Mobile Titans Espouse Openness at MWC...Not An Onion Post

CNET's coverage of a Walt Mossberg hosted panel at MWC today featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvu and AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega revealed a collective obsessive paranoia about the success of the iPhone/iTunes App Store as a mobile content delivery system. This paranoia is obviously making these guys delusional as they apparently spent much of the panel condemning Apple's closed ecosystem and advocating the virtues of openness and interoperability in the interest of spurring successful innovation in the mobile market...clearly forgetting everything their companies believed prior to the start of the panel.

Do They Call Facebook Faithbook or Libro De La Cara in Barthalona?

Crunch Gear is speculating that Facebook is on the verge of announcing some major preload/WAP linking partnerships with the handset guys (notably Nokia & Palm) at the Mobile World Congress (fka 3GSM) in Barcelona. I guess the Facebook crew is beginning to take the mobile space seriously, now that 13% of their 220 mil users (~30 mil users) log on to the site via their handsets. Actually if they were really serious about mobile (or making money in general) you'd think they would be trying to monetize all that traffic with some advertising on their decent WAP site or their sucky downloadable app.

Blogosphere Specularumorizing About Nokia App Store

According to this Techcrunch post citing sources, that cite other obscure Russian sources, there is some thought that Nokia (NOK) will announce a Symbian-based applications store for its devices at the 2009 Mobile World Congress (Feb 16-19) in Barcelona. This doesn't seem too far-fetched given their overall Ovi strategy which already includes a music store (launched in UK late 2007), N-Gage 2.0 (opened April 2008) and a planned movie store. Oh yeah, and the fact that some California outfit is said to be having success with something similar. If this is true, the success of the initiative will be, as it always is with Nokia, all about executing on the user interface, marketing and device integration. If they do launch this applications store it's critical that they find a slick way to integrate all the Ovi experiences so it makes sense to real human, consumer folks beyond the walls of the Powerpoint Palace in Espoo.