This week has been pretty mind-blowing to be honest. Two pretty major announcements made from two behemoths in the industry. First out was Vodafone “outing” itself as a smart pipe nothing more and nothing less. Let’s hope the walk matches the talk. Your humble blogger has been a proponent of this for a long time as you know. More about it here and here. 

Then we had Nokia announcing that they would halt development of Ovi Share, align their efforts to work more in sync with third parties like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Good thinking and way to go to leverage the position as the leading mobiel phone company.

I think we have just witnessed some very positive things the whole economic crisis has brought. This will help growth in the mobile apps/content business. Hopefully this will trigger more outings and realignments for the better.

What is the next move by the big players that would have the biggest positive impact on our industry?

As a producer of mobile internet services I am of course worried about the crisis. Still we do not see any dramatic drops. In fact some areas grow. Now we see the mobile operators helping out here a bit too on the data tariffs where many start to cap the daily cost you will incur while surfing the internet with your phone. In my native Sweden all operators now have caps just under 1 EUR per day. That helps us all. More of that please!

It is obvious and common sense. Not in the mobile industry though. I am glad to see there was a “whistleblower” in action at MWC09 the other week. Steve Bell ex-Motorola is pretty bold but right in his statements. Read them here. Thanks Steve!

I feel like broken record sometimes, but this _is_ important. I feel like tearing every mobile service I have been part of creating apart and start all over again. Not a very rational feeling I know. Better maybe to work with what you have and listen to your customers. Make sure to pick up the important hints and ideas they give.

At Acemob , one of my companies in this space, for the last 18 months all changes made to one of our key services Lifestylers are based on support mails from the users. Feels risky at the time, but it is quite satisfactory to be able to offer services our users actually want. Sure, we mess up sometimes and have to reverse some changes. But that is done quickly since we pick up that sentiments pretty instantly since all check customer support mails every day. One risk is knowing if there are enough users out there wanting the feature in question. But that is the smaller of the risks. It is far riskier to sit in your ivory tower and produce what you think is cool. That’s not cool.

Anyway, CTIA or not, it is still the state of the industry as I see it.

We have many experts thinking and presenting theories – Strand, Juniper et al. you know them.

I am biased, but I tend to listen to people who are actually operationally active and doing the dirty work themselves. Yes, I am one of them, Yes, we tend to get tunnel vision every now and then, but we do live the industry and can provide a sobering insight to some of the external experts.

Why mobile content suck, this was also both the best conference session name and session itself at CTIA this year. Excellent moderation by Andy Nulman from Airborne Entertainment. Thanks Andy!

In short the people from the traditional media or more mature media niches are quite clear. The content is often crap. The experience clunky and the pricing often nothing else than a rip-off. Sobering statements. However painful they might sound like they are true.

So the stuff has to get better, easier to discover and use and I do not want to feel robbed after using something on my mobile. Ok, if that is what the consumer wants. That’s what you need to deliver.

This brings up the other side of the equation. We the content providers. Since most of us plan to pay our mortgages and eat three healthy meals a day, we want to make money. This requires business models that work. Preferably today and not in some undefined future. The big dragons can throw money around and see what sticks to the wall, spaghetti chef style. But the rest of us can seldom afford that. We have our dearly earned money that we want to reinvest to add value for all parties involved.

Thankfully the flat rate data plans are kicking in and the handsets are there with all the features available. That also increases the pressure on the content providers and producers. Then we have this “Next big thing” mobile advertising that we can use to make money from the services if we attract enough users. We do not have to be shackled to the “you-do-most-of-the-work-and-I-take-half”-business model which is the essence of doing your premium billing via mobile operators. So, there are no excuses anymore. It will come down to good services and content to be produced. Now the spotlight is really on us.

To summarise, the time is now for us in the content and service production business to deliver as well. This is easier said than done, but stick to simplicity, real needs among the users and use the comparative advantages the mobile has. No they are not screen size, input interface and processing power! But it is the thing we are most likely to always have with us, it is personal and private, always on and connected to the largest communications network in the world. I can think of a worse brief. Go create!