In yesterday’s announcement from Vodafone we can get a hint of the future. Operator opening up access to their unique assets for content and service providers to create and deploy their services to the masses in a more efficient way than before. 

It is not an app store. Remember Vodafone gives access to bill their customers worldwide. This cover all types of handsets in several markets. Build once and deploy everywhere gets one step closer to reality.

However discoverability still will be a challenge. Rightly so the main responsibility for the marketing will fall on the content provider. If the billing payouts from the operator is more in line with the 5% a credit card transaction costs it is a fair deal. I am still waiting for details on this.

So far we have seen the mobile operators abusing their monopoly to bill to a mobile phone. The quantum leap needed here is that we get the billing cost down to single digit percentage poit of the retail price. That would be the catalyst the mobile content and value added services business needs.