The leading mobile players are the handset guys and the networks.
Up till now they have disdained the travel market plumbing for the sexier applications such as music. However I have always believed that the real deployment of smart handsets would occur when the applications moved into being more generic.
Although there was a link between Dopplr and Nokia before (shall we just say it was family), the move is a smart one for Nokia. They are now staking a claim in the concept that the handset really is a PID - Personal Information Device. This makes the device a serious contender for the user's favorite service. Up till now Blackberry has been leading in this space with the delivery of most applications via the BB service.
The stunning success of Apple and the iphone has changed the paradigm. The vast number of user based applications is great but after a while you are bewildered with the array of choice and the support of these applications makes big demands on the user. Great and fun for now in a social context - but perhaps not so interesting in the "useful" category. I realize that I will be slammed by the faithful for this statement - but bear with me a little. I have watched a lot of iPhone users (from the original to the latest 2 versions) and you can see how the lack of some functionality hurts and the frustration of having too many different apps becomes counter productive. In essence the line "there is an application for that" is now replaced with "how the heck do I manage all that".
The silence of the network providers is stunning in all of this. The profitability of the mobile environment even after forking out all that money for 3G licenses remains almost obscene. However the network providers who have tried so desperately to avoid becoming just a pipe as the internet was for fixed line operators are not necessarily winning the war for the hearts and minds of the user. We are seeing higher churn rates in different countries where the networks have matured. I believe that the applications like Dopplr need to be offered by the networks and that the networks need to be far more involved in the PID services than they have in the past.
So SOME of Mobile gets Travel. When will Mobile really get Travel? I am hoping that it will be sooner rather than later.
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