COMMENT: Vodafone - Going global again?

When the history of the mobile content business comes to be written, will this week be the dramatic turning point of the adventure?

Will it rank alongside the moment when Ralph Nickleby realises that Smike is his son (that's a Dickens reference for you, kids)? Or will it be a footnote, next to the bit about Nokia launching Preminet?

I’m referring, obliquely, to the news this week that Vodafone is to enter the app space. The mere fact that Voda has made this move is a major story in itself. It effectively ends the era of the walled garden, a concept that's come to be despised and ridiculed since Apple showed a more user-friendly alternative nearly a year ago.

Now, the question is whether Vodafone can make a success of it, or whether its app initiative will indeed be the new Preminet.

For me, Vodafone has one massive advantage and one huge hurdle. The head start is billing. Operators are often criticised for being glorified accounting centres that are only good at processing payments.

Maybe. But that could be what makes its app store more lucrative than all the rest. While Apple and RIM require a credit card and a PayPal account respectively, Voda can guarantee that every one of its 290 million customers (maybe a million if the integration with Verizon, China Mobile and others works) will be able to pay straight from the phone bill.

The nasty challenge is user experience. All those form factors and operating systems – what a nightmare. Voda insists it’s co-operating with the rest of the biz to create an über-platform that would allow programmers to write an app which could run on any platform.

Good luck with that. Interesting that the first products will be rolling out on S60 devices. How many times in five years of writing about this biz have I been presented with an amazing new service, only to be told ‘err, it only works on S60’.

Still, it's all very exciting. And I'm told it's merely the start, with many more announcements to come from Vodafone. I hear that Orange has something big up its sleeve too.

I see this week's development as a riposte to those commentators proclaiming the eclipse of the operator, a genuine play for the heart of the content business, but one which plays to the networks' traditional strength of transaction and distribution rather than publishing.

It also puts Vodafone back in the spotlight again. Let's not forget that during the heyday of Vodafone Global it was the go-to carrier for entertainment services. Now it's back, centre stage. Expect to see posters everywhere, with lots of red in them.