What’s next? Faster and cheaper mobile networks, an array of new devices to connect to those networks, disruptive payment models, and more captivating user interfaces. So which companies are likely to help power that new wave of innovation? Welcome to The Mobile 15.

These aren’t necessarily the most successful companies in the mobile world, though you could argue that a few of them might qualify for those lists as well. Rather, what we’re highlighting here is simply innovation: These are the companies, startups and giants alike, that are changing, or could potentially change, the mobile landscape in the most profound ways. We’ll be talking about this list — as well as many of broader themes and challenges in mobile– at Mobilize, our conference in San Francisco later this week.

The Mobile 15 includes some big brands, like Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung, but also some lesser-known names, like the printed memory company ThinFilm and crowdsourced traffic app developer Waze. Some of our picks may surprise you, like the inclusion of long-suffering Nokia. We know Nokia has hit a rough patch in recent years, but we think its attempts to radically reinvent itself with a new OS and new technologies are compelling — see more on our rationale below.

A word about our methodology: To create the list, we didn’t simply pick a bunch of names we liked and throw them into a spreadsheet. Our team — which included writers Katie Fehrenbacher, Kevin Tofel, Ryan Kim and Stacey Higginbotham– submitted dozens of candidates in categories ranging from app development to handset technologies to infrastructure vendors. We even included the Internet of Things — companies are turning everything from medical devices, energy-management systems and product packaging into small mobile computers.

We then graded every company on several different measures of innovation. Those with the highest total innovation scores earned a spot on our Mobile 15 list. Some of these companies, like Israeli startup Intucell,  are working on one-time innovations, while others, like Apple, of course, have a longer track record of breakthroughs. What connects all the companies on our list is that they will have a big impact on the mobile industry.

So keep your eye on these companies in coming months. To the 15!

—Kevin Fitchard

Go to page 2 (of 16) on GigaOM .

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Both SK Telecom, the country’s largest carrier, and KT currently sell the iPhone in South Korea. And both are lobbying Apple for an LTE iPhone, according to the report, which quotes an unnamed senior KT official saying, ”KT is in negotiation with Apple to persuade the latter to support KT’s 1.8-gigahertz frequency in Korea for the upcoming iPhone.”

The main reason they want an LTE iPhone? Because LTE is really big in Korea. The report says there are 10 million subscribers, and they want to add more to their newer networks instead of keeping customers around on their older cell networks, which are less efficient for delivering data. Writes the Korea Times:

The negotiations come as the nation’s three carriers are heavily promoting LTE-enabled smartphones and tablets as the 4G telecommunication technology is seeing an impressive uptake, here.

That means Apple is the key either to revitalizing the local LTE market or to slow momentum. “If Apple’s upcoming iPhone again fails to support LTE bandwidths, then this would be a very disappointing scenario as LTE is everywhere in Korea,’’ said a high-ranking SK Telecom executive.

But, as the story notes, not all LTE networks use the same frequency. Korean carriers use a different band than, say, AT&T, which is different than Verizon’s, and so on.

There are plenty of good reasons to believe the next iPhone could be LTE-capable. Carriers around the world are asking for it; it’s available from most major carriers in the U.S., Apple’s largest single market; and Apple is already using it: the new iPad released in March had a 4G cellular option. And, as my colleague Kevin Fitchard has noted, if Apple doesn’t bring the iPhone up to 4G standards, that would severely impact its carrier partners as they’d be forced, for at least another year, to keep investing in older networks.

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Thin film solar trend

Greentech’s got the makings of one of those occasions when the herd veered left and the market went right. The thin film solar startups that were born in the mid-2000′s, and which used the materials copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) to convert sunlight into electricity, are now facing a tough market. Solyndra, which went bankrupt this month and took down an over $500 million government loan, is only the most high-profile of these companies, and others include HelioVolt, Nanosolar, MiaSole, SoloPower, and Stion.

The creation of companies that use CIGS became a popular pursuit in the mid-2000′s when the price of silicon, which is used as the cornerstone of traditional solar panels, was fetching hundreds of dollars per kilogram. The idea behind CIGS was that as the cost of silicon rose, these companies would make thin film panels without using silicon, and

Workers inspecting panels in Solyndra's factory in April

would be able to make them more cheaply than traditional solar panels. Dozens of top-tier venture firms backed these companies at valuations of billions of dollars.

However, instead of rising, silicon prices have plummeted, reaching the $50 range in June of this year. HelioVolt founder and chief strategy officer BJ Stanbery told us in an interview today that he believes that the industry is going through a “long anticipated consolidation,” and that startups need to find the right partners to survive (HelioVolt announced an equity investment from Korean conglomerate SK Group). Greentech Media reported this weekend that MiaSole is going through a “management adjustment.”

The CIGS startups aren’t just on the wrong end of the silicon price bet, they’re facing a commoditizing solar market that has more supply than demand, the lowest prices in history, a continued weak economy, reduced subsidies in important European solar markets, and fierce Chinese competition. Large companies would struggle in this environment, not to mention a group of startups that mostly haven’t scaled up into large-scale manufacturing yet. Some of these companies will likely get bought, or could find important international partners, but others won’t be as lucky.

When good tech ideas go bad, CLECs

The thin film CIGS solar bet is just the latest tech trend to convince investors and entrepreneurs to enter and then to fall victim to a major flaw and struggle to deliver. Another one that occurred in the late 90′s — for all you telecom vets — was CLECs, or competitive local exchange carriers. GigaOM’s Om Malik wrote about the CLEC tech trend extensively in his book Broadbandits: Inside the $750 billion telecom heist (which you can read for free online courtesy of Google Books, LOL). Essentially the Telecommunications Act of 1996 forced the telecom market to let in upstart companies, coined as CLECS, that wanted to compete with phone companies to offer DSL from the neighborhood level.

But the phone companies that owned the space could charge the CLECs for access, which at the time was called co-location. However at the end of the day, the upfront capital costs eventually made the business model basically unfeasible for most CLEC companies. Dozens of investors like Battery Ventures and Spectrum Equity Partners put investments on the order of $100 million into various CLEC companies like Winstar. These companies burned through cash on these access fees, and in 2001, companies like Winstar started to fall.

In April 2001, Winstar went bankrupt, and articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal touted Winstar: The Debacle for Our Era:

The damage, in fact, was so well distributed among successful, highly sophisticated investors that Winstar is beginning to look a lot like one of those emblematic disasters that comes to define an era on Wall Street much as the battle for RJR Nabisco came to represent the excesses of the corporate takeover frenzy of the 1980s, or the Long Term Capital Management debacle epitomized the risks of high-tech financial instruments in the 1990s.

MVNOs and P2P

Call it the curse of the confusing acronym technology — CLECS, CIGS — and add another one that I covered several years ago: MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operator. MVNOs like ESPN Mobile, Amp’d Mobile, Helio, and others launched in the mid 2000′s with idea to take a brand and turn it into a cell phone company, and rent space on wireless companies’ networks. These companies launched branded cell phones, targeting niche customers that they thought were loyal customers and would pay high monthly bills for branded data, games, and social networks (this was before iPhone and Android and no one yet used wireless data). The startups paid the phone companies network access (like the CLECs did).

Amp’d Mobile raised $360 million from investors like Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital, MTV Networks, Tudor Investments and Universal Music Group. Helio raised hundreds of millions in funds from SK Telecom and Earthlink.

The upfront capital costs of launching branded cell phone companies and paying the wireless companies access was a huge problem. Add to that missteps by startups like Amp’d Mobile which ended up attracting many customers that didn’t want to pay their bills. Amp’d Mobile, like Winstar and Solyndra, went spectacularly bankrupt. SK Telecom estimated that its losses from Helio were expected to reach between $330 million and $360 million in 2007.

And finally from my colleague and video expert Janko Roettgers: P2P content delivery. Roettgers tells me that the promise of P2P video content deliver was based on the assumption that bandwidth would remain hugely expensive, and also that smaller publishers could compete on an equal playing field for attention and ad dollars if only they had cheap enough bandwidth. Companies like BitTorrent went through funding rounds and a whole bunch of startups launched in this area, too.

However, bandwidth prices went down instead of up, but more importantly Google, Hulu and Netflix sucked up all the attention and content, which suggests bandwidth never really was the biggest problem to begin with. BitTorrent had to pay back its funders to bring down the value and expectations after it turned out that no one wanted to pay for P2P bandwidth and most of the startups in this space have disappeared or are slowly fading away by now. The P2P industry association DCIA even completely switched focus to cloud computing after it realized that there is no money in P2P, says Roettgers.

Anyone have a favorite tech idea that went bust?

Image courtesy of Flashpacking Life, roland.

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One of the first (and most notable) changes is the price. Whereas Tweetie 2 was $2.99, Twitter is now a free app for all. And that’s without ads. While I’m slightly sore about having paid for what’s now freely available, I don’t begrudge atebits the money and at least I get the update free. One note of warning, if you upgrade from an existing install you’ll have to re-add all your accounts and any drafts you might’ve saved will be lost. Not fantastic, but not tragic, either.

One thing I’m not too crazy about is the new icon. I realize that official corporate backing required a more recognizable and brand-friendly icon, but the Tweetie icon was one of my absolute favorites. At the very least, I’d have liked them to have kept the same color scheme and cut-out style, while just replacing the word-ballon graphic with the Twitter bird.

Things that are improved are the search function, the addition of recommended user lists and the ability to sign up for a new account right from within the app. Those last two you won’t get anywhere else, either, since no public API exists for either function. Another neat feature is that you don’t have to be logged in to use Twitter for iPhone. Searching and trending topics are available to all via a new interface that launches at first startup if you just want to have a look around without creating an account.

Top tweets are now included in search results as well, which should go a long way toward making them more meaningful, and the retweet function (the official version) has been added to the context menu that comes up for each tweet when you swipe. Finally, some visual changes have been made so that the tweets themselves look more like they do on Twitter.com.

Bottom line, if you liked Tweetie on the iPhone, you’ll like official Twitter incarnation. And if you’ve been waiting for a reason to switch, official support and a price tag of free are two very good reasons. It’ll be interesting to see how the development community responds to this. Tweetie was hard enough to compete with before it became officially sanctioned. Once Twitter for iPad hits, I think apps by third-party sources will have a hard time surviving, except by offering sync services and access to other services like Tweetdeck does.

What do you think? Will you be using Twitter or something else on your iPhone now that it’s out?

In the same way (albeit on a smaller scale) that the South Korean government pumped money into developing broadband infrastructure, the government plans to invest 37 billion won (about $32 million) initially into building out the smart grid test-bed. The companies that will start building the smart grid infrastructure include a who’s-who of South Korean IT companies including mobile leaders SK Telecom and KT, consumer electronics and cell phone heavyweight LG, power companies KEPCO and GS Caltex, and Hyundai Heavy Industries. Taking the same approach as the island nation of Malta — isolating the buildout to a geographical area — the South Korean government plans to build the smart grid test bed on the island of Jeju, which is south of Seoul (see map above).

While the investment from the South Korean government isn’t huge at this point, I wouldn’t discount its goal to acquire a 30 percent share of the global market as unreachable. KT, SK Telecom, and LG have long histories of mobile and broadband innovation, and they tend to spend a lot of money on R&D, taking risks and rolling out products and services that are at the bleeding edge. That means some of the companies’ risky products can be duds — see SK Telecom’s failed mobile joint venture Helio, which was sold off to Virgin Mobile. But the approach seems to be working for many of them: LG is the third largest cell phone maker in terms of marketshare, solidly beating out American phone maker Motorola.

I haven’t researched the ins and outs of what types of smart grid products South Korean firms are working on, but the country’s leadership in the battery space could also give it a leg up in energy storage for the smart grid. Very few American firms have so far been able to compete with both South Korean and Japanese companies when it comes to battery technology.

Given the smart grid industry is just being developed, recently getting a boost from the $3.4 billion in U.S. stimulus funding, it’s not strictly about competition at this point. There’s some cooperative learning going on as well: Earlier this year the U.S. smart grid trade group the GridWise Alliance and the Korea Smart Grid Association (KGSA) teamed up to share intelligence about building out smart grid technology.

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Now there are rumors that SK Telecom and Spring were looking to partner on technology. The whole thing is just too curious, and the company spokespeople for both of them are staying mum.

Sprint has about 52.8 million customers, but is having a tough time holding onto them. The company recently merged its WiMAX effort, Xohm, with Clearwire to form a new company that attracted $3.2 billion in financing from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner and others.

SK Telecom owns 17 percent of MVNO Virgin Mobile, which recently acquired Helio at a throw-away price. SK has sunk a lot of money into Helio. Both Helio and Virgin use Sprint’s network.

And on a related note, Helio’s store in Palo Alto shut down today, after setting what must have been a new record for being devoid of customers but still opening its doors every day. Rumor has it that employees at Palo Alto startups would make bets on whether or not any customers could be spotted in the Helio store. I guess the only ones who didn’t get the memo about people not caring about Helio stores was the management.

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Either there’s something to explain the change in numbers, or we should perhaps take our analyst reports with a grain of salt. However, Linux is undoubtedly moving fast: 15 handsets were launched earlier this year with LiMo, and after several demos and prototypes, anticipation for the Android is running high. But the jury is still out on which framework will win out with carriers and application developers.

LiMo has the backing of NEC, Motorola and Samsung as well as SK Telecom and Verizon. Android, through the Open Handset Alliance, has T-Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, China Telecom, Telefonica, Google and several others. The stated goal behind both efforts is to eliminate some of the costs associated with developing mobile applications for multiple operating systems by using open source. It’s a laudable goal, but the fight between the two for market share demonstrates how hard it will be to lower costs, as developers will still have to build for multiple platforms.

photo courtesy of the LiMo Foundation and NTT DoCoMo

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The company, which was spun off from BAE Systems in 2002 and has raised at least $36.5 million in venture capital from TL Ventures, Intel Capital and SK Telecom, discovered a way to use multiple feed points on one antenna by accident. The result: one antenna that acts like three or four. SkyCross calls it “isolated mode antenna technology,” or iMAT. Instead of two antennas, a SkyCross antenna user gets one antenna with two ports for each frequency. Theoretically one could have an infinite number of antennas, notes Paul Tornatta, managing director with SkyCross, but right now the practical limit is three or four.

Efficient antennas require less effort to “talk” to a base station, so the proliferation of iMAT antennas could improve network operations while also sucking less juice from a device’s battery. SkyCross antennas are already in USB dongles and data cards, will soon be found in certain cell-phone handsets and eventually, in laptops and router cards.

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