With the July 28th Verizon Developer Community event on the planning horizon, Verizon executives have reportedly started discussing alternatives to its rigid BREW-based rules governing application distribution and revenue splits. The venerable BREW protocol (developed by Qualcomm in the last century), has become an artifact of the pre-AppStore days, when sterile descriptions like "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" had a certain mystique and feature phones (rather than smartphones) were the highest-profile applications platforms.

Today, as this post by Stacey Higginbotham in GigaOm notes, Verizon is making a partial about face. An event that's akin to a bar camp and the introduction of a developers "portal" smacks of mobile Web 2.0. Verizon is attempting to capture the creative energy of developers looking to deliver their wares to smartphones running the Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and BlackBerry operating systems. Higginbotham quotes Ryan Hughes, VP Partner Management, to the effect that a Verizon-branded application store will be up and running before year's end and that it will be, not surprisingly, the "sole marketplace" displayed on Verizon-supplied devices. This makes it something of a pre-emptive move against direct access to the Blackberry App Store or the Windows Mobile Marketplace.