C mashup. Again, if you're a salty old OOP dog fluent in any of the C derivatives, you could probably make the transition.

Of course, anytime you hear "gold mine," you have be somewhat skeptical. But in this case, it doesn't seem like pure hyperbole. After all, Apple's app store spurred 1.5 billion downloads in its first year. Although the majority were of free material, about 18 percent weren't, and when we're talking numbers that big, even a small portion adds up to big bucks. How big? Boston research company Yankee Group Research predicts U.S. revenue from smartphone applications will be $4.2 billion by 2013.

Of course, few people are going to hit the market with the kind of app that's going to let them jump from their cube to a life of programming from the beach. But if you're a developer looking for a new direction, now may be the time to try your hand at smartphone development.

-- Chad Broadus