But on the US mobile content market we are living a transitional phase: the first hype cycle is over. Some companies got sold for a lot of money and then failed in execution (pretty much anything the Japanese investors touched). Some others are on their way to oblivion – disappearing after having for too long banked on the carrier market dominance holding, something which will eventually come crumbling down. Then you have those mainly European originated D2C mobile content companies like Thumbplay which had the right timing are were skilled enough to execute well. The only downside there is that they come to the market in a phase where the traditional mobile content market (ring tones and other personalization media) will start to loose both market interest and monetization capability.

The US mobile market is in a ‘post-soviet trauma stage’. There are too many ineffiencies and too much fragmentation for the market to grow as rapidly as it should with the scale economies this huge country offers. We will need to wait for the infrastructure layer to get more harmonized and the Internet companies get more market momentum and only then – probably in 4-5 years – will we see some hockey-stick growth.