Mobile app stores - nice, but where's the money?

I love app stores! I used to (try to) use one back in the early days of mobile phones being able to run other applications - but it was hard! Now I'm a committed Apple iPhone app store customer!

But, even as I use these, I realized that many of the phone manufacturers and mobile carriers, as they rush to create their own app stores, may be missing a larger picture. An app store where you sell 99 cent applications and keep a few cents each -- unless you’ve sold over a billion from a selection of 65,000 , as Apple has recently done -- is a big ho-hum (or, at best, a “that’s nice”) to the CFO of a major carrier or manufacturer. Plus, one more online app store in the cloud is nice, but hardly revolutionary. But carriers, especially mobile operators, who are looking to implement both truly usable customer self-care as well as provide platforms for the “double sided business models” that we have all been talking about should look again at the app store platform. It is, as AT&T recently showed, an excellent way of distributing its customer self-care software (see http://www.billingworld.com/blogs/nextgen/blogdefault.aspx).

And, what better channel to offer services to consumers and a platform for transactions with the businesses they deal with every day? Then, combine it with mobile financial services and transactions – killer.

Machine to Machine Mobile Interfaces - Coming faster than you think

Information Week had a good article on the new Coke Freestyle Dispenser ( see www.informationweek.com/?articleID=172301630 ). It is the best example I have seen so far of a Machine-to-Machine interface over, in this case, the Verizon Wireless network.
(Short version - dispenser with water and flavor, mixes the requested drink in real time, giving over 100 possibilities. RFID-tagged flavor cartridges. Software built on Microsoft CE, communicates daily via Verizon Wireless network with dedicated IP range to a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager for Mobile Devices. Info on sales and re-order of supplies directly to Coke's SAP CRM system.)

Of course, as most of us believe, M2M interfaces over mobile networks are going to be a big thing in the future, representing, I believe, a great growth opportunity for the mobile operators (or maybe new, specialized operators?) over the next decade.