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To do a terrible injustice to Yogi Berra, 80% of mobile application success is half marketing — so sorry! Actually, mobile application success is more like 20% effort on development and 80% of marketing and market awareness.

This is one of those things that gets lost in the hype of the Stores — AppStore and AppWorld. Putting your effort into building an application is such a small part of the equation for success and a recipe for disaster if you think you can rely solely on the good will of those stores — you will get lost in the masses unless you market the heck out your application.

Sure, there are the one-in-a-million successes but those are NOT common (do you know anyone who has had that kind of success just because of the app?), nor can it be counted on as the number of applications grows and grows and grows. Might as well go buy a lottery ticket for better odds.

Whatever the effort you put into building out your application, count on spending 5X that effort on marketing and pushing that bundle of code up a long, steep hill. It is the entrepreneur that realizes this and works hard to create awareness that will succeed.

Canada has Olympic fever. I have Olympic fever. So just like everybody else with an iPhone and a sudden immediate need to know who is ahead in the snowboard cross I downloaded the ‘official’ iPhone application from CTV.

CTV has the broadcast rights for the Olympics in Canada and are doing an incredible job on the old-fashioned telly-vision as well as a stellar job online. It seems that wherever I am I can watch whatever is being broadcast.

Surely the official iPhone app would extend this great coverage and cement the CTV brand? Wrong. The application is a free download that allows you to see the medal standings and a schedule of events. If you want results or push notification you’ll have to spend $1.99 to get them. This is where CTV wasted a HUGE international and domestic branding opportunity.

CTV had a once in a lifetime opportunity to own the airwaves, the Internet and the wireless world instead, the application build by Bell Canada wins hands down. Wrong time to be greedy CTV…