In recent months, there has been a paradigm shift in the mobile content and applications space.

Mobile ringtone sales have flattened out, and sites offering free content and applications — such as getjar, zedge.net, gamejump, and mobile9 — have become increasingly popular. Savvy users are using the Google and Yahoo! search boxes on network operator portals to find free mobile games and ringtones. This is clearly having an effect on operators’ content revenues.

The popularity of the iPhone App Store has demonstrated strong demand for mobile content and applications when they are offered in a user-friendly manner. The Android Market has also seen its fair share of success as measured by user downloads of relevant applications. On the back of the iPhone App Store and the Android Market, Research in Motion has announced the RIM App Store to promote the development of applications for the Blackberry.

Following its acquisition of Symbian, Nokia has announced its intention to open up the Symbian platform. This will enable developers to exploit device capabilities through open application programming interfaces (APIs) that were previously proprietary and therefore needed to be licensed separately.

Mobile network operators are also aggressively pushing their own app stores, as seen in a slew of recent announcements from O2 Litmus, China Mobile App Store and Vodafone Betavine, among others.

A few salient questions arise:
• What role do operators play in these new application development environments?
• What advantages do the operator content/application stores provide over
iPhone/Android/RIM stores, and vice-versa?
• Can operators collaborate with the iPhone/Android/RIM stores to create a win-win
situation for everyone?

Operators are the only entity in the value chain with a holistic view of the consumer based on browsing behavior, purchasing history, and demographic and service plan information.

Subject to appropriate legal clearances regarding privacy issues, operators can use this information to deliver recommended applications to consumers based on their past behavior – similar to Amazon recommendations. They can also pass this information to app store developers for use in developing and distributing applications that are customized to user needs.

Discoverability remains a challenge for application stores, as the current model simply ranks applications by number of downloads – implying that the most downloaded applications receive the most coverage while the other applications suffer. By sharing user analytics information with third-party content providers, operators can add further value for users through the delivery of external applications, which also opens the door for them to engage in profitable partnerships.

- Saurav Chopra