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, if a consumer has to make the choice between keeping up their mobile phone service usage and a new handset I would say in 10 cases out of 10 that they would go for the service and wait till they have come out of the recession to get a new handset. If that assumption is true, wouldn’t you have to stretch the definition of a (usually high end price) smartphone seriously all the way to include pure budget price phones?

And where is the profit for the handset manufacturers? Are they able to subsidize their own market shares through this crisis?

What’s your take? Will consumers postpone handset upgrade in order to be able to afford paying for their mobile services habits to keep them unchanged?

So – the take-aways from this event?

- Fragmentation is abundant and slows everything down. Time to reverse this! Staying with browser based services that are advertising funded is one way to reduce fragmentation radically. But that is an intermediary solution for many. We have to work for more standardisation in our industry for mobile services and content really can take off.

- In addition we are not in sync all the times. The most glaring anecdote I heard proving that was this: O2, the exclusive seller of the iPhone, cannot identify an iPhone handset on their portal hence not making it possible for iPhone users to purchase content on their portal. Hello?!

- Fact that sticks out: There were 10 times more SMS sent than there are Google searched made last year. Yes, we are dealing with the largest communication network in the world! Thanks Saurav at Amobee for this fact!

- And finally the take-away from my presentation:

Handout_Cambridge

Then there is the negative sibling of this – boredom. When we are bored or just have some downtime we get inspired to do something on our mobile. Ping a friend, check out photos on Facebook, play a game maybe.

Whatever the reason for the inspiration, the solutions and ideas for really powerful mobile internet services  come from focusing on the power of the moment of inspiration.

Go brainstorm!