Today Bytemobile announced the appointment of telecommunications industry veteran Hugh Barton as vice president and general manager, North America.  Most recently vice president of North America Sales, Global Commercial Industries, at Unisys Corporation, Barton will lead the company’s team of account managers, sales engineers and professional services engineers in supporting existing customers and expanding the Bytemobile footprint in the U.S. and Canada.  Read more.

- Tod Bottari

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In the last six 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 — such as getjar, gamejump and mobile9 — have become increasingly popular. Savvy users are using the Google and Yahoo!, search boxes on operator portals to search for free mobile games and ringtones. This clearly is having an effect on network operators’ content revenues.

The iPhone App store, which has generated close to 200 million downloads in four months, has shown that there is a 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 when it comes to user downloads of relevant applications. On the back of the iPhone App Store and the Android Market, RIM has announced the RIM App Store to promote the development of applications for the Blackberry.

Nokia has decided to open up the Symbian platform following its acquisition of Symbian. This will help developers exploit device capabilities through open AP

Is which were previously private and therefore needed to be licensed separately.

Operator developer networks such as the Orange Developer Network and Vodafone Betavine have been around for some time but so far have had limited success.

A few salient questions arise:

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

My view is that operators can make third-party applications much more relevant to the mobile consumer by leveraging the user profile information maintained in their networks.

Operators are the only entity in the value chain with a holistic view of the consumer based on user browsing behavior, purchasing history, and demographic and phone plan information. Subject to the appropriate legal clearances regarding privacy issues, operators could potentially share this user profile information as well as real-time location information with third-party applications through the iPhone/Android/RIM application developer networks. The entire ecosystem would benefit from such a collaboration.

Of course, we would welcome your thoughts on this topic.

- Saurav Chopra

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Recently, we commented on the lack of activity around mobile device-based campaigns in the political space – surprising given the impending presidential election. We also noted that while things had been fairly quiet in the U.S., there were some innovative election-based services coming out of the U.K. With tomorrow being election day, we have seen a sudden influx of U.S.-based wireless players jumping on the bandwagon.

While seemingly last-minute, it makes perfect sense for the wireless industry to leverage the mobile device as a communications tool to cover the election results. According to an article in RCR Wireless News, a slew of election-based services will be offered tomorrow in hopes of exploiting the buzz around tomorrow’s race for the White House to attract mainstream consumers to the world of mobile content.

Some of the sites and services outlined in the article include: the partnership between Associated Press and U.S. Cellular to launch an on-deck site focused on election content; Campaign Tracker, a free app for Microsoft Windows Mobile-enabled phones from NewsGator, based on WashingtonPost.com and Newsweek content; and Slate.com’s interactive polling application for iPhones.

I think it’s safe to say that the paradigm shift in mobile politics has already begun, and it will be interesting to see where wireless providers take the election in 2012.

- Stacey Infantino

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