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?

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.

-You will fuck up!
-Risk = Reward
-Therefore risk is key
-People is everything
-Network is key – that’s how the world work
-Passion is key.

Join Morten on the ride at lundxy.com

Another cool cross-over was Nöjesguiden’s (the What’s On of Sweden. Free printed paper and website) work with Belysio. It is a mobile application you download to your phone and then on the Nöjesguiden web page your friends can track your whereabouts and see them on a map in realtime. Another cool way to make mobile bridge the digital and real world.

I think location based services and features in existing services that are using location information is rapidly moving from hype to must-have status. The mobile phone is in many ways such a poor user interface that we need to pick up on the unique and very defendable competitive advantages it has. The fact that the mobile is always with us and the better and cheaper access to location data now is one such feature we need to build upon. Thanks Belysio for a great service!

I am also looking forward to the workshop I am invited to at Vodafone that will discuss these matters. And more so how Vodafone can be an enabler by opening up APIs to the unique information and functions they have at a network level. This would create an explosion in new services. On top of that mobile operators would have made huge profits on mobile content already, without big costly internal “media and entertainment wannabe” departments. Opening up to their unique functions and making the mobile billing option affordable we will have a very different mobile entertainment and apps world very soon. It has nothing to do with mobile. It is pure business sense – few mechants can afford 50% in transaction costs for the sale of their service or product. You have seen my standpoint on this abuse of the billing monopoly before. See this post for example.

Again, Gapminder is a seriously cool way to make a hell of a lot of sense of a hell of a lot of data. And it often provides the facts to change peoples mindsets as well. Pure. Raw. Powerful. Read more about Hans Rosling’s presentation here

Then there were all the cool people that I just had a ball hanging out with over the two days. You know who you are and thanks for interesting meetings!