Well, the Europe vs U.S. divide is a truism many in the industry swear by. The thinking goes: Europe, because of high mobile penetration, handset giants and smaller concentrated markets of operation, is at least a year or two ahead of U.S. After spending two days at the MEM conference in London, I am beginning to doubt that. What’s certainly true is that the consumer usage behavior is more evolved in Euorope. What’s not necessarily true anymore is the technology part. For the first time, mobile video is an area where U.S. is leading Europe…the success of MobiTV will testify to that fact. Then the streaming mobile TV efforts from Qualcomm (MediaFlo) and Crown Castle are not in any way behind other countries.
Same could be said to some extent with mobile games. The only place where admittedly Europe is ahead of U.S. is in mobile music, but the startups like Melodeo and others are challenging that too.
A lot of European companies exhibiting at MEM are trying to enter U.S…among them, Bango and I-Play. The other way around is probably more true: InfoSpace Mobile has a strong distribution in Europe; so has Mforma. AG MObile is making a big push in Europe through DefJam Mobile.
So the seeds of cross-pollination are all there. There’s much more to it than I can write now. How long will the myth survive now?
The MEM Conference coverage is sponsored by AG Interactive & Def Jam Mobile
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post