So, that was Mobile Entertainment Market (MeM) 2009 then. It was my ninth year visiting the mobile content trade show and conference. Cripes.
As ever, it was a mixed bag. On the plus side, it brought together the industry's biggest decision makers - and great to see execs from China, South Africa, Dubai and elsewhere among them.
There were, of course, some genuinely cracking sessions to reflect on. The widgets panel was hugely entertaining, as was the music session. Ralph Simon started that one off with a magic trick in which he produced a string of dollar bills from his palm/sleeve. I presume it was left over from when he sold Zomba to BMG for $3bn.
On the debit side, there still weren't enough people there. And as far as I could see, precious few non-mobile 'outsiders'. Even after nine years, you still get the impression ours is still an 'enablers' led sector. I'm sure MEM and Informa are working on this for 2010.
Anyhow, back to those sessions. For me, the most fascinating part was the chat with Vodafone's Peter Knook and Orange's Pascal Thomas. What came through here was the big difference between the two giants' approaches to apps and the mobile internet to come. While Orange is developing an app shop proposition in which developers make apps to run on its own signature devices, Voda is pursuing a browser-based strategy.
The latter's Joint Innovation Lab scheme - with Verizon, China Mobile and Softbank - will encourage members to write applications in the browser, thus bypassing the fragmentation associated with iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android and so on. Of course, these apps will not be as rich as those coded for native systems, but not all apps need to be complex. This is especially true of simple stuff like sports results, weather, YouTube etc.
And it could all be speeded up by the implementation of HTML5, which is set to make browser-based apps easier to make and run. Google is pushing HTML5 especially hard, and has already embedded elements of it into the latest version of Android.
Of course, this vision was outlined when Voda made its big announcement about services in May. However, what I found thought-provoking was Knook's contention at MEM that this trend could virtually banish the browser from the mobile device.
Here's the argument: we don't use the mobile internet like we do the fixed web, searching Google every five minutes. So instead of launching the browser for every session, we could just keep a bunch of our most cherished widgets on the home screen and use them.
And if these favourites have Vodafone billing and location APIs built into them, then the drinks are on Knook.
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