Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

This is more of an observation than anything else. As I was playing around with a few browsers the other day I was noting happily how far things have progressed in terms of functionality since the first buggy firmware ones appeared. An interesting thing is that these third party browsers will have access to a lot of the type of data that used to depend upon the operator gateway to get sent, such as cell ID or MSISDN.

Given that there are so many potential mobile applications that look for this data, it’s bordering on almost criminal that operators have essentially been sitting on it, preferring to use it only in applications and sites they own or control and maintaining a quasi ‘Walled Garden’ strategy that has done nothing but stifle the growth of the mobile Internet industry.

What has really broken this monopoly though is this advent of third party applications on devices, either J2ME or running off a supporting operating system such as Pocket PC or Symbian. As a result we now are beginning to see the operator branded applications that come with our devices being replaced by downloadable alternatives.

Much the same as mobile VoIP applications are attempting to bypass operators for voice calls, so similarly, it may be only a matter of time before the operators are also bypassed with browsers that give users the option of sending data read from the phone. When that happens we’re more than likely to see an explosion in new and exciting mobile Internet applications.

Gaddo F Benedetti (gaddo at gaddo dot net)