Data the key to mobile apps

There are 4 major players in the "smart and getting smarter" mobile space; Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft - you can argue about the order, but in my mind they are the only meaningful players for the next 5 years.

I'm partial to the momentum and openness of the Android OS, but everyone will decide which phone they want a different way. Key will be the availability of killer apps on multiple platforms.

The key to emerging killer apps working across phones will be the inherent data that is associated with the application, and how interoperable it can be between phones. This is pretty easily done if you are sending Twitter messages, but can get pretty complicated when you are assuming things like geospatial awareness or other complex functions that might be implemented differently on different phones.

Standards will become important, and those standards will also help drive other apps into being - kiosks will be dropping in price, the IPAD and non-Apple competitors to the IPAD will be ramping up sales dramatically, and the number of applications using standardized data will increase dramatically.

Standardizing the data will also help reduce the number of redundant applications - RSS eliminated a host of proprietary ways of transmitting simple information between websites.

You will see some very intelligent applications that get smarter based on all the information flowing through their databases and being improved by both analytics, data points from people, and data points from sensors - the cost of which is dropping rapidly.