What can the networks do to promote third party applications (asks James Parton at Vision Mobile)? This is a well argued editorial, as Parton looks at the rise of the manufacturer’s application stores – but he reckons the stores are full of ‘dumb’ applications, labelling them 1.0, with no context of their user, location or environment. And that’s where the mobile phone networks need to act as enablers.

Because they have the data that can act as the initial context – they know who the phone users are; they have billing details and can easily charge the customer a micropayment; they can use their size as an advertising clearing house; they can provide in-app interactivity. In short a lot of what many third party services are trying to replicate could easily be provided by a mobile phone operator to developers.

I think this is a great starting point, but Parton’s diversion that only the network operators can provide the context is a bit of a dead end. There are countless of ways of finding out context if you have full access to the internet – just using Google on someone’s name is a treasure trove of information.

What I think is important is not that networks make this information available, but that they make it available in a consistent way, so that an application could run on a phone that switches between networks if it wants to, or use a competing service that has nothing to do with the networks.

Even more important though is that people are thinking about what makes a mobile application special and different to one running on a PC. As more developers start to think about what they can do that’s new (as opposed to what they can port to a smartphone) we’ll see innovation, excitement and new ideas force their way to the surface, no matter what the existing gatekeepers do or don’t do.

-- Ewan Spence, April 2010.