This year’s event includes three separate conference tracks, covering a broad spectrum of the industry’s most burning issues; operator and developer revenue streams, publishing strategies, mobile and tablet app marketing, handset innovation, branding and the rise of the TV app.

With operators, platform and app store owners keen to connect with new developer talent, developers are well catered for at Apps World Europe, with two full free-to-attend tracks across both days delivering advice and insight from leading developers.

Speakers across the conference include representatives from brands like Spotify, Rovio, Google TV, EA Games, SingTel, RBS, BBC, Sky, British Airways and O2; eager to discuss how their organisation is harnessing the power of multiplatform apps. To see the full agenda, click here: http://www.apps-world.net/europe/workshops/agendas/workshop-agendas

Ian Johnson, Apps World founder, said: “We feel like this has been a real watershed year in terms of companies recognising the value and scope of what apps represent to their future business activities. The interest in apps has broadened to include marketing professionals across all industries. The opportunity for talented developers to connect with large multinational brands is a facet of the show we take very seriously, that’s why we’re offering the developer streams for free.

“As soon as connected TV takes full hold in the mind of the consumer, we will have a whole new apps revolution on our hands, so I will be looking forward to the TV Apps sessions as much as anyone.”

Speakers include:

Thomas Chung, VP, GM, The Playforge

Peter Vesterbacka, CEO, Rovio (Angry Birds)

Daniel Heaf – Digital Director, BBC Worldwide

Thibaut Rouffineau, VP Developer Partnerships, Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP)

Miles Ross, Head of Mobile, IPC Media

Javier Lorente Martínez, Global Project Manager, Mobile Data Group, Telefónica, UK

Shaun Gregory, Managing Director, O2 Media

Chris Carmichael, ba.com & Mobile Innovation Manager, British Airways

David Gibbs, Director of Mobile Application & Services, BSkyB

James Bromley, Managing Director, Mail Online

Anthony Rose, Co-Founder and CTO, Zeebox

Neil Swanston, Mobile Experience Manager, Centrica

Steve Wing, Head of Digital Marketing, Consumer Media, Guardian News and Media

Rajeev Aikkara, Project Manager – Mobile Systems, ASOS

Justin Moodie, Digital Publisher, DK Books

Evan Krauss, EVP, Shazam Entertainment

Andy Gower, Research Group Leader, BT

Notes to editors

Apps World Europe is part of an international conference series covering four continents, with shows also in New York, Cape Town and Singapore. For more information on the Apps World Series, visit: http://www.apps-world.net

Follow developments and announcements on the official show blog: http://www.apps-world.net/blog

Connect on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/apps-world

For further media information, or to arrange press accreditation for the event, please contact:

Kate Williams

kate@sixdegs.com

To exhibit at Apps World Europe 2011, please contact:

Enquiries@sixdegs.com

Tel: +44 (0) 117 973 2353

The chair and vice chair of WAC are Vodafone’s chief executive for Europe, Michel Combes, and France Telecoms’ deputy CEO, Jean-Philippe Vanot, respectively. The board of directors also includes executives from AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, KT Corporation, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, Smart Communications, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telekom Austria Group, Telenor and Verizon. Twenty carriers have so far signed up to the initiative as fee-paying members.

WAC aims to commercially launch its SDK by February of next year, allowing developers to create widgets that will run on a wide range of devices and be sold on the application stores of a wide range of operators – and it is confident it can keep to that deadline.

It all sounds impressive. So could operators prove sceptics wrong and successfully pull off a multilateral initiative of this scale where so many others have failed before? Could operators have found the answer to fighting back against the huge lead taken by mobile-industry outsiders Apple and Google on the mobile applications front?

I, for one, remain sceptical.

JIL numbers
WAC is largely modelled on its predecessor JIL, which also set out with the aim of creating a single SDK to develop mobile widgets for the combined customer base of nearly one billion subscribers of its member operators. JIL was launched more than two years ago, yet so far 9,000 developers have signed up and 8,000 widgets have been published on the platform. Contrast that with the 43,000 developers and 236,000 active applications currently on Apple’s App Store and the 5 billion downloads the store has clocked up since its launch on the iPhone in July 2008. No numbers are available for the number of JIL downloads.

What’s more, the only avenue available to JIL developers to sell their widgets is Vodafone’s V360 Shop, which is only available on a limited number of devices through eight of Vodafone’s subsidiaries in Europe – covering only part of the carrier-group’s footprint. And the Vodafone 360 service, of which the V360 Shop is a part, has had disappointing take up, accumulating fewer than 500,000 users by the end of May. The latest news from Vodafone is that it is discontinuing development of the Samsung H1 and M1 handsets, the only two devices which natively integrate the Vodafone 360 service.

Meanwhile, none of the other JIL operators have started distributing the platform’s widgets yet.

What is true of JIL will not necessarily be true of WAC. But, when combined with the poor track-record that operators have in both mobile content services and multilateral initiatives, the little progress made so far with JIL doesn’t bode well for WAC.

Clash of cultures
Operators need to distract developers’ attention away from iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and other smartphones to have any chance of generating enough traction for WAC. But many developers – and content providers – were left jaded by their first experiences of trying to deal with operators in the bad old days of the haughty operator portals. And most other developers don’t even have the operators on their radar. They belong to the online and computer worlds in which the likes of Google and Apple are iconic brands for whom they feel inspired to create stuff. Telcos are an alien species as far as they are concerned.

The kind of apps that WAC is aimed at – widgets – is also likely to put off many developers. Widgets and other applications created in web-runtime environments have the potential of reaching a broader audience than the native apps developed for specific smartphone operating systems. But their richness and functionality is severely limited by having to cater to lowest-common-denominator handset specs to reach as broad a range of devices as possible. The result is that the user experience is much poorer and the services that can be delivered much more basic, making it much harder to charge a premium. In fact, the vast majority of widgets are offered free of charge.

WAC intends to make it easy for developers to sell their widgets on operator application stores and portals. But that won’t be of much use if users expect to download them for free.

To its credit, WAC is also planning to enable in-app payments and in-app advertising. But it doesn’t expect the latter to come on stream for another two to three years at least, when hopefully the WAC community will have built up enough critical mass to attract enough ad revenue. Meanwhile, Apple’s in-app advertising service, iAd, has generated around US$75 million in the first two months since it started taking bookings, which according to some sources is more than has ever been spent on mobile advertising in the US by the big brands.

Good idea, but…
Don’t get me wrong. I think the idea behind WAC is a good. It is trying to overcome one of the operators’ biggest deficiencies in relation to smartphone players like Apple and Google: global reach. And it is trying to go one better by reaching out to devices of all types – not just the smartphones owned by an elite of mobile users – and by enabling widget payments via carrier billing – a far-more ubiquitous form of payment than the credit/debit-card dependent payment methods pushed by Apple and Google.

But WAC is three years too late. The market momentum now is with the outsiders from the online and computer worlds. The mobile players are playing catch-up, and the operators are at the back of the pack.

Initially, the WAC platform will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) on Wednesday completed its formation as a corporate entity and cemented its partnership with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL). The company also outlined the business models it will pursue, putting it some distance behind competing platforms.

Peters Suh, formerly CEO of the JIL, will take up the same position at the WAC, supported by Michel Combes, Vodafone chief executive Europe as chairman, and Jean-Philippe Vanot, deputy CEO of France Telecom as vice chairman.

The group, which formed in February 2010, comprises 24 operators, accounting for over three billion subscribers and is an alliance designed to build an open platform for delivering applications to all mobile phone users.

Initially, the WAC platform will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill. Under this model, developers will set the application price and will receive a revenue share for the transaction, defined on an operator-by-operator basis. WAC is a not-for-profit organisation and will receive a small transaction fee for each application to cover its operating costs.

Only in the future will WAC offer business models that enable additional purchases from within an application; leverage network capabilities, such as location, to enhance an application; and facilitate the serving of ads.

The initial specification and components of its SDK will only be available to developers in November, but will provide backwards compatibility for devices based upon the current JIL and BONDI specifications. Still, that puts the platform well behind market leaders like Apple, which already offers in app purchasing and advertising.

Developers currently creating JIL applications can continue working with the existing JIL specification, tools and software libraries and these applications can be deployed on JIL based devices immediately. With the publication of the WAC specification, developers will have a clear path to deploy applications on a wider range of devices supporting the WAC specification in 2011, the firm said.

Perhaps the WAC drive has something to do with Vodafone’s (one of the platform’s biggest cheerleaders) decision to abandon its Vodafone 360 handset strategy. The operator has stopped selling its 360 branded handsets, so far only available from Samsung, and will instead focus on pushing 360 as a suite of services and applications.

Tapulous is a fairly new company that was founded in 2008 and its flagship mobile game “Tap Tap Revenge” is believed to have been downloaded by over 30 per cent of iPhone/iPod touch users, making it one of the most successful games on the iPhone platform.

Disney is now experiencing a very strong growth in customer engagement on mobile and believes that by 2012, 50 per cent of its total customer engagement will be via mobile phones. In June this year, at the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York – AJ Rhodes, director of mobile strategy & marketing for Disney Online, mentioned that the company is already actively engaging with customers on mobile using SMS, free Disney mobile app, premium mobile content (mostly games) and via mobile web.

Disney is now seeing strong customer engagement on mobile with over 240 million users interacting with it on their mobile phones. Of this, over 150 million users send SMS to Disney every month, around 73 million users access the company’s content on mobile web, and 18 million customers use the Disney mobile app.

Disney has been trying to achieve growth in the mobile industry for a number of years now. Its MVNO launch in the US was a failure, but it has achieved more success with the Disney-branded mobile phone service in Japan, in partnership with SoftBank. Earlier in June this year, Disney invested in Playdom, an online game company that makes games for the iPhone and Facebook. In Apple’s App Store, Disney already has a number of popular games including JellyCar 2, which it claims to be its most successful paid-for game to date.

The acquisition of Tapulous, and investment in Playdom in particular, also signals a growing focus of Disney towards mobile social gaming. A key barrier to the growth of the mobile games market has been that kids and teenagers, who in many cases are the biggest users of a mobile game, often don’t have the means or ability to pay for mobile games. That’s why increasingly mobile games publishers are introducing and promoting the concept of mobile social gaming, which includes games with community features that are targeted at a higher age group (20-40 years) of mobile subscribers, who are capable of paying for mobile games.

The growing focus and investments in mobile by leading media and entertainment brands including the likes of Disney, BBC, Sky, and ESPN is also slowly starting to provide the much needed momentum to the mobile marketing and advertising industry.

Application brands sway handset decisions

Branding is becoming an increasingly important tool in the battle for customer loyalty, something which Apple has exploited successfully in its assault on the mobile space. But research released this week reveals how the rise of content and application brands are now altering the mobile landscape.

Following on from a survey of 27,000 UK consumers, research firm TNS discovered that almost one quarter of users are now placing their loyalties with content and application brands like Facebook, Twitter and Google – that’s the same amount that are primarily loyal to their operator.

The handset manufacturers needn’t worry just yet however, as device brands such as Nokia, Samsung, Apple and BlackBerry (RIM) are still the biggest driver (51 per cent) when it comes to consumer brand commitment.

The single most important factor in handset choice remains look and feel (29 per cent) but available applications and content – games, music and maps perhaps – ties for second place with handset brand (13 per cent). However, this figure rises to 37 per cent among consumers aged 16 to 30.

According to TNS, almost a fifth (19 per cent) of UK users are regularly downloading applications to their devices.

These figures show an interesting shift in how consumers are shopping for devices, but that shift is less apparent when all factors are taken into account. When all aspects of a device are considered, apps sink to the bottom of the list, with consumers more easily swayed by look and feel, handset brand, touchscreen, and interestingly, which operating system it sports.

According to Stephen Yap, group director at TNS Technology: “As uptake and usage of mobile services proliferates, we are seeing profound changes in the way that people make purchase decisions and in the brands that are the most meaningful to them.  While established handset makers are standing their ground, network operators are clearly under pressure from the rise of the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.  These content providers are increasingly capturing consumers’ loyalties and are leading the way in bringing users the benefits of the latest mobile technologies.”

Computing resources are shifting to the cloud

Despite the proliferation of smartphones and efforts of promoting native development and runtime platforms, web-based services are emerging as cost-effective challengers that could take application runtime to the web environment. Not only will this allow the development of cheaper and advanced applications, but it could also shift computing resources and their management from the device to the cloud, which could in turn lower the barriers for enabling advanced applications over non-smartphone terminals.

In recent years, the mobile industry has moved from proprietary to open, allowing for continued improvements in device hardware and more innovation at the application level through the creation of developer communities and application distribution mechanisms. This trend has attracted the majority of device vendors and operating system (OS) developers as well as the mobile operators, which are now eager to offer their own branded app store and subsequently an immersive user experience and advanced mobile applications to their customers. As a result, there has been a strong increase in smartphone OS handset shipments, estimated by Informa Telecoms & Media at 216.3 million units in 2009, up 34 per cent on the previous year. By 2014, sales of smartphones will reach 572.5 million units, representing 40 per cent of total handset sales.

This trend is actually encouraging developers to create applications that are targeted at different OSs and native runtime environments. There are many advantages in developing mobile applications natively, including better integration with the device functionality, high-performance, always-available capabilities, and access to greater support from device vendors through the availability of advanced tools and developer programs.

However, there are also many challenges facing native application developers, which include: code complexity, which could affect the cost of the application development and time to market; application portability across a wide range of devices to achieve economies of scale; and restricted application distribution to operators and OEMs’ channels. Moreover, in the case of Apple, application approval has been a contested topic that has alienated several high-profile app developers from Apple’s App Store.

The fragmentation of OSs, user interfaces (UIs) and runtimes and associated developer programs are also likely to hamper any advantage gained from open mobile applications development. Open OS platforms are often differentiated by their level of support to multimedia and graphical capabilities, network connectivity options, input methods and hardware performance. Chipset manufacturers will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a high-performance and enhanced user experience over different platforms and their associated versions because each platform requires a deep integration with the device hardware and a number of optimization cycles are needed to ensure overall system stability and improved performance. Porting an application to several OS platforms is can be a  good reason for failure among independent software vendors (ISVs), but is necessary to achieve economies of scale and reach a wide audience.

In addition, development tools associated with different OSs often lack the cross-platform approach that could enable the developer to write the application once and distribute it across various devices powered by different OSs. Mobile native application developers are stymied by the extreme difficulty of writing mobile apps for multiple OSs, UIs and runtime environments, especially when there is no clear winner and diversity is just increasing with the mushrooming number of app stores. Then there is the challenge of finding the right placement for this content so that it can be discovered easily by the end user.

Native applications developers also need to bear the cost of testing, certification and distribution of their applications. The majority of OEMs, operators and mobile app store (MAS) owners are imposing their own test and certification programs on developers. Testing fees are based on the complexity of the application submitted and are between $250 and $4,000 per submission. If the application is meant to run over variety of devices and terminal platforms, the third-party developer pays the full test fee for one device and gets a rebate for testing the same application on a second device. Additional fees might also be required for network-based applications.  In addition, different OEMs and operators have different criteria for application testing in their certification programs. Native applications developers need to comply with these additional programs if they want their applications to reach different MASs and operator portals, which translates into additional cost burdens.

Also, an obvious difference between desktop and mobile native applications is mobile connectivity. Compelling applications should make maximum use of the customer’s mobility, from mobile location services through to interactive games. Simply replicating the desktop experience will not be enough to sustain long-term growth; users will not pay for mobile versions of applications that are available either free or nearly-free on their desktop computers.

For these reasons, generating native applications that address the long tail of consumer requirements and different consumer groups using various OSs and UIs could be cumbersome, costly and time consuming.

The shift to web runtime and cloud-based services

The mobile web applications development environment is an emerging alternative to native applications. This shift is best illustrated by the rush of operators and handset vendors to provide their own widget ecosystems which use web technologies to facilitate mobile applications development and lower the overall development cost. It could also enable mobile operators and vendors to tap into the wealth of the internet and address their customers with contextual applications that are more relevant to them.

Until recently, a number of barriers prevented web-based applications and cloud services from gaining ground in the mobile market, including: the cost of connecting to web services; the low-bandwidth and latency provided by current mobile access technologies; the bad quality and performance of mobile browsers and related web technologies; and security issues.

Despite their current shortcomings in terms of performance, power consumption, integration and always-on capabilities compared with native applications, web applications have many advantages including: faster development, time-to-market and monetization; wider distribution channels; and adaptability for cross-platformization.

There are many changes in the mobile market that are likely to shift applications development to the web including:

• The accelerating migration towards mobile broadband services.
• The dramatic improvement in mobile browser solutions and UIs.
• The advances of internet transcoding and multimedia transformation.
• The emergence of widgets and widget runtimes as efficient solutions for easy content discovery.
• Deep integration of web services with the device capabilities and features to enable the creation of contextual applications.

In the past year, several trends have crystallized around mobile web runtime technology which promise to transform mobile web applications development, distribution, installation, execution and management. A number of new OSs, including Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS, and a number of mobile platforms, including Microsoft’s Silverlight, Nokia MWRT, Qualcomm’s Plaza Mobile internet, Adobe’s AIR, Access Netfront Widget platform and Opera Widgets, are designed with web connectivity and functionality in mind.  The whole idea is to enable the easy transition of applications development from a native environment to the web environment.

Get more information on the Informa report Mobile Web Applications Development

A number of operators, including Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, O2, Verizon, AT&T, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo,  Softbank and China Mobile, have already developed – or are in the process of developing – widget stores and web developer programs that will make the development and distribution of web applications  easier and content discovery and management simpler on the mobile screen.  For example, the aim of the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) initiative – founded by Vodafone, China Mobile, Softbank and Verizon – is to stimulate a new generation of mobile internet applications around which they can build their service plans and value-added services. JIL’s first project is to develop a widget ecosystem with a single point of access to enable developers to tap into the combined customer base of the four JIL operators – estimated at 1.1 billion subscribers.

The trend towards the adoption of the web as a mobile applications development environment is likely to intensify thanks to both the emergence of mobile cloud computing and the low latency of the next-generation access networks, which include LTE, HSPA+ and WiMAX.

Informa expects the web to become the new ubiquitous platform for application development as more and more applications move to the cloud and allow users to access their personal information anytime from any device and over any access network. This trend is likely to remove “smartness” from the device to the cloud, which could potentially reduce the burdens of fragmentation that the native development environment suffers from and spur innovation through the involvement of the much wider web developer community in creating contextual mobile applications. In addition, this trend will help to shift processing and storage resources to the cloud, which means advanced applications could be accessed by more resource-constrained devices. This could in turn widen the addressable market for the cloud applications beyond the smartphone market.

By increasing the reliance of end users on the web and cloud applications, new business models will emerge and revenues will be diversified from multiple sources that include advertising, network API charges to third-party service providers and the creation of premium services for the enterprise market. In addition, the migration to a web development environment could increase traffic around hosted services such as e-mail, VoIP, online office, calendar, online gaming and social networking.

Several device vendors have been pre-installing key widgets in their devices but the trend now is to reorient their software platform strategies towards the creation of widget ecosystems for the development, distribution, lifecycle management, discoverability and monetization of widgets and web applications in general. These applications are generally easy to create, fast to distribute and serve a plethora of niche markets on the internet.

Tier-1 operators are also realizing the potential of partnering with web application developers to enable innovation over their networks, reduce costs related to building data services and build service plans around long tail of consumer applications that target different user groups.

The aim of major operators is to move away from pipe services based on flat rates towards the creation of content-based service plans that will enable them to address different consumer groups with relevant real-time contextual applications and services.

Operators that are not experts in mobile data services, notably Mobile 2.0, have now openly admitted that they will not be able to create these services on their own and expect to employ third parties in the value chain to create best-of-breed services with sustainable business models.

In this context, vendors of mobile widget solutions could facilitate the work of operators by enabling them to bridge the gap between the web and mobile applications development. These vendors already propose a suite of applications that could include a widget player, idle screen replacement, ODP and a white-label application store. These products could be deployed either individually or as part of an end-to-end widget development, distribution, presentation and monetization ecosystem.

Informa’s report Mobile Web Applications Development looks at various solutions for developing web applications and widgets, their respective deployment scenarios and the different features that could be requested by operators or OEMs that wish to add mobile internet and branded services through widgets. Obviously, operators and OEMs have different requirements when choosing a mobile widget solution depending on which market segments and regions they want to address and which services they aim to deploy. The report also looks at the role of mobile widgets in providing a rich mobile internet experience to help operators and OEMs create new service opportunities, increase customer loyalty and extend the value of their brand to new market segments. It includes a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the revenue opportunities and key trends in widget ecosystems, enabling technologies and the challenges facing operators and OEMs in implementing them.

In recent months handset vendors such as Palm, Motorola, HTC and Nokia have launched new handsets that compare favourably with aspects of Apple’s device. However, notwithstanding the achievements of some handset manufacturers in emulating the iPhone, the mobile industry as a whole is still leagues behind Apple in creating a truly compelling user experience of mobile internet and services.

While it’s clear for handset vendors what they have to do to close the gap on Apple in the smartphone space – produce something that’s as good as the iPhone – operators are still struggling how to replicate the level of experience Apple has created for high-spending mobile users.

Mobile operators have long been guilty of burying their collective head in the sand when it comes to assessing the success of their mobile data efforts. For five or so years, countless operator CEOs would stand up at conferences and tout the success of their closed mobile portals.

This would probably still be going on today had Apple not forced them to admit the reality: the experience they were creating was appalling. It finally became clear that the success of these portals the CEOs said for so long was just about to happen was never going to happen. No wonder data about uptake and usage of mobile portals was always so hard to come by: had this been made public investors would have taken their money from the industry in droves.

But the iPhone changed everything in the mobile industry, not least forcing executives at operators to admit that they didn’t have a clue what they were doing with advanced mobile services.

Which brings us to this month. At the FT conference held in London, I was amazed to hear almost every single speaker, including senior figures at Vodafone, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, state that, essentially, they were still looking for the right approach to mobile services.

Each one of these speakers cited the iPhone experience as the benchmark they were all looking to emulate. And with the exception of Vodafone and its 360 initiative, none of the speakers had much of an idea about what their response was going to be to the iPhone.

And Apple wasn’t even at the event. Come to think of it, Apple hasn’t been a speaker at any major mobile event that I can think of. What’s incredible is that Apple hasn’t needed to come and find out from the mobile industry what the latest themes and trends are. It’s created the biggest shift the industry’s ever seen itself.

And I wouldn’t like to bet against Apple or another company outside the industry creating the next major shift, because on the evidence of this week, it’s not the senior executives at the mobile companies who have the slightest idea what this is going to be. And this by their own admission.

But I think this admission of ignorance is hugely positive. For once, the mobile industry is saying: we’re not making the most of the technology (mobile broadband) available to us, and we need help to do so.

Aside from the iPhone, the overwhelming theme of the conference was partnerships. This was also something of a first. One after the other, the speakers stated the need to become genuine partners with Internet companies to capitalise from the mobile broadband technology opportunity. Most admitted their past failings in this.

The great advantages operators have, and it’s almost the only ones they have, is that they own the networks and they bill the people who use them. Aware of this, Michel Combes, CEO, Europe region, Vodafone Group, spoke about being a ‘smart pipe’ for other companies to sell their services through. Combes said that Vodafone was aiming to be the best operator partner to work with for companies outside the industry. Vodafone, among others, has now thoroughly embraced this stance – a massive turnaround from two to three years ago.

Operator executives should be commended for admitting that they’ve been bad partners to companies outside the mobile industry. Now they’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum, and are tripping over themselves to be the best partner to outside companies that have popular services to sell in the mobile space.

The big question now is: will this new attitude create tangible benefits to operators?

One other theme that dominated the conference was application stores. Companies are tripping over themselves to make application stores, and I question the wisdom of doing this. Each of these companies is, of course, following the path created by Apple in the hope that making a comparable store will lure users away from the iPhone

But I think this is ill-conceived and misguided. People buy the iPhone not for the Application Store. They buy it because it’s the best designed and made device on the market, the one that also offers the best mobile internet experience, the best media player and a great email service. Oh, and you can also play some of the best hand-held games and do a host of other things too. But the latter are just compelling extras to the rest.

The Application Store has been great for software developers, but whether it will be equally as positive for device vendors and operators is another question. I find it hard to see people buying a device mainly because it’s got a great application store. The application store is just one small part of the puzzle.

No doubt the day will come when a new device offers a whole new experience that makes Apple’s look old-hat. But given the vision Apple has manifested in the past, and the dearth of new ideas coming from within the mobile industry, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this new vision didn’t come from Apple itself, or another that is similarly outside the mobile industry.

Operators won’t be completely dis-intermediated by Internet companies in the future. But they will have to accept sharing much less of the pie than they would like.