Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), publisher of the Daily Mail, Metro, Teletext and various other media properties, says it is targeting 150 mobile apps across all platforms during the next 12 months.

Speaking at today’s M-Publishing event in London, AND CEO Richard Titus said the company had identified “four to five app ecosystems that matter”. And, speaking exclusively to Mobile Marketing magazine when he left the stage, Titus identified these ecosystems, in order of importance as Apple, Android and RIM, with Nokia and Windows 7 tied for fourth place, though he added. “Windows 7 is phenomenally interesting. Before the Windows 7 announcement, we had ruled out Microsoft.”

Titus added that he would feel “no shame” in creating disposable applications that might provide a couple of weeks worth of entertainment, before being discarded by the user. He also noted that: “you would be hard pushed to spend more than £100,000 on a mobile app” comparing this to the old days of the web, where companies he worked for would not touch a web build project costing less than $10m.

In a separate presentation, Nick Malaperiman, head of global partner marketing, Ovi Publish, at Nokia, revealed that app downloads from the Ovi store are now running at the rate of 1.7m per day, or 12 every second, with two thirds of purchases coming through operator billing. Malaperiman also paid tribute to the user experience offered by Apple via its apps, saying: “Apple have done a fantastic job, we aspire to that; they set the benchmark.”