I don’t know about you, but in my quest to develop new services and revenue streams I spend amazingly little time talking with mobile operators these days. I say amazingly since I thought I would spend more time with them, since they are such an essential part of the ecosystem.

I see that as a sign of maturity for our industry. As in any industry that matures each party specialise more and try to build on their competitive advantages. Mobile operators have made huge strides in this direction as well. They have practically given up to become the DreamWorks for mobile content and apps. Their USP is pretty weak compared to the entertainment industry. But EMI or the Guardian are not that strong in offering access to the internet, do the billing or provide localisation data either.

Lynette Luna at Fierce Wireless develops this theme very well in her recent post. Just as I mentioned the other day there are some anomalies hanging around though. Hope that some encounters and discussions outside the MWC09 bubble will make Nokia and some others scrap some plans that just seem a bit too far away from their core. Even though the mobile internet is new, cool, hip and part of a paradigm shift normal business and marketing laws (and even gravity!) applies. Few think Nokia or Samsung when they think social networking. But as a tool to get to the social network of choice Nokia, Samsung and all the others have a great opportunity to be in the game.

However efforts like Ovi Store and others (thanks Steve Jobs for letting the Genie out of the bottle). The Ovi publisher model copying Apple’s 70/30 model makes a case for content developers to actually develop new innovative services instead of porting licensed properties to mobile. On the distribution side Ovi also has the potential for mass market reach, even though downloading a store app to the phone before I can purchase things over the air seems a huge impediment. Is this really going to be the case? I am looking for more details following yesterday’s announcement at the Nokia press gathering at MWC09 in Barcelona.

Another observation to support the statement that the industry is maturing is the growth in the B2B mobile solutions niche. We see mobile solutions companies beyond premium sms providers is growing their business across the board. Maybe some caution is relevant if we include mobile advertising. But the general trend that existing media businesses are mobilising themselves seems to be valid. Here the companies that depend less on advertsing revenue are the ones I expect to take the lead out of the recession. In a short few years I am convinced we will be baffled over how primitive and insecure our baby the mobile web was back in 2009. Yes, I remain the optimist.

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