Mobile developers cock-a-hoop at T-Motion announcement

NEWS Mobile application developers have welcomed the announcement from mobile portal T-Motion that it will start sharing revenues with content providers. Damian Bown, CEO of award-winning mobile travel information providers Kizoom, said: "I take my hat off to them. The mobile content community has been waiting for an operator to take the plunge and make an announcement like this." Mobile developers have been struggling to generate a revenue stream, as cash-starved mobile operators have been reluctant to establish a revenue model that gives content providers significant funds. Some money has been reaching the mobile content community in the form of one-off licence fees, but a genuine revenue sharing model will see content providers receiving more money. Revenues that increase with user numbers give content providers an incentive to improve, too. "If you get a fixed price then there is no incentive to make it better," says Bown. However, if this move is to have a major impact it will have to be replicated by the other major European networks. Grant Lemke, chief executive of wireless networking group Wap Wednesday, said: "This announcement is a significant breaking of the ranks. We applaud it, and we call for the others to follow." silicon.com has also reported how the lack of convincing business models has discouraged venture capitalists from investing in mobile content - and if this announcement is followed by other operators the venture capital funding situation is likely to improve. T-Motion will only be sharing up to 50 per cent of revenues, still far less than the 91 per cent passed on to content providers by Japanese network NTT DoCoMo, whose i-mode service has over 24 million subscribers and is widely cited as the model for a successful network. Kizoom's Bown, however, believes 50 per cent is fair, and that T-Motion will pass on more as volumes increase. "Initially, there will be very low numbers of subscribers, and 50 per cent probably represents the cost of billing for those services. "As subscriber numbers grow, however, I would expect T-Motion to reduce their cut," he added. T-Motion is the mobile portal for One2One in the UK and T-Mobil in the Germany.