Jerry Roe of Shazam on mobile content:

"Yet there are two quite different approaches to the delivery of wireless content. The first and most obvious is the straightforward repurposing and provision of information or entertainment content in a wireless format. This has obvious benefits — in terms of speed to market and maximising existing investments — but does not put the medium to best use and is likely to raise significant DRM issues.

The second, and more interesting, is to view wireless content provision as an entirely new market, and to develop new applications and offerings that are specifically designed to exploit the unique opportunities presented by the wireless market."

Completely agree. Most of what we've seen so far has been repurposing of content that already existed: classic arcade games ported to J2ME, mobile editions of magazines, and so on. What we need are applications which are designed with the unique properties of mobile in mind, from the perspectives of financial models (moving beyond pay-per-download), context of usage (looking at how and when people use phones), and technology (you'd think that constant availability of a network might change the sorts of games you'll see).

Troy Evans, Senior Product Manager of Mobile & Devices at Macromedia, wrote this interesting explanation of Macromedia's difficulties getting the Flash player out onto mobiles. I had been wondering whether delays (it's been 5 years since Flash was ported to Symbian iirc) were down to heavy pre-existing investments in Java from operators, or difficulty getting handset vendors to accept new licensing terms for Flash, he responded with:

"...the player technology and distribution model is different from that of Flash Player on the desktop. Today, each mobile phone manufacturer must customize and integrate Flash Lite into the phone's OS and also define integration points (screensavers, ringtones, wallpapers, browser plugin, etc) at the time of manufacturing because new applications cannot be installed after.

This is due to the fact that 95% of the mobile phones in the market place today are proprietary (closed operating system), and cannot be updated.

As more smart phones (Symbian, Palm, Smartphone, BREW), enter the market, we expect the player distribution model to evolve. Because these are OPEN operating systems and new applications can be installed on the phone. Just like the News Express application in UK, Germany and Austria."