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Published last week, "The Saviour of 3G" report from the Swedish analyst firm ranks what it says are the world's leading 125 mobile application developers and content providers, from a global base of some 3,000 companies. The company said the top companies named are those developers who are most likely to attract mobile users to next generation mobile services.
"It's clear that there are no killer applications per se for 3G," the report's author Dr. Edward Nugent said in a statement. "But there are certainly killer mobile service characteristics."
The report rated the companies according to criteria like financing, customer contracts, geographic focus and sales, and said the winning companies were Cybird (Japan), Digital Bridges (UK), Disney (US), InfoSpace (US), iTouch (UK), Ludigames (France), Mforma (US) and Zed (Finland). In Ireland the mobile platform developer, Puca, which Nugent was "in an interesting niche," was also included in the ranking.
Finland topped the list of countries with the most active market, followed by the UK which had 14 companies in the top 120 ranks. Japan, the US and Israel also rated as hot markets.
Nugent said factors like the strong media and network operator relationships for iTouch helped that company gain a top spot. iTouch, which is 50 percent owned by Independent News & Media, was also singled out for its strong fiscal position and management, Nugent said. Last November iTouch recorded a nine-month loss of STG12.2 million to 31 September but also turned in record revenues of STG10 million for the period.
In the Mobile Metrix ranking, which was published by telecom analyst firm BWCS, other top companies included Realtime in Denmark, Riot Entertainment in Finland, Aspiro in Sweden, and Wapme Systems and Materna in Germany.
In Asia, China's Linktone and GWCom, Japan's Hudson and Com2US of Korea were singled out as the strongest players. Other industry research has confirmed that Asia will continue to be the strongest growth engine for the wireless applications market. The Radicati Group said in September that worldwide revenues for mobile operators would grow from USD223 billion at year end 2001 to USD851 billion by year end 2005, with Asia Pacific showing the strongest growth.
In the Mobile Metrix report Nugent warned that operators must change their business models if the mobile Internet is to flourish outside Japan.
"The traditional operator portal model will simply not be competitive in the long term as it inhibits the variety and quality of services available to the consumer," Nugent said. "Already we have seen Vodafone (UK) Telia (Sweden) and China Mobile (China) adopt new business strategies and we believe others will have to follow suit."
Key to success will be the mobile operators' ability to understand consumers' motivation for using new services, he said, and a flow of compelling mobile applications and content.
The outlook for mobile content as a revenue generator was given a boost last week after new research revealed that consumers would be willing to pay for news and entertainment service to their mobile phones.
Jupiter Media Metrix said that because such content has been available free on the Internet, users will be unwilling to begin paying for these services on their PCs. But its research showed that on the new platform of mobile devices, users would be willing to pay for services like SMS alerts, e-mail and entertainment. In total Jupiter estimated that European consumers would spend EUR3.3 billion for content on mobile phones by 2006.
For more information visit http:// www.mobile-metrix.com.
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