As I’m writing this column, there are currently 466,302 mobile apps available for the iPhone and 512,542 mobile apps available to download on an Android phone.

Combined with all of the apps for Blackberries, Windows 7 Phones, and other smartphone platforms, we now have over 1 million mobile apps available for download.

Putting this into perspective, the whole mobile apps revolution began in March of 2008 when Steve Jobs announced the software developer’s kit for the Apple iPhone. When Apple’s App Store officially opened on July 11, 2008, there were a whopping 552 apps to choose from.

To say the apps were an instant success is a gross understatement. Over 60 million apps were downloaded within the first 3 days and tech companies around the world began to sense a market shift. Little did they know how much, and how many industries would be affected. As of today, over 20 billion apps have been downloaded and there’s no end in sight.

Sometime next year, the number of mobile apps will exceed the number of books in print – 3.2 million. This is an interesting comparison to make because both books and apps are information products. Can a book be an app? Or an app be a book?

Here’s where it gets real interesting. Perpetual self-updating books that function as a book-app hybrid may seem like the tiniest of narrow niches, but I predict this will become one of the most lucrative niches of all in the entire publishing world.

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When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a truly remarkable person, yet he had less than two years of formal education.

I recently came across a study that examined the lives of 755 famous people who either dropped out of grade school or high school. The list included 25 billionaires, 8 U.S. Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Olympic medal winners, 63 Oscar winners, 55 best-selling authors, and 31 who had been Knighted.

With names like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Will Rogers, and Joseph Pulitzer, being an academic failure still left you in the company of some incredible luminaries.

Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill Gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood, and the dropout list becomes a venerable Who’s Who of American culture.

So what are we missing here? On one hand we are being told that the path to success is through academia. Yet, we have literally thousands of examples of wealthy, successful, business leaders, industry icons, and some of our greatest heroes that took a different route.

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Over the past couple years, internet-fueled uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and other parts of the world have made Chinese officials very nervous. They have exerted a firm hand in controlling any communications deemed detrimental to the ruling party and have now gone so far as to block any Google searches of the English words “democracy” and “freedom.”

But this kind of conversational scrutiny has proven to be a double-edged sword.

In late July a tragic high-speed train crash occurred in Wenzhou, China. Instantly, Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, became a focal point for information about the accident, letting victim families know the status of their loved ones. At the same time, Weibo became a transparent medium for personal commentary and incendiary speculation about the cause of the accident.

The Communist Party sees a huge threat, and it’s a tough one for them to control.

On one hand, they feel control of the Communist Party is at risk unless they takes firmer steps to stop Internet opinion being shaped by the opposition. But at the same time, the Internet is becoming a very popular medium and a central tool for business and industry.

This is as much a business issue as it is a free-speech issue. So where does China go from here?

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Great lies continue to be propagated

In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in November of that year.

Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA, describing them as “chaordic” a term that roughly translates into “ordered chaos.”

In 1996 he formed the Chaordic Alliance, later renamed the Chaordic Commons, for the purpose of furthering his notions that businesses can run more effectively when they are based on a “vital set of living beliefs” distributed through an organization, essentially replacing top-down command and control.

As we talked, his powers of persuasion were quite evident as he artfully described his “chaordic” theories, and by the end of the conversation I was a true believer, wanting to become a disciple of this new business gospel.

But as with many things that sound too good to be true the first time you hear them, Hock’s “chaodic” theories that somehow worked within VISA, proved non-reproducible in other settings, and have now largely been abandoned after numerous attempts to implement them in other companies.

As we enter the 2nd decade of the new millennium we find ourselves in a similar quandary trying to separate the fallacies from the promises of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. With that in mind I’ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive.

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