The first speech at Mobile Content World was by Roberto Vannini, executive managing director of mobile at Telstra, who spoke about repositioning the role of the operator in a totally new value chain—although I think the underlying fundamentals of the value chain are the same, it’s just the details of the individual components which have changed. He said Telstra was investing in mobile content because its not getting enough value from the market with what it has, and it “believes the return on such investment would be quite consistent”. That’s great news for content developers, although one mobile video producer who got up later said that there was no financial backing in Australia—he’d heard rumors of the Telstra funding but didn’t know anyone who had actually seen any cash.

Vannini believes “real estate” placement will drive the new content markets, which indicates that the telco is still planning to bet heavily on its portal. All the telcos seem to be doing some form of open access, but I often get the feeling its a token effort. During the carrier panel Amanda Hutton, general manager of products and services for 3, spoke about having a “retaining wall” around the garden. There are some 3rd party services but they generally need approval from the telco first. Vannini also spoke about two types of personalization: Implicit personalization where the phone knows what the users wants and explicit personalization, where the user changes the phone to suit themselves.

Statistics: Vannini also put up some predictions about the mobile market in Australia: There will be 23 million mobile users by 2010 (greater than 100 percent penetration), 13 million of those users will be 3G. In December 2006 there were 2.5 million 3G users in Australia.