One of the panels at this morning’s Summit At Stanford 2010 was “Mobile Monetization - Billions for the Taking.” Speakers were Sunil Verma from Mobclix (ad exchange system on mobile), Anderson Thees from Apontador (LBS leader in Brazil) and Bill Diotte from BroadHop (“air traffic controller for networks”).

Here are our takeaways from the session…

First postulate: it’s a good time to enter the mobile industry because there are a lot of changes in the ecosystem, and, consequently, opportunities. The carriers and service providers lost the first smartphone battle, as Apple and Google are playing by their own rules on their platforms. The good thing is that carriers need to monetize their assets and need partners to optimize them: smart startups are welcome. Also, there is a gap between mobile app and carrier that a startup can fit into: better integration means better user experience, and so, better monetization.

On the developer side, little money is needed to build an app and deliver it to the world: innovation will soon follow as more and more developers are able to launch their apps. Developers need to think about cross-platform development (Blackberry is still number one in the U.S. smartphone segment) as the incremental cost is affordable and can bring nice surprises.

The mobile world is discovering more and more revenue-stream possibilities: freemium and virtual goods, for example. Furthermore, transaction costs are becoming lower (still high though; think about the 30% on the App Store), and micro transactions are now possible. Still, the utility base per use model is missing — it is not yet technically possible because of the network infrastructure.

Anderson Thees from Apontador gave a quick international overview: Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) erosion is huge in emerging countries, but the cost for acquiring customers is still high, so free apps and content is very important for a service provider to attract new users.

Regarding Brazil: mobile data there is still very expensive, so paying for mobile apps is not common — you have to provide a real added value. Anderson noted that Apple’s model is a closed garden, but it’s an alternative to something that is not working in Brazil. As soon as emerging countries have relevant 3G/4G networks, the competition will intensify regarding international competition, both from and to developed countries.

Smartphones and high-speed internet explain the passion for subscriptions to mobile services that give access to news or entertainment information. SMS remains the main transmission channel.

The Latin American mobile-content services market will see enormous growth, according to a study by Frost & Sullivan. The firm predicts double-digit growth between now and 2014. In 2009, the market reached $2.5 billion and more than 60 million users. The passion for the sector is due to two principal factors: the adoption of high-speed mobile internet and the arrival of smartphones on the market, as well as other tools for content visualization, like tablets.

Information Services Lead by SMS

According to the study’s figures, SMS-based information services about subjects like soccer, horoscopes or the economy are the primary source of revenue for this sector, accounting for 65 percent of total revenue. Following these are music and game download services. Brazil and Mexico lead this sector; Brazil counts nearly 40 percent of the market’s total users, and Mexico, 30 percent. Venezuela, Argentina and Chili are falling behind these two.

Argentina, Chili and Venezuela Falling Behind.

Argentina, with the most notable market of the three, only accounts for 15 percent of total consumers. All three of these countries have reached the saturation point in their number of mobile users, with each exceeding 100 percent penetration rate. Even if television and video still represent a tiny part of revenues related to mobile content, Frost & Sullivan predicts that this multimedia content will see strong growth in the next five years, profiting especially from the launch of mobile app stores by the main South American mobile operators.

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Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands.

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Motorola announced its first Android handset device today: The Motorola Cliq, with “social skills.” A new, high-performance smartphone is the focus of the Schaumberg, IL-based company’s hope to boost device sales and improve revenue.

Since the success of the Razr several years ago, Motorola has not been making much impression in the wireless consumer market, as independent analyst Jeff Kagan told ComputerWorld today. “Motorola has been stumbling around in the dark,” he says. “This Cliq could be the biggest opportunity for Motorola in many years.”

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Texting has been a ubiquitous trend in teen mobile phone usage, bringing with it educational and ethical implications. With 77 percent of thirteen-to-seventeen year olds having their own mobile phone, this population group has well-defined itself as SMS-happy communicators. Today’s eMarketer spotlights trends shown in a Nielsen study.

SMS usage been increasing steadily for this demographic, but talk time has decreased significantly. Average use per month in the first quarter of 2007 was 435 minutes, which has fallen to 191 minutes in Q1 2009. For text, we have seen a climb from 255 to nearly three thousand (2,899) texts per US teen per month in Q1 2009.

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People use cell phones more often and in greater numbers, but how do they spend their time? A U.S. mobile phone user survey from Azuki Systems, Inc. profiles trends and emerging behavior in surging adoption and mobile time usage.

54 percent of those surveyed said their mobile phone usage had increased by more than 25 percent over the last two years and twenty percent said usage increased by more than fifty percent.

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Instead of downloading ridiculously useless applications on your iPhone, like the famous lighter, here is below a preview of the list of the 10 iPhone Finance Apps That Count, published last week by Mint.com, the money management website that is taking off (see video presentation of Mint).

I would personally not use all of them - on the iPhone that I don’t have - but I would definitely pick the Bloomberg Mobile. And if HSBC had a Mobile Banking iPhone app where customers could find out where the nearest branch or ATM is located, and also check their available balances, I would definitely go for it and upload this second application… Anyway, take a look.

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Curiosity burns for the “GooglePhone.” The community gestalt will foster support, after the first whiz-bang features become more integrated into workflow. But in the meantime, a compass feature sure is fun, and iPhone owners are already bemoaning the Copy & Paste now available on the G1. Mixed reviews abound and completely contradictory aesthetic judgments proliferate. All signs point to delightful complexity: an ideal first day.

GIZMODO’s article on the G1’s Five Most Obnoxious Flaws complains of an unsurprisingly Google-centric interface, lack of video support and storage capacity. It is contradictory that an open platform would require a Google account in order to operate most of the phone’s key features. Hopefully a third-party application shall circumvent this problem before too many potential users put the product out of mind.

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Welcome to day one of the first cell phone to support Google’s Open Source Operating System, Android. With the age of the iPhone well under way, one is moved to wonder what a single-touch screen and a community-based application network have in store for us.

TechCrunch let loose some specifications yesterday:

• In-store, immediate sales only available in stores within 5 miles of a 3G covered area. If a store is beyond that range, representatives will walk customers through a T-mobile.com purchase
• One touch access to: Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, and Google Talk
• Gmail account and data plan required
• GPS
• 3.1 mp camera, no video recording
• No stereo bluetooth (A2DP)
• Dimensions: 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 in
• Weighs 5.6 ounces
• 480×320 65K color screen
• 5 hour talk time, 130 hour standby time
• Expandable up to 8GB

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A Thursday afternoon panel at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference was “Thinking Experientially: What creates good mobile user experience?”

Wired Gadget Lab Editor Dylan Tweney moderated this panel of mobile product specialists. The team was made up of Jason Devitt, CEO of cellular phone call and text tracking site Skydeck , entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and now Google, Mobile Design Strategist Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path, and Jeff Taylor of Hutchinson Whampoa /3.

The popular approach to new mobile design seems to leave it at, “It’s a PC that you carry in your pocket.” This leads to keyboards with toddler-fingertip buttons, limping Internet and nauseating interfaces. The process of creating an intuitive, native mobile experience seems to be as easy as taming a rogue unicorn, judging by the mobile market today. The concensus of the panelists was that the structure of the wireless world is partly to blame. With a tangle of service providers, software developers, hardware manufacturers and others, the need to innovate is displaced by the need to make money as quickly as possible.

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